economics

reading december 2, 2021

St.Andrewism on Maslow, the pyramid which was not a pyramid, and the Siksika (Blackfoot) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRzejkbeH5s taken from this medium post https://gatherfor.medium.com/maslow-got-it-wrong-ae45d6217a8c

minute 8:00 of Graeber-Thiel debate “Where Did the Future Go?” David Graeber gives a perfect defintion of what acdemia would need to foster creativity again: give money to creative intellectuals instead of trapping them in competition, publish or perish and stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF0cz9OmCGw&t=1s

Now Progress Studies, Collison and Cowen, it started a couple of days back from the this 3d on ethics of Progress Studies, Collison offers they are catholic small c (universal maybe) start here https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1464689069401780226

today I was reading this post from Applied Divinity Studies which introduced Stubborn Attachement, the book by Tyler Cowen, which I read but can’t remember much. Here the post https://applieddivinitystudies.com/exegesis/ he also wrote the Moral Foundation of Progress, to read https://applieddivinitystudies.com/moral-progress/

Advertisement

Why we need a ministry for the future (generations)

This is not about the book, this is about discount rates applied to long term, very long term, the one where we are all dead, and so our children, and their children all the way to 500 years which isn’t such a long span in historical terms but yields absurd results when using discount rates

It originates from chapter 4 of Stubborn Attachment by Tyler Cowen and ends up with Burke, worth giving it a second read, future generations is the ones we should fight the climate disaster for, thanks Greta for reminding us, this issue is moral and philosophical with great practical implications: imagine a world where we keep negative interest rates by means of printing a lot of money and make the future generations more valuable than ourselves

https://www.williamrinehart.com/2021/one-dollar-delays/

Modern slavery, according to ancient philosophers

click here and get to listen to David Graeber saying that Aristotle would not find much a distinction between the situation where you are so indebted that you sell yourself into slavery to work 12 hours a day, isn’t very different from the contemporary situation where you rent yourself to work 12 hours a day because you are indebted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs

It’s Graeber talking about his book Debt the first 5,000 years

TMFTF

things that work in TMFTF:

aerosol in the atmosphere to increase albedo, maybe

ecoterrorism, defintely so

slowing glaciers by pumping out water at the bottom, keeping oil riggers happy

organic agriculture, overcoming modernism in agriculture. It also sequesters carbon in the fertile level of the ground

CQE Climate Quantitative Easing, creating a crypto and allocating it to carbon sequestration

wildlife corridors averywhere

upgraded management of water resources, generally caring for things rather than not

easier said than done, but moving away from capitalism will help

nations states will stay, central banks will take leadership in financing postcapitalismm with cretive money.

China will rush ahead of US

and yeah ! Diirigibles and blimps everywhere, hypertech sailboats with 7 masts, that’s the way to go

ITW with the author https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/kim-stanley-robinson-ministry-future-science-fiction

crooked timber run a series of posts on the book, Robinson replied, start from his reply and you will find the 8 articles https://crookedtimber.org/2021/05/14/response-7/

How Asia works

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell is the book on development I want to read. Meanwhile in my bubble everybody is reading it and so here is Scott Alexander reviewing it https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works

and here Noah Smith doing some critics to it “What Studwell got wrong “https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-studwell-got-wrong”

Studwell book is good because it has a 3-step concise, no-bullshit, recipe to develop past the middle income trap:

land reform

promote export

Control finance

Pretty much what would be anatema to IMF and World Bank, not requiring full democracy, rather working well under autocracy, but in the end economis and countries should open up to mjeet the gorwing challenges of an advanced economy

I have been wondering wether this recipe could work for Africa, I will keep an eye on the issue. By chance I ran into this blog post on the divergence in the tropics between some east asina and some west african countries, which in the end boild down to high food prices, which keep high industrial salaries and sitlfe growth. Also, in the flying geese model, asia had Japan, Africa has no seed investments from a contiguous mature country

Food Prices and the Little Divergence https://tomwestland.com/2021/06/08/food-prices-and-the-little-divergence/

Resilient as a Cuban

After Cuba lost USSR financial support in the n90’s,, calories intake fell, they lost weight and became helathier, mortality fell https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/166/12/1374/82812 “Impact of Energy Intake, Physical Activity, and Population-wide Weight Loss on Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes Mortality in Cuba, 1980–2005”

Conversely, when North Korea lost that support, infant mortality and mortality over 65 started diverging markedly versus South Korea https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/28/5/830/4930643 “The life expectancy gap between North and South Korea from 1993 to 2008 “

I found it in this 3d of the Pseudoerasmus which start off mortality comparison between China and India last century betweehttps://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1404403291837112324

Income inequality

the world taken as a single country would be as unequal as the most unequal country on earth, South Africa

World’s inequality was reduced in the past 30 years, for the first time since maybe the 1820’s and this was mainly due to China getting back into the world economy. No longer, right now China is more unequal than the average, so its growth will add inequality

Will Africa grow and reduce world inequality? Very likely no, african countries need growing on avergae 7-8% a year and historically they have not recorded that steady growth ever. And also India needs growing and pulling its population out of poverty, will it succed?

So, unless advqned countries takes a decisive action within, world inequality will soon stop oing down and will start growing again

Thanks Branko Milanovic for that clear view http://glineq.blogspot.com/2021/05/notes-on-global-income-inequality-non.html

and 2 charts from here https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1211317792361926658

Africa latent assets

– African societies are based on achieved status – is closely related to Chinese meritocracy (..) shows Africa to be the most socially mobile part of the world. Africans are also the most optimistic about future mobility.

-‘scepticism of authority’. Unlike many societies in East Asia, Africa is much more like Western liberal democracies in its anticipation that political power will be abused

-‘cosmopolitanism’. Because of the heterogeneous and small-scale nature of historical African society, Africans endlessly had to deal with differences – different languages, different cultures, different histories. This is reflected in African languages where the word for “stranger” is typically the same word as for “guest

from here Vox.eu https://voxeu.org/article/africa-s-latent-assets

Got to note this here while I a reading “Things fall apart” by Chinua Achebe, where it shows

econometrics and strategy statistics

“Differences of opinion in economics are not largely about the precision of estimated data, a la high energy physics, but about the particular assumptions used by the analyst to move from data to estimated parameters of interest. Taking this seriously is what I mean above by “strategic statistics”: the fact that identification in economics requires choices by the analyst means we need to take the implications of those choices seriously”

“there is often a tension between reporting results truthfully and the decisions taken based on those results”

from https://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2021/04/20/statistics-that-takes-strategic-behavior-seriously-a-clark-for-isaiah-andrews/

Deustch in “Beginning of Infinty” says “Like scientific theories, policies cannot be derived from anything. They are conjectures. And we should choose between them not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations: how hard to vary.”

AOC, Smith and the Invisible Hand

AOC says she likes Adam Smith and discussion ensues https://mobile.twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1376263604584976388

Is Adam Smith the capitalist forefather that unveiled to us the Invisible Hand, she decides who stays low or climb high (said with the voice of those green critters in You Story

Bad news, Adam Smith only used the I.H. expression 3 times in his books, two of them he used it to make fun of old things, the 3rd stuck but we are not sure that was not sardonic either

So let us forget the interpretations that piled up over the centuries, let us go and read him like Chomsky did https://mobile.twitter.com/paleofuture/status/1376378264575299591

You got to read the classics especially when the times are achanging