Gonzo “last mile still to come” inflation-reduction reports & takes demonstrate zero situational awareness; the reason to think that people’s economic situations are good is that they are good; Sam...
Gonzo “last mile still to come” inflation-reduction reports & takes demonstrate zero situational awareness; the reason to think that people’s economic situations are good is that they are good; Sam Kriss loathes not Elon Musk but rather Walter Isaacson; Donald Trump has lost what mental marbles he ever had; prompt engineering persists; Boeing & Spirit have forgotten how to do airplane-assembly quality control; people coming to America; very briefly noted; & commenting on Martin Wolf on BREXIT & on gllobalization; lecture on breaking out of agrarian-age near-stagnation; the latest infotech revolution wave, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-01-21 Su…
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: It is absolutely gonzo how many “last mile still to come” in inflation-reduction columns and reports cross my virtual desk these days. The counterpart to that is how very few “all indicators are near their targets, so why isn’t policy near neutral?” takes I see:
Paul Krugman: ‘Core PCE has risen at <2% for the last 6 months; unless forecasts are way off, Friday's data won't change that. More sophisticated efforts to extract the signal from the noise also show us close to target.Where does the idea that there's still a lot of work to do come from? Partly from looking at yoy changes, which are a lagging indicator when inflation is falling fast; partly from the CPI, also lagging bc of how it measures shelter. And partly, I guess, people who were warning sternly about stubborn inflation in early 2023 are having trouble adjusting to the way the problem evaporated. But seriously, time to stop talking about inflation's last mile… <threads.net/@paulkrugman7>
Economics: People have strong reasons to think that their economic situations are relatively good. What are those strong reasons? They are that people’s economic situations are relatively good. Worries about the state of the economy are overwhelmingly worries about future risks, or people remembering that they have heard that other people elsewhere are not doing well:
Conference Board (May 2023): Survey: US Job Satisfaction Hits All-Time High: ‘American workers are more content than ever, according to The Conference Board Job Satisfaction 2023. The report finds improved satisfaction across nearly all 26 components—with gains in non-compensation factors like work-life balance outpacing even those from improved pay and benefits. Overall, 62.3 percent of US workers were satisfied in 2022—up from 60.2 percent in 2021. That’s the highest level recorded since the survey began in 1987…. “With unemployment at record lows, it’s a sellers’ market for labor—US workers are reaping the rewards,” said Eren Selcuk, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. “Job satisfaction was up across the board in 2022—and especially high for workers who switched jobs…”. “With the labor market remaining tight for the foreseeable future, a focus on worker retention is that much more important,” said Allan Schweyer, Principal Researcher of Human Capital at The Conference Board… <https://www.conference-board.org/press/job-satisfaction-hits-all-time-high>
Journamalism: There was, potentially, a very good book to be written about a Chaos Monkey in a time of semi-permanent underemployment and zero interest rates—when there seems to be no way to get to full employment by boosting investment of real resources in projects that pass prudent and sober accounting tests in order to get it to match desired savings. Thus in order to get to full employment we need to, somehow convince people to invest real resources in projects that are imprudent, attractive only to the highly intoxicated, and flunk all accounting tests based on reasonable projections. And we did it. And Elon Musk was an essential—and very useful—intermediary in that project. And he was foresighted enough to cover himself with glue as the money flew by. But that was not the book that Walter Isaacson wanted to write. Thus I think Sam Kriss is right: There is very good reason to hate Walter Isaacson for his hideous waste of opportunity, as he multiplied maximum access by complete uninterest in what was really going on, and why, and came up with a big fat zero:
Sam Kriss: Very Ordinary Men: ‘Elon Musk and the court biographer: I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk…. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy…. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson…. He appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible…. Isaacson’s whole project is weird. Isaacson had incredible access… spent two years following around like a very determined puppy…. An atmosphere of total incuriosity suffuses the entire book. Isaacson notes that Elon and Grimes started dating after a Twitter exchange about “a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk...”. The intellectual world Elon Musk inhabits… the ideas he imbibes… Walter Isaacson simply has no interest in ideas of any stripe. He dispenses with the basilisk in 28 words, so he can get back to telling us exactly who was in the room when various business decisions were made… <https://thepointmag.com/criticism/very-ordinary-men/>
Neofascism & Journamalism: A journamalistic world in which it would be “biased” to spend resources discovering whether something bad is true about any Republican unless some other Republican has already claimed it is true:
Michael Tomasky: Donald Trump Is Losing It. Will the Media Make It a Story?: ‘The media’s obsessions with the mental acuity of our presidential candidates seems dangerously one-sided…. [Trump] confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. And not once. Twice. Maybe four times, if you want to be technical about it. You’d think that this would be pretty big news. And it was, but mostly only because Haley herself ran with the comments and made an issue of them, questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office…. [But] far more outlets waited until Haley starting making hay of it…. Nikki and Nancy… wasn’t just confusing names. Confusing names is understandable…. But Trump confused Pelosi and Haley as people…. The New York Times did one story on this, last October. But one story doesn’t qualify as “coverage”… <https://newrepublic.com/article/178288/trump-haley-pelosi-media-2024>
GPT-LLM-AML: Yes, ChatGPT and company can do some things remarkably well. But only some things. And the questions then become: How much work do you need to put into the prompt so that it lands in a corner of ;its model of the internet that has people writing things that do what you want it to do? Wouldn’t it be easier to do it yourself? How much enthusiasm is a “Clever Hans” effect? And for how many humans is this true—that it would be more efficient to pay them to do nothing, and then get someone else to do the work?:
Mathew Taylor: The Ultimate Guide to Prompt Engineering: ‘Prompting AI tools is a new form of management science…. Five pillars…. 1. Give direction: Describe the desired style in detail or reference a relevant persona. 2. Specify format: Define what rules to follow and establish the structure of the response. 3. Provide examples: Supply a diverse set of test cases where the task was done correctly. 4. Evaluate quality: Identify errors and rate responses, testing what drives performance. 5. Divide labor: Split tasks into multiple steps, chained together for complex goals… <https://every.to/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-prompt-engineering>
Metaversity: Steve Troughton-Smith: ‘All the amazing visionOS apps we've seen are pretty much 1:1 Microsoft's Hololens demos from 2016, but backed by a real OS, SDK and ecosystem. No smoke and mirrors, no 'concepts’, no 'Contoso’. Apple doesn't have to fake it. Execution is everything… <https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/111802607209635632>
Snazzy Labs: ‘The more I see the Apple Vision Pro written off as a “dev kit,” the less I agree with it. You don’t sell a dev kit in every retail store where you have dozens of prescription lens and face shield SKUs—and train the entire staff about it—while offering 25-minute 1:1 demos to customers. This is an expensive product, yes, and one they know they cannot sell to *most* people, but they are absolutely trying to sell the *vision* of it to everyone because they 100% believe it’s a big deal. Otherwise, it’d be like the rack-mount Mac Pro you can only order online. This is not that. It’s not a dev kit. Apple truly believes it’s the “next big thing”—just one they can’t sell to everyone on earth yet. The $599 iPhone (2007) was the same. Expensive and limited in capability, sure. But not a dev kit… <https://twitter.com/SnazzyLabs/status/1749860853481132354>
Economics: Scott Galloway: ‘For profit companies are so great at making profits that they should not be trusted for anything else...
Paul Krugman: Full Employment Is Good for Society: ‘The benefits of reduced discrimination were offset by an increase in overall income inequality, in particular a widening gap between wages in relatively low-paid jobs and wages for the highly paid. Since Black workers remained underrepresented in well-paying jobs, the growing polarization of economic opportunity snatched away many of the gains one might have expected from a society that, again, was still racist but not as racist as before. Which brings us to the surprising progress of the past few years…. I get two kinds of pushback…. Republicans… [who] say that it was a bad or terrible year for the country, even though almost 70 percent of them say that it was OK or better for them personally…. Some on the left… insist that our so-called recovery helped only the rich and did nothing for ordinary families. This is completely wrong… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/opinion/full-employment-economy-mlk.html>
Will Schmitt: Passive eclipses active in US fund market as assets swell to $13.3tn: ‘Milestone comes after decades of growth in index investment products: Actively managed US mutual and exchange traded funds shed about $450bn last year, while passive funds took in about $529bn… <https://www.ft.com/content/faf74f66-c4d6-45aa-bb30-0e73d523c547>
Matthew C. Klein: America's Housing Rebound: ‘Despite years of the highest real mortgage interest rates in almost two decades, construction and renovation spending have been holding steady, if not accelerating outright. It is not surprising that homebuilding and home sales both tanked in 2022, as mortgage rates soared at the fastest pace since 1981. What is surprising is the extent to which many aspects of the market have rebounded in 2023 despite mortgage rates staying high. This resilience is further evidence that the U.S. economy is now able to withstand substantially higher interest rates than in the 2010s… <http://theovershoot.co/p/americas-housing-rebound>
Economic History: Jamelle Bouie: ‘By treating american race hierarchy and nazi antisemitism as manifestations of a broader system you’re flattening the critical distinction that the former emerges out of the capitalist mode of production & remains fundamentally about exploitation and the latter was a project of extermination… <https://bsky.app/profile/jbouie.bsky.social/post/3kjjx4ca5uy2u>
Neofascism & Journamalism: Adam Serwer: ‘One takeaway from… [Nick Confessore’s] piece is that people who saw who the professional “anti woke” types really were got scolded for accurately describing their beliefs because discourse cops decided that was impolite… <https://bsky.app/profile/adamserwer.bsky.social/post/3kjjdlqejjd2y>
Neofascism: Martin Wolf: The bitter lessons of Brexit: ‘Addressing the UK’s challenges requires more than the performative politics of populist leaders…. A classic populist alliance of fanatics and opportunists mixed simplistic analysis with heated rhetoric and outright lies to weaken the UK’s most important economic relationship and threaten its domestic stability…. This supposed liberation has greatly curtailed the freedom of many millions of people on both sides. Whose freedom has it increased? That of British politicians. They can act more freely than they could when bound by EU rules. What have they done with this freedom? They have lied about… the Northern Ireland Protocol. They have threatened to break international law. They even proposed eliminating thousands of pieces of legislation inherited from EU membership, regardless of the consequences. These people have, in sum, destroyed the country’s reputation for good sense, moderation and decency. All this is a natural result of the classic populist blend of paranoia, ignorance, xenophobia, intolerance of opposition and hostility to constraining institutions… <https://www.ft.com/content/717c3c59-795b-4620-ad9b-a44a359077ca>
Silicon Valley: Tim Bray: Mourning for Google: ‘“Ten blue links”· I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted…. But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic…. And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search…. Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious. But I do have a question. What to use? · Among Google products, I mean. These days, when I use Google Search or Chrome or Maps I just don’t feel like they’re on my side. And maybe that’s not unreasonable; after all, I’m not paying for them…. Enshittification is creeping in at the edges… <https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/01/15/Google-2024>
Our text yet again this morning comes from the highly estimable Martin Wolf: Martin Wolf: The bitter lessons of Brexit: ’A classic populist alliance of fanatics and opportunists mixed simplistic analysis with heated rhetoric and outright lies to weaken the UK’s most important economic relationship and threaten its domestic stability…. This supposed liberation has greatly curtailed the freedom of many millions…. Whose freedom has it increased? That of British politicians. They can act more freely…. What have they done with this freedom? They have lied about… the Northern Ireland Protocol… threatened to break international law… destroyed the country’s reputation for good sense, moderation and decency. All this is a natural result of the classic populist blend of paranoia, ignorance, xenophobia, intolerance of opposition and hostility to constraining institutions… <
As Martin Wolf observes , the post-1990 landscape of global trade and finance hyperglobalization was indeed the result of the container, the jumbo jet, the submarine fiber-optic cable, and of the two preceding centuries of global economic divergence.
The slides from the third lecture of my first post-big book excursion through the economic history of the 20th century; a very quick & inadequate runup to how human society arrived at the 1870 hinge of history…
An early DRAFT of a piece I did for a 2024 look-ahead for Nikkei in Japan...Thank you for reading Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. This post is public so feel free to share it. Nine months ago New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote, with respect to the onrushing approach of the latest revolution in information technology in the form of large-scale neural-network machine-learning model systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT4:
The normalization of consumer sentiment continues; Looking back at Silicon Valley “Futurism”; Bari Weiss’s “Free Press” is a parody site; did you have “Christianity as Noble Lie” on your Bingo card?; Moyn’s fantasies of pre-Cold War liberalism; Apple visionPro headset definitely does not look cool; consider Oculus; very briefly noted; & Hexapodia podcas…
BREXIT. Martin Wolf spells it out, correctly. The vitriol to be seen when watching BBC programs like "Question Time" that focussed on this issue was so divisive. Brexiteers would not acknowledge that this would be anything other than an unalloyed benefit. The motive was "keeping those "furrners" out. Screw the risk of any losses - most of which were not believed to affect the older generation. I lost long standing "friends" over the issue.
I will say that Brexit was more a trigger than indicative of of the mood of the ruling party. The UK Home Office became very aggressive towards any perceived foreigner, even UK ex-pats trying to renew passports. Almost every week another story emerges of the Home Office denying residency to EU citizens having lived in Britain for many decades, often for teh most trivial of reasons. This is all of a piece with teh same type of stories over the Windrush scandal, perpetrated entirely by the Home Office and its "hostile policy".
Britain has become stupid. The US seems to be headed in the same stupid direction.
"Enshittification [of Google Search] is creeping in at the edges"
That's a bit of a puzzling comment. Google Search has been on a linear descent toward craterization for the last 5 years, and has been unreliable and essentially unusable for the last 2 years. Even if you know the seldom-used parameters and filters (many of which don't seem to actually work any more) you cannot trust any result you get from Google without checking it against 2-3 other sources. It is a haven of false information, grift, and fraud.
Good to see former Googlers are finally recognizing this, so that's something.
BREXIT. Martin Wolf spells it out, correctly. The vitriol to be seen when watching BBC programs like "Question Time" that focussed on this issue was so divisive. Brexiteers would not acknowledge that this would be anything other than an unalloyed benefit. The motive was "keeping those "furrners" out. Screw the risk of any losses - most of which were not believed to affect the older generation. I lost long standing "friends" over the issue.
I will say that Brexit was more a trigger than indicative of of the mood of the ruling party. The UK Home Office became very aggressive towards any perceived foreigner, even UK ex-pats trying to renew passports. Almost every week another story emerges of the Home Office denying residency to EU citizens having lived in Britain for many decades, often for teh most trivial of reasons. This is all of a piece with teh same type of stories over the Windrush scandal, perpetrated entirely by the Home Office and its "hostile policy".
Britain has become stupid. The US seems to be headed in the same stupid direction.
"Enshittification [of Google Search] is creeping in at the edges"
That's a bit of a puzzling comment. Google Search has been on a linear descent toward craterization for the last 5 years, and has been unreliable and essentially unusable for the last 2 years. Even if you know the seldom-used parameters and filters (many of which don't seem to actually work any more) you cannot trust any result you get from Google without checking it against 2-3 other sources. It is a haven of false information, grift, and fraud.
Good to see former Googlers are finally recognizing this, so that's something.