BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-02-14 We
Angus Bylsma reviewing “Slouching Towards Utopia’; Dario Perkins reminds us that this is not a normal business cycle; the Apollo spacecraft’s computer from 1965; global warming proceeds; very briefly noted; & BRIEFLY NOTED for 2024-02-12 Mo…
Economic History: Thanks much for the review of “Slouching Towards Utopia” <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>!
My reading of Polanyi is that he notes that people will not stand for a society in which wealth is the only source of social power, and that people will especially demand that the use of the land—the shape of the built and non-built environment—the levels of individuals incomes, and most of all that the allocation of finance to keep the wheels of industry going must conform to non-economic social and sociological expectations and intuitions of what is appropriate. From one perspective this is market economic logic vs. social justice. From another perspective, we must never forget that often what people feel to be “social justice” is profoundly unjust: worse for you not to receive from the market the income you deserve is for you to watch others receive much larger incomes than they deserve. And I think Polanyi recognized that.
Thus I do not think Polanyi thought that “fascism… [had] nothing to do with racism, nationalism, conservatism”. That the market was not validating keeping the Black man down, keeping the Pole in his place, keeping women in the kitchen was a key part of the societal half of the part of Polanyi’s double movement in which society tried to constrain and control the market.
And we do see all of that at work today…
Angus Bylsma: Brutishly Short?: ‘Polanyi’s bold point was that social-economic conflict the onrush of market society generated was the mechanism of history. Fascism, for example, was nothing to do with racism, nationalism, conservatism, and so forth. But DeLong’s narrative is, in this regard, strikingly non-Polanyian. The collapse of the post-war social democratic consensus is attributed to, in no particular order, fear of ‘moochers’ and the free-rider problem, policy misadventures in government monopolies, and the failure to combat inflation effectively in the early 70’s… <http://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/brutishly-short>
Economics: The principal lessons going forward from the COVID depression and subsequent reopening is that there are no principal lessons going forward from such a one-off episode:
Dario Perkins: : ‘2020 was not a normal recession. The downturn was not the result of any organic macro process or a response to some underlying financial imbalance…. Since then, we have seen huge macro distortions from a variety of sources, including: Massive rotations in consumer spending…. Logistical chaos…. Further supply shocks from the war in Ukraine…. Pent-up demand and “revenge spending”…. Demand-supply mismatches in jobs markets…. “Volume destruction” from very high inflation (rising prices reduced real spending power)…. Confusing signals out of China…. What did mainstream economics get wrong? Petty much everything…. Main errors were: Allured by faulty leading indicators…. Mislead (again) by the Phillips curve…. Confused by levels effects…. Getting causal relationships wrong…. This has been a fake cycle, caused by massive temporary distortions… <https://blogs.tslombard.com/where-are-we-in-the-cycle>
ONE VIDEO: Computer for Apollo (1965):
Eldon Hall, Ramon Alonzo, Albert Hopkins, Jack Poundstone, & John Fitch:
ONE IMAGE: Global Warming Proceeds:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Paul Krugman: Americans Are Finally Starting to Feel Better About the Economy: ‘Who cares how the market’s doing? (And should they?): ‘there seems to have been a sudden upswing in consumer sentiment, which is finally starting to catch up with the reality that inflation has plunged while unemployment has remained low. And I do mean sudden…
Rana Faroohar: America now has a high-pressure economy: ‘There are three pressure points…. This just isn’t a normal business cycle…. There are still all sorts of macro distortions working their way through the system…. The difference between the data and the felt experience of the economy…. The American public… live with virtually no social safety-net in one of the most rapaciously capitalist societies on the planet, where quick hiring and firing with little or no severance pay is still the norm…. The third and final pressure point… is the nature of markets today… the “everything bubble”…. When the market capitalisation of the Magnificent Seven—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla—is equal to the combined size of equity markets in Canada, Japan and the UK, one must question valuations… <https://www.ft.com/content/4b5801a5-46a4-49b0-a7f9-6587d6d05154>
Economic History: Princeton University Press: Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1: ‘A major new translation of the explosive book that transformed our world. Hardcover: Price: $39.95/£35.00. ISBN: 9780691190075. Published (US): Sep 10, 2024. Published (UK): Nov 5, 2024. Pages: 856…. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system…. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter…. Precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source…. With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts… <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital>
Global Warming: Noah Smith: A bunch of handy charts about climate change: ‘A couple dozen pictures are worth a couple thousand words…. The future of the human race looks OK — at least, as far as climate change is concerned. With the magic of solar and batteries, we can keep civilizational progress humming while also reducing our destructive impact on the Earth’s climate. Yes, there are still some big hurdles out there — the Chinese coal industry, Middle East profligacy, NIMBYs in the U.S., and so on. But in stark contrast to 15 years ago, we now possess the tools to get the job done… <http://www.noahpinion.blog/p/a-bunch-of-handy-charts-about-climate>
Moral Philosophy: Alasdair MacIntyre (1971): Against the self-images of the age: essays on ideology & philosophy: ‘Against those who believe that some particular ideology is still able to provide the light that our individual and social lives need, I shall assert that—in the case of psychoanalysis, of Christianity, and above all of Marxism—either intellectual failure, or failure to express the forms of thought and action which constitute our contemporary social life, or both, have led to their necessary and in the long run not to be regretted decay. Against those who believe that in our type of society ideology as such can no longer find living roots or expression, I shall assert that it is the specific traits of these particular ideologies that we have inherited which make them no longer viable, and not any characteristics of ideology as such; and moreover that the belief in the end of ideology itself masks an ideology which is no less an ideology for being so often unacknowledged and which is perhaps less reputable than it might be insofar as it goes unrecognized… <https://archive.org/details/againstselfimage0000maci_h0j3>
Public Reason: Nick S.: Earnestness Is Underrated… <https://earnestnessisunderrated.substack.com/archive>
Spatial Computing: Joshua Gans: How to seed systems: ‘Once again Apple shows the way through UI invention…. A UI invention is the discovery of a way that ordinary people can interface with a new technology…. Apple’s role in this…. Was it the Apple I or Apple II that was relevant for personal computing? Was it the iPod or iMac that seeded digital music…. It is the big picture that is important. [In] the really large leaps in ecosystem development… Apple worked out a new UI… put it together in what would become a dominant design…. The Vision Pro has only one significant innovation, and it is the big one: it gets the UI for spatial computing right… <http://joshuagans.substack.com/p/how-to-seed-systems>
Ben Thompson: ‘Apple Vision Pro in an economy seat is life-changing. Movie experience is a total escape, and here the Mac screen-sharing makes a massive difference. Anyone flying long-haul regularly: it’s worth it. Absolutely worth it… <https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1756505217913467324>
GPT-LLM-AML: Henry Farrell: The political economy of AI: ‘LLMs are cultural technologies of summarization, whose value depends on people continuing to actually produce culture that can usefully be summarized. Absent intervention, LLMs will likely develop, as other technologies such as Internet search have, in ways that benefit their creators, at the expense of others. The summarizations that they produce risk supplanting the culture that they feed on…. How these technologies develop and get regulated has a lot… to do with the constellations of interests that they disturb and they create…. The political economy of new technologies, like the political economy of everything, is mostly about who gets what… <http://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-political-economy-of-ai>
Journamalism: Dan Drezner: The Ideas Industry in 2024: ‘A few thoughts on many worsening trends…. The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas argued… three trends… erosion of trust in authority and expertise… political polarization… plutocrats with a vested interest in funding certain ideas…. It has become easier to introduce new ideas into the public sphere, but bad ideas just don’t die…. It is the rise of the wannabe intellectual plutocrat that has been particularly bizarre in recent months, however. While sometimes these multi-millionaires are flogging ideas to advance their material self-interest, there are other drivers as well. Perhaps no better person embodies this vainglorious trend than activist investor/wannabe intellectual Bill Ackman… <http://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-ideas-industry-in-2024>