Month: November 2022

The return of the horse?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Faced with climate breakdown, the energy crisis, and modern stress levels, there is a growing movement in French towns to bring back the horse and cart as an alternative to fossil fuels and a way to slow down urban life.

Florence, an estate agent in Hennebont, always stepped out of her office to watch the horse-drawn bin cart pass. “When I hear the sound of the hooves it’s just total happiness to me,” she said. “It brings a kind of gentle calm in these frantic times. It brings a bit of poetry into daily life, a reminder that things can be more simple. If I could live in a world without cars, I would.”

Since the first trials to reintroduce draft horses for municipal tasks in the mid-1990s, the number of French towns and urban areas using them has multiplied by almost 20 and continues to rise. Up to 200 urban areas have used draft horses in recent years. The most frequent tasks are rubbish collection and horse-drawn carriages taking children to school.

In the southern town of Vendargues, where the horse-drawn school carts are so popular that waiting lists have been 100 families-long, a study found they had improved the children’s relationship to learning. Some children who could walk or cycle to school preferred travelling by horse-drawn cart, despite it taking longer, because they found it “calming”.

Here is the full story, via Steven Kaufman.

Peter Thiel…telephone!

Bikers for Organ Donation

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In this cross-sectional study of 10 798 organ donors and 35 329 recipients of these organs from a national transplant registry from 2005 to 2021, there were 21% more organ donors and 26% more transplant recipients per day during motorcycle rallies in regions near those rallies compared with the 4 weeks before and after the rallies.

Both donors and transplants increase around the time of major motorcycle rallies.

Paper here.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Annie Ernaux, The Years.  The most famous book by the most recent Nobel Laureate in literature, and a good and stimulating read.  It takes about twenty pages before you figure out what is going on, so stick with it.  Nabeel was ahead of the curve with this one.

2. Maria Edgeworth, Ormond.  An Irish novel from the early 19th century, it wonderfully portrays the contrast between the Anglo-Irish and “Irish” worlds of the time.  Not a perfect read by any means, but some parts are really quite interesting.  With good enough googling you can find the Penguin edition on Amazon, but I don’t feel like doing it again.

3. Katy Hessel, The Story of Art: Without Men.  A good revisionist account, and with nice photographic images.  Still, the treatment is oddly conservative in some regards.  Why not much more coverage of textiles and pottery, two areas with a highly significant female presence?  Why not more on photography, especially in its earlier phases?  Overall this is a good catalog of underrated women creators, but it won’t help you to understand their history much.

4. Andrew Mellor, The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture.  An excellent book trying to understand the Nordic countries through the lens of music, architecture, and the arts.  “Finland has an unusually high proportion of expatriate Japanese.”  This one will make the addended “best of the year” list.  A good study of social capital, in addition to everything else.

5. Lulu Yilun Chen, The Story of Tencent and China’s Ambition.  There should be more books on Chinese businesses, and this is a good start in that direction.

There is Glory Liu, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism.  Not exactly my point of view, but a very able treatment of how later free marketeers picked up on Adam Smith, interpreted him for their own purposes, and how that process had so much influence.

And Leah Kral of Mercatus has a very good new book out: Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results.

Solve for the equilibrium

by  Tyler Cowen in

A Buddhist temple in central Thailand has been left without monks after all of its holy men failed drug tests and were defrocked, a local official said Tuesday.

Four monks, including an abbot, at a temple in Phetchabun province’s Bung Sam Phan district tested positive for methamphetamine on Monday, district official Boonlert Thintapthai told AFP.

The monks have been sent to a health clinic to undergo drug rehabilitation, the official said.

“The temple is now empty of monks and nearby villagers are concerned they cannot do any merit-making,” he said. Merit-making involves worshippers donating food to monks as a good deed.

Boonlert said more monks will be sent to the temple to allow villagers to practice their religious obligations.

Here is the full story, via S.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Behavioral approaches to increasing savings seem to work in the U.S. military.

2. MIE: “A rare opportunity to purchase one to five adjoining stall seats in the world’s most prestigious concert hall.”

3. A typology of the New Right.

4. On the Diplomacy AI.

5. Are we seeing a global cognitive convergence?

6. Identical twins with different exercise habits.  The reseachers found seventeen such pairs.

Shruti Rajagopalan has a new Substack

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Get Down and Shruti” (how many of you get the musical reference?).  Here is an excerpt from the first post, “Why everyone should pay more attention to India”:

Globally, one in five people below 25 is from India. 47% of Indians, about 650 million, are below the age of 25. This group of young Indians has some unique characteristics.

First, they have grown up in a market economy, post-command-and-control socialism. Two-thirds of Indians were born after the 1991 big bang reforms and have not experienced rationing and long lines for essential goods (other than episodic shortages during Covid). They have lived in an India that has averaged about 6 percent annual growth for three decades. They have access to global goods and content, and this generation of Indians wants and expects to compete with the world.

Second, a large proportion of these young Indians have grown up with access to the internet, with more coming online each year. Close to two-thirds of the population has access to a smartphone, and by 2040, it will be over 95% of Indians. Indians have access to some of the cheapest mobile data plans in the world, and charges are $0.17 per gigabyte on average, with plans as low as 5 cents per gigabyte.

The Substack is available for free, self-recommending.

The cost of regulatory compliance in the U.S.

by  Tyler Cowen in

We quantify firms’ compliance costs of regulation from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor input expenditure to comply with government rules, a primary component of regulatory compliance spending for large portions of the U.S. economy. Detailed establishment-level occupation data, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment’s wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. Regulatory costs account on average for 1.34 percent of the total wage bill of a firm, but vary substantially across and within industries, and have increased over time. We investigate the returns to scale in regulatory compliance and find an inverted-U shape, with the percentage regulatory spending peaking for an establishment size of around 500 employees. Finally, we develop an instrumental variable methodology for decoupling the role of regulatory requirements from that of enforcement in driving firms’ compliance costs.

That is from a new NBER working paper from Francesco Trebbi and Miao Ben Zhang.  Keep in mind those are the costs of compliance narrowly interpreted, not the costs of regulation overall.  And they do not consider the longer-term innovation costs from “having to turn the firm over to the lawyers.”

Child care sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is to date little or no evidence of beneficial effects of longer parental leave (or fathers’ quotas) on maternal participation and earnings. In most cases longer leave delays mothers’ return to work, without long-lasting consequences on their careers. More generous childcare funding instead encourages female participation whenever subsidized childcare replaces maternal childcare.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Stefania Albanesi, Claudia Olivetti, and Barbara Petrongolo.  Drawn from data across 24 countries.

*The Fabelmans*

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the preview I feared it might be unwatchable, but it far exceeded expectations.  This story of Spielberg’s own childhood life (a risky premise for a sentimentalist!) is one of the best Spielberg movies, one of the best movies about America “back then,” and one of the best movies about the power of cinema itself.

It shows the corniness and earnestness of the 1950s and 1960s, and how that awfulness also fed into a uniquely American form of creativity and productivity.  (It also supports my notion that “no one back then really was funny.”)  It is a very good movie about families.  And a very good movie about different parts of America, namely New Jersey, Arizona, and California.

It is fun to look for all the visual references to other Spielberg films, such as the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, which by the way is one of his finest achievements.

The performances and cinematography are excellent, even for a Spielberg movie.

The worst Spielberg movies are the big grossers, such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom take.  Jaws is here an exception.  The best Spielberg movies are the oddball nutters, such as A.I., Duel, Sugarland Express, Minority Report, and the Director’s Cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Spielberg is now close to commercially irrelevant, and I am pleased to see he is using that to his advantage.  Recommended.