BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-07-15 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
Facebook as we know it needs to be shut down. But how do we replace it with something that does what it does without being a similar center for destructive grifting and brain-hacking?:
Brian Stelter: Authors of New Book Depict ‘Facebook’s Dilemma & Its Ugly Truth’: ‘“No Filter” author Sarah Frier, who was tasked with reviewing “An Ugly Truth” for The Times, says the book documents a clear pattern: “The social media behemoth does as little as possible to prevent disasters from happening, then feebly attempts to avoid blame and manage public appearances.” That’s why the back cover of the book cleverly lists the company’s apologias over the years: “I’m sorry.” “We need to do better.” “We need to do a better job.” The authors conclude that “even if the company undergoes a radical transformation in the coming years, that change is unlikely to come from within.” Why? Because “the algorithm that serves as Facebook’s beating heart is too powerful and too lucrative. And the platform is built upon a fundamental, possibly irreconcilable dichotomy: its purported mission to advance society by connecting people while also profiting off them. It is Facebook’s dilemma and its ugly truth.”… “This is a book intended to make you outraged at Facebook,” Frier wrote in her review. “But if you’ve read anything about the company in recent years, you probably already are. Frenkel and Kang faced the challenge of unearthing new and interesting material about one of the most heavily debated communication tools of our modern age. More than 400 interviews later, they’ve produced the ultimate takedown via careful, comprehensive interrogation of every major Facebook scandal. ‘An Ugly Truth’ provides the kind of satisfaction you might get if you hired a private investigator to track a cheating spouse: It confirms your worst suspicions and then gives you all the dates and details you need to cut through the company’s spin”…
LINK: <https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/media/facebook-reliable-sources/index.html>
One Video:
Ben S Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard, Lawrence H. Summers, Axel A. Weber, & Mervyn King (2013): What Should Economists & Policymakers Learn from the Financial Crisis? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxDW6CL-Qvw>
Very Briefly Noted:
Yosemite View Lodge: ‘El Portal, United States. Rates from USD235… <http://www.yosemiteviewlodgeelportal.com/>
C. J. Santoni: The Employment Act of 1946: Some History Notes: ‘“Thus, because of the planlessness of the twenties—because of the lack of courageous action immediately following the collapse—the nation lost 105,000,000 man-years ofproduction in the thirties.”—Full Employment Act of 1945, Hearings, p. 1104… <https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/86/11/Employment_Nov1986.pdf>
Wikipedia: Yojijukugo: ‘English translations of yojijukugo include “four-character compound”, “four-character idiom”, “four-character idiomatic phrase”, and “four-character idiomatic compound”. It is equivalent to the Chinese chengyu… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo>
Wikipedia: Fukoku Kyōhei: ‘(富国強兵, “Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces”), originally a phrase from the ancient Chinese historical work on the Warring States period, Zhan Guo Ce, was Japan’s national slogan during the Meiji period, replacing the slogan sonnō jōi (“Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians”). It is a yojijukugo phrase… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukoku_ky%C5%8Dhei>
Andrea Matranga: The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture: ‘Seven populations independently invented agriculture… [in] response to a large increase in climatic seasonality… store food and smooth their consumption… sedentary lifestyle greatly simplified the invention and adoption of agriculture… <http://www.andreamatranga.net/uploads/1/5/0/6/15065248/neolithic2019.pdf>
Equitable Growth: ’Today we’re kicking off EG grantee presentations at the NBER Summer Institute! First up right now: Emi Nakamura, Jonathon Hazell, Jón Steinsson & Juan Herreno with “The Slope of the Phillips Curve”. Watch: <https://t.co /TCXo6OrqL5>
Dylan Matthews: ’Happy Child Tax Credit day! I’ve been writing about the notion of an American child allowance for at least five years, and we are now implementing a version of it. <https://t.co/8DRdfVFenH>… <https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1415699510077104141>
Corey Robin: Eric Hobsbawm, The Communist Who Explained History: ‘Hobsbawm, perhaps the world’s most renowned historian, saw his political hopes crumble. He used that defeat to tell the story of our age… <https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/eric-hobsbawm-the-communist-who-explained-history>
Greg Daugherty: The Russian Flu of 1889: The Deadly Pandemic Few Americans Took Seriously: ‘Modern transportation helped make it the first global outbreak… <https://www.history.com/news/1889-russian-flu-pandemic-in-america>
Kirstin Downey: The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience <https://books.google.com/books?id=WTbeNKYzg1EC>
Michael Kades: ’By all accounts, the Executive Order reflects a policy decision that promoting competition requires a whole government approach. This idea was one of three principles in Equitable Growth’s transition report: <https://t. co/0grfzl9iYb https://t.co/NUEYCPEErS> <https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/restoring-competition-in-the-united-states/>… <https://twitter .com/Michael_Kades/status/1413309595355947014>
Òscar Jordà & Alan M. Taylor: The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy: ’Austerity is always a drag on growth, and especially so in depressed economies: a one percent of GDP fiscal consolidation translates into a loss of 4 percent of real GDP over five years when implemented in a slump, rather than just 1 percent in a boom. We illustrate our findings with a counterfactual evaluation of the impact of the UK government’s shift to austerity policies in 2010 on subsequent growth… <https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19414/w19414.pdf>
Paragraphs:
Ron Rosenbaum: Revisiting “The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich”: ‘William L. Shirer, who witnessed a 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, would link the criminality of individuals to communal frenzy…. Why? Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years? Why? William Shirer offered a 1,250-page answer. It wasn’t a final answer… but Shirer reminded the world of “what”: what happened to civilization and humanity in those years…. He was one of a number of courageous American reporters who filed copy under the threat of censorship and expulsion, a threat that sought to prevent them from detailing the worst excesses, including the murder of Hitler’s opponents, the beginnings of the Final Solution and the explicit preparations for upcoming war. After war broke out, he covered the savagery of the German invasion of Poland and followed the Wehrmacht as it fought its way into Paris before he was forced to leave in December 1940…. Writing The Rise and Fall was an extraordinary act of… literary-historical generalship—to conquer a veritable continent of information… that terrain of horror in a mere 1,250 pages…. Rereading the book, one sees how subtle Shirer is in shifting between telescope and microscope—even, one might say, stethoscope…. Perhaps one corollary that almost need not be spelled out: There is danger in giving up our sense of selfhood for the illusory unity of a frenzied mass movement, of devolving from human to herd for some homicidal abstraction…
LINK: <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/revisiting-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-20231221/>
Matthew Yglesias & Dara Lind: Time Machine: Volcker Shock: ‘Vox’s Dylan Matthews joins Matt and Dara for another step into Weeds Time Machine: a visit to the past to review some now-forgotten chapter in policy history. This week, it’s a return to the late 1970s and a reexamination of “Volcker shock”: an attempt by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to cope with rising inflation, and the myriad consequences of his efforts. Our hosts discuss the oil crisis, stagflation, the curious relationship between central banking and fiscal policy, and give some much-needed reanalysis to this crucial and topsy-turvy time in American history…
LINK: <https://open.spotify.com/show/1vSUO6Bg4abtjRF7fnGpT1?go=1&utm_source=embed_v3&t=0&nd=1>
Maurice Obstfeld & Kenneth Rogoff (2009): Global Imbalances and the Financial Crisis: Products of Common Causes: ‘The global imbalances of the 2000s and the recent global financial crisis are intimately connected. Both have their origins in economic policies… and in distortions that influenced the transmission of these policies through U.S. and ultimately through global financial markets…. The interaction among the Fed’s monetary stance, global real interest rates, credit market distortions, and financial innovation created the toxic mix of conditions making the U.S. the epicenter of the global financial crisis. Outside the U.S., exchange rate and other economic policies followed by emerging markets such as China contributed to the United States’ ability to borrow cheaply abroad and thereby finance its unsustainable housing bubble…
LINK: <https://eml.berkeley.edu/~obstfeld/santabarbara.pdf>
Danielle Chiriguayo: How the Trump Administration Chose Politics Over Saving Lives During Pandemic, According to White House Insider: ‘Andy Slavitt is President Biden’s former senior advisor on COVID, and the author of “Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response.” He talks to KCRW about the risks the Delta variant poses, and how political leadership factored into America’s dismal response to the pandemic. “[The Delta variant] really is 2020 COVID on steroids. It’s twice as easy to catch,” he says. “But for people who are vaccinated… the vaccines are very, very effective, particularly against getting sick. And so there’s nothing that’s really shaking my confidence in that.”… Slavitt says he’s relaxed around mask-use, except when he has to travel…. Slavitt says throughout the pandemic, the U.S. was unable to combat the virus because communities were divided, especially when people’s vulnerability level to COVID dictated their lives. He refers to it as “the room service pandemic.”… Slavitt says the country suffered because of former President Donald Trump’s dismissive attitudes toward the pandemic. He explains that Trump was motivated by his selfishness and desire to be seen as a winner…. When Trump announced he wanted to reopen the economy by Easter, Slavitt says he and Jared Kushner worked together to persuade the president to push back the date…. “But sadly, he only delayed until the end of April… the state authority handoff, which they believed would allow them to escape accountability when things inevitably went wrong.”… Slavitt explains that whenever someone dissented about the handling of the pandemic, the Trump administration fired them or silenced them. He shares a moment where former Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar wanted to add the phrase “but things might rapidly change” to an otherwise positive pandemic report that would be shared on “Fox & Friends.” Slavitt says that when the White House communications team learned of the phrase, he was pulled from the show and they forbade the DHHS from talking to the public for 45 days…
Marianne Ward & John Devereux: The Road Not Taken: Pre-Revolutionary Cuban Living Standards in Comparative Perspective: ‘Cuba was once a prosperous middle-income economy. On the eve of the revolution, incomes were 50 to 60 percent of European levels… among the highest in Latin America…. In relative terms, Cuba was richer earlier on. Income per capita during the 1920s was in striking distance of Western Europe and the Southern United States. After the revolution, Cuba slipped down the world income distribution. Current levels of income per capita appear below their pre-revolution levels…
LINK: <https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41353825.pdf>
Razib Khan: Here Be Humans: ‘Outside Africa, whether you are an indigenous Australian, Amazonian native or a German burgher, fully 90–99% of your ancestry derives from a single ancestral human population pulse 60,000 years ago. Somehow, an isolated African tribe of 1,000 to 10,000 people, who became genetically homogenous due to their initial small population size, swept across Eurasia. By 50,000 years ago, they reached Australia. They had replaced the last Neanderthals and Denisovans by 40,000 years ago, if not earlier. They even migrated to North and South America 15,000 years ago…
LINK: <https://razib.substack.com/p/here-be-humans>
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"Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?"
Glibly, Asimov had an explanation, humans in crowds become irrational mobs. Less glibly, people don't want to become outsiders. If a person can be persuaded that their neighbors think in way X, then they will conform to X, even if by passive acceptance. Religion certainly works that way. Identity politics works that way. Nazi Germany wasn't the first, nor will it be the last to become crazed. Was it that different from a religious Jihad? Was it that different front a brutal colonialist nation, where the population supported the government and the military enforced it?
I suspect that if you prick a Trumpist, the reasons they support him are not that different from why the German people supported Hitler and the Nazi party. As the quote makes clear, education, the solution advocated by liberals, is not the vaccine that works. "Indoctrination" of children in schools might work, but that is falling into the trap that conservatives complain about and will try to undermine.
Axelrod's game theory experiments suggest (to me) that any sufficiently motivated, but minority behavior can change the majority behavior unless actively excised early on. But this excision is contrary to free speech and a democratic society. So the ractchet works to move democracy and free speech society to authoritarian, censored society. In the long run, resistance may be futile. Depressing, really.
Facebook's success would become the model for any similarly motivated person/company to replicate if FB was changed. While I liked KSR's public solution in "The Ministry of the Future", I suspect it wouldn't work, even if there was a trivially easy way to port all the data from FB to the new platform. A malevolent entity, whether private or public could just replicate FB and continue, offering the same service and competing with any benign alternative that was forced to either grow more slowly or be publicly financed. Groups with agendas that benefit from viral outrage would either stick with FB, or join the FB clones, rather than the hobbled sane version.
FB's MO to do their worst and apologize later is the same MO of many businesses. How many times have oil companies had a serious spill, apologized, promised it wouldn't happen again, and had another accident? Banks are another example.
Unless you want to engineer greed out of the human genome, I don't think doing much beyond regulating the industry to constrain the bad behavior is going to work. Motivated people will always push the envelope of legality, and in some cases, go well beyond if they can get away with it.