#39: Curated links
Recommendations from what I read recently
Link #1: The Maintenance Race
… “The global cost of corrosion is estimated to be US $2.5 trillion a year, which is equivalent to 3.4 percent of the global gross domestic product.”
Yes, we are talking about literal, physical rusting of objects here. This is from Stewart Brand’s book Maintenance: of everything, which builds on his excellent Works in Progress article. The book starts with the same article as its first part. In the second (and final) part, the first section illustrates the same philosophy. It beautifully and subtly lays out a philosophy of work, or doing anything well.
Much of the rest of the book is, as the titles correctly suggest, a series of digressions. Sometimes, it is a bit too specific about mechanics and repair. For most people, I would suggest reading the first chapter and the first section of the second chapter, or even just the original WIP piece.
Link #2: Economic Ideas and Policy Implementation
This is an interesting (albeit sad) paper from Eric Robertson on the impact and stickiness of economic ideas. It examines how bureaucrats in British India responded to famines depending on whether they were trained by Thomas Malthus or Richard Jones. The author uses the sudden death of Malthus as a quasi-random event that determined who taught the bureaucrats at the training institute.
The paper traces how bureaucrats trained by Jones (who replaced Malthus at the civil services training institute) behaved compared to Malthus-trained bureaucrats under similar circumstances. The findings suggest that those trained by Malthus did less to provide relief, supposedly influenced by Malthusian thinking, which held poverty and famines as natural mechanisms to check population growth.
Jones-trained bureaucrats were more likely to provide relief measures: again, supposedly because they were more influenced by Jones’ view of the world, which rejected this kind of Malthusian thinking. The empirical findings seem to hold despite multiple robustness checks.
Linking rainfall shocks to district-level fiscal responses, I show that officials trained by Malthus delivered less relief during droughts, providing 0.10-0.25 SD less aid across all major measures compared with officials taught by Jones. The results reveal that exposure to abstract economic ideas can shape real-world policy implementation for decades.
A small peek into the largely unseen and untraceable ways in which ideas matter. So yes, teaching matters, writing matters!
Link #3: Free Trade on Paper, Protection in Practice
Combining firm- level sales data with international trade prices, we estimate that between 2010 and 2024 this policy regime generated US$2.5–3.1 billion in monopoly rents. Downstream manufacturers bore the cost, as India’s share of global exports of VSF-based yarn and garments declined over the same period. The VSF episode illustrates how governments can comply formally with trade agreements while reproducing protection through domestic policy instruments, with predictable distributional consequences along global value chains.
The new paper by Abhishek Anand and Naveen Joseph Thomas shows how India nullifies ‘free trade’ agreements by introducing non-tariff barriers. They quantify the rents generated for one firm at the cost of downstream export competitiveness. It has a very smart empirical strategy, using the fact that almost all of the Viscose Staple Fiber (VSF) in India’s domestic market is produced by a single firm:
What makes VSF analytically distinctive is who was being protected. VSF production in India is characterised by extreme upstream concentration: a single firm supplies nearly the entire domestic market. There is no infant industry to nurture, no fragmented sector struggling to emerge, and no plausible dynamic-efficiency rationale for prolonged insulation from foreign competition. Yet successive policy instruments were deployed to shield this upstream input from imports even after tariff elimination was mandated. Similar patterns of instrument rotation have been documented across India’s man-made fibre segments, where upstream protection has repeatedly come at the expense of downstream competitiveness (Anand & Thomas, 2022; Joshi & Thakurta, 2025).
This pattern reflects a deeper political-economy logic. When preferential liberalisation threatens concentrated upstream interests, protection does not disappear; it mutates across policy tools.
All of this makes me slightly skeptical about India’s recent free trade agreements (FTAs). Indian policymakers still do not seem to view free trade as a positive-sum game. Instead, they might only be responding to the international crises, and when things ‘cool down’, who knows what new barriers they will create?
Also, here is my Twitter thread on the paper.
Link #4: Polycentric status contests
Vlad Tarko proposes a typology of positional goods — which I did not even know of as a formal category — in this paper.
Positional goods are goods whose values decline when access to them increases. They have an elite aspect, often conveying prestige and status, and this component of their value would diminish if they would become easily accessible to everyone. The nature of these goods can be understood as a position within a ranking (hence their name), and, as such, competition for positional goods is a zero-sum game: when one gains a higher ranking, someone else must get lower. This… can lead to growing social-political problems if, as societies become richer, the main sources of scarcity become increasingly due to positional goods, rather than due to a lack of access to regular goods (Hirsch 1978).
I found the typology extremely useful. In a world of growing abundance, understanding the nature of these positional goods matters for the basic stability of society more than ever.
To these two criteria [rivalrous and excludable] we can add a third: value boundedness, i.e. whether the consumption value of the good decreases as the number of consumers enjoying the good increases… We obtain four different possible types of positional goods… which I label (1) “elite goods”, i.e. bounded private goods, (2) “prestige goods”, i.e. bounded public goods, (3) “status goods”, i.e. bounded club goods, and (4) “hipster goods”, i.e. bounded common-pool resources.
The paper has some interesting implications. Two stood out to me:
Relatively speaking, some positional goods are more inefficient and philosophically problematic than others.
Somewhat counterintuitively, markets are reasonably good at managing the potential downsides of positional goods, and tend to do it much better than government interventions:
…. markets tend to fragment the worst kinds of positional goods into competing hierarchies of status, tend to dissipate and eliminate some positional goods, and tend to turn the most damaging status competitions into more beneficial prestige competitions.
Link #5: Why poor countries stopped catching up
David Oks reviews Arvind Subramanian, Justin Sandefur, and Dev Patel’s (referred to as SS&P from now on) late-2010s findings on convergence — poor countries catching up to the rich countries — as well as their more recent opposite findings suggesting that convergence has stopped. SS&P explain the reversal of the convergence trend due to rising political and economic nationalism, and its negative effects on international free trade.
Oks does not find SS&P’s explanation convincing. Instead, he argued that much of the brief convergence was largely driven by China. First, due to its scale, China's rapid growth meant a huge contribution to global catch-up. Indirectly, China's surge in capital investment and its commodity imports fueled the exports (and growth rates) of poor countries in Africa and Latin America.
I am sympathetic to the China factor as an explanation, but I do not see it as fundamentally different from SS&P’s arguments. At a deeper level, it was the international free trade and end-of-history paradigm that sustained China’s growth over a long time. In other words, the “good institutional environment” was the cause, and China was the vehicle.
Had the end-of-history paradigm continued, we might have found new vehicle(s) to sustain the momentum. We can always retrospectively see that country X drove much of the global progress. But what enabled country X to become that vehicle in the first place is important. And, in my reading, that is what SS&P were getting at.
As an aside, I also think that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis fueled economic and political nationalism over the next decade. We have been seeing its effects in the last decade with the upending of the previous world order.
Link #6: First Contact with America
A fascinating read on how three individuals had wildly different first impressions of the United States, and how that changed the world. Sayyid Qutb went back to Egypt as a profoundly changed man, with a newfound belief in Islamic superiority and violent jihad. Wang Huning gained more conviction for the need for authoritarianism and single-party rule in China. He is practically China’s “chief ideologue and theorist.”
Boris Yeltsin was awed by the abundance in the US, which weakened his belief in the ideology and supremacy of the USSR. That was at least partly responsible for him agreeing to neoliberal reforms that precipitated the collapse of the USSR (even though the reforms did not play out as expected, in the long run).