Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?
economist.com
economist.com
For example, France during the population boom of the high middle ages overproduced knights and minor nobles from 1200-1300. The nobility increased from around 2% to 4% of the population, while the incomes of the richest nobles soared. Eventually, peasants could no longer produce enough to feed themselves and provide income for all the nobles: this was a contributing factor to the famines and wars of 1350-1400.
The most straightforward modern equivalent to Turchin's "elite" nobility would not be people with advanced degrees: it would be investors who do not work for wages. (Not to say there is no overlap between those groups.)
[1] Turchin, Peter. War and peace and war: The life cycles of imperial nations. Pi, 2005.
I feel like you need to mention the black death in this same sentence though, as the nobility population change would arguably be a lesser factor in thrall to that massive event.
It does certainly paint an interesting aftermath as the black death suddenly made life a valuable commodity leading to a small period of time where worker's rights and even in some cases women's rights were improved. Considering that against a backdrop of indignant nobles is entertaining ponder-thought.
The Great Famine was 1315ish, were you thinking of that instead?
But that might also be due to the end of the warm period and the start of the little ice age. For reference: Its about now that the norse have to abandon their Greenland settlement.
As you say though a bigger factor was Portuguese traders gaining access to African elephant ivory which was easier and cheaper to procure than walrus ivory which was the cash crop of the Greenland settlement.
That doesn't seem to line up well with Turchin's secular cycle theory, though: 1300 is supposed to be the peak of the "integrative phase" and 1400 is supposed to be the trough of the "disintegrative phase". In fact, many of the "disintegrative phase" events happen well before 1350 (the Great Famine of 1315-1317, the Shepherds' Crusade of 1320, the Flemish peasant revolts of 1323) and many of the events that happened after 1350 could be explained more simply as effects of the Black Death.
To be fair to Turchin, I think his thesis is that overpopulation and elite overproduction happens first, which then leads to famine/scarcity decreasing the non-elite population, which finally leads to a later period of warfare that kills off the excess elites as they fight for shares of the smaller pie. But I think the claim that this process happens for all societies on a 200-year sine wave warrants some skepticism.
Finding modern cognates to medieval nobility is fraught. In the republican era, it basically means "finger the bad guys." There's a tendency to label whoever you have beef with. Investors, bankers, the wealthy, political elites, the upper class...
Does Peace and War go into inter-nobility issues, or does the thesis rest on just the problem of a fixed size peasantry supporting a growing nobility? I could imagine these issues resulting in famines and peasant revolts. But, I can also imagine conflict emerging among nobility.
You can confer as many titles as you like, but France only has so many hides of land. Landless knights and penniless descendants of counts hanging around palaces and competing viciously for favour seems like it could be a recipe too. Somewhat more parsimonious with this modern thesis.
Arguably, the spanish tradition continues under more modern institutions with the British and Dutch trade monopolies. Nobles and wealthy commoners could go off and stake their claims in the colonies. A more diverse elite.
Instead of being a knight that can either farm (limited number of hides) or crusade, you could also be a textile merchant. You could be a ship captain, VOC clerk or mior Raj.
San Domingue, now Haiti, was also a place where these nobles went off to get rich.
The new world was filled with these kinds of guys.
Are these supposed to be different groups of people?
Remember that the original liberals and republicans were (arguably) conducting conflicts within this overall cluster. In France it was the sans culotte vs the old nobility and clerics. You could argue that zuck or murdoch represents either side.
I could see an argument that Zuck and Murdoch are like pied pipers leading the modern sans culotte around by the nose, though. I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Terrors, in that analogy.
There's a lot of groups one could complain about. On HN it's a toss-up between whether you complain about the wall street bankers or the urban landlords. In other circles people complain about the government and the white collar yuppies. The MBA types get complained about a lot but nobody complains when they're buying a $100 window A/C unit.
You can find examples of net-negative rent seeking in just about every part of the economy but to paint a whole class of economic activity as a drag is naive.
There are also more recent examples of overpopulation of non-productive landowners. Post-ww1 the UK peaked at demolishing more than one stately home per day, as the Downton Abbey class abruptly became non-viable.
In the middle ages the nobility were effectively the government (and the church provided checks and balances, kind of) as well as the investor class. In addition to financing productive capacity they also did all the administrative things governments do. Obviously administrative bloat ebbed and flowed over time. Today we have both government investment in capital project (e.g. a road, or a bus terminal) and private investment in capital projects (a new factory or whatever). Both groups can get very rent-seeky and non-productive if left alone with no reason to not do those things. It's really hard to make generalizations that are more accurate than not.
I think comparison to the pre-industrial world is more effective for understanding that time than it is for drawing conclusions about our own time. All the details are so different you really need to squint to make things line up and when you're talking about big things like macro-economics it's the fine tuning and details that make all the difference.
This was kind of true early on, and got less true both as the size of the nobility grew (especially in countries like France and Russia, which had serious nobility surpluses) and as a professional class of government emerged (by the time you get to Samuel Pepys, you're talking about largely a professional government). Even before that in practice many or most government functions were carried out by appointed or elected commoners.
To take a ridiculously over the top example, take the samurai class in the Tokugawa Shogunate. They were about 10% of the population, and by and large weren't really allowed do anything much at all (beyond wars, but there were no significant wars during that period). 99% of them were pure drain on the economy.
> as well as the investor class
This is way more dubious. Obviously it depends on the time and place, but in most times and most places it was anything from socially unacceptable (England) to effectively illegal (Roman Republic/Empire) for aristocratic landowners to invest in non-land things. What little investment in productive projects there was was largely by merchants, money lenders, and later banks, all generally commoners.
can you expand on this? It's harder to think about "investment" opportunities back then because the economy was basically agriculture, the slave trade, urban real estate, and trading the fruits of agriculture and slavery. I think landowners in the Roman Empire did in fact partake in other business, say starting gladiator companies.
I think it somewhat depends on the era, but in general if you were a senatorial family, you wouldn't want to do this, because you'd lose your senate seat (and might face other sanctions from the Censor). There were rich non-senatorial-class people, some of whom would have been much richer than most of the senators who might own land along with other stuff, but the big landowners were generally the senators, because they weren't allowed do much else. I think even, say, building an apartment block on land they owned was dubious territory for a senator. Mercantile activities were right out.
In the English case, the landowning classes generally didn't invest in non-land things, and arguably the trigger of the industrial revolution was less the technological advances, and more the development of the capital infrastructure to invest in using them (banks, joint stock companies, etc).
All I find online is references online to some TV show. Is there another term for these people?
Investors do a lot of work, because they have to constantly think where to put their money, evaluate alternatives, make sure there is no money wasted on things, etc. Even passive investors who only have S&P portfolios still contribute to the economy by providing capital to companies to invest into new things.
As we saw in the 2008 recession when more and investors pile on even the safest investments (mortgages backed securities) the quality of those investments tends to be diluted (via CDO's, errant ratings companies, exploitative real estate practices)
This is what's making me nervous about index funds right now, the demand seems extremely high, but what about the supply how would you determine such a thing?
What is investors are smart but there simply aren't enough good investments out there? Are they going to give up and become doctors, lawyers or engineers? Or just spend more time with their kids?
If there aren't enough good investments now then that's an indication that the market believes there are major structural problems with the economy that will prevent the future from being richer than the present.
That's a far, far, more serious issue than just a question of what the kind of people who expect to receive passive incomes will do with their time.
Obviously, the pandemic is having a major current impact, but as you say, there has been a shortage of good investments since at least 2008.
I believe the underlying issue is a misallocation of resources into rentier economics and not enough into productive growth. We've collectively put far too much money into monopolies that squeeze larger percentages of money out of people and not enough money into innovation that improves the human environment. We need more of the original Google (i.e. the revolutionary search engine) and a lot less of the current Alphabet (i.e. the rentier advertising monopolist).
Otherewise, either by buying an index or a stock normally, ur giving ur money to other investors, not the company itself.
So, everyone with retirement investments. I think they're known as 401(k) in the USA, here in Australia Super Annuation.
We've built a self-collapsing economy?
If the US really is producing 25,000 more lawyers per year than it can employ, that's a real problem. Multiply that across many other disciplines and that could easily be hundreds of thousands of people with credentials they cannot use. We see this in the UK as well where there is a growing cadre of graduates every year going into jobs that don't need a degree. This leads to growing numbers of people that expected to be in the elite, but aren't.
The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share, and have the organisational and communications skills to do something about it. Investors that don't work for wages don't strike me as a likely group to develop growing levels of resentment.
I know, I know, get off my lawn.
Each class would 1-2 people in it that were genuinely interested in computers.
Early web startup cultures were heavy on college drop outs who had passed the professors in “useful” skills.
Sounds like folks who love the field but hate the job, should teach!
The trouble is that the students will see the instructor as the barrier between them abd a paying career.
I loved solving problems with computers in high school. Didn’t give a crap about theory unless it helped me solve harder problems.
So more engineer then scientist.
Choice for college path. Computer Management or Computer Science.
Once of those was about buying software and managing people.
Other was learning fundamentals so I could build cool stuff.
I did not find the boom period as bad as I expected. Many of the students in it for the money were still very smart and motivated and interesting to talk to. But I preferred the non-boom periods nonetheless :)
You're only going to get a good TA when that professor is teaching a class that's their focus and has a grad student that has that fucus AND that student isn't on other research funding. The system is far from optional for either undergrads or grads. Believe me, I'm not happy either
It is because people are not one dimensional. Most people have talent for range of professions, they are not predisposed to like exactly one of them. Also, most good students will end up liking whatever they picked provided it is within range of things they are not completely failing at.
Learning something often makes one like it more, even if one was initially ambivalent. Plus, once you know a bit more about field, you can find sub-field you are actually good at and find fun. As in, various tech jobs require slightly different aptitudes - some require more patience, some more abstract thinking, others memory. But, you dont know until you try.
You are comparing college students from the 1980s to those from 20xx. I'll tell you what is on the mind of the new students: how the heck do I pay my student loans and save up for a $2M starter home
It is easy to have passion when you barely have student loans and can buy a home with a year or two of earnings.
In case you point out that salaries were also lower back then, i'll give you that, but the ratio of salary/debt and salary/homeprice was far more reasonable back then than now.
EDIT: This is a US-centric view, not necessarily a global view. Further, it is a SF/SV/NYC centric view since that is where a majority of tech+banking jobs are.
Not valid for Scandinavia. In Denmark we get paid approx $1000 per month (like a wage) for studying and we pay $0 for attending university. You only have to pay for your own computer.
Some students have a part time job, some get extra money from parents.
So many students get by with zero loans.
Then university has nothing of the general courses and only specialized following your program.
You have some statistics in page 7 here, for Sweden though. It is influenced by people taking single courses and masters programs instead of the first enrollment so keep that in mind.
https://www.uhr.se/globalassets/_uhr.se/publikationer/2020/s...
I've met people with grad degrees in less remunerative fields who absolutely have exactly the worries you imagine. But a fresh grad with a CS degree and a promising career? A 250k salary isn't even a stretch for them to imagine. Add a partner with a similar income and both the student loans and that $2M starter home seem plenty achievable.
Especially if they look at home prices in Oakland or Hayward where home prices are still under $1M, rather than the more exclusive parts of San Francisco (read: all of it).
A large number of $250k+ salaries, on Wall St, for example permanently disappeared with the move to open source, shared servicing, etc. Former bosses are "retired" or "consultants" or insurance brokers.
Finally, sure, having a spouse who also earns $250k is great, but does everyone have that? Should CS grads only marry other CS grads? What if you wall in love with someone who does HR (which is my case)?
Also note, that stretching for a $2M home with two $250k tech salaries is pretty risky
0. What happens when you turn 35 or 40 and now face age discrimination?
1. Both your salaries are highly industry correlated
2. Both your salaries are regionally correlated
3. If either of you lose a job, you're screwed with a mega-loan.
4. What happens when kids come and you cant work (as easily, or at all?)
Let's ground this in more realistic numbers: you can reasonably buy a $500k residential property in the SF Bay on a single $140k salary. That's a salary that's very achievable for a senior engineer - which is to say five years of experience, which many will hit by 30. It's one that you can keep getting when you hit 35 or 40 if you don't move into management or technical leadership so long as you don't insist on working solely for startups founded recently by 20-somethings. It's a pay packet that will enable you to rid yourself of student loans in relatively short order, should you choose to do so.
The nice thing about the "the tech industry" is that one name covers a shockingly diverse swath. I've seen personal finance, business finance, high finance, business services, medicine, consumer electronics, and more all under the name of "tech". They are not nearly are industry-correlated as calling it all "tech industry" might lead someone to think. Often they have little in common with one another except using a bit of Python or Ruby.
With that in mind, and that any property appreciates in value over enough time (or at least is exceptionally unlikely to lose significant value in the SF Bay), we've got a scenario where of 0-4 concerns, only #2 is really a big one in this new world of remote work. 0 and 1 aren't big issues, as mentioned previously. 3 isn't a huge deal - you're sitting on an asset in which you have a non-trivial chunk of ownership that you can use. 4 is a universal issue that will arise in literally any scenario where you don't have 1%-grade resources, and no change of location (or income) will fix that.
Your concerns are wise, and clear-headed. I applaud your foresight and caution! I think it just might be possible that grounding numbers in reality might change the calculations slightly.
What you say is highly logical and models well with the current state of the world. However, it doesnt model unknown unknowns. The problem with modeling unknown unknowns is that you remain in a constant state of fear of what might happen, even though in the base case you would be OK -- so again your viewpoint makes sense.
However, I myself, cant stop thinking of unknown unknowns. Two that worry me (not worry me crazy, just worry me enough not to buy an expensive home in SF) are:
- What if tech jobs go remote and SF property prices stay constant? Now you dont get the appreciation you are expecting. Also, now, wages are stagnant or reduced with the large pool of workers across the US willing to work for less.
- What if the "burn down tech industry" segment of politicians win power (or cabinet influence) and create all sorts of punitive laws?
- What if we allow a lot more highly-skilled immigrants into the country (generally, i'm in favor of this coming from an immigrant family, but it cannot be denied that there would be a 3-5yr blip downwards in wages as the industry re-calibrates to more efficiently use all resources, including eventually creating net new jobs)
I'll give you three examples of unknown unknowns:
1. A friend in NYC purchased a simple 2family home and rents out the below unit to help pay the mega-mortgage. This year, there was a law that in many cases renters can defer rent (unlikely to pay it later, since it will obviously be a huge number.) Also, there is a moratorium on evictions. Also, the homeowner has to continue paying property taxes, utilities, heating, gas, etc. The model just went out the window.
2. A friend in 2009 -- outstanding performer -- was fighting to keep his job (along with a dozen other folks.) Suddenly there was a sexual harrassment claim (no witnesses, he said vs she said.) One person desperately trying to keep their job was the accuser, one was the accused. The accused lost his job. Took him 9 months to find a new job. Burnt thru his 6mo savings buffer. Increasingly desperate for a job, lowered his salary expectations and no longer earning $250k
3. Company is doing well. You are doing awesome. Making great buck. Suddenly, a corporate acquisition. New overloads bringing in loyalists. Bonuses cut for a year or so. Market is bad, stock grants are below what you got (Happens all the time). Dont want to switch jobs and be LIFO. You just went from $250 TC to $170TC.
My point is not that people cannot make ends meet. They can. Also, we in tech have it pretty good. BUT I would agrue that there are too many unknowns and stresses to "just pursue your passion" as the GP post was saying. I mean, sure, if everything was covered i'd love to pursue my passion. But it isnt.
Finally, you cant easily sell a home.
1. 6% real estate commission (if you put 20% down, you just lost 30% of your equity)
2. Title Insurance (1.5% depending on state)
3. Lawyers, fees, transfer taxes.
4. Bid-Ask spread.
All in, selling a home, especially under duress, exacts ~7-10% cost depending on your tax jurisdiction. If you put 20% down, you just lost 33 to 50% of your equity.
You can choose to minimize your risks to maximize your resources for dealing with unexpected events. This is absolutely, completely, and in every possible way a valid life choice! Validity does not mean free of consequences, though.
I have several friends who live this way. They do their best to minimize every risk in their lives and maximize their spare resources. One thing they all have in common is that they never have enough saved to feel secure - there's always a bigger and scarier scenario that they aren't prepared for. Some of them even struggle to tap their "unknown unknown" funds in the event of genuine emergencies, because there's more that could go wrong and they need to be prepared.
Choosing to be maximally conservative is a perfectly reasonable and completely valid life choice. The catch, perhaps, is contextualizing it and accepting that you will pay a price for minimizing risk. Otherwise there's the real risk that a person winds up forever paralyzed by anxiety, sitting like the world's smallest dragon atop a horde of pennies in case you might need them.
And I think it's fair to say that that's not a portrait of your average college student or the future they envision.
Where I live in, in Charlotte, NC a $1-2 million home budget would buy you a literal castle. Here is one on zillow not far from me for $1.2M it's a 6 bed, 7 bath, 7500+ Sq ft castle on an acre and surrounded by forest while still being only a 20 minute drive to the heart of the city.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14001-Grand-Palisades-Pkw...
For a much more reasonable $250K you can easily get a nice 2-3K sq ft 3-4 bedroom home with a quarter acre lot, nice fixtures and a 2 bay garage. This is in the 15th largest city in the US mind you. Better deals can be had elsewhere.
My argument was that of course students are not passionate, they are worried about student loans, homes, rents. (Fun exercise go to the same Zillow link and try to find homes in NYC max $250k. Then, on what you find, look at the transportation options are into NYC.)
I'm glad you brought up NC because it has a decent sized banking sector but also offers great QoL. I actually left NYC and took a super-interesting job a bit north of you in Virginia. Homes are affordable, QoL is great.
There is a catch though: there arent all that many other interesting jobs in tech (as there were in NY/SF). The startup scene is tiny. There are few FAANG jobs here though Amazon is supposed to come soon. There are some awesome CS research-type jobs, in govnt labs.
There are lots of interesting consulting jobs to be fair, as well as FAANG SE jobs. There are lots of interesting data-type jobs in Intelligence. There are also tens of thousands of totally dead-end tech jobs where you do nothing all day at government offices. A friend told me he's been waiting two months to get approval to install a pip library on a government machine. Another friend works on ancient systems.
Good QoL - absolutely.
Good home prices - absolutely.
Jobs i'd be passionate about - some, hopefully more coming with remote.
Am I obsessively passionate about the work here? No, i'm mostly enjoying the outdoors.
He also talked about how he was able to buy into amazon stocks when it was $60. If you are just starting your career you're jumping into a world where everything is at an all time high, that includes housing as well, every decent asset is currently at an all time high and we know that there's no room for us.
So we're left out of the big party, and we're scrunching to try to survive as we cope with our depression and anxiety about what an insecure future we have with climate change looming in the distance. Yes, take a job for the money. It's the only chance you have.
Lol, there are a lot of stocks now at 60 you could buy that may turn out to be big winners. What kind of argument is that?
Drill down on that issue, and you'll see the real problem.
Non-corporate litigants are majority pro-se now. That's new. Most corporate-individual litigation takes placed in closed-door arbitration, where precedent cannot be established (e.g. to definitively decide that caste-based discrimination violates existing racial discrimination statutes).
"Indigent" criminal defendants do not receive anything resembling effective counsel.
The problem isn't "too many lawyers". The problem is "too many lawyers for oligarchs, and a population too poor to afford lawyers when harmed by oligarchs"
But it's still hard to find a lawyer that charges less than 250/hr.
My hypothesis is that law school is not preparing lawyers well enough to be useful right after school. So many can't find a job to get the experience to compete with senior attorneys who charge 250/hr.
Law schools are making lots of lawyers, but the 'failed' ones just drop out. That is why there is no downward pressure on the fees from increased supply.
Lots of young lawyers have no interest in biglaw either, and only some of them are naive about their future prospects.
If you're competent you have offers left and right and can command a very good salary. If you're out of a diploma mill with just the curriculum under your belt you're basically useless.
And a law degree is probably more comparable to a masters in CS than a bootcamp like flatiron.
I feel like this is only true because there's such huge demand recently if you have a pulse and can code fizz buzz you can get hired - but I know 3 guys of the top of my head who went to school with me, finished 5 years (local uni, I dropped out but kept in touch) and then went in to IT or sales because they weren't good enough to get hired as devs - this was 10 years ago.
If someone used a law degree to sell law software, or malpractice insurance I would count that was well.
It's often stated - and worried about, but whenever a thread comes up about devs over 50, we mainly see counterexamples.
Sometimes these artificial gates are good things. They can protect consumers from low-quality products whose quality is very hard to evaluate. The market you use to "buy" a lawyer is not efficient: lawyers are no commoditized and you don't buy them frequently enough to have a good skill at evaluating them. An artificial gate like a professional association can help ensure consumers get access to a quality product, and that shitty products are prevented from entering the market and driving down the reputation of all producers.
I've seen research that the average lawyer (which is definitely not NYC biglaw firm) successfully collects on about 1/8 of their nominally billable hours.
If that is true, and you also factor in that they are effectively running a small business with all that implies for non-billable work, your $250/hr lawyer working on their own is making about $50k/year. So even if we are off by nearly a factor of two, they are hardly raking it in.
By comparison if you are in larger firms, more of the hourly rate is captured but it is also paying for multiple people.
Don't get me wrong, there are lawyers out there making great money (e.g. partners in those same NYC biglaw firms). But thinking that is the experience of the average lawyers is a bit like looking at levels.fyi and deciding that all over the country most software engineers are making 250k+.
That's insane.
I think time estimation is pretty hard in a lot of legal work also, you may be prepped for 60 hours work over then next two weeks and then a client phone call derails it entirely. It's not always easy to replace that time.
Why is the US producing 25,000 more lawyers than it needs?
Why is this happening in a supposedly rational maximally efficient - or close offer - market economy?
The simple answer is because someone else profits hugely from the money they pay for training. Which in turn is a symptom of an extractive economy, not a productive economy.
A productive economy would do a much better job of allocating talent to social requirements. But an extractive economy is optimised for short-term gain of a small overclass - not the medium/long-term opportunity-growth of a strategically generative economy.
And generally, the choice of education seems to lag behind what's actually in demand, even worldwide.
If there was no free money sloshing around, people would have to do a proper cash flow analysis and look at supply and demand before being able to invest their time in degrees that don’t have ROI.
Same thing happened with pharmacy school, and now there’s tons of pharmacists making very little money for exposing themselves to lots of liability in fast food working conditions.
So getting a degree is a gamble, because you either come out ahead or you get hobbled by it for the rest of your life. Whereas if you did indeed get free money to get a degree it would eliminate the hobble and produce a class of well-educated people who could afford to work for PD wages.
It's a gamble that the government offers to you even when it knows you can't meaningfully pay the loan back.
Isn't there any regulatory body which controls the number of law degrees awarded annually, like there is for doctors?
IN LAW {bar exams + prestigious law firms} ~ IN MEDICINE {board exams + specialty board residency placements}
It also differentiates the bar vs. board exams. You can't practice medicine without certification, but there are plenty of lawyers doing law without a bar association, it only constrains you from doing certain types of work.
It’s as Churchill said of Democracy, it’s the worst form of government we’ve come up with, except for all the others. Fortunately in a Democracy we have the freedoms to discuss, identify and agree solutions to these problems. These solutions will probably lead to more problems. Rinse and repeat.
Through government financed student loans, we make money available for any sort of educational pursuit; and unlike a loan for, say, opening a new restaurant, no business plan or market research is needed to convince a banker that the venture is a sound one.
So, the reason this is happening in a "supposedly rational, maximally efficient — or close offer — market economy" is contained in the first word of the description: supposedly.
In truth, government loans distort and destroy a market economy. Cheap credit undermines rational planning.
> the inability of society to support an excess of people who expect to be in the elite.
Perhaps this is somewhat an issue of self identification though.
That's correct, but is not what is implied by "The source of unrest is resentment among people that don't think they're getting their fair share". Those investors are analogous to the knights & nobles of the 1200s, who most likely will gladly support the existing system because they benefit greatly from it.
What is implied is that people _who train to be investors but cannot find work investing_ will be more likely to develop growing levels of resentment. They are in the same boat as the extra 25000 lawyers per year.
Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).
What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.
But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot.
If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?
In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves.
Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the word) available to assist us with ploughing, sowing, harvesting, transporting, sorting, milking, shelf stacking, ordering, home deliveries, and cooking — the first half of that list is why agriculture is no longer employing 80% of the population.
Similar developments are ongoing in all areas, and that progress is the output of the scientists’ labour.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul...
One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods.
This is in part due to consumer choice
1 bigger buildings
2 better buildings (impoved sealing, more equipment, etc)
But also due to other factors
1 inability to replace skilled labor
2 ecological costs
3 increased code requirements
Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's more beneficial to litigate your job to a safe place than to learn a new or more efficient method of accomplishing the same job.
Wait, are you saying America uses lead pipes, not PVC or copper?
It's a systemic issue - the incentives that we have lead to a governmental inability to function at all levels. Pick any random piece and you can find a reason that it's hard to do meaningful work.
I was using the pipes as an accessible example of what is a single piece of a very, very large mosaic.
The assertion I intended to make was precisely this: That it is impossible to point to a single bad actor (although, you are likely correct in pointing out the most egregious of them). The core issue (IMO, the thing to fix) is that the system of incentives that surrounds the developers, contractors, politicians, homeowners, and everyone else involved rewards slicing the pie over making more pie. Adding value, when it's easier to litigate your way into aquiring a larger share of existing value, is pointless from any individual's standpoint.
Take a look at the debacle that surrounded the Stuyvesant Town housing projects - this is a case where this sort of pie-slicing quite nearly made it through, but was struck down by the courts. I use this example because due to it's failure the techniques involved are clearly visible:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/01/america...
...my central assertion is that the pipes and deals like this are motivated by the same underlying socioeconomic factors. And too many lawyers.
I would love an example of housing for everyone in locations that meets their needs, achieved in a timely manner, in a way that removes profit and investment motives.
What part are you referring to?
> I would love an example of housing for everyone in locations that meets their needs, achieved in a timely manner, in a way that removes profit and investment motives.
Well, on the other hand, is there something inherent in housing that requires those motives?
A lot of the program seems to have rested on subsidies and incentives, which are nice ways of saying you're relying on a profit or investment motive.
> Well, on the other hand, is there something inherent in housing that requires those motives?
Aside from that it requires scarce resources to produce and maintain and is rival in nature? I suppose not. Though that does put it in the company of quite a few other goods and services.
I mean that's just an implementation issue. To scale fast at that time, the government paid already existing corporations to build but kept ownership of the completed buildings. The point is that it's still a state venture and the profit motive/investment, "free market", was essentially suspended. So without this kind of government program the market, because of profit/risk/investment motives, won't build this.
But regardless of that, even if you buy cheap land in a low regulation county/state and use all non-union labor, the building cost is still more expensive than it would be if buildings had the reduction of costs that other durable goods have had over time.
Some of this is clearly regulatory, i.e. codes. Some is clearly consumer choice, note the failure of prefab and tilt up to catch on. Some is clearly ecology, note the disappearance of native large timber from most residential construction.
Many architects and builders have tried their hand at designing homes and construction processes that reduce the costs of buildings but if they have to build to modern codes, expectations and ecological standards they mostly see marginal improvements. There are just a lot of fundamental costs involved with site constructed buildings that meet modern standards.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20622/watch-the...
...It doesn't look anywhere close to market-ready, but goddamn what a gamechanger once it is.
https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Archive/Story-Article-...
Yeah, essentially. We need so few people dedicated to this line of work because of the wonderful scientific, technological and logistic discoveries of the past century. The fact that we have people that starve today is a failure of culture and politics and nothing more. With such a rich soil in which to build an advanced society, the fact that we haven't produced the creativity to produce a more advanced society is not exactly alarming. It says more about the human mind and condition than anything else.
Uhm, we already do all of that stuff that you mentioned with a tiny subset of the population working on all of it, hence the concept of a 'service' economy. We could replace 'service' with any number of alternative concepts that could advance humanity far more significantly.
A related longer article expanding on such ideas: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
I just read Andrew Yang's "The War on Normal People" from 2018 that covers a lot of the same ground as in that article and in a clearer and more persuasive way (but does not outline quite as many possible solutions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Normal_People "Focusing on domestic issues, the book discusses technological change, automation, job displacement, the U.S. economy, and what Yang describes as the need for a universal basic income (UBI). Yang argues that "as technology continues to make many jobs obsolete, the government must take concrete steps to ensure economic stability for residents of the United States," including the provision of a UBI, which is one of three central policies of Yang's 2020 presidential campaign."
Wow, this literally reminds me of one of my tech employers. Eventually half the company was a VP, Director, Senior Director or something else. Often you had a reporting chain with a VP --> Sr.Director --> Director --> 1or2 workers
Naturally, the high salaries above had to be supported, so the 1 or 2 workers at the bottom had to code more, code faster, and the management layer figuratively cracked the whip harder and harder to somehow produce enough billings to support the team of 5. (note the layers above were not sales, they were all program-manager types. sales was a different group.)
This feels wrong. Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension.
The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees and net tax recipients.
By contrast, the median government salary in the US is 51k. Notably many government sector employees like teachers are paid at about the same level of other industrialised countries (although with enormously worse paid vacations, and less autonomy than in most EU countries).
Source: https://work.chron.com/average-salary-government-employees-7... https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...
That is pretty much the definition of the nobility.
Someone many generations ago did something perceived as meritorious by the monarch and was awarded a title and some land. To get to the position where they could have done something to earn them a peerage, their ancestors would have worked a job for payment, and so on.
The only difference is the timescale. The 16th Duke of Hamilton is 400 years from someone who had to work for a living. A highly privileged modern investor whose only job was a sinecure at Daddy's company might have parents or grandparents who worked an upper-middle class job.
> The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees
That is a ridiculous snark. Government employees work for a wage, just as commercial and third sector employees do. If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee. You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?
An investor who is a completely layabout won’t stay rich very long, there is a natural terminus to that sort of behavior. Look at interest rates, the risk-free rate of money is 0%, less with inflation. We have inheritance taxes and can move that slider up/down as needed to prevent aristocracies from forming. Perhaps this is where your real disagreement lies?
>If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee.
https://calmatters.org/category/economy/california-pension-c...
>You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?
Funny you falsely accuse me of snark and then reach into your bag of insults.
I disagree here. The closest equivalent would be people in academia, specifically the portions of academia that don't perform useful work. Basically, the "X studies" crowd. And that's exactly where we see the most political instability coming from these days.
If we are looking for people who earn lots of money for no real tangible work, the people who work in tax exempt churches and congregations are much higher in that list than people in academia.
All modern prophets, pastors, speakers, con artists and so on. People in academia don't buy a new SUV every year, while these talkers do.
And right now, with the Covid crisis, we need the work of the academics. Not the whatever they do in the talkers group.
I think to some extent this maps onto the idea of rent-seeking monopolies in current society and undercompensation of individuals. It's hard to go to something like this
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/'
and not conclude that many people are being undercompensated grossly, and a small number of others are being overcompensated grossly.
For what it's worth, I agree with others that I don't think this maps onto "braininess" per se. I just think that's one of the character traits that happens to be valued the most in Western societies at the moment, so it's projected by the elites the most. In the past it might have been valor or nobility or courage or whatever it was -- the thing that is presented as justification for the excessive income, and protection of that income.
In general I think individuals are misvalued, not in the sense that persons don't matter, but the economic value placed on single individuals can be (and usually are) grossly overstated or understated. I think this transcends many many fields.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK
This is a plot of median household income in comparison to GDP per household, both in inflation-corrected dollars.
The GDP/household line has been pulling away from the household income line since the 1980s. While a great deal of wealth is being created in America, a decreasing share of it is trickling down into the hands of the median person. The rest of it is disappearing into the pockets of the already very wealthy in general, and the billionaires in particular.
The closest thing to French nobility we have today is probably people with government sinecures.
Genuinely “brainy” people can find new ways to contribute to society, there can never be too any of them.
“Elites” on the other hand - highly credentialed and entitled - play zero-sum games.
There’s a lot of interesting critique written by heterodox leftists today, in the spirit of Chris Lasch, on how the current progressive movement is just intra-elite competition. Take BLM for example: how are Floyd/Blake policing incidents related to removing entrance tests from the super-elite schools and colleges, or shaking down super-elite art galleries until they show more POC artists? Or having a nominally black VP who’s made a career out of prosecuting black criminals?
Or the populist conservative movement appealing to the “non-elite” working class, who the progressives used to represent. This is happening all over the western world.
TLDR: Elite vs. non-elite seems exactly right, but let’s not confuse it with “brainy” please
> And we should not expand our system of higher education beyond the ability of the economy to absorb university graduates. An excess of young people with advanced degrees has been one of the chief causes of instability in the past.
I think he genuinely means that too many educated people (by too many meaning more than society can actually accomodate) is a bad thing.
If every paper pusher had a computer science degree I bet a ton of it would get automated really quickly as well.
When liberal arts majors do low skill work they start clamoring for low skill immigration so they get people they can manage.
> “Elites” on the other hand - highly credentialed and entitled - play zero-sum games.
Your comment says nothing about what happens when "genuinely brainy" people get caught in the zero-sum games set up by the elites.
Any book or article recommendations that you might have easy access to? Reason is I've only recently started to read some Lasch and I genuinely like his writing, and on top of that I've also become really interested in fringe/heterodox left-wing writings as of late (I say that as a person usually on the right when it comes to politics). If it matters I'm also a fan of Jacques Ellul (which Lasch mentions among others as one of his inspirations).
While we're on grand theories of politics and society... I think one of our modern/liberal theses is (perhaps) being played out currently.
Assuming that "brainy" is not totally unrelated to academic/educated, we have ratcheted up the supply of braininess. That does include empty credentialist trends, but it also includes people trained in science, engineering, mathematics and such. We have more of all of these people.
A lot of the logic behind producing them (ramping up university enrollment massively over decades) has been that productivity and income are a product of "human capital." IE, an engineer/doctor/etc. is n% more productive than a dock worker and therefore earns and produces n% more because education. Educate more people. They'll produce & earn more.
This was, like most social theories, part economics and part romanticism. People view/viewed economic gaps between poor and rich countries this way. IE, besides physical capital, you could turn a poor country into a rich one with education.
I don't think this was totally untrue. That said, I do think reality has given us some reality check nuances. There are other limits/factors on economic growth than education. To some extent, education was a proxy for wealth/power.. not it's source. Income does not necessarily reflect productivity, and productivity itself can be subjective.
To put a blunt end on it... "clerk" was, 50-100 years ago, the entry level white collar job. It came with entry level bougie status & income. Today, "clerical jobs" are very common. Those clerks are more highly educated. PCS are basically clerical super-efficiency machines. Yet, modern clerks don't have the modern equivalent of old timey clerk's status & income.
There's a joke in leftist spheres that boils down to "Progressives simply want more female slave owners". I think it encapsulates the sentiment of the paragraph I partially quoted quite nicely.
"brainy" people can only contribute more than their non-brainy counterparts when they can leverage meaningful amounts of resources. a really clever person working a register in mcdonalds is not a whole lot more productive than a barely competent employee. even if they have some brilliant idea to streamline things in the store, no one will care.
it's entirely possible to have more "brainy" people than there are opportunities available for them to leverage their intelligence. if resources are diverted to develop "brainy" people, then this would be a case where there are too many of them.
Sure, but brainy people do need resources to apply their ability. In my field (biophysics), pioneering new methods is expensive, time & money wise. Elites have more of both (more grant $ and 10x more grad students).
consider the state of affairs; the mechanisms by which we enact and enforce public policy are largely anachronisms from an era when the most efficient method of information exchange was a printing press. we still vote with paper. mostly in a single day. this is not a situation that we would devise from scratch if called upon to create a solution today.
entrenched interests pose a fundamental barrier to social progress. those interests are demonstrably more efficient at gaming the system as it stands. introduction of chaos to such a system may provide the only opportunity for real, fundamental shift in sociopolitical system dynamics. this is a good thing - a forest needs the occasional fire.
SJW identity politics is left politics made safe for the California startup equity/VC/IPO crowd because it pays utterly no attention to economic inequality at all.
The general shape of this critique of bourgeois identity politics is much older than either the phrase "identity politics" or Silicon Valley itself (its at least as old as divides within late-19th/early-20th century feminism between radical and bourgeois feminism.)
In any case, no one in the lower-end workplace has been particularly interested in what brains I do have, or (apparently) anyone else's around me. It's all about how you can fit into the local pattern, which is often suboptimal yet resistant to change. Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have-- so the chances seem low of me making a useful contribution. To say nothing of barriers to entry constantly & furiously being erected.
The main danger to me with regard to the question in the title seems to be the realization that despite what I was told as a child, I am pretty obviously redundant and unnecessary. Not needed. The world has enough brainy people already. There is little for me to do but try to care for those in my immediate vicinity as best I can and wait out my time.
You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.
[1]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/classifications/MSC-2010.html
Here’s another list of the World’s Hardest Problems. Aka the next $50T of economic growth
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vb8WWbsVyEJzl66_qqtZfFr2...
Wealth transfers and reduction in consumption are clear solutions, but getting people to give up their luxuries and prioritize future generations’ lives over their own is the root problem, which may not have a solution.
I noticed that reading "recommended content" (like from google news) always gets me to thinking like this, but remember 90% of startups fail[1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-star...
So yeah, too many brains are a dangerous thing.
Consider also that a) most businesses fail b) many successful engineering companies were founded and/or staffed by professors, Ph.D. graduates, and Ph.D. students from Stanford and elsewhere, d) intel didn't do so great with VLIW (itanium) or low power/thermal (Atom lost to ARM - and intel seems to have squandered StrongARM/XSCale) either, e) intel probably had many more Ph.D.'s than Transmeta did, and they still hire tons of them.
Be that as it may, it's sad Transmeta died and its IP was sold to Intellectual Ventures, a company that has invented interesting things but also seems to make most of its money from lawsuits.
A good example is the fight on climate change. The status quo wants to avoid responsibility for past, current and future damage. A growing educated population wants accountability. That creates tension.
I agree, as much as I think that to keep leaders accountable is one of the greatest society advances ever. The only way forward is for the status quo to accept change and advance with society and reduce the tension.
Climate hysterics want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their carbon-neutral policies are going to have on society. They want accountability from others, but not themselves. How many have done the calculations to work out the second and third order effects of their zero fossil fuel agenda?
Many of the most ardent callers for climate action are themselves not even climate scientists, but merely offload their thought processing to the intellectuals who are. Almost without fail, neither them, nor the intellectual are educated in economics.
The reality is that nobody can work out the second and effects and so on for these drastic changes, because they have incomplete information. The intellectuals and 'thought leaders' themselves have a fraction of a percent of the actual tacit knowledge that drives economic activity. The knowledge is very widely distributed, which is why central planning is less efficient than the market almost all of the time.
The tension isn't caused by the "status quo" fighting back. It is caused by hysterics calling for action on things they know nothing about. How many extinction rebellion fanatics have read The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels? It's not like they would if they were recommended it - the mere name will put them off because they have a preconceived notion and will ardently resist any information which is likely to cause cognitive dissonance in themselves.
Which tells you everything you need to know.
It isn't intellectualism driving them - it is misplaced fear due to grossly exaggerated climate scare claims, drummed up by the status-quo.
Almost always, it is the same crowds who babble on about equality and wealth distribution too. Many of them from wealthy or middle-classes, who have resources to help the people they claim to want to help, but rarely, if ever, engage in altruistic acts of voluntary work or charity because they'd rather spend the time talking about it. They won't put their own money or action where their mouths are, but demand it of others - many of whom are not in such fortunate positions.
> Climate hysterics want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their carbon-neutral policies are going to have on society.
Not a great start. I don't know of any clean energy policy advocates who _arent totally enthusiastic_ about an opportunity to take full responsibility (and credit) for migrating to a clean economy in the next 10 years. Who, at this point, is ignoring the economics of climate change? Nowhere in here are you even claiming that there is a specific, agree'd upon "consequence" of transitioning to renewable energy, you're just raising a vague spectre of economic collapse, which only implies that policy-makers haven't considered that possibility...which is provably false.
> Many of the most ardent callers for climate action are themselves not even climate scientists, but merely offload their thought processing to the intellectuals who are.
Sounds like a how functioning, science based democratic society should operate, right?
> Almost without fail, neither them, nor the intellectual are educated in economics.
Absolutely right--scientists aren't politicians aren't economists. Multi-disciplinary public policy requires input from many kinds of 'intellectuals' (also, hn is a weird place to be calling people who trained in, and do, a science professionally 'intellectuals', as if its a bad thing).
The alternative is that we live in a fictional autocracy lead by a god-like genius who is singular, all-knowing, and benevolent.
> The reality is that nobody can work out the second and effects and so on for these drastic changes, because they have incomplete information.
Semi-valid criticism. Implies no one has _any_ idea, but its true no one an predict the future with absolute certainty.
> The intellectuals and 'thought leaders' themselves have a fraction of a percent of the actual tacit knowledge that drives economic activity. The knowledge is very widely distributed, which is why central planning is less efficient than the market almost all of the time.
Ah... here is the god you're alluding to--anarcho-capitalism? The distributed knowledge of the market economy knows best.
There is even an anarcho-capitalist case _for_ renewable energy. If you could just price in the cost of emissions and remove subsidies of oil and gas, we would be decades ahead of where we are today on this issue.
> it is misplaced fear due to grossly exaggerated climate scare claims, drummed up by the status-quo.
So "climate hysterics" are the powers that be, and oil and gas is punk-rock. I guess on a millenia scale this is true.
> They won't put their own money or action where their mouths are, but demand it of others - many of whom are not in such fortunate positions.
Waiting to hear about the "climate hysteric" who thinks the solution requires higher taxes (or even, significantly higher cost of living) for people who make under $30k/year. The only reason this would be part of a proposal by a reasonable person is because they know they are negotiating against cynical "ideologues" who personally benefit more from the status quo of an oil and gas dependent economy, who will require this provision for a vote, because they know it sabotages the underlying goals. Why vote no when you can pass intentionally hamstrung legislation?
An overarching criticism of parent's point of view: The general theme of their criticism is that "climate hysterical intellectuals" don't know better than the singular, all knowing free market. It barely leaves room for any public policy position at all--which ignores the fact that the current market status quo is driven massively by public policy that has been in effect now for several generations. To say the current place even approximates a "natural, optimal equilibrium" is a gross misunderstanding of 300 years of carbon policy and political and cultural entrenchment.
Climate change deniers want to avoid responsibility for the economic damage that their polluting policies are going to have on society. They want accountability from others, but not themselves. How many have done the calculations to work out the second and third order effects of their oil burning agenda? ...
> nor the intellectual are educated in economics
> the actual tacit knowledge that drives economic activity
> Almost always, it is the same crowds who babble on about equality and wealth distribution too
That whole reply pretty much sums up what most right-wing climate scepticism is about; a deep fear of equality and perceived threats to their privileged position in society. Hence, going down with the ship (a good economy & status quo) seem more rational than changing course.
(despite not being educated in climate science and lacking actual tacit knowledge on what drives global climate)
My implication is that individuals are the best suited to decide how their wealth is used. There should not exist policy makers who interfere in the market. Policymakers, no matter how noble they might be, are never going to know enough about the conditions individual humans face, and can therefore never know how that money is best utilized.
Climate science is heavily, almost entirely subsidized by taxpayer money, and the products which they are selling are more taxation. This is the driving force behind the climate alarmism - give up more of your wealth and freedoms to a benevolent State who will protect you from this scary thing.
If they were selling actual solutions which made people's lives easier, I wouldn't be so sceptical.
Economics affects us all. It is nothing to do with rich or privileged versus poor. It is to do with the accumulation of wealth versus the consumption (dissaving) of wealth. By economic damage, I am referring to the destruction of wealth, which does not bring any net benefit to a society even if it is "redistributed."
Economic growth, aka, creation of wealth means improved standards of living. Creating wealth is the only way which man improves their standard of living. Without any wealth, your time is consumed entirely on basic survival - you must hunt, gather or scavenge for food just to exist. You can only have any leisure time to invest in other pursuits if you have fed yourself. The way to ensure that you can feed yourself and engage in other pursuits is to accumulate wealth - that is, have some means of feeding yourself without using all of your time for survival. It is no good merely feeding yourself though - if you want healthcare and other luxuries, you need to create excess wealth.
Creation of wealth is not a zero-sum game, which is the fallacy most ancaps seem to hold. By creating wealth, you can improve not only your own standard of living, but also that of your neighbours, and not merely through charity. There are no losers in wealth creation - there are only some that don't do as well as others (which isn't something that needs fixing, because it is not the problem).
> a deep fear of equality and perceived threats to their privileged position in society. Hence, going down with the ship (a good economy & status quo) seem more rational than changing course.
It's more that we don't like seeing the wealth our ancestors worked hard to accumulate being pissed down the drain by people who do nothing but consume, rather than create wealth, and when it is not their wealth to consume in the first place.
By "changing course," you seem to be implying that their exists another course in which more wealth is consumed than created, which obviously has a dire end result: there will be no wealth left, and we will all be back to scavenging for basic survival. You are damn right that continuing economic growth is more rational than such regression.
BTW, I am a big fan of altruism as a means for lifting those who are less fortunate. In order to be altruistic, you must yourself have some capital to expend, or time to volunteer for helpful causes. Only people will such wealth can help their neighbour. If everyone's wealth is in decline, who do you think is going to help the poorest?
Giving more money to the state is not really altruism, but is avoidance of having to be altruistic of ones own volition. You must remember that a large portion of that money you give to the State is used on weapons of war, expansion of a police state which comes with increased abuses of power, and so forth. Are you really sure you want to be giving more of your money to the State?
If all the "impossible" technologies necessary to stop climate change existed today then I don't think anyone would say we should go back to the old fossil fuel days.
The argument isn't about whether or not fossil fuels should be used in the presence of hypothetical cheaper energy harvesting devices in the future, but whether or not fossil fuels should be used now, while they are cheap, abundant and available to everyone. I have recommended a book above: The moral case for fossil fuels.
It may not be obvious what I'm talking about if you live in a well developed nation with adequate sunlight and you can easily accumulate some capital and install PV panels on your rooftop (and you're OK ignoring the devastating environmental impact of PV). The moral case for fossil fuels is about the underdeveloped nations whose economies are held back by low carbon agendas.
The most developed nations are doing quite well (perhaps not well enough for some) on clean energy, but poorer nations are nowhere near at the same level. They are decades behind on technology and general standards of living. The argument for fossil fuels is that we should attempt to accelerate these economies as quickly as possible to bring them up to global standards, and one of the primary tools for enabling this is the availability of cheap and abundant energy. Fossil fuels provide this, even if they're not "clean."
Developed nations have cleaner air, cleaner water, much lower birth rates, fewer pollutants and better environmental protection programmes. We can't expect poorer nations to abide by the same standards of the developed world when they do not enjoy the same standards of living. The longer the delay in bringing them up to standard, the more environmental damage will be done in the long term.
I am all for cheap and abundant clean energy and the idea of phasing out fossil fuels, but holding back progress for alarming unrealistic predictions is not the way to go about it. Focus should be on innovation and not subsidy.
But it is still questionable whether or not an increased CO2 atmosphere is an inherently bad thing. In greenhouses, a doubling of CO2 can lead to more than a doubling of plant mass growth. This is an experiment you can reproduce at home, unlike most climate "science". If more focus were placed on greening the earth, reforesting instead of destroying entire ecosystems to grow soy, palm and canola, I might not be so sceptical of the real aims of these climate scientists and their mouthpieces. The aversion to nuclear energy, which is very clean, is the most tell-tale sign that many "environmentalists" are nothing of the kind.
Along with stupid people who just so happened to get a ton of money by no merit of their own, but don't realize this.
I agree calling it stupid may not be accurate.
Let's say I want to accumulate wealth, and I play the lottery and win, then, by your definition, I'm smart.
I'm not against playing the lottery, but it's objectively proven that it's not a good way to become rich, and a persons smartness has no bearing over whether they actually do win (maybe a negative one, smarter people will gamble less).
In Intellectuals and Society, he notes that many "intellectual elite" have been cheerleaders for some of the worst (economic) disasters and human rights abuses of the 20th century. In 2020, we can see this vividly with the coronahysterics causing untold and immeasurable damage to societies with arbitrary and poorly calculated lockdown rules.
Sowell argues that these intellectuals believe their excellence in one field gives them the legitimacy to talk in depth about other fields in which they're not so excellent - perhaps most notably economics, which is Sowell's own field of expertise. In A Vision of the Annointed, he describes how these intellectuals have concocted a fantasy world view which is inconsistent with actual evidence, and the academies work to insulate themselves away from this evidence when it conflicts with their world view. This is true in economics, where the current leading school of thought (MMT) pretends they're not just kicking the can down the road, and ignores the works of the Austrian school.
When he refers to 'intellectuals,' he doesn't just mean anybody intelligent or accredited with degrees. He is referring to people whose results are just ideas, and not products, inventions or scientific breakthroughs. Many "idea people" ultimately face no consequence upon themselves for their poor ideas; they have no skin in the game and are eager to inflict their world view upon society even if there is collateral damage.
A slightly older of his works, A Conflict of Visions, suggests there are two prevailing visions: an unconstrained and a constrained vision. The unconstrained vision is that held by many intellectual elite and largely ignores some aspects of human nature. It believes that people are innately good and well meaning (The just-world fallacy). They don't believe that humans should have constraints because given the opportunity, they will act in their own or others' best interests. The constrained vision is one in which humans believe that man is not innately good and has some bad inside of him. In this vision, it is necessary to have some constraints (laws, fears, etc) so that they act in a manner which is in the best long term interest of themselves or the wider society.
In the study of economics, it is not possible to ignore human nature because all economic activity is the result of people taking actions in their own self-interest. Praxeology studies how humans behave, without consideration for their thoughts or speech, but merely how they act in the real world. It argues that what someone does tells you far more than what a person says they will do, and even what they tell themselves.
The majority of IYIs are for whatever policy makers put forward because the idea of a benevolent and well-meaning State aligns with their world vision.
And of course, "we're just dismantling the evil capitalist patriarchy" is part of that cartoon world vision.
This describes Sowell and his popular works in a nutshell.
On the role of empiricism in economics, I'll try to express why I think it is mostly witchcraft.
Consider a simple scenario where I'm measuring the effect of petrol and oxygen in an engine. I might measure how explosive a combination of petrol and oxygen is, then increase both the quantity of petrol and oxygen and find that the result is more explosive. I can conclude that, increasing the amount of petrol makes the explosion more vigorous, no?
Of course this isn't necessarily the case. Was it the petrol or oxygen increase that caused the increased explosiveness? We can't know by adjusting both at the same time and deducing the resulting change in output is merely down to the change of only one of the inputs. To conduct the scientific method, we must measure one variable at a time, making every effort we can to keep other potential variables constant. This is Science 101.
In an active economy, there are many variables at play. Millions, perhaps billions or more. These variables are also not controlled by us, the observer making the measurements - because they are the actions of many rational, independent humans, making their own personal choices. So what exactly are we concluding if we take some "empirical measurement" about an economy? Essentially, we're measuring whatever we wanted to measure in the first place based on our preconceived notions. In reality, a stab in the dark.
An economy is not something you can kick start and measure some initial conditions, then determine how each variable influences the an economic effect. We can't pause it to take measurements. It is a continuously running system, almost like a living ecosystem, and you can't possibly repeat a measurement because there is never a time when the initial conditions will be the same as a previous time.
To try and measure the effect of some economic activity in a large economy is like me paddling out 1km from sea on a dinghy, and suggesting that the motion from my oars is causing the waves on the beach. An observer at the beech can monitor the tide, and if he sees waves, it's obvious that the waves are caused by my oars, no? This is the absurdity of 'empirical measurement' in an economy. The observer has a tiny fraction of a percent of the information they need to make any meaningful assessment, and moreover, they cannot repeat their measurement in order to see if other factors are at play, because the economy is never in the same state twice.
If we look at an economy like a living ecosystem, we might compare it to some other science which observes this kind of thing. For example, ethologists study the behaviour of living creatures in their natural habitats. Rule #1 of ethology is that the human observer must not interact with the subject being observed, must make their best efforts to not disturb the subjects when installing monitoring devices, and such. If we were to look at the economy the same way, then any observation we want make about the behaviour of rational actors in the economy must exclude any action from ourselves, the observer. However, in modern economics, the observers are almost always attempting to influence the economy in some ways, such as through printing large amounts of new money out of thin air. It is not possible to deduce what the effect of increasing the money supply has on rational actors in an economy, because the act of increasing the money supply influences the decision making of those actors - you have no idea what the actor may have done without your influence. This is like the ethologist attempting to determine the natural behaviours of captive animals in a lab. The economy you are measuring is not a free market, but a market captive to violent aggression. It is not possible to use this to make predictions about a market which is not captive to violent aggression. This is probably why the intellectuals have such a difficult or impossible time even contemplating an economy without intervention.
So how might one go about testing an economic hypothesis where they are in control of the variables? One idea, perhaps, is to use a simulation, or computer model. Modern "science" loves these, they get peer reviewed, but often you can never find the code or reproduce it even if made available. They often contain plenty of magic numbers. I shouldn't need to say it, but a computer model is not the real world, and its inputs and variables are selected by its designer. Models can't tell us about the real world - they can only tell us about the model.
If we selectively take some inputs in some complex system, then it is very easy to cook up an outcome which is consistent with our preconceived hypothesis. Anything else, we merely have statistics, and as we should know - correlation does not imply causation.
You may remember not too long ago, a certain Mr Neil Ferguson produced a fraudulent computer model predicting a grossly exaggerated mortality for COVID-19 spreading through the UK, which was used as the bases for policy-making. The situation turned out a lot less damaging than his expectations (for which he has a history of getting very wrong). However, the policymakers have already implemented their lockdown, and since the mortality from COVID-19 in reality is less than what was predicted by Mr Ferguson's models, we must conclude that lockdowns have had a dramatic effect on curbing the virus!
Such conclusion, of course, is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, because we can never go back to the initial state and trial it again with different conditions. We merely have to accept this pseudo-science as "empirical evidence" that lockdowns and masks were effective. For what we know, the lockdowns could have had zero effect, or could have actually worsened the mortality from COVID-19. The only thing we can compare one country to is that of another country which attempted something different, but even then, there are too many different factors at play - population density, previous exposure, climate, you name it. There is no way you can deduce an accurate truth about the effect of a lockdown on the effects of the virus. It is 100% junk science. Mr Ferguson's model not only tells us nothing - it has only distorted the minds of "scientists," who are now unable to conceive of a world where, prior to lockdown, the virus may have not been as deadly or contagious as was initially guessed.
So if I tell you that lockdowns had almost zero effect, why is my guess any less plausible than that of Mr Ferguson and his pals? Is it because they have credentials? I thought we were interested in science, not appeal to authority? It is my observation that reactions to COVID-19 were a global mass hysteria event.
There are some things we can measure that are a consequence of lockdown rules, but are wrongly labeled a consequence of COVID-19. For example, we can measure approximately how many patients have gone undiagnosed or untreated for more serious illnesses than COVID-19 compared with previous years, such as cancers, and you'd be right to be upset that so many have suffered due to mis-allocation of health resources by the intellectual elite. You might also measure how suicides have increased upon previous years, and note how this is likely a consequence of loneliness due to isolation enforced via violence and threats. These are just the immediately noticeable effects. Poverty in the developing world will increase due to economic decline, after decades of decreasing. The true effects of these lockdowns will last for years, and will be completely immeasurable - but the policymakers will forever blame COVID-19, and never accept responsibility for the real damage which was caused not by a virus, but by their own authoritarian hands. Their intellectual advisers will pretend nothing ever happened, or will continue to double down on their junk science.
Despite any hard evidence on the constructiveness of a lockdown, policymakers feel forced to continue them because they are sufferers of the sunk-cost fallacy. If they have caused so much turmoil with heavy handed overreactions, then their lack of willingness to admit fault causes them to double down and drag out their bad ideas. They can't accept the guilt and responsibility that they were simply wrong, and so they continue to make the situation even worse (or they have another agenda).
Much of what is thrown around as "science" today is nothing of the such. It has more to do with dogmatic religion than the scientific method. Many of its advocates don't even think to question whether a published work could be flawed, but will accept works of "science" as long as they're written and reviewed by members of the same religious faction. The journals are its scripture, and the editors are its pastors. If you conduct the scientific method but are an apostate, the journals will not accept your work into scripture, and your work will not receive any mainstream acknowledgement.
I am a big proponent of the scientific method, and there is no such thing as "The Science (TM)," because science is not a thing - it is a process. If you don't conduct the process correctly, then you don't have science, but scientism.
If you are interested in learning about Praxeology to make up your own mind, there is a good introductory series of short lectures here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqGqx6fBts0
Praxeology isn't useful at all. The real behaviour of humans cannot be reduced to three or four inalienable axioms. Even moreso, these axioms are by definition unjustifiable, which makes any system based on them unjustifiable as well. Any attempt to reduce human behaviour to an axiomatic system is necessarily a total failure.
The attempt to criticize empiricism by praxeologists is an exercise in obfuscated hypocrisy and a total contradiction. You cannot at once claim that only one's actual behaviour matters, and at the same time arguing that some unknown agent makes that behaviour unreproducible. It's completely absurd at every level.
This is incidentally why Austrian economics fails so hard at actually making any good predictions. It rejects in its totality the scientific method. It's closer to a theology than anything else.
His primary concern is that these people don't take risk and become bureaucrats. Not that they are smart, brainy, or any other ad hominem attack masked as a compliment.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
> In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt
Quite interesting that this article only focuses on the 3rd entry of those
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/24/c...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a.pdf
[3] https://www.demogr.mpg.de/publications/files/3706_1264687048...
It would really be in the best interests of everyone if some of the infighting would stop and people start looking for ways to increase general prosperity by creating more instead of coming up with clever justifications about why we have to take stuff away from people who have it.
And fire all the bankers. They aren't fulfilling their part of the social contract and investing in improving the future. We found that out in 2007 and the situation will keep getting worse until incompetent financiers start losing money.
And banker-scapegoating is also outdated by ~10 years. The regulations passed after ‘08 have made banks boring and powerless.
The focus should be on the tech industry.
In the US? Government debt is at or approaching an all time high relative to GDP. Corporate debt is rather high although I don't know how it compares historically and there is a massive amount of student debt floating around. There are a lot of people out there who, by the numbers, are consuming quite a bit more than they are producing.
US primary energy production has basically flatlined since 2000 [0]. That isn't the be-all and end-all, but it just seems like an easy prediction that long periods of growing population and flat energy consumption is going to lead to problems. The people who can't convince Asians to give them stuff are not going to be rolling in a surplus of stuff, is my read of that chart. I haven't heard good reports about the state of US infrastructure either, but maybe it is better than I think.
The States might make it work, but the political situation is developing pretty much how I'd expect it to if there is a large group of people being squeezed out by lack of access to real stuff. There is a big body of people who just aren't producing as much as they are consuming, and the background talk of "we don't need energy to be wealthy!" - I don't see how that squares off against the growing relatively evident growing instability. Trump in particular is not a sign of a thriving economy. Nor is the Democrat rhetoric in response to Trump.
Population growth is ~.7-.8% per annum, and real GDP growth is estimated at 2% per annum. Given the expansion of the money supply, and the gossip that the US is a 'service based' economy, it is entirely plausible to me that real stuff is growing more slowly than population and the measured growth is some sort of complicated feedback loop that nobody has tracked down.
> Malthusian arguments are outdated by atleast a 100 years.
Hopefully. But it is worth being prepared for a world where obvious trends play out to their conclusion.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy#energy-production-by-regio...
Part of the problem is that people think a Malthusian catastrophe would play out like a Hollywood disaster film. That's extremely unlikely. The word "catastrophe" encourages this thinking. A better term might be "Malthusian crunch."
It would be more likely to play out very gradually over decades. We would see gradual inflation in the cost of anything requiring energy, water, land, etc., and a gradual reversal of progress for the world's poor and middle class. The upper middle class may barely feel it, but they would notice it as they tend to live close to other classes. The rich may neither feel it nor notice it unless they eventually get caught up in rising political instability or populist revolutions.
... which looks a bit like today.
If it eventually results in widespread death most of that death would be due to war, genocide, and disease, not direct starvation as you'd see in a Hollywood film. Most of the death would be proximally caused by political instability, and it would be lost on most people that this political instability was ultimately caused by resource constraints.
There are two places it could eventually go. If technology keeps advancing while population growth slows, we might eventually balance out and even reverse the trend. The crunch would be a kind of narrowing passage through which we would eventually pass. If technology stagnates, population growth accelerates, or political instability causes vital systems to collapse, the result could be extremely ugly.
Decarbonization should be a big priority because climate change adds yet another drag on the system in the form of massive damage to coastal cities and possibly decreased food production or increased cost, increasing the likelihood of the worst outcomes.
The state administers the largest corporate welfare program in the economy via government-guaranteed mortgages. It guarantees nearly $2 trillion worth every year, which the banks naturally buy as they are risk-free income.
So there's no need to fire the bankers. Just stop meddling in the economy with these sophomoric interventions, whether it's GSE mortgage guarantees, or the FDIC: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22223
It's easy to make an efficient economy, it's harder to make one that produces results that are morally acceptable. How do you propose making housing feasible to most people? I mean it's easy to make a society more efficient by eliminating those with special needs as well, we know that, we just don't want it.
As for housing, plenty can be done to make it more affordable, without doing grievious economic harm by disrupting normal market activity on a massive scale.
For example, reverse the expansion of land-use restriction in high productivity metropolitan zones:
"The Simpsons" S10 Ep. 22 - "They Saved Lisa's Brain" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avgMk_w38g0
The whole idea came from what if one of these broad economic disciplines actually worked? Especially marxism, objectivism, and such. As the article mentions, these use economics broadly to explain history... and predict it.
"Psychohistories" are compelling, interesting and intellectually engaging. We have a tendency of adopting them though. That's the problem. They aren't scientific. They aren't even theories in a popperian sense. Ultimately, it's punditry. A perspective. I enjoy it. I enjoyed this article. It's neither true or false though, in any kind of global sense.
All that said, this take augments the (also economist friendly) "anywheres vs everywheres" take on Brexit. That take also had to do with an increase in uni graduates.
A narrower version of Turchin's concept might also be true. Rather than a surplus of (all) graduates crowding the top... this might be an issue of very specific surpluses. EG Journalism, specific government agencies, professorships, political positions... Those are a tiny portion of people overall, but highly influential to the political mood. If most journalists, academics, political aids are competing for a limited pool of jobs... These professions really are tense. Most people who want to can't get a job in these fields. Many want to. There's often no fallback. If you're a journalist/activist/campaigner type... you're either in that insider group or you have nothing. Academics is similar. A phd historian can either be a professor or very little else. No consolation prizes.
Educated people (at least ones having good general University type education) at least have better chance finding something useful to do and creating new opportunities.
My advice for those "academics" would be to undergo voluntary lobotomy and improve the world in accordance to their views.
But this stuff happens with anyone, and maturity and professionalism overcomes it. But perhaps its more obvious or toxic with super knowledgeable and specialized people.
A society with too many over-specialized people is a dangerous thing and IMO what's really happening here. The dynamics that play out from that impact all areas of society in deep, negative ways and pose an existential threat that will come home to roost in times of stress (which the situation also makes more likely to occur).
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." - G. Michael Hopf
Weak in this context is un-resilient, inflexible in thinking and action. Not weakness in the physical sense. With over-specialisation comes implicit neglect of areas outside of the specialization. Producing well-rounded or 'T-Shaped' individuals inherently foregoes pursuing the highest possible level of performance in specialization.
Evidence abounds that modern developed society and decades of stability have produced a populace of over-specialized individuals - The net result being that we now have a systemic weakness in cross-discipline thinking and action. Over time more and more of the issues sitting on the society-wide bug tracker fall into this cross-discipline category and we just can't clear the tickets. They are building up.
Classic example - politicians are now overwhelmingly career politicians, their skill is in staying employed as politicians. This has transformed politics into a game of its own sake, increasingly unintelligible to those not versed in its lore, networked into its cliques, and thinking in its terms. It has ceased to be an effective means to the ends that it once was and is now an end in itself to its specialists. Outsiders to the political sphere face significant additional resistance in bringing any relevant experience to bear in a political context, which is now actively guarded against such non-specialists (or equally specialist, just of the wrong sort).
That's one example but you can find them absolutely everywhere - for the audience here look at how common it has become for technical specialists to fret about how small a cog they have become and how chasing maximum remuneration, recognition, or achievement in their field leaves them fundamentally unbalanced in other areas of their life, but also unable to pivot to anything else. It explains much of the 'stop the ride I want to get off' sentiment from those burning out in their field when considered as acts of mental rebellion against the confines of over-specialisation.
The dependencies this brings are where the risk really lies on a wider scale - develop a populace over specialized and you'll see great economic growth from whole new fields of shoelace-tyeres,food preparers, and (nod) telephone handset sanitizers. But now those roles become essential to individual survival while at the same time the importance and complexity of the underlying acts cease to be understood by those outside the specialisation whom depend utterly on their maintenance. Less trite examples are provision of food, water, heat, and shelter. Today shockingly few people are involved in the provision of these fundamental human needs, awareness of how they come about is as low as it has ever been, and doing any of them for yourself is at best considered weird and at worst legally prohibited.
I see this on a local level in my field all the time - you want to improve security across your organisation and so you set up a dedicated security team. Then any time security is considered someone from that team needs to be involved, and those outside the team limit their thinking on security-related considerations only as far as passing it off to the team. Net result, the organisation's ability to consider and tackle security is significantly weakened.
I don't really know where I'm going with this rant other than a vague attempt to increase awareness of what I believe is a serious fundamental, insidious issue.
These days we have a huge number of educated people, many intelligent (high IQ) people but extremely few clever people. Clever people are those who have common sense and as Charlie Munger pointed out, 'common sense' ought to be called 'uncommon sense' because it's not common at all these days.
We have a problem now in our society that the task of capital allocation which used to be handled by clever people who had plenty of common sense has been artificially handed over to highly educated, intelligent people who in some cases completely lack common sense. They've been trying to design an elaborate, controlled economy from the top down... With an artificial government-controlled monetary system to support it.
Most intelligent people don't understand the importance of creative destruction; even though this process has proven itself to be the effective for millions of years and is the basis of natural evolution. It seems that most people in power have never heard of Leslie Orgel who once said that "Evolution is cleverer than you are".
You need to work with evolution, not against it. The system needs to allow creative destruction and natural selection.
Unfortunately, the best way to learn that skill is through struggle. Too many intelligent people these days haven't experienced struggle in their careers (aside from the artificial struggles of navigating company politics). Many went through university (often paid for by their parents), then as soon as they finished, they immediately got a huge salary at a big corporation.
Many were never in a situation such that their employer could go out of business and they would lose their job and livelihood if they failed to deliver high quality work in a reasonable time.
Also, the skills that you learn in dealing with company politics are counter-productive.