My Recent Interviews Reveal Growing Optimism: On þe "Pitchfork Economics" Podcast; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-03-26 Su
Wiþ Nick Hanauer & company of Civic Ventures; standing up chatbots for individual documents; NC Medicaid expansion; a forthcoming software cost revolution?; del Mastro, Schell, Ham, & Social Studie...
FOCUS: Another More Optimistic Slouching Podcast: This One wiþ “Pitchfork Economics wiþ Nick Hanauer”, Over at Civic Ventures:
<https://pitchforkeconomics.com>
Their focus point: Any society that allows itself to become radicallyunequal eventually collapse into an uprising or a police state—or both. Join venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading political and economiic thinkers in an exploration of who gets what and why. Turns out, everything you learned about economics is wrong. And if we don’t do something about rising inequality, the pitchforks are coming.
<https://overcast.fm/+v_Xjd2KC4>
Rough Highlights:
Lightning-bolt moments of genius before 1870 were next to useless for humanity without the right social network to put their ideas into practice. Nikola Tesla would not have been able to contribute without the support of George Westinghouse—who provided Tesla with the resources and network to develop and deploy his ideas. After Tesla’s time at Westinghouse ended, he became a charity case without the ability to make anything truly useful…
Around 1600 Tomaso de Campanela and Francis Bacon were among the very first to envision a world where science and technology were used to create a society of abundance and human progress, for no world can approach utopia if people have to worry about their basic needs, if women have to have eight pregnancies just to expect to have two children to survive, if everyone is at the mercy of biological vicissitudes…
While we have made great strides in creating a post-scarcity world, we still have a long way to go in terms of using our wealth wisely and distributing it equitably. But I remain optimistic that we can continue to make progress towards creating a better world for all…
People feel very resentful or angry about others’ receiving benefits they feel the others do not deserve…
Industrial policy? No, I don’t think its first-order effects must be to boost capital and avoid boosting labor. I see no reason why policies should not focus on creating good jobs with good wages, rather than simply incentivizing capital. One largely sterile strand of economic theory focuses solely on maximizing production, without considering the distribution of wealth and income. The second, much healthier, strand emphasizes the need to consider both aspects when designing policies…
Massive, massive social-welfare function deadweight losses are created by deviations of the actual distribution of income and wealth from the distribution that corresponds to what people deserve and what incentivization requires. The greatest market failure is that social power is improperly distributed.
Obama-era energy-sector industrial policy was wildly successful, but that is not widely known or appreciated by a general public, which has heard nothing about it but “Solyndra” from Fox News, amplified by the MSM…
Invest in Intel,even though I do not think they will catch up to TSMC. Such investments will keep the pressure on TSMC to charge less. But I not think Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CEO, will be happy with the company’s state in 15 years…
With 8 billion people in the world, collectively we have great intelligence and the ability to think big thoughts…
We had a chance to address global warming. We were close to taking action 30 years ago, with Al Gore, But we missed the opportunity…
The failure of the Biden administration to vaccinate the entire world for free quickly led to the development of new COVID variants like Omicron, which proved very costly…
How have I decided to do the work I do? Gradient descent. Do in the next half hour what seems most fun to do. I believe I can make the most positive impact on the world by working on what I enjoy most, because there is where I am most enthusiastic...
ONE VIDEO: Stand Up Your Own ChatBots wiþ Individual Documents:
Not (yet) a good way to learn things, or a substitute for reading. But excellent for reviewing:
ONE IMAGE: A Forthcoming Software Revolution?
MUST-READ: North Carolina Medicaid Expansion:
I find myself quite distressed at this piece by the very smart Jonathan Cohn.
He tells us, or his headline writer tells us, that the piece will be about how the North Carolina GOP changed its mind on Medicaid expansion.
But all we have is one transparent lie: North Carolina senate leader Phil Berger’s claim that he had not, before, been given the information he needed to understand that the Medicaid expansion did not in fact “reward dependency”. The Obama administration and expansion advocates dumped soooooo much information about who was in the Medicaid-expansion population into his, and every single other Republican’s, information stream. Berger and the others ignored it. They ignored it because they didn’t care. And because they saw a political purpose in ignoring it:
Jonathan Cohn: How This State GOP Completely Changed Its Mind On Medicaid Expansion: ‘Phil Berger, the state’s deeply conservative Senate leader who had long opposed Medicaid expansion, was among those who eventually took notice. Sometime a few years ago ago (accounts about precisely when differ) he began signaling he was open to the idea. In 2022, he gave his full endorsement, touting not just economic benefits to the state but also the potential human impact. He used to worry about rewarding dependency, he said, but had since realized that most of the people who stood to benefit were working. They just couldn’t afford insurance “More often than not, what you have is a situation where folks who would be eligible for Medicaid in the expansion population are people that are actually working full time,” Berger said in an interview with PBS News Hour earlier this year. “Sort of the person that seems to be helped the most would be a single female with one or two children who works a full-time job”…
Jonathan needs to tell me why they now care. Is it that, as death approaches, they have finally concluded that they need to at least make vague motions toward letting Jesus Christ into their hearts? Or has the political calculus changed? And, if the second, how and why?
Very Briefly Noted:
Paul Clayton: ‘Back in the early days, I remember some of the futurists saying that someday everyone would have their own domain. That never came to be. Most people have a pale shadow of a domain called a twitter account…
Ken White: Stanford Law Responds Appropriately, If Belatedly, To Judge Duncan Fiasco: ‘Last time I indulged myself in some spleen-venting…. I was unkind and uncharitable to everyone, as was suggested to be by friends, colleagues, students, and a federal appellate judge. Look, I am what it says on the label. I retract nothing, but I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by a mature, forceful, principled response to the events from Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez…
Katanga Johnson and Saleha Mohsin: US Mulls More Support for Banks While Giving First Republic Time: ‘US authorities are considering expanding an emergency lending facility for banks in ways that would give First Republic Bank more time to shore up its balance sheet, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Dan Shipper: Awe, Anxiety, & AI: ‘Navigating the conflicting emotions of this moment in tech….
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: DeSantis' Drag Show Fiasco, Hate Crimes on Rise, Lauren Boebert Encourages Teen Sex, Idaho Doctors Flee State, James Paterson Banned, Stephen King vs Ted Cruz, Hungry People Don't Exist, More: ‘My take on news, pop culture, sports, and whatever else interests me…
Maciej Ceglowski: ‘The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt…
Cory Doctorow: So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me: ‘We’re good, seriously. It’s hard to overstate how liberatingthe early years of internet publishing were. After a century of publishing driven by the needs of an audience, we could finally switch to a model driven by the interests of writers. That meant that instead of trying to figure out what some “demographic” wanted to read about, we wrote what wewanted to read…
Azeem Azhar: AI is the real Web 3: ‘Large language models … are the future…. Web3… focused on building a data model on the blockchain…. Adoption has been slow… dubious claims and behaviours. In contrast, AI’s rapid improvement… immense potential to revolutionize how we access and use information…. I have gotten more done using ChatGPT than I ever did on the Ethereum Virtual Machine…
¶s:
Paul Ham: 1913: ‘In tandem with the hardening of conservative values was the great chugging sound of industrialisation, which held out the hope of jobs, better health and the deliverance from squalor: ‘The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years (5 words),’ wrote the young French poet Charles Péguy in 1913 (he would soon die on the Western Front). (20) Contrary to the artists’ ‘impression’ of a world that was fragmenting, or being dismantled and transformed, most people perceived a world that was manifestly not breaking up. Ordinary people, big business and political leaders looked out on a planet that was hardening into a steel block, a motorcar, a dreadnought, or a machine gun. Their world was forged in a smelter and solidifying, not crumbling or dissolving. Their future envisaged the rise of nation states and global empires, and the preservation of order, class and hierarchy…
Harvard University Gazette: A Brief History of Social Studies: ‘1. History & Lit a good model... 2. The disciplinary structure of Social Sciences is an iron cage… 3. History matters… 4. “Social theory” matters… 5. But social theory can be your tool rather than your master only if you gain a critical distance on your own… 6. The best way to gain that critical distance is through intensive focus on the creative-trespassing “classics”… 7. But which of the “classics” are useful for understanding society?…
Orville Schell: Xi Jinping’s Chinese Tragedy: ‘OS: Films… in China about a powerful warrior who refused to tolerate any offense from anybody, especially foreigners. Xi embraced this unrepentant aggressiveness…. No longer was China developing under the banner of a “peaceful rise.”… As one country after another got a taste of the “wolf warrior” treatment, political leaders began to question China’s professed friendliness…. China attacked India for no discernable reason…. Hu… was scheduled to be sitting on the stage in what is always a thoroughly scripted, highly regimented spectacle. But for reasons we still don’t fully understand, he was escorted out…. All we really know is that something happened that was not in the official script. For a party that has always been allergic to anything spontaneous, it was an arresting moment…. Nobody wanted to acknowledge what was going on, lest they commit lèse-majesté in front of Xi. Now, if I were Xi, I would have stood up, embraced Hu, picked up the microphone, and said to the whole zombie-like collection of assembled party officials: “Let’s thank comrade Hu for his great service to the nation. He’s feeling unwell and now needs to take a rest.” Then, he could have had him escorted respectfully from the room. But no! He was indecorously expelled, and his former colleagues just sat there like robots doing nothing. That little drama says a lot about how the Chinese system works…
Addison del Mastro: Misunderstanding the Meaning of “Housing Crisis”: ‘Yesterday, I came across this letter to the editor in the Alexandria Times, headlined “How about a population cap?”, responding to nearby Arlington’s Missing Middle housing policy. An excerpt: “Cramming more structures to house more people into the defined space called Arlington or Alexandria is not going to make housing costs more affordable. These costs, whether for building materials, sites on which to build or for the resulting rents, are determined by market forces, i. e., supply and demand. Here’s what these two forces foretell for the champions of equity, inclusion and whatever else is agitating them to make Arlington and Alexandria more densely populated: More population density makes Alexandria and Arlington more costly.” Why the fact that supply and demand determine housing costs, which is true, implies that building more housing will in fact exacerbate unaffordability is not explained…. Note that the author refers to housing advocates as “champions of equity, inclusion and whatever else.” Keep that in mind…
Software was once my line of work. I've lived through too many software revolutions to expect all that much from AI. There were high level languages, structured programming, object oriented programming, automatic memory management, relational databases, sand boxing, code validation, algorithmic verification and at least a dozen others. And, here we are.
(1) AI seems to be focused on the easiest part of coding, cranking out lines of code. The hard parts are figuring out what the software needs to do, dealing with the APIs and their discontents, dealing with obscure and unreported runtime errors, improving performance and eliminating all sorts of little glitches. Writing the code is usually about 20% of the work.
(2) We have more programmers than ever, especially if you count declarative languages like screen scrapers, report generators, HTML and CSS. If AI makes some class of programming easier, odds are that standards will change to demand even more programming. Call it induced demand.
(3) People will be surprised at how much labor it will take to train and validate AI systems. Someone has to gather the corpus, validate it, train the system, verify and tweak it, apply it and update it. Add dealing with regulation some time in the next decade. Since AI algorithms are not transparent, fixing problems will require a lot of skills that barely exist today.
"Industrial policy? No, I don’t think its first-order effects must be to boost capital and avoid boosting labor."
Certainly not "avoid." But I don't see why each and every policy/policy area has to try to achieve multiple objectives. [Tinbergen]