Some new year's reading: January 1, 2022
January 1, 2022 | Newsletter
Hi all,
Happy new year and welcome to a new year’s experiment. First, I’m thinking of moving the platform on which I send out emails. It has been on Mailchimp, but they keep threatening to charge me for the privilege of sending out more than a thousand emails. So I may be heading to Substack, from which I’m sending this.
Secondly, in addition to the occasional pieces I’ve been sending, I’m hoping to make a weekly habit of regularly informing you of articles I found of interest.
So take this as the first such mailout and I’d love any feedback you have on it by return email.
Have a great weekend! and get working on that new year!
Cheers,
Nicholas
The Nobel Prize winner that predicted a crisis between nature and capital
I’d never heard of this guy but he won a Nobel in chemistry and then started writing books in economics. (Not dissimilar to Michael Polanyi whom I’ve written about.) This was nearly a century ago. In any event, as the article says, he “distilled his vision into five policy prescriptions, of which four since have become conventional wisdom”. His fifth prescription was proposed by Henry Simons of the University of Chicago from the late 1930s and was championed by his student Milton Friedman his whole life. Martin Wolf thinks it’s a good idea and so do I. I haven’t done the sums, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t return budget deficits to surpluses throughout the developed world! Click through to see what it was.
Big Tech’s Next Monopoly Game: Building the Car of the Future
I saved this article to read if I had time. But when I read it I raised its status to ‘must read’. It’s fascinating to watch an industry transform around new players and new points of leverage in the value chain. Whenever I learn about this stuff I also think of economists’ capacious lack of imagination in the way they ply their own tools. What we have going on here is the forging of a whole new institutional structure including a whole lot of infrastructural public goods. And as I wrote here, there are plenty of issues about how policy might optimise public benefit other than the standard concerns about competition policy —as legitimate as they are.
How many lives has bioethics cost?
An excellent piece on the scandal of medical ‘ethics’ — you know the same ethics that gets people chucked out of hospital halfway through their chemo and gets good research covered up if it gets in the way of a university’s smooth PR operation with the local bus company.
Anyway, here’s an excerpt from the article:
Recently, the drug Paxlovid was shown to be highly effective against severe disease. So effective, in fact, that the trial was stopped midway, because it was deemed unethical to give half of the participants a placebo when it was clear the real drug worked.
But the drug is still not approved in the US. So as Zvi Mowshowitz points out, “It is illegal to give this drug to any patients, because it hasn’t been proven safe and effective,” but also, “It is illegal to continue a trial to study the drug, because it has been proven so safe and effective that it isn’t ethical to not give the drug to half the patients.”
Mailer and the Second Wavers
I love looking back at turning points and seeing new ways in which people were right — and wrong. What they could and couldn’t see. And what we’ve become aware of —and unaware of.
You can also watch the event on which this article is based on YouTube.
How are the post-Soviet economies doing?
Noah Smith is one of those American economists who knows a vast amount, and is always working to know, and synthesise more. He should put his feet up a little more.
Why TikTok Should Worry Economists
In this article, Tyler Cowen, explores the dumbing down of economics on Tik-Tok.1 I have an interest because I’m making some videos myself and boy is Tik-Tok optimised for instant gratification.
Tiktok is an application where users can view, share, and publish short videos. It has been downloaded at least 200 million times, and with more than 14.43 million daily users. Statista. 2021. Number of daily active TikTok users via Android worldwide as of September 2021(in millions). Accessed December 30, 2021. Statistica.