BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-01-14 Su
Drivers of r* across ten countries;Bay Area left-techno-utopianism incarnate in the form of the Whole Earth Catalog; the emergence of the idea of inequality; entrepreneurship & business applications; a video on Karl Polanyi; very briefly noted; & Econ 210a, Econ 115, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-01-12 Fr…
SubStack NOTES:
Economic History: The extremely low rs observed just before the beginning of the COVID plague had developed over decades as consequences of slow-moving trend shifts in demography and growth. Thus I find it very unlikely that these would have turned on a dime quickly over the past four years. Thus I think a return to secular stagnation over the course of the next decade is more likely than not:
Josh Davis & al.: Global Natural Rates in the Long Run: Postwar Macro Trends & the Market-Implied r in 10 Advanced Economies: ‘Trend inflation is treated as an observable and the unobservable natural rate is treated as latent and estimated from a no-arbitrage state-space model, with both macro and finance blocks…. Most of the long-term variation in yields in recent decades has come from shifts in the natural rate and inflation trend components, not from shifts in bond risk premia… We find bigger “headwinds” with natural rates converging near zero or even negative in all 10 countries by 2020, intensifying concerns about secular stagnation and proximity to the effective lower-bound on monetary policy in advanced economies… <ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/31787.html>
Silicon Valley: Ah! This is incredibly nice to see! Bay Area left-techno-utopianism, distilled and crystalized!:
Lawrence Wilkinson: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it”: ‘In 1968, Stewart Brand and small group of colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog…. “on the 55th anniversary of the publication of the original Whole Earth Catalog, Gray Area and the Internet Archive have made the Catalog freely available online…. Within the site’s grid of publications rests a cornucopia of writing and curation, from in-depth looks at space colonies to ecological analyses of the insurance industry to reporting on the state of the global teenager at the turn of the 01990s. The Whole Earth Index is a work of love, a noncommercial enterprise designed, as project lead and Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw told Long Now Ideas, to “allow us to reflect on how we got to where we are and regain some of that connection to the countercultural world” of the Bay Area of the 1960s and 1970s… <roughlydaily.com/2023/10/17/we-are-as-g…>
Moral Philosophy: The idea that it would be good if all in society were equal was pretty much completely foreign to Mediæval Europeans. Things, were instead, supposed to be equitable—which meant treating people who were unequal in rank, virtue, and contribution to society unequally. Society could not function well without this equitable inequality. The people who overthrew this were, I think, Rousseau and Turgot. Did they do so single-handed? (Or, rather, double-handed.) Or are they litmus tests for a shift in hearts and minds that came from elsewhere? I don’t know. Whichever is the case, however, Alfani and Frigeni have the goods:
Guido Alfani & Roberta Frigeni (2016): Inequality (Un)perceived: The Emergence of a Discourse on Economic Inequality from the Middle Ages to the Age of Revolution: ‘During the Middle Ages… aequalitas… cannot be separated from… aequitas (equity) and is also closely tied to that of civitas as a body… liberalitas/largitio (generosity), and of the vice avaritia (avarice) and vi tuous opposite, prudentia (prudence)…. After the [French] Revolution, however, aequalitas (égalité) boomed while aequitas declined…. the French Revolution spread a new use for the word and concept of equality across Europe… <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311010407_Inequality_Unperceived_The_Emergence_of_a_Discourse_on_Economic_Inequality_from_the_Middle_Ages_to_the_Age_of_Revolution>
ONE IMAGE: Entrepreneurship: Business Applications:
ONE VIDEO: Icarus Films: Karl Polanyi: The Human Factor:
<https://icarusfilms.com/if-capi6>
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Paul Krugman: ‘Had a long talk yesterday with a smart businessman who says he’s worried because inflation is still 3.9%. Gah. Commentators citing 1-year growth in core CPI are doing real harm. Some numbers: Core CPI, 12m: 3.9 Core CPI, last 6m: 3.2 Core CPI ex-shelter (which has legacy issues), 6m: 1.6 Market expectations of CPI for 2024: 2.3. Inflation has been defeated… <https://www.threads.net/@paulkrugman7/post/C2FNsYyOd3e>
Noah Smith: Techno-optimism for 2024: ‘What you should be excited about…. Robot World is coming…. AI art is getting absolutely amazing…. The Decade of the Battery powers onward…. Biotech is still booming….
Ben Thompson: Interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas: ‘If you can go back to the floating point, just back up and say, “What’s an NPU?”. An NPU on some level is just matmul and running these neural nets. If you can start to do some of those offloads into a CPU in an architecture that again is much more homogeneous, history has told us that these problems tend to move to general purpose CPUs over time, and that is where we will invest… <https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-arm-ceo-rene-haas/>
Economic History: Gary Gerstle, ed. (2019): Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession
H-Diplo… <https://networks.h-net.org/h-diplo>
Central Country: Economist: Western firms are quaking as China’s electric-car industry speeds up: ‘Expertise in batteries and a vast domestic market give Chinese firms an edge…. Western firms’ expertise making ICEs counts for little in the electrical age…. BYD shows what China can do. A tech firm that once specialised in batteries, it began making cars in 2003—at first with limited success. Although it managed to become the world’s biggest manufacturer of electric buses, as recently as 2017 it sold only 420,000, mostly ice, cars. Sales were falling. Last year, however, it sold 3m pure electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles—at a profit. It exports to over 70 countries and on December 22nd announced that it would build an EV factory in Hungary, to serve the European market from within… <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/01/11/western-firms-are-quaking-as-chinas-electric-car-industry-speeds-up>
Public Reason: Paul Krugman: ‘Mike Konczal. Maybe a bit unfair to mainstream economists: most saw the Great Recession as a demand shock, and a fair number were on some version of Team Transitory. But accurate for Very Serious People. Case in point: Jamie Dimon. In the news lately, because just as everyone has realized that we’re revisiting 1948, he’s talking stagflation. And 10 years ago he was saying that we couldn’t restore full employment because Americans didn’t have the right skills… Mike Konczal: ‘One thing about the VSP none-correct corner is; it’s the one that blames workers in both cases; for not having the skills to get the jobs (that didn’t exist) or for demanding too much output in nominal wages (even as labor share and real wages were falling through 2022)… <https://www.threads.net/@paulkrugman7/post/C2CyaY9u63h>
Journamalism: Paul Krugman: ‘Are we still writing articles about how Americans aren’t feeling the improved economy without acknowledging that (a) most people say they themselves are doing OK or better and (b) the disparity is mainly driven by Republicans?… <https://www.threads.net/@paulkrugman7/post/C2FenDZOvx3>
Public Reason: Molly White: Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details: ‘I migrated “Citation Needed” from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Here is exactly how I did that…. Substack no longer takes 10% of my subscriber payments. This is honestly pretty huge…. I’m no longer publishing on an a16z-backed platform…. I have full ownership of my writing and subscriber lists. Substack likes to brag that writers retain full ownership over their writing and membership lists, and they do to a much greater extent than some other platforms. But they still keep a lot to themselves, making truly packing up and leaving a challenging experience…. I can accept payments any way I like…. I can make my newsletter look how I want…. I can recommend anyone I want…. What I wanted was not a new platform, but rather no platform….. Server…. Domain…. Mailgun…. Hooking up Mailgun to Ghost is pretty straightforward: you just snag an API key from Mailman and plug it into the Ghost admin interface, et voilà. Less straightforward is doing all the configuration to reduce the chances of email providers seeing someone suddenly sending 20,000 emails all at once from a previously unused domain and going “SPAMMER!”… <https://citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/>
Enshittification: Balamb Springs: ‘Just learned that if you add “cooked.wiki/“ to beginning of ANY recipe url (before the https:/) it strips away everything but the recipe and organizes the ingredients and method into separate columns. Works for mobile and desktop… <https://bsky.app/profile/balambsprings.bsky.social/post/3kisrlri7yf2k>
