Protect Your Slack, Delay Moloch: Why You SHOULD Defend Yourself With Artificial Rents

Inspired by Behold the Pale Child at Secretorum: "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Bakkalon." (or Moloch. Moloch, at the bottom of the Darwinian/economic/political gravity well!)

The point of life is to be happy. How to go about this is mostly biologically determined. Yes, it's good to make others happy if you can, and to have making others happy make you happy as an incentive; for most of us, as social animals, this is also biologically determined. This position is that of a modern-day Epicurus, enhanced with and connected to facts about the natural world and our place in it. Not very controversial, you might think.

But I suspect that many people in the rationalist blogosphere will find it incredibly selfish to think first and foremost of oneself and ones own happiness, instead of the utilatarian (more specifically, Parfitian) long and wide view of everyone's happiness. (This more "selfish" position is not necessarily just individual hedonism, but rather would include having birthday parties for your kids instead of donating that money to dig a well in the developing world.[1]) In a curiously Calvinist-adjacent take, the implied position of the EA world (and tech capitalists telling young people their identify comes from working unhealthy hours and sacrificing the rest of their lives) is that you should de-emphasize your own happiness here and now since it's such a small drop in the ocean of possible conscious experience throughout time.

And yet if people are biologically limited by the link between their happiness and the amount of work they can do - and the kind they can do - and for whom they do it - and they are - what you're asking is many people to sacrifice their own happiness for an uncertain outcome, for an uncertain philosophical position.

The position of working 110% all-out all the time is not just something from the world of Effective Altruism (EA), etc. In a recent post on the Slatestarcodex (SSC) subreddit, in a discussion about the Musk-like approach to constantly fastforwarding everything and having work be eternal crunchtime - a commenter stated that once in a great while, such a push was okay, but it's not sustainable. I would go one step further: I want to enjoy my life, working hard diminishes that, focusing on any one thing to the exclusion of most others diminishes that, and you should avoid crunchtime and working hard wherever possible. (That is, I value slack - see Church of the Subgenius - and I will defend that slack if necessary, even if I have to do it surreptitiously.) Wanting to enjoy your life, and do more things you directly enjoy more often, and fewer instrumental things, is not something to be ashamed of. That's why I'm posting it online and telling you it's good to feel the same way.[2]

It's true that if everyone thought this way, then life-saving and -improving technologies would progress much more slowly. But herein I'm taking the (apparently very hard to grasp position) that I neither want to work that hard, nor do I want to get in the way of people who do want to work hard. I say in all seriousness: good for them, I'm glad we have people built this way![3] But don't feel bad if you're not one of them, and you're almost certainly not. I'm definitely not, and I feel great about it! I've even turned down promotions for this reason. Again, not controversial, I wouldn't think. But it feels very much like an emperor's new clothes position to take.

The opposite of slack is hypercompetition, which I don't have to further describe to anyone living in the developed world in the 21st century, and I would argue a big part of Moloch is hypercompetitiveness (Moloch in the sense of Scott Alexander's synechdoche for a self-perpetuating system with serious and unintentional consequences that benefit nobody.) There is only so much work you can do; you need some slack, and though our modern Molochian culture has trained us to hide our slack-seeking from ourselves, we do it, or we burn out. And part of the outrage at people finding ways to guard slack is a result of hiding our desire for slack from ourselves (read: reaction formation and the predictable reaction to seeing others fulfill their fantasy) when a source of slack protection is noticed. (See: "tears of rent-seekers" regarding taxis, academia, government, or any other area where people have goodness forbid given themselves some extra slack to help them enjoy their lives.)

Other strategies: shrouding - which normally means companies trying to avoid competing on price by making their pricing opaque, but works in the labor market too when workers cooperate to obscure measurement of output - outlawing payment for piece work was a major victory. Another: avoidance of direct market exposure, or any situation where your livelihood rests on your having to react in real time to developments - usually the more layers within an organization away from a customer interaction surface or competition with other organizations, the quieter your life is. (Must be balanced against the risk of paroxysmal collapses; the cycle-time of this class of org is relevant to your choices here (nations = centuries, companies = years or decades if already long-established.)

Some concrete examples are in order, of how you can and should protect slack and benefit your life by erecting artificial rent structures.


SITUATION 1 You're the leader of Organization A. You believe in what the organization is doing, genuinely care about the people there and want them to have good lives, and as a result you "leave some money on the table" by not expecting them to work that hard or otherwise sacrifice their well-being to the organization, as long as they keep the wheels turning.

Then Organization X comes along (for the Parfit-style calculators out there, let's say it has the same number of people), which does NOT care about its people this way, and they are constantly sacrificing themselves, or at least on a sort of psychological Malthusian frontier (of stress rather than starvation.) This might well be an Elon Musk company. Organization X eats Organization A's lunch, and Organization A is destroyed or absorbed, along with the lifestyle of the people in it.


SITUATION 2 Same as above, but you're the leader of Organization B. You know it is likely that if you do NOT drive your people to self-sacrifice, then a Muskite will drive theirs in such a way, and then they'll come for you. So for your organization to continue existing, you have to work them to the point of self-sacrifice. You do this, and keep existing, but the people who work at your organization are now miserable.


SITUATION 3 You're the leader of Organization A, same as Situation 1. Except you have a plan. You want your employees to have a good life but you know that the Muskite misery engines out there like Organization X will come get you. So you make a couple calls to a governor or legislator, take them golfing and make some arrangements, etc. Organization X now finds you have an administrative or legal moat - an artificial rent protector - for example, to do what your org does they have to be in a certain consortium and no one will let the Muskite org join, or Organization X can't operate in a certain business in a certain territory, unless the workers within Org X get lots of protections. You know this can't work forever, but it will work for a while, and benefit the people you care most about. Organization X loses its advantage in being willing to essentially trade personal slack for victory. People on SSC read about this, and cry their eyes out talking about Rents, and how you're immoral for depriving the rest of the world of the fruits of your labors (invisible tragedies, etc.)


I used to join in with the "ha ha, rentiers dying, suck it taxi drivers" until I realized that within a few years, AI will be able to do all of our jobs, and the value of labor will race to zero. Of the strategies I've mentioned, only legal artificial rent structures have any chance of lasting for any length of time. So I'm unashamed to admit I would rather work for Organization A in Situation 3, and unless you're the 1% of the 1% in productivity, you would too. (I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you think you are a 10x 1% of 1% superstar, you are much more likely to be delusional than an actual superstar, and the angrier that statement made you, the more likely you're delusional.) Of course, sometimes the rents come "honestly" from an innovation - but then again, even patent protection is an artifical rent, since it's not just the innovation itself. Mostly rents come "artificially" from barriers like the ones I've described. Taxi medallions, medical licenses, etc. although in most cases there's usually at least some non-bullshit reason for the certification, or guild membership, whatever it is (e.g. it's a quality signal.)

Note that I've written these thought experiments with you in the position of the leader. But you're almost certainly not. If, in a true Rawlsian approach - if you fell out of the sky at random into these thought experiments - you'd probably be a rank-and-file employee. In that spirit:


SITUATION 4 You're an employee (not the leader) of Organization A. You believe in what you do and what the organization stands for. Your leader seems to genuinely want everyone to have good lives and doesn't work anyone too hard. As you smirk and murmur to your colleagues at pool parties, this is because the leader is friends with the governor, and got a law passed artificially protecting you from competition, which is why you have a good income without working too hard.

Then the leader dies or steps down, and a new CEO takes over - one who reads SSC and Marginal Revolution. "Enough with this laziness! Company X has their own lobbyists, and we can't wait for them to get the law repealed and be caught off-guard. 80 hour weeks! No vacation or weekends if you want to be considered serious around here! Constant aggressive deadlines! Do it 10x faster! We're depriving the rest of the world and future generations of the fruits of our labor, how selfish that is, think of all the hidden tradegies! Don't like it? Emigrate/quit and go to our competitor, who will probably have to do the same thing to keep up anyway." Would you say "Yes! Finally, our new leader is high-agency, and this is the moral thing to do instead of collecting rents"? Yeah, sure you would.[4] If you do, you burn out, ruining your health and family life, plus you have no more time to read SSC.


Certainly it's a difficult balance to find, and often you're just surfing a temporary inefficiency wave until that wave breaks and you're back in the same Molochian world as everyone else - but you should try to find it and ride it as long as you can. In the long run, we're all dead anyway. If you can have 5 or 10 more years of slack instead of zero more years, you are not being immoral to take it, and (for the Parfitians in the back) you can't be sure that the only thing you'd do by missing out on the slack is making yourself miserable with no other impact, thus doing the immoral thing of increasing the suffering of the universe on net.


[1] I've noticed that the tech world in general and EA especially is a haven for those who in the abstract, are horrified at the existence of slack (or at least that's the non-revealed preference.) In general consequentialists tend to neglect deontology - the role of duties in what decisions are moral. Consequentialists tend to look for abstract principles for actions to adhere to, but actions are not disembodied principles, they occur in time, and space, and social space - that is, in the context of whatever history and relationships, if any, you have with the people affected. Deontology clears up a lot of the confusion about what to actually do and when to do it, and who to do it with/for. I've also noticed conscientious younger people tend to be consequentialists, and older people season their outlook with more deontology as they age.

[2]Maybe this whole essay is just my own psychotherapy, justifying the following to myself: as a physician, every time I go home at the end of the day or take a day off, I am depriving people of potentially life-saving treatment. Some physicians, more in previous decades than today, kept this in mind and worked ridiculous hours; many modern healthcare organizations are more than happy to take advantage of this mentality of self-sacrifice to make another cent, and then when you start making mistakes because you burn out, they kick you to the curb. Not unique to medicine of course, but I'm very comfortable protecting my time so I can have slack and enjoy my life, and what's more, I limit my responsibilities to my established patients, and not some abstraction of "possible humans in the universe". If you're a naive consequentialist (who doesn't understand deontology or respect the limits set by biology) you've probably dismissed me as Jeffrey Dahmer by this point.

[3]To beat a dead horse: this is not an anti-hard-work screed. If you like to work hard, focus on one thing and one thing only, you find it rewarding, great! Part of civilization's success is that we've set up a system that rewards you, and where the rest of us also by diffusion get the benefit of the wealth and technologies you create. But if your choices start taking away my slack - I'll ask my guild to take our Congressman golfing, after which an artificial moat may mysteriously appear. For a relevant culture-wide take on the same: I once read an account of an American traveler in Japan who said it's great to be a foreigner in Japan - because it's a safe, clean, beautiful, quiet place, due to the crushing social obligations of Japanese culture that keep it this way, and as a foreigner you can free ride on this. But you obviously shouldn't do anything to make it harder to keep the country that way!

[4] SSC surveys have consistently shown that oldest siblings are more likely to be readers. Though it's a stretch, it does make me wonder if an oldest-sibling-rich group concerned about these topics might tend to lack a healthy level of resource anxiety (no older siblings to finish all the dessert before you, hog the TV or soccer ball, etc.) This would lead them to always assume that protecting slack can only be about stupidity or laziness - "Aw, we ALWAYS have to stay on the little kid playground because of them!"

Professional Sports: Salary Distributions and Relationship to Team Size and League Revenues

Some casual fans of pro sports are actually much more interested in the business and psychology of the leagues than the action on the field. IF that's you, read on! I started wondering 1) what is the minimum you could make in each sport? What was the relationship between size of team in each sport, player salaries, and profitability? and 2) that if any of the figures in my table are glaringly wrong, please comment below and I will correct it (and my written conclusions if they're affected.)

Leag	Max/min	avg/med	rev, $B	sal/rev	rev/plyr	rev/pl / avg sal
NFL	76	1.28	18.0	0.10	10,613,208	9.68
MLB	56	2.92	9.56	0.40	10,988,506	2.51
NHL	21	1.04	5.2	0.42	7,065,217	2.36
NBA	44	1.97	10.0	0.34	22,222,222	2.96

Observations:

1. The smaller the team roster size, the better players get compensated (both in terms of minimum income, median, and average.) That is to say: if you're a player, the NBA is the best place to be.
   
   
2. To get an idea of the salary spreads in each sport, we can look at the max:min ratio. (Minimum salaries in each case are determined by the players union contract with the league.) A catchier name for this would beis the "J.P. Morgan index"*, is highest in football, then baseball and not far behind basketball, with the NHL the lowest.
   
   To get a Gini index (to see income inequality within the league) we'd need all the individual salary data. While that may be available, and I welcome you to find it and crunch the numbers yourself, for my level of curiosity a quick-and-dirty index of average salary divided by median will work. Despite the NFL having some outgroup super-earners giving it the highest J.P. Morgan index, baseball is the most unequal (suggesting the most high-earning outliers) at almost 3, followed by the NBA, NFL, and NHL. In the NHL the average and median are almost the same, and the top earner is an outlier among all the leagues at only $16M. (The J.P. Morgan index is also the lowest there.)
   
   As an additional thought, I wonder how closely real output (measured in goals, sacks, strike-outs etc.) correlates with pay - and does this explain why the NHL is so much more egalitarian in pay than the MLB or NFL? (Again there could be contract or business-specific reasons that I'm not aware of, rather than the nature of the sport.) It also raises the question of whether relative status has more of an effect in some sports, i.e. are there more positional effects in hockey?
   
   To explain this concretely: if you look at say, a brick-making factory, there will be people who are faster at making bricks, and people who are slower. If they're salaried, then you would expect rationally that someone who makes twice as many bricks as the median would get paid twice as much, and similarly someone who makes half as many bricks would get paid half as much.
   
   But that's not what we see - the curve is sigmoidal, flattening out at both ends, with the most productive people not making as much per unit as the people in the middle of the distribution, and the slowpokes getting more per unit. How does this make sense? The theory (as described by Robert Frank in Choosing the Right Pond) is that part of the compensation the fast workers are getting is status - they can strut around the factory with everyone knowing they're the best - and similarly to keep the humiliated slowpokes coming back day after day, you have to give them a premium to pay for the humiliation they suffer. So does a quarterback who throws for twice as many yards or scores twice as many touchdowns get twice as much? It's easy to tell just-so stories in other directions before we look at the data - yes, obviously status is a massive part of sports played for an audience, so the effect would be greater - or, people want to play sports professionally and the status of being a professional athlete more than offsets the humiliation of being the worst quarterback, paid commensurate with miserable stats. But again, I would need data at individual salary levels and have to compare stats (which differ for different positions), so if that's interesting enough to you to gather and crunch the numbers, I invite you to do it and post a link in the comments.
   
   
3. I was also curious about whether player salary or team payroll made a difference, and fortunately other people have been too and already crunched the numbers. Keep in mind that what matters to a franchise's owners is how much money they make, and winning or losing is just a means to that end (if it actually matters to the fan's expenditures at all - and the more loyal the fans, the less it matters - see more here.) But it turns out that baseball has the highest gap between payrolls, and it also makes the biggest difference to team performance; the NFL has the least gap, and it makes the least difference. According this article, the low-payroll teams actually made it to the Final Four more often than the high-payroll teams. (More data on MLB payroll-performance relationship here; yes payroll does help you win in MLB.
   
   
4. The most important thing is how much does each player produce? As someone involved in a league or franchise from a business standpoint, you might think of your sport this way: players are machines that produce revenue. In this analysis, using the average salary and number of players per league, as well as the overall revenue, we can see how much of the revenue is taken by salaries, and how efficient each league's players are at producing profit. Interestingly, here the NFL is in a league of its own. Its salaries are only about 10% of its revenue, compared to the other three which range 34-42%, and players in the NFL produce a share of the revenue 9.7 times their salaries, as opposed to the other three, who range from 2.36 to 2.96 times their salaries. Why is this? Does the NFL have better merchandising? More expensive tickets? Or it's just an inherently better TV sport so there's a bigger audience?
   
   (College football is obviously ideal in this regard. The individual player's share of revenue generated-to-salary ratio is nearly infinite. We might all be forgiven for dismissing the overwrought pleas not to pollute the moral purity of the sport by paying the players coming from the administrators of these programs, or the business office of the learning institutions that for some reason host them. It will be interesting to see, with college football consolidating essentially into two superleagues, how they'll keep the rankings and championships opaque in order to continue maximizing the number of bowls and profits therefrom.)

*Wasn't it J.P. Morgan who said the CEO should not make more than a certain multiple of what the lowest paid employee makes? I couldn't find the quote so if I'm misattributing it please correct me in the comments.

Is Discounting the Future Due to a Defect in Impulse Control, Or a Rational Adaptation?

Many people are familiar with the Mischel marshmallow experiment. Kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes.* The concept of varying ability to delay gratification is quite critical to discussions of public policy, since clearly we do not all have identical agency in every situation, by reason of variation of our nervous systems.

The received wisdom in the informed public is that not delaying gratification - that is, discounting the future - is a negative, a deficit in impulse control. The experiment has been run in multiple settings with the discount rate quantified: do you accept a ten dollar payment at the conclusion of your participation, or $11 a month later? (If you take the $10 right now, your future discounting rate is 10% per month.) It's been pointed out repeatedly since then that there are many other plausibly influential factors, including the predictability of the environment. Run this study in Singapore, and you can count on the experimenter being in their office when you go back. In Somalia, after a month, who knows if the building will be there anymore? Whether it's war or just low trust that makes it less likely you'll actually get your payoff, the direction of the impact on your discount rate is going to be the same.

Celeste Kidd created a model of this in children, and sure enough, kids who were disappointed by not receiving a promised reward, later on discounted the future significantly more. This relates to future discount rates in politically unstable parts of the world, as well as in children raised by inconsistent parents. It's a vicious cycle, because increasing your discounting is actual the rational choice.

I would have expected this result to be much better known, so I'm doing my small part in making that happen.

Kidd C, Palmeri H, Aslin RN. Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition. Volume 126, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 109-114.


*It's worth pointing out that, so far as I know, there's no research showing that low future discounting increases happiness - in fact, there's research strongly suggesting that the curve is U-shaped, and beyond a certain point, good impulse control makes us less happy! Isn't that why we care? Essentially longitudinal studies here and here; writeup of both in Washington Post. Of course, your country is affected by the level of impulse control of your countrymen, so the ideal situation might be to be a person with low impulse control in a country of people with high impulse control, a classic free-rider problem.

Trust and Progress

Tyler Cowen talks with Paul Romer about social norms that encourage scientific advancement, or don't. Romer refers to the actually very puzzling question about why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China and (embellishing) it was one of this cacophony of squabbling medieval kingdoms that eventually did it. Romer says,

One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.

I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.

For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?

There's a section near the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (the best alternate history book ever written hands-down) where an alchemist - actually a shady huckster who is aware that what he is doing is just a con - gets caught "transmuting" lead into gold in a demonstration for a local potentate in some Persianate Central Asian state when his hollow, gold-containing ladle is discovered.

He gets his hands cut off in punishment, then swears that he will only work to advance knowledge from then on. This ends up being the start of something like what we recognize as science. Of note, the divergence point in this world is that the Black Plague wiped out all of Europe, turning history into a zero-sum contest between the Islamic world and China)* Because of the reformed con man, science advances much as it did in our history, except with different names (ie, qi for electricity.)

That said, while many hucksters have been caught at their game, few have so dramatically changed their internal incentive structure in response - though this passage highlights the importance of trust and an earnest search for knowledge that may better the world in general. The importance of developing a general background of trust is difficult to overstate.


*Interestingly enough, in Stirling's Conquistador, Alexander the Great lives to a ripe old age and succeeds in his dream of uniting the lands from Europe to the Indus into a macro-state; the resulting world is one of unity and stability, therefore stagnancy, where by what would have been the 20th century of the Christian era they are barely medieval, and China appears to have been overrun by the Tocharians.

Addiction Has Three Types: To Pleasure, Flow, or Meaning

Positive psychology research models happiness as reducing to three components: pleasure (chocolate, sunsets and orgasm), flow (losing yourself in an activity; "action meditation") and meaning - feelings of value and connection and identity within a community. My fellow Americans and I have a tendency to reduce the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is important, but it's not the whole game, and modern consumer society may have specialized in that component and lost the other two.

We commonly think of addiction as a problem of pleasure and pain: pleasure when you consume the addictive substance (or perform the addictive activity), and suffering when you do not, after you're hooked. It's not hard to see how it's not just meth, but sex or food, that could be the subject of addictive behavior. Humans have continued to get better at creating goods and services that cause repetitive behavior in their targets - think brand loyalty, processed drugs (think coca leaves to cocaine; increasing the sugar in everything.) We have probably become better at identifying avoiding these addictive goods and services. Still, I'd bet good money that over time, they're becoming more addictive faster than we're getting better at resisting them.

Through the lens of positive psychology, this starts to look too narrow. It's not just the pleasure component of happiness that has been exploited. Addiction to flow and meaning exist too.

Probably the best example of addiction to flow is video games. They are designed for this purpose, and there is evidence that they are damaging the productivity of young people, particularly young males.

Then there is community addiction. The most harmless form is what Facebook exploits to get you to keep checking whether your friends have liked your post. The more concerning form is that of religious cults, or small ingroup-vs-outgroup communities (often based on unearned, non-opt-outable qualities like race or religion.) This is actually the one that has the most potential for harm. Postwar Japan and late 60s America both featured a shock to the automatic meaning-generating aspect of national community. This is happening in a second wave in the West. It pains me as a staunch atheist to say this, but it's becoming clearer that the disappearance of religion as a community-builder has not been a boon for everyone. If you're also an atheist and that sentence made you squirm, then here's a thought: a substantial part, maybe even the majority, of young American males who support Donald Trump are not religious.

I have enough confidence that these three types are legitimate subtypes that I think it would be appropriate to have them DSM as specifiers. Indeed, the discussion over video game addiction has been ongoing for some time.

The Benefit of Joining the United States Comes from Becoming More Like New England

In an SSRN paper, Maseland and Spruk look at an interesting counterfactual: how would territories have performed that did in reality join the US, if they had not? Also, how might some countries had performed if they had joined the US, when in actual fact they never (fully) did? For this second question the countries are Puerto Rico, Cuba, Greenland and the Philippines. (Newfoundland strongly considered it, mid-20th century.) They find that joining the US is beneficial. However, and more interesting, they find that this effect is in part mediated by the states that actually did join, importing institutional values which are most similar to those of New England states.

This is interesting, because a) there is an overrepresentation of New England-bred and -educated people in America's cultural elites; b) the book Albion's Seed notes the different values brought by settlers from different parts of England to the New World, and as New England Puritans were literally breeding for intelligence, it's not a surprise they had such an outsize impact; c) this may relate to the "law of the Canadian border", which prompts one to ask d) if the benefit of joining the US decreases as one moves south - i.e., since Wyoming was much more likely to receive New England institutional norms than say, Mississippi (based on the country's predominantly east-west migration patterns), does that mean Mississippi did not benefit as much?

Which States Are Americans Moving To and From, As Related to Cost of Living

United Van Lines publishes an annual list of the move-to, move-away balance for each state. With the exception of Vermont there are no big surprises - although many Californians, accustomed as we are to the articles about everyone leaving California, might be shocked to learn that we're only on the move-away side of the balance sheet by less than 2 percentage points.

Here's the scatter plot:


No surprise, people are moving to cheap places. For every cent more a dollar is worth, there's another percent of the move there-move away balance toward people going there.

Are there cheap places people aren't moving to? Yes - Mississippi, Iowa, and Missouri. In fact there's a cluster of cheap places people aren't moving to, and they're in the South and Midwest. Besides the climactic desirability of a place, low cost of living correlates with subpar growth and not many jobs. Yes, people will move to cheaper states in/near the Northeast (proximity to expensive cities) for retirement or if forced out by rent, but if a state is in a large area of other cheap states (not many jobs) then there won't be as much reason to move between them. Hence, the Midwest and Southern states that are cheap, but not attracting many people. (Meanwhile, cheap Idaho is drawing plenty of in-migration - probably coastal retirees, especially from California.)

Are there expensive places people are moving to anyway? Yes, Washington State. Probably mostly Californians, coming from an even more expensive place. Similarly, Vermont is notably off-trend, also in that direction. Probably lots of Bostonians and some New Yorkers.

Not sure what's so great in Vermont. I'm sure it's nice and all, but 3-to-1 move-in to move-out?

Advanced Technologies Increasingly Require States or Other Large Orgs; Loners Lose Out

As history progresses, it's increasingly the case that as an individual, you can't compete with the amazing technologies that have been created and manufactured by large groups of people. This is the opposite of the trend anticipated during the "internet-optimistic" early aughts.

For instance, drones are cool, and seem to put some surveillance (and minimal transport) capabilities back into the hands of individuals. But it seems to me that large organizations (corporations, governments) stand to benefit more by the tracking and surveillance opportunities they create than a single person or family.

There are endless examples of this, many of them with complex technology with capital requirements too great for individuals, depends on large groups to be designed and manufactured, and where there are organizational economies of scale. Maybe you have your one drone, but your state police force has a hundred of them, to watch you and your drone and maybe even knock it down. Space colonization is another case - while it might be a corporation and not a state that finally colonizes another planet, it's likely to be a large corporation.

Consequently, history is increasingly favoring the people who can maneuver into positions of power in large organizations. This is also related to the problem that wealth (rather than income from labor) is more important to individuals and the economy as a whole, and that the best thing you can do is save enough money to invest in these large organizations - yet most people have difficulty getting into a position where they're not dependent on wages. Even forgetting about class based on inheritance - the increasing cognitive demands of these kinds of positions effectively rule them out as possible career paths or life choices for (again) increasingly large slices of the population.

The problem of the benefits of technology accruing more to states and corporations than individuals actually does seem to be a new one (there is a qualitative difference between autonomous drones and swords made of Damascus steel) and this is therefore concerning that we're running into this problem for the first time, rather than it being a cyclic economic problem (for example, complex and leveraged investment instruments) that we've survived going back centuries or more. As recently as the Middle Ages, well-organized nomads could come out of the Eurasian steppes and over-run the most advanced states of the day. While on one hand it's comforting that this is unlikely to happen today (see second half of this article) it does suggest that we passed a threshold in history where states are invincible and the biggest will win - which suggests we should all learn Mandarin.

Is this argument false? If so why? If true, are we screwed, or is there some other way small groups can compete, or is there an inverted U shape to this phenomenon, as the libertarian digerati more freely imagined a mere 15 years ago?

Brain Drain From Emigration of Medical Professionals May Be Imaginary

The UK at one time (and possibly still) had a policy not to recruit aspiring physicians from the developing world to the UK's medical schools. Policy-makers thought that to do so would be to take the best and brightest from abroad and (selfishly) build human capital in the UK, immorally exacerbating the brain drain from already struggling countries - the assumption being that the newly-minted physicians would not return home to contribute to building their economy with their new skills. Sometimes true, yes, but it's worth pointing out that Dennis Mukwege, 2018's Nobel Peace Prize recipient (who is Congolese) got his obstetrics training in France, and was recognized for his surgeries to repair or save women raped by combatants in Congo. It's a good thing France does not have such a policy, or those women would have been disabled or killed by their traumas.

It should also be mentioned that if YOU are an aspiring physician in a developing world country who wanted to pursue your career, and you have your sights set on a British medical school but you're rejected because you're from a developing country - this might not seem to be the most moral choice for the British policy-makers to have made.

So a recent study of emigration of skilled medical professionals (nurses) from the Philippines is a useful contribution to this discussion. To be clear, these are nurses trained in the Philippines who then leave the country to work in the USA - an even "worse" brain drain than what the UK policy aimed to prevent, because the human capital investment is made at home in this case, and then creates value abroad. Therefore, if it turns out there's no damage to the home country's economy, in this even WORSE case, there wouldn't be a problem with developing-world physicians getting trained in the UK. So what did they find?

"...we show that enrollment and graduation in nursing programs increased in response to demand from abroad for nurses. For each new nurse that moved abroad, approximately two more individuals with nursing degrees graduated. The supply of nursing programs increased to accommodate this. New nurses appear to have switched from other degree types. Nurse migration had no impact on either infant or maternal mortality."

This is damning for the UK's policy, because it strongly suggests that all they were doing was discriminating against the developing world's applicants, without paternalistically "protecting" the developing world's economy. Whether this new information affects the policy is another question - if appearing to your countrymen as if you care is more important than actually helping the people you say you care about, then nothing will change.

Original paper here - Abarcar P and Theoharides C., "The International Migration of Healthcare Professionals and the Supply of Educated Individuals Left Behind." H/T Marginal Revolution.

How America Uses Its Land

Full map with all use-types here.

Pennsylvania Economic Growth - Appalachia vs the Urban Northeast, Together in One State

There's a report out from Alter, Fuller, Sontheimer and Seigworth at Penn State, with good summary coverage by Jeff McGaw at the Reading Eagle. It shows how there are really two Pennsylvanias, economically speaking. While this isn't surprising, the degree and timing of the divergence is.

Besides being my home state, Pennsylvania might interest you because it's a swing state, which is in turn directly related to the mix of cultures and economies that comprise it. Pennsylvania is part Northeast/Mid-Atlantic, part inner Midwest/Rustbelt, and - often ignored, but quite important in these numbers - part Appalachia. Overall the state is lagging all of its Northeastern neighbors except for one (more on that in a second), because Pennsylvania's numbers are an average of two regions - the sucessful region (Philly and southeastern PA, which have done quite well after the 2008 recession) and then the rest of the state.

You can see the figures at the report and article, but here are two instructive maps. The top is the county-level 2016 presidential election data. On the bottom is (from Alter et al's article) county resident employment in the post-recession period 2008-2016. Even if you don't know PA geography, the resemblance is obvious.



[Added later: more here at this great Philly.com article, with better geographical resolution, returns in more kinds of races, and 2014-2018 comparison gadgets.]

It turns out the only state that Pennsylvania beats in the Northeast group is West Virginia. That's not a coincidence. The central-and-western PA counties have numbers that look remarkably similar to West Virginia's post-recession numbers in terms of jobs lost and unemployment, but when averaged with Philly and suburbs, these quite-bad numbers are obscured and you end up with one mediocre-looking state, instead of a very depressed large rural region, and a very successful metropolitan area. West Virginia comes across as struggling much more clearly, because it's the only state entirely within the Appalachians. (The Bad Stripe, a demographic region of bad quality-of-life and human development indicators, roughly corresponds to "Greater Appalachia" and does extend a bit into Pennsylvania.)



[Added later: Reddit user Anpanboy uploaded thisvmap of population growth 2018-19,whicu follows the economic growth pretty well.]

So these maps tell two stories. First, it's a cliche of campaign strategists and the cultural commentariat that Pennsylvania is "Philly on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in between." But that's not quite right. Pennsylvania is Appalachia, with Philly and suburbs in one corner. And remember all those angry unemployed coal miners we've heard so much about? They live in Appalachia. Second, the late 90s/early aughts began the renaissance of the Northeastern American city, and even the recession couldn't stop that positive momentum. The divergence you see in these numbers and maps of Pennsylvania is both these stories, playing out in the same state and hidden by being averaged together.

The problem is that coal has been dead in PA for decades, and many of the people demanding its return at this point have never even worked in the industry - more likely, their fathers did, and that's what they view as important valuable work. It's a cultural problem. We all know that coal is not coming back and that it has everything to do with changing technology and nothing to do with regulations, a narrative that people in this part of the country have a hard time accepting. (Abstract economic forces are much harder to viscerally hate than bad people hurting you by design.) What's worse, the big cities like Philly, filled with untrustworthy people unlike you, have come roaring back; worse still, this happened just as media became all-pervasive and started constantly reminding you that these people look down their noses at you. At least before, you might have been unemployed and living in Clearfield County, without being constantly reminded you were on the bottom of a status hierarchy that was exactly inverted, with the most immoral people at the top.[1]

The reality is, for all us blue-staters in the suburbs and cities, these numbers show you that even though your suburb might be getting better all the time, things really are bad out there in the hinterlands, and this is why they were so desperate for a change they voted for Trump. And they're going to vote for Trump again as long as we don't show some solidarity with our countrymen, instead of ignoring their problems or even dismissing them with active contempt,[2] which I admit I've been tempted to do myself. It may be taking a while for people to accept that coal is dead, but it's certainly not their fault. I don't have a clear policy prescription for how to help life get better in interior Pennsylvania, but taking people's problems seriously seems like a good place to start - which I deeply hope the Democrats can do in 2018 and 2020, or Trump will get re-elected.


[1] Many people called the 2008 recession a "man-cession", with men disproportionately hit relative to women. Nowhere was this more likely to be true than Pennsylvania, with effects lingering until today. Construction and construction-adjacent industries were propped up by capital flowing in from the cities, and now that those easy loans have dried up, construction isn't coming back either. This region is part of the "health belt", because it has an overabundance of older people, and the one source of capital coming into this region that has grown is Federal dollars in the form of Medicare disbursements. Therefore, many of the un- and under-employed men in the regions lost their construction-related jobs, and have wives working in nursing or other healthcare fields who became the breadwinners, a final slap in the face.

[2] More than once, both online and in person, I've seen urban and suburban centrists or liberals express sympathy for the plight of people in another country whose luck has gone south for economic reasons out of their control, e.g. when the local mineral deposit was played out; then in the same conversation, say about their fellow Americans (essentially): "Coal is dead, get over it losers." If Democrats want to win elections at some point, this attitude has to stop, because human beings are good at detecting contempt - especially human beings going through tough times - and they don't react well to it.

[3] Mountainous regions tend to be poorer than non-mountainous regions because it's hard to grow crops there - and the difficulty of agriculture means little opportunity for a service economy to develop on top of a farming and trading population. There are exceptions to the rule (e.g. Jackson, WY) but those are based on outside capital brought in by wealthy in-migrants or tourists in recent times. Out of curiosity I looked at Colorado to see if a similar relationship exists between election returns, economics and mountains, as in PA (the eastern half of CO is flat prairie and the western half is the Rockies.) Eyeballing it, there may be some pattern, but certainly not as clear as for PA. Speculatively, it could be that PA's mountains are smaller, and have been settled for (generations) longer, therefore producing an actual population that shows the impact of "bad mountain economies" - as opposed to CO, which has a much more thinly scattered population and may be more mobile relative to what resources there are. Concretely: a coal mine opens in the PA Appalachians in 1850 and a town grows up around it, which doesn't just evaporate when the mine is played out by 1970 - by this point the families have been there for generations, and the climate isn't so harsh, and leaving just isn't really considered. (Although counter to my theory, there are ghost towns in PA.) Versus CO, where an unobtainium mine opened in 1950, and today is just about played out - but the settlement around it is a high-turnover one of mostly youngish men who aren't living at 10,000 feet elevation for fun, and they clear out (or a few remain and develop the area for tourism, e.g. Leadville.)

Prepare for People Signalling Their Taste by Seeking Out "Artisanal" Non-Machine-Harvested Wine

Early move toward automation in Napa, predictably there due to land and labor costs and the availability of automation experts. Prepare for the usual pearl-clutching that a culturally important (but nonetheless already commodified) object like wine is being increasingly mechanized. At least this will give the opportunity for future hipsters (I predict on the 5-10 year horizon) to signal their values by only buying human-produced wine.

States Emerged In Places With Marginal Agriculture Potential That Benefited From Central Control

I. More Evidence for the Argument That States Emerge When Food Production Benefits from Central Control

If you looked at climate and climate alone, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes and the Mexican Plateau would not seem like optimal cradles of civilization. And yet, it's exactly these kinds of marginal places where states first emerged. Yes, those places are hotter and drier than they were during the neolithic, but they still weren't better suited for cultivation than other places with more arable land. They're dry, they rely on rivers, and in some cases there's considerable altitude. So why there?[1] Why did we not first have large states in the Pacific Northwest of North America, or the southern (wetter) African Sahel, or the (early, but not first) wet parts of the Mediterranean? No, it had to be at the edge of the Sahara, or in the highest mountains outside Asia.

The immediate counterargument to such a theory is one word: China. Any theory of early state emergence that does not include China is not much of a theory of early state emergence. And if we're assuming that the cause is marginal conditions for agriculture, we definitely can't explain China, since the Chinese coastal plain is ideal for agriculture and for transporting agricultural goods. Is there still a commonality? One argument is that anywhere conditions are such that farming only works with central coordination of labor - but with such coordination, it really works - you have the conditions for a state. Planning your crops in a harsh environment and relying on the flooding of a river, as in Egypt would be one such setting. Another would be an otherwise fertile environment but where the grain of choice was hard to harvest alone, but paid off handsomely when harvested with central coordination.

In a review of Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, Reddit user lunaranus quotes Braudel and then expands on him:

Rice is an even more tyrannical and enslaving crop than wheat.

The key difference between rice and wheat is that the former can produce ~7.3 million kcals per hectare, whereas wheat can only reach 1.5 million. Unlike wheat, there was no need for fallow land, and bythe 13thC in China a system of double (or sometiems triple) crop was established. "And thus the great demographic expansion of southern China began."

The high population density created by rice, combined with the necessity for elaborate top-down irritation systems, resulted in strong state authority that constantly pursued large-scale works.

My argument is that this principle applies to the more marginal areas, but the necessity for labor coordination, including irrigation, is really what was important. Any place that could get 1) a big bump in food production from central coordination, and 2) which you couldn't defect from and survive, would favor state formation.

II. A Side Observation About Genetic/Cultural Quality vs. Climate as an Influence on Propensity for Regional Dominance, Toward a Macro-Theory of History

There's also the argument - though this makes some people uncomfortable[2] - that people from climates with wider annual temperature extremes are more behaviorally adaptable, and therefore when they encounter people from less extreme climates, they "win". To the surprise of many, the closer to the poles you are, the more extreme the annual temperature difference (the temperate regions are NOT the most extreme.) That is to say, during the summer Arctic regions are at or close to room temperature but can get to -50 C or worse in the winter. (Is -50 C really that different from - 30 C to humans, livestock and agriculture? Maybe this could be adjusted by "meaningful" temperature variation, but I digress.) Sure enough, the history of China is a history of more northerly groups (including, in two cases, non-Han steppe people) taking over territory to the south. The history of India is a history of Indic speakers coming from the north-northwest and displacing Dravidians. In North America, Na-Dene speakers migrated from the northerly Alaska/Yukon region, displacing people throughout Western North America, just in the last millennium. And of course in 2018 it's Germany, not Rome, that has most influence over the continent. Of note: I recently visited the site of Carnuntum, a Roman garrison town frequently visited by Marcus Aurelius, who was trying to keep the Germanic tribes out of the Empire. At the time he celebrated some successes, commemorated with carvings on cliff faces occasionally like the one in Trencin, Slovakia. But Since Carnuntum is now in Austria we can see how successful he ultimately was.

Of course that begs the question of why we haven't all been conquered by the Inuit already. The pattern of the Germanic takeover of northern Europe gives us a clue. The first Germanic-speakers appeared in non-Scandinavian Europe around 120 BC, migrating from (guess what) farther north in Scandinavia. Even in Julius Caesar's time seventy years later, the Celts were still his main concern. It wasn't until the mid-second century that the Germans were a major concern for the empire, with their numbers now growing after settling in the lands north of the Danube. The idea is this: Scandinavia has more extreme temperature and bred more adaptable people, but it's just too cold to grow enough food for the population to expand (the region still only has 26 million today, fewer than California.) After three centuries of farming in the much-more hospitable northern "mainland" Europe, their numbers had grown, and now they were ready to take on the Roman Empire, which lasted only three more centuries after that. So we have our time scale: six centuries from crossing the Baltic to destroying the Western Roman Empire. (You could even make the argument that Braudel's southern Chinese expansion was actually northern Chinese - Han - who had settled in what was previously tribal areas, done under the more stable-appearing timeline of centralized governments.)

And there we have the outline of a macrohistorical and demographic theory: states began in areas where food production was difficult, either because of local conditions or choice of food source, but where food production benefited greatly from centralized control. The old centers of civilization give way to waves of people coming from areas of more extreme climate, usually from the north. One prediction that follows from this theory is that the Inuit and related people, given time in warmer more fertile land, will start farming and demographically expanding, moving further south and indeed controlling Siberia and Canada, but this might be simplistic. It's not the mere fact of living where there are temperature extremes, it's that you have to adjust your behavior to seasons. The Inuit did outlast the Norse in Greenland but it wasn't because they were better farmers. Even though the Inuit might have to move to follow fish and game, they're still hunter-gatherers. My expectation is that it's seasonal agriculture which is the key factor to producing more adaptable behavior (read: more effective ability to control behavior to plan for the future.) So that being the case, in the year 3000 look for states in Eurasia dominated by people who are Siberian agriculturalists today. (Seem silly? If you had told Julius Caesar that western Europe would be dominated by German-speakers within five centuries, including former Roman territory, he would have fallen down laughing.)

Things that may have checked this trend in some cases in the past, and could stop it in the future:

The Old Word interrupting this process in the New World. (Obviously.) If there are two continent systems and one of them has both better diffusion of inventions and more territory, chances are that one will be "ahead" in terms of cultural evolution (the Guns, Germs and Steel argument) and it won't be because of more adaptable northerners, but the other continent finally crossing the ocean that your state-originating-center will be overwhelmed (i.e. the Columbian exchange.) Without that you might orthodict (rather than pre- or retrodict, that is, predicting alternative histories, granted untestable) that the Mapuche would have been the Germans to the Incas' Romans, and likewise the Comanche or Lakota to the Aztecs; maybe the Maori to indigenous Australians.

Centers of civilization getting too far ahead of the northerners. Also, there may be a point where the sheer population numbers of the old centers of civilization are so far ahead of the northerners that they can't be overwhelmed. Had the Germans arrived a few centuries later at the edge of an even more-developed Roman Empire, they may not have had the same effect. The communication and transportation capabilities of modern states may exaggerate this effect, so that the Inuit don't have the same opportunity. There is a major asymmetry in modern technology in terms of the capital and manpower it requires. The Germanic tribes and Mongols had technology that was not substantially inferior to the people they were inundating (in some cases, actually superior.) And colonials in Pennsylvania could re-invent medieval metal-working techniques which turned out to be good enough to run off the British, whose weapons were better but not that much better. But it's harder to imagine that a nascent state in the boreal forests distant from Moscow, no matter how adaptable its people, could really produce their own technology to resist the drones and agriculture-attacking Stuxnet malware of even a decadent future Russia.

Technology obviating the need to plan and adjust behavior seasonally. This is the most speculative. Living in a northern OECD country today, do you really have to plan that much for the seasons now? Yes, you reserve your beach house in the summer and get your coats out during the winter, but your life is not directly dependent on your ability to plant and harvest and store and ration food as it would have been until just a few centuries ago. The reign of the northerners may then be over. Of course, just living in such a technologically advanced society requires cognitive discipline and planning, but does that often result in poor reproductive success? Sure enough, in Iceland in the last century, genes associated with educational achievement have become less common. Also curious: there is a known bump in births in September, but I don't know if this extends outside the U.S. Is this just because in January people don't have anything better to do? Or an adaptation so more babies are born during the harvest when there are calories available? (Easy to check: does it persist in US states or other countries with low seasonal variation? Does it differ between ethnicities (forbidden question!) whose ancestors are from different latitudes, living together in a high-variation climate?)


[1] Inferring too much from population patterns in terms of climate and impact on agriculture and the local economy is always a precarious road to go down, especially in parts of the New World that have seen most of their development in the industrial age. For example - population density in the United States drops off west of the 100 W meridian. This is commonly assumed to be due to decreasing rainfall and therefore poorer agricultural productivity, but this is not the case - it's most likely a historical artifact, since aside from a few wagon trains willing to risk the long ride all the way to the coast, until the trains went all the way through and were cheap and reliable enough, people generally just moved a few miles west to start a new homestead. Around 1880 trains had become accessible for most relocating families, and by 1880 that slowly moving population front had made it to about 100 W. Here's the data. What's more, to this day, poorer countries have lower agriculture productivity even with the same or better innate agricultural endowments in terms of soil and climate - see Adomopolous and Restuccia, 2018.

[2] This makes no argument as to whether and what combination of genes and culture mediate this effect - but to drive the point home, either genes affect bodies, or they do not. If we accept that they do affect bodies, it's a very tortured argument to say that for some reason genes cannot affect behavior, since that's saying genes can affect other organs but not the brain. There's a similar gyration you can observe when someone wants to say that culture matters (fair enough) but can't effect outcomes in the aggregate (that is to say, culture doesn't affect happiness or survival.) Either culture matters to outcomes, or it's meaningless static.

Treasure versus Currency

This scatter plot from Unenumerated is useful and fascinating.

Endowment Effect as a Rational Strategy Part 2: Don't Be A Sucker

Many seemingly irrational decision-making biases can be rational in some settings which differ from typical experimental settings. For example, psychologists and economists scratch their heads that in single-round games, people will expend resources to punish wrongdoers, even when there is no net benefit for the punisher. But in multi-round games, expending resources to punish wrong-doers may actually provide a net benefit and act as a deterrent against future wrongdoing. The irrationality arises because some of these behaviors are rigid with respect to setting, and even in single-round games where we'll never see people again (e.g. someone who cut you off on the freeway) we continue to punish wrongdoers regardless of setting or expected net benefit.

The endowment effect is a bias where we place irrationally high value on things already in our possession, as opposed to the open market. ("That car over there is a clunker, he'll never get three grand for it. But mine? Same year, same condition? Five grand easy. Great car.") Curiously, a group of hunter-gatherers without access to markets (i.e., roads) do not show the endowment effect. Their close relatives who do have access to markets, DO show the endowment effect. I speculated that this could be because the endowment effect is in fact a defense against information asymmetry. Somebody who buys and sells cars for a living knows how much your car is worth more than you do, and they can screw you. Consequently the endowment effect gives you a cushion. If you've never been screwed in an open market before, you don't develop this defense. (So goes my theory anyway.)

Sure enough, Data Colada brings us a paper by Weaver and Frederick which strongly suggests it's trying to avoid a bad deal which is what motivates the endowment effect.

Little Correlation Between Box Office and Film Quality

[Added later: this post was prophetic. The Blade Runner sequel (2049) came out two weeks later and as I'm adding this comment, has been out for a few days. There couldn't be a better illustration of this principle. Reviews from critics and moviegoers alike are extremely positive (including my own here - major spoilers) yet it's underperforming even its modest first-weekend projections. Whether or not word of mouth will increase revenues, it's certainly following in the footsteps of its predecessor, a classic which was initially written off as a box office failure. Movie studio stocks have plummeted as investors realized: even if you make a movie this good, in this day and age, you can't make back your initial investment, and maybe movies are dead as a commercial project, especially relative to video games (see end of linked post).]

I'd been wanting to do an analysis like this for some time. Fortunately a professional (Yves Bergquust at USC) has beaten me to it. It's worth reading the whole article because it's loaded with quantitative analysis of the American film industry, but the upshot for our purpose is that there is no correlation between quality (Rotten Tomatoes rating) and box office.

This reinforces the studios' disinterest, judging by their output and stated explicitly when they're speaking honestly, in making "critically-acclaimed award bait." As with most entertainment, Hollywood doesn't know much about what results in success, but they DO know that spending effort or money on making a good movie has no connection to financial success. Given the medium, that's critically important. A failed experimental painting or short story wastes a few days and dollars of a single person's resources. But movies are intense, multi-million dollar temporary startups. You MUST consider ROI.

To that end, I was also interested to see if budget or ROI are related to quality, and it turns out they are - but of course based on the non-relationship discussed above, that doesn't mean big budget equals big box office. And, bad news for Hollywood, what budget-box office relationship DOES exist is getting weaker over time - which is disastrous, because that means they can't predict ROI anymore.

I'd also like to see if total take (not just box office, also including back-end, ie video) has any better relationship to quality. Cult films that develop a following long after they leave theaters suggest that if there is a profit-quality signal, it would be more likely to emerge using the total take. I would also assume that as distribution channels have multiplied, that box office is less important as a fraction and predictor of overall revenue.

What Determines Amount of International Tourism?

I was looking at Gunnar Garfors's 25 Least Visited Countries in the world. I had always wondered about this, so for fun I decided to compare the tourist numbers he provides against the countries' populations, areas, population densities and per capita income. There is not a strong correlation for any of these, but population had the strongest with r^2=0.15. Grouping countries by island vs. landlocked vs non-landlocked, island countries had a lower average visitation rate.

The real relation is likely going to be an equation of cost and payout - that is, the average cost of visiting, versus what people think they'll get out of visiting there. Countries that are safe with developed tourist infrastructure (which per capita income is a proxy for) and good promotion (which increases the perceived value) and at least tolerable climate will be the best in terms of payout, but the average cost is going to be more complicated - to get lots of tourists, you need lots of countries relatively near you with money, and minimal administrative barriers (i.e. no unfriendly ergo uncooperative political relationships.) This reads like a description of Europe, and not surprisingly, 6 of the 10 most visited countries are in Europe, and the U.S. is the only one in the western hemisphere. If you wonder if local culture is in danger of being destroyed by all these tourists, most-touristed-country France has more tourists per year than its total population, and French culture seems to be in no danger of disappearing. If you're wondering, North Dakota is the least-touristed state in the U.S.

Defense Contractors - Is War Profitable?

Companies like Boeing get some of the revenue from selling consumer (civilian) hardware, and some from defense. Other companies are far more dedicated to producing military hardware (north of 90% of their sales in some cases.) Of the top 10 defense contractors in the world per Wikipedia, I looked only at the 7 U.S. ones that would exist in a similar tax and regulatory environment. The correlation is that the more arms sales, the less revenue.

So why be a defense contractor then? What often matters more is measures of unit profitability (indices like EPS, P:E - or if you're an employee, profitability per employee.) And sure enough, excluding outlier L3, the more military business, the more profitable per employee.

War Requires Material Capacity and Lack of Institutional Constraint

In Never at War, Spencer Weart shows that in the modern era, democracies are extremely unlikely to fight other democracies, but that non-democracies fight democracies, and each other, much more often. You can try to think of counterexamples (Mexican-American War, maybe) but you'll be straining to do so.

A new paper by Blank, Dincecco and Zhukov show that prior to the modern era (i.e., 1200-1800) parliamentary states were actually MORE likely to go to war than absolutist states were. Their argument is that parliamentary states were successful in that they actually had more capacity to make war than the absolutist states, but they had not yet developed institutional constraints to prevent them from doing so, as presumably occurred in the modern era. (H/T slatestarcodex)

Per Capita Income and the Bad Stripe

The Bad Stripe runs southwest from extreme SW Pennsylvania through West Virgina, turning westward through Kentucky and part of Tennessee, crossing the Mississippi through the Ozarks and into eastern Oklahoma. As seen in previous posts about it, it sticks out as a more-or-less contiguous zone of low happiness and quality of life indicators which is a border zone between North/Midwest and South, and is thought of by many as Greater Appalachian (or the greater reach of the Border Reavers, if Albion's Seed is your bag.) Long ago I thought this was just an area of contiguous mountains and hills, hence low population density and slower development, but you can't say that about western Kentucky and Tennessee or eastern Oklahoma.

The county-level per capita income map shows a poorer area roughly paralleling the Bad stripe, along with some of the Black Belt to the south and east of the Southern fall line cities.