BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-11-17 We
Thing that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
Scott Sumner: The Princeton School of Macroeconomics: ‘In the early 2000s… five people… at Princeton… developed what we now view as the standard view of monetary policy in the 21st century, that is policy when interest rates are really low… Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke, Michael Woodford, Gauti Eggertsson, and Lars Svensson…. The key paper here is Paul Krugman’s 1998 paper where he looked at the liquidity trap in Japan…. I believe the paper is underestimated and misunderstood…. I view it as one of the most important macro papers of the last 40 years…. The problem in Krugman’s view was not just that money and bonds are equivalent at zero interest rates. The real problem is sort of bearish expectations of future monetary policy…. One interpretation is that monetary policy still works at zero interest rates. The central bank just needs to commit to future inflation…. The other interpretation… is that central bank promises to inflate are not likely to be credible… so you need Keynesian fiscal policy…
One Video:
The Full Nerd: Intel 12th-Gen Reviews Galore w/@TechTechPotato & A Secret AVX–512 Surprise! <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=7LehCQ9KL0A>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Cat Rambo: You Sexy Thing: ‘I first learned about hopepunk from… Alexandra Rowland. I ended up incorporating it in a class I was teaching, All the Punks, which covered cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, solarpunk, splatterpunk, and more… <https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/11/16/the-big-idea-cat-rambo-3/>
Alice Evans <https://www.draliceevans.com/>
Ronan Farrow & Jia Tolentino: How Britney Spears Got Free, and What Comes Next: ‘Spears fought for years to end the conservatorship she was under, and finally won. But the legal battles aren’t over… <https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-britney-spears-got-free-and-what-comes-next>
John Lippert: Bloomberg 2008–12–23: ‘John Cochrane was steaming as word of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to buy $700 billion in troubled mortgage assets rippled across the University of Chicago…. “We should have a recession,” Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room that looks out on Lake Michigan. “People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do”…
Mark Silk: Did John Adams Out Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings?
Paragraphs:
Andy Kessler: The Chip That Changed the World: ‘In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corp. asked Intel to design 12 custom chips for a new printing calculator. Engineers Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor and Ted Hoff were tired of designing different chips for various companies and suggested instead four chips, including one programmable chip they could use for many products. Using only 2,300 transistors, they created the 4004 microprocessor. Four bits of data could move around the chip at a time. The half-inch-long rectangular integrated circuit had a clock speed of 750 kilohertz and could do about 92,000 operations a second. Intel introduced the 3,500-transistor, eight-bit 8008 in 1972; the 29,000-transistor, 16-bit 8086, capable of 710,000 operations a second, was introduced in 1978. IBM used the next iteration, the Intel 8088, for its first personal computer. By comparison, Apple’s new M1 Max processor has 57 billion transistors doing 10.4 trillion floating-point operations a second. That is at least a billionfold increase in computer power in 50 years. We’ve come a long way, baby. When I met Mr. Hoff in the 1980s, he told me that he once took his broken television to a repairman, who noted a problem with the microprocessor. The repairman then asked why he was laughing…
Martin Ravallion: The Degrowth Fallacy : ‘In an example of the Degrowth Fallacy, in a radio interview… Jason Hickel (introduced as an economist and anthropologist at the London School of Economics) points to Costa Rica to support his claim that rich countries can maintain their social outcomes at lower mean income. Yes, Costa Rica has had good social and environmental policies over many decades, and other countries can learn from that experience. However, the country did this in combination with economic growth. Indeed, mean income has tripled in real terms since 1960, and the average growth rate has been above average for Latin America (World Bank). By combining social policies with policies that directly supported economic growth, Costa Rica was able to attain over time good social outcomes for a country at its level of mean income. Costa Rica is definitely not an example of how good social outcomes are possible without economic growth…
LINK: <https://economicsandpoverty.com/2017/12/21/the-degrowth-fallacy/>
Paul Krugman (May 21, 2020): Crying Fire! Fire! In Noah’s Flood: ‘I’m getting a lot of rage from people who want their deficit-and-inflation crisis, and won’t take no for an answer…. I was trying to come up with an explanation of the curious insistence that we’re facing an imminent interest rate and/or inflation crunch; then I realized that John Maynard Keynes had already done that, in explaining the hold classical economics retained on thought despite its obvious inability to account for the Great Depression: “The completeness of the Ricardian victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority…” And all of this has a real, damaging effect on policy. The econ team at Goldman Sachs (not online) makes the interesting point that FOMC inflation forecasts are pulled up by a small group that keeps forecasting much higher inflation than anyone else; this in turn helps limit the Fed’s willingness to support the economy. And the deficit hawks have, of course, killed any hope of more stimulus. Anyway, I’m sure that the usual suspects won’t change their tune. Even if we do have a Japan-style lost decade, they’ll keep predicting hyperinflation just around the corner…
LINK: <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/crying-fire-fire-in-noahs-flood-3/>
Noah Smith: The Metaverse & (Near-)Infinite Economic Growth: ‘Think of the classic movie American Graffiti… a 1950s world where young people have fun, hook up, and get social status by driving around in cars all day and all night… hugely resource intensive. Nowadays… chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games… Tinder… get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones…less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used…. But more fun…. The Metaverse is just that process taken one step further. The more fun or useful stuff you can do in VR—games, business meetings, vacations, hangouts—the less you’ll have to suck up physical resources to do it in meatspace. The more you can transform your subjective world by overlaying it with AR, the less you’ll have to suck up resources transforming your physical environment to suit your tastes. Thus, the Metaverse can help continue the decoupling of physical resource use from economic growth. The logical endpoint of all this, of course, is personality upload…
LINK:
Derek Davison: Justice Is for The Bad Guys: ‘I dredge this exchange back up because so far this month we’ve seen two fairly explicit cases that undermine Secretary Blinken’s assertion that the United States has the “demonstrated” “capacity” “to make sure that there is accountability in any situations where there are concerns about the use of force and human rights.” Let’s consider them briefly. The first of these cases involves the August 29 drone strike in Kabul, the Pentagon’s parting shot on its way out of Afghanistan. After first insisting that the strike was a “righteous” one that had prevented an imminent Islamic State suicide bombing at the overcrowded Kabul airport, the US military acknowledged weeks later—and only after a New York Times investigation turned up no evidence to support that initial claim—that its attack had in fact killed ten civilians and zero would-be bombers…. Case two… reaches back to the last days of the war against the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in 2019. With IS’s remnants having taken up position in the eastern Syrian town of Baghuz, on March 18, 2019, the US military undertook an airstrike on a large crowd of people huddled in a field just outside of town. That strike killed at least 70 people. we now know, thanks to another New York Times investigation, that they, or most of them, were civilians…. The Pentagon knew they were civilians, because one of its drones filmed the crowd and the strike. Nevertheless, military officials quickly moved to cover it up…. Charged with determining whether or not they themselves had committed a war crime in orchestrating this airstrike, the members of Task Force 9 unsurprisingly concluded that they had not. And the Pentagon was happy to let that be the last word and to leave the March 18 incident to languish in obscurity, despite several internal whistleblower reports to the contrary—until the Times investigation reached the publication stage. Now the Pentagon has acknowledged that the airstrike took place but is insisting that it was legitimate. It claims the death toll included only four confirmed civilians along with 16 IS fighters and 60 people whose circumstances could not be determined…. Because the US military is allowed to investigate itself, a privilege that only agents of national security or law enforcement are permitted to exercise, we’ll never know, and the victims of the Baghuz strike will likely never have justice. Their families will see even less than the pittance the Pentagon intends to give to the families of the Kabul victims. Your mileage may vary, but personally I see nothing in either of these instances to suggest that the United States can be trusted to investigate its own atrocities…
LINK:
Addison Del Mastro: The Record-Tape Missing Link: ‘A fascinating piece of industrial design evolution: This is another one of those occasional old-technology posts (a bunch of you came in through one of those, so hopefully you’ll appreciate this!) As is often the case, I’ve learned most of what’s in here from Techmoan, a British YouTuber who acquires and demonstrates an incredible range of old and largely forgotten electronic devices, largely failed audio and video formats…
LINK:
