A clever Toronto lawyer was deep into a technical argument before the Supreme Court. His position was dependent upon a close reading of the legal text and turned on the letter of the law. Suddenly the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, leaned forward and asked the counsel if his argument also worked in French. After all, the law is the law in both languages and a loophole in one tends to evaporate in the other. Only an argument of substance stands up. The lawyer had no idea what to reply.

– John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country, 2008

In a clip from Eye of the Leopard narrated by Jeremy Irons, we see a female leopard kill a baboon. And then the leopard notices the baboon has just given birth to a tiny baby. Her reaction is unexpected:

At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?

Gregory Willmot

This is a complicated question. Getting accurate counts of the number of extant books at different times in history is very hard bordering on impossible. For example, when the Library of Alexandria burned, a lot of writing was lost,[1]On the other hand, a lot of Egyptian readers were probably excited to get out of overdue book fines. but how much writing was lost is hard to pin down. Some estimates range from 40,000 books to 532,800 scrolls,[2]The Great Library of Alexandria and other writers say that all those numbers are implausible.

Researchers Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden used historical book catalogs to put together statistics on the number of books (or manuscripts) published annually per region.[3]Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries By their figures, the rate of publication in the British Isles probably passed one manuscript per day in around the year 1075 CE.

Most of the manuscripts published in 1075 weren't in English, or even the variants of English common at the time. In 1075, literature was typically written in some form of Latin or French, even in areas where Old English was commonly spoken on the street.

The Canterbury Tales (written in the late 1300s) were part of a move toward vernacular English as a literary language, although they're not exactly readable to a modern eye:

Wepyng and waylyng, care and oother sorwe
I knowe ynogh, on even and a-morwe,'
Quod the Marchant, 'and so doon oother mo
That wedded been.

Even if we know how many manuscripts were published per year, in order to answer Gregory's question, we still need to know how long it takes to read a manuscript.

Rather than trying to figure out how long all the lost books and codices are, we can step back and take a longer view of things.

Writing speed

Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in 11 years, which means that he wrote at an average pace of 125 words per day, or less than 0.085 word per minute. Harper Lee wrote the 100,000-word To Kill a Mockingbird in two and a half years, for an average of 100 words per day, or 0.075 words per minute. Since To Kill a Mockingbird is her only published book, her lifetime average is 0.002 words per minute, or about three words per day.

Some writers are substantially faster. In the preface to Opus 200, the prolific writer Isaac Asimov estimated that he had published about 15,000,000 words between age 30 and 50. His average over his writing career might have been around 1 word per minute, and at times he was averaging writing several thousand words per day. (Over his entire life, his average dips as low as 0.5 words per minute.) Some pulp writers have even higher averages.

It's reasonable to assume historical writers had a similar range of speeds. You might point out that typing on a keyboard is more than twice as fast as writing a manuscript in longhand. But typing speed isn't a writer's bottleneck. After all, at a typing speed of 70 words per minute, it should only take 24 hours to type out To Kill a Mockingbird.

Typing and writing speeds are so different because the limit on writing speed is how quickly our brains can organize, produce, and edit stories. This "storytelling speed" has probably changed much less over time than our physical writing speed has.

This gives us a much better way to estimate when the number of books became too large to read.

The average person can read at 200-300 words per minute. If the average living writer, over their entire lifetime, falls somewhere between Isaac Asimov and Harper Lee, they might produce 0.05 words per minute over their entire lifetime.

If you were to read for 16 hours a day at 300 words per minute,[4]For an average of 200 words per minute. you could keep up with a world containing an average population of 100,000 living Harper Lees or 400 living Isaac Asimovs.

If we estimate that during their active periods, writers are producing somewhere between 0.1 and 1 word per minute, then one dedicated reader might be able to keep up with a population of about 500 or 1,000 active writers. The answer to Gregory's question—the date at which there were too many English books to read in a lifetime—happened sometime before the population of active English writers reached a few hundred. At that point, catching up became impossible.

The magazine Seed estimates that the total number of authors reached this point around the year 1500 and has continued rising rapidly ever since.[5]Seed: A Writing Revolution The number of active English writers crossed this threshold shortly thereafter, around the time of Shakespeare, and the total number of books in English probably passed the lifetime reading limit sometime in the late 1500s.

On the other hand, how many of them would you want to read? If you go to goodreads.com/book/random, you can see a semi-random sample of what you'd be reading. Here's what came up for me:

• • School Decentralization in the Context of Globalizing Governance: International Comparison of Grassroots Responses, by Holger Daun
• • Powołanie (Dragon Age #2), by David Gaider
• • An Introduction to Vegetation Analysis: Principles, Practice and Interpretation, by David R. Causton
• • AACN Essentials of Critical-Care Nursing Pocket Handbook, by Marianne Chulay
• • National righteousness and national sin: the substance of a discourse delivered in the Presbyterian church of South Salem, Westchester co., N.Y., November 20, 1856, by Aaron Ladner Lindsley
• • Phantom of the Auditorium (Goosebumps #24), by R. L. Stine
• • High Court #153; Case Summaries on Debtors and Creditors-Keyed to Warren, by Dana L. Blatt
• • Suddenly No More Time, by Emil Gaverluk

So far, I've read ... the Goosebumps book.

To make it through the rest, I might need to recruit some help.

Reihan reports:

University of Minnesota economist David Levinson envisions a future in which per capita vehicle travels falls significantly, bringing traffic congestion down with it. The chief driver of this death of traffic is not the emergence of a new transportation technology, though technology certainly plays a role in Levinson’s scenario. Rather, it is the shrinking of the American workweek coupled with new business models which draw primarily on existing technologies. Though written in an understated style, it is quite entertaining. I recommend reading it in its entirety. A few aspects of his vision struck me as particularly notable:

1. Just as it was once standard for U.S. workers to work a six-day week, Levinson imagines that the workweek will continue to shrink. Every-other Friday off (the 5/4 schedule) becomes standard by 2015; by 2020, the standard schedule becomes a 9 hour day with four days a week in the office and 4 additional hours of checking in from home; by 2025, workers are taking every-other Monday off (the 4/3 schedule); and by 2030, the “flipped” office, like the “flipped” classroom, becomes the norm — i.e., workers do the bulk of their work at home, and they come to the office for “interactive collaboration days.”

2. But it’s not just the workweek that will change. The pattern of how we work over the life course will also change. Levinson envisions a world in which almost half the population doesn’t enter the paid workforce until age 30, as firms lose interest in financing training. Instead, most people go through an extended apprenticeship period that can last as long as a decade, combining unpaid internships and attending school online. And most people exit the workforce by age 60, as technological advances reduce the value of older workers.

3. The changing workweek causes the value of office buildings to plummet. As office buildings are converted to apartments, the least desirable of which become home to the 20-somethings toiling away at their unpaid internships (subsidized, presumably, by parents, or sustained by part-time work), residential constructions in the suburbs grinds to a halt, and suburban property values drift down, thus making suburban neighborhoods more attractive to low-income households. Large garages are transformed into stores, workshops, and accessory dwellings as families choose to maintain fewer automobiles. Car-sharing, meanwhile, grows more entrenched as a larger share of the population comes to reside in urban cores. (This has the effect of reducing per capita vehicle trips because while car-sharing eliminates many of the fixed costs associated with vehicle ownership, it increases the marginal cost per trip.)

4. Shopping, once a big contributor to vehicle trips, is transformed as people (and their autonomous agents) order online and have goods delivered; decentralized manufacturing and 3-D printing on-demand, in turn, shrink supply chains

There is more at the link…

Paul Niehaus has a new paper, and here is the abstract:

Why is other-regarding behavior so often misguided?  I study a new explanation grounded in the idea that altruists want to think they are helping.  Frictions arise because perceptions and reality can diverge ex post, especially when helping remotely (as for example with international development projects).  Among other things the model helps explain why donors have a limited interest in learning about effectiveness, why charities market based on need rather than effectiveness, and why beneficiaries may not be able to do better than to accept this situation.  For policy-makers, the model implies a generic trade-off between quantity and quality of generosity.

When in doubt, self-deception about helping is the next best thing to helping itself, and cheaper to produce.  If I recall properly, the original pointer was from Michael Clemens.

A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans’ personal debt over the last year as part of the Rolling Jubilee project to help people pay off their outstanding credit.

Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy’s Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before “abolishing” it, freeing individuals from their bills.

By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.

There is more here, and here.  One question is how many of these people will go into bankruptcy anyway.  Another is why not just send the money to even poorer individuals?  The low market value of the debt, of course, means these individuals (mostly) would not have paid anyway, so the leveraged return on this investment is not as high as is being claimed.

For pointers I thank Mitch Berkson and Samir Varma.

Maybe this isn’t the biggest problem, but it’s been my worry as of late.  Must a guaranteed income truly be unconditional?  Might there be circumstances when we would want to pay some individuals more than others?  Many critics for instance worry that a guaranteed income would excessively reduce the incentive to work.  So it might be proposed that the payment be somewhat higher if low income individuals go get a job.  That also will make the system more financially sustainable.  But wait — that’s the Earned Income Tax Credit, albeit with modifications.

Might we also wish to pay more to some individuals with disabilities, perhaps say to help them afford expensive wheelchairs?  Maybe so.  But wait — that’s called disability insurance (modified, again) and it is run through the Social Security Administration.

As long as we are moving toward more cash transfers, why don’t we substitute cash transfers for some or all of Medicare and Medicaid health insurance coverage benefits, especially for lower-value ailments?  But then we are paying more cash to the sick individuals.  That doesn’t have to be a mistake, but it does mean that an initially simple, “dogmatic” payment scheme now has multiplied into a rather complex form of social welfare assistance, contingent on just about every relevant factor one might care to cite.

You can see the issue.  Whether on grounds of justice, practicality, or just public choice considerations (“you can keep your current welfare payments if you like them”), we should not expect everyone to be paid the same under a guaranteed annual income.  And with enough tweaks, this version of the guaranteed income suddenly starts resembling…the welfare state, albeit the welfare state plus.  Unemployment insurance benefits wouldn’t end.  More people could get on disability, and without those pesky judges asking so many questions.

The potential problem is that we inherit and in some ways magnify the problems with the current welfare state, rather than doing away with those problems.

Or we could be truly dogmatic about it, and simply pay each person the same amount of money no matter what.  But then do we take away the various forms of in-kind aid which are already in place?  And what about all those former EITC recipients, whose incentive to work is now lower than ever?

Part of the original appeal of the guaranteed income idea, especially as expressed by Milton Friedman, is that it would substitute for welfare programs and bureaucracies, not all of which work well.  On first hearing, the guaranteed income proposal sounds quite “clean.”  In reality, that is unlikely to be the case.

And once we recognize the proposal may be “the current welfare state plus some extra and longer-term payments,” one has to ask whether this is really what we had in mind in the first place.  It seems that if you wanted to reform current programs and also pay people more (debatable, of course), there may be better and easier ways of doing that than reforms which have to fit under the umbrella of “a guaranteed annual income.”

I still think the core idea is a good one, but perhaps “what the core idea is” is less pinned down than I might have wished.

Here is again Annie Lowrey’s very useful piece, which provides an overview of current proposals.

Here is the second paragraph of the piece:

In Asimov’s tale ["Franchise"], set in November 2008, democratic elections have become nearly obsolete. A mysterious supercomputer said to be “half a mile long and three stories high,” named Multivac, absorbs most of the current information about economic and political conditions and estimates which candidate is going to win. The machine, however, can’t quite do the job on its own, as there are some ineffable social influences it cannot measure and evaluate. So Multivac picks out one “representative” person from the electorate to ask about the country’s mood (sample query: “What do you think of the price of eggs?”). The answers, when combined with the initial computer diagnosis, suffice to settle the election. No one actually needs to vote.

The full article is here.  There is an on-line version of Asimov’s Franchise here.

This is from the obituary of economist Alexander L. Morton:

At 42, Mr. Morton was well on pace in the ascension of his chosen career ladder. He had a doctorate in economics from Harvard, had taught at the Harvard Business School and was finishing a four-year assignment as director the office of policy and analysis at the Interstate Commerce Commission.

He then quit.

He had made enough money in real estate deals and investments to guarantee an independent income for himself. For his remaining 28 years, he was almost constantly on the move, visiting dozens of countries and often going off the expected paths from Western travelers.

And this:

He rarely spoke about himself and never discussed in detail his reasons for retiring in mid-career as an economist to pursue a life of travel. But his sister said he was ready for a change, had the savings to and had done as much as he wished to in the field of transportation deregulation.

To continue along the same path, would have been a case of “been there, done that,” she said.

Here is Alex’s earlier post on traveling more.  Maybe Alexander L. Morton had some really good lunch partners.

This account may to some degree be speculative, but here goes:

According to one avid PF [paid friend] employer, ‘Once you’ve had paid friends who don’t argue with you, it’s actually quite hard to go back to real friends.’

The ex-wife of a PF hoarder said ‘many really successful men don’t actually have time for real friends,’ because normal friends ‘are either resentful or bitter or ask for money,’ and that some ‘are often competitive.’

She said that as a result, ‘very rich men have paid friends as an expensive filter, because they can control them.’

If her ex-husband were not wealthy, ‘he’d be sitting all alone in his apartment with a container of Haagan-Dazs and a bottle of vodka,’ she said.

I say why opt for “paid friends” when you can have a $6,000 Vertu smart phone?

The full story is here, hat tip goes to @ArikSharon.

As of 2010, a graph of starting salaries looks like this:

As of 1991, it looked like this:

That is from Peter Turchin.  Here is a WSJ article by Ben Casselman on the widening job market gap more generally.

My start-down is called “Blake”—after the founder, me, Blake. If you’re unfamiliar with start-downs, no problem, everyone’s here to learn. Really, the only difference between a start-down and the traditional Silicon Valley “start-up” is the process. Rather than having an idea, pitching it to investors, and working tirelessly to see that idea come to life, a start-down begins with everything: a great education, tons of money, and endless opportunity. The start-down then joins an established company and runs it right into the ground through manipulation, negligence and greed. Some people say it’s better than a start-up. Not a ton of people, but some.

Have you ever heard of Garret? It was a small start-down out of Denver—somewhat of a legend in the industry. Garret convinced a bunch of people they could afford to buy a home when he knew, in the long run, they couldn’t. His start-down was so successful that it became a major player in creating a seemingly irreversible downward trend in the global economy. Classic start-down stuff.

Chip is another good one. He’s no Garret, but it’s still a really fun start-down based in Houston. Chip sells 401(k) plans but instead of investing the money he keeps it for himself. It’s like, how has no one thought of that before? I don’t think his bosses have any idea. It just goes to show that the best ideas are the simplest ones. I have a good feeling about Chip.

Every start-down has a different story. We can’t all be Garrets. Blake began 33 years ago in a wealthy suburb outside of Baltimore. I was always a bit of a dreamer, a big picture kind of guy. I wanted more for myself—but in the most literal interpretation of that expression. I attended a prestigious academy high school. From there I went to a prestigious university. During that time I landed a couple of internships through family friends. Things were going great—but I didn’t want to just be an employee, a cog in the capitalism machine—I wanted to make a difference, a really, really bad difference. So when my internship turned into a full-time job, I started Blake. Ever since then I’ve been putting my ideas to work, taking things one day at a time, and doing my best to destroy America from within.

Blake is a start-down with the heart of a start-up. At Blake, we’re all about connectivity: bringing people, information and ideas together in one place. That place is what’s known as “hypothetical condominiums.” They’re hypothetical only in the sense that they don’t exist. You see, I work for a large, publicly traded development firm. And this project is definitely affiliated with them. Yes, that’s their logo right there on the bottom of the page. But enough about them. I’m here to get you in on the ground floor. Here are some pictures—well, drawings, actually, but you get the idea. With your help and money we can make these condos a reality. Not only will they be unaffordable, Blake also promises to only get halfway finished with construction before I’m on the other side of the world—leaving you without a cent to your name and leaving your community with the rusty exoskeleton of a high-rise condominium. It’s Blake’s little way of giving back.

Ladies and gentlemen, everyone has a dream. I just want you to pay to see mine come true. Now who’s in? All of you? Great!

Do you know the saying “only Nixon can go to China”?  Dan Sutter and I once wrote a paper about the phenomenon.  The point is that politicians with a previous record of opposing a policy shift are often the only ones who can bring it about, because their policy support provides a credible signal of policy quality to the relevant interest groups who would otherwise oppose the policy.  Another example would be Schroeder of Germany — from the left-leaning SPD — being the one to do real labor market reform.

Of course this effect does not always operate, for instance Chairman Mao was not the one to deregulate the Chinese economy.  But Deng Xaoping was an old-time hardliner from way back when.

In any case, let’s say we have entered a new era of American political gridlock, in which usually nothing gets done.  When might that gridlock be broken?

Well, gridlock could be broken — at least possibly — by a leading politician supporting a proposal against ideological type.  What does this mean?

1. You might be very nervous if your party elects a President the next time around.

2. You might think twice before supporting ideologues within your party.  They offer the greatest chance of “betrayal,” and if they “stay true” they can’t push through your agenda in any case.

3. You might prefer to support very weak candidates, who have no strong base of support in the ideological wing of their party.  They will find it hardest to betray the ideologues.

4. There are “knowledge issues” and “stubborn self-interest” issues.  At the time, it was possible to persuade many foreign policy hawks that an opening to China might better achieve their preferred ends, such as defeating communism.  In contrast, I suspect no signal can persuade the elderly that “reallocating funds from Medicare to Head Start” can serve their interests, not even if Lawrence Welk swore as such on a stack of Bibles.  If knowledge issues tend to get solved, over time  politics may become more and more about stubborn self-interest issues, which diminishes the potential import of the “Nixon phenomenon.”

Whether we are at this final end stage yet is not clear to me, though I suspect not.  I still see plenty of room for “great betrayals,” whether it is Obama on entitlements or the next Republican President on…just about anything.

While you’re probably aware of Tokyo’s cat cafes that let visitors cuddle up with a kitty while sipping some coffee, you’re unlikely to have heard of owl cafes, the latest craze to take hold in the Japanese capitol. Known locally as a “fukurou cafe,” some of the establishments offer owl-themed food and drink, and some even let you pet the owls in residence.

Some of the stores that garnered online attention late last year include Fukurou no Mise (“Owl Shop”) and Tori no Iru Cafe (“The Cafe with Birds”). Since then, more of the owl cafes have opened around Tokyo and Osaka including Fukurou Sabou (“Owl Teahouse”), Owl Family, and Crew.

There are photos at the link, hat tip goes to Ian Leslie.

What drives individualism and competitiveness as opposed to collectivism and cooperation? Leibbrandt, Gneezy and List have a great paper studying this question with an ingenious experiment. LGL study two types of fishermen in Northeastern Brazil. The two types live within ~50km of one another but one type are lake fishermen and the other sea fishermen. Lake fishing favors individual fisherman in small boats while sea fishing favors team production on larger boats.

LGL ask the fisherman to participate in a simple experiment, throw 10 tennis balls into a bucket. The participants choose how they are paid, 1 monetary unit per successful attempt or 3 units per successful attempt if they have more successes than an unknown competitor (chosen randomly and without their knowledge to avoid social effects; in case of a tie they are paid 1 unit per success). Fishermen could earn 1-2 days of income for less than an hour of work depending on how successful they were and the payment scheme chosen.

Perhaps you won’t be too surprised to learn that 45.6% of the lake fishermen chose to compete compared with just 27.6% of the sea fishermen. What makes the paper great is all the secondary tests the authors do to understand this result at a deep level. The result, for example, is not due to differences in throwing ability or risk preferences.

You might suspect that the different choices about whether to compete or not are driven by cultural differences. But that too is incorrect. The authors, for example, show that women–who do not fish in either the sea or lake villages–do not show differences in the choices to compete (both chose to compete less than the men but at the same rates in lake or sea villages).

Instead, what the authors demonstrate is that differences in the choice to compete or not appear to be learned differences. First, the lake villagers who chose to compete are among the most successful lake fishermen–that is, they have learned that competition increases income. In the sea villages there is no correlation between choosing to compete and fishing income.

Finally, and most tellingly, there is a dose-response relationship between competition and learning. In particular, the choice to compete or not increases with fishing experience with the experienced lake fisherman choosing to compete more and the experienced sea fishermen choosing to compete less (as shown at left).

The paper appears on the surface to be affirming the importance of cultural differences and to be agreeing with the kind of literature that stresses the idea of self-interest and individualism as western and contingent. Yet, in fact, the paper is suggesting that at a deeper level so-called cultural differences may not be transmitted down through the generations but instead are learned responses to very particular production techniques. Note that such learned responses may change rapidly as production techniques change and that the sea and lake villages are both unusual in the modern world in relying on just one dominant production technique with few other options for learning.

More generally, learning needs to be added to incentives, genetics, and culture as an independent yet entangled determinant of choice.