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Javier E

Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy (Ep. 161) | Conve... - 0 views

conversationswithtyler.com/...walter-russell-mead

mead foreign policy future history culture crisis policy politics us interview cowen

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • COWEN: How has the decline of American religiosity influenced US foreign policy?
  • MEAD: Well, I think the most important way is that it has diminished our coherence as a society and undermined the psychological strength of individuals in our foreign policy world.
  • What do I mean by that? If you think about what it’s like to do foreign policy, or even think about foreign policy in today’s world, what are we looking at? Existential threats to human existence. You led us off with nuclear weapons. In the book, I talk about how, as a 10-year-old, my friends and I used to stand around on the playground, debating whether our town, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, would be destroyed in a nuclear attack.
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  • In any case, the fear of nuclear war has been around since the time of Hiroshima, but also, there are other fears. If we don’t get climate policy right, will we all be cooked? Or will climate-induced disruptions lead to great power war, nuclear conflict? Will changing technology — the AIs — take over? Whatever, we live in a time of existential fear, and foreign policy and all kinds of national policy questions get invested with these ultimate questions.
  • What makes democracy work under those circumstances tends to be senses of identification with elites, with different social-political groups. The glue that holds a democratic society — the cultural glue, intellectual glue, spiritual glue — becomes much more important
  • In terms of mass societies and democracies and large cultural groups, it’s profoundly destabilizing. You have that problem, that existential fear, which some people respond to by denial, some people fall into extremism — lots of responses, but you can see that.
  • Then the other thing is that, in a large democratic society like ours — 300-plus million people — if political power was divided equally among all 300 million Americans, it would mean that no one had any power.
  • Politics is less about, if we raise the sales tax half a percent, is that a good thing or a bad thing on balance? It’s more about, can we save the planet? Can we save human civilization? When people face those kinds of questions without some kind of grounding in some kind of religion, faith, it’s actually . . . There are individual people who can keep their psychological balance in the face of that. There are not many.
  • The American political-studies belief since World War II has essentially been, democracy is the only stable form of government. Everywhere democracy is inexorably rising, and every other form of government is incredibly unstable. This bears very, very little relationship to the facts outside of Western Europe, let’s say the world of NATO plus Japan and Australia.
  • to do foreign policy well
  • Which American president has best understood the Middle East, and then worst? MEAD: Interesting. Nobody’s gotten it totally. I’d say George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon probably are the two, in my mind, who best understood what they were dealing with.
  • COWEN: What is it they had that maybe the others didn’t? MEAD: What they saw in the Middle East is that America has both hard-power goals and what you could call soft-power, idealistic goals in the Middle East, that our hard-power goals are vital, and they are achievable. Our soft-power goals are important but largely unachievable. What they did was, they set about dealing with what was essential, and they both did it pretty successfully.
  • The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works.
  • COWEN: Sorry. Is Germany still part of the Western Alliance? MEAD: Well, in the sense it’s been for some time. I remember that Kennan’s goal for Germany was to have a united, neutral, disarmed Germany at the heart of Europe. In some ways, [laughs] Kennan’s goal looks, maybe, closer than ever.
  • Look, I think Germany is a country whose basic economic model is now under question. The German model — and it’s very important in understanding that country — is based on the availability of cheap energy from Russia and large markets in China.
  • Again, let’s remember that the German establishment is more terrified of ordinary German public opinion than even the American liberal establishment is terrified of the Trumpists. You don’t have to look all that deeply into history to see why that would be the case. Providing stability, affluence, and employment for the mass of the German people is a key test of the legitimacy of the German state.
  • Really, ever since we failed to break up the large German corporations after World War II, that German establishment has been the motor of the astonishing success of postwar Germany. Now, suddenly, that engine is running out of fuel on the one hand, and its key customer, China, regardless of anything about human rights or geopolitics, the goal of the Chinese economic development strategy is to end its dependency on capital goods imported from countries like Germany by becoming an exporter of high-tech capital goods.
  • China’s development plans, much more than its Taiwan policy or its human rights, is a gun pointed at the head of German business. So, where do they go? It’s not clear where they go. I don’t think it’s clear to them where they go. That means that a fundamental element of the American alliance system is in a completely new place.
  • I think what we have to be doing in terms of analyzing where German foreign policy goes is to think a little bit less about ideology or things like the German anti-war sentiment or these kinds of things. Yes, these are all there, the Russian soul, all of that. It’s there, but really, how is Germany going to make a living? That’s the question that has to be answered, and that will drive Germany’s orientation in foreign policy.
  • I think, in our society, the ebbing of religion among some, certainly not all, Americans has tended to dissolve these bonds and leads, in all kinds of ways, both on the left and the right, to some of the sense of suspicion, of paranoia, a lack of trust, and declining support for democracy.
  • COWEN: How would you describe that advantage? MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”
  • I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.
  • I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.
  • COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD? MEAD: Huge advantage.
  • COWEN: For our final segment, a few questions about the Walter Russell Mead production function. How much did growing up in South Carolina influence your views on foreign policy? MEAD: I think it’s affected my views of America, and that, in turn, affects my views. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, where, on the one hand, my father actually knew Martin Luther King and marched with him and was involved in a lot of things; but then I had relatives, older relatives who were very much on the other side. That gave me a certain sense of I could love my grandfather even though he voted for George Wallace.
  • MEAD: Yes. All right. The fact that I could love him while really disliking his politics helps me understand . . . I think it helps understand some of the divisions in America even today and gives you a more human rather than a strictly ideological look.
  • But there’s also this: that the South and the White South — which, of course, is where I come from — has had the experience of both being defeated and being wrong. That’s something that a lot of American political culture doesn’t have — your WASP Yankee patricians. I think neoconservatism reflected a sense of people who’ve never been wrong and never been beaten, at least in their own minds. There’s a hubris that comes with that.
  • Historically, one of the roles of Southern politics — think of William Fulbright during the Vietnam War — both for good and bad reasons, doubt that this American ideological project can be transferred, partly because they know America is bad at reconstruction. The failure of reconstruction, both in terms of the White South and the Black South after the Civil War, is a lesson that you get growing up in the South. And so you have an inherent sense of the limits of America’s ability to transform societies. That’s important.
  • COWEN: Your foreign policy understanding — what did it learn from going to Groton?
  • MEAD: Well, I learned a lot there. On the one hand, Groton is a place that prides itself on its tradition of producing foreign policy leaders: Dean Acheson, the Allsopp brothers, Averell Harriman, Franklin Roosevelt. That wonderful book, The Wise Men by David Halberstam — actually, my history teacher is in there. There’s a whole scene that could be from our fourth-form 10th-grade history class.
  • You got the sense of being part of a tradition, and you got the inside view. The way we were taught American history was in no way idealized. Just, say, reading something like the 1619 Project didn’t come to me as a shock. “Oh my gosh, there was slavery, there was injustice in America.”
  • In fact, one of the teachers at Groton used to take aside some of the boys — it was an all-boys school at the time — and explain to them how their family fortune was made. He might say, “Well, George, we’ve been reading a lot about war profiteers in World War I. You need to know that your grandfather . . .” Et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, none of my grandparents had participated in such things, so there was no need to explain to me the family fortune, as there wasn’t one.
  • More than that, though, I was at Groton ’65 to ’70. Those were the years of the Vietnam War. The national security adviser at the time, McGeorge Bundy, was the chair of the Groton Board of Trustees, so I had a close-up look at the aggressive self-confidence of the WASP establishment meeting the Vietnam War and beginning to come to grips with what was going wrong.
  • Those two visions of the inner workings of the American foreign policy elite, and then the ringside seat at the crisis of the old American foreign policy elite, have been profoundly important in my thinking about the world.
  • COWEN: You meet young people all the time. How do you spot the next Walter Russell Mead? What do you look for?
  • MEAD: Well, first of all, I’m hoping for somebody who’s a lot better than me. I’m looking for someone — what is it? Whose sandals I am unworthy to buckle. And I would say that I look for, first of all, curiosity, intense curiosity. I look for an understanding that the personal and the political are mixed, that character matters. You can learn about the world by coming to understand your own psychological flaws and distress, and vice versa.
  • That history matters a lot, and that you can’t know too much history. Now, you have to digest it, but you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.
  • I’m a Christian. I could wish that everyone was, but my friend Shadi Hamid is a Muslim, and I think his Muslim faith actually helps him navigate and understand the world, and I certainly have lots of Jewish friends in the same circumstance. Again, we’re ending up where we started, maybe, but a religious faith, connected to one of the great historical traditions, gives you a degree of insight and potential for self-criticism that are absolutely crucial to foreign affairs.
Javier E

The thing America strives for most? Complacency. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html

complacency conservatism capitalism reaction crisis culture history revolution

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The Great Enrichment is McCloskey’s term for what, in a sense, started with steam and has been, she believes, the most important human development since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The development is the explosion of economic growth that began around 1800 and has, especially since reaching China and India, lifted billions of people from poverty. Today, however, the Great Enrichment might be running out of steam in the United States
  • Now, however, the Great Enrichment is being superseded by the Great Flinch, a recoil against the frictions and uncertainties — the permanent revolution — of economic dynamism. If this continues, the consequences, from increased distributional conflicts to decreased social mobility, are going to be unpleasant.
  • Tyler Cowen thinks a bigger problem is complacency. In his latest book, “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream,” Cowen, professor of almost everything (economics, law, literature) at George Mason University and co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, argues that the complacent class, although a minority, is skillful at entrenching itself in ways detrimental to the majority.
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  • For 40 years, Cowen believes, “we have been building toward stasis” with a diminishing “sense of urgency.
  • Declining labor mobility is partly the result of the domestic protectionism of occupational licensing. “In the 1950s,” Cowen writes, “only about 5 percent of workers required a government-issued license to do their jobs, but by 2008, that figure had risen to about 29 percent.”
  • There is “more pairing of like with like” (assortative mating, economically homogenous neighborhoods, segregation by educational status), and the nation is losing the capacity and will “to regenerate itself.”
  • In the 19th century and much of the 20th century, travel speeds increased dramatically; since the 1970s, ground and air congestion has slowed travel.
  • The Steuerle-Roeper Fiscal Democracy Index measures how much of the allocation of government revenue is determined by current democratic processes and how much by prior decisions establishing permanent programs running on autopilot. The portion of the federal budget automatically spent by choices made years ago is approaching 90 percent
  • An aging population is devouring an increasing portion of national resources — federal revenue disbursed by the entitlement state to provide Social Security and Medicare to the elderly, the nation’s past. This will worsen. Because government is more important to its elderly beneficiaries than to any other age cohort, the elderly vote at a higher rate than any younger group.
Javier E

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...e-long-run-employment-not-less

employment technology trends innovation inequality

shared by Javier E on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978
  • In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes’s “Possibilities”, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.
  • A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.
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  • The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.
  • The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change
  • Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.
  • A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free
  • Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms
  • Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.
  • A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice—but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?
  • Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.
  • the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.
  • Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth
  • The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.
  • The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to roll (see chart 3). These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors.
  • though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price,
  • owever, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up
  • As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity—such as houses in desirable places—are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.
  • Adaptation to past waves of progress rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order. But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries will be hard to duplicate.
  • Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious students.
  • Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity
  • However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.
Javier E

The Experience Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15brooks.html

values materialism US technology quality of life economics

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • until sometime around 1974, the American economy was able to experience awesome growth by harvesting low-hanging fruit. There was cheap land to be exploited. There was the tremendous increase in education levels during the postwar world. There were technological revolutions occasioned by the spread of electricity, plastics and the car.
  • But that low-hanging fruit is exhausted, Cowen continues, and since 1974, the United States has experienced slower growth, slower increases in median income, slower job creation, slower productivity gains, slower life-expectancy improvements and slower rates of technological change.
  • But his evidence can also be used to tell a related story. It could be that the nature of technological change isn’t causing the slowdown but a shift in values. It could be that in an industrial economy people develop a materialist mind-set and believe that improving their income is the same thing as improving their quality of life. But in an affluent information-driven world, people embrace the postmaterialist mind-set. They realize they can improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth.
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  • He argues that our society, for the moment, has hit a technological plateau.
  • many of this era’s technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little additional economic activity
  • Jared’s other priorities also produce high quality-of-life gains without huge material and productivity improvements.
  • For Sam, income and living standards were synonymous. But for Jared, wealth and living standards have diverged. He is more interested in the latter than the former. This means that Jared has some rich and meaningful experiences, but it has also led to problems. Every few months, new gizmos come out. Jared feels his life is getting better. Because he doesn’t fully grasp the increasingly important distinction between wealth and standard of living, he has the impression that he is also getting richer. As a result, he lives beyond his means. As Cowen notes, many of our recent difficulties stem from the fact that many Americans think they are richer than they are.
Javier E

Economist Tyler Cowen says our overwhelming priorities should be maximising economic gr... - 0 views

80000hours.org/...ler-cowen-stubborn-attachments

tyler cowan growth priorities environment stability history crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Tyler makes the case that, despite what you may have heard, we can make rational judgments about what is best for society as a whole. He argues:Our top moral priority should be preserving and improving humanity’s long-term futureThe way to do that is to maximise the rate of sustainable economic growthWe should respect human rights and follow general principles while doing so.
Javier E

Mega-eruptions Caused Mass Extinction, Study Finds - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...n-volcano-paleontology-science

extinction Triassic volcano dinosaur

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers say they have confirmed that eruptions large enough to bury the U.S. under 300 feet (91 meters) of lava occurred at the same time that vast numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from the fossil record. About 201 million years ago, tectonic forces started ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart, said Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and lead author of the study. The underlying mantle rock melted, generating these large eruptions, he added. The rift, which eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin, happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. (Read about how Pangaea formed.)
  • by using a rare mineral called zircon, found in igneous rocks like basalts, the researchers were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years—pegging the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event. “Zircon is a perfect time capsule for dating those rocks,” said Blackburn. When the mineral crystallizes, it incorporates uranium, which decays over a known time with respect to the element lead. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in our samples, we can determine the age of those crystals, he explained.
  • There is evidence that the initial volcanic eruptions doubled the amount of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to increased global temperatures and ocean acidification, he noted. This happened quickly, which probably didn’t give organisms at the time much of a chance to adjust to the changes.
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  • There is one case 65 million years ago, at a point in time known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (K-T boundary), with strong evidence supporting an asteroid impact around the same time the dinosaurs disappeared.
  • “That one instance really guided everybody’s thinking, and the idea that impacts caused mass extinctions was really, really popular,” said Renne, who wasn’t involved in the Blackburn study.
  • enne says that even the asteroid impact at the K-T boundary likely only finished the job that major volcanic eruptions in India started. (Related: “What Killed Dinosaurs: New Ideas About the Wipeout.”)
Javier E

Will Economics Finally Get Its Paradigm Shift? - HBR - 0 views

hbr.org/...finally-get-its-paradigm-shift

economics paradigm economic crisis social science

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • A Kuhnian paradigm is a set of assumptions that allows scientists in a particular field to avoid time-wasting arguments over the basics and spend their days solving small but useful puzzles
  • Scientific assumptions are never perfect mirrors of reality, though (“all models are wrong; but some are useful“). When evidence piles up that contradicts the paradigm, a science sometimes needs to go through the painful process of a paradigm shift.
  • Financial economics adopted its own, narrower paradigm, in which the starting point was that the prices prevailing on financial markets were more or less correct (a belief that in those days went under the name Efficient Market Hypothesis
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  • Just as Kuhn was writing this, economics was finally settling into what looked like a scientific paradigm, in which mathematical models built around rational agents trying to maximize something called utility were presumed capable of answering all the questions that needed to be answered
  • in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous assertion of the then-reigning hubris of financial economics, Michael Jensen’s “I believe there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis,” was followed a few sentences later by this: Yet, in a manner remarkably similar to that described by Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we seem to be entering a stage where widely scattered and as yet incohesive evidence is arising which seems to be inconsistent with the theory.
  • That evidence has just kept on piling up in finance
  • On the theoretical side, there seems to be much less consensus than there was 50 years ago about what rational behavior under uncertainty even looks like.
  • while mainstream academic economists have become more open to alternative approaches and willing to acknowledge gaps in their knowledge (see my interview from a couple weeks ago with Harvard’s John Campbell, or the generally friendly reception among mainstream economists to Thomas Piketty’s jeremiads against mainstream economics in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), they haven’t really changed how they go about their work.
Javier E

That voodoo that you do: The bitter, political fight to create a new macroeconomics | T... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...voodoo-you-do

macroeconomics economics theory social science debate progress

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • THE big debates in macroeconomics have never been polite. I suppose it's understandable that this is the case; after all, the stakes are high
  • I disagree with Mr Cowen that the topic is too important to become politicised.
  • , politics is how we resolve lots of really important, really difficult issues. One could indeed argue that the problems we face are the worse because there has been too little politicisation.
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  • Mr Cowen's view of dispassionate progress in macroeconomics is just not how things usually work. In the 1970s it was not the case, for example, that rival macroeconomic camps settled their differences, then alerted the world of the new consensus so it could be acted upon. Instead you had bitterly divided academics; you had a political ideology which saw some things it liked in one of the camps, which made those things a part of a successful political programme, and which took a policy gamble; and that gamble created new evidence which informed (though by no means settled) the debate over how inflation and monetary policy and expectations all work. The same thing happened in the 1930s. And in the 1980s, when the original voodoo economics had its day in the sun.
  • Economists might not like it, but this is how the world will find its way out of the current mess. Not by the calm resolution of disagreements between Larry Summers and John Cochrane, but by the increasing politicisation of a set of radical economic ideas, of one sort or another, which eventually find their way into the practical political programme of a party with a mandate to govern.
  • And then they'll do what they do and we will learn something about who was right and who was wrong, and a few economists will change their minds, but most will find a way to tweak their old models so that the new evidence looks like an affirmation of what they believed all along.
  • So what does that tell us about how macroeconomists ought to behave? Well, as scientists, they have an obligation to state their hypotheses as clearly as possible, to make testable predictions whenever possible, and to be rigorous and transparent in gathering evidence to support or falsify those predictions
  • But macroeconomics is also inherently political, and the practitioners who seek to "politicise" their ideas and make them a political reality play as vital a role in the advancement of the field as the scrupulously apolitical academics
Javier E

Opinion | The Age of Decadence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...western-society-decadence.html

decadence growth decline dystopia culture crisis history

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Following in the footsteps of the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, we can say that decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development
  • Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.” He added, “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.” And crucially, the stagnation is often a consequence of previous development: The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success.
  • “What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of that endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”
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  • what happens when an extraordinarily rich society can’t find enough new ideas that justify investing all its stockpiled wealth. We inflate bubbles and then pop them, invest in Theranos and then repent, and the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.
  • what this tells us, unfortunately, is that 21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.
  • slowly compounding growth is not the same as dynamism. American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s: Early in the Jimmy Carter presidency, 17 percent of all United States businesses had been founded in the previous year; by the start of Barack Obama’s second term, that rate was about 10 percent. In the late 1980s, almost half of United States companies were “young,” meaning less than five years old; by the Great Recession, that share was down to only 39 percent, and the share of “old” firms (founded more than 15 years ago) rose from 22 percent to 34 percent over a similar period
  • From World War II through the 1980s, according to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment often approached 10 percent of G.D.P.; in 2019, despite a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-G.D.P. ratio was less than half of that.
  • This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses look around at their investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos than resemble Amazon, let alone the behemoths of the old economy.
  • the dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class — basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends — rather than reflecting surging prosperity in general.
  • In 2017 a group of economists published a paper asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” The answer was a clear yes: “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”
  • In his 2011 book “The Great Stagnation,” Tyler Cowen cited an analysis from the Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, who modeled an innovations-to-population ratio for the last 600 years: It shows a slowly ascending arc through the late 19th century, when major inventions were rather easy to conceive and adopt, and a steepening decline ever since, as rich countries spend more and more on research to diminishing returns.
  • the trends reveal a slowdown, a mounting difficulty in achieving breakthroughs — a bottleneck if you’re optimistic, a ceiling if you aren’t
  • the relative exception, the internet and all its wonders, highlights the general pattern.
  • The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, one of the most persuasive theorists of stagnation, points out that the period from 1840 to 1970 featured dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas — energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment.
  • in the last two generations, progress has become increasingly monodimensional — all tech and nothing else.
  • Take a single one of the great breakthroughs of the industrial age — planes and trains and automobiles, antibiotics and indoor plumbing — and it still looms larger in our everyday existence than all of the contributions of the tech revolution combined.
  • We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies.
  • With this stagnation comes social torpor. America is a more peaceable country than it was in 1970 or 1990, with lower crime rates and safer streets and better-behaved kids
  • it’s also a country where that supposedly most American of qualities, wanderlust, has markedly declined: Americans no longer “go west” (or east or north or south) in search of opportunity the way they did 50 years ago; the rate at which people move between states has fallen from 3.5 percent in the early 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2010. Nor do Americans change jobs as often as they once did.
  • Meanwhile, those well-behaved young people are more depressed than prior cohorts, less likely to drive drunk or get pregnant but more tempted toward self-harm
  • For adults, the increasingly legal drug of choice is marijuana, whose prototypical user is a relaxed and harmless figure — comfortably numb, experiencing stagnation as a chill good time.
  • then there is the opioid epidemic, whose spread across the unhappiest parts of white America passed almost unnoticed in elite circles for a while because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble
  • In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm.
  • This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent.
  • This doesn’t excuse the grifting or the rage stoking, especially presidential grifting and rage stoking, and it doesn’t make the mass shootings, when they come, any less horrific. But it’s important context for thinking about whether online politics is really carrying our society downward into civil strife
  • This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization
  • Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence, rebellions against the technocratic management of stagnation that defined the Obama era.
  • in practical terms the populist era has mostly delivered a new and deeper stalemate. From Trump’s Washington to the capitals of Europe, Western politics is now polarized between anti-establishment forces that are unprepared to competently govern and an establishment that’s too disliked to effectively rule.
  • The hysteria with which we’re experiencing them may represent nothing more than the way that a decadent society manages its political passions, by encouraging people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968 on social media, to approach radical politics as a sport, a hobby, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.
  • The terrorist in 21st-century America isn’t the guy who sees more deeply than the rest; he’s the guy who doesn’t get it, who takes the stuff he reads on the internet literally in a way that most of the people posting don’t
  • once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.
  • It suggests that the virtual realm might make our battles more ferocious but also more performative and empty; and that online rage is a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant and yet, ultimately, far more stable than it looks on Twitter
  • in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth.
  • Human beings can still live vigorously amid a general stagnation, be fruitful amid sterility, be creative amid repetition. And the decadent society, unlike the full dystopia, allows those signs of contradictions to exist
  • The last hundred-odd years of Western history offer plenty of examples of how the attempt to throw off decadence can bring in far worse evils, from the craving for Meaning and Action that piled corpses at Verdun and Passchendaele, to the nostalgic yearning for the Cold War that inspired post-9/11 crusading and led to a military quagmire in the Middle East.
  • So you can even build a case for decadence, not as a falling-off or disappointing end, but as a healthy balance between the misery of poverty and the dangers of growth for growth’s sake
  • A sustainable decadence, if you will, in which the crucial task for 21st-century humanity would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; using education to lift people into the sunlit uplands of the creative class; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current position
  • this argument carries you only so far. Even if the dystopia never quite arrives, the longer a period of stagnation continues, the narrower the space for fecundity and piety, memory and invention, creativity and daring.
  • So decadence must be critiqued and resisted
  • by the hope that where there’s stability, there also might eventually be renewal,
  • The next renaissance will be necessarily different, but realism about our own situation should make us more inclined, not less, to look and hope for one — for the day when our culture feels more fruitful, our politics less futile and the frontiers that seem closed today are opened once again.
katherineharron

What the loss of RBG means for the economy, Wall Street and Corporate America - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

economy

shared by katherineharron on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any more chaotic, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg set off a political earthquake that could rattle the fragile economic recovery.
  • At a minimum, the loss of RBG is yet another wild card for investors, CEOs, small business owners and consumers
  • The Supreme Court vacancy is shaking up the previously stable battle for the White House, not to mention control of the US Senate.
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  • We don't see how the parties can reach a stimulus deal in this environment," Jaret Seiberg, policy analyst at the Cowen Washington Research Group, wrote in a note to clients Monday. "Failure to enact the Phase 4 stimulus will damage the recovery."
  • The unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg adds another element of risk to the timing of the [stimulus talks] outcome, and could weigh on the market overall in the near term,"
  • he Dow was down 3%, or around 800 points, during afternoon trading.
  • If -- and this is a big if -- President Donald Trump successfully replaces Ginsburg, it would result in a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court.
  • "All else equal, it may seem like having a large conservative majority on the court would be positive for business and therefore share prices, because it would reinforce the already antiregulatory and pro-capital tendencies of the Court for the foreseeable future,"
  • Some have argued that the Supreme Court vacancy is a big advantage to Trump because it will fire up his conservative base and, crucially, shift the conservation away from the pandemic.
  • The clearest conclusion we can draw from the Supreme Court vacancy is that it adds yet one more question mark to a year marked by deep uncertainty. And the year isn't over yet.
Javier E

What stage of capitalism is Sam Bankman-Fried? - 0 views

messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/...oakv2

capitalism crypto collapse effectiveness

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • For Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto exchange FTX, the simple answer is that a leaked balance sheet leads your biggest rival, himself under federal scrutiny, to instigate a sort of “bank run” you cannot possibly cover, exposing billions of dollars in shortfalls you apparently created by riskily investing money that wasn’t yours.
  • How do you make a multibillion-dollar company disappear in a week?
  • And revealing yourself, in the process, to be a very new kind of financial villain — one who pitches not just the prospect of profit but also deliverance from the corrupt speculative system in which you “made” your “billions.”
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  • — what exactly was the meme?
  • Cryptocurrency is little more than a decade old, and yet it has passed through several reputational phases: first, as the lawless province of black marketeers and hard-core libertarians obsessed with escaping government oversight; then as a speculative market in which many of those people made an astonishing and enviable amount of money; then as an investment sector for adventurous normies who might previously have turned to simple day-trading; then as an “asset class” eyed by big-money investors and establishment banks
  • it was very tempting to believe, and nobody was trying to look all that closely, it turns out — not the editors who put him on the covers of Forbes and Fortune; not the traders who trusted him with billions in daily trading volume; not the recipients of his philanthropic pledges, many of which will now go unfulfilled; and most conspicuously, not the investors who handed him millions without seeming to even bother checking the books.
  • To investors and legislators, he looked like the potential face of a new era for crypto, poised to legitimize through transparency and regulation what had always been an enormously shady, if often quite lucrative, sector.
  • To progressives, he looked like our kind of oligarch, a sort of boy wonder who seemed capable of conjuring up world-changing billions guiltlessly, effectively out of thin air.
  • And he had promised to give that magic internet money away just as quickly
  • It was part of his DGAF brand, like the unkempt hair and cargo shorts he wore onstage alongside Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
  • As recently as July 2021, FTX raised $900 million from, among others, Sequoia Capital, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point and SoftBank Vision Fund, which had previously written down billions of dollars in investments in Uber and WeWork. In January, a Series C round raised an additional $400 million.
  • In a now-legendary profile published on the Sequoia website just weeks before the collapse, almost every paragraph contained what should have been a red flag but was presented instead as a mark of Bankman-Fried’s special genius — and Sequoia’s, for endorsing it
  • The death of FTX has been called crypto’s “Lehman moment,” but it was not the first such collapse — it follows the implosions of Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, Terra and Luna, among many others. But it’s fitting that Bankman-Fried will now always be remembered as this crypto crash’s central figure, because he postured as someone who could rewrite not just the rules of the financial system but its morality as well.
  • Now the comparisons are less flattering: to Bernie Madoff, of course, and to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, even though Bankman-Fried has not been charged with any crimes; also to Adam Neumann of WeWork, Travis Kalanick of Uber and the other iconic start-up hucksters of this strange venture-capital era.
  • those founders were, for all their delusions and sociopathy, pitch-deck visionaries — persuasive proselytizers for not just new products but whole new worlds that could be simply invested into being.
  • In his self-presentation, Bankman-Fried seemed to be pitching something else: an outward indifference approaching disdain. His serious-seeming commitment to effective altruism underlined the impression: If he was earning his billions only to donate them, he represented a very different case study in the morality or moral potential of unregulated markets
  • he flatly described the crypto markets as pointless speculation bordering on fraud — one of the interviewers paraphrased Bankman-Fried’s summary as “I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good” — it wasn’t a misstep
  • What stage of capitalism is this?
  • in the world of big money he was a genuinely new archetype: a smugly superior Gen X slacker and an entitled, world-changing millennial at once
  • it has also been the source of a lot of reflection and debate, about whether it had been at all reasonable to treat what made him distinct as a basis for lionization.
  • He said in the Sequoia profile, for instance, that no book was ever really worth reading, and he told the economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that faced with a coin-flip game in which half the time he’d double the value of the world and half the time he’d destroy it, he’d choose to play again and again
  • he revealed himself to be wasn’t a singular bad actor but a representative one. Blockchain technology may well offer meaningful uses for the wider world in the future, but as of now, it is most significant as the basis for a realm of pure and unregulated speculation.
  • The volatility was not some deep secret only now revealed. It’s an almost inescapable aspect of a financial subculture erected outside the oversight and control of the law on the principle that they weren’t necessary
  • The world’s second-largest crypto exchange has gone belly-up, but the crypto market as a whole is down by only about 20 percent. For many speculators, it seems, collapses like these were already priced in.
Javier E

Opinion | Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...intellectuals-republicans.html

far right intellectual thinker conservative

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.
  • But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?
  • A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that
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  • — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.
  • The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.
  • The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.
  • If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.
  • Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.
  • Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”
  • The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.
  • Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.
  • in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.
  • It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.
  • Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”
  • he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)
  • Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.
  • Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”
  • Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny
  • the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”
  • Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.”
  • “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.
  • Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.
  • Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.
  • In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace i
  • in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianit
  • He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.
  • The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.
  • Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.
  • He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.
  • All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)
  • But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”
  • Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.
  • “Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”
  • In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”
  • Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.
  • These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.
  • In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.
  • These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?”
  • Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.
  • It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.
  • The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.
  • In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.
Javier E

Welcome to the blah blah blah economy - 0 views

image

unpredictable economy global

started by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 no follow-up yet
Javier E

The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-new-tech-worldview

tech guru theories pundit culture innovation western civilization ai

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Sam Altman is almost supine
  • the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation
  • Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks
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  • a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.
  • They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition
  • The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.
  • ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment
  • The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.
  • Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”
  • A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat
  • The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?
  • Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.
  • Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor
  • This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.
  • Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech
  • the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism
  • A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019
  • Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study
  • There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution
  • His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.
  • Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.
  • With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.
  • He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.
  • All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”
  • While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.
  • “The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”
  • In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions
  • Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.
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