BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-17 Fr

Economic effects of Richard M. Nixon; Chat-GPT nibbles at freelancers’ jobs; Moyn & McManus see an imaginary spectre & call it “liberalism”; conquering child mortality; FRBB economic research conference; very briefly noted; & Hunt on writing essays, DeLong’s notes on probing for full employment, “National Review” as goldbug grift, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-17 Fr…

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Economics: A very nice paper. But, alas!, too close to a one data-point regression. But this is the way the world works. It would be worthwhile for someone to try to extend this to the whole cross-national dataset used for the central bank-independence literature:

: ‘Personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials… a narrative identification strategy…. Nixon pressured Fed Chair Burns to ease monetary policy in 1971…. Political pressure shocks (i) increase inflation strongly and persistently, (ii) lead to statistically weak negative effects on activity, (iii) contributed to other inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmit differently… in particular by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. While the benefits of central bank independence have…. Increasing political pressure 50% as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the U.S. price level by more than 8%…”,“body_json”:{“type”:“doc”,“attrs”:{“schemaVersion”:“v1”},“content”:[{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”},{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Economics”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: “},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“A very nice paper. But, alas!, too close to a one data-point regression. But this is the way the world works. It would be worthwhile for someone to try to extend this to the whole cross-national dataset used for the central bank-independence literature:“}]},{“type”:“paragraph”},{“type”:“blockquote”,“content”:[{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”}],“text”:“Thomas Drechsel”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: Estimating the Effects of Political Pressure on the Fed: A Narrative Approach with New Data <“},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“link”,“attrs”:{“href”:“https://econweb.umd.edu/~drechsel/papers/drechsel_political_pressure_shocks.pdf","target":"_blank","rel":"noopener noreferrer nofollow”,“class”:“note-link”}}],“text”:“https://econweb.umd.edu/~drechsel/papers/drechsel_political_pressure_shocks.pdf"},{"type":"text","text":": ‘Personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials… a narrative identification strategy…. Nixon pressured Fed Chair Burns to ease monetary policy in 1971…. Political pressure shocks (i) increase inflation strongly and persistently, (ii) lead to statistically weak negative effects on activity, (iii) contributed to other inflationary episodes outside of the Nixon era, and (iv) transmit differently… in particular by having a stronger effect on inflation expectations. While the benefits of central bank independence have…. Increasing political pressure 50% as much as Nixon, for six months, raises the U.S. price level by more than 8%…”}]}]}]},“restacks”:0,“reaction_count”:0,“attachments”:[],“name”:“Brad DeLong”,“user_id”:16879,“photo_url”:“https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

Economics: It looks as though Chat-GPT was a measurable economic thing very early. The depressing things in my eyes are what appear to be larger price effects than quantity-worked effects, and the failure of quality work to be judged as superior to stochastic parrotage:

: ‘Freelancers in highly affected occupations suffer from the introduction of generative AI… in both employment and earnings…. We do not find evidence that high-quality service, measured by their past performance and employment, moderates the adverse effects on employment. In fact, we find suggestive evidence that top freelancers are disproportionately affected…. Upwork’s freelancers API… scraped … freelancers’ profile pages,… The release of ChatGPT leads to a 2% drop in the number of jobs on the platform, and a 5.2% drop in monthly earnings…”,“body_json”:{“type”:“doc”,“attrs”:{“schemaVersion”:“v1”},“content”:[{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”},{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Economics”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: “},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“It looks as though Chat-GPT was a measurable economic thing very early. The depressing things in my eyes are what appear to be larger price effects than quantity-worked effects, and the failure of quality work to be judged as superior to stochastic parrotage:“}]},{“type”:“paragraph”},{“type”:“blockquote”,“content”:[{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”}],“text”:“Xiang Hui, Oren Reshef, & Luofeng Zhou”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market <“},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“link”,“attrs”:{“href”:”deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery….”,“target”:”_blank”,“rel”:“noopener noreferrer nofollow”,“class”:“note-link”}}],“text”:”deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery….”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: ‘Freelancers in highly affected occupations suffer from the introduction of generative AI… in both employment and earnings…. We do not find evidence that high-quality service, measured by their past performance and employment, moderates the adverse effects on employment. In fact, we find suggestive evidence that top freelancers are disproportionately affected…. Upwork’s freelancers API… scraped … freelancers’ profile pages,… The release of ChatGPT leads to a 2% drop in the number of jobs on the platform, and a 5.2% drop in monthly earnings…”}]}]}]},“restacks”:0,“reaction_count”:0,“attachments”:[{“id”:“baee548f-1bdf-4f99-bb12-6414cf7066d6”,“type”:“link”,“linkMetadata”:{“image”:“https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/d14df425-16e8-4e79-9920-c58e48036ef5_160x70.svg","title":"The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market”,“description”:“Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds the potential to either complement knowledge workers by increasing their productivity or substitute them entirely.”,“url”:“https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4527336","host":"papers.ssrn.com"},"explicit":false}],"name":"Brad DeLong”,“user_id”:16879,“photo_url”:“https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

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Moral Philosophy: I confess I do not understand either Michael McManus or Samuel Moyn here.

Yes, liberalism was about “liberty, equality, and fraternity”. But the “liberty” was always tied up with having one’s own sphere of action buttressed by control of one’s own property—resources that were yours to control without let or hindrance. The “equality” was equality before the law—no special castes with privileges—and was that majestic equality that, as Anatole France put it in “Le Lys Rouge”, “forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” And what kind of “fraternity” can be built on such a foundation? As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his “Souvenirs”: “Although some sort of demagogic agitation prevailed among the workers in the towns, in the country all the landowners… seemed to form a single unit…. Neither jealousy nor pride separated the peasant from the rich man any longer, or the bourgeois from the gentleman; instead there was mutual confidence, respect and goodwill. Ownership constituted a sort of fraternity linking all who had anything, the richest were the elder brothers and the less prosperous the younger; but all thought themselves brothers, having a common inheritance to defend…”

Moyn and McManus might wish that liberalism was a fighting faith that advanced from civil rights and civic equality to political rights and political equality to social rights and a UBI. But that was not where the center of gravity of liberalism was. John Stuart Mill demanded that the poor be sterilize if they could not afford to purchase expensive child licenses, for the sake of the Storm God of the Semites—it was not meet that the productive with their property be taxed to support the unproductive whose parents had generated them through lack of foresight.

Rather, the center of gravity of liberalism.was much more “the liberalism of toleration”, “the liberalism of fear”, and “the liberalism of property”—of what C.B. McPherson called “possessive individualists”.

Thus I think Moyn and McManus are chasing a spectre that never was:

: ‘Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times is [Moyn’s] crowning achievement… provid[es] the clearest ideological explanation for all the retreats and concessions traced in his other books: that liberalism traded its once radical soul for victory in the Cold War… by internalizing a host of conservative ideas that reduced liberalism’s world historical ambition to secure liberty, equality, and fraternity for all to a thin shell of what it once was. It’s a startling thesis, and only a historian and scholar as principled and original as Moyn could make it convincingly…. Liberalism entered the world as a revolutionary fighting creed…. From Locke onwards liberals were committed to overthrowing the ancien régimes… advancing arguments that—contra the claims of conservatives from Robert Filmer to Edmund Burke—all people were morally equal and entitled to be treated as such…. This was an explosive position…. Burke lamenting how the “new conquering empire of light and reason” was advancing everywhere and destroying “all the pleasing illusions” that made subordination easier…”,“body_json”:{“type”:“doc”,“attrs”:{“schemaVersion”:“v1”},“content”:[{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”},{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Moral Philosophy”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: “},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“I confess I do not understand either Michael McManus or Samuel Moyn here. Yes, liberalism was about “liberty, equality, and fraternity”. But the “liberty” was always tied up with having one’s own sphere of action buttressed by control of one’s own property—resources that were “},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”},{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“yours”},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:” to control without let or hindrance. The “equality” was equality before the law—no special castes with privileges—and was that majestic equality that, as Anatole France put it in “Le Lys Rouge”, “forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” And what kind of “fraternity” can be built on such a foundation? As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his “Souvenirs”: “Although some sort of demagogic agitation prevailed among the workers in the towns, in the country all the landowners… seemed to form a single unit…. Neither jealousy nor pride separated the peasant from the rich man any longer, or the bourgeois from the gentleman; instead there was mutual confidence, respect and goodwill. Ownership constituted a sort of fraternity linking all who had anything, the richest were the elder brothers and the less prosperous the younger; but all thought themselves brothers, having a common inheritance to defend…” “}]},{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Moyn and McManus might wish that liberalism was a fighting faith that advanced from civil rights and civic equality to political rights and political equality to social rights and a UBI. But that was not where the center of gravity of liberalism was. John Stuart Mill demanded that the poor be sterilize if they could not afford to purchase expensive child licenses, for the sake of the Storm God of the Semites—it was not meet that the productive with their property be taxed to support the unproductive whose parents had generated them through lack of foresight.”}]},{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Rather, the center of gravity of liberalism.was much more “the liberalism of toleration”, “the liberalism of fear”, and “the liberalism of property”—of what C.B. McPherson called “possessive individualists”.”}]},{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Thus I think Moyn and McManus are chasing a spectre that never was:“}]},{“type”:“paragraph”},{“type”:“blockquote”,“content”:[{“type”:“paragraph”,“content”:[{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“bold”}],“text”:“Matthew McManus”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: Samuel Moyn on the Abandonment of Revolutionary Liberalism”},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“link”,“attrs”:{“href”:”www.liberalcurrents.com/author/ma…”,“target”:”_blank”,“rel”:“noopener noreferrer nofollow”,“class”:“note-link”}},{“type”:“bold”}],“text”:”www.liberalcurrents.com/author/ma…”},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“link”,“attrs”:{“href”:”www.liberalcurrents.com/samuel-mo…”,“target”:”_blank”,“rel”:“noopener noreferrer nofollow”,“class”:“note-link”}}],“text”:”www.liberalcurrents.com/samuel-mo…”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:”: ‘”},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times “},{“type”:“text”,“text”:“is [Moyn’s] crowning achievement… provid[es] the clearest ideological explanation for all the retreats and concessions traced in his other books: that liberalism traded its once radical soul for victory in the Cold War… by internalizing a host of conservative ideas that reduced liberalism’s world historical ambition to secure liberty, equality, and fraternity for all to a thin shell of what it once was. It’s a startling thesis, and only a historian and scholar as principled and original as Moyn could make it convincingly…. Liberalism entered the world as a revolutionary fighting creed…. From Locke onwards liberals were committed to overthrowing the “},{“type”:“text”,“marks”:[{“type”:“italic”}],“text”:“ancien régimes”},{“type”:“text”,“text”:“… advancing arguments that—contra the claims of conservatives from Robert Filmer to Edmund Burke—all people were morally equal and entitled to be treated as such…. This was an explosive position…. Burke lamenting how the “new conquering empire of light and reason” was advancing everywhere and destroying “all the pleasing illusions” that made subordination easier…”}]}]}]},“restacks”:0,“reaction_count”:0,“attachments”:[{“id”:“d3f7c1d3-df93-4cd6-9f56-cdd17a0a7a0d”,“type”:“link”,“linkMetadata”:{“image”:“https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e1c14f7e-1dad-4e7c-bcd4-7189b306d160_731x472.jpeg","title":"Samuel Moyn on the Abandonment of Revolutionary Liberalism”,“description”:“Samuel Moyn argues that Cold War liberals abandoned liberalism’s revolutionary promise.”,“url”:”www.liberalcurrents.com/samuel-mo…”,“host”:“liberalcurrents.com”},“explicit”:false}],“name”:“Brad DeLong”,“user_id”:16879,“photo_url”:“https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","user_bestseller_tier":100}}" data-component-name=“CommentPlaceholder”>

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Very Briefly Noted:

Economics: Charles Schultze: Oral History Interview: ‘For an oral history, I’m probably one of the worst, because my memory tends to wipe out details…. Second… inflation… we were struggling with… a modest austerity balancing act…. [Third] a steady expansion in the share of the national economy going to civilian programs… just couldn’t keep going…. had to be at least halted…. In modern terms at least… difficult for a Democratic President. The two put together meant very difficult times, which I don’t think any of us recognized initially…
Noah Berlatsky: Americans Hate the Economy. Americans Love the Economy: ‘It’s not clear how to square positive economic indicators with negative economic sentiment.… If the media were really convincing people that the economy is bad, wouldn’t people spend as if the economy is bad?…
Cecilia Elena Rouse & Lisa Barrow: America Needs Public Investment in Childcare: ‘Externalities…. Investing in children is one of the most productive investments a society can make. Support for child health and education has been shown to yield benefits (positive externalities) for society as a whole…. Between the high costs of childcare, the absence of credit markets to help young parents pay for it, and the pressure on providers to contain costs by paying extremely low wages, the US public sector has more than enough reason to step in with support…
Guy Berger: ‘When does inflation stop being salient? Inflation discourse is divided between data nerds who note recent inflation data is nearly back to normal, and normies who anchor to much lower prices in the not-distant past. The CPI is up >18% over the past 3 years…
Lauren Fedor: Ohio’s rustbelt turns into a magnet for chip fabs: ‘Tech investors say ‘Hi, not Goodbye, Columbus’ as projects worth tens of billions crowd in…
Journamalism: Dan Murphy: ‘White supremacist internet rando: “The Jews are coming for your blond daughters and will replace you with mud people.” Elon Musk: “Exactly!” The New York Times: “We found the most anti-semitic sophomore at Harvard and he’s the greatest danger to society”…
GPT-LLM-ML: George Hammond: Investor frenzy will overvalue AI tech start-ups, says early OpenAI backer: ‘Many are ‘investing because everybody else is’ and most will lose money, claims Vinod Khosla…. This year, venture capitalists have invested $21.5bn into AI companies globally, compared with $5.1bn in all of 2022…. [Vinod] Khosla is confident AI will radically change the world… take on 80 per cent of the workload in 80 per cent of all human roles over the next two decades, and will create huge economic value…
Azeem Azhar & Chantal Smith: GPTs for all: ‘LLMs are like databases; they know what they know and struggle to imagine data that they haven’t been trained on; researchers don’t seem to find any evidence of LLMs being able to generalise. But unlike traditional databases, they are non-deterministic, that is you won’t get the same response each time you query them. They also store the data in a high-dimensional latent space, which allows us to explore concepts in that latent space. I think of this as a powerful analog to the “join” operator in traditional databases because connections across concepts, things that are sort-of like something else, is similar to analogic thinking. But these two qualities: the non-deterministic nature and the embeddings in latent space make its behaviours very different to traditional databases. Extremely powerful in some ways, and unhelpful in others…
Neofascism: Dan Drezner: The Authoritarianism Is the Point: ‘Why is the Trump campaign so loudmouthed about its autocratic policy plans?… First-term versions of all the policies listed above generated considerable legal, political, and public backlash. Advertising these policies seems like a great way of mobilizing Trump’s opponents…. For Trump to win, he needs to mobilize and broaden his base more than ever before. One way might try to do that is releasing plans that freak out the very people that his base wants to see freaked out…
Science Fiction: TV Tropes: ‘Zeppelins from Another World: ‘“Hite’s Law” states that any historical change used to create an Alternate History will tend towards filling the skies with airships. As he points out, taking this to its logical conclusion, this suggests that The Roaring ‘20s and The ‘30s were actually those of an alternate history. As other common features of alternate histories are things like widespread totalitarian ideologies and global social upheaval, well, that would explain a lot about those decades. A corollary of Hite’s Law is that rather than bother some random passerby with historical trivia to determine whether or not one is in an alternate timeline, it is much faster simply to look up…

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