Sam Bowman: Common Knowledge, Recycling, Nuclear Power, Albion's Seed, Narrative Violations
Our curator this week is Sam Bowman (@s8mb). Sam is Head of Publishing at Stripe Press and a founding editor of Works in Progress magazine. He has also been director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, a principal at Fingleton, and executive director of the Adam Smith Institute.
Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Sam.
Sam’s Picks
Kevin Simler, “Ads Don’t Work That Way”
When Corona beer advertises how laid back people who drink it are, it isn’t trying to convince you that drinking it will make you feel laid back. Instead, Kevin Simler says, it’s trying to create “common knowledge” that will make other people view you as laid back when they see you with it—and not, say, an All-American patriot, or a knowledgeable beer connoisseur (which you might drink something else to signal). Simler’s model makes sense of how a lot of ads are written, and of why they are where they are. The ones that run on public billboards, instead of being targeted to us through our phone screens, are often out there so that you know the rest of the world knows the kind of person who drinks Corona.
Robert Wiblin, “What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong”
Putting rubbish into a landfill is much better for the world than people think. Landfills are cheap, not too bad for the environment because—in the developed world—they’re lined with plastic, and they prevent trash from ending up in the ocean, which a lot of people worry about. Even if you’d recycle your trash instead, that can be so energy-intensive that it could be more wasteful and bad for the environment than just sending it to a landfill.
Jack Devanney, “The Two Lies that Killed Nuclear Power”
Jack Devanney is an engineer interested in why nuclear energy has been a flop. The answer, he says, is that we’ve built in neverending cost rises to nuclear power by demanding that any and all productivity gains have to go straight into stricter and stricter safety controls. But that approach stems from one of the “big lies” he writes about: the misconception that releases of radioactive materials are much more deadly than experience shows they really are.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Albion’s Seed”
The best book review I’ve ever read, that mainly takes a few dozen of the most interesting facts from the book it’s about and lists them. Did you know that the American Quakers introduced laws prohibiting people from mocking other religions? Or that, as well as the famous “scarlet A” for adultery, “Puritans could be forced to wear a B for blasphemy, C for counterfeiting, D for drunkenness, and so on”? I wish all book reviews were like this.
Jeffrey Friedman, “A crisis of politics, not economics”
This article by the late Jeffrey Friedman completely overturned my view of the financial crisis, and plausibly attributes it to the incredibly unfortunate interaction of well-meaning regulations intended to encourage prudence by banks. If this is correct, it is extremely challenging for how we think about financial regulation and regulation more generally, because it suggests that sophisticated interventions intended to reduce risk can backfire with the opposite effect, in this case catastrophically.
Anton Howes, “How the Dutch Did it Better”
Anton Howes’s economic history investigates the inventors and inventions that made the Industrial Revolution happen. His Substack is one of the best around. He argues that an “improving mindset” led to a flowering of innovation and entrepreneurship across a huge number of domains—not just things like steam power and steel, but also watches and musical instruments. If true, it is one of the most important claims imaginable, because it suggests that culture is the underlying variable that made the modern world. This post looks at some of the factors that led to the Dutch Golden Age, the time and place where modern capitalism first began to take shape.
Saloni Dattani, Siddhartha Haria & Rachel Glennerster, “Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner”
From Works in Progress, a long essay on the development of the malaria vaccine. The authors track how we got to a working malaria vaccine—detailing things like the invention of a machine for mass decapitation of mosquitos (to harvest malaria from their salivary glands), through the 23 years of trials that were often delayed because of a lack of funding, to where we are today: rolling out tens of millions of doses of a vaccine that reduces child mortality from the disease by more than half. They highlight how “advance market commitments” could encourage the development of new vaccines for other diseases, by getting governments and NGOs to pledge to buy tens of millions of doses of treatments that don’t yet exist—if someone can create one that works.
Ramsi Woodcock, “Yet Another Amazon Antitrust Paradox”
Amazon and other large tech platforms are sometimes accused of being too closed and giving unfair preference to certain products (like their own). But from a consumer perspective Amazon might be too open. While platforms’ openness allows them to grow to a gigantic size, it can come at a big cost, as anyone who uses Amazon will know. The site is full of junk products from fake brands, with reviews you can’t trust. The curation that Amazon does, like other retailers, is a natural response to the abundance of choice that the open market offers, and naturally makes them smaller as well. The “paradox” is that measures designed to make Amazon and other platforms more open and neutral might actually reinforce their monopoly positions, by keeping them as large as possible, even if they are worse to use.
Dynomight, “Historical analogies for large language models”
LLMs will do to human writers what freezers did to the ice trade. No, actually—what tractors did for farmers, or maybe what calculators did for accountants. Or how about what mass production did to hand-made goods? Dynomight writes about the many historical analogies we have to choose from, which are so varied that you might end up concluding that such analogising isn’t very useful to begin with.
Spotlight on Sam’s Work
Subscribe to Works in Progress, a magazine publishing short essays showcasing new and underrated ideas to improve the world.
And be sure to read Sam’s classic essay The Housing Theory of Everything.