Maybe a side note, but it’s not obvious to me that
When you are losing you increase variance. When you are winning you decrease it.
is in general true, whether normatively or empirically.
Maybe a side note, but it’s not obvious to me that
When you are losing you increase variance. When you are winning you decrease it.
is in general true, whether normatively or empirically.
I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that’s best left to a full post, I’m not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze’s 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2.
Will elite worldviews increasingly diverge from the worldviews of those left behind economically?
Maybe, although just as there are forces for divergence, there are forces for convergence. The media can, and do, transmit elite-aligned worldviews just as they transmit elite-opposed worldviews, while elites fund political activity, and even the occasional political movement.
Would increasing inequality really prevent people from noticing economic gains for the poorest?
That notion sounds like hyperbole to me. The media and people’s social networks are large, and can discuss many economic issues at once. Even people who spend a good chunk of time discussing inequality discuss gains (or losses) of those with low income or wealth.
For instance, Branko Milanović, whose standing in economics comes from his studies of inequality, is probably best known for his elephant chart, which presents income gains across the global income distribution, down to the 5th percentile. (Which percentile, incidentally, did not see an increase in real income between 1988 and 2008, according to the chart.)
Also, while the Anglosphere’s discussed inequality a great deal in the 2010s, that seems to me a vogue produced by the one-two-three punch of the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, and the economist feeding frenzy around Thomas Piketty’s book. Before then, I reckon most of the non-economists who drew special attention to economic inequality were left-leaning activists and pundits in particular. That could become the norm once again, and if so, concerns about poverty would likely become more salient to normal people than concerns about inequality.
Will the left continue adopting lots of ideas from postmodernism?
This is going to depend on how we define postmodernism, which is a vexed enough question that I won’t dive deeply into it (at least TheAncientGeek and bogus have taken it up). If we just define (however dodgily) postmodernism to be a synonym for anti-rationalism, I’m not sure the left (in the Anglosphere, since that’s the place we’re presumably really talking about) is discernibly more postmodernist/anti-rationalist than it was during the campus/culture wars of the 1980s/1990s. People tend to point to specific incidents when they talk about this question, rather than try to systematically estimate change over time.
Granted, even if the left isn’t adopting any new postmodern/anti-rationalist ideas, the ideas already bouncing around in that political wing might percolate further out and trigger a reaction against rationalism. Compounding the risk of such a reaction is the fact that the right wing can also operate as a conduit for those ideas — look at yer Alex Jones and Jason Reza Jorjani types.
Is politics becoming more a war of worldviews than arguments for & against various beliefs?
Maybe, but evidence is needed to answer the question. (And the dichotomy isn’t a hard and fast one; wars of worldviews are, at least in part, made up of skirmishes where arguments are lobbed at specific beliefs.)
Um. Not in economics where it is well-defined. Capital is resources needed for production of value.
While capital is resources needed for production of value, it’s a bit misleading to imply that that’s how it’s “well-defined” “in economics”, since the reader is likely to come away with the impression that capital = resources needed to produce value, even though not all resources needed for production of value are capital. Economics also defines labour & land* as resources needed for production of value.
* And sometimes “entrepreneurship”, but that’s always struck me as a pretty bogus “factor of production” — as economists tacitly admit by omitting it as a variable from their production functions, even though it’s as free to vary as labour.
I recognize the difference, but I don’t think it’s an important one for the purposes of deciding whether to oppose a type of discussion. (I wouldn’t expect, in general, a person’s honest report of their experience to be much more valuable than someone else’s honest attempt to sketch a general model of some phenomenon.) It’s also a different objection to Dagon’s, which is basically “boo political/social identity, because identity is hard to talk about!”.
Edit to add:
Historically, we also had the downvote button.
Yep, if we still had the downvote button, I probably would’ve just downvoted Dagon’s comment and left it at that.
This would be a little more interesting if he linked to his advance predictions on the war so we could compare how he did. And of course if he had posted a bunch of other predictions so we could see how he did on those (to avoid cherry-picking).
We may be able to get part of the way there. I found the following suspiciously prediction-like (and maybe even testable!) statements by Ctrl-Fing the pre-invasion posts on D-Squared’s blog.
From October 21, 2002:
On the other hand, I am also convinced by Max Sawicky’s argument that Iraq is likely to be the first excursion of an American policy of empire-building in the Middle East, which is likely to be disastrous under any possible performance metric.
But, I retain my original belief that improvement in Iraq is politically impossible unless there is some sort of shooting war in the area culminating in the removal of Saddam Hussein. I don’t set much score by “national-building”, and don’t really believe that what the Gulf needs is more US client states, and I never believed any of the scare stories related to the “WMD” acronym which is currently doing such sterling duty in picking out weblog authors who don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about. [...]
So, how can we square these beliefs a) that something has to be done and b) that if something is done, it will be a disastrous imperial adventure by George Bush.
But apparently, having given up on the bin Laden connection and the Saddam-has-nukes idea, we are now going to be emotionally blackmailed into a war. In my experience, good ideas don’t usually need quite so many outright lies told to support them, but what the hey.
This February 26, 2003 post doesn’t explicitly make predictions, but it’s clearly written from the premise that the Bush administration would “completely fuck[] up” “the introduction of democracy to Iraq”. Compare the end of the footnote on this February 5, 2003 post.
There might be empirical claims relating to WMD in later posts. Such might still count as predictions because the amount of WMD to be found in Iraq remained contentious for some time after the invasion.
Older home appliances were also a lot more expensive in real terms (that is, controlling for inflation).
A point brought home to me by the MetaFilter discussion of the article linked in our OP:
Part of it is that the appliances are also literally cheaper. It looks like a full size fridge cost about $500 in the 60s, which works out to $3500 adjusted for inflation.
The example I was going to use was washers and dryers, which cost about $385 for the set in 1959, or about $3200 in current money.
I found a stash of business records from 1913, for a company that sold quality socks.
Adjusting to today’s money, a pair of these socks cost $70. But they were really nice socks, apparently. The kind you would mend with your darning kit.
My grandmother paid roughly $7 for it [a Westinghouse oscillating fan] in 1938, which was a lot for a blue-collar family to spend in the Depression, and which amounts to $117 in 2017 dollars.
Makes sense when I think about it. As Yvain documents, enough big-ticket items have become so much more expensive in the US that a bunch of other goods or services must’ve become much cheaper — otherwise the US inflation rate would always be massive.
I strongly disagree. (This is a special case of my general disagreement with strong forms of Politics-is-the-Mind-Killer-type objections to discussing capital-P Political topics.) I also want to amplify Gram_Stone’s observation that this kind of topic was historically acceptable on LW.
Dat anthropic bias tho!
Yep.
The school → university transition might be the most interesting one WRT tristanm’s question, because although it theoretically offers the best opportunity to select for rationality, in practice a lot of people can’t or won’t exploit the opportunity. I imagine even quite nerdy students, when deciding where to apply to university, didn’t spend long asking themselves, “how can I make sure I wind up at a campus with lots of rationalists?” (I sure didn’t!)
!
That clarifies things somewhat.
It makes me paranoid and alienated if people I know join facebook groups that advocate political violence/murder/killing all the kulaks, although to be fair its possible that those people have only read one or two posts and missed the violent ones.
Does it help to disaggregate “political violence”, political “murder”, and “killing all the kulaks”? I’m happy with some instances of political violence, and even some political murders are defensible. The assassination of Jonas Savimbi pretty much ended Angola’s 26-year civil war, for example. To quote Madeleine Albright: worth it.
If the people you know are thumbs-upping literally “kill all the kulaks” (and maybe they are! I’m sure I’ve seen that kind of stuff in YouTube comments and Stalinist tweets, so it is out there), I can understand your reaction. But if people are merely affirming that some political violence is worthy of support...well, I’d have to say that I agree!
The (speculative) explanation my mind immediately goes to: a combination of the you-are-the-average-of-your-5-best-friends heuristic, and the dilution of a selected social group when its members move into new environments.
Universities and workplaces, with unusual exceptions, are probably not going to select as aggressively for high rationality (however you define “rational” & “rationality”) as your in-school social selection did. So (I suspect) when the people in your circle started expanding their own social networks during university and then at work, the average rationality of their friends & acquaintances went down. And because (insofar as a person and their behaviour are malleable) a person’s influenced by the people they hang out with, that probably made the people you know/knew less rational, or at least less likely to behave rationally.
Related to your second paragraph, I was intrigued when I saw economists pointing out that even low-skilled immigrants could raise natives’ productivity & income by (1) nudging natives to upskill and move into higher-skill jobs, and (2) lowering childcare & housework costs, making it easier for native women to work paid jobs.
I guess gathering links to multiple related articles under one LW post makes sense.
I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
Moral realism (also ethical realism or moral Platonism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts),
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
Neither subjectivists nor relativists are obliged to deny that there is literal moral knowledge. Of course, according to them, moral truths imply truths about human psychology. Moral realists must maintain that moral truths —and hence moral knowledge—do not depend on facts about our desires and emotions for their truth.
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
I agree with the substantive point that the changes in living standards we ultimately care about come from productivity growth, not GDP growth as such.
Now for the inevitable disagreements/critiques:
The post title, “Increasing GDP is not growth”, isn’t actually true as such. Referring to increasing GDP as economic growth isn’t a weird LW/transhumanist/etc. affectation; it’s totally normal & conventional. If I heard a newsreader talking about economic growth, I’d guess they were most likely talking about (inflation-adjusted) GDP going up.
The people I most associate with this kind of immigration-grows-GDP meme are single-issue-ish advocates of open borders, but AFAIK they refer to immigration increasing global GDP (which is kind of a strange usage of “GDP”, since the “D” does after all stand for “domestic”, but that’s what they say). It’s right there in the title bar. This avoids the issue of country-level GDP being dependent on how one draws lines on a map.
It took me a moment to realize the post wasn’t using “productivity” in the conventional economist’s sense (at least when talking at the national level), namely labour productivity, which is output per worker or output per hour worked. This is distinct from output per person, and made the references to “productivity per person” momentarily confusing (because with the conventional understanding of productivity, writing “productivity per person” is a bit like writing “GDP per capita per person”).
PhilGoetz probably knows this already, but I don’t know whether everyone reading this does: some advocates of higher immigration explicitly expect immigration to raise productivity, specifically of workers who come from lower-productivity countries to higher ones. The usual term for this is the “place premium”. A Google search brings back among other things an illustrative working paper by Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett.
Relating to that, I have sometimes wondered whether recent government policies to lower the number of foreign students & graduates in the UK might backfire by degrading UK-Chinese relations in the long run.
There are ~100k Chinese students in the UK, which presumably translates to a flow of ~30k per year. Although small compared to China’s population, reducing that flow might eventually have some impact on how the Chinese and UK states relate to each other, since those students are relatively likely to be China’s movers & shakers of tomorrow, and relatively likely to have some Western Liberal Democratic Values™ rub off on them.
IMO, an unadorned link to a news website (unless it’s more directly LW related) seems better suited to the open thread or media thread.
I suspect the answer is “not in general, unless you’re willing to pump extra money into the payment-extracting mechanism”. Depending on how generally you define “free rider problem”, at least some examples of the problem are likely to be captured by Holmström’s theorem: a system which pays each member of a team to to provide inputs to produce output can’t balance its budget (exactly split the output’s value among the team members), be self-enforcing, and Pareto efficient.
I think your fresh paint example is susceptible to Holmströmean logic. Suppose you’ve found a painter who’s willing to do an amount of painting proportional to the money they’re given; you’re willing to pay for $40 worth of painting but your two housemates would only pay for $20 worth of painting. If you propose to either housemate that you pay $20 to the painter while the housemates pay $10 each, the housemate will (assuming they act as homo economicus spherical cows) notice that if they don’t pay anything, $30 of painting will still get done, more than the $20 they wanted in the first place. So they won’t pay anything, as you expected.