Saturday, September 30, 2023

Behavioral trait patience reduces cost of interest and societies preferring productivity select for patience.

From Selection, Patience, and the Interest Rate by Radoslaw Stefanski and Alex Trew.  From the Abstract:

The interest rate has been falling for centuries. The key to explaining this decline is increasing societal patience, driven by a process of natural selection. Three observations support this mechanism: patience varies across individuals, is inter-generationally persistent, and is positively related to fertility. To establish the importance of this channel, we introduce a dynamic, heterogeneous-agent model of fertility. The structure of our model enables us to use modern, micro level data to calibrate the historical distribution of patience. Our quantitative results match the centuries-long fall in the interest rate, highlighting the crucial role of selection in this historical, and ongoing, trend.

If this is saying what I think it is saying it makes me a little nervous.  I am interpreting this to mean that 

1)  The interest rate has been falling for centuries

2)  The behavioral trait of patience contributes to a lower interest rate

3)  The behavioral trait is heritable

4)  Productive societies select for the trait of patience.

Possibly a  Just So story.  Possibly directionally true.  Certainly plausible.

Plausible but unproven, I'd say.

History

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

Picking Blackberries, 1969 by A. Buchanan

Picking Blackberries, 1969 by A. Buchanan






























Click to enlarge.

Friday, September 29, 2023

History

 

Public policy intended to make things worse by reinforcing a utopian delusion

From Baltimore’s Thin Blue Line Is Broken by Maurice Richards.  The subheading is Nothing kills a police department faster than destruction of officer morale—and in the BPD, morale is dead.  Somewhat incendiary and provocative in terms of its forecasts, the article none-the-less also has more factual than I have sen anywhere else since the original incident, a street party in Baltimore back on July 2nd which resulted in 30 people being shot and two killed.  

Atlanta is a better version of Baltimore but it is worth keeping an eye on what there as there are many similarities between the two.  Both are black majority cities with black mayors, black majority police departments, black majority city councils, usually black police chiefs, and markedly understaffed police forces.  Atlanta is more prosperous but also prone to Woke policies but usually implemented in a weaker version.

The “thin blue line” symbolizes the police’s role in maintaining civilized society. The police are the barrier between the law-abiding and the criminal, the vulnerable and the predatory, order and chaos. Across the United States, police are under attack and the blue line is wavering. In Baltimore, it has broken.   

The Baltimore Police Department has been in crisis for years. The BPD operates under an onerous consent decree and is understaffed by 700 officers. Democratic mayor Brandon Scott’s “Group Violence Reduction Strategy,” apparently designed to replace cops with social workers, is responsible for much of the crisis. GVRS produced “Safe Streets,” Scott’s flagship violence-reduction initiative. The Safe Streets program hires ex-convicts and former gang members as “violence interrupters” to mediate conflicts between gang members, drug dealers, and other violent criminals. Safe Streets workers do not cooperate with the police.

In July, I observed in City Journal that Baltimore’s crime-enabling policies had culminated in the worst mass shooting in the city’s history. On July 2, 30 people were shot, two fatally, at an unauthorized “Brooklyn Day” block party in the Brooklyn Homes public housing project.

On August 30, Mayor Scott released the city’s agency after-action reports regarding the mass-shooting incident. The BPD, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC), and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement—the agency administering Safe Streets—each submitted reports.  

Many Baltimoreans had hoped that city leadership would use the report as an opportunity to end misguided policies that had elevated concerns for criminals above those for victims. They focused much of their dissatisfaction on Safe Streets, which has evaded scrutiny for years. 

The critical issue affecting all BPD operations, including those on Brooklyn Day, is a massive staffing shortage. BPD officers were hopeful that in the wake of the Brooklyn Day disaster, acting police commissioner Richard Worley would finally address short-staffing and the resulting mandatory overtime, canceled off-days, and poor morale.  

Instead, Baltimore’s leadership ducked responsibility, remained committed to failed policies, and scapegoated the officers and command staff of BPD’s Southern District. The fallout has put the Baltimore Police Department on the road to extinction.

Interesting.  Atlanta Police Department (APD) is understaffed by perhaps 20% of more.  City Council flirted with defunding the police but shied away at the final vote.  Regardless, the predicates of the debate were unquestioned that APD was violent against black residents despite no evidence supporting that contention.  A handful of police officer were railroaded after a couple of incidents despite being exonerated once the cases got to court.

Instead, City Council began funding Atlanta Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative (PAD). 

PAD fosters a new approach to community safety and wellness by engaging in creative problem-solving to respond to community concerns, and addressing people’s human needs with dignity, patience and care. PAD provides an alternative to criminal justice involvement through two core strategies:

It is a joke within a joke and a pit of public money disappearing into the pockets of various community organizers and groups.

Atlanta Police Department is so understaffed that unless it is a call about a violent crime occurring at that very moment, you are looking at a response time of half an hour or more.  Or no responding officer at all.  

Were that not bad enough, you are encouraged to independently make the assessment whether substance abuse or mental illness might be involved and, if so, then call PAD instead of APD.  But PAD only operates between 7am and 7pm Monday and Friday.  And they similarly are understaffed.  

All of which is bad but apparently not nearly as bad as in Baltimore where the equivalent organization, Group Violence Reduction Strategy, actively works against the police department.  Leading to the civic catastrophe of July 2.

None of which gets covered in the mainstream media.  You have to wait for it to show up in the specialist press a couple of months later.  Overheated it might be, but at least it has some meaningful facts.

An Insight

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Mortal singing


I have posted in the past about the raucousness and violence of medieval scholarship towns as well as the the enduring sameness of students (letters home pleading for more money.)

This is an interesting project which captures the specifics of crimes from records from the 1200 and 1300s and also provides some capacity to put the impressions on a measured footing.  

A deep dive into historical documents reveals that during the late medieval period in the 14th century CE, Oxford had a per capita murder rate four to five times higher than other high-population hubs like York and London.

And the reason? Bloody students.

Like, quite literally. Newly translated documents list 75 percent of the perpetrators of murders with known background as "clericus", a term most commonly used to describe students or members of the then-recently founded University of Oxford. And 72 percent of the victims were also classed as clericus.

This information has been compiled into a newly relaunched, interactive website by Cambridge University's Violence Research Centre. It's called the Medieval Murder Map, where you can explore the map to learn the details of violent historical crimes.

"A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions," says criminologist Manuel Eisner, lead murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge's Institute of Criminology.

"Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers

How about compared to today?

It wasn't guaranteed that the perpetrator would be brought to justice. But the crime rate in Oxford is certainly striking. Back then, the city had a population of around 7,000, with around 1,500 of those people students. Eisner and his colleague, historical criminologist Stephanie Brown of the University of Cambridge, worked out that the murder rate was around 60 to 75 people per 100,000 per year.

The murder rate in the US per 100,000 is about 5 per 100,000 compared to Oxford's rate in the 13th century of 60-75 per 100,000 per year.  Our murder rate today ranges from nearly zero in places like Vermont and New Hampshire to nearly 24/100,000 in Mississippi.  St. Louis, at 65/100,000 has the highest murder rate of any major city in the US.  Well in 1300 Oxford league.  

Click through to the article for the interactive map.  Love the particulars.  For example.

Harps, viols, insults and a stabbing

On 21 August 1306, around midday, Gilbert de Foxlee, clerk, died in his lodgings in the parish of St. Peter’s in the East, Oxford. The following day he was examined by Thomas Lisewys, the king’s coroner of the town of Oxford, and found to have a wound in his left shin, below the knee, 4 inches in diameter and one and a half inches deep. An inquest was thereupon held before the coroner. The jury say under oath that on the evening of the festival of the Nativity of St. John Baptist [23 June], the tailors of Oxford and other townsmen who were with them, spent the whole night in their shops, singing and entertaining themselves with harps, viols and various other instruments, as is their practice and the custom there and elsewhere regarding the celebration of that festival. After midnight, when they did not expect anyone to be wandering in the streets, they and the others who were with them left the shops and took their choir out into the high street heading for the drapery. As they were enjoying themselves, they suddenly came upon Gilbert de Foxlee with his sword drawn and naked in his hand. He immediately started to argue with them, demanding to join their choir. Since they had among their number some persons of note, they approached him and asked him to go away and not cause anyone any trouble. Gilbert was not prepared to agree to this, but broke away from them and then dogged their footsteps, hurling insults at a certain William de Cleydon and threatening to cut off his hand with his sword unless William promptly surrendered to him his place in the choir. At this, Henry de Beaumont, crusader, Thomas de Bloxham, William de Leye, servant, John de Leye, and William de Cleydon rushed towards Gilbert; Henry gave him a wound on the right arm with his sword, Thomas stabbed him in the back with a dagger, while William de Cleydon felled him with a blow to the head. Immediately after, William de Leye, with a hatchet called a “sparth” [a fighting axe], gave Gilbert the wound on his left leg, by the knee, from which he died on 21 August, having lived for 8 weeks and 2 days and having received all the last rites.

Sounds like a nightly news flash in any major city today.  An armed and drunk individual insists on having his way, which leads to a fight and wounds and/or death.  Details of course different.  A sword instead of a gun.  A fight over joining a singing group instead of rapper performance.  A lingering death of eight weeks rather than the instantaneous.  

What struck me most was the prevalence of Norman names.  The Norman conquest was in 1066.  The conquest was that, a conquest not an invasion.  The upper class were supplanted but not everyone else.  There was no mass migrations of Normans out of Normandy and into England.  Despite the minuscule numbers of Normans, virtually everyone named has a Norman name.  

Just as with other nations at other times, violence varied enormously by class and culture.

Data Talks

 

Restaurant Car, 1936 by Leonard Campbell Tayor (English)

Restaurant Car, 1936 by Leonard Campbell Tayor (English)

















Click to enlarge.

Writing which is not just carelessly wrong but willfully wrong.

From Apoorva Mandavilli is a terrible science reporter working at the New York Times by Vinay Prasad.  The subheading is A brief catalog of her errors.  

Prasad has an axe to grind but he is not wrong.  But he is dealing with a central issue of our new, more distributed and uncontrolled epistemic environment that has resulted from a relatively free internet in combination with universal access vis smartphones.  

Among the jungle of writers, whom can we trust on what subjects and to what extent?  

We have to each consciously construct and cultivate our own chosen epistemic ecosystem in a way that we did not necessarily do in the past.  

This is not a bad thing, merely novel and challenging.

You end up with a whole range of constituent profiles.  There are those who know a lot about a little.  Those who know a little about a lot.  Those who are safely reliable in discerning (and communicating) facts and those who are daring but less reliable in anticipating emerging patterns of truth.  There are those who are linguistically glib and rhetorically convincing versus those who are prosaic, indeed boring, but usefully true.  

Everywhere on each continuum and every mix among all the continua.  

And out there in the internet jungle you have the hosts of mainstream media pundits, the legions of Substack writers, myriad bloggers, the serious commenters and the snarky commenters.  How do you keep track of who is who.  Who is epistemically useful under what conditions.

Its a lot of cerebral work.  So much that no one person can keep track of it all and we end up with impressions.  

I have often thought it might be interesting to crowd source some sort of running list of indictments and triumphs among writers and thinkers.  Who is reliably and usefully true and who is prone to a pattern of gaffs and errors.

In these posts, I routinely rail against the seeming pervasiveness of both innumeracy and advocacy among our current crop of reporters.  Just the facts is an alien concept.  It is all opinion unanchored in empirical reality and unconstrained by contextual knowledge.  Everything seems to be about how they imagine the world ought to be.  

Prasad is, in this column creating the sort of profile of a particular writer.  The old New York Times Science writer John Tierney was both broad in his interests and deep in fundamental knowledge.  You can safely randomly read just about anything of his and learn something.  You might not always agree with his argument but you can understand why he makes the argument he does.

I cannot think of any particular New York Times journalist that comes anywhere close to him now.  I think there is one but I don't recall his name.  And then there are all the rest.  A nameless crowd of journalists who reliably produce drivel which is recognizable as drivel on first reading.  Either rehashed press release journalism or poorly written column inches with little reason, logic, empiricism, or numeracy.  

Mandavilli is one such.  Once mentioned by Prasad, I do recognize her writing but would not have been able to name her.  Her work is what you glance over and immediately recognize as non- or negative value-adding and simply ignore other than to register that there are people out there who will believe anything.  

Prasad provides seven specific errors.   I am sure the candidate list was far more extensive.  

In effect, it is a journalistic rap sheet.  Instead of a Record of Arrests and Prosecutions, it is a journalist's Record of Atrocious Propaganda.  Writing which is not just carelessly wrong but willfully wrong.  

Thursday, September 28, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

Littered with self-erected barriers to the programs own success.

From Biden's DEI Tech Hubs Program by River Page.  The subheading is a new government grant program that aims to build "tech hubs" in the middle of nowhere is littered with political patronage, dei tomfoolery, and self-erected barriers to success.  

In 2009 Obama’s Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, announced that the Economic Development Agency (EDA) had awarded Pensacola, Florida a grant of $2 million dollars to attract tech businesses to the Panhandle city. The grant was estimated to create 670 jobs and attract $27 million in private investment. The project, a “tech campus” set in the middle of the city's rapidly gentrifying downtown, was finished in 2012. When I moved to Pensacola in 2016, it was a green field that homeless people hung out at. When I moved in 2022, it was being used as a practice field for youth soccer. The “tech campus” has yet to attract a single tenant, a single job, or a single dollar of private investment. 

Despite past failures, the federal government is once again attempting to build new tech hubs outside of the big coastal cities where they have previously been concentrated. This time, they’re going even bigger. The EDA recently finished accepting applications for its new Regional Technology and Innovation Hub Program (known colloquially as “Tech Hubs”), a large grant program created by the CHIPS Act which will see 20 regions designated as Tech Hubs. Of these 20, three to eight will be given grants averaging $65 million dollars for programs meant to develop the local tech sector. The convoluted details of this program demonstrate a clear commitment to DEI principles, naked political patronage, and are littered with self-erected barriers to the programs own success. 

The republican experiment thoroughly vanquished the monarchical dynasties of the nineteenth century and then the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth

I had a very interesting conversation the other day with a young gentleman.  His question was whether the world was really progressing and if so to what degree.  He was aware that the sturm and drang of any given moment always obfuscates reality.  But to what degree?  The message is always that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, that the younger generation aren't up to the task, and that the old days were the golden days.  But is that true?

It is a topic on which I have read and thought a great deal.  On virtually every socio-econometric measure one might alight upon, it is relatively straightforward to demonstrate that in empirical terms, everyone, everywhere, is dramatically better off today than a hundred years ago, seventy-five years ago, fifty years ago, even twenty-five years ago.  And not by only a few percent.  Dramatically better.  

Longer lives, healthier lives, wealthier lives, better educated lives, safer lives.  Fifty years ago, most the world was still living under authoritarian regimes (communist states, one-party states, military juntas, a single person dictators).  The few members of the OECD worried about that nest of calamities.  

They are mostly gone now.  Most states aspire to at least the appearance of some version of a Classical Liberal state.  Still plenty to worry about as they progress by fits and starts into consent-based forms of government and market economies, but the direction of progress is obvious.  Instead of those dozens of communist states, dictatorships etc., now we worry about a handful of failed states (Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan) or near failed states (Syria, Sri Lanka, several in Africa).  

In 1975 we still worried about nuclear proliferation, famines, multiple active wars, civil wars, genocide (Cambodia), and grotesque repressions.   Now?  We have Ukraine and Russia, plus a handful of smoldering areas of India, Philippines and elsewhere.  

It is indeed intriguing why there is such a pervasive gloom about progress among institutional players when the empirical reality is so obviously good.  Lots of good conversation and speculation to be had.  

I am convinced that the global progress has been achieved by the spread of the central attributes of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values.  The confidence in a knowable world via the scientific method, reason and logic.  Natural Rights, Rule of Law, Equality before the Law, Due Process, Consent of the governed, Individualism, Property Rights, Limited Government, etc.  

Everywhere that the core elements of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values have spread, prosperity and beneficence has followed.  Absent Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values, corruption, violence, disease, and stagnation remain the Hobbesian state of nature.  

The conversation was recalled to mind by some opening passages in Founding Fathers by Joseph J. Ellis.  

Several other prominent American revolutionaries also talked as if they were actors in a historical drama whose script had already been written by the gods. In his old age, John Adams recalled his youthful intimations of the providential forces at work: “There is nothing … more ancient in my memory,” he wrote in 1807, “than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had always travelled westward. And in conversation it was always added, since I was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America.” Adams instructed his beloved Abigail to start saving all his letters even before the outbreak of the war for independence. Then in June of 1776, he purchased “a Folio Book” to preserve copies of his entire correspondence in order to record, as he put it, “the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing.” Of course we tend to remember only the prophets who turn out to be right, but there does seem to have been a broadly shared sense within the revolutionary generation that they were “present at the creation.”

These early premonitions of American destiny have been reinforced and locked into our collective memory by the subsequent triumph of the political ideals the American Revolution first announced, as Jefferson so nicely put it, “to a candid world.” Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, former colonies of European powers have won their independence with such predictable regularity that colonial status has become an exotic vestige of bygone days, a mere way station for emerging nations. The republican experiment launched so boldly by the revolutionary generation in America encountered entrenched opposition in the two centuries that followed, but it thoroughly vanquished the monarchical dynasties of the nineteenth century and then the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth, just as Jefferson predicted it would. Though it seems somewhat extreme to declare, as one contemporary political philosopher has phrased it, that “the end of history” is now at hand, it is true that all alternative forms of political organization appear to be fighting a futile rearguard action against the liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States in the late eighteenth century. At least it seems safe to say that some form of representative government based on the principle of popular sovereignty and some form of market economy fueled by the energies of individual citizens have become the commonly accepted ingredients for national success throughout the world. These legacies are so familiar to us, we are so accustomed to taking their success for granted, that the era in which they were born cannot help but be remembered as a land of foregone conclusions.

Indeed.  Americans, well, really, everyone, tend to overlook that the American Revolution, Janus-like, had two faces.  The common story is that of the fractious colonies rebelling against monarchical mother Britain and succeeding almost by mere chance and against the odds in gaining their independence.  

What is overlooked is what was obvious at the time (and which Ellis covers well) - the Americans were not just rebelling against, but were actively revolutionizing.  They were consciously seeking to birth the first manifestations of Age of Enlightenment thinking and Classical Liberal Values embodied in a constitutional republic; a nation of laws not men.  That was the Revolution.  Not the fighting that brought it about but the Revolution in the concept of individual man, natural rights, government, and consent.  What was brought forth with the Constitution was an entirely new concept of how a nation could be governed that was alien to everything that went before.

At that time there were four proto- or actual Classical Liberal, Age of Enlightenment revolutions.  Only the American one succeeded.  It was rare and uncertain but once it got out of the nursery, it changed the world.  

Portugal looked like it might be headed towards a Classical Liberal model until the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.  The response to the catastrophe reverted everything back to a monarchical, centralized decision-making model.  

Then there was, of course, the French Revolution beginning in 1789.  A domestic revolution that ended up in class warfare, slaughter, and global war under a military dictatorship.  

Finally, there was the Haitian Revolution of 1791 which was infused with Classical Liberal ideas but which quickly collapsed into genocide.  

The American Revolution, both as a war for independence but even more as a Revolution in the concept of governance, survived and indeed revolutionized everything.  The Classical Liberal Model and Age of Enlightenment worldview is everywhere the default aspiration, though never explicitly so.  From a world virtually entirely composed of non-consensual all powerful monarchs, warlords, theocrats in 1775 to where we are today, the progress is immense and inescapable.

More progress needed and there is always a risk of backsliding but obvious progress to anyone who can break free from the cacophony of fear mongers.  

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

Trout in the milk and pollice verso

From The Trout in Robert Menendez’s Milk by Jonah Goldberg.  The subheading is Too many politicians feel no shame, much less express it.

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,” Henry Thoreau observed, “as when you find a trout in the milk.” 

That line came to mind when I heard about the Robert Menendez allegations. You can come up with all sorts of explanations—maybe even some plausible ones—for why he had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed in various jacket pockets in his closets. Where else would you keep walking around money? But those gold bars are not just literally but also figuratively, gold. When comedy writers really hit paydirt—a term from goldmining no less!—we say that’s gold! Well, having gold bars whose serial numbers indicated they’d been registered to one of his co-consprirators, well, ain’t dross. I’ve been trying to come up with more hilariously damning—albeit circumstantial!—evidence and the only thing I’ve been able to come up with is if he had a thick sheaf of German-bearer bonds stolen from the Nakatomi tower or maybe an envelope with the words, “Bribe money” on it. 

In Thoreau's day, milk came straight from the farmer, delivered in jugs.  It was a common trope that some farmers increased their income by watering down their milk, scooping water from a creek to add to their canisters of milk.  Unless witnessed, there would be no evidence save for the proverbial trout in the milk.

Goldberg is correct, we are all too accustomed to murky ethics among politicians and it is clear that many of our troubles are sourced to politicians and their ilk who are either incompetent or corrupt.  Frequently, both.  

Natural rights, Rule of Law, Equality under the Law, Due Process - I am devoted to them all and disgusted by pundits and mainstream media who are more than happy to usurp all four and instead form a digital mob to serve as judge, jury, and executioner.

Menendez tests that resolve.  There have been a lot of trout in his milk for a long, long time.  Inordinate numbers of accusations, several investigations, a couple of trials.  

It is awfully tempting to go with the other old saw - no smoke without fire.

But our system works because we do indeed strive to be a government of laws, not men.  

Menendez is our chance to be tempted, but also our chance to demonstrate we do believe in Natural Rights, Rule of Law, Equality under the Law, Due Process.  He should have his day in court rather than the pollice verso (the turned thumb) of the digital mob at the Roman Circus.  Perhaps pant pockets stuffed full of cash and jacket pockets with gold bars will be sufficient evidence this time to show that even members of the nomenklatura can be held equally accountable.  

Pollice Verso, 1872 by Jean-Leon Gerome (French, 1824-1904)


















Click to enlarge.

The Old Bookcase, 1929 by Friedrich Frotzel

The Old Bookcase, 1929 by Friedrich Frotzel































Click to enlarge.

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

The mean time of innovation is faster than the mean time of social and regulatory evolution.

From US Capital is Depreciating Faster by Timothy Taylor.  

I routinely refer to the steepening of the innovation S-curve in the US and the world.  100 years ago, the introduction of a new technology such as refrigerators or telephones, might take 40 or 50 years before the innovation became ubiquitous and the market saturated.  50 years allows plenty of time for social norms to adapt to the new technology, for cultural standards, for regulatory clarity etc.  

There was a long ago debate about proper salutations when picking up a phone, not knowing whom was addressing.  The phone's inventor, Alexander Graham Bell suggested "Ahoy!" but Thomas Edison's much more pedestrian "Hello!" won out.

But especially as the digital revolution began taking over innovation from the 1960s onwards, with its corresponding Moore's Law, the innovation S-curve has becomes very steep.  The introduction of the trinity of browsers, the internet and smartphones circa 2000 has seen the s-curve steepen to perhaps at most ten years.  

Ten years is no time at all to accommodate the social, cultural or regulatory issues arising from the new technology.  The mean time of innovation is faster than the mean time of social and regulatory evolution.  

Taylor offers another example of this steepening of S-Curves.

But in the last decade or so, gross investment has been about 20% of GDP, and net investment has fallen to about 5% of GDP. In other words, gross investment as a share of GDP has fallen a bit, but not too much. The real change is that about three-quarters of investment is now going to replace capital that has worn out, so net investment is much lower.

What’s going on here, as I understand it, is that the life expectancy of capital investment has been declining. If a firm bought a large piece of physical equipment for a factory back in the 1960s or 1970s, it was probably hoping to get at least 10 or 20 years of use from that investment. But if a modern firm makes a major investment in new computers, databanks, and software, that investment will depreciate over a much shorter time period.

In short, it’s not just how much an economy invests in capital equipment, but also how long that equipment can reasonably be expected to last. The data shows that the typical US capital investment, with its greater emphasis on rapidly evolving information technology, is depreciating faster than it used to.

All sorts of implications flow from this, both philosophical as well as financial, political and productivity.

I have argued often that one of the luxuries to American arising from our astonishing productivity is the capacity to greater policy risks.  Basically, individually and collectively, the richer we are, the more capable we are of testing ideas and policies which will be significant failures.  We can indulge naive utopian hopes.  

When we do so, it results in a massive malinvestment in scarce capital.  Los Angeles invests a billion dollars over a decade in building Housing First stock to warehouse the homeless, discover the cost is exorbitant and the policy is a failure with no improvement in individual welfare but a dramatic increase in the homeless population.  

This almost goes beyond malinvestment into malevolent investment.  

But if capital depreciation in the productive part of the economy is accelerating, might we begin to see a crowding out of mainvestments and bad policies?  Possibly.  

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

The View, 1955 by Ronald Lampitt

The View, 1955 by Ronald Lampitt 




























Click to enlarge.

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

Heh

Why does the mushroom get invited to all the parties?

Because he's a fun guy.  

Construction of a galleon in a Genoese shipyard (painting, 17th century) by Agostino Tassi

Construction of a galleon in a Genoese shipyard (painting, 17th century) by Agostino Tassi 




















Click to enlarge.

Monday, September 25, 2023

History

 

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Northern Lake, 1923 by Lawren Harris (Canada)

Northern Lake, 1923 by Lawren Harris (Canada)





















Click to enlarge.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Dunbar's Number and the falling cognitive burden of soical network maintenance

As I work to clear a large backlog of paperwork, archiving, etc., I come across a sleeve of negatives.  No folder, no notes, nothing.  Peering at the negative against a light adds little information.  I can't place the who and where of the content.

I have a small device for digitizing negatives and pull it out and digitize the 22 pictures out of 36 which have enough light for an image at all.  These are not great pictures.  Low light, poor resolution, low contrast, marginal focus.  

I eventually pull the clues together.  These are pictures my youngest son would have taken, almost certainly with a disposable camera some seventeen years ago when he was about ten years old and away at summer camp.  

I send the collection to him via Google albums and get confirmation that that is what the mystery sleeve of negatives is. 

He then mentions something interesting.  He sends five pictures of the friends with whom he has kept in touch.  Within three minutes of my sending the album.  

I am astonished.  Five people from seventeen years ago and three minutes to find and post their current picture.

I go through the photos again.  As best I can tell, there are twelve people among the photos.  He has stayed in touch with five of them, to the point of having recent photos of the five.

It is impossibly improbable in my own context placing myself back at the same age in my earlier time.  Hardly any children had cameras and so pictures taken by kids were relatively few and far between.  In addition, they did not circulate.  One in ten, perhaps one in a hundred instances where the child comes home, gets the photos developed, then sends some back for extra copies and then mails those copies to friends.

In terms of keeping up, you did it by phone or by mail.  If you did that.  Which most did not.  

Economists are accustomed to thinking in terms of barriers to entry.  The barriers to social network maintenance and sustenance were large pre-1990 (cost of photos, time to develop photos, cost of mail, cost of long distance calls, etc.)  Those costs, and therefore the barriers to social network maintenance and sustenance are now, in many ways, close to zero.  

What is lost and what is gained with frictionless communication?

What are the implications for Dunbar's Number when the cognitive burden for social network maintenance and sustenance is dramatically lower than it used to be?

History

 

An Insight

 

The artist had just added them to liven up his picture. Artistic license became reality.

From The Polish way of rebuilding by Ed West.  The subheading is Let's make Coventry medieval again.  

In part, it is a description of the irony that the reconstruction of Warsaw under the occupying Soviet forces was much more responsive to citizen sentiment and therefore ended up with a beautiful city in the architectural fashion of its own history.

In contrast, in Britain, birthplace of parliamentary democracy, Coventry, which was raised to the ground by the Luftwaffe, was rebuilt according to the desires of urban planners and steadfastly against the wishes of the residents of the city.  Coventry is a byword in England today, and for decades, for urban ugliness and decline.

A couple of items.

The Polish Army and resistance fought bravely - some 20,000 Germans were killed or wounded - but at huge cost. As many as 200,000 Poles, most civilians, were killed in the battle and over 80% of the city destroyed – worse destruction than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And so the Nazis had carried out their plan to erase the Polish capital — yet this was something the Poles refused to accept, even after 1944

In the past whenever I used to occasionally fall into debates about nuclear weapons, one of my central questions has always been why we distinguish how a city is destroyed versus the extent to which they were destroyed.  

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies but more people lost their lives to Allied fire bombing of Tokyo and other cities.  Do we care that one was nuclear versus age old fire bombs or do we care how many people died and how much was laid waste?  

West is adding Warsaw to the list of virtually leveled continental cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden - each with monstrous death tolls and comprehensive physical destruction and none involving nuclear weapons.  

There is a second point that comes up with some regularity on this blog.  The importance in modern world history, the distinctive advantage of the West, in creating, storing, and distributing knowledge.  Part of that is related to cultural openness and generative capability.  

Time and again over the past five centuries, we find northwestern and some Mediterranean powers, even without resource or numeric superiority, overcoming daunting odds due to access and utilization of stored knowledge.  Here is another example.

Remarkably, as Polish art historian Aleksandra Janiszewska-Cardone wrote last year, the authorities were helped in their efforts to rebuild the old town using the paintings of  Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto, who had visited Warsaw in the 18th century before its partition. When the Capital City Reconstruction Office (BOS) presented their plans to the Soviets in late 1945, they included five photographs of Bellotto’s artwork.

Janiszewska-Cardone quoted Małgorzata Omilanowska, a Polish art historian and former minister of culture and national heritage, who described it as ‘the emanation of the dream of a generation of architects experiencing the trauma of war, who built the Warsaw they wanted to love and believed that its residents desired one like it.

Some things were not quite accurate. The Branicki Palace was mostly destroyed but rebuilt based on a Canaletto work, and today features little statues of lizards and a gorilla eating a banana – but they never actually featured in the original building, the artist had just added them to liven up his picture. Artistic license became reality.

But the artist proved invaluable in restoring the city, and as the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand put it. ‘From the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw’. 

The paintings themselves, previously taken by Napoleon and by Tsar Nicholas I after the uprising in 1831, had been seized by the Nazis but survived the war and can today be found in the Royal Castle, (below) destroyed and only restored in the 1980s. The Castle forms part of a citadel that is today UNESCO listed, part of a beautiful square that is almost entirely reconstructed – except, I noticed, one modernist building opposite the castle which, horror of horrors, prominently displays the legend ‘McDonald’s’.

Warsaw isn’t the only European city to rebuild itself in this way. Part of Frankfurt’s Old Town is being reconstructed, the German financial centre in recent years tearing down a 1970s concrete block and replacing it with 15 reconstructed medieval houses.

Similarly the Royal Palace of Dresden, in a city destroyed on the fateful date of 13 February 1945, has been rebuilt as before.




I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

Among the London Searchlights, 1918 by Christopher RW Nevinson

Among the London Searchlights, 1918 by Christopher RW Nevinson































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Saturday, September 23, 2023

History

 

An Insight

 

I see wonderful things

 

Data Talks

 

Street of Shadows, Greenwich, London, 1977 by Clifford Charman

Street of Shadows, Greenwich, London, 1977 by Clifford Charman





















Click to enlarge.

Friday, September 22, 2023

Lost luggage

Very interesting discovery, both for the material remains as well as the capacity to place it in historical context.  From 17th-century dress recovered from shipwreck.


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I'm sorry, what happened?

I saw this and assumed it was just a humorous spoof.  

Having watched and laughed, my thought was:

We are in epistemic trouble when we see something we really want to be true but know it almost certainly is not.  And the internet is full of stuff we want to be true, presented in ways that convince us is true.  When it is not.

But this purported 911 call from the F-35 pilot who ejected over South Carolina earlier this week is simply a classic.  I know it being on NBC is not dispositive to it being a spoof, but it increases the probability that it is real.

And I love the three cultural languages being spoken.  I hear perhaps an Indian immigrant with a very polite and accommodating demeanor.  After all, he did just greet a military pilot who crash landed in his backyard.  He is talking to a sweet voiced South Carolina lady who is trying to make sense of a scenario not quite anticipated in any of her 911 call center scripts.  And in the background there is the command presence voice of the pilot who sounds like he may have wrenched his back but is communicating in a here-are-the-facts manner, clear and forthright, but still not cutting through the fog of a confused call.

911:  I'm sorry, what happened? 

[snip]

911:  How far did he fall?

Pilot:  I was at 2,000 feet.

911:  What caused the fall?

Pilot:  Uh, aircraft failure.

Everyone is doing their best to do the right thing but the whole process just wasn't designed for this particular scenario.

History

 

The internet as an antidote for pompous virtue.

I see that Dove is still making headlines with awkward marketing choices, in this instance by partnering with a BLM advocate for fat liberation.  A partner who apparently has a history of histrionic vengeful lawfare type activities.  

Regardless of the present kerfuffle, it reminded me of the last time Dove drew a lot of attention, back a decade ago with the release of a soft focus self-indulgent ad about how self-critical women were about their looks.


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Mindless but harmless.

But then came the mocking spoofs.  Some of those were pretty raucously funny.


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There was something similar a year later when a women's advocacy group put out 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman to highlight the caustic environment of comments women have to experience.  Not wrong but a little tone deaf.  There was both a class and race uproar given that disproportionate numbers of the commenters were either black or blue collar.


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Regardless of the intended message, the original attracted an even better spoof, 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man.


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An Insight

 

Some chooses to live an expensive life, others have it forced on them.

As frustrating as our new media environment is, forcing you work harder to find out anything approaching the truth, it is also kind of entertaining on occasion, particularly as it unleashes the knowledge and obsessiveness of the often marginalized.

The present instance is a tweet from the overweening David Brooks who is gifted with glibness more than knowledge or wisdom.  
To be fair, perhaps this is an example of Poe's Law.

Poe's law is an adage of internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views. The law is frequently exploited by individuals who share genuine extremist views and, when faced with overwhelming criticism, deflect by insisting they were merely being satirical.

Was Brooks being absolutely clueless or was this intended as sarcasm?  So far, the evidence seems heavily tilted towards clueless but we'll have to see whether the satire defense comes up.

I am quite familiar with Newark Airport.  I once spent five years flying in and out of there 40 or fifty times a year.   There is a certain appreciation of it that only comes from deep familiarity.  To say that it is not without its charms does not contradict the basic condition that it is not a particularly charming airport.

And it is no doubt expensive as always comes from the corruption attendant to government granting concessions to food vendors for limited space.  Airport food is expensive everywhere the world over.  

In the case of Newark, if you want to get by with the equivalent of a McDonalds, you'll probably pay 2-3 times more than anywhere outside of the airport.  Perhaps $15-20 for what is more usually $5-$10.

What Brooks is consuming is clearly not McDonalds.  It is clearly what falls into the category of higher end of airport food.  What passes as a restaurant.  Brooks just introduced his class blinders.  Everyone eats at McDonalds.  Only some people eat at higher end restaurants.  Ever; much less at the airport.

Only 20% of Americans dine at an upscale restaurant with any regularity.  Brooks is one of them.  

40% of Americans drink no alcohol, in contrast to David Brooks. 

Very crudely, just over 10% of Americans both dine in upscale restaurants and also drink alcohol.  

David Brooks is one of them.  

This is beginning to feel like Charles Murray's bubble quizz

Brooks was willing (or his employer) to pay $78 for an unscale restaurant burger and alcoholic drink.  Wish there were reporters who could sort out how one man spends nearly $80 on a burger, fries and a drink.

Well, not reporters per se.  Possibly citizen reporters.  There are people interested in the facts.  
Follow the chain.

Based on Clymer's research,  2/3rds of the tab was for the drink.  The food was only 1/3rd of the cost.  Alcohol was 2/3rd of the $80 bill.

David Brooks could have eaten for $20 at the airport and received a perfectly adequate meal.  Instead he chose to eat high end and with a stiff quality alcoholic drink.  He lives as the 10% and wants to be shocked by how much it costs to live as the 10%.  Living high on the hog is a choice not empirical evidence.

It is one thing to choose to live an expensive life (David Brooks), it is another thing entirely to have it enforced on you through inflation (everyone else.)

I'll wait for Brooks' next blockbuster revelation - Alcohol on airplanes and in hotel minibars is exorbitant!