too many parts of society are oriented towards bottom line activities of mistake avoidance instead of top line activities of taking risk and creating value.
.. “You can think of this book as detailing the social roots of the resulting slow growth outcome and explaining why that economic and technological stagnation has lasted so long.”
.. Cowen identifies a country that very much has a cheerful, can-do spirit: China. “I have visited China many times over the past five years, for a different book project, and what I’ve observed there has made America’s social stagnation increasingly clear to me. That was one reason I came to write this book.”
.. Thinking about that point makes me wonder if economists are poorly-equipped to measure how an optimistic vision can propel growth.
.. “We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world.” Must our imaginations be limited by the screen? That would be a shame.
.. Maybe it can push forward nuclear fusion; it’s already been reported that American thorium scientists who could no longer develop the technology in the United States have taken their designs to China, which is happy to encourage their work.
.. One doesn’t have to admire Steve Bannon’s policy views to see that he’s lived a unique life. The recitation of his career path (born in Norfolk; Virginia Tech; HBS; officer in the Navy; Goldman; etc.) doesn’t sufficiently convey the diversity of his experiences. He has been involved with Seinfeld; Biosphere 2; the rescue effort of the Iran hostage crisis; a World of Warcraft virtual gold mining company; Titus (the Shakespeare adaptation featuring Anthony Hopkins); Breitbart; the White House; and surely other interesting ventures I’ve never read about.
Patrick Byrne
.. He contracted Hepatitis C from a trip to Xinjiang in his 20’s; ongoing treatment has required his heart to be stopped over 100 times.
.. Let me take this opportunity to register a complaint with the term “open-minded,” which is increasingly praised as an important virtue.
I’ve started to dislike the term. First of all, it’s unobjectionable—who would profess he is not open-minded? More importantly, it’s not always clear what the term refers to, and this is worth thinking through. It might indicate the state of being “soft-minded,” in which one would readily be swayed by better arguments. But often it tends to connote “empty-minded,” in which one accepts anything and retains little. Many people are indeed open to different cultures and ideas, but they’re not necessarily conceptualizing their experience, nor active in seeking new experiences out.
.. I would like for everyone to be “hungry-minded,” in which one realizes that there is so much to know. A hungry-minded person senses that he is expert in so few areas of knowledge; that terrible gaps plague even his supposed areas of expertise; that there are important areas of knowledge of whose existence he is barely even aware; and that he should be fixing these deficiencies, now and ravenously. My favorite people to talk to are those who look for new experiences, think about them in an analytic way, and are eager to share their thoughts.
.. I’m slightly skeptical of thinking that we can save the world with indeterminate policies like looser monetary policy or housing reform. Are so many companies waiting to make things happen if only we’d cut interest rates by 0.25 percent? Will so many excellent service jobs be created if rents in Manhattan and the Mission were only cheaper by $250? To me these are policies worth advocating for, but I must say that they feel so marginal.
.. The most striking thing I learned from Harford is that the most success-oriented teams are usually the most miserable teams. For example, the amateur investment clubs that generate the highest returns are usually composed of people who don’t know each other well—it’s the only way to generate pushback on ideas that aren’t well thought through. Clubs composed of friends will find it more important to keep friendships intact rather than focus on returns.
.. Living a life that’s not so well-ordered can improve skill-acquisition.
.. It’s odd to me that a country that hasn’t experienced warfare for centuries would maintain such a militarized culture. The book makes it feel that being Swiss is the civic religion of Switzerland, and the service in the army is the annual demonstration of faith.
.. The biggest objections to this book will come from those who haven’t been steeped in Thielian arguments for techno-pessimism.
.. Maybe we can lay the blame for complacency at the feet of Carter, who again and again entreated Americans to lower their expectations. He’s the president who encouraged people to carpool, who put on a sweater and asked people to lower their thermostats, and oversaw repeated crises.
.. The chapter never explicitly mentions pot, except in the title. By introducing little oddities in the text, Cowen makes room for claims that are too difficult to baldly state; in other cases, watch for occasions in which he’s offering commentary on something other than what he’s directly writing about.
This Economic Phenomenon Is Making Government Sick
K-12 education hasn’t improved very much and also costs more, an economic phenomenon that has been labeled the “cost disease.” It turns out the cost disease also shapes politics: To the extent governments manage, run or fund low-productivity-growth sectors, the spending required to sustain those sectors can automatically boost the size of government over time.
.. Part of the problem is that fixing people is harder than fixing machines, because it requires the cooperation of what are often recalcitrant patients. That’s why productivity improvements are difficult to achieve in education as well. Online learning can be potent and very cheap, but it is hard to get enough of the students to care.
.. If patients and students would diet properly, take the right medicines and crack open their textbooks, more drastic cost improvements could result.
.. The first problem will be that other areas of government spending (“discretionary spending”) will tend to suffer, as money is soaked up by the low-productivity sectors. Voters will feel that governments are neglecting some of their most important interests, such as infrastructure.
.. All of the various sides may be correct in their major claims, but none will have a workable solution. This actually isn’t so far from where the health-care debate stands now, and where the retirement and nursing home debate is headed as America ages.
.. As it stands, we’re set to re-create these debates at higher and higher levels of government spending in the low-productivity sectors. And I don’t view such dramatically tense, life-or-death issues as conducive either to rational decision-making or to a broadly liberal, consensus-based politics.
.. If you care about politics, I suggest spending less time on the candidates and more time studying productivity growth. I also suggest spending more time thinking about how to make working with human beings as easy and as fruitful as manipulating physical capital. Often the real political problem is not the people who disagree with you, but rather the empirical regularities of economies and the humans who inhabit them.
Tyler Cown on “Black Lives Matter”
My views are pretty simple, namely that I am a fan of the movement. Police in this country kill, beat, arrest, fine, and confiscate the property of black people at unfair and disproportionate rates. The movement directs people’s attention to this fact, and the now-common use of cell phone video and recordings have driven the point home.
I don’t doubt that many policemen perceive they are at higher risk when dealing with young black males, and that is part of why they may act more brutally or be quicker to shoot or otherwise misbehave. I would respond that statistical discrimination, even if it is rational, does not excuse what are often crimes against innocent people. For instance, a man is far more likely to kill you than is a woman, but that fact does not excuse the shooting of an innocent man.
.. I also don’t see that citing “Black Lives Matter” has to denigrate the value of the life of anyone else.
.. but at its essence I see this as a libertarian idea to be admired and promoted.
The coalition for diversity whose diversity did diversity just win?
Non-Democrats are more likely to count other forms of diversity for more than the Democrats do. I see Democrats as somewhat concentrated in particular cities and also in particular occupations, more than Republicans are. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is another way in which Democrats are less diverse.
.. Correctly or not, many Americans do not think racial and ethnic diversity is the diversity that should command so much attention. That is one place to start for understanding why so many 2012 Obama voters switched to Trump this time around, or maybe just stayed home.