One of the selling points of unconditional cash transfers is that they wouldn’t be a disincentive to work. That instead they would help quality of life. And indeed, in high poverty contexts, they don’t disincentivize work. But this result suggests that in the US at least, they do cause people to work less. This is only one study in one context, so I wouldn’t consider anything “proven.” But, it is a big study and a very bad sign.
Economic stagnation and population decline is bad too. Highly skilled immigrants are especially good for the economy and for the tax base, which pays for social services. Rising housing costs are indeed a problem. Is there a part of town that can accommodate sky-scrapers?
I agree with some of the points here, but take issue with others. In the US at least, a lack of affordable housing is caused more by excessive veto power at the local level. As for inequality, it does not appear to be widening anymore, and there is quite a bit of disagreement over how bad it is in the first place. See Auten and Splinter for example. Economic stagnation is a problem for Western Europe. Plenty of other countries, USA included, are doing well. I’ve noticed excessive doomerism among a certain set of highly educated, relatively affluent, and left leaning westerners that I don’t think is doing anyone any favors.
How accepted is this result? If it’s true, it basically destroys a huge fraction of modern philosophy. A large fraction of the continental tradition would have the rug pulled out from under it.
Except there don’t appear to be anywhere near enough airbnbs to put a dent in the rent increase. I’m not saying it won’t do anything; I’m just saying it won’t do much. If you want to lower rents, you’re going to need to find a place to build, and if you can’t find any place, then prices will continue to go up and who will you find to scape goat then?
You could, you know, just build more housing. But that would be far too sensible. A 30% social housing requirement seems equally nuts. Who is going to want to build anything with those margins. If you want social housing, that’s great: raise taxes and pay for it. Throwing a massive wrench in the market machinery helps nobody apart from the politician who wants to create the impression that they are “doing something.” The unaffordability crisis is just going to worsen, until you end up with an S.F. situation, where the middle is hollowed out and only the extremes remain.
I really wish somebody had sat me down before grad school and told me just how important it is to sell yourself. So much of research is a form of sales: you have to sell your work and by extension your ability; you need to convince the department that you are a star so that they go to bat for you; you have to convince star professors to co-author with you so that you can get good publications; you need to attend all the conferences in your field and sell your research to potential reviewers and editors. Putting your head down and just doing your work is a terrible strategy and will get you absolutely nowhere.
I have to say I prefer the type of book review that you see in the New York Review of Books. This is basically 95% pure summary with a tiny and vacuous conclusion. I find the discussion at the beginning of Auten and Splinter puzzling and it makes me wonder if the author understands AS or PSG beyond a few tweet storms on Econ twitter.
Sounds more to me like they were naive when it came to the inevitable PR war that would follow. They should have come out guns blazing with all the dirt they had. Instead they said very little and it just appeared nonsensical.
Might be easier to come up with new models with analytic solutions if you have a probabilistic model at hand. A lot easier to evaluate against data and iterate. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if we develop better tools for introspecting these models over time.
I think this is a good point. I wonder how useful diversity statements are for accomplishing this task. It just seems like cheap talk to me. More useful would be to reward people in tenure review for outreach to minorities.
I’m from a minority, just not one that is recognized as such in the convoluted system that is racial politics in the US (I am of Iraqi descent). But if I were in the shoes of someone who should be benefiting from DEI policies, I’d be pissed off with how it’s shaken out. Seems like a whole lot of empty, performative symbolism with negligible actual change. Things like DEI statements read like box ticking to me, allowing administrators to say they’ve “tried” without doing anything. Same goes for sensitivity trainings, and flashy renaming of, for example, master to main. The singular focus on symbolism has not done anyone any favors apart from a few semiotics professors, although I wonder if they’ve been chastened by how little their favored policies have accomplished.
I don’t normally care about meaning shifts as it’s part of language evolving. But nonplussed really does bother me, as the new meaning is the opposite of the original meaning. So I often have no idea what people mean when they use the word. Is it so hard to use a dictionary? All you have to do is click on the word.
There are a lot of interesting questions. Why did it go up in the first place during the pandemic. We didn’t see this trend in other developed countries. Also, why has crime gone down so much since the early nineties? More police? More incarceration? Abortion? Lead? There are so many theories.
This is not true. Japan and South Korea both experienced the majority of their growth as democracies. Eastern Europe only took off after the fall of the USSR. Chile experienced most of its growth after Pinochet. India is the largest Democracy on earth and it is growing at a very fast clip.
That being said, there simply aren’t very many countries and even less ones that made the successful leap to rich world status regardless of the political regime. There’s a huge small sample problem here. And then of course there’s also a huge endogeneity problem. The literature in general has found a weak positive association between democratization and growth. And that’s about the most we can say. Stop worrying about the data not being on your side; it isn’t on anyone’s side.
Le Courbousier is what happened. He actually wanted to demolish Paris and put up a huge office park. But I love modern architecture. Try going to the Salk institute or even the Marin County Civic Center. It’s pretty mystical.
The value in the 9K sweater is not in the material. You can get just as nice sweaters for a lot lot less money. Probably 20X less will get you a very nice, very well made, very soft sweater. The value of the sweater is in the brand. Somehow Loro Piano has found out how to get people to agree to pay 9K for a damn sweater. If they can do it with Vicuna, they’ll find another material to do it with as well.
Meh. If a ton of competitors rushed in and drove ad price down to marginal cost, they’d still be screwed. They got all their money from classifieds and eBay and Craigslist are to blame for the death of that business model.
Can we really blame loss of objectivity on the loss of the business model? The NY Times is doing fine and they totally threw out objectivity as a goal. Seems more like a cultural shift to me.
I don’t understand how you can devote so many words to the staying power of “capitalism” and not once give any concrete sense of what the economics of an alternative would look like and how you would make it work. The degree to which people microanalyze culture seems bonkers to me. If you don’t like our current economic system, then it’s kind of on you to come up with a viable alternative using empirical evidence. Nirvana was a great band, but they have absolutely nothing to do with this.
You’re kind of missing something. The interesting result is that they didn’t find evidence for Diamond’s theory, which isn’t so surprising to me. The world is a very complicated place and mono causality is, almost surely, never the case.
I’m not a fan of their embrace of pop music. Music publications are useful to the extent that they introduce you to music you wouldn’t have otherwise heard. You can’t avoid hearing pop music all the damn time. Why anyone would want to read about it as well is beyond me.
I love Ulysses and metafiction in general, but when people apply this kind of writing style to philosophy it drives me a bit up the wall. Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.
So why would you abuse your reader by making it a pain in the ass to figure out what you mean? I know there are some fancy arguments around stretching limits of language, but none of them seemed all that sensible to me. The only advantage I see to obscurantist writing is that it makes it impossible to critique the philosophers work. Any critique will just be met by the response that you didn't fully understand the author's argument. The Searle/Derrida debates are a great example of this. The upshot is that people spend all their time debating what you actually mean. Which I guess is good for the philosopher's brand, but doesn't advance knowledge much.
This isn't to say that you can't have beautiful writing in philosophy. I think Gaston Bachelard is a great example of both an elegant writer and a clear writer.
That being said, people really really love GEB, so it probably is worth reading regardless of these misgivings. One of these days I'll get to it.
Why not? Are you making some oblique reference to Popperian refutationalism or is your point just that it’s very difficult to 100% prove something, so often it’s more a matter of a significant updating of priors? If it’s the latter, using “proof” doesn’t seem like the worst shorthand to me. Anything more involved would go over the head of the average nytimes reader.
I dunno. I was in academia for a while and wrote some papers, and in my field at least, the literature review was worthless and really only there to give other people in your field citations. Which is to say that it was not an area of great originality and if you’re citing somebody else’s literature review, you’re really just citing the grammatical structure of the sentence because there’s nothing original in what you’re saying. So I’m not especially bothered by copying a few sentences from there. It just seems a bit sloppy and a bit lazy to me. Which isn’t to say that I’m much of a fan of Gay. And it does seem like the much bigger deal is the thin publication record. Although, at the same time, isn’t administration the natural place for people who don’t like research to go?