Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 190

What I’ve been reading

1. Andrew Hussey, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and it Arabs.  Probably you should read a book on this topic, and this book is it.

2. Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation.  An excellent study of one episode in the history of environmental catastrophe.  Overall, the environment remains understudied in economic history or for that matter public choice.

3. Elliot A. Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery.  Chapter twelve is a fascinating look at the debates over Alvin Hansen’s “secular stagnation” thesis.  It is uncanny how much the exact same debates are being replayed today.

4. Dominic Couzens and Mark Sisson, The Secret Lives of Puffins.  Unlike many sea birds, puffins are quiet, and their divorce rate is in the range of seven to nine percent.  Excellent photos in this one.

5. John Keay, Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition.  A very good treatment of how much work remains to be done in the “nation building” enterprise in South Asia.  Recommended.

A simple observation on the proposed the Comcast-Time Warner merger

Though combining the nation’s No. 1 and No. 2 largest cable providers sounds like the kind of transaction that would raise the eyebrows of regulators, the cable market is still so fragmented that even after the merger, Comcast will control less than 30 percent of total subscriptions. That number is significant. On two earlier occasions, most recently in 2009, federal courts rejected efforts by the FCC to cap cable ownership at 30 percent. Even if the rule had been upheld, the combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable wouldn’t violate it.

That is from Larry Downes.  Geoffrey Manne  has produced a lengthy study of the proposed merger.  His conclusion?:

As Manne summarizes his paper, there is no “plausible theory” of anticompetitive harm under current antitrust standards. “Instead,” Manne writes, “arguments against the merger amount to little more than the usual ‘big-is-bad’ naysaying.”

Here is an earlier post on this proposed merger.  When you get past all the mood affiliation here (corporate, “big,” “merger,” “cable company screws me over,” “inequality,” etc.) this merger just isn’t that big a deal and the case against it isn’t that strong.

What was Aragorn’s Tax Policy?

Excellent interview with George R. R. Martin at Rolling Stone:

How did you come up with the Wall?

The Wall predates anything else. I can trace back the inspiration for that to 1981. I was in England visiting a friend, and as we approached the border of England and Scotland, we stopped to see Hadrian’s Wall. I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn’t know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces – it planted something in me. But when you write fantasy, everything is bigger and more colorful, so I took the Wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high, and made it out of ice.

and some political economy:

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.

Assorted links

1. Robocopulation.

2. Japanese markets in everything: turtle taxis.  And The Onion on the great stagnation.

3. Piketty discovers risk.  And what Piketty actually should favor.

4. I bet it’s not as good as Mr. Yung’s fish n’ chips in New Zealand, not even at $2k a head.

5. The campaign to measure gross output.

6. Deeply strange research results, concerning women married to fishermen.

7. Philip Cook on crime and lead.

The Great Reset, higher education edition

From my university president, @CabreraAngel:

35 years ago there were 44% more tenured faculty than adjuncts. Today there are 76% more adjuncts than tenured faculty

Communism, Capitalism and Copyright

Over at Crooked Timber Scott Mclemee is upset that a copyright action is removing Marx from Marxists.org:

The Marxist Internet Archive (marxists.org) is a vast and growing resource, run entirely by donated labor, and as polylingual as circumstances permit. (Do they have Trotsky in Tagalog? Indeed they do.) Yesterday, a notice appeared in the Archive’s Facebook group, and also on its homepage, saying that Lawrence & Wishart’s lawyers demand removal of material from the Marx-Engels Collected Works: “Accordingly, from 30th April 2014, no material from MECW is available from marxists.org. English translations of Marx and Engels from other sources will continue to be available.”

…Chances are the archive volunteers never contacted the press before putting the material up because they assumed, reasonably enough, that an edition prepared largely if not entirely with the support of old-fashioned, Soviet-era Moscow gold was not anybody’s private intellectual property—that the works of Marx and Engels now belong to the commons.

As you know, I have some sympathy with this complaint if not with the motivating example. What really burns Mclemee, however, fills me with glee. At the same time as Marx and Lenin were being pulled from Marxists.org he and Corey Robin received:

…radically under-priced materials from the enemy’s publishing apparatus. He’d received an order containing dirt-cheap copies of Bastiat from the Liberty Fund, while a day earlier I had downloaded free digital editions of the major Austrian School books on theory of value and the socialist-calculation debate from the Mises Institute website. There’s more to neoliberal hegemony than loss-leader pricing, but as ideological combatants those people know what they’re doing.

Most of the 19th century was a good time for equality (Department of Ahem…)

From “Real Inequality in Europe Since 1500,” (pdf) by Philip T. Hoffman, David Jacks, Patricia A. Levin, and Peter H. Lindert:

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

If you have been following the recent debates over Thomas Piketty, you might have come away with…um…the opposite impression.  The emphasis there is added by this blogger. As for other countries:

Thus the great grain globalization of the late nineteenth century favored workers’ relative purchasing power in food-importing Western Europe, though not in food-exporting areas.

By the way here is Scott Sumner on consumption inequality.

For the pointer I thank John Nye.

Very good sentences

President Barack Obama will spend the next few days on an awkward mission to Asia. Essentially, he is going to try to tell the Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos and Malaysians that their lives and welfare are more precious to America than those of the Afghans, Ukrainians and Syrians to whose rescue America has recently declined to come. That may not be the truth.

That is from Clyde Prestowitz at the FT.

South Korea safety fact of the day

In South Korea, more than 31,000 people, including 3,000 students, die every year in accidents, accounting for 12.8 percent of the country’s total annual deaths, the highest rate among major developed nations.

Those episodes include everything from car accidents to fires, and it is unclear how much can be attributed to a lack of focus on safety. But there is a general acknowledgment in hypercompetitive South Korea that success is often measured by how quickly and cheaply a job is done, and that spending too much time and resources trying to follow rules is sometimes seen as losing a competitive edge.

Is that efficient or not?  The full story is here.

Assorted links

1. MIE: powdered alcohol is coming on the market.

2. The world’s fastest elevator (China, 45 mph).  And China’s dirt is dirty.

3. Improving the axe.  And male body average is over.

4. “Robots allow the cows to set their own hours…”

5. Claims about baby rivalry.

6. Brad DeLong reviews Piketty.  And Piketty on his love of capitalism.

7. Felix Salmon is going to Fusion.