Value & Power: Negative-Sum Force, Zero-Sum Fraud, & Positive-Sum Exchange; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-09 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
We humans are an anthology intelligence both with respect to knowledge and information and with respect to work and production. Put the one side are we manage ourselves in the realm of thought. How do we manage ourselves in the realm of work and production? Or, rather, how does each of us try to tune our by-now extremely sophisticated and fine division of labor so that we can accomplish our own purposes?
Well, basically, there are three ways that we can appropriate for ourselves things out of the common pool created by our extremely sophisticated division of labor in production and work. We can do so by force, by fraud, or by win-win exchange. Which of those we choose is determined by how much we regard ourselves as invested in the well-being of others, how much effort each of these modes of action is for us, and how valuable is the work of those whose efforts we are trying to control and appropriate. When something becomes or when someone’s work becomes more valuable, it is worth more of our energy to appropriate—and this can either be good or bad for those who make all the valuable things, depending:
James Davis Nicoll: Five SFF Books in Which Valuable Is Not the Same as Powerful: ‘The use of the word “commodity” underlines an unfortunate truth: valuable is not the same as powerful. One might think a particular class of person having a monopoly on an economically vital activity would make them powerful. No—it makes whoever controls them powerful. A quick glance at history shows many, many cases where considerable force was used to compel useful people to perform necessary services for little to no reward, from manual labour to reproduction. Perhaps SPI’s background, were it to be further detailed, would show powerful women dominating galactic politics…but it’s just as likely that telesthetic women are traded, controlled, and denied personal autonomy. Perhaps some fictional examples are in order…. Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant (1970)…. Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (1980)…. Caverns by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. (1981)…. A Heroine of the World by Tanith Lee (1989)…. The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2017)…
LINK: <https://www.tor.com/2021/12/07/five-sff-books-in-which-valuable-is-not-the-same-as-powerful/>
One Picture:
Fighting COVID-19, one virus particle at a time:
One Audio:
Robert Farley & Matt Yglesias: An Oral History of the Blogosphere Episode I <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/12/an-oral-history-of-the-blogosphere-episode-i-matt-yglesias <https://content.blubrry.com/lgm/lgm2021podcast42.mp3>
Forthcoming September 6, 2022, from Basic Books:
Slouching Towards Utopia: A History of the Long Twentieth Century: Paragraph 4: Histories of centuries, long or short, are by definition grand narrative histories, built to tell the author’s desired story. Setting these years, 1914–1991, apart as a century makes it easy for Hobsbawm to tell the story he wants to tell. But it does so at the price of missing much of what I strongly believe is the bigger, more important story. It is the one that runs from about 1870 to 2010, from humanity’s success in unlocking the gate that had kept it in dire poverty, up to humanity’s failure to maintain the pace of the rapid upward trajectory in human technological competence and wealth that the earlier success had set in motion.
Very Briefly Noted:
Peter Temin (2013): The Rise & Fall of Economic History at MIT: ‘… LINK: <https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/79063/Temin13-11a.pdf>
Ben Thompson: FTC Sues to Block Nvidia ARM Acquisition, Innovation & the Data Center, ARM’s Future <https://stratechery.com/2021/ftc-sues-to-block-nvidia-arm-acquisition-innovation-and-the-data-center-arms-future/>
Jason Kottke: Quick Links: ‘While the official global death toll from COVID–19 is about 5.2 million, the excess deaths (including unreported cases, other illnesses that couldn’t be treated, etc.) is now estimated at 17.6 million, according to The Economist economist.com… <https://kottke.org/quick-links/>
Ezra Klein: ’The asymmetry where Republicans weren’t bound by the filibuster in building this Supreme Court but Democrats are bound by it in legislatively responding to its rulings will prove devastating if Democrats don’t change it…
Davis Kedrosky: The History of Economic History: Part I: ‘The Cliometric Revolution…
Paragraphs:
Daniel Gallardo Albarrán & Herman de Jong: Industrialization, Health & Human Welfare: ‘The lives of the English population evolved very differently before and after 1800… material living standards worsened… health gains… longer working hours… rising inequality…. Human welfare shrunk between 1760 and 1800, by about 0.3 percentage points annually. After 1800 we detect a very different pattern…. Rising wages take the lead and, despite health stagnating during the first half of the 19th century, individuals overall become better off by 1850 by 0.7 percentage points annually…
LINK: <https://lrhmatters.com/wellbeing/industrialization-health-and-human-welfare>
Diane Coyle: State of the Person & State of the Nation: ‘Anne-Marie Slaughter’s… Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work and Politics… is a highly personal reflection on her own failings at a time (2017) when the organisation she led, New America, was plunged into a public crisis…. [with[ allegation[s] that the think tank had parted ways with an employee who had been critical of Google, a $20m donor…. Slaughter mishandled the response… goes on to diagnose her limitations as a leader and how she went about addressing them…. A decent read and as a human being I found the personal story interesting. But I wasn’t convinced about the attempt to project the personal onto the political…
Matthew Yglesias: The CDC’s Vaccine Data Is All Wrong: ‘the answer to the riddle “Why is the CDC’s vaccination count so bad?” turns out to be that actually nobody is counting. In the footnotes, they explain that they receive data that has been de-identified for privacy purposes, and consequently, you may be reported to them as two separate individuals if you get different doses from different providers. They also explain that not everyone has county of residence information, which is why the county-level counts aggregate up to a lower number than the state-level count. Then, in a methodological choice that I think was a mistake, they top code everything at 99.9% on the theory that “this cap helps address potential overestimates of vaccination coverage due to first, second, and booster doses that were not linked.” This top-coding lets the CDC avoid saying absurd things like 117% of the senior citizens in Montgomery County are vaccinated. But by doing so, they are obscuring the underlying flaws in the data…
LINK:
John Ganz: The Political Economy of Reaction: ‘De Boer actually hits the nail on the head when he points out how lucrative involvement in these sorts of provocations is for him: he describes getting many more subscribers when he inserts himself into some media fracas…. It is possible to make a living, even to be quite successful and gain a degree of fame or intellectual legitimacy and recognition in mediums like podcasts and newsletters, but the threat of irrelevance and obscurity hangs over the cultural producer and the need to publicize, to reach new publics and markets is ever-present…. Being involved in some public outrage is a very quick and effective form of publicity…. This connection between journalism, theatricality, and cultural politics feels very familiar to me from reading about the 19th and 20th century…. I recently recommended Philip Nord’s The Politics of Resentment: Shopkeeper Protest in Nineteenth-Century Paris and his description of the dynamics of the literary culture of the Third Republic feels apposite…. It is surely possible for someone to find something louche and romantic in all this, or to find in this some kind of revolt or radicalism, but to any clearsighted observer, it’s all pretty dingy…
LINK:
Timothy Snyder: Lesson 12: Make Eye Contact & Small Talk: ‘This is the one that has aroused the most comment over the years. I take it that this is because it reminds us just how small-scale politics can be, and calls upon us to do something that seems ever more strange as we retreat into groups. It does not seem like much of a challenge, but it is a challenge. It is also, if it comes to that, a form of self-defense…. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life…
LINK:
Here is a first draft of the reading list for my part of next semester’s Economics 210a. Introduction to Economic History (for first-year graduate students in economics). Christie Romer, however, won’t let me assign more than three articles per week. So which should stay, which should go, and which should be replaced:
Jan 19. Intro & Malthusian Economies
Robert M. Solow (1985): “Economic History and Economics”, The American Economic Review vol. 75, no. 2 (May), pp. 328-331 <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf>
Kenneth Arrow (1985): “Maine & Texas”, The American Economic Review vol. 75, no. 2 (May), pp. 320-323 <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/1805618.pdf>
Jared Diamond (1987): The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race <http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race>
Richard Steckel (2008): Biological Measures of the Standard of Living <http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.22.1.129>
Gregory Clark (2005): The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004 <www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/ .pdf>
David Donaldson & Daniel Keniston (2016): “Dynamics of a Malthusian Economy: India in the Aftermath of the 1918 Influenza” <https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/Donaldson_Keniston_Influenza.pdf>
Jan 26. Technological Roots of Economic Growth
Moses Finley (1965): Technical Innovation & Economic Progress in the Ancient World <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2591872>
Michael Kremer (1993): Population Growth & Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2118405>
Chad Jones (2015): The Facts of Economic Growth <https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/facts.pdf>
Alfred Chandler: Scale & Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, pp. 3-89 <https://archive.org/details/scalescopedynami00chan>
J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, & David N. Weil (2010): Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space <https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15199/w15199.pdf>
William D. Nordhaus (1997): Do Real-Output & Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not <http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064>
Feb 2. Domination & Unfreedom
Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, & Jeffrey G. Williamson (2010): Pre-Industrial Inequality <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02403.x/abstract>
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, & Nathan Nunn (2013): “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128 (May), pp. 469–530 <https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/128/2/469/1943509>
Frederick Law Olmsted (1861): The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton & Slavery In The American Slave States pp. 143-183 <https://archive.org/details/cottonkingdomtra00olms>
Nathan Nunn (2008): The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25098896.pdf>
Stanley Engerman & Kenneth Sokoloff (1994): Factor Endowments, Institutions & Differential Paths of Development among New World Economies <http://papers.nber.org/papers/h0066>
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848): Manifesto of the Communist Party <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>
Feb 9. The Industrial Revolution
Robert C. Allen (2011): Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention & the Scientific Revolution <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00532.x/pdf>
Stephen Nicholas & Richard H. Steckel (1991): Heights & Living Standards of English Workers during the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770–1815 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2123399.pdf>
Peter Temin (1997): Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2951107.pdf>
Greg Clark (2001): The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution <http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/secret2001.pdf>
Simon Kuznets (1971): Modern Economic Growth <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/lecture/>
Feb 16. Convergence & Divergence
Lant Pritchett (1997): Divergence, Big Time <http://tinyurl.com/dl20090112o>
Peter J. Klenow & Andres Rodriguez-Clare (1997): The Neoclassical Revival in Growth Economics: Has It Gone too Far? <https://delong.typepad.com/klenow-rodriguez-clare.pdf>
Michael Kremer, Jack Willis & Yang You (2021): Converging to Convergence <https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/nber-macroeconomics-annual-2021-volume-36/converging-convergence>
Richard Baldwin: The Great Convergence, pp. 1-15, 79-141, 177-206, 242-279 <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/book-baldwin-great-convergence-selections.pdf>
Worth noting that there's a long-standing theory (I forget whose it is) regarding the decline of warfare in the 20th century. The theory is that war has become unprofitable. In the Roman era, armies came back with gold, jewels, materials, control of mines, slaves, control of land.
The theory is that the profitability of war has ended due to changes in relative value. It being much, much harder to coerce intellectual labor than it is to coerce physical labor; and harder to coerce skilled physical labor than brute physical labor; harder to coerce physical labor than to seize physical items; and harder to seize delicate scientific tools than to seize raw materials. I would extend it to say that it is harder for misogynists to control women for the purposes of "spreading their seed" now that birth control is almost impossible to suppress and abortion pills are available. When the most valuable thing in the country is the expertise of a scientist, it's impossible to seize it in war; the scientist can, and will, fail to cooperate.
So when the things which are considered valuable become harder to *loot*, war becomes less profitable. And when it becomes less profitable it declines.
Re Yglesias: Quite surprising. And a little hard to believe. I would tend to assume (or do I mean "hope"?) that the CDC's use of data internally is a little more sophisticated.