Sebastian Junger on human connection

Posted on by

An excellent podcast with Russ Roberts. One excerpt:

When you deprive people of the chance and the necessity of acting heroically and generously for other people, you deprive them of a fundamental part of what it means to be human, what it means to have a meaningful life; and a fundamental way of feeling content and happy in your life.

All sorts of interesting thoughts in the conversation. I may be tempted to annotate it.

In general, we can see Russ expanding into more non-economic topics. I think this may be right.

When Russ and I were students, professors taught us to defend capitalism as an economic system. The neoclassical model of factor rewards was a defense of the distributional aspects of capitalism. Macroeconomics was a claim that economic downturns, rather than reflecting ever-deepening systemic crises, could be managed and contained.

What we are seeing now is a much broader assault on our entire social system and its values. Does liberal democracy suffer from a spiritual void which new ideologies are trying to fill?

Straight economics does not seem sufficient to answer the contemporary progressive left. The Intellectual Dark Web is where we are groping for better approaches.

Question from Handle

Posted on by

He writes,

“Should we worry about low domestic population growth rates” is actually a fascinating question, along with typical follow-up questions of “What could be done about it, and should any of that be done?”, and I hope Arnold gives his take on it one day.

For more than twenty years, I have thought that the age of “mass ____” was ending, as the Industrial Revolution gives way to the digital age. Henry Ford needed a big army of workers. Bill Gates did not.

One implication of this is that we should not worry about low domestic population growth rates. The masses are not going to make the same contributions to economic and military strength that they did in the industrial era.

If you scratch me, you will find an elitist. That is, I think that the future will be shaped by a relatively small elite. But the catch is that I do not know what that elite will look like or what it should look like. I don’t want it to look like the Progressive products of American higher education. Unless they turn out to be very Straussian.

Bleg: Klassic Restrospective

Posted on by

Readers,
I am working on the idea of a retrospective, a sort of “greatest hits” collection of my writings.

My current thought is to have a set of short pieces, about one to four pages each. Each essay would be built around one of my sayings, such as “information wants to be free, but people need to get paid” or “the null hypothesis” or “price discrimination explains everything.”

What I am asking from you is to remind me of sayings that you think are worth including, or favorite blog posts or essays of mine.

Leave your suggestions as comments.

Thanks for your help.

Tyler, Marc, and Ben

Posted on by

That is, Cowen, Andreessen, and Horowitz, in a 40-minute podcast. I chose to annotate it. Annotating is, like writing a book review, a way for me to absorb the material. Some excerpts from my essay:

1. As far as I can tell, blockchain can only help to prevent one type of cheating: digital forgery. If blockchain is going to have a killer app, then it has to enable a transaction to take place where the only impediment to undertaking such a transaction currently is the threat of digital forgery.

I would add that digital money faces the threat of digital forgery. But digital money also faces other impediments. ICYMI, my whole point is that other impediments to trust are, in the grand scheme of things, much more important.

2. New listening technology strikes me as incremental, not revolutionary. Portable radios are a very old technology. I listened to the Beatles sing “When I’m 64” on a transistor radio when I was 13. Now I’m 64.

3. Could AR and VR become a big part of everyone’s life? In my opinion, yes. Have the breakthroughs necessary for that to happen occurred or are they on the verge of occurring? In my opinion, no.

I would add that I do not know what the key breakthroughs will be. In fact, we will only have a better idea in hindsight. Who knew ahead of time that the breakthroughs needed to make mobile Internet access a winning technology had taken place by 2007 but not earlier?

4. I assume that in Israel and China, security issues provide an arena for cultural mixing between government and technology. Presumably, there is also some cultural mixing between Silicon Valley and part of the American military and homeland security apparatus.

Normative sociology of homelessness

Posted on by

Christopher F. Ruto writes,

the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened

The article goes on to list various approaches to homelessness, all of which assume a politically correct cause for the problem. For example, one woman on the city council is reported to claim that

the city’s homelessness crisis is the inevitable result of the Amazon boom, greedy landlords and rapidly increasing rents.

Pointer from John Cochrane, who concludes

really dysfunctional policies persist through the repetition of these fairy-tale narratives.

Normative sociology, which looks at what some people want to be the causes of social problems, is quite harmful.

Klassic: the two systems people work under

Posted on by

A reader suggested an old blog post on two systems.

In the business system, your status comes from market acceptance. If the market likes your offering, you have high status. To hold onto that status, you must deal with competition. Ultimately, you have to accept the choices that consumers make.

In the other system, which applies to permanent government employees, teachers, and professors, status comes from credentials. You automatically get more money if you have a higher degree. You can acquire tenure, which insulates you from job loss. (During the recent recession, compare the rate of job loss among people in system A with that in system B.) Finally, you operate on the basis of authority. In government, you can force people to obey your edicts. In education, you can force students to take your courses–or, better yet, to pay your salary even though hardly any students enroll in your courses.

There is more at the link, and I probably should have written even more.

Question on marriage trends

Posted on by

from a commenter:

Half a century ago, men earned roughly 60% of college degrees. Today, women earn roughly 60% of college degrees. And the gap seems to be growing, as women outpace men in formal education.

2)Matching by educational attainment in the marriage market — marrying someone at a similar formal education level — is increasing.

Have you any insights or conjectures about how the seeming tension between these two trends eventually might shape politics?

Well.

On politics, assuming these trends lead to an increase in unmarried college-educated women and unmarried men without a college degree, it would seem to favor the Democrats. The women will vote ardently for Democrats, but a lot of the men will take out their frustration in other realms.

I would not count on the trends continuing. The bargaining power that college-educated men have enjoyed is probably not conducive to a healthy society. One indication of that is the backlash that has emerged as the #MeToo movement. But at some point college-educated women will discover that to restore their bargaining power exit works better than voice, as it were. They could create more competition among males by finding alternatives to the college degree as ways of qualifying men as marriage material. The process of coalescing around such alternative signals may take a while, but it is something to watch for.

Mariana Mazzucato

Posted on by

I found myself frustrated by her conversation with Russ Roberts. She repeatedly points out that government has funded successful innovations. The implication, in her view, is that we should pay higher taxes in order to fund more innovation.

But the question is whether the government or the private sector is structurally more suited to spending money on innovation. It seems to me that Russ could not get Ms. Mazzucato to discuss the issue at that level. Trading anecdotes back and forth about particular private-sector and public-sector successes and failures is not constructive. I gave up listening well before the podcast ended.

I like to break down innovation into experimentation, evaluation, and evolution. I think that government has a disadvantage at all three.

Any one organization is limited in the number of experiments on which it can focus. When the government was focused on landing on the moon, it succeeded. But it is hard for any one organization, not just government, to focus on a lot of experiments at once.

When it comes to evaluating experiments, everybody is overly optimistic about their own projects. But in the private sector, the subjective evaluation of the project champions is subordinate to the third-party evaluation of consumers. In the public sector, the legislators and bureaucrats who champion a project also are doing the evaluation.

Finally, when it comes to evolution, government has no natural mechanism to shut down unworthy projects. When a private-sector project is not producing value, it loses money and gets terminated.

Twenty years ago, I wrote an essay in which I explained why, contrary to what some pundits were arguing, middle managers should not be encouraged to take more risks inside corporations. In essence, I made a “skin in the game” argument. That argument applies very strongly to the case of government-funded risk-taking, in which the cost of failure is not borne by the decision-makers.

Thoughts on temperament

Posted on by

I put them into this essay.

we treat people as having persistent inclinations to behave in certain ways. That is, we treat people as having temperaments. In everyday life, we operate with a theory of temperament.

I make no claim to expertise in this area. The essay has an IDW flavor to it. That is, to me, it seems reasonable and sensible, yet it might require a “trigger warning” of some sort.

Normative social analysis

Posted on by

Handle comments,

Were all those people voting for Trump because of they were upset that the establishment figures weren’t “delivering effective governance”? Were they all convinced that Trump could deliver “effective governance” better than any of those other establishment figures? Um, no. That’s not what happened, and that’s not what people were thinking or complaining about.

Instead, most of them were extremely frustrated at the establishment conformity to the elite consensus that was so stiflingly uniform that no one would vigorously articulate support for what they wanted except for a brash showman outsider.

They [Niskanen Center moderates] have learned the wrong lesson from that experience. This is the “normative political science” version of the “normative economics” analysis of the [financial crisis of 2008], in which the narrative one tells always conveniently ends up implicating policies that happen to align with one’s political preferences.

Indeed, your first concern upon reading any sort of social analysis is whether the writer is articulating the desired causal model or actually has compelling empirical evidence for that model. Very often, it is not possible to definitively confirm or refute any particular causal narrative.