Monaco on the Marin Headlands
The Dalmation Coast in Croatia, the Amalfi Coast in Italy and Monaco’s coast on the Mediterranean Sea are often found on lists of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. Here are some pictures. Hard not to agree. The fourth picture is of the Marin coastline near San Francisco. It’s also beautiful but is it obviously more beautiful than the other coastlines? Personally, I don’t think so. But one thing is different. Far fewer people are enjoying the Marin coast. Why? Because fewer people live there. Can something be beautiful if there is no one to see it?
There is something to be said for protecting natural wilderness but must we do so on some of the most valuable land in the world?
I agree with Market Urbanism, “Quite simply, we must build Monaco on the Marin Headlands.”
Hat tip to Bryan Caplan who makes the point about beauty in his excellent, Build, Baby, Build.
Croatia
Amalfi
Monaco
Marin:
What film or literature is useful for making sense of the AI moment?
That is a reader query, I take it there is no point in my trotting through the obvious picks, starting with I, Robot and Her. Sophisticates will ponder Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad, which very well understood the quirky and semi-religious potential in LLMs, even though he was writing in Communist Poland a very long time ago (those people loved to talk about cybernetics).
Have you ever pondered the 1994 Sandra Bullock movie Speed? I think at this point it is not a spoiler to report “It revolves around a bus that is rigged by an extortionist to explode if its speed falls below 50 miles per hour.” And yes, this is a Hollywood movie of the 1990s, so it does end in a kiss.
Here is a visual mapping of how science fiction has made sense of AI. Am I neglecting any other non-obvious picks?
Urban design taken seriously?
Why does “how would you design a city so that more people fall in love?” feel like an absurd question? It shouldn’t be https://t.co/Z2GfCYEOjo
— Tyler Alterman (@TylerAlterman) April 28, 2024
GPT-4o suggested:
“1. **Serendipity Corners**:
– Implement areas designed to encourage unexpected encounters. For example, interactive art installations or quirky features can serve as conversation starters. These could change frequently to keep the city dynamic, such as rotating sculptures or murals with interactive elements like touch-activated sound…
3. **Social Puzzles**:
– Install public games or puzzles that require collaboration from multiple people. This could be anything from giant chess boards to augmented reality treasure hunts that encourage teams to work together to solve clues scattered throughout the city.”
Claude’s answers were along broadly similar lines. For an economic answer, how about “raise the city income tax on working”? Love is not taxed, but work income is. Furthermore, these days it is relatively difficult to strike up romantic relationships in many kinds of workplaces. (Of course you would need offseting “stay in the city” subsidies, in balanced budget fashion.) Taxing female education is another bad idea, but if the unconstrained goal is to increase the number of love matches that might work too.
What else?
Those circularity-inducing service sector jobs
Yes, in Tokyo women pay men in make-up to flatter them. But what does the whole market look like?
Yamada Kurumi, a client, works at a brothel to earn enough money to visit the clubs, which she does about once a week. She had boyfriends in the past but finds hosts more exciting. She is unsure whether to seek an office job after graduating from college or to carry on with sex work, which pays better. “A lot of people start losing touch with friends once they get addicted to host clubs,” says Ms Yamada. “My host is already part of my everyday life…If I get a normal job, I probably won’t be able to see him any more. That scares me.”
Here is more from The Economist.
Tuesday assorted links
1. How pro-China is Singapore?
2. Will home insurance cease to be a norm?
3. She has an AI arm (NYT).
4. Hari Kunzru on reading, and rereading, and Zola.
5. South Korean rebellion: “Organisers monitor the participants’ heart rates; the contestant with the most stable heart rate wins.” You are disqualified if you fall asleep.
Deadly Precaution
MSNBC asked me to put together my thoughts on the FDA and sunscreen. I think the piece came out very well. Here are some key grafs:
…In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer. Does the FDA’s lengthier and more demanding approval process mean U.S. sunscreens are safer than their European counterparts? Not at all. In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.
Sunscreens protect by blocking ultraviolet rays from penetrating the skin. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays, with their shorter wavelength, primarily affect the outer skin layer and are the main cause of sunburn. In contrast, ultraviolet A (UVA) rays have a longer wavelength, penetrate more deeply into the skin and contribute to wrinkling, aging and the development of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In many ways, UVA rays are more dangerous than UVB rays because they are more insidious. UVB rays hit when the sun is bright, and because they burn they come with a natural warning. UVA rays, though, can pass through clouds and cause skin cancer without generating obvious skin damage.
The problem is that American sunscreens work better against UVB rays than against the more dangerous UVA rays. That is, they’re better at preventing sunburn than skin cancer. In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection. Precisely because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against UVA rays. Thus, instead of being safer, U.S. sunscreens may be riskier.
Most op-eds on the sunscreen issue stop there but I like to put sunscreen delay into a larger context:
Dangerous precaution should be a familiar story. During the Covid pandemic, Europe approved rapid-antigen tests much more quickly than the U.S. did. As a result, the U.S. floundered for months while infected people unknowingly spread disease. By one careful estimate, over 100,000 lives could have been saved had rapid tests been available in the U.S. sooner.
I also discuss cough medicine in the op-ed and, of course, I propose a solution:
If a medical drug or device has been approved by another developed country, a country that the World Health Organization recognizes as a stringent regulatory authority, then it ought to be fast-tracked for approval in the U.S…Americans traveling in Europe do not hesitate to use European sunscreens, rapid tests or cough medicine, because they know the European Medicines Agency is a careful regulator, at least on par with the FDA. But if Americans in Europe don’t hesitate to use European-approved pharmaceuticals, then why are these same pharmaceuticals banned for Americans in America?
Peer approval is working in other regulatory fields. A German driver’s license, for example, is recognized as legitimate — i.e., there’s no need to take another driving test — in most U.S. states and vice versa. And the FDA does recognize some peers. When it comes to food regulation, for example, the FDA recognizes the Canadian Food Inspection Agency as a peer. Peer approval means that food imports from and exports to Canada can be sped through regulatory paperwork, bringing benefits to both Canadians and Americans.
In short, the FDA’s overly cautious approach on sunscreens is a lesson in how precaution can be dangerous. By adopting a peer-approval system, we can prevent deadly delays and provide Americans with better sunscreens, effective rapid tests and superior cold medicines. This approach, supported by both sides of the political aisle, can modernize our regulations and ensure that Americans have timely access to the best health products. It’s time to move forward and turn caution into action for the sake of public health and for less risky time in the sun.
*Crooked Plow*
That is a recently translated Brazilian novel by Itamar Vieira Junior, set in Bahia. It is better to read this one without any spoilers. And I am pleased to announce that we have another great Latin American (and Brazilian) novel, worthy of entering the canon.
I haven’t seen a good ungated review of the book, as no one seems to care. I did like this NYRoB (gated) review. Further on the plus side, the book is also short and an easy read.
What should I do in Cape Town, South Africa?
I won’t be there for long, but what should I see and what should I eat? How is the general level of safety these days?
I thank you all in advance.
Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models
We investigate whether an LLM can successfully perform financial statement analysis in a way similar to a professional human analyst. We provide standardized and anonymous financial statements to GPT4 and instruct the model to analyze them to determine the direction of future earnings. Even without any narrative or industry-specific information, the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. The LLM exhibits a relative advantage over human analysts in situations when the analysts tend to struggle. Furthermore, we find that the prediction accuracy of the LLM is on par with the performance of a narrowly trained state-of-the-art ML model. LLM prediction does not stem from its training memory. Instead, we find that the LLM generates useful narrative insights about a company’s future performance. Lastly, our trading strategies based on GPT’s predictions yield a higher Sharpe ratio and alphas than strategies based on other models. Taken together, our results suggest that LLMs may take a central role in decision-making.
That is from a new paper by Alex Kim, Maximilian Muhn, and Valeri V. Nikolaev, all at Chicago Booth. Via William Allen.
*Best Things First*
The author is Bjorn Lomborg, and the subtitle is The 12 most efficient solutions for the world’s poorest and our global SDG promises. I missed this book when it first came out last year. Here is what Lomborg presents as the twelve best global investments, in no particular order:
Tuberculosis
Maternal and newborn health
Malaria
Nutrition
Chronic diseases
Childhood immunization
Education
Agricultural R&D
e-procurement
Land tenure security
Trade
Skilled migration
Monday assorted links
1. “Our work suggests the intriguing possibility that non-equilibrium order can arise more easily than assumed, even before that order is directly functional, with consequences impacting mutation rate evolution and kinetic traps in self-assembly to the origin of life.” Link here.
2. Kabosu, who inspired the dogecoin meme, has passed away.
3. 52-minute video on birding in northern Colombia.
4. Old but renovated Singapore shophouses are now some of the most expensive properties in the world (FT).
A theory of information, by Noah Smith
So here you go: a theory of how totalitarianism might naturally triumph. The basic idea is that when information is costly, liberal democracy wins because it gathers more and better information than closed societies, but when information is cheap, negative-sum information tournaments sap an increasingly large portion of a liberal society’s resources. Remember that I don’t believe this theory; I’m merely trying to formulate it.
Here is the full blog post, gated after some point.
David Friedman on his father Milton
When my parents got married, they decided that there were certain things that were difficult to say and should therefore be replaced by numbers. Only one survived in actual usage. In their family “number two” meant, in my family still means, “You were right and I was wrong.”
One reason is that it is shorter, so easier to say. A second reason is that using the number reminds speaker and audience that admitting error is a difficult and virtuous thing to do, which makes it easier to do it. A third reason is that using a family code reminds the speaker that he is speaking to people who love him, so are unlikely to take advantage of the confession of error to put him down.
My father used to be fond of the phrase “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” sometimes abbreviated TANSTAAFL. He eventually stopped using it on the grounds that it was not true, that both consumer and producer surplus are, in effect, free lunches. He replaced it with “Always look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Phrases he continued to use included “A bad carpenter blames his tools,” “It is a capital mistake to make the best the enemy of the good” and Cromwell’s “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” He referred to my carrying too many logs in from the woodshed to the fireplace in order to do it in fewer trips as a lazy man’s load.
Here is the full Substack post.
What does it look like to build more housing?
…we examine how housing provision has evolved for the largest four metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in California and Texas. Despite differences in their topographies and regulatory environments, we find several common dynamics. As these MSAs grow, we see that fewer new net units are built at the periphery and a smaller share of the new units are built as single-family detached houses. As a greater share of new net units are built in infill locations, more units are built using higher-density—and more costly—multifamily housing construction techniques. Interestingly, we see these housing supply patterns in both “pro-growth” MSAs and “highly regulated” MSAs. Among all of our sample MSAs, we also find a declining share of Census tracts that participate in accommodating growth. Our results are consistent with the existence of a convex housing supply curve. We believe that this secular trend will pose genuine challenges to many urban housing policies aimed at improving affordability.
That is from a newly published paper by Anthony W. Orlando and Christian L. Redfearn. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.