Tag: noah smith

What does the future look like, and how should you think about the answer to that question?

I came across this tweet a while ago, and found it quite funny:

I have asked this question myself while interviewing candidates, and the reason I ask it is not because I want to get a definitive answer from the student. Prediction is a mostly pointless activity. It is because I want to understand what factors the interviewee includes in her analysis.

And the reason I begin with this in today’s post is because two really and truly excellent pieces worth reading were gifted to us earlier this week.

First, Noah Smith interviewed Patrick Collison.

N.S.: So, what are the three things that excite you most about the 2020s?

It’s hard to restrict to three! But here are the first that jump to mind:

First, the explosive expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the internet. Sounds prosaic but I think still underestimated. Several billion people recently immigrated to the world’s most vibrant city and the system hasn’t yet equilibrated. When you think about how YouTube is accelerating the dissemination of tacit knowledge, or the number of creative outsiders who can now deploy their talents productively, or the number of brilliant 18 year-olds who can now start companies from their bedrooms, or all the instances of improbable scenius that are springing up… in the landscape of the global commons, the internet is nitrogen fertilizer, and we still have a long way to go — economically, culturally, scientifically, technologically, socially, and everything in between. I challenge anyone to watch this video and not feel optimistic.

Second, progress in biology. I think the 2020s are when we’ll finally start to understand what’s going on with RNA and neurons. Basically, the prevailing idea has been that connections between neurons are how cognition works. (And that’s what neural networks and deep learning are modeled after.) But it looks increasingly likely that stuff that happens inside the neurons — and inside the connections — is an important part of the story. One suggestion is that RNA is actually part of how neurons think and not just an incidental intermediate thing between the genome and proteins. Elsewhere, we’re starting to spend more time investigating how the microbiome and the immune system interact with things like cancer and neurodegenerative conditions, and I’m optimistic about how that might yield significantly improved treatments. With Alzheimer’s, say, we were stuck for a long time on variants of plaque hypotheses (“this bad stuff accumulates and we have to stop it accumulating”)… it’s now getting hard to ignore the fact that the immune system clearly plays a major — and maybe dominant — role. Elsewhere, we’re plausibly on the cusp of effective dengue, AIDS, and malaria vaccines. That’s pretty huge.

Last, energy technology. Batteries (88% cost decline in a decade) and renewables are well-told stories and the second-order effects will be important. (As we banish the internal combustion engine, for example, we’ll reap a significant dividend as a result of the reduction in air pollution.) Electric aircraft will probably happen, at least for shorter distances. Solar electricity is asymptoting to near-free, which in turn unlocks other interesting possibilities. (Could we synthesize hydrocarbons via solar powered atmospheric CO2 concentration — that is, make oil out of air — and thereby render remaining fossil fuel use-cases carbon neutral?) There are a lot of good ideas for making nuclear energy safer and cheaper. France today gets three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power… getting other countries to follow suit would be transformatively helpful in averting climate change.

There’s lots more! New semiconductor technology. Improved ML and everything that that enables. Starlink — cheap and fast internet everywhere! Earth-to-earth travel via space plus flying cars. The idea of urbanism that doesn’t suck seems to be gaining traction. There’s a lot of good stuff on the horizon.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-patrick-collison-co-founder

I know I say this every other day, but please – pretty please with a cherry on top – do read the whole thing. And subscribe to Noah Smith’s Substack, and follow him on Twitter, and follow Patrick Collison on Twitter, and read the page titled Advice on his website.((I’ve linked to it before, and I’ll gladly link to it again, it’s that good))

There are many, many, many things to appreciate about Patrick Collison, but the thing that has stayed with me the longest is a tweet of his, that helped me understand how to approach Twitter (and therefore life):

Wonderful advice, and I’ve taken it to heart.

But you need the “No, but” approach in life too. Not so much to disagree with other people, but to constantly ask yourself how you might be wrong, and to think about what needs changing for the better.

And a wonderful essay that speaks about precisely this came out this week as well:

The Decadent Society came out in hardcover about three weeks before Italy’s hospitals were overwhelmed by the coronavirus and lockdowns began to descend across the Western world. So it was probably not the ideal time to bring out a book arguing that our era is defined by drift, stalemate, boredom and repetition, that Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” is still with us thirty years after he declared its advent, that our society is more likely to glide slowly toward dystopia than to leap forward toward a renaissance or plunge into catastrophe. Surely here was something new, here was history come again, here was the shock, the crisis, the un-simulated Reality, the hinge from one age into the next. Surely the pandemic meant the end of decadence, whatever else it meant.

In the Zoom interviews with which I finished up my book tour, I usually half-conceded the point. Yes, this was a real crisis, death taking off its masque amid the partygoers, stalemate giving way to disaster, Reality Itself suddenly pushing fantasy and simulation aside. But at the same time, nothing about a temporary crisis necessarily alters long-term patterns. Plagues can open new chapters in history, but it all depends on how people respond to them, what kind of responses are possible, and which pre-existing trends they accelerate or blunt. Would our decadent institutions, when tested, crumble, taking us deeper into crisis, closer to collapse? Would the shock of pandemic spark a new era of technological innovation, or midwife a new age of political reform? Or would stagnation reassert itself, or even deepen, in the aftermath?

https://douthat.substack.com/p/the-pandemic-and-the-decadent-society

I haven’t yet read Ross Douthat’s book, but he refers to the four horsemen of the decadent society in his essay: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition.((It is fascinating to me how in the excerpt above, he refers to this quartet as drift, stalemate, boredom and repetition. The first three words have changed, and if you ask me, for the better. The fourth is, well, repeated. I would love to ask Ross Douthat if that was deliberate – and if so, well played, sir!))

And this essay is a larger examination of the same question: where do you see the world in the future, but now viewed not through the prism of sunny optimism that imminent technological advances can bring you, but also through the prisms of institutional, cultural and demographic pessimism.

This point, in particular, stood out for me:

Lyman Stone recently calculated that there would be 5.8 million more babies if the U.S. had just maintained its pre-Great Recession birthrates; the pandemic is likely to subtract at least several hundred thousand more, with similar trends in Europe.

Yes, it’s possible to hope that the optimistic economic scenario described above will speed a fertility rebound. It’s possible to look at developments in U.S. family policy and see our political system slowly, slowly coming round to taking those issues seriously. Maybe there’s a big turnaround waiting to happen here: Maybe in a Biden boom there will be a battery-powered minivan in every driveway, piloted by a remote-working parent, and simply stuffed with kids.

But to the extent that the fertility collapse is connected with the struggle to transition to adulthood, the struggle to form stable romantic partnerships, it’s also easy to see how the coronavirus’s negative effects could linger — how a lost period for courtship and marriages, a retreat from physical reality and real-world intimacy in crucial years for both, could reverberate through the next decade and beyond.

https://douthat.substack.com/p/the-pandemic-and-the-decadent-society

I sincerely hope he is wrong about this, and I genuinely think that he is, but is it a point worth thinking about and a factor worth including in your analysis of the future?

Absolutely.

Reading both essays will absolutely not help you get the answer to the question of what the future will look like. Nothing will, because the future will remain resolutely unknowable. But both essays will help you get started on which factors you might want to use in your analysis of the question. And will be very informative about why the people who helped make both essays happen think the way they do.

And therefore I’d recommend that you read them. Multiple times over, preferably.

Macroeconomics and Arguments

The best way to learn is by arguing with somebody.

Classes are boring, reading is passive, and videos are both of these things. But when you meet somebody who is well informed, thoughtful, respectful of your viewpoint but is willing to argue with you, well: Merry Christmas.

I’m well aware that social media leaves one with the impression that none of these things are true these days, but that is just our tendency to search out the bad, rather than the good.

When I teach courses in behavioral finance, for example, I often show a discussion between Richard Thaler and Eugene Fama:

That is not the point of today’s blogpost, but it is still a video worthy of your time, whether you’re interested in the topic or not. These two gentlemen (Nobel Prize winners both of them) hold diametrically opposite views when it comes to the efficiency of markets. But they spend a little over forty minutes here, engaged in perfectly civil conversation with each other, without once ceding an inch to the other’s viewpoint. The point isn’t the fact that we’re left without a clear understanding of who is right and who is wrong. The takeaway is that it is entirely possible to argue without turning the argument into a shouting match.

It is, as nine pm teaches us every night in India, a vanishing art.

Macroeconomics is a subject that lends itself to vigorous debate for a variety of reasons. One, and let us be clear about this, nobody has the slightest idea about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to macroeconomics. Yes, really.

Two, counterfactuals are impossible to come by, and so you can engage in endless games of but-have-you-considered.

Three, every macroeconomic crisis that I have had the opportunity to study as it has unfolded has led to all of what is listed below:

  1. Some old theories have been vindicated
  2. Some old theories have been falsified
  3. All theories have been updated
  4. We still don’t know quite what is going on

What’s worse is that the first two points depend almost entirely upon one’s point of view. And again, no, I am not making this up.

But I am not saying that this makes macroeconomics “bad”. This is precisely what makes it fascinating!

And the example du jour comes from two economists who love arguing with each other: Noah Smith and Tyler Cowen. The topic? President Biden’s proposed stimulus.

Blanchard’s argument that Biden’s bill is too large rests on the idea that this amount of spending will cause the economy to “overheat” — in other words, that inflation will rise. To prevent this, he suggests shrinking the size of the bill and financing more of it with taxes.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/covid-relief-isnt-stimulus-its-social

This is a point made by Larry Summers as well, by the way. For a good summary, see this Vox article.

Noah Smith’s point, and it one worth considering, is that this recession isn’t like the others. We say that every time there is a recession, by the way, but Smith’s point this time around is that the spending shouldn’t really be thought of as a stimulus, it should be thought of as social insurance:

If you get a check during a pandemic, you’re not going to go out and spend it at restaurants and bars, because…well, there’s a pandemic. Instead, you’re more likely to stick it in the bank, pay down debt, or pay the back rent that you owe.
In a normal recession, this is exactly what we don’t want people to do. We want them to take their government checks and go out and spend them, to restart the virtuous cycle of economic activity! But in a pandemic, it’s fine.
It’s fine because what we’re trying to do with COVID relief isn’t actually pump-priming — it’s retroactive social insurance. Some people, through no fault of their own, took a big hit from a risk that only a few people were paying attention to. In order to relieve those people’s suffering, we are giving them money that they can use to pay rent and buy necessities, as well as money to pay down debts so they have a bit more financial security.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/covid-relief-isnt-stimulus-its-social

The rest of the post is worth reading, because it identifies potential flaws in the argument he is making, and provides reasoned counter arguments. So well is this done that you begin to side with him…

…until you read Professor Cowen:

Leave aside the political question of how aggressively to pursue an agenda of a larger, more activist government (and keep in mind that I am more libertarian than many of the participants in this debate). Take a Big Government as a given. History shows that consumption still ought not be the priority.
…
It’s not as if there aren’t obvious candidates for alternative investment: green energy, broadband and public-health infrastructure for the next pandemic, to name a few. Yes, I am familiar with the argument that spending the extra trillion or so now will make it possible to spend more trillions later, including on such policies. But whatever kind of complicated political story you might tell, the basic laws of economics have not been repealed. Increasing current expenditures does, in fact, involve foregone future opportunities.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/investment-investment-investment-how-to-think-about-the-biden-stimulus-proposal.html

And his concluding paragraph is an excellent teacher at work, because he goes back to the Principles of Economics:

I say you can divide the commenters here into two groups.  Those who produce complicated arguments about why opportunity cost reasoning does not apply here, and those who stress the relevance of the opportunity cost of allocating another trillion dollars or two.  I believe that once you recognize that distinction, you know what to do with it next.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/investment-investment-investment-how-to-think-about-the-biden-stimulus-proposal.html

To which a pro-stimulus (or pro social insurance) person might say, “But people first!” Does that argument hold true? If this stimulus results in runaway inflation a couple of years down the line (students of the Indian economy might recall the years 2009-2013, so we’re not talking hypotheticals here), then was the stimulus in fact worth it? How do we balance this argument against the very real need to provide a stimulus today?

I am completely unsure about what the correct answer is – and that is my point in today’s post.

How can one not be fascinated by macroeconomics?

EC101: Links for 31st October, 2019

  1. “To make this easier to navigate, I’ve grouped the publications by one measure of influence, academic citations per year since publication. The categories are not indications of the quality of the research, just its academic influence to date. Within categories, I’ve ordered studies chronologically.”
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    A useful set of links: 100 of Michael Kremer’s most popular papers.
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  2. “Moreover, the key target of economic policy, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), doesn’t provide much help. So with a view to ‘remastering’ macroeconomics, in a new ING report, produced with the help of John Calverley, Carlo Cocuzzo and I investigate how GDP could be remixed. We pay particular attention to the impact of the rapid digitalisation of the economy that has been gathering momentum over the past 25 years. Pursuing the music analogy, our focus is on a digital remix of GDP.”
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    I’m not a big fan of the concept of GDP in the first place, but that being said, this article helps us understand how the digital economy might perhaps be underrated in national income.
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  3. “Nigeria, like other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, is facing a demographic boom. By 2050, its working-age population will have increased 125 percent. At current GDP growth rates, the local labor market will be unable to absorb all the new entrants. One way for Nigeria to reduce this pressure, and make the most of remittance and skills transfers, is to promote new legal labor migration pathways with countries of destination across the globe.”
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    A useful overview of the Nigerian labor market and how it might be made more effective Applies in part to India as well, I’d argue.
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  4. “Trouble is, the rescue is entirely fictional. The only reason it’s even being attempted is to delay — as long as possible — the collapse of this large shadow lender. Such an event, as S&P Global said in a rare show of plainspeak by a credit appraiser, could be powerful enough to deliver a “solvency shock” to India’s troubled banks. Neither the lenders, nor the Indian government, wants to contemplate this grim prospect. Hence, the make-believe restructuring.”
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    Andy Mukherjee explains the mess that is Dewan Housing. Not only is this not going to end well, I’d argue that there are a lot many more skeletons about to tumble out of the closet.
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  5. “The march of technology means oil’s days are numbered. And for the good of the planet, that transition has to happen as fast as possible. But it doesn’t mean the people who gave their lives to getting energy out of the ground should have to suffer.”
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    Noah Smith on the second order effects of the slowdown in demand for oil.

Links for 23rd May, 2019

  1. “Ec 1152 is an introduction to that kind of economics. There’s little discussion of supply and demand curves, of producer or consumer surplus, or other elementary concepts introduced in classes like Ec 10. There is no textbook, only a set of empirical papers. The material is relatively cutting-edge. Of the 12 papers students are required to read, 11 were released in 2010 or after. Half of the assigned papers were released in 2017 or 2018. Chetty co-authored a third of them.And while most economics courses at Harvard require Ec 10 as a prerequisite, Ec 1152 does not. Freshmen can take it as their first economics course.

    “I felt increasingly what we’re doing in our offices and our research is just totally detached from what we’re teaching in the intro classes,” Chetty says. “I think for many students, it’s like, ‘Why do I want to learn about this? What’s the point?’”
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    Honestly, I am not really sure about this. My own take is that if anything, there is too much of an empirical bias in economics today, not too little. And this class seems to take that trend forward, which is… not great?
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  2. “Economists think historians are teaching it. Historians think it is being done by economists. But in truth the study of economic history is almost absent from the university curriculum. Economic history has fallen through the cracks. And economics students across universities are suffering because of its absence.My contention is that our economic past should play a far more central role in the education of economists today. Because I think the study of economic history will make economists into better economists. My mission is to make academic and professional economists aware of the key problems associated with missing out this training from the education of new economists. And then, once the problem is fully acknowledged and understood, to present easy-to-implement pedagogical solutions.”
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    This, on the other hand, I am all in favor of. Economic history needs to be taught. Forget needs to be taught, I need to learn more of it!
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  3. “It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history—and it had happened almost entirely in secret. The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, the country’s fleets had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species. It had been an elaborate and audacious deception: Soviet captains had disguised ships, tampered with scientific data, and misled international authorities for decades. In the estimation of the marine biologists Yulia Ivashchenko, Phillip Clapham, and Robert Brownell, it was “arguably one of the greatest environmental crimes of the 20th century.””
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    Speaking of economic history, Alex Tabarrok at MR serves us a timely reminder about its importance.
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  4. “In democratic countries, we often talk about this concept called audience costs, which is, if you tell your public one thing and then you do another thing, your public is going to punish you for it. But leaders are not elected in China, so there’s a lot less popular-audience cost. And the regime prides itself on total control over the media and censors everything that it doesn’t like. So even if it, in reality, made important concessions to the U.S., it can simply hide that fact from the Chinese public. Of course, the educated public will find out about it, but so what? The vast majority of Chinese people will be almost completely ignorant of that fact, and that’s fine. So when the U.S. is negotiating with China it should not worry about things like that, because China prides itself on its total control over the media—and there’s a lot of documentation showing that they’re pretty successful in what they do.”
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    The first time I heard the phrase audience costs, which alone is reason enough for sharing this article. But the rest of the excerpt speaks to how audience costs can be waved away – and that is scary!
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  5. “When an American buys a chair from China for $50, it decreases net exports by $50, but it raises consumption by exactly the same amount. The two effects net out exactly. Unfortunately, the way economists decided to define GDP makes imports’ negative contribution to the equation highly visible but hides their positive contribution from view.”
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    And in a neat way to circle back to the set of links today, please read this link in its entirety. Econ 101 matters!