BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-29 Sa
Journamalistic grifting machines; Greg Clark vs. institutionalist theories of economic history; plutocrats in 1982 and now; Nvidia, Apple, & TSMC Deep Magic; Cicero made a very unwise joke about Cæsar Octavianus; very briefly noted; the last intellectual crypto bandwagoneer; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-26 Tu…
ONE IMAGE: Journamalistic Grifting Machines:
A reminder that journamalists like Carl Cannon who make preserving partisan “balance” their job number one, and proudly prioritize “nonpartisan news aggregation and serious investigative journalism” wind up as moderately well-paid shills for grifters cheating their audience. And Carl Cannon is OK with that:
ONE VIDEO: Against “Institutionalist” Explanations of Modern Economic Growth:
Greg Clark in 2009 explains how England in 1300 had:
low incentive-impairing social spending,
low public debt,
low taxes,
low inflation,
social mobility (albeit predominantly downward in relative terms, as was true in general in the Agrarian-Age world),
(a substantial degree of) personal security (murder rate of 1/5000, compared to 1/20000 in the contemporary United States, and
government-provided security of property.
How about markets? Goods markets were effectively free for things except land, constrained by feudal and inheritance claims; but real estate is constrained by “planning” in the modern world. Capital markets existed—but in Mediæval Europe were constrained by usury laws. Labor markets were constrained by feudal and guild ties—to some degree. Robust legal intellectual-property protections are the only things missing:
SubStack NOTES:
Plutocracy: Of the techies, the most prominent on the Forbes 400 list in 1982 were David Packard (8) and William Hewlett (18). The top person on the then-list who would have been recognizable from 50 years earlier was David Rockefeller (5). His counterpart today is Warren Buffett (7 today), who was number 92 on the 1982 list. Richer than Buffett today we have Gates, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos—and Arnault (LVMH) from fashion, and Musk from… I am not sure, he used to be tech-finance (PayPal), but since his companies have not yet made any serious money at all. (Below Buffett come, now, Page, Brin, Ballmer, and then tech dominance ceases):
Eric Rosen: The Changing Landscape of Billionaires since 1982: ‘In 1982, there were only 13 billionaires on the [Forbes 400] list and a net worth of $75mm secured a spot. The richest person in the US, was Daniel Keith Ludwig (shipping and R/E) and had a net worth of $2bn in 1982 or $6.2bn adjusted for inflation…. Steve Jobs, then just 27, described in his bio as a “computer freak” worth upwards of $100 million [$310 million adjusted for inflation]…. The list from 1982 had 22.8% from oil, 15.2% from manufacturing, 9% finance and only 3% from technology…
Deep Magic: The 72-core (16 CPU, 40 GPU, 16 NPU) Apple M3Max chip is perhaps 720 mm^2, contains 92 billion transistors, and is made on TSMC’s 3 nm N3B process. The 132-SM Nvidia H100 chip is 814 mm^2, contains 80 billion transistors, and is made on TSMC’s slightly less demanding 4 nm N4 process. Apple charges laptop buyers about $1500 for the M3Max—but that includes something like a 200% markup over manufacturing, so figure that the manufacturing variable cost of an M3Max is $500. And as a chip more complex in its architecture, larger in its transistor count, and made on a more demanding process, TSMC ought to be charging more for a marginal M3Max than for a marginal H100. That the manufacturing cost of a marginal H100 is 1% of its current market cost is really not sustainable—and it makes me wonder who the people are who have money to burn but not programmer expertise to shift model-training off to a slower but much cheaper chip. I mean, in the end quantity has a quality all its own. And things do not have to use CUDA libraries:
Austin Carr: Nvidia’s AI Chip Stands Out as Tech’s Hottest Product: ‘Nvidia Corp.’s H100 artificial intelligence accelerator…. With its 80 billion transistors, the H100 is the go-to workhorse for training… large language models…. A single H100 now lists for $57,000 on hardware vendor CDW’s online shop—and data centers are filled with thousands of them. When Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang delivered the company’s first AI server with an older generation of graphic processing units to OpenAI in 2016, few could’ve predicted the role these kinds of chips would play…. Nvidia’s graphics cards were then synonymous with video games, not machine learning… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-29/nvidia-s-ai-chip-stands-out-as-tech-s-hottest-product>
History: The Latin “Tollendum” equals: should be extolled… or lifted up… or lifted out… or removed. How a word can maintain that amount of meaning-tension is not something I understand.
Cicero tried to use Octavian, and wund up dead. Perhaps it was because he could not resist being a little too witty. I do not know where this tradition originated, but here is Cæsar Octavianus after the battle of Mutina in April -43, as reported by C. Velleius Patroculus in his “Compendium of Roman History” Book II, ch. 62. “Laudandum and tollendum” are the last three words of the passage quoted below in Latin: “should be praised and should be [fill in the blank]”:
C. Velleius Patroculus: Compendium of Roman History: Before the defeat of Antony [at Mutina in April -43] the [Roman] senate, chiefly on the motion of Cicero [Octavianus] , passed all manner of resolutions complimentary to Caesar and his army. But, now that their fears had vanished, their real feelings broke through their disguise, and the Pompeian party once more took heart. By vote of the senate, Brutus and Cassius were now confirmed in possession of the provinces which they had seized…. Decimus Brutus was voted a triumph, presumably because, thanks to another’s services, he had escaped with his life. Hirtius and Pansa were honoured with a public funeral.
Of Caesar [Octavianus] not a word was said. The senate even went so far as to instruct its envoys, who had been sent to Caesar [Octavianus]’s army, to confer with the soldiers alone, without the presence of their general. But the ingratitude of the senate was not shared by the army; for, though Caesar [Octavianus] himself pretended not to see the slight, the soldiers refused to listen to any orders without the presence of their commander.
It was at this time that Cicero, with his deep-seated attachment for the Pompeian party, expressed the opinion, which said one thing and meant another, to the effect that Caesar “should be commended and then—elevated…” <https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2C*.html>
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Conference Board: Economy Watch: US View (December 2023): ‘It is more probable that the US economy will slip into a short and shallow recession in early 2024. Consumer spending… is beginning to cool. Moderating real income gains, falling savings and rising debt will likely further curb consumer spending heading into 2024…. As the economy cools in early 2024 so too will the labor market…. The path to 2% will be long and bumpy. We believe the Fed Funds Rate has peaked, but don’t foresee any cuts until mid-2024… <https://www.conference-board.org/research/economy-watch-US/Economy-Watch-December-2023-US>
Kashik Basu: Poor-Country Debt Crisis Looms: ‘COVID-19… increase[d] public spending…. Low- and lower-middle-income economies borrowed massively…. That left dozens of countries in debt distress or at high risk of it…. Poorest countries… external debt service… projected to surge by 40% in 2023-24. Ghana and Zambia have already defaulted, Ethiopia will likely default by 2024…. Not enough is being written about this…. Urgent international intervention is necessary…
Swan, Trevor W.: 1956. “Economic Growth & Capital Accumulation.” Economic Record 32:2 (November): 334–361. <https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecorec:v:32:y:1956:i:2:p:334-361>…
Market Sentiment: The Problem with the Magnificent 7: ‘Only two companies (Exxon & GE) from the 1980s list made it to 2000. Even IBM had dropped out of the top 10 list…. Incredibly, as of 2023, the only companies not associated with tech in the top 10 list of the S&P 500 are JP Morgan Chase and Berkshire. Just 7 companies contribute 28% of the total market cap of the S&P 500…. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft… virtual monopolies…. Only one company (Microsoft) from the 2000s and not even a single one from the 80s made it to the 2023 list…. If history is any guide, investing in the largest stocks is a surefire way to increase portfolio risk and underperform the market…
Robin Wigglesworth: Hedge fund herding is worse than ever: ‘The… “Magnificent Seven”…. Mutual fund managers… have mostly eschewed them…. Hedge funds… yelled “YOLO” and jumped in with both feet…. Goldman Sachs… “Our Hedge Fund VIP list of the most popular long positions has returned +31% YTD, and most of the ‘Magnificent 7’ mega-cap tech stocks remain at the top of the list. Mirroring the increasing concentration in the equity market, concentration in hedge fund portfolios has risen; the typical hedge fund holds 70% of its long portfolio in its top 10 positions. These dynamics have also lifted hedge fund exposure to the Momentum factor to a near record.” Hedge fund crowding is now the most extreme it has been in the 22 years that Goldman has tracked hedge fund positioning.… Momentum can be fun to ride, but…
<https://www.ft.com/content/047d52a0-01a1-4db5-b342-f7f159d10d84>
Public Reason: William Grimes: The West Studies the East, & Trouble Follows: ‘Said published… “Orientalism” nearly 30 years ago…. Robert Irwin… characterizes [it] … as “a work of malignant charlatanry.” Its distortions are so fundamental, its omissions so glaring, that the first order of business, as Mr. Irwin sees it, is to offer a dispassionate account of what Western scholars did and did not do…. More often than not, the scholars Mr. Irwin describes took an enlightened view of the peoples and the cultures they studied. “There has been a marked tendency for Orientalists to be anti-imperialists,” he writes, “as their enthusiasm for Arab or Persian or Turkish culture often went hand in hand with a dislike of seeing those people defeated and dominated by the Italians, Russians, British or French”…. [But] in the age of postcolonial studies, “Orientalism” continues to get an enthusiastic, even reverential hearing. It may not be right, but it feels good… <https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/books/01grim.html>
CryptoGrifting: Molly White: “Issue 47—Residual Garbage”: ‘Crypto venture capital funding plummeted 68% compared to 2022… $10.7 billion invested into crypto projects…. Reports… trumpeting… “hacks are down”… primarily driven by the fact that the assets that are being stolen are simply worth less…. Anti-rug-pull bot rug pulls: The Megabot project promised traders an AI trading bot that would earn its users “up to 30% monthly”. Besides that, it promised that the bot would trade while “sidestepping potential risks such as honeypots, rugs, and slow rugs”. “No one will be able to rug you anymore,” its website boasted. Or at least the website boasted that before it went offline…
Neofascism: Timothy Burke: The News: One of Those Years: ‘The inability of standard centrist-technocrat governments to deliver anything like vision… is opening up space for far-right ethnonationalist rulers who lack the capacity to manage state administrations… but who do have some kind of consistent social-cultural vision…. That was the story for first-wave fascist regimes… as well.… [In] the United States… 40% of the electorate stares catastrophe in the face and happily embraces it…. They fear they’d lose the country entirely if we just went on muddling through with competent centrism and a more-or-less liberal majority sociocultural bent, so they’d rather burn the whole thing down…
Jeff Tiedrich: The “Crisis at the Border”: ‘Jim Jordan… a few of his Republican pals… an airplane… reporters… fly down to… expose the seriousness of the border crisis. Because everyone knows there’s a border crisis. it’s all over Fox News. Newsmax. Breitbart. Border crisis. Six billion filthy violent foreign-language-gibbering illegal immigrants streaming across our southern border and coming to f*** up all your shit and take your job…. Yes, SIX BILLION! Marjorie Three Toes wouldn’t lie to you, would she?)… Spoiler alert: they couldn’t find one person crossing the border…. “As they rumbled along the entry port of San Luis, a dam along the Colorado River and more desolate sections of the U.S. border between Arizona and Mexico, though, their search came up empty”…. In the real world, there is no border crisis…. But… Gym lives inside the Wingnut Grievance Bubble, where everyone knows there’s a border crisis…
Dan Drezner: My 2023 Airing of Grievances: ‘If someone levies a accusation of plagiarism, make sure they understand what plagiarism, you know, actually means. I took a cursory look at Christopher Rufo’s plagiarism allegations against Harvard president Claudine Gay…. The very first example Rufo provides is… a textbook example of paraphrasing someone with the appropriate citation! It’s not plagiarism, and it sure as hell makes skeptical that Rufo knows what that word means…. Weak-ass claims of plagiarism weaken necessary claims of plagiarism. Cut it out…
