BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-01-03 We
Travel times in 1914; Biden’s industrial policy; very briefly noted; Arpit Gupta on the natural rate of inflation; Claudine Gay plagiarism complaint; Baratunde Thurston on how there is always sumthin; Sean Casten on the insanity of the GOP base; Matt Yglesias on how SubStack shouldn’t cheerlead for individual writers; & blancmange baking at the New York Times; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; cognitive DDOS attacks to confuse people about inequality; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-29 Sa…
ONE IMAGE: Travel Times in 1914:
ONE VIDEO: How Biden Has Changed Everything:
Very Briefly Noted:
Neofascism: James Gleick: ‘What happening at the Supreme Court is a massive unresolved bribery scandal that implicates at least three justices, but sure, let’s talk about AI <https://mastodon.social/@JamesGleick@zirk.us/111681390781452763>
Economics: Diane Coyle: To Fight Populism, Invest in Left-Behind Communities: ‘Structural economic shifts… have made urban living more lucrative. In today’s knowledge-based economy, where value is increasingly derived from intangible sources, gathering people in densely populated urban areas often results in positive spillovers…. Western countries must revitalize small towns and rural communities and ensure universal access to essential public services…. There is an economic case to be made for investing in public services and the infrastructure that sustains them. By recognizing that a shared sense of optimism and a basic faith in the possibility of social mobility fuel economic growth, we can repair the economic damage of the past two decades. A country that overlooks “places that don’t matter” risks becoming irrelevant itself… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improved-public-services-can-reduce-geographic-disparities-by-diane-coyle-2023-12>
Danny T. Quah (1997): Empirics for Growth & Distribution: Stratification, Polarization, & Convergence: ‘Journal of Economic Growth, Mar., 1997, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 27-59… <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40215931>
Public Reason: SubStack: ‘Congratulations! You’re a Substack Bestseller: Congratulations on reaching over 1,000 paid subscribers on Substack. Your name and profile will now display this badge to show that you’re a bestseller. You can turn it off in settings if you prefer… <https://public.hey.com/p/nT87mqpSXGz5otiyfBVY61ww>
Global Warming: Laura Tyson & Lenny Mendonca: California Leads the Way on Climate: ‘As a center of innovation, California has a long history of developing solutions to global warming, including its decade-old cap-and-trade system. The state’s sustained commitment to the green transition has highlighted the power of subnational governments to accelerate progress toward net-zero emissions… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/california-climate-policy-pioneer-by-laura-tyson-and-lenny-mendonca-2023-12>
Economic History: Philip Koop: ‘I feel that mobile pastoralism is getting short shrift as a mode of “production, coërcion, & cognition” here…. It does not fit into the technological succession sequence…. But that is just what makes it such an important example; people disagree whether pastoralism developed from mixed farming or from hunting and gathering, but either way it provides a fine example of the “non-linear progression of society”…. Pastoralism supported a higher-than-subsistence standard of living; not many pastoralists switched to farming by choice… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/an-appreciation-of-ernst-gellner/comment/45974908>
Cognition: Richard P. Feynman: QED: ‘A wise guy named Feynman approaches you saying, “Shh, if you know how to count, you don’t have to learn all this fancy stuff about carrying and adding! All you’ve got to do is to get a hold of 564 jars. Then you put into each jar 253 pebbles. Finally, you pour all the pebbles out onto a big pile and count them. That’s the answer!” So you see, Feynman not only teaches you how to multiply, but also gives you a deep understanding of what the high priests and their students, those people soon to have Ph.D.s from prestigious universities, are doing! On the other hand, if you learn to multiply Feynman’s way, you couldn’t quite apply for a job (4 words) as an accountant. If your boss asked you to multiply big numbers all day long, you would be exhausted, and the students who went to High Priest University would leave you in the dust… <https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8169.pdf>
Well, Mike DeWine has a limit after all: Erin Reed: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Vetoes Trans Ban, “It Is Parents Who Know Their Child Best”: ‘The move is a stunning blow to proponents of gender affirming care bans and shows that there may be cracks in the Republican Party’s strategy on targeting trans youth… <https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1740767422452535443>
GPT-LLM-ML: Dave Karpf: Bullet Points: A couple predictions for AI in 2024: ‘A friend who works at one of the major tech platforms. He is a level-headed guy, and is also rather AI-pilled…. He has used machine learning to automate parts of his workflow for years—stuff like automated tagging and flagging pieces of content for human review. Now he is using generative AI to manage those same tasks… radically better. It’s not that the AI never makes errors, or is poised to replace him or his colleagues. It’s just that it does all the machine learning tasks 10x better, with 1/10th the effort on his part. The parts of his job that were huge time sinks have just been simplified.
That… makes a lot of sense to me. I am both unsurprised and unconcerned that LLMs do the job better than support vector machines or other classifiers. But it is a type of AI enthusiasm that has nothing in common with the Sam Altman extended fantasy universe…. AI, in this case, is functionally a system upgrade. Think of it like replacing a Playstation 3 with a Playstation 5. That’s a huge improvement. But it’s still a gaming console. It isn’t going to write your novel or cook your dinner…. Compared to Web3 and the Metaverse, that still makes generative AI much more real…. But that doesn’t mean we’re on the path to artificial general intelligence. It seems more likely that generative AI’s impact will eventually be on par with word processing…
Literature: Victor Hugo (1862): Les Misérables: ‘Preface: So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862…
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: A very nice piece by the sharp Arpit Gupta. I believe he is 100% right on sectoral rotation. I would, again, plead for people to pay much more attention to thinking about the natural rate of inflation—what rate of inflation is needed to get real micro prices across sectors into what a flexprice market economy wants them to be?
In addition, he is right that this is not an inflation-expectations story because (with the exception of the April 2023 10-Year TIPS inflation anchor-dragging crash and the August-October 2023 10-Year Nominal Treasury r*-is-way-up episodes) expectations of the long run did not move. And the points about labor flexibility and productivity are well-made, and important.
I did have one major wince, however. Gupta claims we have just seen “fairly historically unique set of circumstances resulting in a sectoral reallocation”. But we saw this in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
A knowledge of economic history is a true secret weapon in considering possibilities, not being completely blindsided, and not being stupid:
Arpit Gupta: The Goods-Services Rotation Theory of Inflation <arpitrage.substack.com/p/the-goods-serv…>: ‘Under… flexible prices… sectoral reallocation would work out just fine… Because of this interaction of price rigidity and sectoral impacts, you can get aggregate inflation even if total spending doesn’t change at all: the first rotation to goods increases the overall price level, and the second rotation back to services does as well….
Inflation seems more a product of conditions on the ground at the moment, rather than the more complicated forward-looking story…. Inflation… [making] people… pessimistic… lower their spending today… some stabilizing dynamics with respect to inflation….
Another miss here is thinking about the labor market: Larry Summers and others… pessimistic <nber.org/papers/w29739 about the labor supply side… follow[ing] a lot of pessimism, in the 2010s, about the marginal productivity of laid off workers. Instead, it turns out the labor market was able absorb many…. The pandemic period of inflation deserves to be considered in its own right; not as a simple restatement of previous trends. With the benefit of hindsight; it seems like the economy wasn’t in as much risk of remaining either stagnation in demand (as it was in the 2010s) or in persistent inflation (as in the 1970s).
We experienced a fairly historically unique set of circumstances resulting in a sectoral reallocation of spending towards goods and then back to services, and this pattern can explain a lot…
Intellectual Property: Ah. I see Claudine Gay has resigned…
To me, it looks as though a not-incredibly-rare way that Claudine Gay writes is to (a) copy a sentence from a source, (b) paste it, and then © edit it a little, while (d) sometimes citing the source and sometimes not.
That is not at all a good way to write.
That is not a way that I have ever been tempted to write because my prose-writing muscles were set before it was at all possible. Even when you are reading a sentence and then trying to express the same thought, the degree of commonality here strikes me as… unusual and unlikely—everybody I read, after all, uses words I tend to shy away from for whatever reason, and so I think I would have a hard time producing this degree of consenance:
Anonymous: Claudine Gay Complaint <braddelong.substack.com/api/v1/fi…> <https://braddelong.substack.com/api/v1/file/a739dd85-e085-4a44-bf66-9f708c67a2a6.pdf>
Neofascism: Ignorance is Strength! George Orwell may have thought that his “Nineteen Eighty-Four” had some elements of parody, in that the doctrines and slogans of EngSoc had been sharpened to make them even more obviously false and insane. But it appears not:
Sean T. Casten: ‘“What caused the civil war?”, “Does burning fossil fuel warm the planet?”, “Do guns kill people?”, “Should women have equal rights?” and any number of other really simple questions are “gotchas” in a GOP primary. That makes me sad… <https://www.threads.net/@seantcasten/post/C1ZsgfFOAJ7>
Neofascism: As Robert Penn Warren’s character Willie Stark, Governor of Louisiana, says in All the King’s Men: “There is always sumthin…” I am not sure that is true. I do know that there is always something that can be made to appear true for a while by enough bad actors. Cf.: GamerGate. For me, thus, the question has to be: Despite their flaws, is this the best person we can get for the job?
The big problem with Claudine Gay in her situation is that her occasional practice of copy-and-paste-a-sentence-and-then-change-a-few-words is destructive of some of the core values of the institution she was picked to head. I don’t think anyone, no matter what their gender or ethnicity, could have survived that in that hot seat. Cf.: Larry Summers—what were the objections to him, again, exactly? How did they impact his ability to do his job, which was to try to shake up an organization that wastes truly staggering amounts of money and badly needs a shake-up?:
Baratunde Thurston: A.I. Explosion & D.E.I. Blowback: ‘I do know enough about humans to understand that you can find dirt in anyone’s closet if you’re motivated enough… not to excuse [Gay’s] behavior but humble all who would ride in on a high horse. In the end, she lost the room and key members in it: donors, elected officials, shitposters, and exhausted students and faculty. She may also have simply lost her own will to face this mountain of scandals and hate-infused personal attacks…. Many things can be true at once. She can have made mistakes, and the attacks against her can be bad-faith, racist, sexist, strategically-timed acts of information warfare. Her case is also a microcosm of America’s race story: no matter how high a Black person, and particularly a Black woman, climbs, they will be targeted for destruction…. The Harvard shield could not protect her. If anything, it invited more spears…. If she led the same institution but wasn’t a Black woman, she’d likely still have her job. In moments like these it’s helpful to remember the many chances extended to men like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, people who’ve publicly trafficked in and amplified deeply antisemitic tropes, and who still command empires of influence in public and private… <newsletter.baratunde.com/p/10-predictio…>
Public Reason: Do note that right now we are not arguing over whether SubStack should be muting the reach of Neonazis. We are simply trying to get SubStack to stop boosting the signal of Neonazis.
Which is why something much stronger than “Substack should also constantly be trying to make business and product decisions that are consistent with their desire to be doing minimal content moderation…” is called for here, as a simple morality-mandated exercise of voice by those of us who are not (yet) choosing exit:
Matt Yglesias: Last Mailbag of 2023: ‘Nobody does takes like “Microsoft Word has a Nazi problem” or “Ikea shouldn’t sell office furniture to companies.”… Substack is mostly like that—a software product that I find useful and so do lots of people who have lots of different political opinions…. But… Substack does a lot of little things like recommendations and leaderboards to try to make the platform more valuable and lucrative…. But it does get you into a conversation in which it’s hard to just plead pure neutrality. What if an overtly white supremacist site were number two on the politics leaderboard? That’s a bad look…. Substack should also constantly be trying to make business and product decisions that are consistent with their desire to be doing minimal content moderation…
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