Work on these things
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Well, from the point of view that it sets a bad example, it is...
What domains do you suppose will have the biggest impact?
“Underfunded research initiatives” seems like a reasonable start, but maybe someone can come upwith something better.
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?
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.
i 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.
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.
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...
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...