No, I Do Not Think þe Microprocessor Doomed Social Democracy; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-02 Su
Art Goldhammer & the relative autonomy of the state; peak carbon; Microsoft GPT mojo; Ukraine's struggle; Pinecone, Ben Thompson, SK Ventures...
FOCUS: No, I Do Not Think the Microprocessor Doomed Social Democracy:
Very nice from Art Goldhammer:
Art Goldhammer: In left-liberal circles there is a rough consensus about what has gone wrong… neoliberalism and globalization…. From the late 1970s on, governments across the developed world retreated from the social democratic reforms credited with fostering the harmonious prosperity of the three decades following World War II—the period the French have dubbed les Trente Glorieuses—thereby triggering a populist and xenophobic backlash while polarizing previously consensual political systems and weakening resistance to authoritarian demagogues. This account of political change across the Western world since the 1980s has much to recommend it… is… espoused… by a number of excellent recent books, among them Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Michael Tomasky’s The Middle Out, and Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia. Yet each of these estimable authors embraces the notion that the novel feature of the period was superstructural… ideology was in the driver’s seat…. But what if… the key innovation… was the… microprocessor, which simultaneously created new markets, dramatically altered trade flows, and shifted both the economic and military balance of power among nations?… The microprocessor not only became the flagship product of the neoliberal era’s dominant industry but also served as its indispensable instrument, without which it would have been impossible to tame the torrents of information necessary to manage far-flung supply chains and global capital flows…. Chris Miller’s Chip War deserves credit precisely for redirecting our attention from superstructure to base, from the high political drama of the past four decades to the more prosaic business of manufacturing microchips…
What do I think of this? I think “yes”. One alternative way to conceptualize the political-economy history of the long 20th century since 1870 is to see it as a series of transformations from the Steampower to the Applied-Science to the Mass-Production to the Global Value-Chain and now into the Info-Biotech “modes of production”. Due to the extraordinary rapidity of technological change, each of these 40-hear transitions is of the same order of magnitude as the 700-year transformation from Agrarian-Age Feudal to Imperial-Commercial or the 200-year transformation from Imperial-Commercial to Steampower. And “modes of production” is not quite right. The distribution, communication, and, indeed, domination components are key as well.
However, when Charlie from Trier and Freddie from Barmen wrote about how “the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more…” they were primarily thinking of the 700 year transformation from Agrarian-Age Feudal to Imperial-Commercial Society. The “last instance” thus had plenty of time to arrive: there was lots of opportunity for time and chance to damp out the effects of different events and conjunctures.
Do note that as of 1880 the transition from Commercial-Imperial to Steampower society had been running for only 200 years. The last instance had definitely not arrived: while the Steampower mode-of-production was teaching people the lessons of socialism, there was no socialism yet. Indeed, in some respects 700 years had been too little for the “last instance” to fully arrive in the transition from Agrarian-Age Feudal to Commercial-Imperial society. There were lots of feudal survivals in the world of the late 1800s. Indeed, what is one to make of:
Exceptional periods… occur when… warring classes are… nearly equal… [so] state power… acquires… a certain independenc… the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie… the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie…. The latest achievement… is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation…the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage bumpkin-squires..
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The feudal survivals—the landlord-bureaucrat-soldier caste of northeastern Germany—that were supposed to have been overthrown hundreds of years before are still around, and still in control as of Engels’s old age. Engels thought it was ridiculous that Bismarck summoned the ghost of feudalism to maintain himself and his emperor. But he did it nonetheless.
What, then, are we to do in our day, when the mode-of-production shifts every 40 years or so? Then the speed of transformation negates any possibility of an analysis that solidly anchors the present superstructure in the base at all. The coming of the microprocessor, the jet with the flatbed seat, the internet, and hyperglobalization made rolling the stone of social democracy an uphill struggle against gravity. But it did not, alone, doom it
ONE-IMAGE: Peak Carbon Emissions?
ONE VIDEO: The Best of the Generative-AI Launch Demos:
MUST-READ: I Endorse This Good Take on Ukraine’s Struggle:
Jamie Mayerfeld: The Putinite Line: ‘Here is the narrative that Russia and many of its Western supporters tell. Ukraine and Russia belong together; they are joined by culture and history. But in 2014 a Western-backed coup overthrew the legitimate democratic leader of Ukraine, and the virulently anti-Russian far right took over the country. Crimea and the Donbas region chose to separate from Ukraine, and Russia came to their aid. Ukraine mercilessly bombed civilians in the Donbas. International mediators negotiated the Minsk accords between Ukraine and the Donbas separatists, but Ukraine violated the terms of the agreement. All this took place against the backdrop of NATO’s eastward expansion in violation of U.S. pledges made to Moscow in 1990. Putin… sought reassurances from the U.S. that it would not bring Ukraine into NATO. When the U.S. refused, Putin was motivated by his legitimate security concerns to launch an invasion of Ukraine. We see here many specific lies being stitched together to form a big lie…. In the decades before February 24, 2022, Russia had infiltrated Ukraine’s security services, poisoned a presidential candidate, backed a stolen election, supported corrupt leaders, encouraged those leaders to use deadly force against democracy protestors, annexed Ukrainian territory, instigated rebellions, and sent troops onto Ukrainian territory to battle the Ukrainian military, all the while stating that Ukraine was not a real country, and that its land formed part of the Russian world. The false narrative… is designed to bury the historical truth.... It nourishes, sustains, and strengthens Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine. It is a pack of lies that incites mass murder. How unfortunate that this false and deadly narrative was assiduously supported in the pages of The Nation and Jacobin. The sooner we can get rid of it, the better…
Very Briefly Noted:
Matthew T. Winkler: Fed Critics Are Missing Some Important Context: ‘The central bank is fulfilling its obligation to restrain wage and price pressures while so far avoiding a recession and keeping employment full…
Justin Fox: New York City’s Jobs Recovery Is Still Unbalanced: ‘Office jobs have held up, but hospitality and retail are still down. Can a boom in health-care jobs help even things out?…
Joachim Klement: Equal-weight = robustness: ‘If the market doesn’t behave as you expect, you can be way off with your mean-variance optimised portfolio while the equal-weighted portfolio will do just fine. Not great, but fine…
Matt Levine: SVB’s Depositors Weren’t Very Loyal: ‘This counterargument is not crazy! It just turned out to be totally wrong. It turned out that SVB’s depositors were not more loyal than average bank customers, but less loyal…. Traditional banks do not have customers who will spring into action to set up a telephone chain to cause a bank run. But Silicon Valley is efficient and scalable, so they got their money out fast…
Mark Gongloff: Come to Florida for the Low Taxes, Stay for the Climate Disaster: ‘The Sunshine State may be cheap and alluring, but it’s also on the front lines of a warming planet, raising the risks of both routine hazards and epic catastrophes…
Tyler Cowen: Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history: ‘No one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring…
¶s:
SK Ventures: Integrating the Goldman AI Report Into Our Views: ‘Goldman’s approach… treats… prospective productivity gains… as a function of the ease of applying… generative AI technologies, as opposed to the availability of low-hanging economic fruit…. The gains of generative AI in other occupations are large, and larger than Goldman anticipates in this report…. Gains from producing software are very large, given that… we have underproduced for decades, and software sits in the sweet spot with respect to its combination of a clean grammar and logical structure, and given that it has been too costly to produce for most of its existence, hence why it’s been so slow to “eat the world”…. Software’s underproduction worldwide has led to a kind of society-wide technical debt, which is largely misunderstood but is immensely important…
Ben Thompson: An Interview with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman about the AI Product Revolution: ‘It would take us something like five or ten years to digest… GPT-4… into products…. We’ve just started to scratch the surface…. We have this narrative… about value capture accruing to incumbents. But I think… the reason… is that we’re… just bolting these models into existing products…
Pinecone: Prompt Engineering and LLMs with Langchain: ‘Instructions tell the model what to do, how to use external information if provided, what to do with the query, and how to construct the output. External information or context(s) act as an additional source of knowledge for the model. These can be manually inserted into the prompt, retrieved via a vector database (retrieval augmentation), or pulled in via other means (APIs, calculations, etc.). User input or query is typically (but not always) a query input into the system by a human user (the prompter). Output indicator marks the beginning of the to-be-generated text…. “Prompt = ‘….’ Context: ‘…’ Question: ‘…’ Answer: ‘…’…
"How unfortunate that this false and deadly narrative was assiduously supported in the pages of The Nation and Jacobin. The sooner we can get rid of it, the better…"
Of course the Putinist bullshit would be supported by the Moron Left. Let's recall Jill Stein also attending Putin's dinner in 2016 and sitting at his table next to Michael Flynn. And the ever-more-moronic Susan Sarandon saying that Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 would "speed the revolution" - the same claim made by the German Communists in 1932-33 as they campaigned against the Social Democratic alternative to Hitler as a "Social Fascist" and claimed a Nazi victory would "speed the revolution." We all know how that one turned out. There's the Left and the Moron Left, and it's important to learn the difference.
Winkler: Yes, but it risked causing a recession by delaying by about 6 month of instrument setting to achieve FIAT and the risk has not evaporated.
Gongloff: Florida is the poster child for the need of forward looking disaster insurance rate setting reform.
Levine: All the more reason not to take on (and for regulators not to have allowed taking one) humungous interest rate mismatch risk.