In what sense? Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Who is even in a position to do that? People get their insurance from their employers, and are treated at the nearest hospital (where the prices are an outright secret beforehand). I can't see how market economics apply even a little bit, as far as the person in need of care is concerned.
> South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies.
On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all; they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed capitalism.
I think that's exactly his point, actually, although I thought that was quite well understood. E.g. "How Asia works" explained the difference between taiwan/japan/s korea on one hand, and philipines/indonesia/malaysia on the other hand exactly around this axis.
Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-w... (search for "Barrington Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more quickly.
But... there's a clear policy angle here? There's no need to navel gaze about culture on this. If you follow the same policies that other major powers followed when they were growing (protectionism + heavy coordination between government and large coorporations) you will find growth.
To be honest I feel so little empathy from this author and their post.
I mean there's so much comprehensive studying about the american health care market. The US gov't has spent 50 years staring at it in trying to make it less of a nightmare!
He poses the question of quantifying worker productivity in knowledge economies as if this hasn't been a topic of discussion and like 10 iterations for the past 50 years.
He talks about a lack of criticism of institutions, when there are _centuries_ of criticism on various arms of the government and how they function. Political science is a whole branch of study!
I just get the vibe that this person almost never actually reads books, and just reads pop science takes on economics all day. I mean he's probably a major player in economics but I guess that's kinda the point.
I see how you could interpret his post that way, but saying that Cowen does not actually read books is... not knowing the guy very well :)
His perspective I believe is that a lot of those points have been studied, but need a fresh look, and are the most likely to be intellectually disrupted if you want.
> why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions.
I've mostly read about France's rural history in the 19th century, but imho its institutions were not that bad, whatever the term might mean for the 19th century. Afaik both Louis Philippe I and Napoleon III were pretty laissez-faire when it came to business, an attitude that proved successful for the first waves of industrialisation. Napoleon III's reign also added some proto-Keynes-ian touches to France's economy. A very quick search gave me this quick write-up on the issue [1]:
> Napoléon III also directed the building of the French railway network, which greatly contributed to the development of the coal mining and steel industry in France, radically changing the nature of the French economy, which entered the modern age of large-scale capitalism. The French economy, the second largest in the world at the time (behind the United Kingdom), experienced a very strong growth during the reign of Napoléon III. Names such as steel tycoon Eugène Schneider or banking mogul James de Rothschild are symbols of the period
I don't know where you get the idea from that France had bad institutions, but I can not disagree more. They have a long track record of stellar institutions, most of the continental law tradition was modelled after the French 'code civil' implemented at the beginning of the 19th century. The grand Ecoles produced excellent scholars and administrators as is also evident from the scientific output in the 19th century, only rivalled (surpasses) by England and Germany.
It was well understood also that any European bureaucracy would be dominated by Frenchmen, because they simply were the best.
The topic is complex, but France was (and still is) a very centralized country, compared to the UK, Netherlands, Denmark, or what would become Germany. And you had fewer, bigger land owners. It is often argued that it is only through competition with all those neighbors that it managed to modernize. That's what Rodrik alluded to in the talk I mentioned earlier.
And still today, agriculture is more important to our French psyché than it tends to be in other countries in the north and the west.
Chinese emperors have done this type of land reform innumerable times and it has always ended up in famine and disaster/regime change. Land consolidation became a thing (as it inevitably does) and baron landlords became commonplace as the consolidation of fields occurred. The positive aspect of land redistribution via the equal field system is that it alters the power structure for the corrupt landlords who should not have power and prevent progressive changes that benefit society. The negative aspect is it's borderline impossible to vet who is "worthy" of being a landlord. The Chinese unfortunately would let "laissez-faire" take over property control.
Eventually someone who knew how to get a leg up on others would take advantage of others financial incompetence, likely mortgage the property, then acquire it, eventually leading up to owning basically a whole province thus becoming basically creating their own landed title and domain. Then suddenly you've got a feudalistic system that has always existed, but the head government now may even have a worse problem they created themselves. It's happened when the south basically broke off after the final rebellion during the Tang dynasty. These landholders eventually had enough power and cultural difference that they could break from the north and retain full autonomy.
Necessary but not sufficient and all that... In how Asia works, Studwell argued quite convincingly how land reforms in Japan, South Korea, etc. was a prelude to successful industrialization because it allowed creating financial surplus thanks to increase agricultural output across a significant part of the population.
But like I said about how these wide sweeping reforms, they create instability and also famine. The reason it ended up being good (as your link also shows) was due to land consolidation. Millions of independent farmers does not create a food surplus as much as a few consolidated landmasses that can maximize production. As I stated, the consolidation inevitably occurs and always have in the many times China has performed land redistribution.
The primary reason the growth occurred was because of the land consolidation. Instead of having millions of independent farmers, they consolidated the land and only required hundreds of thousands of laborers to work on the land to maximize production. Thus allowing for a massive labor force that could be utilized for industrial production.
> Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this?
We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its "average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer randomness.
The fact that it’s a smaller territory means that effects that would even out in larger territories don’t apply. I.e. it’s a relative effect.
Here’s an example: suppose a large retirement community of Chinese immigrants exists in Hong Kong, raising the average age. In order for this kind of retirement community to shift the age distribution the same amount in a country 10x larger, that retirement community would have to be 10x or so larger as well. A 10x larger retirement community is way less likely.
This isn’t to say that all small things lie on the extremes of the distribution, only that an extreme value is likelier to come from a smaller sample.
Perhaps, but there's a wide distribution of age of death, and the author is fretting about a 5 year difference in life expectancy between 2 populations that are doing fine.
Assuming someone can ever fully explain the cause of this life-expectancy difference, it's going to be multi-faceted and complex and amount to nothing more than a long list of generic advice and policy prescriptions that will go nowhere and probably be culturally incompatible.
Size isn't the salient factor. Consider two "cities," one of which draws its political borders around its inner suburbs and one that doesn't. They may have identical populations, even, but they'll produce very different results on many common statistical measures.
This is why you should almost never compare two places based on political borders or designations. (You have to instead normalize around something less arbitrary. "City" and "state" aren't proper categories for classification, because what gets included from city to city and state to state can vary across multiple dimensions.)
“ According to a Stanford University study recently published in the science journal Nature, Hong Kong people walk an average of 6,880 steps a day, making us the most ambulatory populace out of the 46 territories and countries assessed.”
My theory would be that life expectancy measures more length of life than quality of life. There's also Asian culture in place.
For example, an old person eats unhealthy, smokes, makes lots of irresponsible decisions in life. She gets cancer, stroke, diabetes, kidney failure, we can still keep her alive for decades. She might be hooked to a dialysis machine. She has little savings. She might not have the money, time, or energy to deal with this.
Asian culture dictates that her only daughter quit her job to take care of the sick mother. There's a huge drain on society, but it keeps someone alive longer.
Given that this is Marginal Revolution, I wouldn't expect them to accept any of the answers that involve state intervention.
There's another possibility: several of the "oldest person in Japan" were found to have been dead for some time and their relatives were claiming their pensions.
Yes just like the "Blue Zone" diet areas were found to be curiously poor parts of countries. It turns out they weren't the places with the most residents over 100, they were the places with the most... poor record keeping and fraud.
> Hong Kong life expectancy: Hong Kong is a city with no rural area. If you look at the life expectancy of just Sydney, leaving out the rest of Australia you get 86.7 years instead of 82.5. It's no secret that life expectancy in cities is generally longer, especially if they are well to do ones that don't make their money from accident prone industries.
The use of political borders to make regional comparisons is a common source of ridiculous conclusions. It usually happens in more banal and easily-identified ways, like when you hear somebody say something like, "Austin is bigger than Boston," (no, it isn't, obviously) but this shows how it can fool even very smart people if they're not paying attention.
Austin isn’t anywhere close to the size of Boston, neither statistically nor experientially. That this isn't obvious to everyone sort of proves my point. The use of political borders as boundaries for making regional comparisons only misleads.
I really don’t think I can put too fine a point on this: the Boston region is so much bigger than the Austin region that nobody familiar with both places could possibly think Austin is bigger. The only way to think Austin is bigger is to be mislead by the arbitrarily drawn political borders of each region’s core city. (I’m also taller than Shaq if for some silly historical reason we only define Shaq to include the parts of his body up to his knees.)
> One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem
hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back this up?
From what I recall having read, there are health improvements, financial improvements, having two parents is much better for raising children (from what I recall this is independent of the gender of the two parents), and there are larger systematic issues when significant portions of the population have difficulty finding a relationship (look at the purposed roles polygamy plays in destabilizing the Middle East or the social costs of China's one child policy that strongly influence people to have a single boy now that a few decades have passed).
I mean they pay roughly 3-4 times as much for the same level of service as the single payer healthcare in my country. So it's a massive market with much larger profit margins, the lack of vertical integration adds not just one, but many layers of profit generation (and total cost increase) compared to a single-payer solution, and you can skew the perverse incentives in favor of your product in ways that are not legal or possible in other countries (e.g. lobbying/bribing doctors to favor your new drug). So yes, it's definitely influential, and it attracts companies, but not only in favorable or sensible ways if you're a consumer/patient.
I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local/family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart).
Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.
IMHO this is because of SEO. Whatever algorithms search companies make, those who exploit them (called SEO, whatever the hat color is) will have an advantage over those who don't.
Unless the algorithm could actually detect "quality" (instead of poor analogs for it). Then if SEO couldn't really exploit it, SEO would just be making "quality" content.
SEO is only half the issue. Even a great SEO won't be able to get your site to rank if it only has 10 pages and new content is rarely added (think of a small company's marketing website).
Search engines think volume of content and frequency of updates are positive signals, so in the past decade we have seen a deluge of "content marketing", with corporate blogs and media sites chock-full of absolute garbage clickbait and listicles, written by freelance copywriters for pennies per word. All to obtain a higher domain ranking, or domain authority.
While users are looking for the needle in the haystack, websites are just making the haystack bigger to capture users who were looking in a different haystack.
The problem with this is that black-hat SEO's have learned to mimic "independent blogs" and their linking/referencing networks (blogrolls, etc.) to the point that search engines are basically forced to discount all of these results. We need trusted, curated guides to the "independent" Internet, like the ODP/DMOZ of old. For both humans and search engines alike.
Google in particular doesn't have an incentive to direct people to the independent web. Every year, there are fewer organic links in search and more ads and more links to Google properties.
One of the worst changes is their effort to hide Wikipedia results for anything health-related and instead send you to "reputable" sites that will hit you with multiple pop-ins, heavy advertising that harms the reputation of the sites, and content sliced thin like salami to increase page views and ad impressions.
The same is also true of "reputable" sites like anandtech, which post good articles, but have the problem that there are so many ads on the site that the ads interfere with the other ads on mobile.
So far as ODP/DMOZ, that ran into the problem that the editors became corrupt and pretty soon the only way to get into the directory was to bribe an editor.
Whether that's for an agenda, a product, a way of life, service, access, or anything else with a direct (or indirect) transaction of value - it's a dead giveaway.
I'll take your questions at face value. You are likely being downvoted for your use of an aggressive tone, but that's another matter.
1) Recipe for a good minestrone soup, no. Actively endorsing a specific brand of an ingredient, yes.
2) No. (One might argue you're building a brand and advertising yourself. I don't, necessarily. If the efficient loop was possible to create using only a particular compiler, then yes.)
3) Yes. The page is selling a particular idea, and most likely lying by accident. After all, how many screens have been calibrated for colour correction accuracy? Are you, as a reader, getting the correct information?
I take the view that making a value judgment on an idea is essentially selling that idea.
i.e. "A is better than B" is clearly advocating for A, as is "A is good"
I disagree with ads in general, but my problem is that blocking any form of endorsement as you suggested above would mean we can't transmit really any useful information. Obviously that means there's some acceptable level of endorsement... but that goes back to the problem of having a game-able filter.
Don't worry, I am well aware that my answer came off as snarky and brash so a similarly phrased response should not have been unexpected. And I know that my position is extreme. Even with the overall attitude change over the past 6-8 years about advertising[ß] my views are still outside the mainstream.
This is a personal opinion, but I believe you can do endorsements without falling into advertising trap. It takes effort, because you need to quantify your reasons of choosing a particular option (or a set of options) over the remaining ones. You need to specify the reasons, be painfully aware of and outline your own biases, and be willing to acknowledge the tradeoffs in your stated choice.
Obviously, if you are externally incentivised to make a particular choice before you broadcast about it, that's an ad. As one may imagine, I absolutely detest the entire influencer phenomenon - to the point of treating any product or service using them as bad actors perpetuating a disgusting system.
ß: Back in 2011/2012 HN was, in general, very pro-advertising. A lot of the [vocal] posters made their money on it or dealt with large advertising budgets on a daily basis. Ad block users were derided as parasites or thieves. Anyone questioning the common good was pushed away. Compare to the tone shift over the past couple of years and the difference is stark.
Many of the worst mind-polluting ads aren't trying to sell anything explicitly. For instance ads that talk about what an innovative and young company GE is, or how ADM is Supermarket to the World, etc.
I suppose banning everything that pulls in stuff from any of the big ad-pushing companies would be quite a good start. You could probably even use existing open source ad-blocker blacklists. The only workaround from the top of my head is self-hosting advertisements, and there's a reason why this is not the norm.
Yes, using an ad-blocker list is exactly what I was planning. Would then blacklist from the index any sites that serve ads. Would prolly also at a minimum, heavily penalize affiliate links.
Are you saying that you don’t enjoy the 4 page life retelling story intermixed with countless ads and the same staged photo from 5 different angles and 4 different focal points when you just want to see the recipe? Luckily, there is an extension to parse all that out.
It's a problem that's solved by buying a dedicated recipe cookbook. I don't mean to be blunt but at this point, we all know the game these recipe blogs are playing. There is simply no way to monetize users of such basic text content without plastering those pages with autoplaying videos, email signup modals and a million HTTP requests to ad and analytics servers.
millionshort.com is a search engine that lets you exclude high-ranking, SEO-gamed domains from your search. You can remove the Top 10, 100, or 1000 domains from your results. It might not exclude the recipe blogs you're talking about (I dislike those as well), but is a step towards finding more long-tail search results.
"Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields": I've been thinking a lot about this one lately. There's so much confusion (and willful disinformation) in the world when it comes to science, and so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this - that usually comes years later when a meta-study comes along. In most fields, as an outsider, you basically have to get lucky that one of these meta-studies has cropped up recently and you happen to talk to an expert that can point you at it. In medicine there is the Cochrane organization that does a pretty good job of communicating these findings in a clear way. But why isn't there something like this for all fields of science, constantly updated, so journalists, policy-makers and curious amateurs like myself have a single point of entry when we want to understand the state of the art in a given scientific field? A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy?
It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers, quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere accessible.
> "so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this"
I respectfully disagree that journalists don't understand that. They do, they are just incentivized to fill their websites/shows with grabbing headlines to get more ad revenue. It's mainly an incentive problem, not an understanding problem.
In the long run, this could also help combat the "Fake News" phenomenon.
Part of the Utopian mindset of the early Internet was the belief that making more content available to people would automatically lead to people being better educated and informed. But of course it also opened up people up to unprecedented amounts of disinformation, deliberate or otherwise.
Slowly establishing authorities on given topics and building their reputation could help over time to filter the wheat from the chaff on various topics.
This gap is filled by consultants; a centralized, interdisciplinary knowledge-hub would be more than "a huge undertaking", because the forces that are at work when people try to reach consensus are not the same forces that drive unbiased research; "science is great, but full of people". unless you find a way to form such an organisation without the detrimental impact of social and opportunistic dynamics, the result wouldn't match the desired outcome.
> A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy?
The Particle Data Group does this for high energy physics quite effectively. It's just not knowledge that laymen can absorb in a useful way.
I started https://roadmap.sh with the hopes of doing something similar. It currently only has a few items that I have expertise in plus in the form of a visual representation, however I am going to change it and will soon be reaching out to other people for contributions. It is one of my goals this year to focus fully on it.
IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a list of priorities betrays a view of the world, I find something eery about this one. Nothing said is obviously wrong, but there's something between the lines that I can't quite put my finger on. To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.
Something on Tyler Cowen's blog is a path towards Marxism? LOL
The blog owner (Cowan) runs the Mercatus Center at GMU, which exists entirely to explore free market alternatives. It's funded directly by the Koch family; one of the Koch brothers is on the board.[1]
That said, Tyler Cowen's food blog is pretty good, if you live in the Northern VA / Washington DC area.
Actually, that explains a lot of his posed questions.
Another corporatist Koch shill at GMU that shouldn't be considered an economist if Brian Caplan. If you ever see any "insightful" articles by either one of these, run like hell.
There’s a neoliberal hierarchy implicit in the things the author deems worthy of researching. In other words, things that make more money are inherently better regardless of cultural differences or human factors and we should all aspire to be productivity porn stars. Other types of people or lifestyles don’t warrant investigation.
It appears that throughout human history an increase of wealth is the precursor to an increase in all of the things anti-capitalists love. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first.
Wealth for whom? If the money is going into poor people's pockets, things will improve, but inevitably capitalism, and specially neo-liberalism, will only be lining rich people's pockets. We're seeing that happen right now across the globe, and we're seeing popular uprisings in response to that.
> It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first.
Can't disagree with that. But we haven't been enriching the poor. We've been practicing trickle down economics instead.
Enriching the rich has marvelous side effects like a proliferation of low paying contract work (jobs!), ratcheting housing prices (wealth!) and increased production of luxury goods (utopia!).
But then you look at minimum wage, inflation and the consumer price index; and see that the poor have been hemorrhaging purchasing power since the 1970s.
So, yeah. Increasing wealth is great for humanity. But there's a wide gap between anticapitalism and the neoliberal/libertarian economic theories which brought today's plutocracy. The middle ground is classical capitalism.
Of course not. We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"? Maybe you need to look beyond the literal "first world problems" in your privileged corner of the West.
Im not sure suffering works that way. Someone in East Asia who is poor but has a loving family, community, autonomy, and meaning may be better of then a relatively rich Westerner who lacks those things.
That's part of my point, of course - that material resources are clearly important when you're talking about someone who's truly in extreme poverty, but it's not clear whether going beyond this point matters that much more than, say, better social inclusion etc.
> We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"?
I love this line of thinking because it always shows someone has put forth no effort into what the "poverty reduction" means. The International Poverty line has been $1.90/day. So, if you make the equivalent of $1.90 in your country or higher, then you are not in poverty. Now how about you go and do some work and see how nutritionally complete your diet will be on $1.90.
> I love this line of thinking because it always shows someone has just guzzled from the gutter of ideology.
I somewhat disagree with zozbot and I agree with your material analysis (I'd add something about the rising Gini indices in the mentioned developing nations), but this sentence adds nothing to the conversation.
As I understand it, the poverty line is $1.90 in USD. Not in local currency, and not adjusted for local prices. Which is why it sounds like anyone living in poverty should starve to death within a week, but they actually don't (because $.190 isn't comfortable in Cambodia, for sure, but if you get local prices you won't starve to death in a week).
OK, half a kebab and a few beers. Many's the time I've woken up to empty beeer bottles and a half-eaten kebab and I haven't starved to death ;)
I would have agreed with you. But I live in Berlin, which is "poor but sexy", and I'm watching a culture of artists and creativity get destroyed by increasing wealth. I don't have anything else other than this observation, though. I'd love to know why or how, and what we could do to preserve the culture in the face of rising wealth.
And here we are at the highest levels of inequality since the 1920s. For the last 100 years, efficiency has meant squeezing every spare penny of disposable income from the working class. These people don’t benefit from market gains.
I think what society is really missing is this sense of belonging. We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't.
History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.
> I think what society is really missing is this sense of belonging.
Social capital is what gives people this sense of belonging - of being in a "tight knit tribe". I think that conservatives understand this a lot better than progressives, who tend to see everything about society in terms of either material conditions (wealth vs. poverty), or zero-sum power relations where one side 'wins' and the other side 'loses'. It's not clear that these matter all that much. Plenty of people throughout history had very little in the way of material resources, and were required to answer to people, institutional frameworks etc. exerting some sort of power on them - and yet, they still found lots of ways to smile and be happy at their life. We should understand how they managed to do that.
If anything, conservatives and liberals, due to their devotion for capitalism, are united in fracturing people and communities. That's just the natural end goal of an economic philosophy that views everything via the lens of corporate profit.
Capitalism is an economic system centered around market relations, which has little to do with how "people and communities" organize themselves socially. The two issues just have very little to do with each other.
Yes. In some sort of ideal world, where corporations would never dream of regulatory capture, abusing a monopoly position, finding ways to keep upstarts out of the way.
In the real world, capitalism is an unstable system. The "winner" gets too close to the state and then tries to shape the rules so they fit the incumbent and discourages everyone else. Boeing and the FAA is a recent high profile example.
Capitalism relies on the state to enforce private property rights. The free market then naturally influences your government, which in turn naturally influences how people organize their lives. So yes, capitalism influences how people and communities organize themselves.
That's a very US-biased view. There's plenty of conservatism skeptical and even hostile to capitalism and free markets. It's a quite common position in the Catholic community, for example.
My favourite definition of a tribe is that it's a group where everyone gives what they can and takes as little as they need to. Everyone should be willing to give their last slice of bread and be offended at the idea of 'owing someone' for it.
This just doesn't scale well, but it happens in things like gaming groups, married couples, etc.
Social capital works differently at different scales. By definition, the kind of tribe you're talking about where "everyone knows (and trusts) everyone else" cannot possibly scale beyond 100 members, which today doesn't even cover a tiny neighborhood in a city. But having dense and reasonably stable social connections is quite helpful even beyond that.
Could you elaborate on your thinking in regards to loops? I honestly can't think of anything like that. It's not like the Romans were focused on prosperity and then the dark ages were spiritual - as near as I can tell, for the movers and shakers it's always been about power, and for the underclasses it's survival, just with whatever veneer you want to put on it.
In fact it's only recent that the commoner could even aspire to wealth, regardless of whether that actually correlates to ability to achieve it.
Buddha is textbook - rich fellow who realizes that it hasn't made life better.
Islam went through many cycles of this. Corrupt powerful pagan Quraish. Spiritual Muhammad and Rashidun caliphate. Corrupt Umayyad Caliphate. Spiritual Abbasid Caliphate. The Ottomans went through this as well. We're historically at a low point with regards to Islamic society.
Third world faces this - many of them have abundant natural resources, compared to say, Europe. But the wealth brings corruption, not prosperity.
I think the Rashidun Caliphate has a lot of good examples - caliphs turning down state gifts, distributing most of the wealth, selling off luxuries like silk, jewelry, and carpets for infrastructure, making sure that their families didn't profit from state funds.
Anything where an individual can benefit unfairly from the effort of an organisation is a form of corruption, as it involves abuse of power entrusted. This includes CEOs overpaying themselves, or government leaders with excessively high compensation. They're making use of their position to skim resources for personal benefit, and sadly, it's a culture now that this is what people should aspire to.
Things usually improve when people can draw a line where they have enough, and allocate excess resources to the rest of the organization. This is usually (not necessarily) triggered by spirituality because there's nobody else to keep the watchmen in check.
Once leaders do this, those down the command chain also do the same. There were plenty of situations where commoners were well off - in Egypt, Rome, China, Caliphates, and so on. I believe we actually have lower social mobility today than in some eras of the past, but it's far from terrible.
I could well be wrong, and encourage those with more understanding of history to correct and give counter examples.
Related to this, I recall two issues that could inform his Hong Kong life expectancy point:
1. A recent study that found very high life expectancy "blue zones" were highly correlated with poor record keeping and pensions - the strong implication was that it was mostly fraud. Don't think Hong Kong was one of the areas studied, but I think skepticism is warranted.
2. A common thread I've seen in many longevity studies is that social connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of a long lifespan, and contrarily, "lonely people die young." I'd expect that a very close-knit urban area with relatively low migration (e.g. as opposed to NY or SF where there is so much moving in and moving out) would exhibit this social connectedness.
I think there's a large undocumented migrant population too, who make up a lot of the working classes and this could skew that stats as well.
EDIT it's a lovely place too, Hong Kong (picturesque, pleasant climate, easy to get around). I'd say that would have a lot to do with it as well, once you can pay the rent ...
We're missing a socioeconomic model that isn't communism or capitalism. Socialism seems like an economic patch, but it's not a satisfactory solution. Socialism is sort of like how free range chickens seems nice but only when compared to how horrid the caged ones have it.
A lot of brainpower in the last century went into technological progress, but we have enough computing power, internet, cloud, data to work on this thing.
Misery is a very strong inverse correlate however. I'd be given to thinking that a lot of economic activity is driven by the need to escape [EDIT and stay out of] poverty on one end, and a cohort of super-competitive success-addicts on the other. Most other people are quite content in the middle, and want to stay there. It is the threat of penury we should be looking more at than the lure of riches.
For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were promised.
If society was focused on getting everyone to 70k, everyone would be happier. But instead, modern society encourages people to make as much as possible, create as many jobs as possible, and pay as close as possible to 15k.
It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.
I have to agree with you and admit that I'm somewhat relieved to see I'm not the only one who felt this way. The list as a whole reflects a certain self-unaware separateness from the "real world". It is hard to describe, but eery indeed.
I think it smacks of a young person who has been spending a lot of time trying to get an insight into what super-wealthy industry leaders, VC, politicial leaders etc. are wondering about, to the point that these lines of enquiry seem perfectly normal and hasn't had enough exposure to the broader picture to understand why these things are weird, even unfeasible. Could be completely wrong. Just a guess.
EDIT just checked his Bio. Nope, not young. Perhaps just in some sort of bubble. Thinktank perhaps. The whole tone is all very think-tanky.
I strongly disagree with this comment. Many, many people pour massive amounts of time and energy into finding a partner, and often end up dissatisfied with the results. Mechanics that improve the experience and the result of dating really would make life easier and better for many people. If you doubt this, have some conversations with people in their late 20s and 30s who are dating.
Your "find me a wife" portrayal is the least charitable possible interpretation of that section of the article. Was your comment made in good faith?
Since he seems to be married (according to Wikipedia), this strikes me as a very uncharitable reading. (It would also be uncharitable if he wasn't married though)
I think it's the "highly effective people are not doing this well" comment that strikes us. Nobody is doing this well, but his emphasis on top performers makes it seem like "we need to solve this problem for them so they can go back to being highly effective"
ahh, but for that we need to go back to a world where highly effective people married people who were content to bring up children and not be highly effective themselves. Having children is a huge barrier to being highly effective, unless you can offload all the caring duties onto someone else ;)
I felt this way too. At least one thing is blatantly wrong though: there is no discipline of institutional criticism. This is literally what political science deals with.
I expected such semi-negative, distrustful comment the second I finished reading this list. Some will dislike the individualistic, anti-collectivist character of it.
I would argue the list is not individualistic at all as, as others posters have mentioned, it implicitly reduces the individual person to their economic output (productivity).
A real individualistic list would focus on the quality of life of the individual.
Of course money is important in that regard but studies have pretty consistently shown that community, meaning, and I’ll throw in health, are the key components of individual happiness.
It's not individualist so much as corporatist, and not so much anti-collectivist as anti-humanist. This post exactly mirrors Stalinism in its reduction of humans to their capacity for production. Can we please just for once stop trying to portray anything but the most extreme pluto-techno-libertarian POV as pure communism?
Employing a euphemism to make something sound better is always fun (corporate "missions" and "visions" are often good examples) but that doesn't really change the underlying reality.
There seems to be a confidence that these things can simply be measured by some metric and then improved. That sort of implies a lack of appreciation for the nuance / complexity for some of these topics ... let alone any understanding of what happens if you do simply measure and improve such systems.
It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not...
Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)
My take is that the article expresses interest in topics a certain fraction of the right are interested in (IQ) but it often leans left relative to the interest in those topics (IQ is affected more by environment than 'people who care about IQ' think.)
I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin.
In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry.
Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.
It all seems to be about increasing economic efficiency. Good little workers, turn dollars into more dollars as efficiently as possible! Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science (except tangentially for the NSF/NIH item) let alone arts, etc. It's an MBA wish list, not a human one. Not a surprise considering the source, but still disappointing.
Tyler posts all the time about music, literature, food, and travel. I think he's perfectly aware of what's required to increase quality of life. I think this list mostly demonstrates that he believes there are certain people and institutions in the world that are incredibly effective, and we actually don't understand why at all.
We who live at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy wonder at his lack of focus on quality of life, but I believe if you asked most people in the world (people who are not American or European) what they most valued, they'd tell you access to food, clean water, cheap energy, healthcare, etc. Things that come from economic growth, which comes from building effective institutions and increasing the number of people who can be productive.
To paraphrase Adso in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, only the powerful have the privilege of knowing their true enemies. In my own words, if someone who is troubled focuses on something, it doesn't necessarily mean that that something is the cause of their problems.
Things that come from actually building stuff. Purely economic growth, as represented by banks and brokerages and economics departments, doesn't put food in anyone's belly or a roof over their heads.
I'm thankful that someone else wrote this comment so I wouldn't have to try and figure out how to put it into words. This list sets off minor alarm bells for me as well.
I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?"
It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work).
Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
Measuring software developer productivity is a hard problem. But I totally agree that the biggest production drain in any software team is bad management and bad direction. Building the wrong thing faster is not going to help much. Not wasting time building the thing that the marketing manager thought would be cool while on a night out with the CEO would help more.
It feels off because the author is a conservative. But he's rational and well-spoken. We should be able to welcome him with "I disagree with you but I will listen to your arguments. Sometimes they will be persuasive and change my mind and other times they will help me to strengthen my own arguments against your position".
But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".
> If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”.
This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.
This also match my personal experience (my girlfriend is from there). The other side of the coin is that they are on average much happier and social than other cultures.
This is in line with schools of thought that see happiness as inversely proportional to perfectionism.
> To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.
oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.
I think there's a lot allocated to it, both funds and brainpower. Maybe there should be more, but money is probably not the bottleneck.
It's not necessarily the worst thing either. Some researchers think nuclear apocalypse is still more likely to cause human extinction, which could happen if too much political pressure goes upon climate change.
The point of this was to look at questions the author thought were interesting but maybe overlooked I think, not a "TOP 10 QUESTIONS WE NEED ANSWERED NOW OR THE HUMAN RACE IS DOOOOMED!!!" listicle.
No surprise. The author is a middle aged conservative economist. These people are more concerned with the next 30 years of gains than climate change, as they won’t be around holding the bag when crops start to fail.
Tyler Cowen’s whole gimmick is to play dumb and distract people from the actual issue. Back when unemployment was 10% he wrote about “zero marginal product” people. He literally called people useless. As if the financial crisis was caused by video games and dirty movies on the internet. When pressed on it he admitted he doesn’t know much about macroeconomics. Change the subject, then play dumb, that’s his only move.
While we're running through Tyler's greatest hits, he also argued in favour of high prices for drugs [0], since lower prices would lower innovation.
If the advocate of lower drug prices does not have clear quantitative evidence for a conclusion of “lowering drug prices will not harm innovation very much,” commit the analysis to the flames, for it harbors nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Tyler Cowen is the opposite of Batman. I genuinely don't understand why he gets so much press.
>A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system.
im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states, where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause the employee some religious moral unrest.
>Who are the actors and what are their incentives?
Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state, and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments, but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give preferential treatment to their products.
Absolutely. It's like "Steal This Book" from a while back, which was effectively outdated a month after it came out -- all of the info it had was picked up on, and fixed.
Healthcare benefits GREATLY from asymmetrical information and pricing, and the moment a guide is published they'll alter the system.
When I lived in Australia I had a mole removed on my knee -- a trivially minor surgery. They were able to give me a breakdown ahead of time what everything would cost, and what potential complications could crop up (and what they'd cost). All in it was ~$260.00 AUD in 2014 dollars, with ~400 for the biopsy. My dad had a skin growth removed off his neck and pre-insurance was north of $1700 USD last year -- and he only found that out a month later when the bill showed up (insurance covered most of it)
Another straightforward appeal for transparency, transparency, transparency.
The middleman organizations that negotiate deals in private, hospitals that make different discount deals with different insurers, even the insurers internal risk assessments and differential rates, all of these factors have been at least partially investigated.
Let's combine those research results, and keep shining more light on the places where collusion and obfuscation let companies get away with sucking money out of patients, and when the whole ball of wax is exposed to the public, then we can root out the worst actors and keep digging until the system is as free of greedy manipulators as we can manage.
Or we could French Revolution the CEOs and CFOs...
Society failing some potentially super effective people is observable. If we employed half as many tricks to align people with challenging (skills-appropriate) and socially valuable work as we do to align potential buyers with products, I think a lot more would get done and a lot more people could live meaningful lives. I know several examples of people not doing things they're good at. Actively marketing yourself as a requirement for getting valuable work is an obstacle for many. Sometimes business culture is an obstacle.
Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards social control.
I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential.
Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also doesn't help.
You do not need a Bloomberg terminal for everything but one for each industry vertical. What Bloomberg did for capital markets ..for.. healthcare...retail etc.
I interpreted this as building a terminal for each of all the various domains out there. Not just 1 Terminal with all the different data you need. That would close to impossible, and impractical to build.
Rather, focus on a specific domain, like startup funding for instance, organize/collect data on that, and allow people to draw correlations and insights from that data.
And to answer your question, does Wolfram Alpha tell me how much funding all food delivery startups had in 2019?
Would the ideal form of this look substantially different from crunchbase? I’ve never used a Bloomberg terminal myself, is this suggesting something about the user experience or just having all the data centralized in one place?
It would not. startup funding was an example of a domain where there are products like crunch base that just collect, aggregate and centralize all that data. The user experience is the easy part
This is a pretty unoriginal list of libertarian talking points. Classic “smart” person asking questions that have been studied over and over and over and thinking they are the first to ask.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadi would say it is more of a market than a system
Market's don't require multiple sellers or even buys, see: monopolies and monopsonies.
On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all; they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed capitalism.
See "kicking away the ladder" by Ha-Joon Chang.
Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-w... (search for "Barrington Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more quickly.
To be honest I feel so little empathy from this author and their post.
I mean there's so much comprehensive studying about the american health care market. The US gov't has spent 50 years staring at it in trying to make it less of a nightmare!
He poses the question of quantifying worker productivity in knowledge economies as if this hasn't been a topic of discussion and like 10 iterations for the past 50 years.
He talks about a lack of criticism of institutions, when there are _centuries_ of criticism on various arms of the government and how they function. Political science is a whole branch of study!
I just get the vibe that this person almost never actually reads books, and just reads pop science takes on economics all day. I mean he's probably a major player in economics but I guess that's kinda the point.
His perspective I believe is that a lot of those points have been studied, but need a fresh look, and are the most likely to be intellectually disrupted if you want.
I've mostly read about France's rural history in the 19th century, but imho its institutions were not that bad, whatever the term might mean for the 19th century. Afaik both Louis Philippe I and Napoleon III were pretty laissez-faire when it came to business, an attitude that proved successful for the first waves of industrialisation. Napoleon III's reign also added some proto-Keynes-ian touches to France's economy. A very quick search gave me this quick write-up on the issue [1]:
> Napoléon III also directed the building of the French railway network, which greatly contributed to the development of the coal mining and steel industry in France, radically changing the nature of the French economy, which entered the modern age of large-scale capitalism. The French economy, the second largest in the world at the time (behind the United Kingdom), experienced a very strong growth during the reign of Napoléon III. Names such as steel tycoon Eugène Schneider or banking mogul James de Rothschild are symbols of the period
[1] https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Napoleon_III#Deve...
It was well understood also that any European bureaucracy would be dominated by Frenchmen, because they simply were the best.
And still today, agriculture is more important to our French psyché than it tends to be in other countries in the north and the west.
Eventually someone who knew how to get a leg up on others would take advantage of others financial incompetence, likely mortgage the property, then acquire it, eventually leading up to owning basically a whole province thus becoming basically creating their own landed title and domain. Then suddenly you've got a feudalistic system that has always existed, but the head government now may even have a worse problem they created themselves. It's happened when the south basically broke off after the final rebellion during the Tang dynasty. These landholders eventually had enough power and cultural difference that they could break from the north and retain full autonomy.
And in China, it is well acknowledged that the reform from 1978 were a significant step toward China economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform
The primary reason the growth occurred was because of the land consolidation. Instead of having millions of independent farmers, they consolidated the land and only required hundreds of thousands of laborers to work on the land to maximize production. Thus allowing for a massive labor force that could be utilized for industrial production.
We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its "average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer randomness.
Here’s an example: suppose a large retirement community of Chinese immigrants exists in Hong Kong, raising the average age. In order for this kind of retirement community to shift the age distribution the same amount in a country 10x larger, that retirement community would have to be 10x or so larger as well. A 10x larger retirement community is way less likely.
This isn’t to say that all small things lie on the extremes of the distribution, only that an extreme value is likelier to come from a smaller sample.
Perhaps, but there's a wide distribution of age of death, and the author is fretting about a 5 year difference in life expectancy between 2 populations that are doing fine.
Assuming someone can ever fully explain the cause of this life-expectancy difference, it's going to be multi-faceted and complex and amount to nothing more than a long list of generic advice and policy prescriptions that will go nowhere and probably be culturally incompatible.
This is why you should almost never compare two places based on political borders or designations. (You have to instead normalize around something less arbitrary. "City" and "state" aren't proper categories for classification, because what gets included from city to city and state to state can vary across multiple dimensions.)
Brian Kearns
“ According to a Stanford University study recently published in the science journal Nature, Hong Kong people walk an average of 6,880 steps a day, making us the most ambulatory populace out of the 46 territories and countries assessed.”
For example, an old person eats unhealthy, smokes, makes lots of irresponsible decisions in life. She gets cancer, stroke, diabetes, kidney failure, we can still keep her alive for decades. She might be hooked to a dialysis machine. She has little savings. She might not have the money, time, or energy to deal with this.
Asian culture dictates that her only daughter quit her job to take care of the sick mother. There's a huge drain on society, but it keeps someone alive longer.
Given that this is Marginal Revolution, I wouldn't expect them to accept any of the answers that involve state intervention.
There's another possibility: several of the "oldest person in Japan" were found to have been dead for some time and their relatives were claiming their pensions.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
> Hong Kong life expectancy: Hong Kong is a city with no rural area. If you look at the life expectancy of just Sydney, leaving out the rest of Australia you get 86.7 years instead of 82.5. It's no secret that life expectancy in cities is generally longer, especially if they are well to do ones that don't make their money from accident prone industries.
I really don’t think I can put too fine a point on this: the Boston region is so much bigger than the Austin region that nobody familiar with both places could possibly think Austin is bigger. The only way to think Austin is bigger is to be mislead by the arbitrarily drawn political borders of each region’s core city. (I’m also taller than Shaq if for some silly historical reason we only define Shaq to include the parts of his body up to his knees.)
* Native Americans: 75.06 years
* African Americans: 75.54 years
* White Americans: 79.12 years
* Hispanic Americans: 82.89 years
* Asian Americans: 86.67 years
hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back this up?
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/36/13271.full.pdf
This one seems a little odd, but I included it for completeness. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027156031...
Well, from the point of view that it sets a bad example, it is...
Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.
Search engines think volume of content and frequency of updates are positive signals, so in the past decade we have seen a deluge of "content marketing", with corporate blogs and media sites chock-full of absolute garbage clickbait and listicles, written by freelance copywriters for pennies per word. All to obtain a higher domain ranking, or domain authority.
While users are looking for the needle in the haystack, websites are just making the haystack bigger to capture users who were looking in a different haystack.
http://www.seobook.com/brands-vs-ads
One of the worst changes is their effort to hide Wikipedia results for anything health-related and instead send you to "reputable" sites that will hit you with multiple pop-ins, heavy advertising that harms the reputation of the sites, and content sliced thin like salami to increase page views and ad impressions.
The same is also true of "reputable" sites like anandtech, which post good articles, but have the problem that there are so many ads on the site that the ads interfere with the other ads on mobile.
So far as ODP/DMOZ, that ran into the problem that the editors became corrupt and pretty soon the only way to get into the directory was to bribe an editor.
It's a tough problem.
Keep in mind that as soon as you do define it, people are going to look for a workaround.
Attempt to sell.
Whether that's for an agenda, a product, a way of life, service, access, or anything else with a direct (or indirect) transaction of value - it's a dead giveaway.
Is a blogpost highlighting a particularly efficient way to write a tight loop selling you something?
Is a plain white webpage selling you the benefits of that particular shade of white?
1) Recipe for a good minestrone soup, no. Actively endorsing a specific brand of an ingredient, yes.
2) No. (One might argue you're building a brand and advertising yourself. I don't, necessarily. If the efficient loop was possible to create using only a particular compiler, then yes.)
3) Yes. The page is selling a particular idea, and most likely lying by accident. After all, how many screens have been calibrated for colour correction accuracy? Are you, as a reader, getting the correct information?
I take the view that making a value judgment on an idea is essentially selling that idea. i.e. "A is better than B" is clearly advocating for A, as is "A is good"
I disagree with ads in general, but my problem is that blocking any form of endorsement as you suggested above would mean we can't transmit really any useful information. Obviously that means there's some acceptable level of endorsement... but that goes back to the problem of having a game-able filter.
This is a personal opinion, but I believe you can do endorsements without falling into advertising trap. It takes effort, because you need to quantify your reasons of choosing a particular option (or a set of options) over the remaining ones. You need to specify the reasons, be painfully aware of and outline your own biases, and be willing to acknowledge the tradeoffs in your stated choice.
Obviously, if you are externally incentivised to make a particular choice before you broadcast about it, that's an ad. As one may imagine, I absolutely detest the entire influencer phenomenon - to the point of treating any product or service using them as bad actors perpetuating a disgusting system.
ß: Back in 2011/2012 HN was, in general, very pro-advertising. A lot of the [vocal] posters made their money on it or dealt with large advertising budgets on a daily basis. Ad block users were derided as parasites or thieves. Anyone questioning the common good was pushed away. Compare to the tone shift over the past couple of years and the difference is stark.
PSAs also often fit into the same category.
https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
We discussed it in another thread just the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21938261
I agree that it’s a tricky and quite big problem.
https://millionshort.com/
It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers, quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere accessible.
I respectfully disagree that journalists don't understand that. They do, they are just incentivized to fill their websites/shows with grabbing headlines to get more ad revenue. It's mainly an incentive problem, not an understanding problem.
Part of the Utopian mindset of the early Internet was the belief that making more content available to people would automatically lead to people being better educated and informed. But of course it also opened up people up to unprecedented amounts of disinformation, deliberate or otherwise.
Slowly establishing authorities on given topics and building their reputation could help over time to filter the wheat from the chaff on various topics.
(ignoring matters like funding etc.)
The Particle Data Group does this for high energy physics quite effectively. It's just not knowledge that laymen can absorb in a useful way.
If you or anyone else would like to contribute, feel free to reach out, the codebase is opensource at https://github.com/kamranahmedse/roadmap.sh
The blog owner (Cowan) runs the Mercatus Center at GMU, which exists entirely to explore free market alternatives. It's funded directly by the Koch family; one of the Koch brothers is on the board.[1]
That said, Tyler Cowen's food blog is pretty good, if you live in the Northern VA / Washington DC area.
[1] https://www.mercatus.org/about and https://www.mercatus.org/board
Another corporatist Koch shill at GMU that shouldn't be considered an economist if Brian Caplan. If you ever see any "insightful" articles by either one of these, run like hell.
Can't disagree with that. But we haven't been enriching the poor. We've been practicing trickle down economics instead.
Enriching the rich has marvelous side effects like a proliferation of low paying contract work (jobs!), ratcheting housing prices (wealth!) and increased production of luxury goods (utopia!).
But then you look at minimum wage, inflation and the consumer price index; and see that the poor have been hemorrhaging purchasing power since the 1970s.
So, yeah. Increasing wealth is great for humanity. But there's a wide gap between anticapitalism and the neoliberal/libertarian economic theories which brought today's plutocracy. The middle ground is classical capitalism.
Of course not. We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"? Maybe you need to look beyond the literal "first world problems" in your privileged corner of the West.
I love this line of thinking because it always shows someone has put forth no effort into what the "poverty reduction" means. The International Poverty line has been $1.90/day. So, if you make the equivalent of $1.90 in your country or higher, then you are not in poverty. Now how about you go and do some work and see how nutritionally complete your diet will be on $1.90.
I somewhat disagree with zozbot and I agree with your material analysis (I'd add something about the rising Gini indices in the mentioned developing nations), but this sentence adds nothing to the conversation.
In Cambodia... I could easily feed myself on $1.90 a day, if I wasn't white and getting barang (foreigner) prices.
As much as I love Döner, half of one isn't nutritionally complete.
OK, half a kebab and a few beers. Many's the time I've woken up to empty beeer bottles and a half-eaten kebab and I haven't starved to death ;)
History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.
Social capital is what gives people this sense of belonging - of being in a "tight knit tribe". I think that conservatives understand this a lot better than progressives, who tend to see everything about society in terms of either material conditions (wealth vs. poverty), or zero-sum power relations where one side 'wins' and the other side 'loses'. It's not clear that these matter all that much. Plenty of people throughout history had very little in the way of material resources, and were required to answer to people, institutional frameworks etc. exerting some sort of power on them - and yet, they still found lots of ways to smile and be happy at their life. We should understand how they managed to do that.
If anything, conservatives and liberals, due to their devotion for capitalism, are united in fracturing people and communities. That's just the natural end goal of an economic philosophy that views everything via the lens of corporate profit.
In the real world, capitalism is an unstable system. The "winner" gets too close to the state and then tries to shape the rules so they fit the incumbent and discourages everyone else. Boeing and the FAA is a recent high profile example.
My favourite definition of a tribe is that it's a group where everyone gives what they can and takes as little as they need to. Everyone should be willing to give their last slice of bread and be offended at the idea of 'owing someone' for it.
This just doesn't scale well, but it happens in things like gaming groups, married couples, etc.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Karl Marx.
In fact it's only recent that the commoner could even aspire to wealth, regardless of whether that actually correlates to ability to achieve it.
Islam went through many cycles of this. Corrupt powerful pagan Quraish. Spiritual Muhammad and Rashidun caliphate. Corrupt Umayyad Caliphate. Spiritual Abbasid Caliphate. The Ottomans went through this as well. We're historically at a low point with regards to Islamic society.
Third world faces this - many of them have abundant natural resources, compared to say, Europe. But the wealth brings corruption, not prosperity.
I think the Rashidun Caliphate has a lot of good examples - caliphs turning down state gifts, distributing most of the wealth, selling off luxuries like silk, jewelry, and carpets for infrastructure, making sure that their families didn't profit from state funds.
Anything where an individual can benefit unfairly from the effort of an organisation is a form of corruption, as it involves abuse of power entrusted. This includes CEOs overpaying themselves, or government leaders with excessively high compensation. They're making use of their position to skim resources for personal benefit, and sadly, it's a culture now that this is what people should aspire to.
Things usually improve when people can draw a line where they have enough, and allocate excess resources to the rest of the organization. This is usually (not necessarily) triggered by spirituality because there's nobody else to keep the watchmen in check.
Once leaders do this, those down the command chain also do the same. There were plenty of situations where commoners were well off - in Egypt, Rome, China, Caliphates, and so on. I believe we actually have lower social mobility today than in some eras of the past, but it's far from terrible.
I could well be wrong, and encourage those with more understanding of history to correct and give counter examples.
1. A recent study that found very high life expectancy "blue zones" were highly correlated with poor record keeping and pensions - the strong implication was that it was mostly fraud. Don't think Hong Kong was one of the areas studied, but I think skepticism is warranted. 2. A common thread I've seen in many longevity studies is that social connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of a long lifespan, and contrarily, "lonely people die young." I'd expect that a very close-knit urban area with relatively low migration (e.g. as opposed to NY or SF where there is so much moving in and moving out) would exhibit this social connectedness.
EDIT it's a lovely place too, Hong Kong (picturesque, pleasant climate, easy to get around). I'd say that would have a lot to do with it as well, once you can pay the rent ...
A lot of brainpower in the last century went into technological progress, but we have enough computing power, internet, cloud, data to work on this thing.
Misery is a very strong inverse correlate however. I'd be given to thinking that a lot of economic activity is driven by the need to escape [EDIT and stay out of] poverty on one end, and a cohort of super-competitive success-addicts on the other. Most other people are quite content in the middle, and want to stay there. It is the threat of penury we should be looking more at than the lure of riches.
Studies show it does, to a degree. Once you hit something like $70-80k the satisfaction levels off.
It's one of those hygiene things -- not having it will make you (or others) miserable, but having it doesn't mean you're good or happy.
For a society, I think the culture of making as much as possible has left everyone slightly worse off, instead of slightly better off as we were promised.
It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.
EDIT just checked his Bio. Nope, not young. Perhaps just in some sort of bubble. Thinktank perhaps. The whole tone is all very think-tanky.
Your "find me a wife" portrayal is the least charitable possible interpretation of that section of the article. Was your comment made in good faith?
I mean, even in this list.
To my mind, this list is very much like the "how to make more entrepreneurs (in the VC sense) more successful" articles that show up often.
A real individualistic list would focus on the quality of life of the individual.
Of course money is important in that regard but studies have pretty consistently shown that community, meaning, and I’ll throw in health, are the key components of individual happiness.
It’s very leftist idea to try to solve that on society’s level.
The list is focusing on things we can improve on society’s level from an individualistic perspective.
It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not...
Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)
I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin.
In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry.
Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen
>Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science
Tyler is all about those things, but his whole thesis is that they are directly linked to economic efficiency. That is not an unsupported idea.
We who live at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy wonder at his lack of focus on quality of life, but I believe if you asked most people in the world (people who are not American or European) what they most valued, they'd tell you access to food, clean water, cheap energy, healthcare, etc. Things that come from economic growth, which comes from building effective institutions and increasing the number of people who can be productive.
Since there are more poor people than rich people, it makes sense to focus on what most humans care about.
Things that come from actually building stuff. Purely economic growth, as represented by banks and brokerages and economics departments, doesn't put food in anyone's belly or a roof over their heads.
That said, I found him very insightful when he came on Eric Weinsteins podcast recently.
I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?"
It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work).
Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
(I don't actually advocate putting anyone in gulags or even their existence).
But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".
This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.
This also match my personal experience (my girlfriend is from there). The other side of the coin is that they are on average much happier and social than other cultures. This is in line with schools of thought that see happiness as inversely proportional to perfectionism.
oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.
It's not necessarily the worst thing either. Some researchers think nuclear apocalypse is still more likely to cause human extinction, which could happen if too much political pressure goes upon climate change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If the advocate of lower drug prices does not have clear quantitative evidence for a conclusion of “lowering drug prices will not harm innovation very much,” commit the analysis to the flames, for it harbors nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Tyler Cowen is the opposite of Batman. I genuinely don't understand why he gets so much press.
[0] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/ar...
What domains do you suppose will have the biggest impact?
im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states, where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause the employee some religious moral unrest.
>Who are the actors and what are their incentives?
Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state, and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments, but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give preferential treatment to their products.
Absolutely. It's like "Steal This Book" from a while back, which was effectively outdated a month after it came out -- all of the info it had was picked up on, and fixed.
Healthcare benefits GREATLY from asymmetrical information and pricing, and the moment a guide is published they'll alter the system.
When I lived in Australia I had a mole removed on my knee -- a trivially minor surgery. They were able to give me a breakdown ahead of time what everything would cost, and what potential complications could crop up (and what they'd cost). All in it was ~$260.00 AUD in 2014 dollars, with ~400 for the biopsy. My dad had a skin growth removed off his neck and pre-insurance was north of $1700 USD last year -- and he only found that out a month later when the bill showed up (insurance covered most of it)
This is dishonest. Philosophers call it "begging the question."
For someone who considers a fetus to be a human life, distinct from the mother's, with all its own dignity, this is not a "simple service".
The middleman organizations that negotiate deals in private, hospitals that make different discount deals with different insurers, even the insurers internal risk assessments and differential rates, all of these factors have been at least partially investigated.
Let's combine those research results, and keep shining more light on the places where collusion and obfuscation let companies get away with sucking money out of patients, and when the whole ball of wax is exposed to the public, then we can root out the worst actors and keep digging until the system is as free of greedy manipulators as we can manage.
Or we could French Revolution the CEOs and CFOs...
“Underfunded research initiatives” seems like a reasonable start, but maybe someone can come upwith something better.
Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards social control.
I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential.
Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also doesn't help.
Isn't that Wolfram Alpha?
Rather, focus on a specific domain, like startup funding for instance, organize/collect data on that, and allow people to draw correlations and insights from that data.
And to answer your question, does Wolfram Alpha tell me how much funding all food delivery startups had in 2019?
https://delhiseoservice.com