BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-10-23 Mo
The fragility of agrarian societies of domination, Elon Musk's disgusting algorithm, The Biden-Powell A vs. the Obama-Bernanke C, & Zack Beauchamp on the genocidal ideology of Hamas; annular solar...
The fragility of agrarian sciences of domination, Elon Musk's disgusting algorithm, The Biden-Powell A vs. the Obama-Bernanke C, & Zack Beauchamp on the genocidal ideology of Hamas; annular solar eclipse over Shiprock; TSMC’s 3-nm “teething” problems; very briefly noted; & Quiggin & Smith on techno-optimism, Berry on “commercial society”, Engels & Marx as Scottish Enlightenment-influenced stage theorists, & 2023-10-19 Th’s “Briefly Noted”…
NOTES:
Economic History: Is there something to the idea that efflorescent Malthusian agrarian-age societies of domination are extraordinarily fragile? That any depopulation shock sets off a struggle for extracted resources that breaks the imperial peace that has produced the investments in infrastructure and otherwise that have generated a relatively dense population to exploit? Or am I just cherry-picking favorable examples here?:
Neofascism: Elon Musk has tuned the Twitter algorithmic feed to his liking in an extraordinarily disgusting way:
Economics: From Robin Brooks: Biden & Powell get an A. Obama & Bernanke get a C. A 1.5-year burst of moderate inflation is a very low price to pay for what looks like a permanent 8%-higher level of real production:
War: Zack is very smart on what Israel should do. It won’t. Netanyahu will almost surely make it bloody, for he has spent too much time and treasury building up Hamas as a counterweight to Fatah, and needs to somehow overwrite that in Israel’s memory. But by what right does Netanyahu propose to spend the blood of Gazan civilians trying to rectify that mistake of his? The Knesset needs to move him out immediately, or the situation is highly likely to become an even much bigger disaster than it is now. Withdrawing from the West Bank as the Israeli military tries (and probably fails) to completely suppress Hamas in Gaza would be a good start:
ONE IMAGE: Annular Solar Eclipse:
ONE AUDIO: TSMC’s 3-nm “Teething” Problems?:
Trying to untangle a very confusing set of rumors about Macintosh M3 model likely release dates, and what it means for Moore’s Law’s possible continuation:
John Gruber & Ben Thompson: Dithering: Pencils, iPads, and 3 nm: ‘A weird Apple Pencil announcement highlights the weird iPad line, and weirdness around the 3 nm process may play a role…
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Nick Timiraos: Higher Bond Yields Likely to Extend Fed Rate Pause: ‘Officials are signaling that a run-up in long-term interest rates might substitute for a further central bank rate hike…
Paul Krugman: The deficit is indeed too high. We won’t do anything about it: ‘Ask voters about specific spending, and there’s almost nothing they want to cut…. Our weak social safety net is at least part of the reason we have so much poverty and Americans are, to put it bluntly, dying so much younger than their counterparts abroad. Why make it even weaker?… Republicans are even trying to deprive the I.R.S. of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. And while Democrats are at least willing to tax the rich, that by itself won’t be enough (although it would help). And they aren’t willing to take the political heat for proposing tax hikes on the middle class…
Martin Wolf: The global economy is resilient but limping: ‘The expected number of years needed for emerging and developing countries to close half the gap in incomes per head with high-income economies has risen sharply, from 80 years for projections in the April 2008 WEO to about 130 years for projections in April 2023. The glad story of economic convergence is stalling…. The world experienced its hottest September ever last month after surpassing the previous record by an “extraordinary” 0.5C. Moreover, if real interest rates are going to be permanently higher, as some believe, the conditions for long-term investment and growth will also be permanently worse, just when a huge surge in investment is needed to meet climate challenges and wider development goals…
Economic History: Anton Howes: Age of Invention: How to Steal Technology: ‘in 1751 Holker’s career took yet another turn when he was recruited by the French government as an industrial spymaster. Holker’s chief task was to steal British textile technologies…. The real challenge was in adapting the stolen technology once it had been brought to France. Holker’s network managed to entice a small colony of some thirty people over to France: over a dozen workers involved in the making of cotton velvets…
GPT-LLM-ML: François Chollet: How I think about LLM prompt engineering: ‘Prompting as searching through a space of vector programs…. enabled you to do basic things like plural(cat) → cats or male_to_female(king) → queen. Meanwhile LLMs can do pure magic — things like write_this_in_style_of_shakespeare(“…your poem…”) → “…new poem…”. And they contain millions of such programs…
Ethan Mollick: So, what is the best way to get good at using AI?: ‘If you are new to AI, you may find our free YouTube 5-part video series useful (it is built around an education context, but people have told me it was broadly helpful)
CryptoGrifters: Molly White: Web3 Is Going Just Great…
Dave Karpf: Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new?: ‘On Marc Andreessen's “techno-optimist manifesto”…. The reason why people are calling for more regulation of a16z’s investments isn’t because they’ve been “told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” It’s because retail investors lost their life savings just last year by throwing cash at the Ponzi schemes that a16z was actively hawking. (Marc Andreessen should really consider taking the “have an ounce of fucking shame” challenge)…
Central Country: Akshat Rathi: How China Left the World Far Behind in the Battery Race: ‘CATL, now the world’s largest battery company…. China’s rise as the global leader of lithium-ion batteries is now a matter of regret for the oil industry, which invented them; for the Americans, who nurtured the technology towards commercialization; and for the Japanese, who were the first to scale up the technology…. Subsidies for electric cars. The catch was that to be eligible the battery had to be Chinese-made…. BMW… partnered with Chinese car maker Brilliance and CATL…. “We have learned a lot from BMW, and now we have become one of the top battery manufacturers globally,” Zeng said at an event celebrating Zinoro in 2017…
Journamalism: Scott Lemieux: Donald Trump’s economic populism doesn’t exist, so it must be invented: ‘What happened… is unambiguous: Biden supported striking UAW workers, and Trump expressed support for a non-union shop while telling workers that striking was futile…. But when the reality conflicts with a Beloved Media Script, such as “Donald Trump is an economic populist,” the script often prevails in the face of any facts…. The New York Times… Wall Street Journal... Politico…. Many major news outlets did something similar, writing up a Trump campaign event in a way that left the impression that Trump was going to speak with striking autoworkers…. It’s hard to say that reporters are making a “mistake”…
Economic History Watch: To continue, depopulation for various reasons (drought, climate change, plague etc.) was usually bad news for workers. Employment arrangements tend to become more exploitative when that happens. Those who are in power would rather not pay high wages that result from depopulation and labor scarcity. They'd rather control the mobility of labor instead. That quickly devolves into bondage/serfdom/slavery types of scenarios. If I am recollecting correctly, Douglass North coauthored at least one paper that studied how labor contracts evolved from feudalism through the industrial revolution. A key issue in those contracts was how freely workers were available. My own inference was that population growth over the past two centuries or so essentially got us out of feudal-type contracts, for workers were easy to come by, making it unnecessary to pin anyone down to the land and its Lord (in exchange for security). Modern-day Malthusians may want to see that there's a silver lining to having more people around. The distant past with relatively low levels of population was not idyllic, especially for labor and living standards.
Economic History Watch: You're probably not cherry picking. That fragility due to depopulation comes through in Evsey Domar's classic 1969 paper on the causes of slavery/serfdom as well.