BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-03 We
Quinn Slobodian; North American watersheds; fueling technology booms; Davies on history; Sethi on trigonometry, Pythagoras, & the highly racist Charles Murray; Lawrence Freedman on the tech counter...
ONE AUDIO: Writtenology—Crack Up Capitalism ft. Quinn Slobodian:
The “Trashfuture” Podcast: <https://overcast.fm/+LX9lmJY7E>
a podcast about business success and making yourself smarter with the continued psychic trauma of capitalism by @raaleh, @HKesvani, @milo_edwards, @inthesedeserts and @aliceavizandum
ONE IMAGE: Watershed Boundaries in North America:
MUST-READ: How to Get a Productive Technology Boom:
Smart reflections from a guy who has seen a lot:
William H. Janeway: Says More: ‘Michael Kremer, a Nobel laureate economist and Director of the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab, recently devised a useful guide to such “market-shaping” initiatives. As a first step, the customer specifies their desired function and/or performance. This becomes the basis for an open competition, which brings, as a prize, a pilot procurement contract. That contract can be the basis for the sort of “advance market commitment” that has been successfully pioneered in the field of public health…. This approach… can be viewed as the formalization of the procurement process through which the US Department of Defense (DoD) facilitated and accelerated all the technological advances that, together, created the Digital Revolution—from the first electronic computers to software and semiconductors…. [Do] not… place “greentech bubble” in opposition to “greentech revolution.”… The former may well be a stepping stone to the latter. Like state procurement, speculative investment is decoupled from concern for visible economic value and therefore can finance the trial-and-error experimentation necessary for frontier innovation. On the path to the Digital Revolution, we experienced two rounds of speculative mania… the “-onics” mania of the early 1960s… the 1990s… great tech bubble, which served to fund both the physical infrastructure for the internet-based economy and the first major wave of experiments in the economic applications of that infrastructure, beginning with e-commerce…
Very Briefly Noted:
Economist: First Republic fails, and is snapped up by JPMorgan Chase: ‘Regulators arrange a deal for the California-based lender…
Richard Henderson: Banking Crisis: ‘PacWest Bancorp and Western Alliance Bancorp led a deep selloff in the sector on Tuesday…. Trading in both firms triggered multiple volatility halts as PacWest fell 28% to close at a record low while Western Alliance tumbled 15%. The pair has shed more than $5 billion in market value so far this year…
Dalia Marin: Can Germany’s Economy Avoid a China Shock?: ‘The German and American automobile executives attending this year’s Shanghai motor show may have expected to take a victory lap following their three-year pandemic-related absence. Instead, Western manufacturers were met with a harsh reality: dozens of new Chinese-made electric vehicles are coming for their market share…
Fernando Chague & al. (2019): Day Trading for a Living?: ‘It is virtually impossible for individuals to day trade for a living…. 97% of all individuals who persisted for more than 300 days lost money…
Jessica Karl: Can Biden’s Army of Influencers Prove the Economy Is Booming?: ‘The president has created more jobs than any of his predecessors, but nobody seems to notice…
Charlie Stross: ‘Bear in mind that the Singularity and transhumanism (and space colonization) are all branches of a 19th century Russian orthodox quasi-heresy, by way of early 20th century Soviet Cosmism. They all assert rationality but then apply a teleology of progress towards godhead. It's structurally warmed-over Christianity, minus the Jesus stuff…
Dave Karpf: Web3's fake version of Web history: ‘Chris Dixon must know better than this, right?… A closer look at the history of the World Wide Web is a warning flare against Dixon’s investment portfolio. It makes plain that the Internet has always had a monopoly problem, and that the primary tool for limiting monopoly power is an active regulatory state. It offers constant reminders that financial incentives tend to distort and destroy community behavior…
Dracula Daily: May 3: ‘Meet Jonathan Harker, on a fun road trip for work, as he collects some new recipes: Jonathan Harker's Journal…
Matt Yglesias: DeSantis is struggling without the COVID issue: ‘Right now he's “Paul Ryan but says ‘woke’ a lot” instead of “Trump but competent”…
Nate Silver: Some Personal News: ‘Much of FiveThirtyEight’s… intellectual property… is merely licensed…. I still own these models, and can license or sell them elsewhere…. The contract I signed… and the renewal with Disney/ABC in 2018 were always designed to keep my options open…. So… I'm now exploring those options!…
¶s:
Dan Davies: The valve amplifier of history: ‘“Recognising that an analogy is no good” is a relatively quick cognitive operation…. Creating a mental model from scratch is a very expensive cognitive operation, though. So, if you have a supply of previously existing mental models, it might be a very good strategy to just start going through them one by one, effectively running your thumb through the book going “nope, nope, nope, maybe … nope, nope, nope … nah, doesn’t work … maybe … nope, nope … hang on this might work”…. But where might you get a large supply of ready made mental models to go through in this way? Yes… [History:] Just filling your head up with stories about how things could happen means that you’ve got a catalogue to rifle through, while the constraint that they’re stories about things that actually did happen once should exercise some kind of rudimentary quality control on the library of candidate solutions…
Rajiv Sethi: ‘Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson gave a talk… a new trigonometric proof of the Pythagorean Theorem…. The two students were teenagers still in high school…. An ingenious geometric construction that the students call a waffle, and they are able to use this, together with the law of sines and a convergent infinite sequence, to prove the theorem…. The proof is original, elegant, and undoubtedly correct. But not everyone was in a mood to celebrate. Here is Charles Murray, conjecturing that the proof will eventually be found invalid, that a publication that proudly announced it would bury this uncomfortable truth, and that Hollywood would spin yet another false narrative: Charles Murray: “What's the over/under on when it will be discovered the proof is invalid? What's the over/under on when Popular Mechanics will prominently publish that the proof is invalid? What's the over/under on the release date of the movie, Hidden Trigonometricians?”…
Lawrence Freedman: Why Apple Won the Personal Computer Race: ‘Capitalism and the Counter-Culture…. Wozniak later spoke about the revolutionary talk surrounding groups such as the Homebrew Club. “How people lived and communicated was going to be changed by us, changed forever, changed more than anyone could predict exactly”. To do this they sought to bring “computer technology within the range of the average person, to make it so people could afford to have a computer and do things with it’”. They imagined a world in which everybody owned a computer “no matter who you were or how much money you made”. This would be a ‘benefit to humanity – a tool that would lead to social justice’ and not just serve the interests of big companies. Those companies, such as IBM and Digital Equipment saw personal computers as toys and minor business. They “didn’t hear our social message. And they didn’t have a clue to how powerful a force this small computer vision could be”…
Paul Krugman: What’s Driving Dollar Doomsaying?: ‘Lately more sober voices, who should know better, are sounding the alarm… Fareed Zakaria… eve… Michael Pettis…. [Should] you believe that the dollar’s dominance is in imminent danger[?]… You shouldn’t…. [And] the importance of controlling the world’s reserve currency is greatly overrated…. The dollar is widely used because it’s widely used… a web of self-reinforcement, keeping the dollar pre-eminent…. Tugging on one or two strands of this web isn’t likely to cause it to unravel. Even if some governments… can make partial de-dollarization stick, all the other advantages of the dollar as a banking and borrowing currency will remain. So ignore all the dollar doomers out there…
How to Get a Productive Technology Boom: Yes that's how. Moreover, Michael Kremmer's "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990" in the 1993 QJE changed my research life (as it probably did for many others). Importantly, it steered the new growth theory toward new economic history in a way that was not the case before. I am indebted to him for that paper. Perhaps we should all be, too. His other important contributions, of course, have made the airwaves since. So, I thought I'd flag that lesser-known paper.
What’s great about that watershed map is how simple it is, and yet how much it conveys about the role of geography in North American history and the development of the North American economy. Take the Great Basin: without any other topographical detail, you can see that the region is landlocked and shedding water in all directions, so, yes, it’s probably kind of dry. Pretty neat, really.