Art

The Novelist Paradox

James Bailey5 Comments

If novelists are so smart, why don’t they succeed at much besides writing fiction?

When I read a good novel I think “the author must be very smart to be able to write this and understand people so well”.

But novelists tend not to be very successful at things in life other than writing fiction, certainly not at anything like the rate of people who write good non-fiction books.

Just off the top of my head, people who wrote good / highly acclaimed non-fiction books while also being highly successful in other fields:

  • Julius Caesar
  • Marcus Aurelius
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Richard Feynman
  • Winston Churchill
  • Barack Obama
  • JD Vance
  • Many top economists (Keynes, Hayek, Friedman)

While off the top of my head, novelists who reached anything like that level of success in other fields include:

… No one?

The best that comes to mind is people that started philosophical movements related to their writing, like Ayn Rand, Scott Alexander, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. But that’s clearly a different kind of success than for most non-fiction authors. Likewise when I ask Claude the best examples I get are doctors, lawyers, and academics, not world leaders. I’ve been kicking this idea around for years but was inspired to finally write it down because I found out that before Ben Hur was a movie it was a wildly successful novel, and the novel was written by former Civil War general Lew Wallace (not a great general as they go, but its still impressive to be a general at all). But I still think that is the exception.

In fact, worse than just “not being world-changingly successful”, some of my favorite living novelists sometimes seem crushed by the weight of everyday tasks like giving public talks, maintaining relationships, or completing their work anywhere close to on time.

Naming the living novelists I’m thinking of would be mean so here’s F Scott Fitzgerald

The paradox: if novelists are so smart, why aren’t they more broadly successful?

Potential resolutions:

  1. I’m wrong and novelists actually are broadly successful.
  2. Novelists are so smart, but tend to have other deficits that keep them from being broadly successful, or from wanting to try, e.g. being neurotic introverts
  3. Novelists aren’t so smart, it’s more of a narrow skill that we shouldn’t expect to indicate general intelligence, like being good at painting or football.

The question can be flipped: why can’t / won’t many very successful people write fiction? Are they more grounded in the real world when it treats them well? I’m not ‘very successful’ but I write a lot. In my case I’m not convinced I could even write a bad novel, much less a good one. Wouldn’t know where to start.

Cunningham’s Law Update: John Giebfried writes in with excellent counterexamples along the lines of resolution #1-

A Canticle for Aadam Jacobs

mdmakowsky2 Comments

For the talk of the future of generating art, let’s not forget the task of remembering the art we’ve already made. Behold: more than 10,000 cassette recorded concerts, from as far back as 1984, recorded in community centers, church basements, taverns, all-ages clubs, and hundreds of other unsung “venue” owners who let then (and often always) unknown bands play shows for a a couple dozen attendees, all in the hopes that door money and beverages might keep the owner out of the red on a random weeknight while.

I have a couple bootlegs from concerts I attended, but it never occurred to me that I might get to listen to a 1995 Blonde Redhead show at The Empty Bottle or The Blow Pops playing 1991 show at a Milwaukee spot I’ve never heard of. These shows have always had an ephemeral quality to them, existing far more in the stories of those who claimed to be there that night than the actual direct artistic footprint.

But maybe not. Maybe the internet can and does, in fact, remember. Because while there is a lot to be absorbed from the finished product, but there is often so much more learn from the imperfect and unpolished early stages. A band before they slowed down or ventured beyond their first 3 chords, a writer still stuck in the first person, a disseratation chapter still haunted by the writing of the insecure graduate student we all were. The awkard phases when an artist (or artists) are still finding their voice. Perhaps, more than ever, we need to remember the importance of not skipping over the embarassing, exhausting, and, yes, often futile work at the beginning and middle. There are more shortcuts than ever to making a thing, but no shortcut to becoming the version of yourself that can make the thing that only you can make.

Joy on The Subscription Economy

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

An Al Jazeera talk show called The Stream had me back again for

“Why subscriptions are taking over our lives”

along with journalist guest Sanya Dosani.

Our episode began with some clips from TikTok of young people expressing anger over feeling trapped in “the subscription economy.” Watch our show at the link above to see.

The subscription economy is a business model shift where consumers pay recurring fees for ongoing access to products/services (like Netflix, SaaS) instead of one-time purchases, focusing on “access over ownership” for predictable revenue. Gen Z feels upset that they are getting charged for subscriptions, some of which they simply forgot to cancel. They have nostalgia for the days of toting a zipper case of CDs onto the yellow school bus in 2004.

My commentary starts around minute 5:30 in the show. The first thing I point out is that, by and large, we have more entertainment available to us at a lower price than people did in that bygone era of mostly cable TV and physical discs. (This is a bit like the point I made on The Stream in March 2025 about how fast fashion represents more stuff for consumers at lower prices, which is good.)

In the episode, we discussed how people can still buy CDs today. Sanya Dosani made the point that, “there’s a place for buying and a place for renting.” Everyone should be aware of how cheap DVDs, books, and CDs are at rummage sales in the United States in 2025. You can get a music album for 50 cents. Some youths have (re)discovered that DVD players are cheaper than a year of streaming subscription costs.  

Around minute 17, I got to bring up my research about intellectual property, digital goods, and morality.

I have two papers with Bart Wilson about taking and digital goods. In 2014, we published “An Experiment on Protecting Intellectual Property”.

And now we have a new working paper titled “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property” that makes a clean comparisons between the taking of rivalrous physical goods versus nonrival digital goods.

We find that people do not feel bad about taking the digital goods, or “pirating.” We even find that, in a controlled experiment with no previous context for what we might call intellectual property protection, the creators of these digital goods do not call such taking stealing either. It seems to be understood that folks will take and share if they can.

The proposed reason for artificially restricting the taking and resale of intellectual property is that creators need a way to profit from providing a public good. (Intellectual property rights in the U.S. Constitution are covered by Article I, Section 8.)

I said in the interview, “If you were able to just give a song to all of your friends, you probably would, and then that artist might not be able to make songs the next year.”

Thus, I suggested, “The subscription economy is a reaction to the fact that most people don’t view it as wrong to take things they can take and not necessarily pay for them. Companies had to find a new way to be able to make money and stay in business.”

I’ll clarify that I have not done quantitative research to prove that subscription models emerged causally because of pirating. I’m speculating. Another side to this is that people simply want to stream and companies are providing exactly what people want (despite the complaints circulating on TikTok). People reminisce about the “golden days” of early Netflix, but most people forget that the company was losing money at that time.  Media production and distribution companies have to make money to stay in business.

At the end, the host asked me, “… what does it mean for who we are as humans, more of an existential question, where we are going with this age?”

That’s a deeper question than you might expect for a conversation about CD-ROMs. However, people do care about having some tangible form of art about them. Think of the ancients buried alongside beads and dolls. Netflix will never be the only thing that people want. As for Gen Z being upset about convenient Spotify, “what does it mean for who we are” has got to be part of it.

References:

“An Experiment on Protecting Intellectual Property” (2014) with Bart Wilson. Experimental Economics, 17:4, 691-716.

“You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property,” with Bart Wilson 

As an aside, furthermore, I’ll say here on the blog that Gen Z is by some measures the most entertained generation in history. For spiritual, not financial, reasons, I encourage them to cancel their subscriptions, take out their AirPods, and feel the silence and dread for a week.

Rockonomics Highlights

James Bailey1 Comment

I missed Alan Kreuger’s 2019 book on the economics of popular music when it first came out, but picked it up recently when preparing for a talk on Taylor Swift. It turns out to be a well-written mix of economic theory, data, and interviews with well-known musicians, by an author who clearly loves music. Some highlights:

[Music] is a surprisingly small industry, one that would go nearly unnoticed if music were not special in other respects…. less than $1 of every $1,000 in the U.S. economy is spent on music…. musicians represented only 0.13 percent of all employees [in 2016]; musicians’ share of the workforce has hovered around that same level since 1970.

there has been essentially no change in the two-to-one ratio of male to female musicians since the 1970s

The gig economy started with music…. musicians are almost five times more likely to report that they are self-employed than non-musicians

30 percent of musicians currently work for a religious organization as their main gig. There are a lot of church choirs and organists. A great many singers got their start performing in church, including Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, John Legend, Katy Perry, Faith Hill, Justin Timberlake, Janelle Monae, Usher, and many others

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Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich

James Bailey2 Comments

That is the title of a 2020 book by Dierdre McCloskey and Art Carden. It attempts to sum up McCloskey’s trilogy of huge books on the “Bourgeois Virtues” in one short, relatively easy to read book. I haven’t read the full trilogy, so I can’t say how good the new book is as a distillation, but I found that it was easy to read and at least makes me think I understand McCloskey’s basic thesis for why the world got rich. I share some highlights here.

Part 1 of the book aims to establish that the world did in fact get richer over recent centuries, plus give a basic explanation of liberal political thought. If you already know this you could skip this part and cut down an easy 189 page read to a very easy 106 page read (part 1 is for some reason written in a way that assumes you disagree with the authors, which grates when you don’t, or perhaps also if you do).

Part 2 gets to what I at least came for- digging into the history to solve the puzzle of why the Industrial Revolution / Great Enrichment took off when and where it did. Which means first, explaining why many things people think made 18th century England special were actually common elsewhere, like markets:

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Predicting College Closures

James Bailey7 Comments

This week the University of the Arts in Philadelphia announced they were closing effective immediately, leaving students scrambling to transfer and faculty desperate for jobs. U Arts now joins Cabrini University and Birmingham-Southern as some the 20 US colleges closing or being forced to merge so far this year. This trend of closures is likely to accelerate given falling birth rates that mean the number of college-age Americans is set to decline for decades; short-term issues like the FAFSA snafu and rising interest rates aren’t helping either.

All this makes it more important for potential students and employees to consider the financial health of colleges they might join, lest they find themselves in a UArts type situation. But how do you predict which colleges are at significant risk of closing? One thing that jumps out from this year’s list of closures is that essentially every one is a very small (fewer than 2000 undergrad) private school. Rural schools seem especially vulnerable, though this year has also seen plenty of closures in major cities.

Source

There appear to be a number of sources tracking the financial health of colleges, though most are not kept up to date well. Forbes seems to be the best, with 2023 ratings here; UArts, Cabrini, and Birmingham-Southern all had “C” grades. If you have access to them, credit ratings would also be good to check out; Fitch offers a generally negative take on higher ed here.

In a 2020 Brookings paper, Robert Kelchen identified several statistically significant predictors of college closures:

I used publicly available data compiled by the federal government to examine factors associated with college closures within the following two to four years. I found several factors, such as sharp declines in enrollment and total revenue, that were reasonably strong predictors of closure. Poor performances on federal accountability measures, such as the cohort default rate, financial responsibility metric, and being placed on the most stringent level of Heightened Cash Monitoring, were frequently associated with a higher likelihood of closure. My resulting models were generally able to place a majority of colleges that closed into a high-risk category

The Higher Learning Commission reached similar conclusions. Of course, there is a danger in identifying at-risk colleges too publicly:

Since a majority of colleges identified of being at the highest risk of closure remained open even four years later, there are practical and ethical concerns with using these results in the policy process. The greatest concern is that these results become a self-fulfilling prophecy— being identified as at risk of closure could hasten a struggling college’s demise.

Still, would-be students, staff and faculty should do some basic research to protect themselves as they considering enrolling or accepting a job at a college. College employees would also do well to save money and keep their resumes ready; some of these closures are so sudden that employees find out they are out of a job effective immediately and no paycheck is coming next month.

Abnormal Times Call for Abnormal Policies

James Bailey2 Comments

The Fed made two mistakes during the Great Recession of 2007-2009: being too slow and weak in their initial reaction to the financial crisis, and being too hurried in their attempts to return to a ‘normal’ policy stance. The first mistake turned what could have been a minor road bump into the worst recession in decades, and the second mistake meant it took a full decade from the start of the crisis in 2007 for unemployment to return to pre-crisis levels.

The rapid recovery from the Covid recession shows that the Fed learned from its first mistake in 2007. In 2020, the Fed acted quickly and decisively, so that despite the worst pandemic in a century the US experienced a recession that lasted only months, and it took unemployment barely 2 years to return to pre-Covid levels. But the Fed’s talk about cutting rates this year makes me worry they did not learn the second lesson. Despite all their talk of being “data driven”, I don’t see how a dispassionate look at current inflation, labor market, or financial data could lead them to be considering rate cuts; if anything it currently suggests rate hikes.

Why then is the Fed talking rate cuts? Of course you can dig and find a few data points to support cuts, but I think the driving factor is simply a feeling that interest rates are currently above “normal”. They are digging to find data points to support cuts because they want to return rates to “normal”, just as in the early to mid 2010’s they were digging for reasons to raise rates to “normal”. Rather than being consistently too hawkish or too dovish, they are consistently too eager to return rates to “normal” when circumstances are still abnormal.

This is not simply out of a social and political desire to avoid appearing “weird”, though that is definitely a factor. There is also a long academic tradition of measuring the stance of monetary policy by comparing current interest rates to a neutral, “natural” rate of interest, r*. But this tradition has problems. The “natural” rate of interest is always changing, and at any given time we can’t really know for sure what it is. The current Fed Funds rate may be higher than it has been in recent years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is above the current natural rate of interest; the natural rate itself could have risen too. This is why interest rates aren’t a great way to measure the stance of monetary policy. At times Chair Powell himself has made the same point, saying that trying to set policy by comparing to the “natural” rate of interest r* is like “navigating by the stars under cloudy skies”.

Lacking such celestial guidance, I can only hope the Fed will make good on their promise to be data-driven and navigate by the guideposts they can see around them: measures like current inflation and unemployment, or market-based forecasts of such measures.

Fear of the Unknown and Fear of the Known

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ famously omits graphic violence. You never see the bad guy stab anyone – though it’s heavily implied. Some say that this accounts for the impact of the film. The most thrilling parts are left to the viewer’s imagination. And a person’s imagination can be pretty terrifying. The delight of the unseen was especially appropriate at a time of 13 inch televisions and black-and-white movies. If the graphics on the screen couldn’t carry the movie, then the graphics in a person’s mind would do the trick.

Fast forward to ‘Burn Notice’. I don’t watch this show, but my in-laws do. They have a huge TV with a super high resolution. The TV has a diagonal span that almost surpasses my height. I’m short, but not that short. This is a big TV.  I’ve only seen Burn Notice at their house. It strikes me as poorly acted, poorly written, and self-serious to the point of absurdity. I keep expecting that self-referential nod to the open secret that the show is ridiculous, but it never comes. It’s a bad show. From all that I can see in high definition, there’s nothing worth seeing.

What is so good that I watch? Although I’m seven years late, I’ve recently been watching Marvel’s Luke Cage. Being a superhero show, some of the standards are lowered. The script is weak at times, the acting is OK, and the plot has some credibility holes. But the point of the show is to explore a world in which superheroes exist, and one of them happens to live in Harlem. Luke Cage is part of the earlier Marvel cadre of post-acquisition-by-Disney shows that also includes Iron Fist, Daredevil, & Jessica Jones. These shows are less tongue-in-cheek and comedic than the later shows like Loki, Wandavision, or Moon Knight. I enjoy watching Luke Cage on a small 40 inch television, and occasionally on my phone.  

Then I stayed at an Airbnb last weekend that had a HUGE TV. This thing easily had a diagonal measure that surpassed my height. After getting the kids down and answering emails, I sat down to enjoy my current go-to show before hitting the hay. And dang it if I wasn’t distracted the entire time. On this massive screen I could see every pore on everyone’s face and every blank stare parading as acting. I could see each and every glare of poor lighting and every character’s ill-timed reply and change of expression.  Most of the show is one big charade.

Much to my dismay, I had discovered that I was watching ‘bad tv’. Let me be clear. I’m not supposed to watch bad tv. That’s the realm of those other people. But me? I have enlightened preferences and a refined pallet. I’m not a person who watches bad tv. But that grandiose self-conception has been dashed by this serendipitous visit to a nice Airbnb.

I’ve had some time to dwell on my new revelation and this is what I’ve settled on. First, I’m going to keep watching Luke Cage on my small TV and I’m going to enjoy it. There is little that I can do now about the nagging knowledge that, given a higher resolution, it’s not a good show. You can’t unknow things. Second, maybe Burn Notice isn’t a bad show. Maybe it’s just a bad show when I can see too much detail, such as on my in-law’s TV. Maybe I would enjoy it on a TV with lower resolution. Regardless, I’m not going to watch it.

Third, now I have a new margin of preference over shows and movies. Now I consider whether a show or movie would be helped or hurt by more visual detail. Quick-paced, big-budget action shows like Jack Ryan are probably better in greater detail. Game of Thrones is probably better as a 4k experience. But shows in which the comedy or the drama unfolds by virtue of the circumstances, rather than the visual spectacle, are probably best watched at a lower resolution. When the audience experience hinges on implications and connections that occur in the viewer’s mind, that’s probably a better show at a lower resolution. Luke Cage is a ‘good’ show in low-res. In high-res, I’m afraid that see too much.

When Hitchcock omitted visual detail, he leaned on the mind’s eye to fill in the gaps. He was guiding the brain toward conjuring the unnerving scenes that he could not as easily mimic on screen. Advances in home entertainment have moved the goalpost. A more detailed viewing experience changes the type of shows that we are willing to watch because we have a new criteria for fitness. The supply side response on the part of studios is that shows lacking visual stimulation will need to lean more on the mind’s eye and our interpretations of social interactions in order to for audiences to experience the best version of the show. Because the best version won’t be in front of us. We know too much.

OpenAI wants you to fool their AI

James BaileyLeave a comment

OpenAI created the popular Dall-E and ChatGPT AI models. They try to make their models “safe”, but many people make a hobby of breaking through any restrictions and getting ChatGPT to say things its not supposed to:

Source: Zack Witten

Now trying to fool OpenAI models can be more than a hobby. OpenAI just announced a call for experts to “Red Team” their models. They have already been doing all sorts of interesting adversarial tests internally:

Now they want all sorts of external experts to give it a try, including economists:

This seems like a good opportunity to me, both to work on important cutting-edge technology, and to at least arguably make AI safer for humanity. For a long time it seemed like you had to be a top-tier mathematician or machine learning programmer to have any chance of contributing to AI safety, but the field is now broadening dramatically as capable models start to be deployed widely. I plan to apply if I find any time to spare, perhaps some of you will too.

The models definitely still need work- this is what I got after prompting Dall-E 2 for “A poster saying “OpenAI wants you…. to fool their models” in the style of “Uncle Sam Wants You””

Gari Melchers

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Who’s your favorite artist? Warhol? Picasso? Van Gogh? Maybe someone much earlier, such as Michelangelo or Titian? Of course, there is something about the style or subjects that you enjoy. But something about the artist’s personal life might also matter to you. Personally, I’m a fan of Hieronymus Bosch, about whom we know little, and William Blake, who had some social and political opinions that would still be considered liberal even today.

Picasso, Dalle, and Warhol were all eccentric. Picasso had multiple girlfriends who didn’t get along, Dalle enjoyed exemplifying surrealism in his dress and behavior, and Warhol was a reclusive hoarder. Their eccentricity increases their allure and fosters an aura of mystique that they are privy to some unknown truths.

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