Working on Economics with Fable 5
wilsoniumite.com
wilsoniumite.com
Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz.
The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model.
It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.
> I simply could not have written this piece. I myself have no formal economics background
No shit, me neither, I read a couple macroeconomics textbooks at the age of 30 and now I wouldn't make arrogant and obviously wrong claims like the above. And I don't have the hubris to publish a paper.
On my near-term todo list is to explore a particular crank physics theory of my own with AI... but not as a way to validate it, I know it's a crank theory that is far too simple to have been missed by pros in the relevant fields, but as a window into the literature and figure out what's wrong with it and thereby learn something. I will be framing it to the AI in pretty much precisely that way: Go get literature and reputable sources and talk through why this is already well known, probably well known to be a bad and wrong idea.
I still feel like not enough people are talking about this here on HN... AI has opened the scientific literature like never before. It's like being able to interrogate it and interview it as if it was a person, rather than just searching papers, for keywords you don't know, for lines of thought you've never heard of, in a sub-sub-sub-field you didn't even know existed, and failing before you even knew what it is you wanted. I've read more papers in the past 6 months than the past 10 years. Whatever opportunity you have to try this out, be it some question bothering you for the last 10 years, or a crank theory of your own to prove out against the literature, the foundation of some vibe-coded program informed by the literature rather than just vibing on the neural weights directly, or just asking something random about the studied effects of beavers on local ecosystems, you gotta try this. Prompt it specifically for "reputable sources and scientific papers", that helps a lot. It does not make you suddenly an expert in the field, but it does let you poke through the pile of literature far, far more effectively than you could hope to before.
And then don't forget to ask it why your summary is wrong or incomplete. Even if it doesn't convince you, you'll learn yet more.
At work I'm putting together an MCP server that more easily exposes our legume data for model consumption, and part of the insane value-add has been the curatorial work that our collaborators at USDA put into the data over years. For example, genome data (i.e. nucleic acid fastas) include relevant metadata such as their DOIs, so models can fetch and read the original papers (if they're open access, of course).
This goes a long way to boosting the intelligence/usefulness of these systems for research.
This is still pointing the LLM in a specific direction . You might want to prompt something like “give me a summary of relevant literature” and avoid sharing your point of view. Wdyt?
If I were operating in a field in which I was already an expert, or in a field that is more strongly opinion-based anyhow (e.g., philosophy... it isn't particularly clear that being an "expert" in philosophy has any strong impact on your chances of being "right", for whatever that even means in that field), I might ask for something more neutral, but I know I'm not.
Ah well.
Sheesh.
What do you believe are the most important contributions here over standard Georgism or Ricardo's theory of rents?
https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...
There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.
Eh. Bacon futures disagree with this hypothesis.
There is shifting burdens from good to good or person to person.
I find it no surprise that so many of the loudest proponents for georgism are highly compensated tech workers with low physical consumption - exactly the demographic that would be favored most under that system.
While it obviously encourages putting high value land to greater use, it also encourages avoiding high value land itself.
If the tax burden of your San Francisco house or office doubles, you may look into relocating to where land is cheaper.
It obviously depends on the rates.
Georgism does a excellent job of incentivising better land use, but is trivial to shelter income from.
A teacher renting a run down aprtment might have a similar land tax footprint to a tech ceo in a taller building, or maybe the ceo just teleworks from home in Wyoming.
xAI or whomever puts their next Mega server farm on undesirable land, and then operates basically tax-free.
The end of day problem with the Georgist theory is that we now live in a knowledge and information economy, not an industrial one governed by material inputs. Changing a 1 to a 0 on a string of bits might yeild a billion dollar profit, but requires no material overhead.
It's to 1) fund services while 2) minimizing distortions.
If someone can consume land of no value and produce huge amounts of value from it, that's a good thing. They should be entitled to as much upside as they can produce.
That said, the point of a taxation scheme is not to "minimize distortions". If you think that is important, thats fine, but it isn't a commonly held position.
Funnily, It is mostly Georgists that think it is a very important property of a tax.
I dont care if a tax has zero distortion when it is levied predominantly on one person to benefit another, or levied on the masses to benefit the few. Those who get the lion's share of the benefit should carry the lion's share of the cost.
Distortion has a very specific economic meaning which has nothing to do with who benefits and how much.
For example, a fuel tax to fund highway maintenance is distortionary but appropriate in my view.
Paying for the cost of wear and tear is a "distortion", because it changes the amount consumed. I argue that the cost of maintaining and building roads should factor into road consumption decisions!
Another example, If people want to live in remote fire-prone areas, they should pay more taxes to account for the higher state costs of infrastructure and safety, not fewer taxes because the land is cheaper than urban zones. The people driving the cost would be disconnected from the burden, and incentivized to drive them higher!
Distortion is a feature, not a bug.
Distortion isn't just "produces different behavior," because if it were, then any tax change in any direction to anything would be distortionary. Distortion is when a tax produces less-efficient behavior. For goods like roads, the inefficient-behavior state is the one created by not having consumption taxes.
The un-priced state of government infrastructure and service use is a market failure, but this is exactly what modern georgism and LVT calls for in its myopic focus on land and natural resources!
Georgism actually does not argue against Pigouvian taxes or use taxes per se. His view is more that you should expect to get less of whatever you tax. In this case, our shared view is that you actually want to tax road usage because you want less of it. I doubt George thought that people should use roads less, so I presume he wouldn't have been fond of the idea of taxing their use.
And it's worth noting the vast majority of LVTers or Georgists are not "single-taxers." They typically would believe that no tax scheme in lieu of a high LVT will produce desirable results, but not necessarily that any additional taxes on top of an LVT are necessarily bad.
I think single taxers or mostly single taxers have bad policy, and also overestimate the difference in revenue from current property taxation of land and improvements. I most often hear it as an alternative to income taxes and paired as a funding source for universal healthcare and UBI.
I haven't read Progress and Poverty but my understanding is George wanted to abolish state-sponsored charity/welfare.
I think LVT as a social solution to poverty is largely out of date, and more of a niche policy fix for some urban NIMBY problems. Particularly because modern modes of consumption, value production, and (dare I say it) rent seeking have grown beyond material inputs.
I think George's view on state-sponsored charity/welfare is more nuanced than that. It's a bit analogous to the prior argument. It's not that charity is bad, it's that in the absence of LVT, it will never be sufficient to solve the problem because a large portion of the intervention will get eaten by land rents. Basically that land rents rise to an equilibrium of "there's some poverty", no matter how much money you dump into the demand side.
Here's evidence of exactly that dynamic with a similar intervention of minimum wage increases: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
Temporary reduction in evictions, then rents rise to equilibriate back at "there are some evictions." There is some set point of eviction rate that landlords as a whole are comfortable with, and they will set their prices to whatever is needed to achieve that rate.
He also seemed to believe that LVT itself would achieve the most aspirational visions of charity/welfare, so maybe (hopefully!) it would be unnecessary, but I don't remember him taking aim at charity/welfare as a concept.
IMO the right way to think about LVT is this:
Without LVT, virtually no other interventions can achieve shared prosperity. Minimum wage, UBI, public housing, rent controls, even just the advancement of technology itself... they all either equilibriate into higher land rents, OR they require controls on land rents that create catastrophically inefficient use of resources anyway.
Virtually every political persuasion favors some types of Pigouvian taxes, which are deliberately designed to do this, but which believe that it's generally good for a tax to be distortive by its own merits?
So as you point out, one large segment of voters are interested in pigovian taxes. I think there is also a large overlapping segment that want taxes to optimize or reform behavior absent externalities for things they don't like.
However, I think the biggest moral consensus amongst voters is for taxes levied on the beneficiaries from the public work or institutions funded.
The public cares not if a tax has absolutely zero distortion when it is levied on the masses to benefit the few.
This more resembles income, profit, or use taxes.
Instead the people who benefit from the infrastructure have the bill for the public transportation system rolled into their land value tax.
Right now in the current system you pay both income taxes and then you pay the landlord again because to him as the monopoly owner of land, the public infrastructure is pure producer surplus.
The demographic that would be favoured under that system is people who work for a living and the people being disadvantaged are the ones sitting on land or extracting the producer surplus.
Because in my experience talking with them, most don't, and the vast majority are anti-federal organizations of any kind. And these have been multiple discussions over the course of 20+ years.
Now granted, among the people who are actually free-thinkers and have their own opinions, you will find many libertarian-adjacent views, but I've found that those people do not refer to themselves as libertarians.
there's also a difference between Libertarians and libertarians. im not american so i refer to the latter but i know what u mean
Edit: Just for fun I just defeated it with AI-generated text that it reported as 100% human-written. Great stuff. Truly genius scam.
I’m leaving out the ‘pseudo-scientific’ part of GP’s description, since it doesn’t entail anything technically.
The only counter example is when a human composed a piece deliberately trying to mimic AI slop.
So call it an AI slop detector if you want, but either way it accurately identifies stuff I don't wan't to read.
Is that the level of sensitivity we're looking for? More than literally 0%? Do you know how crazy it'd be to achieve that, even if they were trying to?
It has literally never been done.
What a hilarious inversion of credulity.
And as stated, even Pangram's own marketing material claims at least a 0.4% false negative rate on their own contrived corpus. A one in 250 event is hardly even rare.
You seem quite defensive about Pangram, and it shows up in a few of your comments. Is there a reason for that? If it's extending to outright denial of Pangram's own stated error rates... sheesh... very weird indeed (unless they're paying you, obviously).
Every time I've asked for evidence from someone who claims something like you do there always seems to be a reason it can't be posted. So it makes one suspicious.
Is there no way you can modify your prompt to be shareable?
That's another claim you made, which is quite silly. You've never found something that Pangram marks as 0% human and which you deem to be 100% human? Huge gulf.
And no, not really. It's copy from fundraising materials. Removing the identifiable portions of it would remove virtually everything, which is perhaps why Pangram didn't flag it?
What I wrote is true (it is a claim about my experience), so I'm not sure what you're attacking.
I amended my statement to avoid a discussion about the provenance which is not what I actually care about. What I care about is if I want to read it. Humans could theoretically write something in AI voice and if they did, I wouldn't want to read it.
I have not seen any examples of human text in LLM style that clearly predate 2023. If you can supply one, that would be incredible evidence.
If you're able to supply a prompt which generates text that fools pangram and is not like one sentence long or a list of names or something, but actual prose I want to read, then I will concede.
Duh.
If your statement was "my super special dowsing rods tell me what I want to read with 100% accuracy" I'd say "cool." But that wasn't your claim.
> If you're able to supply a prompt which generates text that fools pangram and is not like one sentence long or a list of names or something, but actual prose I want to read, then I will concede.
This is an even more conservative claim than the one you just made! Sheesh.
Have a good day.
Up until now you have been reading the words of Anthropic’s Claude, in particular Fable 5. In part, this is because I simply could not have written this piece. ... Although it might seem strange I thought it wrong to impose too much upon the machine, changing its voice to emulate mine. Richard Sutton’s bitter lesson would likely advise as much. Instead it has its unique voice, grating to some perhaps but altogether fitting that it should be able to keep it, and I only gave it advice on what considerations during writing would bridge the gap between its understanding and that of a reader.
"Here is, for those that have read this far, the acknowledgements that used to be in the formal paper but we decided to remove it, mostly because the paper has been reworked and rewritten so many times by us."
It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.