Posts Tagged ‘Brad DeLong’
“If I only had a brain”*…
The estimable Brad DeLong ponders the Discovery Channel series Naked and Afraid, concluding that “the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz had a greatly exaggerated view of what he would have been able to do if he only had a brain”…
There is a shlock TV show, on the Discovery Channel, called “Naked & Afraid”.
In it, two humans are dropped into a wilderness somewhere, naked, with one and only one piece of technology each (usually something like a knife, a fire starter, or a fishing line). All around them are other mammals doing their mammal thing: living their lives, reproducing their populations, evolving to fit whatever niche they have found where they are. But the two humans dropped by themselves (well, they are surrounded by cameramen, sound technician, drivers, logistical support, and such who do not help and who stay out of the field of view) do not. Instead, the humans proceed, not too slowly, to start starving to death.
I am not being figurative or metaphorical…
[DeLong details the altogether dire deterioration and resulting ailments of two recent “contestents”…]
… Perhaps you just shrug your shoulders and say: “humans are relatively inept”… The other mammals out in the Amazon have been equipped by Darwin’s Daemon with teeth, claws, instincts, and brains that allow them to get into daily caloric balance. We don’t have much in the way of teeth and claws. We do have opposable thumbs. We do have big brains. They are supposed to compensate. But perhaps you shrug your shoulders and say: “they do not compensate very well”. For, out in the wilderness, Melissa Miller’s brain and thumbs failed at the one job for which Darwin’s Daemon gave them to us, for which other mammals’ teeth, claws, instincts, sprinting speed, dodging quickness, and much smaller and thus less energetically expensive brains largely suffice.
The rule: a smart, knowledgeable human (or two) in the wilderness naked should be afraid: they are highly likely to start starving to death.
And yet: Somehow we are here. We have not all yet been eaten. We have been evolved evolved. Our ancestors survived, and reproduced.
Our ancestors started to come down from the trees about seven million years ago. That was when we left the ancestors of our chimpanzee cousins still up in the forest canopy.
By five million years ago, the ardipitheci were walking upright when they had to, with much smaller and less sexually-dimorphic canines, but as of them with no signs of fire or stone‑tool use or indeed of semi-systematic butchery. Their brain cases were only 350cc, only 350 cubic centimeters. By 3.5 million years ago, the autralopitheci afarenses were habitually walking on two legs with their 450cc brain-cases. By 2.5 million years ago, the homines habiles with their Oldowan stone toolkit and 650cc brain-cases were around. And paleontologists judge they deserve our genus name: homo. By 1.8 million years ago, there were the homines erecti spreading out across the world, with their Acheulean handaxes, their endurance walking/running, and their 950cc brain-cases. When we look back 600,000 years ago, the world was then populated by the likes of the homines heidelbergenses: widely-controlled fire; complex hunting with tools like spears.
These people were not yet us: Their brain-cases were only 3/4 of the size of our brain-cases of 1350cc. They did not have organized big‑game hunting with spears, complex prepared‑core toolmaking techniques, long‑distance mobility, or evidence of our sustained and cumulative symbolic culture—cave art and engravings, personal ornaments, ritual burials, complex language‑supported planning, long‑distance exchange networks, composite tools made with adhesives, tailored clothing, or shelters. They did not have the final brain expansion, the globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.
And between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago there emerged people we definitely call us: homines sapientes, albeit “archaic”, with our brain-case size of 1350cc, but without the fully globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.
From a chimpanzee-sized brain one-quarter the size of ours five million years ago to our current state, our ancestors and then we have been evolved. And now we are here. So how can there have been so much selection pressure for larger brains when, even today, out in the wilderness they are insufficient to keep us, when naked individuals, from being hungry and afraid?
You know where I am going here. The answer of course, is simple: What is smart—what the brain is good for—is not each of our brains, but all of our brains thinking together. And the tools that we, and those who came before us, have made—tools that no one individual could make in a lifetime, and that embody all of that thinking-together one. Melissa Miller is an expert on knives, how to use them, and what to use them for. She could not make one from scratch.
From long-ago Acheulean handaxes to contemporary hunger in the Amazon, the throughline is simple: selection favored group knowledge and group production by a pecialized division of labor, not solo genius. Our edge not only was and is not claws or speed, it was and is not the ability to think up clever solutions to problems on the fly. Instead, it was pooled memory and anthology thinking-power, plus the division of labor that allows us to carve tools that contain the results of that collective thinking-power…
“Does Each of Us Have a Big Enough Brain to Compensate for Our Lack of Fangs, Claws, Sprinting Speed, & Dodging Quickness?” from @delong.social.
* “the Scarecrow” in The Wizard of Oz
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As we band together, we might recall that it was on this date in 1926 the Winnie-the-Pooh was first published…
The origin of the name of the bear that was stuffed with fluff began years before the book Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne [here] was published on this day in 1926. During the first World War, Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn caught a bear and named her “Winnie” after his adopted hometown in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was the brought to the London Zoo where Milne’s son, Christopher Robin would visit. [See also here.]
Christopher re-named his own teddy bear, Edward Bear, to Winnie-the-Pooh. His father named the characters in his book after Christopher’s stuffed animals including Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. (Mr. Milne added Owl and Rabbit).
In 1961, Walt Disney Productions bought the rights to the stories to create a series of cartoon shorts beginning with Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree which debuted in 1966. The last full-length animated movie from Disney, simply titled Winnie the Pooh, came out in theaters in 2011; the live action movie about the inspiration of the stories, Goodbye Christopher Robin by Fox Searchlight Pictures arrived in theaters in October of 2017 and Disney followed up with a live action/CGI about an adult Christopher Robin returning to the 100 Acre Wood in 2018.
– source
“A strange idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg, and very, very much absorbed him”*…
The estimable Brad DeLong shares the prose outline of one of his lectures…
[In] my “roots of property, exchange, and the division of labor” lecture [I try] to make novel and strange the idea people think that they “own” things: to impress students with how just plain weird that is. And then there are the next steps: That people enter into reciprocal gift-exchange relationships with or using things they “own” is really weird. That reciprocal gift-exchange transforms into cash-on-the-barrelhead one-shot economic “trade” is perhaps the weirdest of all. Where do these things come from? And what are the chances that any Turing-Class intelligent social creature would ever develop them? And how much less efficient and functional as an action-taking anthology-intelligence could the East African Plains Ape possibly be without these social-institutional things that underpin the global-scale societal coördination mechanism we call the “market economy”?
What if we see the idea of “owning” something is one of humanity’s strangest inventions? Before markets, before money, there was a peculiar leap: the belief that things could be “mine” even when I’m not looking. Explore how property and exchange, far from being “natural”, are peculiar to the East African Plains Ape, are societal-scale technologies that turned us into a market-making species, and how that leap—property and exchange—became the foundation of our economic world and of a great deal of our success as an action-taking anthology-intelligence.
That we believe in property and exchange is absolutely key to the “market” institutional mode of organizing the practical-action coördination side of humanity as a successful anthology intelligence. And that is not all that property is key to, for spheres of ownership, action, and control that can be readjusted are very important parts of our conceptual map for a great deal of our additional collective modes and mechanisms of societal organization. And these ideas—not just “I will growl and bite you if you try to drag this zebra carcasse I am eating right now away from me”, but that this is mine and it stays mine even if I am not right here growling—is really weird.
Where and how does it originate?
And why did it make sense for the first of the homines erecti who added this to their shared conceptual maps?…
Touching on the thinking of Doug Jones (who locates the cultural emergence of “property” in the development of the hand-axe), Adam Smith, Aristoteles of Stagire, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Friedrich Engels, DeLong concludes…
However, once we have constructed this jenga tower on top of its foundations of reciprocity and ownership, one of very key pieces of humanity’s glory and power as an action-taking coördinated anthology-intelligence has fallen into place.
The true genius of the market system lies in its capacity to decentralize decision-making, to push choices and authority out to the periphery—out to the individuals and enterprises who are closest to the ground, who possess the granular, local knowledge that no distant central planner or bureaucratic committee could ever hope to match. In this way, the market harnesses and aggregates the dispersed intelligence of society, transforming millions of individual judgments, preferences, and bits of information into a coherent pattern of production and allocation.
The result is an astonishingly adaptive and responsive system, one that can, at its best, direct resources toward their most valued uses with a minimum of wasted effort. But, and this is crucial, this remarkable coördination is only truly effective for rival and excludible commodities—goods and services for which one person’s consumption precludes another’s, and for which access can be limited to those who pay. In these domains, the market’s invisible hand is real and powerful, allocating goods through the interplay of supply, demand, and price.
When markets are functioning well—when property rights are secure, when contracts are enforced, when information is sufficiently available—they become the central nervous system of a vast, intricate organism. They coordinate sprawling networks of production and exchange, linking together farmers, manufacturers, merchants, workers, and consumers in a web of mutual interdependence. It is the division of labor, enabled and deepened by the existence of wide and deep markets, that serves as the engine of productivity and prosperity. As Adam Smith observed, the specialization of tasks allows individuals to become more skilled and efficient, unleashing a flood of innovation and output that no autarkic household or command economy could hope to rival.
Yet—and this is a point too often ignored—the benefits of this productivity are not distributed evenly or automatically. Who gets what, and how much, is determined by the prevailing structure of bargaining power and the existing arrangements of property. The market does not guarantee justice, only efficiency; it delivers abundance, but it apportions that abundance according to the rules of the game, rules that are themselves the product of history, law, and politics. Thus, while the market is a marvel of coordination, it is never a substitute for vigilance about the distributional consequences it generates…
How ownership and trade have made us truly weird: “‘Property’ & ‘Exchange’ as a Coördination Mechanism at Societal Scale,” from @delong.social.
Apposite (and in the spirit of both DeLong’s concluding observation and Aristotle’s injunction: “Property should be in a general sense common, but as a general rule private… In well-ordered states, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use of them.”): “Think LIke a Commoner“
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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As we ponder property, we might send insightful birthday greetings to one of its most sardonic observers, William Makepeace Thackeray; he was born on this date in 1811. A novelist and illustrator, he is best known for his satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel Vanity Fair, a panoramic– and piercing– portrait of British society, and the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon (which was, of course, adapted for a 1975 film by Stanley Kubrick.
“The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers”*…
As scholars like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowan have begun to call out a slowing of progress and growth in the U.S., others are beginning to wonder if “innovation clusters” like Silicon Valley are still advantageous. For example, Brian J. Asquith…
In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a short treatise with a provocative hypothesis. Cowen challenged his audience to look beyond the gleam of the internet and personal computing, arguing that these innovations masked a more troubling reality. Cowen contended that, since the 1970s, there has been a marked stagnation in critical economic indicators: median family income, total factor productivity growth, and average annual GDP growth have all plateaued…
In the years since the publication of the Great Stagnation hypothesis, others have stepped forward to offer support for this theory. Robert Gordon’s 2017 The Rise and Fall of American Growth chronicles in engrossing detail the beginnings of the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States, starting around 1870, the acceleration of growth spanning the 1920–70 period, and then a general slowdown and stagnation since about 1970. Gordon’s key finding is that, while the growth rate of average total factor productivity from 1920 to 1970 was 1.9 percent, it was just 0.6 percent from 1970 to 2014, where 1970 represents a secular trend break for reasons still not entirely understood. Cowen’s and Gordon’s insights have since been further corroborated by numerous research papers. Research productivity across a variety of measures (researchers per paper, R&D spending needed to maintain existing growth rates, etc.) has been on the decline across the developed world. Languishing productivity growth extends beyond research-intensive industries. In sectors such as construction, the value added per worker was 40 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 1970. The trend is mirrored in firm productivity growth, where a small number of superstar firms see exceptionally strong growth and the rest of the distribution increasingly lags behind.
A 2020 article by Nicholas Bloom and three coauthors in the American Economic Review cut right to the chase by asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” and answered its own question in the affirmative.6 Depending on the data source, the authors find that while the number of researchers has grown sharply, output per researcher has declined sharply, leading aggregate research productivity to decline by 5 percent per year.
This stagnation should elicit greater surprise and concern because it persists despite advanced economies adhering to the established economics prescription intended to boost growth and innovation rates: (1) promote mass higher education, (2) identify particularly bright young people via standardized testing and direct them to research‑intensive universities, and (3) pipe basic research grants through the university system to foster locally-driven research and development networks that supercharge productivity…
…
… the tech cluster phenomenon stands out because there is a fundamental discrepancy between how the clusters function in practice versus their theoretical contributions to greater growth rates. The emergence of tech clusters has been celebrated by many leading economists because of a range of findings that innovative people become more productive (by various metrics) when they work in the same location as other talented people in the same field. In this telling, the essence of innovation can be boiled down to three things: co-location, co-location, co-location. No other urban form seems to facilitate innovation like a cluster of interconnected researchers and firms.
This line of reasoning yields a straightforward syllogism: technology clusters enhance individual innovation and productivity. The local nature of innovation notwithstanding, technologies developed within these clusters can be adopted and enjoyed globally. Thus, while not everyone can live in a tech cluster, individuals worldwide benefit from new advances and innovations generated there, and some of the outsized economic gains the clusters produce can then be redistributed to people outside of the clusters to smooth over any lingering inequalities. Therefore, any policy that weakens these tech clusters leads to a diminished rate of innovation and leaves humanity as a whole poorer.
Yet the fact that the emergence of the tech clusters has also coincided with Cowen’s Great Stagnation raises certain questions. Are there shortcomings in the empirical evidence on the effects of the tech clusters? Does technology really diffuse across the rest of the economy as many economists assume? Do the tech clusters inherently prioritize welfare-enhancing technologies? Is there some role for federal or state action to improve the situation? Clusters are not unique to the postwar period: Detroit famously achieved a large agglomeration economy based on automobiles in the early twentieth century, and several authors have drawn parallels between the ascents of Detroit and Silicon Valley. What makes today’s tech clusters distinct from past ones? The fact that the tech clusters have not yielded the same society-enhancing benefits that they once promised should invite further scrutiny…
How could this be? What can we do about it? Eminently worth reading in full: “Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation?” (possible soft paywall), from @basquith827.
See also: Brad DeLong, on comments from Eric Schmidt: “That an externality market failure is partly counterbalanced and offset by a behavioral-irrationality-herd-mania cognitive failure is a fact about the world. But it does not mean that we should not be thinking and working very hard to build a better system—or that those who profit mightily from herd mania on the part of others should feel good about themselves.”
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As we contemplate co-location, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that a denizen of one of America’s leading tech/innovation hubs, Jay Forrester at MIT [see here and here], was awarded a patent for his coincident current magnetic core memory (Patent No. 2,736,880). Forrester’s invention, a “multicoordinate digital information storage device,” became the standard memory device for digital computers until supplanted by solid state (semiconductor) RAM in the mid-1970s.
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