BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2021-10-29 Fr
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...
First:
I must say that if I belonged to the Chinese Communist Party, I would not be at all confident about what the future is going to bring.
I would be deeply, deeply worried about the “middle income trap“. I would be very worried about the apparently very low real rates of return on China’s investments, and worried about how many people think they have valuable property to secure their old age—who will find out brutally that it is in fact not so. Not all of the losses when values are ultimately marked to what is sustainable can be hived-off into a “bad bank”, and then put to BlackRock and other foreign investors.
It is true that the government guarantees can greatly reduce the required rate of return needed to keep people happy holding assets. And it is also true that, as long as inflation does not become highly salient, stable governments that engage in only a little financial repression can keep enormous amounts of debt going in a merry-go-round.
But there are worries on top of disappointing returns on real assets, outsized promises made to savers and investors, plus the middle income trap—since it is vastly easier to shrink your low-productivity sectors then to create truly global north-scale high-productivity ones. There also are all the political uncertainties. China no longer has, anywhere in its system, a consensus mechanism for choosing its leaders. The memory of and the consequences of the Chinese Communist Party not having a way to retire Mao Zedong should loom large. He ought to have been moved into an honorable role as respected-but-rear-line sage-guardian. But from 1955-1975 he did not agree. And China writhed in torment as a result. That should make everyone in the Chinese Communist Party, and everyone in China, very very very worried indeed.
Truth be told, even modulus the large gap in average wealth and productivity levels, I would rather have America’s problems today than China’s:
Economist: The Confidence of China’s Communist Party Is Striking: ’Since the Ming dynasty, Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.” An earthier variant runs: “With no tiger in the mountains, the monkeys are in charge.” Today’s Communist Party bosses have no time for such cynicism. They want the masses to believe that, even in the remotest villages, their welfare is the concern of an all-knowing leader, Xi Jinping, served by officials striving to follow his stern but wise example…. Since Mr Xi became supreme leader in 2012, party membership has been presented as something close to a secular priesthood, in which a select few selflessly serve the masses. Government ministries in Beijing play their part in spreading the faith. Their high-flying staff—almost always party members—compete for the career-enhancing honour of a stint as grassroots officials in impoverished villages and towns…
LINK: <https://www.economist.com/china/2021/10/21/the-confidence-of-chinas-communist-party-is-striking>
One Audio:
Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: ‘Our world is marked by the Great Gender Divergence. In India, Iran and Egypt, most women remain secluded and surveilled, with few friends. Chinese women work but are locked out of politics. Latin America has undergone radical transformation, with now near gender parity in political representation and mass rallies against male violence. Scandinavia still comes closest to a feminist utopia, but for most of history Europe was far more patriarchal than matrilineal South East Asia and Southern Africa. What explains the Great Gender Divergence?… Two kinds of agricultural societies… Eurasia[n] patrilineal communities transmitted land and herds to sons… southern Africa[n] and southeast Asia[n] horticultural[ists] tracing descent and property down the female line. In the former, female chastity was tightly policed…. The Middle East and South Asia grew even more endogamous (through cousin marriage and caste). Meanwhile Europe emerged from Late Antiquity with… nuclear families and participatory assemblies. When families were trapped in agriculture, this variation in kinship did not make a huge difference…. The Great Gender Divergence really occurred in the 20th century…. Women… gained status, autonomy and much broader friendships. But this progress towards gender equality was contingent on strong growth, weak kinship and democratisation. If prevailing wages were too low to compensate for the loss of honour, female seclusion persists (as in much of India, Iran and Egypt). These effects are compounded by political trajectories. Only in democracies (so excluding Russia and China) can women openly challenge patriarchal privileges, foster feminist consciousness, and collectively mobilise against male violence…
LINK: <https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy> <https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rocking-our-priors/id1282553335?i=1000538048742>
Very Briefly Noted:
Jo Walton: SF Reading Protocols… <https://www.tor.com/2010/01/18/sf-reading-protocols/>
Tim Noah: Tragedy Kept Alan Krueger From Claiming a Nobel Prize, but He’s Not Forgotten: ‘Paying tribute to the late economist who, with David Card, changed America’s mind about the minimum wage… <https://newrepublic.com/article/163994/david-card-alan-krueger-nobel-prize>
Angelica Oung: ’Are we about to see the Cultural Revolution 2.0 in China?…. Wen Jiabao… criticized the Cultural Revolution… veiled commentary… China is going the wrong way… using whatever political capital he has… to push back against the new Red Guard… <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/thread-oung-cultural-revolution-2.0%3F.pdf>
Dan Alpert: ’“There’s No Great Resignation” My colorfully illustrated data THREAD on the U.S. labor situation, demonstrating why post-pandemic shortages - like goods supply-chain disruptions - will prove temporary…
Sam Ro: There are worse things than inflation: ’Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein explains…
Jeet Heer: Podcast: David Shor’s “Popularism”: ‘Doug Bell on the promise and peril of poll-based politicking…
Matthew Yglesias: The Inflation Situation Is Pretty Simple: ‘Supply-chain problems are overhyped—we did a lot of stimulus, and people are buying a lot of stuff…
Paragraphs:
Todd Gitlin & al.: An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy: ‘Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger. The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020, and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power…
LINK: <https://newrepublic.com/article/164153/open-letter-defense-democracy>
Alan B. Krueger: Reflections on Dwindling Worker Bargaining Power & Monetary Policy: ‘Declining competition and worker bargaining power can help explain the puzzle du jour of relatively weak wage growth despite historically low unemployment…. It is… appropriate to model the labor market as imperfectly competitive, subject to monopsonylike effects, collusive behavior by firms, search frictions and surpluses that are bargained over. As a result of these labor market features, firms should be viewed as wage-setters or wage-negotiators, rather than wage-takers…. It is important for central bankers to be aware of the impact of the growing use of monopsony power and noncompetitive labor market practices on wages, employment and output. What this means for monetary policy, however, is less clear. My tentative advice is that the optimal central bank response depends on: 1) the extent to which weaker wage growth is passed through to prices, or allocated to profits; 2) the elasticity of aggregate labor supply; and 3) the ability of a booming economy to counteract collusive behavior and other anti-competitive labor market forces. These considerations should be part of the conversation along with central banks’ other weighty concerns, such as the effect of monetary policy on financial stability, the effect of tariffs and trade wars on inflation and output, and the effects of demographic shifts on potential output…
LINK: <https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/6984/Lunch_JH2018.pdf>
Janeway Institute: Launch Event: ’The Weslie and William Janeway Institute for Economics will be officially launched on Tuesday October 19th 2021, 16:00–17:45pm (BST-UK) with a series of opening speeches and followed by a panel conversation on the subject of ‘Economics Evolving: Recent Trends and Future Directions’…. Speakers: Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge; Dr. William Janeway, Founder; Professor Tim Harper, Head of School of HSS; Professor Leonardo Felli, Chair, Faculty of Economics; Professor Vasco Carvalho, Director, Janeway Institute. Panel Conversation: ‘Economics Evolving: Recent Trends and Future Directions’ with: Professor Hélène Rey (LBS), Professor Antoinette Schoar (MIT Sloan School of Management), Professor Hyun Song Shin (BIS) and Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia). Chair: Professor Vasco Carvalho…
LINK: <https://www.janeway.econ.cam.ac.uk/event/janeway-institute-launch-event>
David R. MacIver: How to Make Easy Decisions: ‘I should warn you that following this advice may transform you into a strange and alien creature. I think this is one of my more disconcerting traits for others, because fully embracing it causes you to stop doing a lot of social signalling that people pretend is necessary. In particular it often is in tension with the advice I proposed in Telegraph your moves, because it will sometimes limit your ability to predict your actions far into the future…. An “easy decision” in the sense that I’m using here is a decision for which there is a strategy for making that is low-effort, reasonable, and not substantially worse than any higher effort strategy…. An easy decision is not one in which there is a low-effort strategy for getting the right answer. You may not be able to get the right answer. The strategy simply cannot do much worse than any higher effort strategy…. To a large degree all easy decisions look like one of these two patterns: Either it’s obvious which decision you should make, or it doesn’t matter which decision you should make and you should pick arbitrarily. Anything that doesn’t fit this pattern necessarily requires more work to make the decision. The trick is learning to recognise when you’re in one of these situations, and then get permission to make them that way…. The most common example of an easy decision that people make wrong is “Would you like to do the thing now or would you like to procrastinate and let the situation get much worse before you do the thing?”. This is an example of the “Would you like the better thing or the worse thing?” where people routinely choose the worse thing…
LINK:
Kevin Munger: It’s About Time: ‘The wag will say “bruh this argument is old af, have you even read Plato’s Phaedrus? Socrates said that writing sucks because it will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.” Socrates was right! And all of the critics who said that new technologies would change the nature of human beings and our relationship to society were right!… McLuhan: “In periods of notable technological change, men lose most of their dignity and autonomy. Electric speed-up of data transmission and retrieval renders the age-old habits and patterns of visually classified knowledge (including our educational, political and commercial establishments) quite hollow and inept… those who struggle to maintain the older patterns of perception and procedure in their lives are automatically deprived of their autonomy and dignity…” Social media thus cannot be fixed without fundamentally reorganizing society to account for the reality of the internet…. The fading socio-technical stack of the past five hundred years was far from perfect, but it made possible the human flourishing we have seen over the past centuries. If the printing press and the internet are media technologies of the same magnitude of impact, we will need to develop a new socio-technical stack made of cultural technologies that we cannot yet imagine…. In my opinion, the aspect of the Internet Revolution that we need to get a handle on first is how it has affected our ability to make sense of the world, both in terms of individual perceptions and group decision-making. Our society is an awkward teenager in the middle of a growth spurt: the relationship between our limbs has rapidly changed, and our sensory apparatus doesn’t quite know where everything else yet…
LINK:
One of the things I have always been thankful for is that I am not likely to ever be the supreme ruler of China. It is an amazingly unenviable job. The best you can do is live a reasonably long life and die of natural causes, and good luck with that.
The problem with Walton's piece is that one has to do the same kind of work making inferences and dealing with deferred information in most fiction. I remember reading Pride and Prejudice and barely understanding anyone's motivations or the highly restricted world of upper class Regency life. Even stories set in the current era can require a lot of thinking to figure out the world in which they are set.
The main difference I can see is that science fiction requires that work with regards to basic properties of the world that most fiction assumes the reader has knowledge from alternate sources. If the story is set in 9th century Wales, it is a very alien land, but since it is 9th century Wales the reader knows something of its history, it topography and its traditions. If they wish to know more, there are many sources. The reader and author share background information about the nature of gravity, the atmosphere, biology, technology and the like. Notice the STEM nature of that list.
People who don't get science fiction probably can't understand why someone would enjoy figuring out orbital characteristics or technological contrivances even while they themselves enjoy the work of figuring out an unreliable narrator's lacunae, the social relationships of the castes or the forces that led one character to kill another.
I used to enjoy science fiction a lot more, but more and more often I get bogged down by all the clever world building now in vogue. It's feels like a video game where they start with the world building and then let the story play out almost as an afterthought. In film making, they call this "working the set", and it is not something that makes for a great movie.
Enjoyed the Walton. Belatedly. Meanwhile the genre widens and tends to engulf everything else, which, if anything, sharpens the point And I notice that in the comments Jeff Vandermeer was having difficulty with the idea of "the literal *versus* the metaphorical," as well he might.