Politics

War and Peace and War

Posted by Peter on April 15, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, by Peter Turchin

This book describes a plausible model of how conflict between hostile cultures such as Islam versus Christianity can create the kind of large-scale cooperation (asabiya) needed to create empires, and that the absence of a nearby border with such a conflict results in the decay of that empire.

It is very hard to evaluate how accurately he analyzes the evidence for his theory without a really complete knowledge of the history of several empires.

Asabiya resembles what Fukuyama calls trust, but is stronger, and includes some willingness to risk ones life for other members of ones society. Turchin implies that this is a desirable quality (although I can’t recall anything explicitly saying that). I wonder whether the wars it contributes to outweigh the benefits. The answer might depend on the extend to which it is possible to have trust without much asabiya (Turchin’s analysis suggests a pessimistic answer).

Much of the book contains standard style histories, mostly of times and places that haven’t received much attention. I often found these parts annoying because I couldn’t figure out which parts contained evidence for Turchin’s model, and most of them didn’t seem important enough for me to remember.

He suggests that inequality within an empire reduces its stability. Most of this isn’t very original nor backed up by much evidence. One idea that I hadn’t heard before involves the upper class intentionally reducing the asabiya of lower classes, especially with extreme forms of inequality such as slavery. It seems quite likely that the upper classes sometimes attempt this. But the other parts of the book suggest that this may backfire – conflict normally increases asabiya. Turchin writes as if geographic separation between the conflicting cultures is needed for this effect, but it isn’t obvious to me why.

The book is in some ways gloomy, suggesting that it would take an alien attack to create a big increase in worldwide cooperation. But he does leave some hope that recent technological changes may have made his model obsolete.

Avoid News

Posted by Peter on March 9, 2011
Posted in: Investing, Politics. Tagged: .

Avoid News is a good rant against paying attention to the storytellers that typically get labeled as news reporters:

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily? You are not that irresponsible with your money, your reputation or your health. Why give away your mind?

I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.

Bryan Caplan says:

P.S. When I read this passage, the counter-example of Tyler Cowen came immediately to mind.

I don’t consider that much of a counter-example. I found Tyler Cowen’s blog to be a dangerous addiction, and I’m glad I quit. I have a strong impression that he could be much more creative than he is, but has made a deliberate choice to pursue fame at the expense of creativity.

In order to maintain the pretense that news focuses on important information, storytellers focus on events that make us unhappy (avoiding or fixing mistakes are more important than understanding what routinely goes right, which makes it hard to focus on good news). [This also applies to other sources of political information, but that means I want the most concise source, which is not likely to be a rapidly published source.]

I’m not willing to completely follow the advice to kick my news addiction, since I’m somewhat dependent on social connections with people who imagine that news media provide valuable information. But I can mostly learn enough by watching The Daily Show, which often (but hardly consistently) is careful to indicate that they focus on frivolous, entertaining stories that give low priority to educational value. I’m definitely better off with that than I was when I was addicted to serious-sounding daily news sources.

I have a system for reading financial news that minimizes the problems with news. It involves mostly reading numbers that I find via stock symbols. Most of those numbers have been checked by accountants, who have strict rules to minimize biases. I’m fairly careful to select which symbols I follow by analyzing numbers, not stories.

For more evidence that news harms you, see an experiment done by Andreassen where subjects trading stocks did worse if they saw a constant stream of news than if they saw no news once they started trading.

Also, Robin Hanson’s analysis of how the press handled one story suggests a pretty clear positive correlation between the time a source takes to convey a story and the accuracy of that story.

[I’ve been neglecting this blog recently due to an obsession with finding waterfalls; that will change any week now when rainfall tapers off.]

Wired for War

Posted by Peter on November 8, 2010
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, by P. W. Singer.

This book covers a wide range of topics related to robotics and war. The author put a good deal of thought into what topics we ought to pay attention to, but provides few answers that will tell us how to avoid problems. The style is entertaining. That doesn’t necessarily interfere with the substance, but I have some suspicions that the style influenced the author to be a bit more superficial than he ought to be.

I’m disappointed by his three-paragraph treatment of EMP risks. He understands that EMPs could cause major problems, but he failed to find any of the ideas people have about mitigating the risk.

With some lesser-known risks, the attention he provides may be helpful at reducing the danger. For instance, he identifies overconfidence as an important cause of war, and points out that the hype often created by designers of futuristic devices such as robots can cause leaders to overestimate their military value. This ought to be repeated widely enough that leaders will be aware of the danger.

He expresses some interesting concerns about how unmanned vehicles blur the lines between soldiers in battle and innocent civilians. Is a civilian technician who is actively working on an autonomous vehicle that is about to engage in hostile action against an enemy an ‘illegal combatant’? Does a pilot walking to work in Nevada to pilot a drone that will drop bombs in Afghanistan a military target?

Doctor/Hospital ratings

Posted by Peter on October 14, 2010
Posted in: Health, U.S. Politics.

Despite strong opposition, a little progress is being made at informing consumers about medical quality and prices.

Healthcare Blue Book has some info about normal prices for standard procedures.

Healthgrades has some information about which hospitals produce the best outcomes (although more of the site seems devoted to patient ratings of doctors, which probably don’t make much distinction between rudeness and killing the patient).

Insurers are trying to create rating systems, but reports are vague about what they’re rating.

One objection to ratings is that

such measures can be wrong more than 25 percent of the time

A 25 percent error rate sounds like a valuable improvement over the current near-blind guesses that consumers currently make. Does anyone think that info such as years of experience, university attended, or ability to make reassuring rhetoric produces an error rate in as low as 25 percent? Do medical malpractice suits catch the majority of poor doctors without targeting many good ones? (There are some complications due to some insurers wanting to combine quality of outcome ratings with cost ratings – those ought to be available separately). Are there better ways of evaluating which doctors produce healthy results that haven’t been publicized?

More likely, doctors want us to believe that we should just trust them rather than try to evaluate their quality. I might consider that if I could see that the profession was aggressively expelling those who make simple, deadly mistakes such as failing to wash their hands between touching patients.

Awakening Giants

Posted by Peter on June 3, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, China, Economics.

Book review: Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India by Pranab Bardhan.

This short book has a few interesting ideas.

The most surprising ones involve favorable claims about China’s collectivist period (but without any claim that that period was better overall).

China under Mao apparently had a fairly decentralized economic system, with reasonable performance-based incentives for local officials, which meant that switching to functioning capitalism required less change than in Russia.

Chinese health apparently improved under Mao (in spite of famine), possibly more than it has since, at least by important measures such as life expectancy. This is reportedly due to more organized and widespread measures against ordinary communicable diseases under collectivism.

This Time is Different

Posted by Peter on March 11, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , .

Book review: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.

This book documents better than any prior book the history of banking and government debt crises. Most of it is unsurprising to those familiar with the subject. It has more comprehensive data than I’ve seen before.

It is easier reading than the length would suggest (it has many tables of data, and few readers will be tempted to read all the data). It is relatively objective. That makes it less exciting than the more ideological writings on the subject.

The comparisons between well governed and poorly governed countries show that governments can become mature enough that defaults on government debt and hyperinflation are rare or eliminated, but there is little different in banking crises between different types of government / economies.

They claim that international capital mobility has produced banking crises, but don’t convince me that they understand the causality behind the correlation. I’d guess that one causal factor is that the optimism that produces bubbles causes more investors to move money into countries they understand less well than their home country, which means their money is more likely to end up in reckless institutions.

The book ends with tentative guesses about which countries are about to become mature enough to avoid sovereign debt crises. Among the seven candidates is Greece, which is now looking like a poor guess less than a half year after it was published.

City of Gold

Posted by Peter on January 9, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, Mideast. Tagged: , .

Book review: City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism by Jim Krane.

This book describes how a nearly barren piece of land became a prosperous city. Dubai sounds like what you’d expect if Bill Gates had taken over a small desert tribe and turned it into a real estate development company.

Part of its success is due to having the right amount of oil given its population size. Most non-industrialized countries that find enough oil to affect their economy are corrupted by dependence on it and by political fighting over who profits from it. Dubai found enough to finance a good deal of growth, but quickly saw that oil revenues would decline before long. Also, it had few enough people that the ruling family could afford to buy off any potential opposition.

But Dubai’s development started before it had much hope for oil money, and is partly due to the ambitions of a few people who ruled it. There must be a fair amount of luck involved – it seems to be an accident that Dubai is ruled by competent businessmen who are uninterested in politics (one ordered his reluctant brother to become the ruler). British rule over the region early on also helped ensure political stability.

The book’s description of Dubai’s legal system is confusing. How did a tribe with no tradition of private property make investors feel safe? I’ve read elsewhere that importing a British judge and British common law to the financial district is part of the explanation. The rest of Dubai seems to manage with virtually no legal system. I’m still puzzled about how Dubai provides enough predictability to attract large investments.

He describes Dubai’s lack of democracy as “an embarrassment”. But most of the book suggests that Dubai has been doing better than a democracy could. It makes much faster decisions than a democracy, and it forces bureaucrats to compete for performance scores that would be too easily gamed if voters were in charge.

Dubai’s ambitious expansion has made it resemble a financial bubble for much of the past 55 years, but most of its gambles have succeeded. This makes me wonder how to distinguish similar expansions from bubbles in the future (or in China, the present).

Dubai is an important model for how seasteads might develop, and will compete with any seastead.

The author has a modest pro-Dubai bias, but reports some serious problems such as workers being unable to leave because their passports has been confiscated, and wasteful subsidies of energy and water prices.

He claims that until 2008 the region “hadn’t experienced a financial shock for more than three decades”. Was the 1982 Kuwaiti stock market crash in a different region? It’s not obvious where to get enough financial data to say how the shock from that affected Dubai.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

Posted by Peter on November 11, 2009
Posted in: China, Economics.

Book review: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang.

This is the most insightful book I’ve read so far on the Chinese economy. Most commentators only look at the most readily available data, but Huang dug through many obscure detailed records that were less likely to be manipulated.

The most important point of the book is to show that the widely held view of China as having gradual, steady improvement since 1978 is wrong. There was a dramatic political change in 1978 that allowed the rural parts of China (which still account for a large part of the economy, and where entrepreneurial culture had not been stamped out by communism) to prosper. Then starting in 1989 urban-focused leaders stifled rural businesses, causing stagnation there until 2002, when leaders more friendly to rural business gained power and allowed fairly healthy growth to resume.

Meanwhile urban areas have been dominated by crony capitalism which produced a good deal of gdp growth through massive state-directed investment in large companies, especially in the 1990s. This growth has produced fewer benefits to the average person than gdp numbers would lead us to expect.

Most of China’s success has been due to private enterprise. Beliefs that state-run businesses have produced growth are partly due to confusing reports about which companies are private.

I’m fairly impressed by the documentation of the changes in the rural political climate, but since the author seems to be the only one reading his sources of data and since it would be very time consuming to check them, it would be easy for errors to go unnoticed. For urban issues, he appears to be overstating the importance of problems that are not unique to China.

He partly clears up the puzzle of China doing better than should be expected for a country whose legal system doesn’t provide much rule of law. He provides evidence that some of the most important successes depend on British law imported via Hong Kong. But he doesn’t provide enough evidence to tell us how important this effect has been.

He leaves unanswered many questions I’d like answered. Why did government policies undergo these changes? Is the surprisingly reported steady gdp growth mostly the result of manipulated statistics? How much of the growth has been an investment bubble, and how much is sustainable? How did entrepreneurial culture survive communism in rural China so much better than in other countries?

Medical Tourism Seasteads

Posted by Peter on October 28, 2009
Posted in: Freedom, Health. Tagged: .

How can a hospital-like business operating outside of existing territorial jurisdictions avoid harrassment by governments whose medical lobbies want to spread FUD?

Given that these businesses will initially have no track record to point to and less protection than existing medical tourism providers from whatever government provides a flag of convenience to the business, merely providing comparable quality medical care won’t be enough for such businesses to thrive. So I’m proposing practices which could enable those businesses to argue that current U.S. hospitals are more dangerous. I’m not suggesting this just for marketing purposes – I want safe hospitals to be available, and regulatory costs in the U.S. make it easier to start an innovative hospital offshore than in the U.S. (especially for types of innovation that don’t respect doctors’ prestige).

It has been known since 1847 that doctors kill patients by failing to wash their hands often enough. Yet this threat is still common. An offshore hospital could offer patients documentation showing when medical personel who touch the patient washed their hands (e.g. by providing the patient with video recordings of the procedures sufficient for the patient to verify cleanliness), with a double your money back guarantee. There are many other less common errors that patients could use such videos to check for.

The book Counting Sheep argues that hospitals often impair patients’ health by disturbing their sleep. Paying patients if night-time noise or light levels exceed some pre-specified limits should reduce this problem.

Next, I want the hospital’s fee structure to give it increased incentives to avoid failure. For procedures with objectively measurable results, I want the hospital to charge the patient only if those results are achieved, and to pay the patient some pre-specified amount if results leave the patient measurably worse off. (For hard to measure results such as change in pain, this approach won’t work).

The article You Get What You Pay For: Result-Based Compensation for Health Care has more extensive discussion of incentives and of strategies that hospitals might use to reduce the rate at which they harm patients.