BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-09-25 Mo

1/50 of people who die are still dying of COVID; NBER conference on GPT-LLM-ML; US budget deficits; very briefly noted; & Baldwin & Grozoubinski on economic development, Tanenhaus mocks well...

Sep 25, 2023

MUST-READ: 1000 Deaths a Week from COVID Continue Here in the United States:

Paul Weimer: ‘Reminder, the order portal for the four free COVID tests from the federal government is back up and running as of today <https://www.covid.gov/tests>…

50,000 deaths a year—a 2% elevation in the death rate—is not a joke. If you have it, you really should try to not infect more people. And testing is the only good way to figure out if you have a mild case (rather than something else). Figuring out you have a moderate or severe case is usually not a problem.

(Yes, I finally got it, after 3 1/2 years.)

ONE VIDEO: NBER Economics of GPT-LLM-ML:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

ONE IMAGE: U.S. Budget Deficits:

Very Briefly Noted:

Economics: Robert W. Conn & al.: Science, Philanthropy, & American Leadership: ‘Philanthropy… under-appreciated… $21.5 billion of research funding at universities and non-profits in 2021 or roughly 42% of the federal outlay at these institutions….Decentralized and diverse set of philanthropic funders… make[s] [research] more risk tolerant and more innovative…
Javier Blas: What Happened to Africa Rising? It’s Been Another Lost Decade: The continent’s social and political malaise…. Dependence on commodities…. A young and increasingly urban population that voraciously consumes social media…. Sub-Saharan Africa GDP per capita peaked in 2014 at $1,936 and has since fallen more than 10%…. A grueling fight against booming population growth…. Problems… in three large buckets…. [Private for-profit] funding squeeze…. Another kind of funding squeeze, but from foreign aid, China and the private sector…. The continent’s commodity-led growth model, the legacy of past crises and the impact of climate change…
Economic History: Richard Langlois: The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: ‘Managerial capitalism… administrative coordination by trained professional managers is essential…. Yet… why did both its practice and the accompanying narrative lie in ruins by the end of the century?… The structures of managerialism solidified their dominance only because… war, depression, and war again superseded markets, scrambled relative prices, and weakened market-supporting institutions…. Market-supporting institutions… reemerged to shift advantage toward entrepreneurial and market-driven modes…
Human Capital: Noah Smith: At least five interesting things for the middle of your week: ‘Higher education seems to be becoming an ever-larger determinant of… cleavages… a class divide for the age of knowledge industries—the human-capital bourgeoisie vs. the human-capital proletariat…. Pretending to ourselves that our divisions are all about race, will blind us to some of the ruptures…
CogSci: Patrick Marren: Fatal Certainty: ‘How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century into an Era of Strategic Shock—And How Rigorous Imagination Could Bring Us Back…
Social Fabric: Annie Lowrey: ‘I found Melissa Kearney's book careful and interesting, but came away convinced the conversation we should be having is about how to improve outcomes for kids growing up with a single parent, not how to get those parents married…
Joshua Gans: ‘Your daily reminder that single parenting is hard and that left-wing politics has traditionally been focused on helping single parents for this reason. Showing that having two parents is a privilege is the basis of all those historical left-wing policies…
Neofascism: Matt Yglesias: ‘Remarkable quote: “‘We always get the blame’, said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior appropriator. ‘Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame…’
Nick Cohen: Disaster Conservatism: There's nothing worth saving from the Tory years. Nothing at all: ‘Blair and… Brown accepted Thatcher’s privatisations, council house sales, and restrictions on trade union rights… because neo-liberalism appeared to work…. [But] there is no legacy from an outgoing Conservative government that is worth preserving, and honest Conservatives admit it…
Science Fiction & Fantasy: BracketyJack: Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes: The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings…

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NOTES & SubStack Posts:

Economic Development Watch: I am sorry to be such a Debbie Downer, but I fail to grasp how “services rather than manufacturing” can be the future of trade-led development. In the past nearly any place with low wage labor and good enough institutions could try to become a manufacturing platform. It could, if lucky, then turn that into the nurturing of communities of engineering expertise. On that you could build sufficient knowledge transfer for development. There were two essentials: First was the high share of labor in valued added. Second was the extraordinary competence and usefulness of every single human eye-ear-hand loop for tasks that could not otherwise be performed. Those made the difference. They allowed the cheap production of high-quality manufacturers in poor countries. But what high-quality services can be produced by those who are not where the customers are and are not super-fluent in the customers’ language? I really do not see it:

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Neofascism Watch: I confess I am unlikely to find time to read even deBoer or Mounk, having failed to find much new (to me at least), true, important, and interesting (to me at least) in what I have read from them in the past. But their new books cannot be as empty as Sam Tanenhaus says here, can they?:

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Public Safety Watch: “Make it so that, if you are going to be doing anything more disruptive than jaywalking it is a lot riskier to carry a gun than not to—that it the way to get most guns off the streets and so in a decade have a population (and police!) who are not scared of getting shot.” That is an interesting alternative to “arrange land use so people can stay in places where private security guards are going to hassle apparent non-prosperous non-residents”. It might well be a better one, but I cannot say. I would sleep much easier, however, if it were accompanied by a major push for a UBI, for Matt’s standard YIMBY construction measures on steroids, and for throwing truly huge amounts of money at addiction treatment:

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Apropos of Future Felon Donald Trump and United States Senator Joe Fetterman, which of these two men has just been introduced to the concept of “clothes” fifteen minutes before the photo was taken?

And yet Professional Republican Kathleen Parker says:

Public Sphere Watch: I have long greatly admired and loved the work of Brian Buetler. My web-enabled brain immediately surfaces six pieces of his that I marked at the time as really liking a lot:

2022: Enemies of Democracy Should Fear the American Voter…
2020: What to Do About GOP Bad Faith After Trump…
2017: How Democrats Can Wage War on Monopolies—and Win…
2017: Trump’s Advisers Are Nudging Us Closer to Catastrophe…
2014: Paul Ryan's honesty problem…
2014: Obamacare politics transformed…

And now he is launching a SubStack: Off Message <offmessage.net! Which has Matt Yglesias’s immediate and enthusiastic endorsement: <substack.com/@matthewyglesias/note/c-40…>

So I am definitely gonna sign up.

But there is something about the framing of the inaugural issue…:

Philip Koop

Sep 26, 2023

The NY Times in my inbox today informs me that 'Pamela Paul, a Times columnist, wrote that she hoped deBoer’s book would be read “especially by those on the left.”'

What greater disrecommendation could you need?

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