9 Comments

I just became a paid subscriber, and maybe someone has asked this question recently, but when will Economic History of the 20th C (Slouching towards Utopia) be released (Basic Books, I believe)?

I am keen to buy a copy !

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September 6, 2022, is the publication date...

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Ask me if I'm surprised that Facebook's LIKE button "leads to misinformation 2 jumps down". That said, I'm very glad that this has been documented, along with all the other bad things they are doing.

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What has happened at Yale Law School that prompted the video from West Side Story?

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https://reason.com/2021/10/13/dont-use-the-term-trap-house-in-your-party-invite-at-yale-law-school/

Briefly, a YLS student sent out a blast email inviting everyone to a "trap house" party—which is definitely not a classy move, as you are calling your invitees either addicts or dealers. You **might** do this as an in-group joke with people you know well. But if it were addressed to me, my immediate wish would be that you did not think you knew me well enough to issue such an invitation.

Then other YLS said that they had been offended enough to demand a group, public apology...

Then the first YLS student said that he was being oppressed by others purporting to be offended...

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I don't think Intel was ever out of the game. They are just more and more focused on a niche market in the processor world. This new chip is great for desktop PCs, but it uses too much power for portable devices, and Intel makes much more powerful processors for servers. Having followed the Intel-AMD game over at Ars Technica, I know that Intel and AMD each have had their time boasting the fastest desktop PC. I consider it like a horse race. People still race horses, but it has been over a century since horse racing had much to do with transportation.

China definitely has a problem, but it's a problem no one has solved. At any given time, there is only so much high productivity work to go around, and by its very nature, high productivity work can only employ a small fraction of a nation's work force. If you increase productivity, you decrease the number of workers. China grabbed a big chunk of the world's supply of high productivity work, but there is only so much of it in the world. My main gripe with the article is that it fetishizes dynamicism but only a particular flavor of it. It is possible to have a great deal of dynamicism with low and middle productivity work, but no private entity will place its bets there as the returns are too low. It's similar to the bias against solar and wind power and in favor of large power plants.

Thanks for reminding me of Logarithmic History. How did they slip off my reading list?

The problem with economic charts is that people take them seriously when they often show only local attractors. It's like Hooke's Law: displacement is proportional force, except when it's not. Economists, unlike physicists, tend to leave out the "except when it's not" part.

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It is an odd game. I take it that the real question is not "who can build the fastest microprocessor" but, rather, "who can build the most capable microprocessor that they can sell for less than $500 and make a profit, and that users can run without blowing their electricity budget". How that interacts with various benchmark measurements is very unclear to me... My guess is that TSMC charges Apple $150 for an M1Max. What I do not know is how much the M1Max "costs" in terms of notional money that should be allocated to Apple Chip Design Services, and how capable these things are for different workloads, and how much of a hindrance in the desktop space is the fact that Intel's chip needs 8x the power...

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Indeed they do. Local attractors are useful to know about, however, within limits...

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Absolutely right.

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