Giving guilty Trump voters permission to keep voting for Trump; managing the engagement of humans vs. technology; ancient multi-tools; Campos on making poor people poorer as Republican job #1, Wolf...
Clive Crook's claim that ‘Modern liberals… are instinctively opposed to democracy…" is a bit bizarre.
- When Left liberals are unhappy with election results, their first instinct is to work hard to convince more people to vote and to expand the voter rolls.
- When Conservatives dislike election results, they tend to respond by working hard to limit voter participation.
It should be quite clear that it is the Right who are anti-democratic, not the Left.
WIldfire's piece reminded me of Ehrlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb, except her time horizon is a decade, not half a century. A lot of people have been dishing Ehrlich lately, but he was largely on the mark even though a lot has been done to mitigate and delay disaster.
The last time we had fiscal conservatism and social liberalism was under LBJ, and he was noted for his guns AND butter budgets. He even pushed through an income tax surcharge to pay for the extra guns needed for Vietnam. Nowadays, talking about raising tax rates is political suicide. If you want to make things better, you have to press social improvements and keep quiet about funding them. This has nothing to do with voters. It has to do with political tactics. It's no surprise that the US has such an empty quarter. To be honest, I'd be surprised if any nation has that quarter well occupied. No one offered an example.
When Crook says that to criticize Trump voters is to disrespect ordinary Americans, he is implying that non-Trump voters, even though they are the majority, are not "ordinary" Americans. That sounds stupid when you say it like that, and Crook is not stupid, which is why he does not say it like that. I reckon that is what he thinks though. Is there really more to it than that?
There's an argument to be made that our "first contact" with AI was the interaction of civil society with the "slow AI" of the limited liability joint stock corporation, as described by Charlie Stross in his "Dude, you broke the future!" speech.
And while leviathans like the East India Company, Dole Fruit, and other colonial mercantilists did dominate large swathes of the globe for a period, ultimately liberal self-governance fought back and, despite the paroxysm of fascist destruction in the mid-twentieth century, brought us a period of peace and widely-shared prosperity unlike anything the world had ever seen.
The problem is that our mechanisms of liberal self-governance have been ossifying and getting turned to the uses of the powerful in preserving the status quo of their power. (So, you see "environmental" laws used to protect a "historic parking lot", or to prevent construction of windmills that would spoil some rich person's view.) Meanwhile the AIs keep evolving and getting more clever.
We need a period of democratic renewal -- we need to start widely deploying new mechanisms like deliberative polling, and proportional approval voting for electing legislatures. Nothing will work forever, because eventually whoever has a slight advantage in the status quo will hit on ways to exploit the new rules and start trying to consolidate their advantage. But if it bought us another fifty years of peace and prosperity, I'd count that a win.
AI Dilemma: Interesting video. I know he’s not popular here, but Elon Musk gave a talk about the AI potential and safety in a recent WSJ interview. Shorts: Tesla’s AI is farther ahead than Open AI/Microsoft. Artificial General Intelligence is 3 to 6 years away. China is about 12 months behind the US and Europe for AI. Non-zero chance of AI destroying humanity. Non-zero chance of AI becoming a nanny for humanity.
Wildfire. This seems to be mainly about not estimating and pricing risk properly. That the losses result from climate change is ultimate irrelevant.
EG. Seems like State Farm could use sophisticated weather modeling to figure out an offer schedule for wildfire insurance based on location of the property and its characteristics that make it vulnerable to fire. Would no one buy a fair insurance product?
Tett: ?? A world in which asset prices do not rise would be a worlds where productivity and real incomes were not rising, a very dangerous world indeed. A world in which real interest rates are high will require some adjustments in conventional cost benefit analysis to separate out the cost of capital and pure time preference. [I believe Nordhaus does thin in his carbon pricing paper.]
El Erian: Practically yes, "multilateralism" is the best way to avoid suboptimal ways to respond to supply chain risk and some climate externality problems. In principal a country could adopt optimal policies unilaterally. (The US does not need Europe's agreement to allow secure chip subsidies to be used for investment in Europe. Politically it would be helpful if by agreement each had the same border-blind policies.
Clive Crook's claim that ‘Modern liberals… are instinctively opposed to democracy…" is a bit bizarre.
- When Left liberals are unhappy with election results, their first instinct is to work hard to convince more people to vote and to expand the voter rolls.
- When Conservatives dislike election results, they tend to respond by working hard to limit voter participation.
It should be quite clear that it is the Right who are anti-democratic, not the Left.
WIldfire's piece reminded me of Ehrlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb, except her time horizon is a decade, not half a century. A lot of people have been dishing Ehrlich lately, but he was largely on the mark even though a lot has been done to mitigate and delay disaster.
The last time we had fiscal conservatism and social liberalism was under LBJ, and he was noted for his guns AND butter budgets. He even pushed through an income tax surcharge to pay for the extra guns needed for Vietnam. Nowadays, talking about raising tax rates is political suicide. If you want to make things better, you have to press social improvements and keep quiet about funding them. This has nothing to do with voters. It has to do with political tactics. It's no surprise that the US has such an empty quarter. To be honest, I'd be surprised if any nation has that quarter well occupied. No one offered an example.
When Crook says that to criticize Trump voters is to disrespect ordinary Americans, he is implying that non-Trump voters, even though they are the majority, are not "ordinary" Americans. That sounds stupid when you say it like that, and Crook is not stupid, which is why he does not say it like that. I reckon that is what he thinks though. Is there really more to it than that?
There's an argument to be made that our "first contact" with AI was the interaction of civil society with the "slow AI" of the limited liability joint stock corporation, as described by Charlie Stross in his "Dude, you broke the future!" speech.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html
And while leviathans like the East India Company, Dole Fruit, and other colonial mercantilists did dominate large swathes of the globe for a period, ultimately liberal self-governance fought back and, despite the paroxysm of fascist destruction in the mid-twentieth century, brought us a period of peace and widely-shared prosperity unlike anything the world had ever seen.
The problem is that our mechanisms of liberal self-governance have been ossifying and getting turned to the uses of the powerful in preserving the status quo of their power. (So, you see "environmental" laws used to protect a "historic parking lot", or to prevent construction of windmills that would spoil some rich person's view.) Meanwhile the AIs keep evolving and getting more clever.
We need a period of democratic renewal -- we need to start widely deploying new mechanisms like deliberative polling, and proportional approval voting for electing legislatures. Nothing will work forever, because eventually whoever has a slight advantage in the status quo will hit on ways to exploit the new rules and start trying to consolidate their advantage. But if it bought us another fifty years of peace and prosperity, I'd count that a win.
Saunders: How does favoring high spending+ high taxes = low deficits code?
Interesting if this were an arrow chart. If the empty quarter was ever populated who abandoned it?
AI Dilemma: Interesting video. I know he’s not popular here, but Elon Musk gave a talk about the AI potential and safety in a recent WSJ interview. Shorts: Tesla’s AI is farther ahead than Open AI/Microsoft. Artificial General Intelligence is 3 to 6 years away. China is about 12 months behind the US and Europe for AI. Non-zero chance of AI destroying humanity. Non-zero chance of AI becoming a nanny for humanity.
https://youtu.be/PDy7s1SDDn4
Wildfire. This seems to be mainly about not estimating and pricing risk properly. That the losses result from climate change is ultimate irrelevant.
EG. Seems like State Farm could use sophisticated weather modeling to figure out an offer schedule for wildfire insurance based on location of the property and its characteristics that make it vulnerable to fire. Would no one buy a fair insurance product?
Noting one link from the climate article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/state-farm-home-insurance-california-wildfires
Tett: ?? A world in which asset prices do not rise would be a worlds where productivity and real incomes were not rising, a very dangerous world indeed. A world in which real interest rates are high will require some adjustments in conventional cost benefit analysis to separate out the cost of capital and pure time preference. [I believe Nordhaus does thin in his carbon pricing paper.]
El Erian: Practically yes, "multilateralism" is the best way to avoid suboptimal ways to respond to supply chain risk and some climate externality problems. In principal a country could adopt optimal policies unilaterally. (The US does not need Europe's agreement to allow secure chip subsidies to be used for investment in Europe. Politically it would be helpful if by agreement each had the same border-blind policies.
Two elephants were overlooked:
Where is Fed instrument setting actions in the model?
Confusing "safe (from credit risk) assets" with safe (from interest rate) assets.
I do not have the technical skill to understand how these would affect the conclusions.