BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-05-10 Fr
The left’s views of the geopolitics of industrial policy; China’s exports: solar panels, batteries, & electric vehicles; very briefly noted; Koyama reviews Kuran on Islamic civilization growth retardation; it is too dangerous to ever get completely out of (U.S.) stocks; & Teaching the history of economic growth (Econ 135) next semester: toward a schedule & topics: notes; PODCAST: Hexapodia LVIII: mourning the death of Vernor Vinge; Japan’s economy: present, past, & future; & BRIEFLY NOTED: for 2024-05-07 Tu…
ONE VIDEO: The Left’s Views of the Geopolitics of Industrial Policy:
ONE IMAGE: China’s Exports: Solar Panels, Batteries, & Electric Vehicles:
Very Briefly Noted:
Human Capital: Campuses are, for the most part, calm places: Paul Musgrave: Everything Matters and Nothing Does: ‘Living in a discursive object in contested times…. That the elite and the conservative media alike have decided to invest campus politics with a profound significance is well known. I do not know how to think about this. The protests are, in some ways, widely supported… but… not a mass movement. I suspect that most campuses are like mine: tolerant of the protesters, sympathetic to many requests, skeptical of specific demands, and somewhat more outraged by the treatment of the protesters than strictly endorsing (all of) the protesters’ views…. Concerns about anti-semitic content are not entirely an elite fixation… [but] less prominent for most students than many members of congressional committees…. Most students are not protesting nor even thinking about the protests most of the time…. Most faculty are not encouraging the protests even if I would wager that a number of them are disappointed or even angry at how specific protests have been addressed by specific administrators… <https://musgrave.substack.com/p/everything-matters-and-nothing-does>
Enabling the people (or a representative sample thereof) to truly speak and make choices: Martin Wolf (2023): Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy: ‘Western polities are ailing — deliberative assemblies would revivify them…. Elections are necessary. But unbridled majoritarianism is a disaster…. [e have] constraining institutions: independent oversight over elections, an independent judiciary and an independent bureaucracy. But are they enough? No. In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of… citizens’ juries…. There are two arguments for introducing sortition…. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians…. Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media. A modest way to do this is to introduce citizens’ juries to advise on contentious issues… <https://www.ft.com/content/81b94348-c915-4b3c-a9b2-8a26d71bb4c9>
Economics: Hard agree: Dani Rodrik: Don’t Fret About Green Subsidies: ‘Governments should stop decrying each others’ green industrial policies as norm violations or dangerous transgressions of international rules. The moral, environmental, and economic arguments all favor those who subsidize their green industries, not those who want to tax others’ production… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/green-subsidies-justified-on-economic-environmental-and-moral-grounds-by-dani-rodrik-2024-05>
Economic History: When Karl Marx was a Popular-Frontist (briefly): Jonathan Sperber (2013): Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life: ‘August 4, 1848… Marx… asserting that… through… “intellectual weapons” the “interests of the individual classes” could find “a mutually agreeable compromise…”. “Denial of mutual concessions, as well as perverted concepts of the relationship between the classes of the population,” had led in Paris “to a bloody outcome” [in June 1848]. Marx went on to denounce the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship in the name of a “single class”… as “nonsense.” Rather, a revolutionary government would have to be made up of “heterogeneous elements” that would “reach agreement about the most appropriate form of administration through the exchange of ideas.” This renunciation… of the class struggle… from the man who had just written the Communist Manifesto six months earlier, sounds, well, downright un-Marxist…. The ceaselessly anti-Prussian editorial policy of the New Rhineland News… [sought to] rally… the Rhineland… [against] authoritarian Prussian rule. Provoking or exploiting hostility between different social classes would only weaken such a coalition. [Hence] this idea of temporarily renouncing anti-capitalism for anti-Prussian purposes… <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Karl_Marx_A_Nineteenth_Century_Life/ytIfuJ8zzeUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=sperbert+marx+Provoking+or+exploiting+hostility+between+different+social+classes+would+only+weaken+such+a+coalition&pg=PA228&printsec=frontcover>
Stabilizing a society in crisis requires cutting back weakly justified claims on society’s resources, but weak claims are often held by very strong claimants: Peter Turchin & Sergey A. Nefedov (2009): Secular Cycles: ‘The plunge in elite incomes which begins in the pre-crisis period… affects most strongly the lowest noble stratum…. Gentlemen living on £10–20 a year who was employing only three servants and lived in one house, and whose meals were devoid of much luxury in terms of wine and spices, had little room to maneuver when… income plunged by up to 50 percent in the mid-fifteenth century…. A number of social mechanisms exist by which elite surpluses can be reduced: (1) deaths… from civil war, (2)… purges… by new rulers, (3) limitations… on heir production… (4) downward social mobility…. The three main factors driving… sociopolitical instability are general overpopulation, elite overproduction, and state insolvency, all these trends must be reversed before the disintegrative phase can come to an end… <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Secular_Cycles/sx8030FFL4cC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=turchin+nefedov+%C2%A310%E2%80%9320+a+year+who+was+employing+only+three+servants+and+lived+in+one+house&pg=PA17&printsec=frontcover>
Cognition: There is an awful lot of non-genetic development of biological characteristics in modern humanity: Joseph Henrich: The Secret of Our Success: ‘What [were] the implications… when reading—and its related neurological changes—first became widespread… [and] changed the brains of many people while opening the cultural transmission pathways… [in] a sudden expansion of collective brains…. To read these words you are using a culturally constructed network… the brain’s “letterbox”… a specialized piece of… firmware…. The relationship between “R” and “r” is literally etched in the brain circuitry of English readers…. Hebrew characters activate the letterbox in Hebrew readers, but not in English readers…. Learning to read… thickens the corpus callosum… modifies the superior temporal sulcus and the left inferior prefrontal cortex…. This rewiring endows highly literate people with (1) longer verbal memories, (2) broader patterns of activation… to spoken words, and (3) a greater awareness of… sounds that make up words…. However… skilled readers are probably worse at identifying faces, since jury-rigging the relevant brain areas impinges on the fusiform gyrus…. These are biological modifications to our brain, but not genetic modifications… the end result of thousands of years of cultural evolution…. The brain’s letterbox gets wired into a kind of neuronal sweet spot, where it has the tools for fine-grained object recognition and connections to language centers…. <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Secret_of_Our_Success/8XKYDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+brain%E2%80%99s+letterbox+gets+wired+into+a+kind+of+neuronal+sweet+spot,+where+it+has+the+tools+for+fine-grained+object+recognition+and+connections+to+language+centers+henrich&pg=PA261&printsec=frontcover>
Anthology Intelligence: “Eternal September” as the typical failure mode of all accelerations in the speed and density of human communication. A good argument. But I still think advertising-supported businesses supercharge this process: Michele Avalle & al.: Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time: ‘Drawing from an extensive dataset that spans eight platforms over 34 years—from Usenet to contemporary social media—our findings show consistent conversation patterns and user behaviour, irrespective of the platform, topic or time…. Debates and contrasting sentiments among users significantly contribute to more intense and hostile discussions. Moreover, the persistence of these patterns across three decades, despite changes in platforms and societal norms, underscores the pivotal role of human behaviour in shaping online discourse… <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y>
The difference between reality and what people see on their screens: John Burn-Murdoch: How our sense of economic reality is being distorted: ‘A new study adds to the evidence that competition for eyeballs may be warping our sense of the world…. None of this is likely to change. A recent paper in Nature found that the more negative a headline, the more people will click on it, and anyone who has spent time on social media — now the primary source of news for a growing portion of people — will know the same dynamics apply there. From news organisations to TikTokers, everyone is now optimising for engagement, and that means we hear more about the bad than the good… <https://www.ft.com/content/8cd76cde-7694-4674-99a7-188c18257530>
MAMLMs: The intellectual wellspring of the idea of a Superintelligent Singularity: Vernor Vinge (1993): The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era: ‘Stan Ulam [27] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying: “One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue…” Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is still thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [24]).) [24] Stent, Gunther S., The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, The Natural History Press, 1969. [27] Ulam, S., Tribute to John von Neumann, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May, 1958, pi-49… <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19940022856>
Science Fiction: David Brin: Vernor Vinge—the Man with Lamps on His Brows: ‘They said it of Moses—that he had ‘lamps on his brows.’ That he could peer ahead, through the fog of time. That phrase is applied now to the Prefrontal Lobes, just above the eyes - organs that provide humans our wan powers of foresight. Wan… except in a few cases, when those lamps blaze! Shining ahead of us, illuminating epochs yet to come…. Vernor gave us peerless legends that often depicted human success at overcoming problems… while posing new ones! New dilemmas that may lie just beyond our myopic gaze. He would often ask: “What if we succeed? Do you think that will be the end of it?” Vernor’s aliens… were fascinating beings, drawing us into different styles of life and paths of consciousness. His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk…. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration… though I deem it to have been even more prophetic about the yin-yang tradeoffs of privacy, transparency and accountability… <https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2024/03/vernor-vinge-man-with-lamps-on-his-brows.html>
SubStack NOTES:
Economic History: As I get older, I find myself more attracted to Patricia Crone’s observation that we should not measure other high erasion societies against a Dover-Circle yardstick, but should rather recognize that they were very successful at what their leaders intended them to do, which was to maintain and perfect their particular modes of societies of domination. In a stable and well-functioning society of domination nobody who holds any concentration of social power—whether ideological, political, or military—wants there to be long-lasting and powerful business organizations:
Mark Koyama: Review of Timur Kuran, “The long divergence: how Islamic law held back the Middle East”: ‘The book demonstrates how dynamic institutional analysis should be conducted…. Kuran is… able to show how separate institutions… egalitarian Islamic inheritance practices, polygyny, and the structural of Islamic partnerships mutually supported one another, making it difficult to establish long-lasting economic organizations. Institutions, in this view, do not exist in isolation but are rather systems of mutually reinforcing ‘interrelated elements’…. Had any one Islamic institutionexisted in isolation, reform would have been feasible. However, reform of any single insti-tution was likely to fail unless other institutions were also transformed. Hence Islamic legalinstitutions formed a mutually self-reinforcing set of institutional arrangements… <https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0xqkwli8nnmm1qbbck3zv/Review-of-the-Long-Divergence-PC.pdf?rlkey=pq3bi7t61ujqikfy3pgyxoz0c&e=1&dl=0>
Economics: Over time. the earnings yield on stocks has trended downward. That means that pretty much any market timing rule for the equity proportion of your portfolio will fail. Price-earnings ratios that appear high today from the perspective of past generations will, if this trend continues, appear low in a generation. In this context, the sheer size of the equity return premium is going to make any but the most finely tuned and crafted equity-share market-timing portfolio strategy into a loser. And the finely tuned and crafted strategies that are winners on historical data are very unlikely to be properly robust:
John Authers: It’s Dangerous to Stay Out of Stocks: ‘Research from Barclays provides fresh evidence that you should almost always have some money in equities…. Over no 20-year period since 1925, a span that includes both the stock market crash of 1929 and the global financial crisis of 2008, have [U.S.] equities failed to beat inflation. That cannot be said of any other asset class:… The same pattern is confirmed in Barclays’ home market of the UK, for which its data stretches back to 1899. The last 125 years have been much less kind to Britain’s economy and financial markets than they have been to the US, and so there was one 20-year period over which stocks lagged inflation… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-09/skipping-stocks-is-a-very-risky-investment-strategy>
![https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","belowTheFold":true}">](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","belowTheFold":true}">){kind=link}