BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-01-12 Fr
Seth Lloyd on free will, complexity, & unpredictability; the demographic transition & the population explosion; very briefly noted; Trump claims Nikki Haley is Obama’s sockpuppet; Josh Barro on...
Seth Lloyd on free will, complexity, & unpredictability; the demographic transition & the population explosion; very briefly noted; Trump claims Nikki Haley is Obama’s sockpuppet; Josh Barro on universities unmoored & at sea; neuroscience tools fail to understand microprocessors; & Raymond Aron, Bob Rubin, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-01-08 Mo…
ONE VIDEO: Seth Lloyd: A Turing Test for “Free Will”:
ONE IMAGE: The Demographic Transition & Population Explosion:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Barry Ritholtz: CPI Increase is Based on Bad Shelter Data: ‘Inflation data for December. CPI came in a 0.3% versus 0.2%…. Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed to shelter as the source of the increase…. [But] in the real world, shelter measures were flat or negative…. Owner’s Equivalent Rent is a noisy, survey-driven model that operates on a very long lag. CPI overweights shelter, making it the largest part of CPI. While BLS data shows a modest increase, real-world, real-time measures show the opposite—a decrease in the shelter component of CPI. OER and the BLS model will get here eventually— I would guess the model will catch up to reality by early Summer… <https://ritholtz.com/2024/01/cpi-increase-is-based-on-bad-shelter-data/>
Richard Kogan, Chad Stone, Bryann DaSilva, & Jan Rejeski: Difference Between Economic Growth Rates and Treasury Interest
Rates Significantly Affects Long-Term Budget Outlook: ‘Growth has exceeded interest rates on average over the last two centuries, and has done
so by greater margins in recent decades…. Between 1947 and 2025, economic
growth exceeds interest rates… by an average of 1.3 percent[age points]… <https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/2-27-15bud.pdf>
Alan Blinder & Janet Yellen (2001): The Fabulous Decade: Macroeoconomic Lessons from the 1990s… <https://archive.org/details/fabulousdecadema0000blin>
Barry Eichengreen: Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar… <https://archive.org/details/exorbitantprivil0000barr/mode/2up>
Anna Stansbury & Robert Schultz: The Economics Profession’s Socioeconomic Diversity Problem: ‘Relative to the similar-aged US population, we estimate that US-born economics PhD recipients are around five times less likely to have a parent with no college degree, and five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree. Such patterns suggest the economics profession is missing out on both talent and perspectives… <https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.37.4.207>
Brooke Masters: What happens if the trustbusters win?: ‘Enforcers need to come up with a plan for boosting competition to Big Tech…. There are basically three options: fines, break-ups or finding another way to make Big Tech act differently. Though the first two are simpler, the third is looking like the smartest choice…. Such remedies are hard to design and even harder to enforce…. But if today’s trustbusters want to do more than grab headlines, they need to have a plan ready to go… <https://www.ft.com/content/58db8a2f-3dc1-46f7-9adf-db076fe2c93d>
Central Country: Debin Ma: China’s Long March Back to Stagnation: ‘Yasheng Huang… The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline.… Huang unveils the causes of not just 40 years of remarkable growth, but also its recent reversal into stagnation under the current regime…. Keju… was, in fact, tuned to near perfection as an instrument of social control and political indoctrination… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-historical-roots-of-economic-miracle-and-return-to-statism-by-debin-ma-2024-01>
Public Reason: Bill Janeway: ‘“Indeed, the economist J. Bradford DeLong has made a convincing case that the seventies were the “historical axis” for the wheel of economic modernity, a time when the first Industrial Revolution gave way to the second Industrial Revolution of modern technology and globalization.” You made. It into Adam Gopnik’s big piece on the impressionists in The New Yorker… <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/camille-pissarro-the-audacity-of-impressionism-anka-muhlstein-book-review>
Republicans: C. Boyden Gray: Oral History: ‘I didn’t go to [George H.W. Bush] and say, you know, Darman is blocking—he didn’t want to hear staff infighting…. Darman was so clever. The guy was demonically clever…. Lucy and the football, at the last minute you pull it away. I thought I was going to get the meeting. I thought that I was going to get the meeting. I always thought it was going to happen. And by now, I realize how I got burned by Darman, who—God, he’s charming, funny, and just, you don’t want to disbelieve the guy, because he’s so funny, and he’s so brilliant. You don’t want to think he’s a goddamned liar. But he is. He was. And so you get head faked all the time and I should have realized, Jesus Christ, this had gone on too long. I’ve got to figure something else out. But there’s really almost nothing, I don’t know what you do in a situation like that…. [Michael] Boskin apparently never had a single one-on-one meeting with President Bush the whole four years. Here is his economic advisor, never met alone with him. Darman wouldn’t let Boskin in there without him, you know. And Darman knew how to manipulate the paper… <https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/c-boyden-gray-oral-history>
Neofascism: Casey Newton: Why Platformer is leaving Substack: ‘We’ve seen this movie before—and we won’t stick around to watch it play out…. Until Substack makes it clear that it will take proactive steps to remove hate speech and extremism, the current size of the problem isn’t relevant. The company’s edgelord branding ensures that the fringes will continue to arrive and set up shop, and its infrastructure creates the possibility that those publications will grow quickly. That’s what matters…
SubStack NOTES:
Racism & Neofascism: Note that this is Trump personally, but that it is also much much more than that—it is nearly everyone in the Trump affinity. When the chips are down, the reason to vote for Trump (rather than Haley, DeSantis, Christie…) in the Iowa contest next week is that Haley, DeSantis, Christie are really working for Obama, and that the key goal is what it has always been: to erase the fact that a BLACK MAN was President of the United States:
Human Capital: Josh Barro thinks well of some of his professors at Harvard—but not many, and he thinks well of precisely zero Harvard administrators. They should all think about that:
Josh Barro: Universities are not on the level: ‘For me, the problem starts with the replication crisis…. A decent amount of what I was taught in Harvard’s social psychology courses was just wrong… replications failing… p-hacked… fraudulent data…. Universities’ level of interest in addressing widespread research dishonesty in behavioral science has been… mixed. I can’t be the only one wondering how much longer Dan Ariely is possibly going to remain a professor in good standing at Duke….
Research dishonesty in universities goes beyond the social sciences. In the humanities, it has taken a different form—postmodern research that aims at “my truth” instead of truth…. A lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research — it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals. Of course, this is not what all (or even necessarily most) professors in the humanities are up to…. I see arguments… that it’s administrators at the top of these institutions pushing departments in politicized directions….
It’s part of a broader dishonesty in how people in higher education insist on talking about affirmative action. Affirmative action policies prefer personnel of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds as part of an effort to alter the institution’s demographic balance—this is the point of affirmative action—but apparently it’s racist to admit this….
If I [had] copied like Gay did when I was a Harvard student, and if I got caught, I would have expected the university to require me to withdraw. And that’s why it’s been so jarring over the past month to watch some academics and journalists announce a new, laxer standard on plagiarism that was unknown to us when we were students….
All of this colors the way I feel about the conservative “war on higher ed.” Liberals… are very agitated about it. But it’s not clear to me exactly what one is supposed to be defending and why. I’d much rather see this industry do some introspection about why it’s losing public trust…
The only place where I would register serious disagreement with Josh is on affirmative action: It is a fact that there are important aspects of finding merit—of finding the people who will do the job best—that escape our standard old-boy-network and well-primed-test-accomplishment screens, and there is good reason to act on that fact. The point is that massive demographic imbalance is probably a sign that you are doing meritocracy wrong.
Plagiarism: This is such a stupid thing to do.
The fact that people are doing this stupid thing makes me look for systems that make doing such a stupid thing easy. So I am swinging around to thinking that there are now a lot of people who copy paragraphs from Wikipedia and elsewhere, drop them into their documents, thinking "I will go back and deal with this later".
And if they fail to include the quotation marks when they copy-&-paste, or if they are overwhelmed, trying to get the document out…:
Josh Barro: Universities Are Not on the Level: ‘Keith Boykin… wants to see analyses of other college presidents’ writings to see if they plagiarized too…. My guess is this sort of copying is not that common, precisely because academics know it’s so easy to catch if you go looking for it…. What I do think there’s a lot of out there, undetected, is data fraud of the sort we’ve seen in the Hauser and Gino cases...
Cognition: Great kudos to Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording! Emergence is all in situations like this. But if we had good models of complexity, the systems we could study with them would not be very complex, would they? Somewhere or other Seth Lloyd has… a paper?… a talk?… about how a system possessing “free will” is precisely one that you cannot understand but only observe—that the most energy- and information-efficient way for us to understand what it will do is to watch it and see:
Eric Hoel: Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why: ‘The authors apply a suite of popular techniques from neuroscience to… the MOS 6502 microchip… [with] only 3,510 transistors… Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Pitfall…. Looking at the connectomics… performing “lesions”… analyzing… individual transistor behavior… [via] firing rates or tuning curves… averaging the chip’s activity into fMRI-like voxels… dimension reduction and Granger causality. Many pretty graphs…. The conclusions were utterly obscure…. The 98 “lesions” that led to the unique failure of Donkey Kong!… An equivalent result in the brain would net a Nature paper for some hungry young graduate student…. You’d never be able to derive a single thing about barrel-throwing or bananas from the knowledge… <theintrinsicperspective.com/p/neuroscie…>
re: Racism and neofascism.
And the thin-skinned Trump was intent on dismantling Obama's successes in retaliation for the humilation Obama meted out on him at the White House Correspondents dinner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGpLg0b3DE&pp=ygUqb2JhbWEgaHVtaWxhdGVzIHRydW1wIGF0IGpvdW5hbGlzdHMgZGlubmVy
Trump always says he will return any attack with 5x the severity. One can imagine what he will do to Biden et al after teh humiliation of the loss of the 2020 election.
"The men of my generation have not lost the memory of the years 1931-1935. While Anglo-Saxon currencies were devalued, the value of the franc was proudly maintained, but the French economy was ruined. In short, our partners do not refuse to put pressure on the American authorities; they fear triggering a crisis of which the entire Western world would be a victim."
Hmm. I don't think David Glasner would put it quite like that; he'd probably say something about "the insane Bank of France."
"American privilege is largely responsible for the origin of the deficit, namely capital outflows."
Isn't this a reversal of causality? Please accept my abject apologies if I am misremembering or misrepresenting your friend Barry Eichengreen, but my recollection was that he identified three advantages to printing the reserve currency:
1) Your domestic firms pay no FX-related transaction costs.
2) Your domestic firms are not exposed to currency risk (or do not have to pay the cost of hedging) because they buy their inputs and sell their outputs in the same currency.*
3) You accrue seigniorage; foreign entities must sell you something of value in order to maintain a working balance to lubricate international transactions, and their central banks must maintain a prudent reserve holding in your currency (hence its *reserve* status.)
Point 3 seems to *require* the reserve currency provider to run a current account deficit?
* Not only domestic firms! For example, this is how a Canadian hedge fund makes a bet on a US stock: they do not sell CAD for USD, take a position in the stock, then buy CAD for USD when they liquidate the position. Instead, they borrow USD and post CAD as collateral, and put on the stock position with borrowed USD. This exposes them to collateral calls, and they must pay the difference between the USD rate and the CAD rate; but of course, the latter is often negative. But the point is that if their USD bet is correct and results in a nominal profit in USD, that always translates to a nominal profit in CAD, instead of potentially being wiped out by an adverse FX swing.