Friday, December 8th, 2023 - TrickJarrett.com: Semper Ad Meliora

Fascinating to learn that part of the reason of Van Gogh's posthumous success was because of his sister-in-law

Johanna Gezina van Gogh-Bonger (4 October 1862 – 2 September 1925) was a multilingual Dutch editor and translator of the letters of the van Gogh brothers. As the wife of art dealer Theo van Gogh, she was the sister-in-law of the painter Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh-Bonger became the key player in the growth of Vincent's posthumous fame. Formerly a largely unknown and marginalized figure, she is the subject of a new, full-length biography by major Van Gogh scholar Hans Luijten and her life is now a focus in popular culture.

12/8/2023 6:44 am |

| Tags: art, vincent van gogh

A look at the history of QWERTY

I had a conversation very similar to the custom keyboard portion of this video with coworkers a few evenings ago, discussing how I had also experimented with a custom keyboard arrangement - but, for me, the biggest issue was that it was not the only keyboard I used so I had to both learn a new layout and actively use a standard key arrangement.

The evolution of the keyboard was fascinating as I hadn't heard about those earlier designs before qwerty. Though, I will say, parts of the video were a slog as the presenter has an odd pacing to how he speaks at times.

12/8/2023 7:12 am |

| Tags: keyboard, history, technology, psychology

"Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya"

From the conclusion of the linked study and its initial results from this large test. Bolding is my own.

This paper has described what we have learned two years in to a unique experiment designed to examine the effects of Universal Basic Incomes—here, a commitment to giving everyone in rural communities in Kenya income transfers sufficient to meet basic needs for over a decade. The design also lets us compare these effects to those of two shorter-term transfer programs which delivered similar amounts of money during the period we studied—as small monthly payments or in a single lump sum—but without the promise of ongoing funding. Communities that received long-term transfers saw substantial economic expansions. Over-all enterprise counts, revenues, costs, and net revenues increased by 14%, 41%, 35%, and 52%, respectively—substantial changes relative to the quantity of money transferred in, which amounted to 11% of control mean expenditure. This reflected structural shifts, with the expansion disproportionately concentrated in the non-agricultural sector, particularly in retail—indeed much of the economic story appears to have been the expansion of supply chains to meet increased local demand for goods manufactured elsewhere.

Labor supply did not fall—we estimate a small, insignificant increase, and can reject large decreases—but also did not rise by enough to account for much of this expansion. Instead the main pattern was one of changing occupational choices, with workers switching out of wage employment and into self-employment (and wages rises in response). Household well-being improved on some common measures (e.g. food consumption, depression) but not others (e.g. children’s anthropometrics and schooling).

Relative to these effects, those of the shorter-term transfers were striking. Communities that received lump sum transfers experienced economic expansions similar to and on some measures even larger than those that received long-term transfers, as well as significant population growth (13% more households). Yet communities that received the same amount of money structured as short-term monthly payments saw very different effects: aggregate output grew significantly less, while by some measures (e.g. consumption) short-run household well-being increased more. Collectively this pattern of effects implies that both the way in which a given quantum of transfers is structured and the promised future duration of transfers can have large consequences for behavior and outcomes today. It is consistent, for example, with a model in which borrowing and saving are difficult and investment projects require both a large up-front capital outlay and ongoing flow investment to turn a profit—though this is hardly an exclusive explanation.

The pattern of effects on mental health—specifically, depression—are also noteworthy. Depression scores fell in all arms, but more so in short-term and especially the long-term arm than in the lump sum arm, even though the lump-sum arm saw the largest economic response. Perhaps the lump sum recipients feel the weight of the future more heavily, knowing that they have made their bets and have no further cushion to anticipate if those do not pan out.

Time (and subsequent round of data collection) will shed some light on this point, letting us examine how these interventions are affecting the volatility as well as the average levels of living standards. It will also reveal whether more generally the trajectories of households in the long-term communities diverge from those in the others as they continue to receive transfers. The long horizon of their transfers may allow them to bide their time, waiting for the right opportunities to arrive. Or it may prove that the initial wealth transfer in the lump sum arm was sufficient to kickstart those communities onto permanently better trajectories at much lower cost than the long-term approach.

In the meantime we conclude with three remarks relevant to the broader dialogue about UBI. First, UBI here did not lead to the adverse effects that some of its critics have argued it would. Most notably, people did not work or earn less on their own. This is in line with and extends the partial-equilibrium evidence from other shorter-term and more finely-targeted transfer programs in low- and middle-income countries (Banerjee et al., 2017). Second, while there is much to learn from the many short-term pilots now underway around the world, one should be cautious extrapolating from these to forecast the consequences of longer-term policies. Households here made their plans with the future in mind, and those in the long-term arm experienced very different outcomes—whether because they could borrow against or plan to spend their own future transfers, or plan to win future business from their neighbors. And third, tranching matters. Discussions about UBI usually begin from a narrative of meeting basic needs. But even the most destitute households often look for ways to accumulate sums of money large enough to make larger, lumpier purchases (Collins et al., 2009). Designing UBI schemes in ways that respond to this need could make them a more compelling strategy for addressing extreme poverty over time.