Those new, unpaid Tasmanian service sector jobs

by  Tyler Cowen

Tasmania is looking for curious, adventurous professionals to fill a wide array of unusual roles—including a “wombat walker,” who will be responsible for taking the stocky marsupials on their morning jaunts and feeding them snacks.

Tasmania has posted a series of “odd jobs” in a bid to boost tourism during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, which runs from June to August. All of the gigs are unpaid, though the local tourism board will cover the cost of travel, lodging and food…

“The stuff that makes us feel alive,” the tourism board adds.

Here is the full story, via Mike Doherty.

What should I ask Christopher Kirchhoff?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  In case you do not know, Christopher self-describes as:

Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He recently worked special projects at Anthropic. Previously, Dr. Kirchhoff helped design and scale $1 billion in philanthropic programs at Schmidt Futures. He also founded and led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Office, Defense Innovation Unit X, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $70 billion dollars of technology acquisition. During the Obama Administration, he was Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council and the senior civilian advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I very much enjoyed his new book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah.  Here is his home page.  The book just received a very strong review from the FT.

So what should I ask Christopher?

PR for the UK?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I say no, we have enough European governments with proportional representation already.  Should not someone allow for the possibility of more decisive action?

Estimates are suggesting that Labour won two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote, more or less.  So that induces the usual cries of misrepresentation of the electorate (it also reminds us that virtually all electoral systems are not “democratic” in the naive sense of that term).  But Britain has many serious problems, and I would rather see one party given a decisive mandate to handle them.  And I write that as someone who is not in general rooting for the Labour Party — virtually all of my favorite British politicians are Tories, even if I do not like what that party has become as a whole.

Contrast the British with the recent French election.  The distribution of votes was not altogether dissimilar, but the Britsh have “a landslide,” while the French have a possibly ungovernable situation.

I do love checks and balances, but the UK needs to defeat NIMBY and fix the NHS.  Now it is Labour’s turn to try.  Here is a broad outline of Labour’s 100-day plan.  Not exactly what I would choose (see Wooldridge at Bloomberg), but if they get two or three big things right the regime still could be a success.

Note that the margins for the Labour victorious seats are extremely low, which means there is an ongoing constraint on the exercise of government power.  I am not so worried about an “elected dictatorship.”  If anything, it may not be decisive enough.

Another consideration is that PR for the UK could end up meaning the rise of an Islamic party of some kind, of course with minority status.  I suspect that would worsen rather than improve democratic discourse in Britain, and perhaps hinder immigrant assimilation as well.  I don’t want that to happen, and so it is another reason why the UK should not switch to a PR system.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Has the Minotaur labyrinth been discovered in Crete?

2. Catching a Soviet lab leak.

3. A life cycle hypothesis, from AutismCapital.

4. A Potemkin landslide? And Labour vote share declined in districts with high Muslim populations.

5. A Singaporean talking about America and Asia, video.  He is of course a Straussian.  The comments are interesting too, you can see to what extent he is regarded as a U.S: puppet, which of course is absurd.  The underlying ideological shifts in Singapore remain an underreported story.

6. Japan is finally eliminating the use of floppy discs.

7. By one measure, these are the most Christian countries.  Does Vatican City really deserve to be number one?

8. Conversations with Tyler, DC meet-up July 16.

The intelligent chicken culture that is Canada

by  Tyler Cowen in

A British Columbia chicken earned a Guinness World Record by identifying different numbers, colors and letters.

Gabriola Island veterinarian Emily Carrington said she bought five hyline chickens last year to produce eggs, and she soon started training the hens to identify magnetic letters and numbers.

“Their job was to only peck the number or letter that I taught them to peck and ignore the other ones. Even if I add a whole bunch of other letters that aren’t the letter they are supposed to peck, they will just peck the letter that I trained them to peck,” Carrington told the Nanaimo News Bulletin.

Carrington decided to have all of her chickens attempt the Guinness World Records title for the most tricks by a chicken in one minute.

One of the chickens, Lacy, emerged as the clear winner of the flock, correctly identifying 6 letters, numbers and colors in one minute.

The focused nature of the tricks led Guinness World Records to create a new category for Lacy: the most identifications by a chicken in one minute.

Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.

How Many Workers Did It Take to Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built circa 2600 BC and was the world’s tallest structure for nearly 4000 years. It consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight on the order of 6-7 million tons. How many people did it take to construct the Great Pyramid? Vaclav Smil in Numbers Don’t Lie gives an interesting method of calculation:

The Great Pyramid’s potential energy (what is required to lift the mass above ground level) is about 2.4 trillion joules. Calculating this is fairly easy: it is simply the product of the acceleration due to gravity, the pyramid’s mass, and its center of mass (a quarter of its height)…I am assuming a mean of 2.6 tons per cubic meter and hence a total mass of about 6.75 million tons.

People are able to convert about 20 percent of food energy into useful work, and for hard-working men that amounts to about 440 kilojoules a day. Lifting the stones would thus require about 5.5 million labor days (2.4 trillion/44000), or about 275,000 days a year during [a] 20 year period, and about 900 people could deliver that by working 10 hours a day for 300 days a year. A similar number might be needed to emplace the stones in the rising structure and then smooth the cladding blocks…And in order to cut 2.6 million cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the project would have required about 1,500 quarrymen working 300 days per year and producing 0.25 cubic meters of stone per capita…the grand total would then be some 3,300 workers. Even if we were to double that in order to account for designers, organizers and overseers etc. etc….the total would be still fewer than 7,000 workers.

…During the time of the pyramid’s construction, the total population of Egypt was 1.5-1.6 million people, and hence the deployed force of less than 10,000 would not have amounted to any extraordinary imposition on the country’s economy.

I was surprised at the low number and pleased at the unusual method of calculation. Archeological evidence from the nearby worker’s village suggests 4,000-5,000 on site workers, not including the quarrymen, transporters and designers and support staff. Thus, Smil’s calculation looks very good.

What other unusual calculations do you know?

Sam valadi, https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/16344178454

The polity that is the UK

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is no doubt that the past 14 years has seen miserable progress on living standards. Real household disposable income per person has flatlined in the UK since the 2019 election, compared with roughly 2 per cent annual growth in most parliaments since the second world war. More interesting is the distribution of income changes over the past five years and the whole period the Conservatives have led government since 2010.

Despite a huge rise in food bank use and cuts to social security for working-age households, the surprise is that it is the poorest households that have done better than the rest of the UK.

Better is a relative measure, however. Taking detailed income data up to 2022-23 and updating this with known trends thereafter, the Resolution Foundation finds that only the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution saw any real income gains in the latest parliament.

Here is more from Chris Giles at the FT.  Samir Varma sends me this link about problems with British driving school and the resulting fees and queues.  By the way, the SNP is likely to lose three-quarters of its seats in Scotland (FT).  And how small a group of party voters will be necessary to mount a challenge to Reform Party leadership?  Will there be a core?

Words from Ross Douthat

by  Tyler Cowen in

As a holiday meditation, consider that many of the things that fill people with understandable fear for our national future – polarization, extremism, radicalization, mutual incomprehension across cultural and moral and theological chasms – are also in their own way signs of national vitality. It’s good that so many people from so many different backgrounds still find the American future worth fighting over. It’s potentially good that freaks, weirdos and eccentrics have an increasing share in our politics alongside levelheaded moderates. It’s potentially good that far right and further left are both seeking reimaginings of the national narrative, incompatible as those imaginings may seem. We face a difficult situation in the world and a bad, late-imperial-seeming choice in November — but many of our derangements are also indicators of a heathy discontent with the comfortable decadence of developed societies. From multiple perspectives the American experiment appears at risk — but better to be at risk than to be settled, torpid, stagnant.

Maybe these are just the things you tell yourself when you’ve just had a fifth child. But I think there’s a good chance, a very good chance, that my children will inherit an America quite different from any of our past golden or silver ages, but still the best place to be born and live and flourish in this age of the world.

Here is the link.

Independence day assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Charles Fain Lehman on marijuana legalization in NYC.

2. New Zealand YIMBY on the move.

3. Facts and speculations about Jackie Chan.

4. Federal judge temporarily blocks rule banning noncompete contracts.  And what the FTC maybe should have done, but didn’t.

5. “To illustrate our methods, we systematically exploit data from more than 14 million high school yearbook pictures of graduating US seniors to analyze persistence and change in style. We document a striking convergence of male and female style characteristics.”  Link here.

6. Scott Sumner movie reviews.

7.  “Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.””  NYT link.

*Emergency Money*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Tom Wilkinson, and the subtitle is Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, 1914-1923.  Notgeld, or emergency money, typically was privately issued to make up for the deficiencies of government money during that period.

It is hard to think of a book that is more “for me.”  The book covers history, monetary economics, private currency issuance, and the artistic renderings put on the private notes.  You can see plenty of desperation in those visuals, and clearly the 19th century seems like a long time ago.  I read this one right away upon arrival.

You can buy it here.  Here is a good short piece on the art.

An overly simple model of positive and negative contagion

by  Tyler Cowen in

When people feel bad and act badly, if only in rhetoric, they make others around them worse as well.  That is a simple account of negative contagion of mood.

There is positive contagion too, but it is harder to pull off.  If nine people tell you nice things, and one person serves up a somewhat credible insult, it is the insult that sticks with you.

Most social times are a relatively stable mix of positive and negative feelings, but sometimes the dynamics of negative contagion take over, and negativism leads to yet more negativism.  Arguably this happened in Europe before WWI, and arguably it is happening in many countries today, including the United States.  Very bad events, such as financial crises, also can trigger cycles of negative contagion.

This negative contagion is self-validating.  If all the negative feelings, expressed collectively, in fact make outcomes worse, it will seem those negative feelings are justified.  In this equilibrium the negative feelings about “opposing others” will be true, but still it would be better to avoid that equilibrium altogether.

A country can get out of a negative cycle either by winning a major war, or when a political entrepreneur comes along with enough oomph and reforms to shift the equilibrium, as Ronald Reagan did in America.  Still, negative cycles are hard to break once you get into them.  That said, over time things do start to become worse, so options for the positivity entrepreneurs do arise, at least if they can overcome coordination problems and get enough people to feel better.

Many thinkers and writers contribute to this equilibrium of negative feelings, most of all by writing about each other.  Even if their substantive points are correct, their social marginal product usually is negative, though you can learn from them because they are competing to offer the most incisive critique.

If you can avoid being overwhelmed by the peer pressure of this negative dynamic, the private and social returns are high.  You can just keep on going and build things.  Yet few are able to resist the logic of Durkheim, no matter how ostensibly contrarian they may be.  In fact the contrarians are often at greatest risk of being caught up in this, because they are so skilled in rejecting and also criticizing the claims of the opposing forces.

Happy Fourth of July!

Finland knows how to troll MR commentators

by  Tyler Cowen in

Perhaps that is why I like the country so much:

Ideally, Marianne Korkalainen’s high school in Rautavaara, a tiny town in eastern Finland, would enroll at least 20 new pupils each year. This autumn, her shrinking municipality will send her only about 12. But Ms Korkalainen, the head teacher, has a plan: she intends to invite half a dozen youngsters from poorer countries to help fill her empty seats. Eager adolescents from places such as Myanmar, Vietnam and Tanzania will swap their tropical cities for her snowy bolthole. They will receive a Finnish education, at Finnish taxpayers’ expense.

Here is more from The Economist.  Finland soon will have a shrinking population, and worse yet:

By 2030 the country could have nearly 10% fewer children aged 4-18, according to eu projections. By 2040 their ranks might be smaller by a fifth. This spells trouble in particular for rural schools, which suffer both from having few births and from migration to the cities. Hundreds have shut their doors in recent decades. Some now offer local youngsters bungs, such as free driving lessons and small cash “scholarships”, in the hope of keeping them around.

There is even a Finnish start-up, Finest Future, that sells Finnish lessons to poorer students around the world, in the hope of preparing them for a Finnish taxpayer-subsidized education in Finland.  The belief is that recruiting individuals this way is easier and more effective than trying to find good job candidates abroad and also train them in Finnish later on.  Stuff the Kalevala down their throats!

Finland has a foreign-born population of about 9 percent, well below the Western European average.  I don’t know if this schools policy is a good idea, but I do know most people are not good at thinking about it in cost-benefit terms.