WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED for 2024-10-24 Th
My weekly read-around...
My weekly read-around...
The 1962 “Port Huron Statement”; denaming libraries; techbros being weird; & weekly briefly noted for 2024-10-17; R&D spending; higher education becoming a femininomenon; Steve Rattner on Trump’s plans to attack the American economy; very briefly noted; & SubStack Notes…
SubStack Posts:
ONE IMAGE: R&D Investment:
ANOTHER IMAGE: Higher Education Becomes a Feminomenon:
ONE VIDEO: Steve Rattner on Trump’s Wishes to Attack the American Economy:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Equities are still returning 4%/year in earnings. Add in 2%/year in inflation and you have 6% per year as a nominal return. To get that down you need a lot of (i) retained earnings misinvested and (ii) multiple compression. If multiples halve over the next thirty years, that gets you a return drag of -2.3%/year. If one-third of earnings are misinvested to destroy half their value that gets you a return drag of -0.7%/year. To get to their forecast you need both:
Anthony Pompliano: Goldman Sachs Thinks We Will Have A Decade-Long Bear Market — I Disagree With Them: ‘Goldman Sachs and Apollo… wrote “we estimate the S&P 500 will deliver an annualized nominal total return of 3% during the next 10 years (7th percentile since 1930) and roughly 1% on a real basis”… <https://pomp.substack.com/p/goldman-sachs-thinks-we-will-have>The key is to do whatever it takes to attract valuable and worthwhile communities of engineering practice, because so much depends on that. The difficulties are twofold: (i) it is no longer obvious what those are, because the judo move of using your low wages as a competitive advantage in labor-intensive manufacturing is no longer available; and (ii) the Hamilton-List road to manufacturing-industrial development, even if you could follow it, will no longer employ an extraordinary number of people. I think that Dani Rodrik is right in saying there will have to be “many recipes”. But I also think it is going to be very hard indeed:
Kai Schultz & Shruti Srivastava: The Made-In-China Economic Model Is No Longer Driving Miracle Growth: ‘Compared to two decades ago, manufacturing today makes up a smaller portion of global economic output—and China already accounts for more than a third of it. Add the next dozen countries into the mix and there’s little room for places still looking for a way in…. Dozens of nations have no clear route to building wealth. What comes next?…Growth is likely to be hard-won in the future. Diversification is key. Countries can no longer rely just on manufacturing. They should branch into services… and consider protectionist policies as the old rules of globalization shift and change… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-10-24/supply-chain-latest-new-trade-and-growth-models>It is, I think, going to depend on how many engineers people train, what they are put to work doing, how much the government is willing to tax consumers to subsidize investors and exports, and how China wants to spend the earnings from its exports:
Brian Potter: Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing?: ‘1. A multinational company puts its factories in China, lured by some combination of cheap production, big contracts, and the dream of huge market opportunities. 2. China appropriates the multinational company’s technology, through some combination of joint ventures, acquisitions, reverse engineering, and espionage. 3. The appropriated technology makes its way into the hands of Chinese domestic companies. 4. The Chinese companies squeeze the multinational company out of the Chinese market. 5. The Chinese companies go overseas and outcompete the multinational company in world markets. High-speed rail and wind turbines are two industries that have gone through at least steps one through four of this cycle…. Smartphones and electric cars are two other industries that have gone through some version of this cycle (though they haven’t necessarily followed it exactly). One industry that hasn’t yet gone far through this cycle is large commercial aircraft…. But this isn’t for lack of trying…. Why has China been so much less successful in applying the China cycle playbook to making commercial aircraft[?]…. The sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft…. Aerospace firms are well aware that their technology is their critical asset…. Securing FAA and EASA certification may also make it more difficult for Chinese firms to appropriate foreign aerospace technology…. [Perhaps] the Chinese method of top-down, state-owned development doesn’t pair well with commercial aircraft manufacturing and the amount of integration of different technologies and systems…. But struggles so far doesn’t mean that China will never be successful…. For China, successfully building commercial aircraft isn’t a matter of the economics (which are miserable), it’s about national pride and prestige…. The C919 might not be the aircraft that breaks into the international market; rather, it might be an aircraft that follows it… <https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-the-china-cycle-come-for-airbus>Economic History: There is a family tree that claims that William the Conqueror is my great^35-grandfather, because at some point in the Ridgeway family it was important to them that they were descended from one of his bastard daughters. (He almost surely is one of my great^32- to great^38-grandfathers, but not through that Ridgeway line: after all, I have 35,000,000,000 great^35-grandfather slots for a world that then held only 300,000,000 people.) It is almost surely false. Just as is the claim that William the Conqueror’s great^15-grandfather was Fornjótr the Jötunn—the Frost Giant. History and the ideology needed either to establish a social position or create a social bond through often-fictitious ancestry are always intermixed. And it is the details of a society that determine whether it is worth (i) convincingly forging a long genealogy back to the gods, (ii) simply noting that one’s land was spear-won by one’s grandfather, or (iii) appealing to one’s style of life to demonstrate that one is obviously arya. And even in case (i), the idea that things were different in the past was very hard won-by, except possibly when Mediæval Western Europeans gazed at Roman ruins. Remember that for Mediæval Western Europe, all of the Nine Worthies—pagans Hektor son of Priam, Alexander the Great, and C. Iulius Cæsar; Hebrews Yehoshua, Dawid, and Yehudah Maqqaba; Christians Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godrei de Bouillon—were all conceptualized as French knights of ca. 1300:
Doug Jones: ‘Donald Brown… [believed] historical consciousness is underdeveloped in societies with closed, hereditary systems of stratification. India of course is famously a caste society…. High levels of caste endogamy have been characteristic of India for at least 1500 years…. In societies with hereditary ruling elites and caste-like social stratification, according to Brown, history is an inconvenience…. Mythological accounts of caste origins… link caste hierarchy to the order of the cosmos…. There is a real difference, Brown argues, between historical knowledge and ideology, and caste-like societies generate more of the latter… <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2024/10/22/homo-hierarchicus-9/>Public Reason: Relatively few among ruling élites thoroughly buy into the idea that they are tyrants seated on thrones of skulls—most régimes require some ideology that legitimates their rule and their take that has at least some buy-in from those they dominate. Of course, where you do confront people who glory in being tyrants ruling from their skull-thrones, it ain’t gonna work:
Michelle Nicholsen: Nonviolent Resistance Proves Potent Weapon: ‘Erica Chenoweth… and colleague Maria J. Stephan… collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head—in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change…. Chenoweth…. ‘Four different things…. Large and diverse participation that’s sustained…. Loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites…. The campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation…. When campaigns are repressed—which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes—they don’t either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves…. A surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful campaign: just 3.5 percent…. Even though they “failed” in the short term… nonviolent campaigns tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who gradually began to initiate changes and liberalize the polity… <https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/why-nonviolent-resistance-beats-violent-force-in-effecting-social-political-change/>Public Reason: The Washington Post tries to sanewash Donald Trump yet again, to the max. And Noah Smith objects:
Noah Smith: Against Steelmanning: ‘It's usually not a good idea to try to make arguments look stronger than they really are. The other day, an editor at the Washington Post called me up and made a proposal. She wanted me to write a series of articles “steelmanning” Donald Trump’s economic policy proposals—in other words, making the strongest case I could possibly make for Trump’s ideas. Her rationale—like that of many proponents of steelmanning—was that if people are going to be persuaded that Trump’s ideas are bad, it will be more persuasive to first present the very strongest version of those ideas, so that people know Trump’s opponents are arguing in good faith, and would therefore find criticisms more persuasive. I politely refused, and I told her that when the series came out, I would use it as an occasion to write about why I think steelmanning is usually a bad idea. But why wait?… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-steelmanning>CryptoGrifters: Hooo boy! It is true that stablecoins are, so far, the only crypto use case that has any legs at all. Stores of value that route around the US regulatory framework are valuable for those who do not trust their own governments and their currencies, and may be valuable in the future if they can indeed undermine moats that preserve hefty transfer fees. But even stablecoins are likely to fall in the long run to Central Bank Digital Currencies for all those who do not need to hide in the shadows, and there are lots of incentives for governments to diminish shadows, and lots of tools they can use. Moreover, “room-temperature superconductor” these days has almost as bad a connotation as “crypto”:
Patrick Collison: ‘Stablecoins are room-temperature superconductors for financial services. Thanks to stablecoins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years. Stripe is going to build the world’s best stablecoin infrastructure, and, to that end, we are delighted to welcome @stablecoin to @stripe… <https://x.com/patrickc/status/1848393059559502177>Neofascism: That Trump has concluded, after his disastrous debate with Harris, that he has much more to lose than gain from a 60-Minutes interview does seem a reasonable conclusion to me:
Stephanie Kaloi & Ross A. Lincoln: Trump’s Campaign Staff Is Hiding Him Because ‘The More He’s Out There, the More People are Repelled,’ MSNBC Guest Says: ‘Tara Setmayer further accuses “bootlickers” of keeping the truth away from the Republican candidate so he doesn’t “see how terrible everything looks for him”…. “The more he’s out there, the more people are repelled by him, and his advisers are smart enough to know that,” she explained…. Last week Trump backed out of a “60 Minutes” interview that had been in the works for months, becoming the first presidential candidate to do so in 50 years. CBS later explained that Trump canceled because he objected to being fact-checked, and because he demanded correspondent Lesley Stahl apologize for statements she never actually said during her 2020 interview… <https://www.thewrap.com/joy-reid-msnbc-trumps-campaign-staff-hiding-him/>Why doesn’t Bill Ackman have any friends?:
Ron Kampeas: ‘The sequence is amazing: 1) [Bill] Ackman accuses [Stuart] Stevens of “ad hominem” attack for short comment, demands detailed reply; 2) Stevens provides detailed reply; 3) mocks Stevens for not having a “day job” allowing him to write detailed replies. Also calls him a liar… Josh Marshall: ‘There should be an aid group for billionaires going through midlife crises on Twitter who, because of their assets, have no one to tell them to shut up and get professional help or at least a hobby…. This is how people with only yes men in their lives suffer. No one to step forward to help him. Quite sad actually… <https://x.com/kampeas/status/1846177354424488215>Journamalism: New York Times going the extra mile to whitewash people who are truly American Nazis:
Dave Levitan: ‘Some corrections in the media are misspelled last names. Calling someone an assistant professor when they had recently been promoted to associate. A misheard year that makes someone a few years older than they are. Then there's this <www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/u...>: “a correction was made on Sept. 1, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that a local chapter of Moms for Liberty had accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler in a newsletter. The group, which later issued an apology, was aware that the quote was from Hitler when the newsletter was published… <https://bsky.app/profile/davelevitan.bsky.social/post/3l34n2eic322h>
SubStack NOTES:
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"It is, I think, going to depend on how many engineers people train, what they are put to work doing, how much the government is willing to tax consumers to subsidize investors and exports, and how China wants to spend the earnings from its exports:"
You left out just how much the Boeing Management, who were the McDonald Douglas bean counter management (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing#Merger_with_McDonnell_Douglas) bean count the company to death in order to show those workers who's boss.