BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-08-11 Fr

David Aaronovitch on how Gerard Baker continues to provide cover for those wrecking western society; Americas viewed sideways; Ian Morris on how Britain is an island near Europe; & Burke, Gieschen...

Aug 11, 2023

…Smith, & Breunig on socio-economic anxiety, long-term value investing, China’s middle-income trap, & LLMs…

MUST-READ: David Aaronovitch on Intellectually Bankrupt Trump Enabler & Courtier Gerard Baker:

Without the Gerard Bakers of the world, Trump would never have gotten a foothold. Without the Gerard Bakers of the world, Trump would today be an asterisk:

Public Sphere: David Aaronovitch: Murdochstein's monster: ‘Cognitive plasticity… [for example] British Communists who had worked with exiled Czech communists… knew them and their families… subscribe[d] to… Stalinist conspiracy theories which ended up with those…. comrades being hanged…. I tweeted… “It's going to be fascinating to track the various ways and hot takes by which commentators try to suggest that prosecuting Trump for his crimes is unfair, a mistake, illegitimate- all without ever questioning the evidence.”…
Gerard Baker… “New Trump indictment is a dangerous move” and the drophead “To prosecute the former president for his madcap ideas is a misjudgment from which there will be no turning back”…. “It is perfectly reasonable to believe that the former president is a seriously bad man, a crook and a threat to the constitutional order of the United States, and to believe simultaneously that the proliferating criminal charges against him are a grave injustice, a dangerous abuse of executive power and, above all, a profound error.”…
When you read Gerry you are probably reading Murdoch in one of his more thoughtful moments… the Dark Prometheans… whose backing of Trump helped bring America not fire, but chaos. Baker… entered the right… via neoconservatism and the free market. Trump… protectionist… [the] America First strand of isolationism… a terrible champion of the US as a global power….
Baker’s argument…. Jack Smith[‘s] case is weak because Trump is too mad to be… accused of knowing… he was lying…. The law should be kept out of politics…. “Americans… in revolt against… an entrenched elite with control over all the main levers of… authority…”. [Baker would make] “but I am a barking narcissist” a defence to any and every crime…. But we don’t even need the adolescent for this one…. Bill Barr… said… “I have come to believe that he knew well that he had lost the election.”…
What about… [the] logic… that… the electorate and only the electorate should sort out the legality of a politician’s actions…. If Trump were elected it would almost certainly be despite the plurality of Americans voting against him…. Since… there is no provision for preventing a… criminal… imprisoned… from becoming President… this concern… seems to be misplaced. Then there’s Baker argument three, which is both disgraceful and partly true. It essentially posits that a successful prosecution will create such resentment that, well, who knows what will happen? So best not….
Three characteristic Baker deflections… so typical of embarrassed American right-wingers. Three times in his column Baker (unnecessarily) says the prosecutions… [are] primarily a partisan move…. What nonsense…. Baker maintains… (as he does in virtually everything)… that the US media has exaggerated Trump’s uselessness and occasional stupidity…. Third is the standard mitigation of Trump supporters that, however horrible, reactionary, prejudiced or unreasonable they may appear, they are the victims of elite America and as such deserve our consideration….
All that these victims of the elite have on their side are the Supreme Court of the USA, the US House of Representatives, 26 out of 50 state governors and every title and camera that Rupert Murdoch can command. Oh, and a good chance of getting a man who Baker himself describes as “a crook” into the White House, despite that person not winning the most votes. Poor disenfranchised sods….
After 2016 that was the tiger that Rupert and Gerry decided to ride. That’s the tiger that’s eating them now. They’re not terrified that Trump will lose—they’re terrified that he will win…

Baker seems to have (A) three arguments—(1) the jury won’t convict, (2) legitimacy on this issue lies not in the system but with the people, and (3) Trump’s supporters will turn into terrorists and destroy society so we must appease him—and (B) three deflections—(1) this is a partisan move, (2) Trump is actually not that dumb hence not that bad, and (3) Trump supporters have been oppressed and need to be cut a break.

The end of Baker’s column is a plea: Prosecuting Trump will create “the ominous sense that the country’s future will be determined, not by the complex and balanced machinery of due process, justice and the law, but by the brute struggle of raw political power.” And so we should not do it. What is Baker’s alternative? To accept the brute exercise of raw political power that the Republican Senators engaged in in blocking Trump’s impeachment, and then to accept whatever brute exercise of raw political power the Republican grift machine will engage in next year as it tries to reinstall Trump as president against the wishes of a majority of Americans.

To say “patriots shouldn’t do X because it will create the appearance of Y” when the alternative is for the Republican grift machine—which Baker supports—to continue to engage in the reality of Y makes absolutely no sense.

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

ONE VIDEO: Economists & Archeologists: Ian Morris with Javier Mejia on UK Long-Term History:

Very Briefly Noted:

Economics: James Kahn: Trend Productivity Growth Update: ‘The… probability of productivity currently being in a low-growth (1.3% annual rate) régime… fell to 0.96, compared to 0.98 from… data through 2023Q1…. Strong productivity growth in Q2 (3.7% versus −1.2% in 2023Q1)…
Joe Weisenthal: What Joe’s interested in this morning: ‘Fed… September 20th… markets appear to be expecting a pause…. Kmetz… Louie, and… Mondragon of the SF Fed published a note suggesting that shelter could see significant disinflation…. Latest used car data from Manheim… showed another 1.6% sequential drop…
Tim Duy: ‘July nonfarm payrolls… slightly below expectations… 187k jobs while the previous two months were revised down by total of 49k…. The nonfarm payroll numbers nicely match… soft-landing… unemployment and wages data complicate the story…
GPT-LLM-ML: Matt O’Brien: Tech experts are starting to doubt that ChatGPT and A.I. ‘hallucinations’ will ever go away: ‘“This isn’t fixable”….
Treason: Ken White: ‘Mike Pence referring to a “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” is rude, unprofessional, dehumanizing, and unbecoming a presidential candidate. The preferred terminology is “The Federalist Society”…
Josh Marshall: John Eastman Comes Clean: ‘Hell yes we were trying to overthrow the government…
Techtopia: Casey Liss: A Decade of ATP: ‘Ten years ago today, we formally launched… our idle chatter after our “real” podcast…. The start of ATP is somewhat nebulous—was it when Marco released us goofing off on Soundcloud? Perhaps….
Christopher Livingston: I broke “Baldur's Gate 3” by playing as a party of bears: ‘Turns out marching four summoned bears across the map without their rangers results in a little bit of confusion…
Global Order: Chris Patten: The Crisis of American Leadership: ‘Post-World War II… the United States has abided by international law and made the world a safer place…. George W. Bush’s disastrous military adventurism… powerfully undermined trust… [now] nearly impossible to tackle pressing global challenges…
Stupidest Men Alive: Jeet Heer: ‘There are times when you stop fearing death and realize it will come as a relief: Freddie deBoer & Richard Hanania: “Are Men Smarter than Women?: Sex Differences in Intelligence” & “Darwin & Marx: Friends or Foes?”…

Refer a friend

¶s:

Socio-Economic Anxiety: An attribution of Trumpist origins to what Barbara Ehrenreich used to call the “fear of falling”—that the post-Great Recession world shares with the post-WWI world the erasure of security for those who thought that they deserved security, and so look for a strongman on their side to break eggs and get them that security back. I am much more on the “derangement of the public sphere” and “breaking of the institutions of community-based politics” side of the origins=of-Trumpism debate than on even this version of the “socio-economic anxiety” as the root cause of neo-fascist animosity against the enemies of the true volk. But I could be wrong:

Tim Burke: The News: When Failure Is Not an Option: ‘An incredibly narrow and specific time period, roughly 1955-2000, which many older people in the U.S. are inclined to reference, consciously or otherwise, as if it was a long-standing norm rather than a rather exceptional period…. Whenever [else] we’re talking [about]… the risk of being wiped out, of suffering financial ruin from a place of relative comfort, has always been vastly more acute for the middle and upper-middle classes… visible in long-term socioeconomic data… in fiction and day-to-day reportage: going broke suddenly due to bad investments, bad decisions, hidden liabilities, and so on is the nightmare of bourgeois life…. Bourgeois life is laden with danger from transgressions of manners and finances alike. Not, mind you, the kind of danger to life, security and possibility that people living in poor communities face…. But the 21st Century bourgeois live as their forebearers have, in a condition of heightened anxiety, of constant gnawing attention to risk…. A frequent part of lottery dreaming among the middle and upper-middle class who buy the tickets just to indulge the fantasy is that it would be fuck-you money, that the first thing to do after putting the jackpot in the bank is to drop a bomb of unguarded scorn in the middle of the fragile web of manners, reputation and probity that normally requires repair each and every night…

Finance: More and more of the potential smart money in investing these days, seems to be looking for an arbitrage Lough: find two counter parties with inconsistent views, and get in the middle. Plus, the dumb money appears to be becoming much dumber: something like GameStop or AMC simply would not have happened in any previous market régime. this does seem to create opportunities for what used to be called “security analysis”:

Frederik Gieschen: : The Courage to Stand Out: Sam Zell's Contrarianism: ‘“So what do you do?” I replied, “I’m a professional opportunist.” And that has been my response to that question ever since…. So, what worked for Zell?: (1) Discipline (“suffering from knowing the numbers”). (2) Keen observer of change. (3) Speed of execution. (4) Closing deals by solving problems. (5) Turning being an outsider into an advantage. In addition, we can observe many of the markers in From Predators to Icons in his story, including a family business, early sales experiences, networks of mentors and allies, a strong education, and even family money…

China: I am swinging around to the view that while the Communist Party of China thinks that it has the confidence, the institutions, and the ability to incentivize party bureaucrats to conduct a successful industrial policy, in fact the Communist Party of China does not. The question of whether China can escape the middle-income trap then hinges on whether quantity has a quality of its own: the scale provided by 1.3 billion people plus the high savings rate and the government ability to do something to throw the investment, financed by that high savings rate into high potential-externality sectors:

Noah Smith: China’s economy just keeps looking weaker: ‘I’ve written about China’s economic slowdown a fair amount, but the negative news just keeps coming. Foreign investment in China is cratering at a rapid pace, as inflows collapse and outflows stay strong. FDI is now back to 1990s levels in dollar terms — which will be much much less as a percentage of GDP…. Why aren’t companies investing in China? In a word, risk… of war… the country’s central government is already cracking down on foreign businesses… the risk of companies getting their technology stolen has become more apparent…. China’s successful industrial policy in the 1990s and the early 2000s was almost entirely local rather than national; it was a bunch of local governments going around and wooing foreign investors, and making sure their investments paid off. That’s not working anymore, because now the central government (i.e., Xi Jinping) has stepped in and started messing with the formula…

GPT-LLM-ML: A point that I had never really absorbed before. The file size of the models that LLMs output is really, really really small: thus the output of the process is such extreme file compression that there is no space for the model to actually contain any kind of representation of world ground truth, and all it will ever be able to do is to output, plausible stochastic parrotage. Hence it will tell you the truth only to the extent that you happen to be lucky in landing in a piece of the model, where only truth was in the training data set:

Drew Breunig: How Large Language Models Work: ‘GPT-3 was trained on 499 billion tokens [2TB of text]… more than you could read in hundreds of lifetimes…. Lambdalabs estimated it would cost $4.6 million and 355 years to train GPT-3 on a single GPU…. The only thing that isn’t big about LLMs is the filesize of the model they output. For example, one of Meta’s LLaMA models was trained on one trillion tokens and produced a final model whose size is only 3.5GB! In a sense, LLMs are a form of file compression. Importantly, this file compression is lossy…. Shanahan… “We are not really asking who was the first person to walk on the Moon. What we are really asking the model is the following question: Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what words are most likely to follow the sequence ‘The first person to walk on the Moon was’? A good reply to this question is ‘Neil Armstrong’”…. LLMs are doing their best to guess the next word in a sequence given everything they’ve processed in their training data. If the sequence they’re given is novel they’ll just guess and toss out words with contextually similar values. This is problematic when there’s little relationship between a text’s factual meaning and the context within which it’s usually used…