BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-06-22 Tu
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...
One Video:
Mohamed El-Erian: How The U.S. Economy Will Fundamentally Change: LINK: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ1TA75ZSJo>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Carola Frydman, Eric Hilt, & Lauren Mostrom: Ownership and Control of American Public Corporations, 1880–1920<https://ecgi.global/sites/default/files/Ownership%20and%20Control%20of%20American%20Public%20Corporations%2C%201880-1920.pdf>
Curio: Discover Podcasts <https://curio.io/discover>
Blum Center: Innovation Chronicle: ‘Big Ideas finalists, Infant Warmer, prize-winning PET recycling… <https://mailchi.mp/berkeley/blum-center-innovation-chronicle-april-5032498?e=74b79a9d93>
Milton Friedman (1976): In South Africa <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/milton-friedman-in-south-africa.pdf>
Zach Carter: The End of Friedmanomics <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/carter-friedman.pdf>
Paul Krugman: ’Zach Carter has a characteristically fascinating article on Milton Friedman and his fading legacy…. Monetarism… is dead, and should never have had the influence it did. James Tobin was right in 1970: to the extent that there was a correlation between monetary aggregates and GDP (there hasn’t been much of one in recent decades), Friedman had the causation reversed… <https://jstor.org/stable/1883016> <https://twitter. com/paulkrugman/status/1406237371419566086>
Zach Beauchamp : Benjamin Netanyahu is out of power in Israel. Here’s what comes next: ‘“I’m not optimistic about Israel, ever,” says Hadas Aron, a professor at New York University who studies Israeli politics. “But I do think it’s not meaningless that someone else will be in government, that something else could at least have the potential to rise”… <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/6/13/22464927/benjamin-netanyahu-prime-minister-vote-naftali-bennett>
Wikipedia: Croatia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia>
Encinal Nursery <https://encinalnursery.com/>
David Brin: The Ancient Ones, ch. 1–2 (Audio) <https://westillread.com/2021/04/20/the-ancient-ones-ch-1-2/>
Choose a License <https://choosealicense.com/licenses/>
M.G. Siegler: Time Shifts: ‘In a time of ‘Return to Office’…. We all knew and understood that commute times add up, but it is different to live this reality again. A 30-minute commute in the morning and a 30-minute commute at night is an hour of your day you had previously “unlocked”… <https://5ish.org/p/time-shifts>
The Rise of the Robots: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads: ‘As of September 2018… <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/09/the-rise-of-the-robots-some-fairly-recent-must-and-should-reads.html>
Paragraphs:
Robert Farley: With Focus on China, US Senate Passes Major Industrial Policy Bill: ’If the bill ultimately passes both houses of Congress, it will represent a major shift in how the United States government manages its relations with the tech sector…. The bill is intended to foster the reinvigoration of the manufacturing side of the U.S. technology sector…. The Senate version faces criticism regarding the lack of significant oversight of the technology companies that will benefit from the bill. However, the extent of bipartisan support in the Senate suggests a big enough coalition to survive negotiations between the House and Senate versions…. Both Republican and Democrats displayed an allergy to industrial policy after the 1970s; that both now seem interested in government intervention is a huge change from the long-standing consensus…. Whether this amounts to a new “Cold War Consensus” is altogether uncertain, but the fact that concern over China can bridge one of the most poisonous political divides in U.S. history should probably cause some concern in Beijing…
LINK: <https://thediplomat.com/2021/06/with-focus-on-china-us-senate-passes-major-industrial-policy-bill/>
Shac Ron: ’Arm64 didn’t appear out of nowhere. Apple contracted ARM to design a new ISA for its purposes. When Apple began selling iPhones containing arm64 chips, ARM hadn’t even finished their own core design to license to others. Arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches. ARM designed a standard that serves its clients and gets feedback from them on ISA evolution. In 2010 few cared about a 64-bit ARM core. Samsung & Qualcomm, the biggest mobile vendors, were certainly caught unaware by it when Apple shipped in 2013. Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided. M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/stuntpants/status/1346473074544181249>
David Glasner: What’s so Great about Supply-Demand Analysis?: ‘This analysis is the bread and butter of economics…. There is much to be said for the analysis…. But it’s also important to understand its limitations, and, especially, the implicit assumptions… It focuses attention on the idea of an equilibrium price at which all buyers can buy as much as they would like, and all sellers can sell as much as they would like…. That equilibrium price, aside from enabling the mutual compatibility of buyers’ and sellers’ plans to buy or to sell, has optimal properties…. The chief problem with supply-demand analysis is that it requires a strict ceteris-paribus assumption…. But another implicit assumption underlies supply-demand analysis: that the economic system starts from a state of general equilibrium…. Finally, and perhaps most problematic, comparative statics is merely a comparison of two alternative equilibria, neither of which can be regarded as the outcome of a theoretically explicable, much less practical, process leading from initial conditions to the notional equilibrium state…. It’s important to understand [that]… the relationship between the formalism and the real world is tenuous…
LINK: <https://uneasymoney.com/2021/06/16/whats-so-great-about-supply-demand-analysis/>
Ezra Klein : Interviews Betsey Stevenson: ’"We got three months left of these extra $300 payments. I don’t think anybody is sitting at home and thinking, aw, I just am going to live high on the hog on these unemployment insurance payments. I think they’re thinking, my job is miserable and I’m going to take this nice time for a break. And I’m going to look right now while I can for something better. And I guarantee you that we could get rid of all of unemployment insurance tomorrow, and we wouldn’t put 7.5 million people back to work overnight…. It might even be OK… appreciate the fact that people have had a really hard year. People who have white collar jobs with good incomes feel like they’ve had a hard year…. Well, if you’re barely putting food on the table, your job became enormously more miserable, and then you turn on the news and you see people yelling at you because you’re not getting back to work fast enough. That’s just a lack of appreciation of the humanity of lower wage workers… If UI is having an effect, it’s small…. Do we really need to deny benefits to millions of people because we’re worried about whether we might have had a few thousand more jobs?…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-betsey-stevenson.html>
Jeet Heer: Tucker Carlson Is a Made Man: ‘Fox News host loves to rail against the mainstream press but enjoys the protection of media clubbiness…. Smith rightly notes that Carlson’s “double-game” is hardly new…. Right-wing demagogues battling the media has always been akin to professional wrestlin…. Access journalism has always been morally dodgy but in the case of protecting a figure like Carlson (not to mention Trump) shouldn’t it be seen as beyond the pale? And who are these journalists who are shielding Carlson?…
LINK: <https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/tucker-carlson-is-a-made-man>
Sheri Berman: Threats to American Democracy: ‘Even though Trump lost the election, American politics has not returned to ‘normal’. Indeed, Trump’s removal has made clearer the nature and severity of the threat to American democracy. We now have a two-party system where one of the two parties prioritises partisanship over democracy and is accordingly willing to promote policies that would seriously, if not fatally, impair the functioning and legitimacy of democracy’s core foundation—free and fair elections…
LINK: <https://socialeurope.eu/threats-to-american-democracy>
Ezra Klein: AMA!: ‘Too much feedback about me and it gets in my head in bad ways. Compliments roll off me, criticisms stick, and in both cases, it’s all just weird exacerbations of my ego. I already get more public feedback then I think human beings are tuned to absorb, so I try to limit all the additional stuff about me that I can. But I appreciate that you all like or hate the show enough to be here!…
LINK: <https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/nxf1ib/im_ezra_klein_host_of_the_ezra_klein_show_ama/>
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I didn't find El-Erian's interview responses particularly insightful. They have already been provided by many MSM articles. Despite his predictions, we can already see the pushback from some companies, most notably the Wall Street banks. E.g. "If you can eat out at a restaurant, you can work in the office." Take your pick: Zitron's observation of useless middle managers desperate to regain control and micromanage employees within the office, or the fear of business owners losing control of their employees' costs and hence profits, even staying in business. History partly rhyming with the Black Death, just with a much smaller mortality and morbidity rate, changing the relative power of the wealthy and the workers.
Re: Ezra Klein : Interviews Betsey Stevenson
The more I read about this issue, the more I keep thinking this is analogous to the Spartans' fear of a helot revolt. Essential workers are poorly paid, abused by their bosses, who whine if they cannot get enough workers cheaply enough. While they cannot go to war on these workers to keep them in line, they can try to make their lives even more miserable (although in a pandemic exposure to a potentially fatal disease the outcome is still death). 2500 years of civilization later and little changes...