WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2024-08-09 Fr
Poll aggregators & such; housing-cost inflation numbers out of date; the plague-driven permanent wheel towards goods; reproducing ChatGPT2; Eichengreen on the likely Fed easing pace; “New York Times” as an intellectual-property thief; Trump proposes a Central Bank Digital Currency to pay off the national debt; “New York Times” lies in claiming Trump “agreed to” rather than “proposed” a Fox-News debate; American conservatives are weird because they are fundamentalists; very briefly noted; & thinking about what to teach; Charlie Maier’s concept of the project-state; Adam Smith’s very limited attachment to laissez faire; bad Fed call at the July meeting; the problem of modern governance; & weekly briefly noted for 2024-08-01 Th…
Poll Aggregators & Such:
Not something you want to spend too much time on over the next three months. The informational juice from squeezing these lemons is low. Try to resist!:
Silver Bulletin <https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model>
The Economist <https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/trump-harris-polls>
RealClearPolitics <https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/>
Decision Desk HQ <https://elections2024.thehill.com/national/harris-trump-general/>
The Cook Political Report <https://www.cookpolitical.com/survey-research/cpr-national-polling-average/2024/harris-trump-overall>
ONE IMAGE: Our Currently Reported Official Housing-Cost Inflation Numbers Are Substantially Out of Date:
A SECOND IMAGE: The Plague-Driven Permanent Wheel of the Economy Towards Goods & Away from Services:
ONE VIDEO: Andrej Karpathy: Let’s reproduce GPT-2 (124M):
SubStack NOTES:
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Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Dan is definitely on to something here. But I have no idea why this kind of neo-Austrian doomerism—the social-democratic order has to collapse and collapse soon—is so very prevalent among all the TechBros. But it certainly is. We see this most of all in the P(DOOM) discourse. But it is all over the place:
Dan Drezner: The Panic of the Techbros: ‘Techbros… panic a lot. Remember the hyperinflation of 2021-2022? No…. Nonetheless techbros like Jack Dorsey were convinced that hyperinflation was coming…. Elon Musk now seems to be in permanent panic mode, whether it’s about civil war in Europe or that Christianity will perish…. I have attended too many events where I had to listen to techbros assure me that the Mother of All Recessions was happening in 2024… after an entire year of techbros assure me that the Mother of All Recessions was happening in 2023. Or 2022…. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have been bearish on the U.S. economy for quite some time…. On a deeper level, however, one wonders if Silicon Valley is about to face… the massive amount of unproductive entrepreneurship coming from tech… [and] the air is coming out of an AI bubble….t would not surprise me if this week sees more volatility due to the pre-existing panic of the techbros… <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-panic-of-the-techbros>Actually, I think there is something different about a steel job—it is manipulating nature in awesome ways as part of a very large distributed division of labor. It’s not the case that you have to do it with your muscles or your brain directly—recall JFK’s talk with the janitor who said his job was to put a man on the moon. It has to be well=paid, and it has to be respected. But being part of doing something that seems out of the ordinary for standard humans definitely helps with second. Not, mind you, that Eric is wrong with respect to the big picture: he is right there;
Eric Loomis: Unions Make Jobs Good: ‘There is no such thing as a “good job.” The good jobs we nostalgically remember today as good were only made good by unions forcing the companies to pay up for these super crappy jobs. There’s nothing inherent about a steel job that makes it better than a fast food job… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/08/unions-make-jobs-good>
Central Country: The thing about this Party-State view of Chinese economic progress is that there are definite limits to the returns to physical capital accumulation, and that the investments that are really worth making are those that generate improvements in total factor productivity. Has the “bloated industrial base” delivered those? Sometimes yes, but much more often no, Will the next wave focused on “New Productive Forces” deliver those? Possibly. But it seems unlikely. What has changed that would enable them to do so?:
Zongyuan Zoe Liu: China’s Real Economic Crisis: ‘Why Beijing Won’t Give Up on a Failing Model…. As the party sees it, consumption is an individualistic distraction that threatens to divert resources away from China’s core economic strength: its industrial base…. China’s economic advantage derives from its low consumption and high savings rates, which generate capital that the state-controlled banking system can funnel into industrial enterprises. This system also reinforces political stability by embedding the party hierarchy into every economic sector. Because China’s bloated industrial base is dependent on cheap financing to survive—financing that the Chinese leadership can restrict at any time—the business elite is tightly bound, and even subservient, to the interests of the party. In the West, money influences politics, but in China it is the opposite: politics influences money. The Chinese economy clearly needs to strike a new balance between investment and consumption, but Beijing is unlikely to make this shift because it depends on the political control it gets from production-intensive economic policy… <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-real-economic-crisis>
MAMLMs: Apple is not paying the NVIDIA tax. (Neither is Google.) And it is making features, not hype backed by the huge overpay spend on NVIDIA training farms:
M.G. Siegler: Apple Does What It Does, Without Too Much AI Spend: ‘Cook just kept calling Apple Intelligence “another compelling reason” to upgrade but not “the compelling reason” to upgrade…. Some may upgrade to “future proof” their device for when Apple Intelligence ships, but will it be more than normally would upgrade already?… This should assuage concerns that Apple is overspending on their AI build out. They need to spend some, of course. But unlike their peers, they’re not going to overdo it—and, in fact, they’re likely paying their peers who are perhaps overdoing it… <https://spyglass.org/apple-q3-2024/>The Problem of Induction suddenly changes from being an academic curiosity to being something of immense immediate economic and technological import:
Gary Marcus: This one important fact about current AI explains almost everything: ‘The simple fact is that current approaches to machine learning (which underlies most of the AI people talk about today) are lousy at outliers…. An analysis of [a] specific [Tesla] car crash… [with] an overturned double trailer…. Professor Koopman says about the crash…. The system is “not trained on pictures of the overturned double trailer. It just didn’t know what it was… [just] lights… in unusual positions. A person would’ve clearly seen something big… in… the road. But… machine learning… trains on… examples and if it encounters something it doesn’t have a bunch of examples for it may have no idea what’s going on.” Everyone commenting on or thinking about AI should learn it by heart, if not verbatim, certainly the gist… <http/s://garymarcus.substack.com/p/this-one-important-fact-about-current>Human Capital: The importance of having people who are here for the mission: no organization or community can flourish unless it is composed of such, and unless it excludes people who are not here for the mission. As I periodically say, conservative professors whose first words to a visiting professor are “you should close your office door; otherwise undergraduates may wander in” are definitely not here for the mission of the university. And it would be very dangerous to enlarge their numbers:
John Quiggin: ‘High-grade bothsidesism here [from the Connors Institute]. Having grudglingly conceded that conservative Americans are far more badly misinformed than liberals, the author complains that the underrepresentation of conservatives in academia (relative to the American population) is an indication of liberal bias. Apparently creationists, climate denialists, vaccine “sceptics” etc deserve some affirmative action… <https://substack.com/@jquiggin/note/c-63876148>
Where do MAMLMs generate useful shortcuts and time-savers? Where do they simply add to the crud of low information-density words my eyes must wade through? I need help figuring out which is which, and what is what before classes do start this fall;
Rob Nelson: The Revolution Will Not Be, & Other Thoughts on AI This Fall: ‘The situation with LLMs… [is] hey have uses, but they are not revolutionary…. LLMs provide shortcuts or time-savers, and often, they are not worth the effort, especially if you care about the quality of the output…. Personalized learning in the form of the latest tech is not the answer to the challenges of schooling in modern society…. Instead of continuing to try to use LLMs to tutor individuals, maybe we will use them as engines to generate interesting educational problems. The fact that Mollick has deep experience in simulations and games is one reason he is so good at seeing their educational potential… <https://ailogblog.substack.com/p/the-revolution-will-not-be-and-other>NIMBYism: Finally, progress!:
Darrell Owens (2023): Berkeley Rents Fall Amid Construction Boom: ‘The city’s government rental registry reveals that rent controlled apartments are declining in price as Berkeley undergoes a housing boom…. Since 2018, initial lease rents in older apartments have stopped rising relative to inflation. Since 2021, monthly-reported median real rents (inflation adjusted) in older 1-bedroom Berkeley apartments have been dropping 2.5% annually. Real rents for 1-bedrooms are below 2016 levels… in nominal dollars…. What happened in the mid-2010s?… After two decades of community debate, Berkeley voters overwhelmingly approved in 2010 and 2012 to re-zone downtown for a housing construction boom. But downtown housing projects were constantly held up in litigation by NIMBY groups and the city council. In 2017, the courts neutered a lot of methods to block new housing by ruling that Berkeley (and all California cities) had a legal obligation to follow its own zoning laws…. There is no de-population occurring in Berkeley like San Francisco. In the midst of the 2020 lockdown, Berkeley posted its highest population count ever at 124,000 residents…. Berkeley is number 5 in California for population growth since 2022. Rent declines aren’t being caused by declining student enrollment either…. The clearest evidence that this is development-related is the homeowner market. Berkeley’s not building any new homes you can own, only rentals, and has strong rules against converting rentals into condos. Berkeley now has one of the worst homebuyers markets in the United States because there’s no new inventory for single-family homes… <>And more progress!:
Darrell Owens: The Big Zoning Battle of Berkeley: ‘This is very important, readers…. Berkeley, California will vote on Tuesday, 7/23… [for] “Missing Middle” housing…. All 1, 2, 3, and 4 unit zones will be replaced with a new code that has no density restrictions whatsoever…. All new housing must have a height average of 28 ft…. 60% of a lot may be built on, previously it was 40%…. Housing must be set back 15 feet from the street…. The back of the building must be set back 4 feet from the adjacent lot, although in the hills it’s 20 feet. 150 square feet of open space for every 1,000 square feet of floor area…. In practice this will yield multi-family homes of 2 to 12 units, but it also does not foreclose 1 unit homes or single-family. Any projects over 5 units must legally restrict 20% of their units for low income households. This is a pretty reasonable “upzoning” that re-legalizes the kind of the small, pre-World War 2 apartment buildings and condos that were made illegal all over the U.S. during the suburban craze of the mid-20th Century. Its a good model for American cities… <https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/the-big-zoning-battle-of-berkeley>Antifascism:
Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Ilona Sologoub: PROJECT SYNDICATE: The Case for Ukraine’s NATO Accession: ‘Member countries must use NATO’s upcoming summit in Washington to reaffirm their commitment to admitting Ukraine. Refusing to offer a clear timetable for Ukrainian accession would fuel further aggression by signaling to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his neo-imperial dream is feasible… thus making World War III all but inevitable…. The West must realize that Russia is already at war with NATO. The Kremlin is financing terrorism, engaging in disinformation campaigns, fueling domestic conflicts, meddling in the elections of democratic countries, and reportedly planning a sabotage campaign across Europe… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-western-countries-could-benefit-from-ukraine-nato-membership-by-yuriy-gorodnichenko-and-ilona-sologoub-2024-05>