CHIPS Act Lurching Forward; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-17 Mo
New York Times learned ignorance; CHIPS Act implementation; Cowboy Junkies; working with a software copilot; I need a bigger computer; & Potter, Griffin, Hiltzik, Geneva, & McFaul...
FIRST: Why Is Knowing Little an Advantage for New York Times Reporters?:
This:
Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan: People Are Using A.I. Right Now: ‘ChatGPT and other A.I. tools are helping people to save time at work, to code without knowing how to code, to make daily life easier or just to have fun…
“Code without knowing how to code”: ask Chat GPT4 to code something even moderately complex, copy and paste the result into an environment, and run it, and odds are it will not work without at least some debugging. What software copilots allow you to do is to remove the book you had at your left hand that you frantically paged through trying to figure out what the exact format for that is in this computer language, and to avoid the visits to confusing Stack Overflow threads. You still have to “know how” in the sense of knowing how to set up code architecture, know when something is close enough to correct for it to be worthwhile running it to get an error message, and know how to debug. Since nearly all of us are much better at architecture, recognizing that it is close, and debugging than we are at actually writing stuff ex nihilo, it is an enormous productivity amplification for programmers.
But it does not allow people “to code without knowing how to code”, and nobody who actually knows anything about it would say that. And yet they do…
OK. Maybe the problem is that they believed Ehtan Mollick when he said “I can’t code” when what he meant was “I have a day job, and can’t code well”? But still…
FOCUS: CHIPS Act Lurching Forward:
:
Back before 2000 the Trump administration, the Paul Ryan House, the Mitch McConnell Senate, and the entire caucus of professional Republican economists united behind a tax cut for the rich that created no net incentives for investment in America. They claimed they were doing it to boost America’s capital stock—by an extra 40% when the economy would have arrived at its steady-state, according to Robert Barro. And Mike Boskin signed on to that forecast. In actual fact it had zero effect.
And now the Biden Administration with CHIPS (opposed by 2/3 of Senate and 9/10 of House Republicans) and IRA (opposed by all Republicans), has actually done something, and set things in motion:
Amanda Chu & Oliver Roeder: ‘Transformational change’: Biden’s industrial policy begins to bear fruit: ‘Companies have committed roughly $204bn in large-scale projects to boost US semiconductor and clean-tech production as of April 14, promising to create at least 82,000 jobs. While not all these projects were a direct result of the passage of these bills, they will probably be eligible for the tax credits. The amount is almost double the capital spending commitments made in the same sectors in 2021 and nearly 20 times the amount in 2019…. “The industrial policy that’s being put into place hasn’t been seen for generations,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “This is a generational, transformational change that we’re seeing in America and our productive capacity.”… More than 75 per cent of all investment is headed to Republican-held Congressional districts, where it will create 58,000 jobs, according to FT data. The surge in spending pledges in Republican areas comes despite the GOP’s votes against both the Chips Act and IRA in Congress…
Moreover, it is set things in motion in the western alliance beyond the United States. The European Union looks ready to begin to make a similar commitment of about 1/3 of the size of CHIPS and IRA to its own semiconductor and green transition sectors.
I have heard a bunch of invalid criticisms of the Biden administrations industrial policy push – mostly that holding firms that receive support to labor standards is counterproductive and wasteful. The only criticism I have heard that seems to me to be substantially valid. Is the criticism that policymakers have underprioritized both the semiconductor sector’s and the green-transition sector’s dependence on second- and third-tier suppliers that produce essential inputs. Much more U.S. government thought should have gone to working backward through the Leontieff matrix to understand where potential supply-chain bottlenecks actually are.
But at this stage I am happy to be able to say: so far, so good; things seem to be going quite well.
ONE VIDEO: Cowboy Junkies: Sweet Jane:
MUST-READ: Working with a CoPilot:
Mainframe computing was the first, personal computing was the second, the internet was the third, and social media was the fourth white-collar information-systems work revolution in my lifetime.
Now here comes number five. We need to figure out how to master it before it, masters us, as the social media white-collar information systems, work revolution did:
Byrne Hobart: Working with a Copilot: ‘Ask a two-part question: 1. Which things you do can be automated?… 2. Which automatable components of a job are the most important complements to other work?… Part of working alongside LLMs means figuring out where you have a comparative advantage and where the machines do. This is very easy to see in coding…. It's very easy to sketch out a project, and for most of the boilerplate components you're really just writing a descriptive function name and letting the model do the rest. But you can't just mindlessly replace the process with AI. You'll get a poorly-structured mess in no time at all—with the awesome power of AI, you can create a year's worth of technical debt in a single afternoon!… For LLM-assisted code, the big tradeoff to keep in mind is between writing something fast and being able to maintain it. (Interestingly enough, this puts an even bigger premium on using very readable languages, because you'll spend relatively more of your time looking at code you didn't write and making sure you understand how it works.)… It doesn't help with more complicated decisions, but it does help to implement them. "Rewrite the following function to produce a timestamp, and rewrite this other function to accept a timestamp as one of its inputs" is a task that ChatGPT handles quite easily…
ONE IMAGE: I Shoulda Bought a Bigger Computer:
Very Briefly Noted:
Rana Foroohar: Immigration is back in the US: ‘The return of migrant dynamism could mean good things for American growth and the fight against inflation…
Patrick Jenkins: Deposit insurance is key to the confidence trick of banking: ‘Reforms to guarantee schemes in UK and US are essential to avoid a deeper crisis…
Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C McGregor: A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms: Political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures…. Scholars must analyze groups as they are embedded in relations of power…. Scholarship routinely lacks analysis of inequality…
Haifeng Huang (2014): Propaganda as Signalling…
Virginia Heffernan: I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory: ‘As the US boosts production of silicon chips, an American journalist goes inside TSMC, the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry…
Aaron Rupar: The Dominion lawsuit is not going well for Fox News…
Marcin Wichary: Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the first great war for your thumbs:
‘Some brilliant, idiosyncratic—and often ill-fated—gambits to transform computer input…
Noah Smith: Five big trends that have changed in the last few years: ‘In which I pay attention to the world so you don't have to…. College tuition is going down now…. College tuition is going down now…. Fertility rates aren’t what they used to be…. China’s popularity as an investment destination is falling…. Inequality is falling (or at least has plateaued)…
¶s:
Brian Potter: How did solar power get cheap? Part I: ‘The most important government solar PV initiative during this era was likely the series of “Block Buys” by the Energy Research and Development Administration… to purchase a certain amount of solar PV cells from private companies, at specific prices and performance targets…. Between 1976 and 1981 the Block Buy program purchased 400 kilowatts of solar PV modules, about 17% of the total PV market at the time. (Today, annual solar module production is 268 gigawatts, or about 570,000 times as large as the market in the late 1970s). The cost of solar PV continued to fall. Silicon got cheaper, PV plants got larger and saw greater economies of scale, and PV modules got more efficient. By the early 1980s, the cost of solar PV had fallen to $11 per watt…
Elle Griffin: Economic possibilities for our grandchildren (re-visited): ‘Much of what [Keynes] said [in 1930] about the industrial revolution then, is being said about the AI revolution today. In fact, this exact speech might as well be given today. I originally intended to write an essay comparing notes between what Keynes thought then, and what we think now, then I realized his lecture was in the public domain and I changed course. I thought it might be more fun to annotate his original work with modern thoughts on the topic…. For the sake of brevity, I edited out some of the “super specific to the speech he gave in 1930 England” bits as well as the “a little bit long and fluffy…. there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes today in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them. I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs…
Michael Hiltzik: America’s decline in life expectancy speaks volumes about our problems: ‘U.S. average life expectancies are lowest in the Southeast, highest on the West Coast and the Northeast. But why?… Few developed countries other than the U.S. turned COVID and anti-pandemic options into political issues, converting such proven treatments as vaccines into partisan litmus tests. But COVID is far from the only explanation for America’s dismal trend line. The pandemic accounted for about half the decline in life expectancy, according to the CDC. “Unintentional injuries,” a category that includes drug overdoses, contributed an additional 16%, followed by heart disease (4.1%), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3%) and suicide (2.1%)…. They’re connected to what the CDC called “the social determinants of health” — “economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, racism, climate change and political systems.” Americans with the shortest life expectancies “tend to have the most poverty, face the most food insecurity, and have less or no access to healthcare,” Robert H. Shmerling of Harvard Medical School wrote in October. “Additionally, groups with lower life expectancy tend to have higher-risk jobs that can’t be performed virtually, live in more crowded settings, and have less access to vaccination, which increases the risk of becoming sick with or dying of COVID-19.” The magnitude and diversity of the problem should prompt Americans to engage in serious soul-searching. There’s little evidence of that happening…. What’s striking about recent figures compiled by Ney are the geographic disparities in longevity. “America is seeing the greatest gap in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years,” Ney says…
Tana Ganeva: Is the NYT Op-ed page anarchist performance art? An investigation: ‘Douthat merely asks questions, challenging his readers to reach their own conclusions—the Socratic method, as it were…. I bet that neither Douthat or DeSantis would deprive their own kids of Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrison. Also, Virgil’s “Aeneid” is all war, infidelity, and a sequel to a book about gay lovers (The Iliad)…. Their moral flaw though is the utter contempt they have for the people they ostensibly politically align with. It’s a flaw they share with DeSantis…. My favorite thing about wing nut GOP voters (stay with me here) is that they can always sniff out the “Machiavellian” culture elites that think they can fool thems yokels by pretending they like to hunt or whatever and don’t trust French fries or books…
Michael McFaul: Why Vladimir Putin’s Luck Ran Out: ‘Putin was simply at the right place at the right time…. Putin’s regime was resilient, neutralizing critical voices and nurturing popular support just enough to remain intact for more than two decades…. Putin’s war in Ukraine… triggered deep damage to his own country, especially to Russia’s armed forces, the economy, society, and, in the long run, to his own regime…. Aat least 200,000 Russian soldiers have died or been wounded on the battlefield in Ukraine so far. Russia has lost roughly ten-thousand pieces of military equipment, including thousands of vehicles (tanks, infantry and armored fighting vehicles, and others), more than a hundred aircraft and helicopters, and more than two-hundred command posts and communications stations. Russia will have to divert billions of dollars from things like education, infrastructure, and healthcare if its military is ever to reach its previous capacity…. Putin’s war has produced lasting, negative changes in Russian society. The Russians who have emigrated since the war began have tended to be more liberal and democratically inclined than an average Russian citizen…. Putin boasts that the Russian people “will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scums and traitors,” and sees ridding the country of this “fifth column” as a “natural and necessary self-purification of society” that will strengthen Russia. But what he forgets is that the people leaving are also the most innovative, creative, and entrepreneurial Russians…
At the 42-minute mark.
Yep, capital intensity of the manufacturing sector had barely budged and equipment input growth had receded since then. That's likely turning around now. The value of constriction put in place for manufacturing facilities is surging, lifting with it workers in construction of industrial buildings. Given the tight labor market and perhaps a scarcity of skilled workers, the capital intensity of manufacturing is likely to increase. That is closely related to productivity growth. The manufacturing sector had dragged productivity down over the last decade. That may change, perhaps raising potential GDP growth. It may be too early to call it a new steady state, but the Fed better pay attention and re-think its long-term assumptions of growth (and whether the economy is above or below potential). My worry is that too restrictive a monetary policy may nip this positive outlook for manufacturing in the bud. And my hope is that (although prices should matter to relocation decisions) some of this is semi-autonomous, driven by geopolitical reasons and the hard lessons businesses learnt from the supply chain snarls over the past few years. Fingers crossed.