It’s Not Just Going to Be Art; It Is Going to Be Words as Well, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-10-20 Th
CONDITION: I Do Not Understand the Current State of the Macroeconomy:
Charles Steindel: “The Philly Fed manufacturing numbers were pretty much like NY. Things are terrible, they are going to stay terrible, but we are boosting employment and want to keep on doing so…”
FIRST: It’s Not Just Going to Be Art; It Is Going to Be Words as Well:
Modern AI—Machine Learning—is coming for wordsmiths as well as daubers. Suppose I start with:
Ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus:
World Economic History, -6000 to 1870
Brad DeLong
2022-10-20 Th
Between 1848 and 1873 John Stuart Mill published the successive additions of his Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. In each edition of the book he included the following passage:
“Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect… great changes in human destiny… <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.36903>”
1873 was not that long ago. For somebody like my son, born in 1990, it was the date of birth of his great-great grandparents. From 1870 to today is five generations. From -6000 to 1870 is 260 generations. Moreover, there was about as much proportional technological progress from -6000 to 1870 as there has been from 1870 to today. Yet between -6000 and 1870 typical human standards of living increased by perhaps 40%. By contrast between 1870 and today humanity’s collective standard of living has grown ten-fold—and the typical standard of living more than 5-fold. For from -6000 to 1870 human population grew from 5 to 1300 million—260-fold. Since 1870 human population has grown from 1.3 to 7.6 billion—six-fold.
That population growth is the answer to the question of why humanity’s productivity and standard of living has risen so much since 1870, while it rose so little before. Before 1870, that greater population puts more pressure on resources caused nearly all of pre-1870 technological progress to be eaten up by the need to compensate for the smaller farm sizes and poorer near-surface ores available to the average member of the growing population. Before 1870, technology lost its race with fertility. After 1870, it won it.
Thus the first questions about the pre-1870 economy present themselves: Why was technological progress so slow before 1870. And why was population growth so relatively fast, by the yardstick of the contemporaneous rate of technological improvement, over the nearly 8 millennia between -6018 70? Why, and how? Put a pin in those questions: we will return to them later.
That technology lost its race with fertility over -6000 to 1870 profoundly shaped all of human history not only up to 1870, but since. Technology’s loss of its race against fertility meant that the pre-1870 world was one of dire poverty: there was absolutely no chance, back then, for humanity to be productive enough to bake a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough. People, however, still desperately wanted enough for themselves and their families. What to do? Since you could not produce with high enough productivity, you chose—if you could—the alternative: to take. You established yourself as part of the elite, élbowed competitors for membership out of the way, dominated, and took: history was then a coalition of thugs-with-spears plus their accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. They lived the (relatively) good life that we remember as the high civilizations of the past. The strong did what they wished, while the weak suffered what they must…
And then I ask the AI at <http://lex.page> to continue. It comes up with:
Ancient Rome was such an elite. So too were ancient Greece, China, and India. Further back in time, other elites—the priests, nobles, and kings of the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley—lived large on the sweat and toil of the common people. And the common people were kept in their place—and in poverty—by the force of the elites’ arms.
But the elites were not always successful in their efforts. All of…
Nathan Baschez says that it seems, right now, useful for sparking ideas—i.e., overcoming writer’s block:
<https://every.to/divinations/how-lex-happened>
I would like to see what it does were it to be trained not so much on the general set of words on the internet, but on what I have written…
And then I went and asked <http://nightcafe.studio> to respond to the prompt “Brad DeLong”:
MUST-READ: Fanfic Department:
Ellie Carina: The Trials of Mairon…
Oþer Things Þt Went Whizzing by…
Very Briefly Noted:
Noah Smith: National Conservatism has no coherent, workable plan for America: ‘No workable, coherent economic plan.... National Conservatism’s social and cultural approach is anti-nationalist.... National Conservatives are vulnerable to bad influences on foreign policy...
Richard Powers: Two thoughts from Richard Powers: ‘The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story…’ ‘When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder…’
Martin Sandbu: How (not) to intervene in energy prices: ‘Price caps give the wrong incentive—to consume even more of something whose scarcity is the root of the problem…. We shouldn’t let the debate be distracted into “pros and cons of rationing” but focus squarely on the kind of rationing that is best…
Randy Au: In-person-only conferences are so… bleh: ‘By just about any definition of the word, I’m considered an extreme introvert. Socializing on the internet, or amongst a tiny group of <5 people is more than enough to fulfil the majority my psychological needs. Obviously I’d hate going to in-person conferences…
Yasmine Seale: The Annotated Arabian Nights…
Hamish McKenzie: Introducing The Active Voice, a new podcast about writing and the internet: ‘A survival guide for writers in the 2020s...
Matt Ford: The Chief Justice Who Isn’t: ‘In 2009, C-SPAN conducted a series of interviews with the Supreme Court justices…. Host Susan Swain asked him what his fellow Americans should understand about the Supreme Court’s role in modern society. “The most important thing for the public to understand is that we are not a political branch of government,” Roberts told her. “They don’t elect us. If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad”…
Alex Shephard: The Spectacular Failure of Right-Wing Social Media Platforms: ‘From Kanye West (maybe?) buying Parler (but why) to Donald Trump's flailing (and scammy) Truth Social, the "free-speech" revolution is floundering...
¶s:
Nicole Barbaro: Review of THE PARENT TRAP: ‘The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parent and Fix Our Inequality Crisis, by Nate Hilger…. Inequality we see in developmental outcomes is the result of the inequality of parents’ ability to build the necessary skills children need.... It’s society’s fault for putting so responsibility on parents to be experts in areas that some adults spend decades in educational settings to become experts. His proposal is that we spend at least as much on children as we do on the elderly… to, as the book title says, stop overloading our parents… As a developmental psychologist, I agree most strongly with Hilger’s view that children need far more skilled support especially in the first five years of development prior to formal education. Many behavior genetic proponents, in my view, seem to forget about the immense brain development that occurs in the first few years of life, years in which too many children develop in underestimating environments that inhibit the reaching of their full potential. A view which is still compatible with what we know about behavioral genetics of cognitive ability...
Tyler Cowen: Classical liberalism vs. The New Right: ‘Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson…. Skeptical about free speech…. Sociological forces operating that are seen as more important than “mere” free market economics…. A self-validating structure to New Right arguments over time…. While I try my best to understand the New Right, I am far from being persuaded…. Successful societies are based on trust, including trust in leaders, and the New Right doesn’t offer resources for forming that trust or any kind of comparable substitute…
Robert Skidelsky: Gorbachev’s Tragic Legacy: ‘Admired in the West but loathed by his countrymen as a harbinger of Russia’s post-Cold War misfortune, Mikhail Gorbachev fully grasped the immense challenges of reforming the ailing Soviet Union. Today’s Russia largely reflects the anti-Western grievances stemming from his failure…. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet Union could not keep up with the US militarily while satisfying civilian demands for higher living standards. But while he rejected the Brezhnev era’s stagnation-inducing policies, he had nothing coherent to put in their place. Instead of facilitating a functioning market economy, his rushed abandonment of the central-planning system enriched the corrupt managerial class in the Soviet republics and led to a resurgence of ethnic nationalism. To my mind, Gorbachev is a tragic figure. While he fully grasped the immense challenges facing Soviet communism, he had no control over the forces he helped unleash…
John Gruber: Monica Chin Reviews the New Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga: ‘Writing for The Verge…. $2,369… a Core i7-1260P with eight efficiency cores and four performance cores (as well as 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage). Unfortunately, that new processor doesn’t deliver the kind of performance gains I imagine many X1 Yoga users will care about…. For things like document markup, presentations, word processing, and video calls, I never got any heat or heard any fan noise …. Unfortunately, I am going to have to say the dreaded sentence: Iwasn’t impressed with the battery life…”. Intel’s chip offerings are clearly to blame, but that very much is a Lenovo problem…. ThinkPads are supposed to be top-tier industry-leading laptops…. But now they’ve released a $2,400 notebook that gets crap battery life and only stays cool and quiet when you stick to basic productivity tasks...
Scott Lemieux: The “classical” stands for “fascist”: ‘A thing that actually exists is a conference on “academic freedom” at which the keynote speaker is…Peter Thiel. The rest of the lineup is as you’d expect…. Kieran Healy: ‘I assume Niall Ferguson's talk will foreground his valiant efforts to get people to dig up dirty on an undergraduate student whose politics he didn't like, and also his "subtle game of grinding them down on the committee" they were both on…. Like, if they offered me enough money, maybe I could go to the conference and promise to be good, and then in between the panel and dinner I could sneak out and get maybe thirty minutes worth of talking to John Meyer or something. That'd be worth it. Anyway, what better exemplifies the best of the Classical Liberal Tradition—from the keen empirical eye of an Adam Smith to the startlingly open mind of a Jeremy Bentham—than a Keynote from the guy who regrets women getting the right to vote and crushed a gossip site he disliked…”. Peter McGratton: “I look forward to the panel both-sides-ing climate change and Covid…
The Mystery of the Current State of the Economy reminds me of the Air France Flight 447 crash. When your instruments are giving you confusing messages and not responding the way you expect to your control inputs, doubling down those inputs is probably not going to fix the situation.
Just for info: here in the Netherlands we will be adopting a variation of the "tiered tariff", where the price for gas will be limited to €1,45 per cubic meter for the first 1,200 cubic meters, and for electricity to €0,40 per KWh for the first 2,900 KWh, with standard market prices above these limits.
As Sandbu suggests, this seems a reasonable compromise. Yes, it means that some people will receive the benefit even if they don't need it, but there are instances - and this temporary measure seems to me to be one of them - where the costs of means testing exceed the benefits. But it also lets "the market" do its job above the minimum, thus discouraging excessive consumption.