BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-16 Sa
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-16 Sa
A read-around...
One Audio:
Spencer Jakab & Barry Ritholtz: Reddit, Gamestop & Meme Stocks <https://ritholtz.com/2022/07/transcript-spencer-jakab/>
One Image: Inflation Is a Better Problem to Have than a Permanent Output Gap: Massively Better
Very Briefly Noted:
Scott Lemieux: They’re Getting What They Want: ‘The states with the most restrictive abortion laws are also, as a rule, the states that do the least for families and children…. Reproductive autonomy… weakens hierarchies of gender. And the social safety net… undermines the preferred conservative social order of isolated, atomized households kept in line through market discipline… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/07/theyre-getting-what-they-want>
Jemima Kelly: Web3 Is Just a Fresh Serving of the Same Old Crypto Nonsense: ‘The future is bright; the future is “append-only” databases…. But… in truth, Web3… is just the newest way of serving up the same old crypto bullshit… << https://www.ft.com/content/bb53f8d8-a4bc–4ab0–8a81-e8befe7e31d1>>
Andy Haldane: In Conversation - RSA: ‘The Overton window is now open for us to rethink how we value, reward and make resilient… essential activities and jobs… broader than the future of work… also … the future of business, the future of government and the future of civil society… <https://www.thersa.org/comment/2021/11/andy-haldane-in-conversation>
Minxin Pei: Can the US Win the New Cold War?: ‘If the Republican Party continues its assault on US democracy… the US will, at the very least, lose its ideological appeal…. [And] it is hard to imagine that a country beset by such turmoil could possibly lead a coalition of democracies on the world stage… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-republican-assault-on-democracy-undermine-prospects-in-new-cold-war-by-minxin-pei-2022-07>
Twitter & ‘Stack:
Erik Hoel: All Writing Is Centralizing onto Substack: ‘Precisely for the reasons of UI and UX and ease and audience onboarding. A lot…. This is, I think, a very good thing. Substack is an alternative means of engagement with the web—it is centralized but, importantly, siloed… <
¶s
Perhaps this is because at the bottom we may be wired for sociability through network-based gift-exchange. The next question is: Where does property come from? But once you have property, the path to the "elementary intuitions about freedom" as a combination of doing what you want with your property and reciprocity and gift exchange seem almost inescapable:
George Scialabba (2018): Slouching Toward Utopia: ‘Unless we have reached the end point of humankind’s moral development… the average educated human of the 23rd century will look back… and ask incredulously about a considerable number of our most cherished moral and political axioms, “How could they have believed that?”… Two four-letter words lie at the heart of contemporary America’s public morality: “free” and “fair.”… All production is social production… the joint product of all preceding ages, and all those born into the present are legitimately joint heirs of those assets…. The most galling part of each day is encountering the ubiquitous self-designation of apologists for capitalism as champions of freedom…. Still… the elementary intuitions about freedom to which defenders of laissez-faire capitalism appeal are widespread and at least superficially plausible…
LINK: <http://georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2018/03/slouching-toward-utopia.html>
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Forthcoming on October 14, 2022 from Oxford. I would give a limb to write some thing as great as Jonathan’s Karl Marx: A 19th-Century Life. I am not so sure that there can be a thematic unity for the period 1950 to 2000, but, if there can be, Jonathan's decision to make it "interconnection" appears to me to be the most fruitful theme to explore:
Jonathan Sperber: The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: ‘Imagining the Era…. 1. The rate of global economic and population growth over the years 1950– 73… greater than at any previous time…. 2. In 1950, the United States was the only country in the world with at least 250 privately owned automobiles per thousand people…. By 2000, there were twenty-four countries…. 3. In the five years after the end of the Second World War, one person in thirteen in the world was a refugee. 4. About one-tenth as many people were killed in wars of the second half of the twentieth century as during the two World Wars…. 5. The decolonization of Asia and Africa… saw the end of the largest colonial empires in human history. 6.… Human presence in space has been limited to low earth orbit…. 7. As late as 1960, atmospheric CO2 levels were little above their preindustrial values…. 8. By 2000, there were more women university students than men…. 9. In 1960… commercial passenger aircraft were propeller planes; by 1970… jets. 10…. antibiotics… DDT, and… mass vaccination… reduced infectious disease so drastically in the quarter century after 1945…. 11. In 1995, there were only sixteen million users of the Internet… Five years later… 361 million…. How [can] all these… be understood as part of a broader historical process, and not merely as a succession of disconnected headlines[?]…
LINK: <https://www.amazon.com/Age-Interconnection-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0190918950/>
Our perceptions are only the things that can (or might) drive action—I think that is essential to understanding how the brain works. Not that I think I have the slightest clue:
György Buzsáki: How the Brain ‘Constructs’ the Outside World: ‘We learn that sticks that look bent in water are not broken by moving them…. Neuronal circuits that initiate an action dedicate themselves to two tasks. The first is to send a command to the muscles that control… bodily sensors…. Neurons that initiate eye movement also notify visual sensory areas of the cortex about what is happening…. This corollary message provides the second opinion sensory circuits need for grounding—a confirmation that “my own action is the agent of change.” Similar corollary messages are sent to the rest of the brain when a person takes actions to investigate the flower and its relationship to oneself and other objects…. As an experimenter, I did not set out to build a theory in opposition to the outside-in framework. Only decades after I started my work studying the self-organization of brain circuits and the rhythmic firing of neuronal populations in the hippocampus did I realize that the brain is more occupied with itself than with what is happening around it…
LINK: <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-constructs-the-outside-world/>
I think that Cosme is right here in picking up on this theme from Ernest Gellner. In the Before Fimes, the ruling ideas had to be the ideas that reinforced the force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction machine that the upper class used to grab from others, in order to provide enough for its own members and their families. Thus the test of an idea was rarely “is it true?” in the sense of being useful in manipulating nature or cooperatively organizing people, but rather “is it useful?" for we in the upper class. The coming of the Royal Society, and its insistence that we take nothing on the word of an authority but, rather, experimentally test everything is a huge shift once it becomes general.
But there is always, always backsliding, wherever there is a valued hierarchy:
Cosma Shalizi: Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2007: ‘Ernest Gellner had a really profound analysis of the political aspects of scientific rationality (see e.g. Plough, Sword and Book, or most centrally Legitimation of Belief; or the exegesis by Michael Lessnoff), where he pointed out that one of the effects of rationalism and empiricism was to “locate the well of truth outside the walls of the city”, i.e., to create a source of epistemic authority which was not under social control…. Suppose he was right about this (as I think he was)…. In a firm which adopts evidence-based decision-making, the decisions of superiors become challengeable by inferiors, on grounds which the hierarchy has committed itself to respecting. Whether this advances the interests of the organization or not, it can’t be comfortable for those in charge…. Scenarios include: evidence-based decision-making become a ritual shell for business as usual; increasing secrecy and restriction of information, so that higher management preserves its authority on the grounds that it does, in fact, know best; such centralization, followed by the discovery that empiricism in one conference room does not, in fact, lead to better decisions leading to the rejection of evidence-based management as a failure; or, perhaps, some sort of partial democratization within management…
The question is: what was tsarist Russia? It had many pieces. There was the frontier-settler rich agricultural society of the Ukraine and Odesa. There was the early-industrialization society of the Baltics and St. Petersburg, plus Moscow. There was the start of the resource-extraction industrial society. And there was the orthodox-peasant society. The way of such things is that the modern-urban social formations colonize and then assimilate the pieces of pre-modern Agraria that they rule as modernity advances, one way or the other—Peasants into Frenchmen <https://archive.org/details/peasantsintofren0000webe>. And it is that process that creates both a nation and a national-industrial economy. Perhaps a regional focus would be better, applied to the Empire of the Tsars? Poland, Baltics-St. Petersburg, west Ukraine, east Ukraine, Muscovy, Caucasus, Urals, central Asia, far Siberia? I confess I have a hard time wrapping my head around what happened, let alone what might have happened had things been otherwise:
Davis Kedrosky: Twilight Imperium?: ‘Tsarist Russia was in the early stages of a not-too-atypical European development pattern, hamstrung by poor (but not fatal) political economy and rapid population growth…. I’m also not arguing that counterfactual Tsarist growth would have been faster than under Lenin and Stalin…. I find Allen’s story of rapid labor mobilization, increased human capital, and an accelerated demographic transition relatively convincing….. Without the war, it’s possible that Russian growth and (potentially) institutional change would have delivered the goods and forestalled the violent destruction of the old order…
LINK:
One thing Substack has going for it is paywalls. These provide a mechanism for monetization less obnoxious than advertising. They also allow writers to have a public face and private face with free and paywalled content. This provides a mechanism for hiding controversial postings that might lead to problems for Substack. That and its lack of algorithms might give it some traction.
Where does property come from? I always gathered it was a government service. At some point, it comes down to "you and what army?" If you have the stronger army on your side, you get to decide what is property and who owns it.
Regarding Sperber's hodgepodge of headlines, back in the early 1970s, I worked for a company that sold a natural language database product that kept track of the dimensions, such as length or price, of every value. Buckminster Fuller was pretty impressed by it, but argued that it made no sense to combine physical (e.g. length) and metaphysical (e.g. price) values. Reading Sperber's list, I can't help thinking he is conflating too many categories and so obscuring any pattern. I read too many triumphalist 19th century articles with similar hodgepodges of facts about check clearing operations, population growth, telegraph stations, railroad passengers, steamship miles and so on. Perhaps I'll take a look and see if the book manages to make some sense of this rather than just trying to make an impression.
Buzsáki sounds like he has some fascinating insights. We are, for all our ignorance, starting to learn something about how the brain works. I've been reading Visual Differential Geometry and Forms, and one thing that is striking is how long it took for mathematicians to move from an extrinsic to an intrinsic point of view and, strangely, how much less intuitive the intrinsic view seems. It wasn't until rather late in the 19th century that intrinsic geometry started coming into its own and just in time for Einstein to use it as the basis of his General Relativity. I think Buzsáki is doing something similar with our understanding of the brain, so I'll stay tuned.
I think it is easy to both overestimate and underestimate Russia. One thing about Russia is that Russia rarely surprises. It may change the formalities of its government and the names of its cities, but it doesn't seem all that much different nowadays than it did under Peter the Great. Ages ago, I took a course from Evsey Domar on Soviet Economics, and, to be honest, the dynamics were basically the same under the tsars and, beyond the scope of the course for obvious reasons, modern Russia today.
Regarding "They're Getting What They Want", I've been struck by how many conservatives outright admit "I don't like abortion because I want to give churches, husbands, families, etc more leverage to force women to do what they want."