BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-03 Su
Dan Wang & Derek Thompson on how china’s economic miracle went off the rails; May 2024 Fed rate cut probability at 77%; very briefly noted; Ezra Klein talks to Kevin Roose and Casey Newton about OpenAI; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-01 Fr…
ONE AUDIO: Dan Wang & Derek Thompson: How China’s Economic Miracle Went Off the Rails:
Writer Dan Wang joins Derek to discuss why the Chinese economy has slowed down after decades of growth and the implications of that decline:
<https://www.theringer.com/2023/11/28/23979075/china-economy-technology-green-energy>
ONE IMAGE: The Market Sees Interest Rates Now Trending Downward:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Felice Maranz: Treasury Melt Up <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-11-29/five-things-you-need-to-know-to-start-your-day>: ‘Yields on two-year Treasuries fell as much as 13 basis points [last] Wednesday. Swap contracts referencing Fed meeting dates repriced to levels consistent with the policy rate declining by a quarter percentage point from its current range of 5.25%-5.5%; a reduction was previously seen happening a month later in June…
Sam Ro: Wall Street’s 2024 outlook for stocks <https://www.tker.co/p/wall-street-2024-stock-market-outlook>: ‘The S&P 500… closping] at 4,594.63. The index is now up 19.7% year to date, up 28.4% from its October 12, 2022 closing low of 3,577.03, and down 4.2% from its January 3, 2022 record closing high of 4,796.56…
Jonathan Kirshner: Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-Populism: On Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism”: ‘Rigged capitalism… yields massive concentrations of wealth for a sliver of largely-above-the-law plutocrats, combined with stagnation and declining opportunities for the majority—leads to a basic political problem: “How, after all, does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy? The answer is pluto-populism”…
Olga Usvyatsky: What can accounting tell us about Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI? <https://thedig.substack.com/p/cross-post-what-can-accounting-tell>: ‘Microsoft says it will increase its investment in specialized supercomputing… build out Azure… sell Azure to OpenAI as its customer… integrate OpenAI technology with its new line of Microsoft’s products…. Notably absent from Microsoft’s official press release is any mention of a specific purchase of shares in OpenAI or any terms of the deal, i.e. the size of any outward-facing investment in OpenAI the company or how much, if any, of the investment came as a direct cash injection…
Economic History: Jürgen Osterhammel & Patrick Camiller: The Transformation of the World: ‘The Genevan historian Bouda Etemad concludes that between 1750 and 1913 as many as 280,000 to 300,000 European and (in the Philippines) North American soldiers died in overseas colonial wars, either in battle or as a result of disease; India and Algeria were the two deadliest theaters for European troops. Indigenous troops in the service of the colonial powers suffered a further 120,000 casualties, while Etemad calculates that the number of Asian and African warriors who died resisting the whites was between 800,000 and one million…
Public Reason: John Burn-Murdoch: Should we believe Americans when they say the economy is bad? <https://www.ft.com/content/9c7931aa-4973-475e-9841-d7ebd54b0f47>: ‘In an increasingly polarised and performative society, vibes are now often trumping objective reality…. I know what you’re thinking: inflation explains all of this…. It’s certainly a good theory, but countries all around the world have faced steep inflation…. Disproportionate doom seems to be a new American affliction…. …
Noah Smith: Vibes vs. Data <https://noahpinion.blog/p/vibes-vs-data>: ‘If you want to be upset over what’s happening to inflation, wages, wealth, income, etc., you have a perfect right to be upset. But at least you should know what’s actually happening. But lots of people simply don’t know. Some will be quick to interpret mistakes about the national economic situation as stemming from personal lived experience…. But when you poll people about their personal economic situation, they’re much more positive than they are about the national economy as a whole…
GPT-LLM-ML: Max Read: The end of business-class A.I. doomerism <https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-end-of-business-class-ai-doomerism>: ‘It might seem counterintuitive to say that the technology you are funding or managing is existentially dangerous to the human race, but… it’s great marketing for A.I…. It allows you to co-opt and subsume any specific, near-term, actionable criticism of your A.I. systems and the material effects of their deployment into much vague, long-term, and much-less-actionable fear of total apocalypse…. It allows you to insist on (and probably dictate) incumbent-protecting regulations…. [But] it’s much harder to be scared of apocalyptic A.I. if you’ve monkeyed around in ChatGPT, I think…
Political Philosophy: Nescio13: Burnham, Machiavelli, & Republican Freedom <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/burnham-machiavelli-and-republican>: ‘Berlin… skated over… Constant’s…negative liberty… and positive liberty, the “liberty of the ancients” or “public autonomy”… in addition [a third]… “social and economic liberty”… “a fourth, international strand of liberty: the freedom of each and all”…. [Plus James Burnham]… “‘liberty’, as Machiavelli uses the word, means… no external subjection… and internally, a government by law, not by the arbitrary will of any”…. Individual freedoms are at best a by-product of Machiavellian liberty. This is rooted in the idea that it is only in the ordered nature of group-life that individual rights or justice are secured at all…
Really-Existing Socialism: Madoc Cairns: Settling scores with God: Leszek Kolakowski at the End of History <https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/06/settling-scores-god-leszek-kolakowski-end-of-history-poland>: ‘How the Marxist-turned-Catholic-conservative remains the pre-eminent thinker for our age of tragedy…. Kolakowski… arguing, in essays such as “The Concept of the Left” that socialism is a moral ideal… emerged as a leader of the reform movements that were rising across the eastern bloc…. In 1988 Kolakowski published Metaphysical Horror, the book he considered his masterpiece. After the Enlightenment no meaning is self-created, Kolakowski wrote; all values are imputed values. But imputed by what? This radical uncertainty—this “metaphysical horror”—threatened the eclipse of meaning entirely. Kolakowski, like Pascal, saw an abyss on the edge of his sight. But where Pascal chose transcendent faith, Kolakowski chose something more ambivalent…. What did he see when he looked forwards? Nothing good. The Enlightenment was a “catastrophe”, he wrote, but an irreversible one. Our last hope of avoiding “civilisational suicide”, one late essay said, is to “run very fast to stay in the same place”. Later, it seemed, even that hope was lost. In one of his final interviews Kolakowski reiterated Metaphysical Horror’s argument: our need for meaning persists, but our ability to comprehend it slips away…
SubStack NOTES:
GPT-LLM-ML: This “we fired Sam Altman <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-44631025> not because we thought he had made any major mistakes but because we did not think we could control him if we ever did want to because he had made a major mistake” emanating from the friends of former OpenAI board members Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner is, from one perspective, simply weird, and from another perspective obviously true. True, because it turned out that Sam Altman had the backing of the loyalty of OpenAI’s staff and of the money of Satya Nadela’s Microsoft, and they indeed could not control him. Weird, because Helen Toner and Tasha McCaulay’s AI-worries are now revealed as being scared of shadows—of taking big actions based on phantasms down the strategy and circumstances tree that do not yet have even a shadow of reality. Thus the cause they thought they were supposed to advance is now much weaker. And also weird because not even Ilya Sutskever and Adam D’Angelo’s friends will hint at what they thought that they were doing—other than as of some Thursday in November they suddenly thought that Sam Altman ought to go:
Ezra Klein: Interview with Casey Newton & Kevin Roose <nytimes.com/2023/12/01/podcasts/transcr…>: ‘People saw—I saw—Altman fired by this nonprofit board meant to ensure that A.I. is built to serve humanity. And I assumed—and I think many assumed—there was some disagreement here over what OpenAI was doing…. [But] I think, I can say conclusively… that was not what this was about. The OpenAI board did not trust and did not feel it could control Sam Altman, and that is why they fired Altman. It’s not that they felt they couldn’t trust him on one thing, that they were trying to control him on X but he was beating them on X. It’s that a lot of little things added up. They felt their job was to control… that they did not feel they could control him, and so… they had to get rid of him. They did not have, obviously, the support inside the company to do that….
All the OpenAI people thought it was very important… that they had this nonprofit board… building A.I. that served humanity that could… shut down the company… if they thought it was going awry in some way or another. And the moment that board tried… now, I think they did not try to do that on very strong grounds… it turned out they couldn’t. That the company could… reconstitute itself at Microsoft or that the board… couldn’t withstand the pressure….
[The new] board members do not hold the views on A.I. safety that… Helen Toner… and Tasha McCauley… held…. These are people who… serve on corporate boards in a normal way where the output of the corporate board is supposed to be shareholder value, and that’s going to influence them even if they understand themselves to have a different mission here…