BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-21 Th
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-21 Th
A read-around...
I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please the button below. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription:
One Audio:
Martin Wolf: How to Change One’s Mind <https://www.ft.com/content/44f526b2-8181-44b8-86d7-c50527b172ae>
One Image:
Very Briefly Noted:
Izabella Kaminska: The Blind Spot <https://the-blindspot.com/about-us/>
Austin Carr: Google’s ChromeOS Flex Aims to Bring New Life to Old Computers: ‘Google is trying to resurrect old Macs and PCs with new software…. Flex is a cloud-centric platform mostly designed for web apps like Gmail and Google Docs… help millions of dying PCs adapt to the modern world… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-19/google-s-chromeos-flex-aims-to-bring-new-life-to-old-computers?cmpid=BBD071922_TECH>
Christopher Condon: Supply Chain Latest: Yellen Pitches Friend-Shoring to Counter China: ‘As she hammers away at a plan to limit Russia’s oil revenue, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also found time during a three-stop East Asian tour to promote the Biden administration’s approach to reshaping global supply chains… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-19/supply-chain-latest-yellen-pitches-friend-shoring-to-counter-china?cmpid=BBD071922_TRADE>
Duncan Black: The Sensible Hustle: ‘“We all agree on these goals, BUT…” On policy it’s always, “don’t do it like this, do it like that.” On climate change specifically I can never remember if the Sensible solution is a cap-n-trade, a carbon tax, or regulation, because we seem to cycle through those about every 3 months or so. Propose carrots, they demand sticks as the carrots are too expensive, propose sticks, they say the sticks are politically unpopular or will DESTROY BIDNESS. We don’t have to listen to these people or engage with them as if they are acting in good faith. They are not… <https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/07/the-sensible-hustle.html>
David Wallace-Wells: Endemic Covid–19 Is Beginning to Look Pretty Brutal: ‘100,000 annual deaths may be as good as it gets… LINK: <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?CCPAOptOut=true&emc=edit_dww_20220720&instance_id=67123&nl=david-wallace-wells&productCode=DWW®i_id=64675225&segment_id=99028&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F44bc247e-a8bb-5c5b-bcff-19b82a2ece81&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880>
Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Anastassia Fedyk, & Ilona Sologoub: How to Organize Reconstruction Aid for Post-War Ukraine<https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/planning-reconstruction-of-ukraine-by-yuriy-gorodnichenko-et-al-2022-07>
Heebie Jeebie: Slouching Towards Utopia: Reprise <http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2022_07_17.html#018059>
Michael R. Strain: Cap Russia’s Oil Price Now: ‘US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has proposed… allow[ing] Russia to continue exporting oil, but impose a cap on the price Russia can charge. This would help keep a lid on oil prices while ensuring that the US and its allies are not funding Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-oil-price-cap-yellen-plan-by-michael-r-strain-2022-07>
Robert J. Shapiro: The Case for Bill Clinton’s Economic Record: ‘Clinton delivered the strongest economy of the past half century and helped working families… <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/07/21/the-case-for-bill-clintons-economic-record/>
Twitter & Stack:
Misha David Chellam: Movement vs. Abundance Progressives
Eric Topol: The Pandemic & the Boiling Frog Story
¶s:
When the economics profession is unified, it can have an impact: ideas that essentially all professional PhD economists say are nonsense have a very hard time getting political and policy traction. But one of the lessons of the days since the start of the global financial crisis that caused the Great Recession back in 2007 is this: It requires only a relatively small number of incompetent or simply grifting professional Ph.D. economists to provide running room for all kinds of stupidity:
Noah Smith: Nutty Macroeconomic Theories Will Ruin Your Country’s Economy: Turkey & Neo-Fisherism: ‘Neo-Fisherism… its most notable proponent is John Cochrane, formerly of the University of Chicago, now of the (aptly named) Hoover Institution… originally invented by Narayana Kocherlakota (who later discarded the idea) and Steve Williamson. The basic idea… is that in the long run, high interest rates raise inflation and low interest rates reduce inflation… exactly counter to conventional wisdom…. We think that if you raise interest rates, inflation goes down, as it did in the 1980s…. But no, say the Neo-Fisherians, you have to wait for the long term. In the long term, they say, keeping interest rates high will cause inflation at first to dip but then to recover to an even higher level than it was before!… In 2014, I got a call from a reporter in Turkey…. She told me she was interested because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration had been advancing this idea, and were looking for support from economists….
When inflation rose, Erdogan insisted on keeping rates low. As a result, inflation rose more, but Erdogan stayed the course. Now it looks as if the country is exploding upwards into hyper-inflation… exactly the kind of explosion that Neo-Fisherian theory assumes away…. The idea… is wrecking Turkey’s economy now…
LINK:
“The old world is dying, and the new struggles to be born; now is a time of monsters"—Antonio Gramsci
Let me put it straight: Neoliberalism ought to have died no later than 2008, in the Global North at least. Failure to reinvigorate economic growth, hobbling governments’ ability to deal with rapidly-approaching wicked problems like global warming, and its extraordinary inequality-raising effect on the distribution of income should, when added to its role in causing and then accentuating the Great Recession, have placed it in the garbage can of history. Yet it hangs on and it's possible successors appear considerably worse. Now why is this?:
Brian Ketterling: Neoliberalism Is Dying. What Comes Next?: ‘[Gerstle’s] The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order first tackles… the New Deal order, 1930–1970… New Deal liberalism’s undoing: the Vietnam War, race, and an economic crisis… vexing to elites and the public alike…. Ronald Reagan… built the neoliberal order; George H. W. Bush extended it; and… Bill Clinton consolidated it…. Sectors of the public called for things… lower property taxes, deregulation, and the privatization of public goods… in a racialized response to the civil rights movement…. Politicians like Reagan mined this discontent to great political effect…. Gobal models… the state-authoritarian capitalist model… neoliberalism retooled… ethno-nationalism…. None of these geopolitical arrangements will serve America or the world well…. The interregnum before the emergence of the next political order will be messy…
LINK: <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/neoliberalism-is-dying-what-comes-next/>
I confess I do not understand lawyers: Why do Elon Musk’s lawyers think it is good for their client for them to potentially annoy the Chancellor by working much too hard to make an untenable positio, appear tenable, on the surface, for a little while?:
Matt Levine: Elon Wants to Fight the Bots : ‘Oh Elon. In some parallel universe, Elon Musk’s dispute with Twitter Inc. is about how many bots there are on Twitter. In that universe, Twitter’s merger agreement with Musk contains a representation that no more than 5% of Twitter’s monetizable daily active users, or mDAUs, are bots, Musk’s obligation to close the merger is contingent on this representation being true, and Musk has discovered that it is wrong. Therefore he is able to walk away…. In our actual universe none of this is true….
Now, even in the real world, the merger agreement does contain a representation that none of Twitter’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission “contained any untrue statement of a material fact.”… Twitter’s SEC filings do mention bots…. Let’s pick out the factual assertions….
There are “false or spam accounts” on Twitter.
Twitter reviews some sample accounts each month.
It estimates, based on that review, that the bots (false or spam accounts) are fewer than 5% of mDAUs.
That estimate is based on the “average of false or spam accounts in the samples.” That estimate, and the labeling of spam accounts, is subjective; Twitter “applied significant judgment” to reach it.
“The actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.”
You could imagine how some of those statements could be false. If Twitter did not review any sample accounts—if it just made up the 5% number and put it in the filings—then its SEC filings would be false…
Musk’s lawyers…opposing Twitter’s motion to have a quick trial…. This document… exists in that alternate universe where Twitter promised that no more than 5% of its mDAUs are spam bots and Musk agreed to buy Twitter in reliance on that promise.…
LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-18/elon-wants-to-fight-the-bots#xj4y7vzkg>
Not just the low effective population size of the human race, but a not-stable female-to-male ratio of effective population size that does not seem to me to accord with a species that is substantially monogamous:
Doug Jones: Toba?, or the Sperm Whale Effect?: ‘74 thousand years ago, a big chunk of the island of Sumatra blew up… the biggest volcanic explosion in the past two million years… coincides with a shift back to glacial conditions, and it may be that there’s a connection…. Did Toba have an effect on human evolution? Somewhere between 100 and 50 thousand years ago, human populations went through a bottleneck: modern humans are descended from just 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs from that period. It’s been argued that Toba wiped out the majority of Homo sapiens around at the time, leaving only a small group of survivors. But the evidence that Toba is responsible for the bottleneck is equivocal…. We may not be looking at an external catastrophe wiping out most of humanity, and a few groups of survivors recovering. Instead, we may be looking at a small population of our eventual ancestors expanding and outcompeting other populations, so that it was our ancestors, not a volcano, who made sure that most human beings alive 74,000 years ago didn’t leave descendants…. Human beings typically belong to tribes and ethnic groups defined by distinctive cultures, and cultural boundaries (including language boundaries) often act as barriers to interbreeding. Several authors have suggested that this may make human beings unusually susceptible to population replacement via “cultural group selection” and that this might account for humans having unusually low effective population size, as genes “hitchhike” along with expanding cultures. Interestingly, sperm whales, which live in populations defined by different song dialects (and other cultural differences) may show the same genetic pattern…
LINK: <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2021/08/05/toba-or-the-sperm-whale-effect-6/>
I really would like Cozmo to finish this essay on how modern intellectuals are in a very different sociological relative position, then their predecessors before the age of mass literacy and mass communication:
Cosma Shalizi: Intellectuals: ‘Intellectuals… interpret, and justify or condemn. They have nothing else to talk about. They must either support themselves in some way independent of their activity as intellectuals, or receive support for their opinions… inherited family wealth, clerking, the learned professions, and teaching. Much of our intellectual heritage has been built by the idle sons of gentlemen, time-serving dynastic bureaucrats, and schoolmasters…. How, though, might intellectuals persuade other people to support them for the sake of their opinions?… “We have in our possession certain books which contain information of the greatest importance…. To order one’s life in accordance with them is certain to bring all good things; flouting them leads to the worst possible misery.” If you believe that, it becomes imperative to have accurate copies of the books around, and somebody who can interpret them and apply them their lessons…. What qualities make for succcess in an Interpreter of Written Authorities?… Literacy… knowledge of the accepted canon… [and] of the tradition of commentary… skill in interpreting writing, particularly knowledge of the exact meanings of words, and sensitivity to their associations, connontations, and subtle shades of import… eloquence… aptitude in applying interpretations to events and situations… and arguing for the correctness of the application… belief: to persuade others, it helps to first persuade yourself…. Such Interpreters naturally tended to organize into more or less formal clerical establishments… at least from the classical eras, about –600 to –200, onwards…. (Incidentally, why a canon?… The inherent implausibility of many books containing the Answers… the limitations of manual book reproduction… network externality.)… This venerable pattern has fallen, comparatively speaking, on hard times…
I find myself a bit skeptical about the 'abundance progressives'.
Apart from the general vagueness of the presentation, there are bits like this:
"Movement Progressives and Abundance Progressives want similar things, but take divergent approaches.
We think there is value in both approaches — Abundance Progressivism is too wonky, whereas MP has captured mindshare and heart strings. Abundance Progressives would also do well to adopt at least a dose of skepticism towards governmental processes that favor the rich and powerful over the poor and marginalized."
The two groups "want the same things", except that the APs don't (currently?) care about "governmental processes that favor the rich and powerful over the poor and marginalized"... if I read this correctly.
There is also the fact that his examples seem a bit off. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is a Democratic Socialist, and therefore placing "under-rerpresented groups [...] front and center" only because she is a member thereof. And calling Jared Polis, formerly a member of the House Liberty Caucus, a "progressive" seems to be stretching the term beyond usefulness.
Sensible Hustle: Nothing but a tax on net CO2 and methane emissions is sensible. How to split the revenue between reducing other taxes with higher deadweight losses (taxes on business income), investments in mitigation of effects of earlier delays in enacting the net tax on CO2 and methane emissions, deficit reduction, and offsetting income effects for low income households, is debatable.