BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-06-21 Mo
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...
First:
This strikes me as rather important. But do note that Biden has consistently portrayed his major initiatives as sensible and common sense. It is the Republicans who are pretending that they are radical-left initiatives, and making them of partisan salience. All Democrats can do is to beg McCarthy, McConnell, Murdoch, and the other grifters to limit their culture war grifting to unimportant symbolic issues, and let the business of government operate as the business of government should. But experience tells us that does not work. ObamaCare is RomneyCare, after all. But, yes, instead of making everything a culture-war battlefield, today not everything is a culture-war battlefield. Perhaps McCarthy and McConnell have told Murdoch and company to cool it on normal business? It is not clear to me what is going on:
Matthew Yglesias: The Rise & Importance of Secret Congress: ‘In the final two years of the Obama administration… we suddenly—with little fanfare but large bipartisan majorities — got: The Every Student Succeeds Act, a major rewrite of federal K–12 policy; An overhaul of the Department of Veterans Affairs, spearheaded by Bernie Sanders and John McCain; The FAST Act, which authorized $305 billion over five years in infrastructure spending; A ban on incorporating plastic microbeads into health and beauty products…. Biden has only been in office six months…. But along with the water bill he’s also signed the COVID–19 Hate Crimes Act, and the Senate passed the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021—formerly known as the Endless Frontiers Act.…
The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues… polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock…. Members of the minority (rightly) think that any popular, well-known bill that passes on a bipartisan basis is going to help the standing of the president…. In an era where congressional voting is so highly correlated with presidential approval, and primary electorates say they’d rather have members that fight the other party than help their own state, it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful….
But… no Republican congressman is going to be primaried for voting for the low-salience Endless Frontiers Act, because it doesn’t count as “giving Biden a win”…. While our representatives are grandstanding in front of the cameras, they’re also hammering out compromises on low-profile issues….
The most important implication is that if you don’t have the votes to steamroll the opposition, avoid making your issue coded as highly partisan. Don’t frame your issue as a “win” for your party; talk about it as a common-sense reform. Do the work of trying to find and convince people across the ideological spectrum that it’s a good idea and that it’s in their interest to support it. You should also pay attention to substance rather than labels. The energy bill that passed late last year is a very significant injection of funding into zero-carbon energy research and deployment. But it wasn’t coded as a “climate bill,” and it’s certainly not the “Green New Deal”…
And as we saw with the Endless Frontiers Act, the final product is going to be deformed somewhat by the picayune priorities of members of Congress rather than reflecting the pure vision of a technocrat or ideologue. But that’s how it’s basically always been in America, and we’ve somehow muddled through okay…
LINK: <https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret>
One Video:
AC-DC: Highway to Hell <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l482T0yNkeo>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Quinn Cummings: _’I was in my mid-thirties before I realized I have face blindness. In my defense: 1. Not a serious case. I… rarely scream in terror upon finding Consort in the shower… <https://twitter.com/quinncy/status/1406348740957327360>
Joana Duran-Franch: Oh, Man! What Happened to Women? The Blurring of Gender-Based Occupational Segregation: ‘Demographic changes have masked the labor market effects caused by the demanualization during 1990–2016. The demanualization has decreased the aggregate employment rate of low-educated women by the same amount it has done for men, 8.1 percentage points… <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H2XWd5WPqRPeBrlqbWMQfrO3pryxBZ2H/view>
Zach Carter: The Second Death of Milton Friedman <https://zacharydcarter.substack.com/p/milton-friedman>
Wikipedia: Archpriest Avvakum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avvakum>
Marshall Berman: All That’s Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity <https://www.google.com/books/edition/All_that_is_Solid_Melts_Into_Air/mox1ywiyhtgC>
Marx, Modernism, & Modernization <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/berman-marx-modernism-%26-modernization.pdf>
In the Forest of Symbols: Notes on Modernism in New York <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/berman-notes-on-modernism-in-new-york.pdf>
LECTURE NOTES: Feminism & Demography: A lecture I am now happy enough to let this into the wild—but subject to revision: I will not stand by anything if questioned sharply and harshly. What I am interested in is finding out: (a) Is it right? (b) Does it hit the right notes? Last Edited 2021–06–18 :: 6459 words… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/draft-lecture-notes-feminism-and>
LECTURE NOTES: Adam Smith: It is really too bad I do not get to teach this stuff regularly... 6696 words… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/lecture-notes-adam-smith>
Stephen S. Cohen, J. Bradford DeLong, & John Zysman (2000): Tools for Thought: What Is New and Important About the “E-conomy” <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-stephen>
Brad DeLong & Peter Leyden (2015): Are We Approaching ‘Peak Human’?<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-e-archives-from-2015> <https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2015/11/are-we-approaching-peak-human-the-honest-broker-for-the-week-of-november-9-2015.html>
Andrew Marvell: An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland: ‘Though justice against fate complain,/And plead the ancient rights in vain;/But those do hold or break/As men are strong or weak… <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44683/an-horatian-ode-upon-cromwells-return-from-ireland>
Paragraphs:
What do we mean when we say that “the plague years will pack between one and two decades of digital transformation into a very short time”?
Steven Sinofsky: Disruption at Work: It’s More than just WFH: ‘The structure and design of corporations are rooted in everything that happened after WWII from an influx of labor, growth in housing, rise of computing, and even the military…. When we look back at 1950–2000, we will see it as pre-internet or pre-software-defined-business era. Much time was spent taking tech and applying it to the hard parts of running businesses that were doing what had been done inefficiently, at local scale (e.g., accounting and logistics). But those difficult parts were the problems defined by 1900–1950, the problems of figuring out just how to design, assemble, and distribute goods. Technology was applied to “automate” or “make efficient” those problems. It has been incredible. The disruption that took place was “scale”—corporations brought capabilities to make and distribute things globally, in a newly global market…. The first 25 years of internet, in hindsight, were an era of “connecting” those innovations…. Walmart took computers and software and turned the elaborate processes of selecting merchandise, distributing it, monitoring sales, and so on and automated it per store. Amazon built one giant store with everything…. That is what disruption looks like….
The debate over remote work vs hybrid vs HQ is only part of the picture…. PC people set out to solve information and programming problems not “how do you do reliability of OS 370 card readers”. In going after the same target (“accounting”) with new architecture, whole new economics and solutions appeared…. It is said the pandemic pulled forward a decade or more of “digital transformation”. Yes. But what it really is going to be is the equivalent of what WWII did to the corporation or the microprocessor to mainframe. The question is not “work remotely”, but what is the very structure of getting things done? We can’t see it now, but in 25 years corporations will run very differently. They will not be 3/5’s HQ with everything the same. Why and how?…. This is what disruption looks like. It happens slowly at first, then very quickly. It seems impossible to imagine a different way to do things, then we’re doing things in a different way. Stay tuned for a whole new way to work…
LINK: <https://a16z.com/2021/06/12/disruption-at-work-its-more-than-just-wfh/>
Freddie from Barmen: 175 years ago Friedrich Engels put his finger on the major flaw in economics that Paul Romer has tried to repair over his career:
Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: "According to the economists, the production costs of a commodity consist of three elements: the rent for the piece of land required to produce the raw material; the capital with its profit, and the wages for the labour required for production and manufacture…. A third factor which the economist does not think about–I mean the mental element of invention, of thought alongside the physical element of sheer labour. What has the economist to do with inventiveness? Have not all inventions fallen into his lap without any effort on his part? Has one of them cost him anything? Why then should he bother about them in the calculation of production costs? Land, capital and labour are for him the conditions of wealth, and he requires nothing else. Science is no concern of his.
What does it matter to him that he has received its gifts through Berthollet, Davy, Liebig, Watt, Cartwright, etc.–gifts which have benefited him and his production immeasurably? He does not know how to calculate such things; the advances of science go beyond his figures. But in a rational order which has gone beyond the division of interests as it is found with the economist, the mental element certainly belongs among the elements of production and will find its place, too, in economics among the costs of production. And here it is certainly gratifying to know that the promotion of science also brings its material reward; to know that a single achievement of science like James Watt’s steam-engine has brought in more for the world in the first fifty years of its existence than the world has spent on the promotion of science since the beginning of time…
The two plague years have given very many people who were not aficionados of online information a great deal of experience in dealing with it—especially in dealing with the short run gifts that are very, very obvious: people wanting your credit card number to give you a refund, and such. Will this help them develop the mental skeptical mechanisms needed to cope with the dopamine-loop misinformation TechnoPrinces of Facebook and elsewhere? Is what we have seen over the past 20 years simply normal human gullibility when faced with something new and where they have to learn very quickly? We can hope. But so far it has been a vain hope that people can be somehow vaccinated against or build immunity to the viruses purveyed by the dopamine-loop engagement-maximization misinformation TechnoPrinces:
Matthew Yglesias: “Future“ & the Future of Media: ‘Content distribution… is mediated via Google… Facebook, and… lesser… smaller networks like Twitter. All… especially Facebook… deci[ded]… to give maximum visibility to content that is maximally engaging…. Engagement-maximization mostly boosts rightwing populists pushing pessimistic negative-sum worldviews while giving a secondary boost to leftwing populists pushing a different set of pessimistic negative-sum worldviews. Oops! Peter Thiel… deeply involved with Facebook… [thinks] billionaires can… ride in the slipstream of conservative populism, crush electoral democracy… and then keep the flame of technological progress alive as a kind of esoteric knowledge. I don’t think that works…
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"it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful"
Whether that is true or not, that claim is absurdly tendentious. The Democratic congress was entirely willing to make a deal with Trump; they were stymied only by Trump's perversity and intransigence. If I want some fatuous both-sides framing, I'll go to the real New York Times, not private label New York Times.
And anyway, is it true? The best support for this claim is polling that shows voters change their positions once they are informed of their party's positions. But it is the politicians who decide those positions! The possibility that Republican politicians would suffer for cooperating to implement policies favoured by Republican voters is ... extraordinarily remote. The Republican politicians are on record attempting to take credit for Covid relief measures that they voted against!
"But so far it has been a vein hope that people can be somehow vaccinated against or build immunity to the viruses purveyed by the dopamine-loop engagement-maximization misinformation TechnoPrinces:"
Yet we learned to ignore most advertising. Snakeoil hucksterism was the click-bait of the day and is now a meme about not being fooled. While I once viewed the enticing click-bait that is now added to almost all online news content, I know that it is worse than empty calories and ignore the clever titles. Ad blockers continue to fight an arms-race over online advertising. Any company that demands that I must whitelist them and be forced to watch their adverts are just ignored. (When companies can guarantee that the ads they host with their content is malware free and pay compensation if that guarantee is not met, then I will consider whitelisting them if they can show their content is really worth my attention.)
You have just written about the form of the "attention economy", but much of that is polluted by advertisers treating eyeballs as a commons to be exploited in a way that makes "the tragedy of the commons" seem tame by comparison.
I fully expect in a decade or so that my personal (not corporate controlled) AI assistant will select the ad-free content that it thinks I really want to read or watch and make sure that there are limits to my eyeballs being glued to a screen, We can see the outlines of the pieces that will make this happen, and if I am correct, then your sense that aggregators will capture the profits will prove false, as the assistant can always ensure that the source is accessed directly and not through a corporate "walled garden" like FB. If micropayments can ever be made to work, then that might be a way to pay for content rather than through subscription models, but failing that, a tip-jar will do with the AI noting content use and suggesting suitable tips periodically.