Links 25.2024
On a Personal Note
I’m sending this out right before the Germany vs Switzerland game. So, I will make it quick:
BTW Episode 02 of Weltanschauung just dropped.
We’re All Soviets Now
Niall Ferguson is one of those victims of the American “Culture War.” Obviously, he seems to be a brilliant historian. I mean, he has all the necessary credentials to prove this. Yet, despite this (read: he should know better), his hate for the current cultural elites in his niche domain (i.e. Western higher education), he feels the urge to publish a piece that equates the USA today with the Soviet Union right before its collapse. Bruv!
Just read this paragraph:
A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.
Honestly, I feel pity for him. Of course, we all know the parasitic nature of politics that can gradually take over minds; but somebody should have told him that applying the rule of law to Trump has little in common with Stalinist repression or that the ideological experimentation at universities has little to do with the general discourse. To be full Chomsky “America Bad”, he only lacks some Uyghur labor camp relativism.
But let’s be charitable. Because I think Ferguson has a point after all. If you take away his personal resentment and tone down the hyperbole, his argument closely aligns with what I have been writing about for quite some time: the consequences of Western complacency are finally catching up with us. However, unlike the flawed ideological system of the Soviets, which rightfully ended up in the dustbin of history, liberalism still has the appeal to attract millions…if not billions. So, let the doomers be doomers….and let’s work on the comeback.
The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we’re in—the second one—heats up.
I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. […] I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.
This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor—the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”
I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?
[…]
A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”
Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.
The U.S. economy might be the envy of the rest of the world today, but recall how American experts overrated the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s.
And yet, you insist, the Soviet Union was a sick man more than it was a superpower, whereas the United States has no equal in the realm of military technology and firepower.
Actually, no. […] [T]he federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.
It gets worse.
According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.
[…]
Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.
It is a reflection of the quality of healthcare enjoyed by their American counterparts today that they are both older and healthier. Nevertheless, Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78) are hardly men in the first flush of youth and vitality.
[…]
Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. […] In the great “return to truth” unleashed by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, Soviet citizens were able to pour forth their discontents in letters to a suddenly free press. Some of what they wrote about was specific to the Soviet context—in particular, the revelations about the realities of Soviet history, especially the crimes of the Stalin era. But to reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.
In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”
Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.
[…]
In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.
The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
Just Stop Oil: do radical protests turn the public away from a cause? Here’s the evidence
“Just Stop Oil” did it again: They caused a huge publicity stunt by spray-painting Stonehenge. As usual, this sparked a debate amongst NPCs about whether their methods are actually counterproductive.
Now, I have more respect for that sort of confrontational activism than I have for keyboard activism. Yet, both exist for the same thing: signaling. While online social justice warriors are solely engaging in virtue-signaling to indulge in their own narcissism; activist groups, such as “Extinction Rebellion”, use their stunts more strategically, namely to do movement building. They don’t aim to be part of the general discourse or to speak to the larger public. No, instead their activism tries to recruit those who are already “converted.” And (surprisingly to many), this seems like a reasonable strategy!
Members of the protest group Just Stop Oil recently threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in London. The action once again triggered debate about what kinds of protest are most effective.
After a quick clean of the glass, the painting was back on display. But critics argued that the real damage had been done, by alienating the public from the cause itself (the demand that the UK government reverse its support for opening new oil and gas fields in the North Sea).e.
[…]
In one set of experiments researchers showed people descriptions of protests and then measured their support for the protesters and the cause. Some participants read articles describing moderate protests such as peaceful marches. Others read articles describing more extreme and sometimes violent protests, for example a fictitious action in which animal rights activists drugged a security guard in order to break into a lab and remove animals.
Protesters who undertook extreme actions were perceived to be more immoral, and participants reported lower levels of emotional connection and social identification with these “extreme” protesters. The effects of this kind of action on support for the cause were somewhat mixed (and negative effects may be specific to actions that incorporate the threat of violence).
Overall, these results paint a picture of the so-called activist’s dilemma: activists must choose between moderate actions that are largely ignored and more extreme actions that succeed in gaining attention, but may be counterproductive to their aims as they tend to make people think less of the protesters.
[…]
Our experiments took advantage of this framing effect to test the relationship between attitudes to the protesters themselves and to their cause. If the public’s support for a cause depends on how they feel about the protesters, then a negative framing – which leads to less positive attitudes toward protesters – should result in lower levels of support for the demands.
But that’s not what we found. In fact, experimental manipulations that reduced support for the protesters had no impact on support for the demands of those protesters.
We’ve replicated this finding across a range of different types of nonviolent protest, including protests about racial justice, abortion rights and climate change, and across British, American and Polish participants (this work is being prepared for publication). When members of the public say, “I agree with your cause, I just don’t like your methods,” we should take them at their word.
Decreasing the extent to which the public identifies with you may not be helpful for building a mass movement. But high publicity actions may actually be a very effective way to increase recruitment, given relatively few people ever become activists. The existence of a radical flank also seems to increase support for more moderate factions of a social movement, by making these factions appear less radical.
[…]
Protest plays a role in agenda seeding. It doesn’t necessarily tell people what to think, but influences what they think about. Last year’s Insulate Britain protests are a good example. In the months after the protests began on September 13 2021, the number of mentions of the word “insulation” (not “Insulate”) in UK print media doubled.
Some people don’t investigate the details of an issue, yet media attention may nevertheless promote the issue in their mind. A YouGov poll released in early June 2019 showed “the environment” ranked in the public’s top three most important issues for the first time. Pollsters concluded that the “sudden surge in concern is undoubtedly boosted by the publicity raised for the environmental cause by Extinction Rebellion” (which had recently occupied prominent sites in central London for two weeks).
[...]
Dramatic protest isn’t going away. Protagonists will continue to be the subject of (mostly) negative media attention, which will lead to widespread public disapproval. But when we look at public support for the protesters’ demands, there isn’t any compelling evidence for nonviolent protest being counterproductive. People may “shoot the messenger”, but they do – at least, sometimes – hear the message.
Political Expression of Academics on Social Media
Not the most surprising results; but an interesting dataset that is worth diving into.
Here are some interesting takeaways:
academics are grossly detached from public opinion (even on twitter)
academics are less tech-optimistic than the general population
academics at top-ranked institutions display higher egocentrism and toxicity
only a small fraction of academics create the majority of content; this could lead to a skewed perspective on academic consensus
Check out this thread for some more thoughts from the authors.
Abstract
Academics have traditionally played a vital role in both the generation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and narratives. Social media, relative to traditional media, provides for new and more direct ways of science communication. Yet, since not all academics may engage with social media, the sample that does so may have an outsize influence on shaping public perceptions of academia more broadly through at least two channels: the set topics they engage with and through the particular style and tone of communication. This paper describes patterns in academics' expression online found in a newly constructed global dataset covering over 100,000 scholars linking their social media content to academic record. We document large and systematic variation in politically salient academic expression concerning climate action, cultural, and economic concepts. We show that these appear to often diverge from general public opinion in both topic focus and style.
The Science of Having a Great Conversation
Lately, I've felt like my conversational skills are somewhat going down the drain. This might be because I'm interacting with many more people than before…and so I am (quite naturally) falling back on some generic small talk. But the real reason seems to be that I've gotten a bit lazy in how I steer conversations these days. In the past, I used to be that annoying contrarian who loved challenging others with the most obnoxious thought experiments or immediately asking them about ‘the big questions.’ I mean, you all know what I’m talking about. I’m an intense guy.
However, I feel like I lost track of this a bit. And that did not only result in some unnecessarily dull conversations recently; but also in bad habits that I picked up myself (i.e. monopolizing a conversation much more, etc.). This article is a great reminder of our civic duty to have meaningful conversations. I promise to be back, babyyyy. So, stay tuned for some new and better variations of the infamous “what’s a deal breaker on a first date” question :P
If you’ve ever spoken to someone and later felt that you would have better spent your time talking to a brick wall, you’ll surely identify with the observations of Rebecca West. “There is no such thing as conversation. […] It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”
If someone feels that their conversations have left no impression on those around them, then that is the definition of existential isolation. You’ve probably experienced this on a bad date, at an awful dinner party, or during an interminable family gathering.
Psychological research has identified many habits and biases that impose barriers between ourselves and others—and if we wish to have greater connection with the people around us, we must learn how to overcome them. The good news is that corrections are very easy to put into practice. Tiny tweaks to our conversational style can bring enormous benefits.
Let’s begin with the sins of inattention. “The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard,” declared the early 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt in his On the Conversation of Authors, published in 1820. “Some of the best talkers are, on this account, the worst company.”
[…]
Asking more questions can make a big difference to someone’s likeability. In a separate experiment, Huang’s team analyzed recordings of people’s conversations during a speed-dating event. Some people consistently asked more questions than others, and this significantly predicted their chance of securing a second date.
It’s easy to understand why questions are so charming: They demonstrate your wish to build mutual understanding and give you the chance to validate each other’s experiences. But even if we do pose lots of questions, we may not be asking the right kind. In her analyses, Huang considered six different categories of questions. You can see the examples below:
1. Introductory
Hello!
Hey, how’s it going?
2. Follow-up
I’m planning a trip to Canada.
Oh, cool. Have you ever been there before?
3. Full switch
I am working at a dry cleaner’s.
What do you like doing for fun?
4. Partial switch
I’m not super outdoorsy, but not opposed to a hike or something once in a while.
Have you been to the beach much in Boston?
5. Mirror
What did you have for breakfast?
I had eggs and fruit. How about you?
6. Rhetorical
Yesterday I followed a marching band around.
Where were they going? It’s a mystery.
Huang found that follow-up questions, which ask for more information about a previous point, are much more appealing than the “switch” questions that change topic, or the “mirror” questions that simply copy what someone has already asked you. The most superficial are the introductory questions—essential social niceties, but which hardly demonstrate a genuine interest in another person.
[…]
We should try to create conversations that allow both parties to open up about deeper thoughts and feelings to identify points of common ground. Arthur Aron has powerfully demonstrated the advantages of self-disclosure, using an experimental paradigm that is sometimes known as the “fast friends procedure.”
Aron’s participants were first sorted into pairs. They were then given a series of 36 questions to discuss over the next 45 minutes. Half the pairs saw questions that stimulated small talk:
How did you celebrate last Halloween?
Describe the last pet you owned.
Where did you go to high school?
This was the low self-disclosure condition. They were perfectly reasonable questions—the kind you might happily ask on a first date—but they weren’t necessarily going to provide many profound insights into someone’s inner life.
The rest of the participants were asked to discuss more probing questions:
What would constitute a perfect day for you?
If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
This was the high self-disclosure condition. The aim was to get the pairs to open up to each other about their specific thoughts and feelings, with answers that more directly reflected the idiosyncrasies of their minds. In each case, the participants were asked to engage equally. “One of you should read aloud the first slip and then both do what it asks,” they were told.
After the 45 minutes were up, the participants were asked to describe how close they felt to their partner using a seven-point scale, a higher score indicating greater closeness.
The people in the high self-disclosure condition rated their relationship as 4, while those in the small talk condition rated themselves as 3. This would be a relatively large effect size for any single psychological intervention, but it’s especially noteworthy when you consider that most people’s lasting friendships do not score much higher.
These results have now been replicated in large studies, which have also shown that it is just as effective during remote communication as face-to-face interactions. Self-disclosure can even increase connection among people from different social groups, increasing closeness regardless of differences in demographic factors, such as age or immigration status, that you may expect to pose as barriers to friendship.
When asked to predict how they will feel during the exchange, most people expect that the fast friendship procedure will be painfully awkward. When they engage in the task, however, the conversation flows far more smoothly than they expected, and afterward they report feeling a greater sense of connection with their partners than they had thought possible.
People expect their partners to be indifferent to them and to be bored by their self-disclosure. But people are far more interested in our innermost thoughts and feelings than we imagine. Self-disclosure requires a leap of faith, but when we make it, we tend to land safely.
Cost of Living City Ranking 2024
I’ve always been a fan of “geoarbitrage”—where you strategically relocate to places with a great trade-off between low cost of living and high quality of life. Combining this with remote work in hard currencies (i.e., USD, EUR, BTC) kinda feels like you found a glitch in the matrix.
Of course, I know that this ain’t possible for everyone; but for those who don’t want to spend 60%+ of their salary on rent in NYC, London, or Amsterdam, you might want to have a look at this ranking. Because Tbilisi, Santiago, Warsaw, Athens, Cape Town, and Budapest do look tempting, right? (Istanbul basically priced itself out of this sort of competition btw)
PS: Those following me for a while will understand that many of those sweet spots (low cost/high quality) are the exact cities where I wanted to buy properties. As usual: You heard it here first!
Of the 10 most expensive cities for international assignees, half are located in Western Europe, with Switzerland being home to four. However, it is Southeast Asian cities that lead the list, with Hong Kong and Singapore remaining in the first and second positions, respectively. The two most affordable cities are Lagos (225) and Abuja (226), both located in Nigeria (on the African continent).
European cities feature heavily in the top 10 most expensive places to live. In addition to the four Swiss cities, London has joined the top 10 ranking in 8th place. Other expensive cities in the region include Copenhagen (11), Vienna (24), Paris (29) and Amsterdam (30).
Dubai has jumped up the rankings to become the costliest city in the Middle East for international employees. It is ranked 15th on the global ranking, up three places from 2023. The next most expensive city in this region is Tel Aviv, which has dropped by eight places to rank 16th. It is followed by Abu Dhabi (43), Riyadh (90) and Jeddah (97).
Within South America, Montevideo in Uruguay ranks as the most expensive location for international employees at number 42. It is followed by Buenos Aires (77, down 32 places) and Sao Paulo (124). It is worth noting that, in addition to Buenos Aires becoming a less expensive place to live, Santiago in Chile also fell 73 places to 160th on the list.
In North America, New York City (number 7 in the global ranking) remains the most expensive city. It is followed by Nassau, Bahamas (9), Los Angeles (10), Honolulu (12), and San Francisco (13). The biggest differences found in North America’s year-on-year rankings are both in Mexico. The capital, Mexico City, went up 46 places to 33, and Monterrey went up 40 places to 115.
African cities that placed highest in the global Cost of Living City Ranking are Bangui (14, up 12 places), Djibouti (18) and N'Djamena (21). The least expensive cities in the region include Blantyre (221), Lagos (225, down 178 places) and Abuja (226).
In addition to Hong Kong and Singapore, the other most expensive cities in Asia include Shanghai (23), Beijing (25) and Seoul (32). Some of the least expensive cities in the region are Karachi (222), Bishkek (223) and Islamabad (224).
Finally, for the Pacific region, Sydney tops the list at 58th place, followed by Noumea, New Caledonia (60); Melbourne (73); and Brisbane (89). New Zealand’s Auckland and Wellington remain the least expensive Pacific locations, coming in at 111th and 145th, respectively.
[…]
Comparing the data on costs and quality of living highlights the challenge of finding the sweet spot between the two — in other words, a city that combines low costs with a high quality of life. According to Mercer’s recent data, just eight cities in the ranking have achieved this (Ljubljana, Montreal, Warsaw, Zagreb, Budapest, Panama City, Santiago and Kuala Lumpur).
This list of eight cities should be of interest to families looking for a better lifestyle, remote working/digital nomads and companies looking for locations that will be attractive to top talent.
Peace,
SG