Archive for October 2024
“Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars’ worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old can do it.”*…
Scheduling note: the press of travel and obligation will make it impossible for your correspondent to post for the next few days; regular service should resume on or about Friday the 11th…
Rising prices prompted many consumers to shift to lower-cost goods from premium brands. However, as Ana Elena Azpúrua reports, an analysis of millions of products by Alberto Cavallo shows how inflation hit budget products harder in many countries, a phenomenon called “cheapflation”…
Surging inflation drove many consumers to cheaper brands or lower-quality products, but new data suggests that switching might not have saved them as much as they might have expected.
During the most recent period of high inflation, prices of the least expensive products increased more than those of the costliest, according to an analysis of microdata from large retailers by Harvard Business School Professor Alberto Cavallo. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Cavallo and coauthor Oleksiy Kryvtsov, senior research officer at the Bank of Canada, refer to this phenomenon as “cheapflation.”
In the United States, the prices of the cheapest food products climbed 30 percent between January 2020 and May 2024, outpacing the 22 percent increase of the fanciest foods.
Kryvtsov and Cavallo, the Thomas S. Murphy Professor of Business Administration, analyzed millions of products from more than 90 big retailers in 10 countries, including detailed price data for products within the same categories, something that’s been difficult to study. After creating indexes tied to pre-pandemic prices, the researchers concluded that “cheapflation” isn’t unique to the US…
… The price gap between cheap and expensive goods widened most as inflation was peaking, but the spread remained even as prices stabilized, eating away consumers’ potential savings.
“Prices for cheaper brands grew between 1.3 and 1.9 times faster than the prices of more expensive brands, and only when inflation surged, not before or after,” the researchers write.
Why? Cavallo and Kryvtsov find evidence of an increase in the relative demand for cheaper products, as consumers shifted their spending from high to low-priced varieties in an attempt to lower their grocery bills. They also point out other reasons, including targeted fiscal stimulus, which likely increased the demand for cheaper varieties, and the possibility that cheaper products tend to depend more on global supply chains, like the ones disrupted by COVID-19. At the same time, the profit margins of cheaper goods could be tighter than those of makers of high-priced goods from the same category, adding pressure to raise prices as supply costs increased.
But when inflation decreased, “the relative prices of cheaper options remained permanently higher, even though the inflation inequality abated. This may help explain why some consumers may think that prices are ‘too high’: not just relative to the past, but also relative to more expensive varieties,” the authors write…
One reason we’re feeling the pinch: “Charting ‘Cheapflation’: How Budget Brands Got So Pricey,” @anaeazpurua on @albertocavallo in @HBSWK.
* Henny Youngman
###
As we scrimp, we might send developed birthday greetings to Jakaya Kikwete; he was born on this date in 1950. And economist and politician, he served as finance minister then President of Tanzania. Kikwete was instrumental in the political and economic reforms that have led to Tanzania being called “a success story” and served as chairperson of the African Union (in 2008–2009) and the chairman of the Southern African Development Community Troika on Peace, Defence and Security (in 2012–2013).
Since stepping down as President in 1915, Kikwete served as the African Union High Representative in Libya and as a member of the UN’s Lead Group of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement. Since 2022, he has been a co-chairing the Commission for Universal Health convened by Chatham House, alongside Helen Clark.
“Music proposes. Sound disposes.”*…
On the heels of Bach and Gluck, a visit to a temple of sound…
The BBC Sound Effects Archive is available for personal, educational or research purposes. There are over 33,000 clips from across the world from the past 100 years. These include clips made by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, recordings from the Blitz in London, special effects made for BBC TV and Radio productions, as well as 15,000 recordings from the Natural History Unit archive. You can explore sounds from every continent – from the college bells ringing in Oxford to a Patagonian waterfall – or listen to a submarine klaxon or the sound of a 1969 Ford Cortina door slamming shut…
– source
Open and easily searchable: “The BBC Sound Effects Archive,” from @BBC.
See also: 32 Sounds (and here).
(Image above: source)
###
As we listen, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences)… that’s to say, the first “talkie.” Based on the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson (the plot, adapted from his short story “The Day of Atonement”), The Jazz Singer was warmly received– and effectively marked the end of the silent film era.
The Jazz Singer won two Oscars at the first Academy Awards, has been added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress (as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”), and was chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety. It has passed into the public domain and can be seen at the Internet Archive: here.
“I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history”*…
Using his “musical animation machine.” Stephen Malinowski illustrates the genius of Bach’s “Great” Fugue in G minor, BWV 542…
Q: What’s so “great” about this fugue?
A: It’s called “great” to distinguish it from the other fugue in G minor (BWV 578) which is called “little”; you can compare it here. The BWV 578 fugue is a stand-alone piece, but BWV 542 is a pair of pieces; its full title is “Fantasia and Fugue in G minor.”…
* James Hilton
###
As we marvel, we might recall that it was on this date in 1762 that Christoph Willibald Gluck‘s glorious opera Orfeo ed Euridice premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa. The first of Gluck’s “reform” operas (which brought “noble simplicity” to what had become abstruse opera seria), it was hugely influential on subsequent German operas. Variations on its plot—the underground rescue mission in which the hero must control, or conceal, his emotions—can be found in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Wagner’s Das Rheingold.
“What happens when you get to the end of things?”*…
Charlie Wood introduces a remarkable new collection in Quanta…
A couple of years ago, I was chatting about black holes with Dan Harlow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he made a casual comment that left a deep impression on me. I asked if some new work he’d been doing strengthened the case that space-time was “emergent.” Without missing a beat he replied, “Sure, if it needed strengthening.”
Harlow isn’t the only physicist with serious doubts about what reality is made of. For more than a decade now, Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study has been delivering a polished lecture arguing that space-time is “doomed.” Time and again, I’ve heard theorists in high-energy physics make similar-sounding statements, and I’ve always been struck by their confidence. We don’t have the faintest idea what the next theory of physics will look like, whether it will involve strings, loops, triangles or something entirely new that no one has thought to propose. And yet so many theorists seem rather convinced that whatever it will be, it won’t involve space or time.
Why? What does that statement mean? What would it look like to do physics without referring to space or time? I’ve spent most of this year trying to find out. The results have just been published in “The Unraveling of Space-Time,” a massive package that includes articles, videos and interactive animations from me and my colleagues Mark Belan, Emily Buder, Amanda Gefter and Joseph Howlett.
Over the course of more than 40 interviews with nearly 30 physicists, I learned that there are many ways to define emergent space-time. But at the most basic level, “emergent space-time” means that space and time are the outputs of a theory instead of the inputs. A classic analogy is heat. To explain why a teacup cools, scientists of the 1700s put heat into their theory of the world as a substance that repels itself and naturally spreads out. But this “caloric theory” was ultimately replaced by thermodynamics, a theory where a primary input is molecules that buzz around with some energy. As molecules crash into each other, their energy spreads, and we now recognize this process as the origin of heat transfer. Heat is an output — a prediction — of thermodynamics. It is an emergent phenomenon.
Space-time is the ultimate input. If physics is largely about predicting what happens where and when, you need a stage upon which things can happen. Albert Einstein became a household name for revealing that this stage acts like a fabric that bends in ways we experience as gravity. He described in spectacular detail how space-time behaves, much as 19th-century scientists described how heat behaves with caloric theory. The idea that space-time is emergent is the idea that space-time will eventually go the way of heat, water, air and so many other substances before it; we will someday understand it to be the inevitable consequence of the behavior of simpler entities. Call them the “atoms” of space-time.This week’s series explores the mind-bending notion of emergent space-time from a number of angles. There is, of course, the why of it all. This mostly boils down to the strange things that happen when Einstein’s theory of space-time collides with quantum mechanics, the theory of the subatomic world. When we combine features from both theories, we see that any experiment that tries to probe reality a little too closely will get thwarted by the appearance of a black hole, an enigma that undermines the familiar picture of space-time in its own way.
For this and other reasons, physicists are pushing to escape our familiar space-time, often referred to as the “bulk,” in search of alien environments conducive to new ways of doing physics.
Where else might one do physics, if not in the bulk? A few ideas are being developed, including one that goes by the name of holography. This is roughly the idea that any gravitational system — even the entire universe — can have an alternative description as a collection of quantum particles moving around a flat surface. From these gravity-free surfaces, a bulk world with gravity somehow pops out. It’s a remarkable theoretical claim, and over the past few years, holographers have developed a suite of tools that have helped them decode the bulk from the behavior of these surface particles.Another research program, spearheaded by Arkani-Hamed, has even more ambitious aims — getting both space-time and quantum mechanics as outputs from even more alien inputs. His group has recently developed an entirely new language for making predictions, one that makes no reference to space-time. Instead, it uses only geometric shapes and primitive counting tasks.
Is space-time, at least in its current form, definitely doomed? The idea tortured one of the pioneers of gravitational theory, John Wheeler. And today, the end of space-time is even more widely accepted. Most of the theorists I spoke with struggled to think of colleagues in the quantum gravity community who would defend space-time as a fundamental ingredient of reality. However, some researchers are pursuing alternatives. I spoke at length with Latham Boyle about patterns in particle physics that have led him and his collaborators to the more conservative notion that space-time might come in two “sheets.”
The various proposals under development are unlikely to see experimental tests this century, so a conclusive answer doesn’t seem near. But if it were someday established that space-time does break down, what would that mean for us?
On a practical level, not much. Einstein’s fabric of space-time is so sturdy that little short of a black hole would put a noticeable dent in it. But at a conceptual level, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic rethinking of reality. When Democritus suggested that matter emerges from tiny barbed “atoms” more than 2,000 years ago, he couldn’t possibly have foreseen that parts of his proposal would ultimately be realized in the form of quantum theory — a framework asserting that reality is an ocean of overlapping waves of possibility that resolve into fixed objects only in certain situations.
If the void itself emerges from something, that something will be at least as alien. Just as individual molecules don’t themselves have a well-defined notion of heat, the base level of reality could lack marquee features of our existence that we take for granted. Places. Times. The ability to influence only nearby objects. The requirement that causes precede effects. Physicists are already finding that these notions seem unlikely to be present in a more precise accounting of the world. They seem to be the approximate outputs of something stranger.“One of the most spectacular aspects of these new findings is the emergence of causality can only happen in the approximate description,” Elliott Gesteau, a quantum gravity researcher at the California Institute of Technology, told me over Zoom earlier this year. If there is gravity, he continued, “which is what we have in our world, then this causal structure is only approximate and must break down.”…
Are we on the verge of a new physics? “Why Space-Time Looks Doomed,” from @walkingthedot in @QuantaMagazine.
The full interactive collection is here, and eminently worth reading in full.
* John Wheeler
###
As we wrestle with reality, we might spare a thought for a physicist whose work helped move the questions we face forward– Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck; he died on this date in 1947. A theoretical physicist, he is best remembered as the originator of quantum theory. It was his discovery of energy quanta that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
“Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power”*…
Coleman McCormick on a framework that can help us understand change in systems– and build resiliance…
A forest is a complex ecosystem made up of thousands of organisms living, evolving, interacting with each other, and changing over time.
At the top of the hierarchy are the leaves, changing annually, growing, dying, and shedding in a year-long seasonal cycle. Next there are branches, fewer in number and slower in growth. Then the whole tree itself, changing over decades. The tree sits in a stand of dozens, and the stand in a forest of thousands of individual trees. The forest within a biome, the biome in a region with a particular climate.
You get the idea.
All natural ecosystems evolve in layers like this that connect to each other, but move at different speeds. You can imagine other systems with similar structures: your body is made up of proteins, DNA strands, organelles, cells, membranes, organs, a skeleton, and eventually, your whole body. Cells are being generated but also dying off at almost the same rate. Slower layers like the nervous system take a long time to heal (if ever) when subjected to injury.
Seeing complex systems this way — as layered collections of variable-speed elements — is a useful framework for understanding why we have a hard time changing them.
Stewart Brand [and here and here] noticed this recurring pattern in the anatomy of systems, which he called pace layering.
The concept builds on an observation made by architect Frank Duffy, who noticed a hierarchy in the components of buildings. In his book How Buildings Learn, Brand expanded this observation into a model he termed “shearing layers,” which describes how different parts of a structure change at varying speeds. Site → Structure → Skin → Services → Space plan → Stuff. Each must survive or adapt on different timelines. When architecture fails to account for the different rates at which users need to modify these layers, it results in rigid, non-functional design. Buildings where Services or the Space Plan are overly inflexible are difficult to adapt to users’ changing needs.
In his later book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand expanded the concept of shearing layers to a civilizational scale:
At the bottom, nature moves along on its own eons-level time scale. In the middle, governance and culture shift with generations. Infrastructure and commerce in the range of years. And on the surface, fashionable trends flare up and die out with sometimes daily regularity, like the turbulent wave tops in a stormy ocean. Each layer serves a function:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power...
… Seeing the world through this lens — not only of scale, but also of time — has distant reach to so many other domains. It’s a fundamental characteristic of how systems work and adapt to change.
The fast flurry of activity at the top of a pace layered system creates a testbed for new ideas. In the forest, each individual tree can try out different evolutionary adaptations. New survival strategies are tested in numbers not possible if entire ecosystems had to move together. If one tree tests a new trait that turns out not to work, only a single organism is at risk, not the whole forest.
Because upper layers move faster they can also rebound faster. A forest fire or a passing herd of elk causes some damage, but only at the surface level upper crust of our strata. The bark and branches and leaves may get eaten or burn off, but in a few weeks they bounce back.
Pace layering builds resiliency into complex systems. The fast layers shield the slower ones from shocks, while selectively transmitting changes down through the layers, allowing slower ones to incorporate those adaptations. But some changes propagate too fast.
Some of the worst cases of system shock happen when change shakes to lower levels too rapidly. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rapid change in the governance layer caused wreaked havoc in the layers above: massive instability on a national scale, rippling through the whole system for decades. In this case, a totalitarian government imposed rigidity on commerce, infrastructure, and even fashion, and didn’t allow for the necessary shifting and experimentation required for the system to maintain resilience.
Drawing sharp lines between layers actually draws an inaccurate picture of how a thriving system works. A more accurate diagram would show smoother gradients across the transitions between layers.
Resilience comes from allowing this gradient — this slippage — at the junctions between layers. Each layer, above and below, must allow for give and take from its neighbors. Slow layers must permit some influence at the edges, and fast layers must slow down to maintain a workable interface with the slower. The layers need to be able to negotiate with one another. If the fast ignores the constraints of the slow, you get discontinuous instability. If the slow never bends to the fast, you get stifling stagnation…
[McCormick explores the applicability of this framework to governance and to corporate activity…]
… With age, my mind seems to sink to lower levels in the hierarchy. “Current things” are more likely to hit me and bounce off. We come around to new ideas more slowly. Above us are the teenagers, trying new technologies, listening to new music, pushing new memes, on a weekly or daily basis. We parents underneath can’t keep up.
But “keeping up” isn’t our role! Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast tries things, slow preserves what works. Resilient, sustainable systems balance this learning and remembering.
Not every meme or new song or fashion trend has staying power, but some do. The ones with notable resonance absorb and influence the culture below. Youth play the role of experimenters, continuously throwing new ideas at the wall — some good, many terrible. The elders carry the torch of tradition, and provide the stable platform of time-tested solutions on top of which the innovators can explore.
Pace layering is one of those ideas with such broad reach that once you learn about it, you see it everywhere…
The hidden architecture of resilient systems: “Pace Layers,” from @colemanm.
For Stewart’s own essay on Pace Layers, see here; and for more, here.
* Stewart Brand
###
As we take the long view, we might send connective birthday greetings to Alexander MacMillan; he was born on this date in 1818. MacMillan was cofounder (in 1843) with his brother Daniel, of Macmillan Publishers, one of the “Big Five” English language publishers.
Though not himself a professional scientist, MacMillan did much to promote science in the Victorian times– especially when he established the journal Nature (in 1869), enabling communication between men of science. The journal had the support of many influential contributors, including Thomas Huxley. Yet, it remained a financial challenge for Macmillan. Other scientific quarterlies had short lives, but Macmillan tolerated losses for three decades, committed to the journal’s mission “to place before the general public the grand results of scientific work and scientific discovery; and to urge the claims of science to move to a more general recognition in education and in daily life.” That mission continues to the present day.
You must be logged in to post a comment.