Contra Yglesias, Bidenomics is more than just Keynesian full-employment; þe astonishing negative managerial competence of Elon Musk; Sal Khan wants to build Neal Stephenson's "Young Lady's...
"Give me full employment, a competitive exchange rate, and proper funding by the government of infrastructure and technical education, and you have done 90% of the good that I think optimal industrial policy could do. Give me a large push to make gaining education, technical, and apprenticeship-like skills easy, and I think you have taken care of a bunch of our maldistribution concerns as well."
Bingo! I was going to add one more "give me" to this list, but then realized that "... proper funding by the government...." should take care of it.
I don't actually have much trouble explaining success with Tesla and SpaceX but not Twitter. Elon does not understand people, I feel it quite likely he is spectrum. He is definitely "not a people person" as a friend who worked for Tesla once told me.
With Tesla this didn't matter. People understanding - things like making it look cool - could be delegated. With SpaceX it didn't matter either. With Twitter it matters in spades. Twitter business is getting people to use and engage. Also, Twitter was an existing business with lots of mindshare already, and lots of cheese to move.
Twitter was clearly in financial trouble already. Lots of things would have to change, many oxen were due to be gored, and much cheese to move. Elon is not cautious about things like that, which can be useful, even if it doesn't work out well in the short term.
Tesla may have already existed when he took it over, but nobody knew much about it.
Apple is becoming even worse than 1990s Microsoft. I have their expensive iPhone only because I am locked into iTunes with a large curated library of audiobooks and carefully constructed books split into chapters. If I could port this library to an open system that was good, I would leave in a moment. Since Jony Ive left, the iOS interface has become more complex, less usable, with stupid tweaks, yet is still functionally like DOS with TSR, while Android has moved ahead to be more like Windows. Moving data between apps is ridiculously hard, and yet Apple will not budge after version 16.
Apple always made using a computer "easy" if you acquiesced to doing things their way, rather than the way you wanted to do things, most notably with file systems. Now it squeezes the user into more restrictive avenues, as well as stiffing AppStore vendors to give a large chunk of revenue to Apple. Apple is no better than Amazon or even eBay in following the "enshittification" of their walled garden.
Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, here we come!
An impressive demo of the capabilities of the tutor. I hope it gets released to the educational world in some way. What was not clear was whether the underlying ChatGPT-4 hallucinations have been stymied by their layer on top of it.
In connection with your last Hexapodia podcast, this is AI that could displace educators, but also improve the roles for those who can use the technology to improve teaching.
Mathis and Clark: (paywalled so who knows) did they link this to the ongoing failure of the US to lead the world by example to a tax on net emissions of CO2 and methane?
Monocrisis: Kudos for pouring shade on Tooze! Over does the role of racism in sustaining today's land use restrictions (which apply to commercial development, too) and building codes as ancillary obstacles. Underplays the potential of congestion pricing to ameliorate existing restrictions and undercut the opposition to land use reform per se. Really a stretch to suggest that better urban policies would have a significant effect on the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions, though the effect of the tax on urban policy would be positive.
I see that a year of my writing comments on Matt's Substack has not yet persuaded him that fiscal policy does not determine macroeconomic outcomes. :)
The Fed gave us the fast recovery. The Fed by mistake gave us more inflation than was necessary to deal with Putin/supply chain shocks. The Fed gave us a tight labor market (which it seems to regret!) The Fed gave us inflation reduction. If there is a recession it will be the Fed that gave us that. It is apolitical mistake to crow over the Fed's successes, not grouse about the Fed's inflation, and position itself to blame the Fed if there is a recession.
Biden gave us leadership of the West against the further encroachment of Russian in Ukraine, some gestures toward attracting more high skilled immigration, the flawed but positive ARA and CHIPS, tragically failed to reduce the deficit with meaningful increases in the personal income tax and sidestepped putting social insurance (which should have included a CTC and a more generous UI system) on a sustainable basis with a VAT. I absolutely reject equating "fiscal discipline" which OUGHT to be a centerpiece of any Democratic administration, with expenditure reduction.
"Give me full employment, a competitive exchange rate, and proper funding by the government of infrastructure and technical education, and you have done 90% of the good that I think optimal industrial policy could do. Give me a large push to make gaining education, technical, and apprenticeship-like skills easy, and I think you have taken care of a bunch of our maldistribution concerns as well."
Bingo! I was going to add one more "give me" to this list, but then realized that "... proper funding by the government...." should take care of it.
I don't actually have much trouble explaining success with Tesla and SpaceX but not Twitter. Elon does not understand people, I feel it quite likely he is spectrum. He is definitely "not a people person" as a friend who worked for Tesla once told me.
With Tesla this didn't matter. People understanding - things like making it look cool - could be delegated. With SpaceX it didn't matter either. With Twitter it matters in spades. Twitter business is getting people to use and engage. Also, Twitter was an existing business with lots of mindshare already, and lots of cheese to move.
Twitter was clearly in financial trouble already. Lots of things would have to change, many oxen were due to be gored, and much cheese to move. Elon is not cautious about things like that, which can be useful, even if it doesn't work out well in the short term.
Tesla may have already existed when he took it over, but nobody knew much about it.
Earth keeps breaking temperature records due to getting hotter.
Hard to treat the problem with the seriousness it deserves while laughing out loud.
Apple is becoming even worse than 1990s Microsoft. I have their expensive iPhone only because I am locked into iTunes with a large curated library of audiobooks and carefully constructed books split into chapters. If I could port this library to an open system that was good, I would leave in a moment. Since Jony Ive left, the iOS interface has become more complex, less usable, with stupid tweaks, yet is still functionally like DOS with TSR, while Android has moved ahead to be more like Windows. Moving data between apps is ridiculously hard, and yet Apple will not budge after version 16.
Apple always made using a computer "easy" if you acquiesced to doing things their way, rather than the way you wanted to do things, most notably with file systems. Now it squeezes the user into more restrictive avenues, as well as stiffing AppStore vendors to give a large chunk of revenue to Apple. Apple is no better than Amazon or even eBay in following the "enshittification" of their walled garden.
Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, here we come!
An impressive demo of the capabilities of the tutor. I hope it gets released to the educational world in some way. What was not clear was whether the underlying ChatGPT-4 hallucinations have been stymied by their layer on top of it.
In connection with your last Hexapodia podcast, this is AI that could displace educators, but also improve the roles for those who can use the technology to improve teaching.
Ball: I read to the end and found nothing sad about the end of Twitter.
Mathis and Clark: (paywalled so who knows) did they link this to the ongoing failure of the US to lead the world by example to a tax on net emissions of CO2 and methane?
Monocrisis: Kudos for pouring shade on Tooze! Over does the role of racism in sustaining today's land use restrictions (which apply to commercial development, too) and building codes as ancillary obstacles. Underplays the potential of congestion pricing to ameliorate existing restrictions and undercut the opposition to land use reform per se. Really a stretch to suggest that better urban policies would have a significant effect on the optimal tax on net CO2 emissions, though the effect of the tax on urban policy would be positive.
BTW, how are we supposed to have a competitive real exchange rate with a huge fiscal deficit?
I see that a year of my writing comments on Matt's Substack has not yet persuaded him that fiscal policy does not determine macroeconomic outcomes. :)
The Fed gave us the fast recovery. The Fed by mistake gave us more inflation than was necessary to deal with Putin/supply chain shocks. The Fed gave us a tight labor market (which it seems to regret!) The Fed gave us inflation reduction. If there is a recession it will be the Fed that gave us that. It is apolitical mistake to crow over the Fed's successes, not grouse about the Fed's inflation, and position itself to blame the Fed if there is a recession.
Biden gave us leadership of the West against the further encroachment of Russian in Ukraine, some gestures toward attracting more high skilled immigration, the flawed but positive ARA and CHIPS, tragically failed to reduce the deficit with meaningful increases in the personal income tax and sidestepped putting social insurance (which should have included a CTC and a more generous UI system) on a sustainable basis with a VAT. I absolutely reject equating "fiscal discipline" which OUGHT to be a centerpiece of any Democratic administration, with expenditure reduction.
Housing.