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Cope, or good sense?
As I wrote last time, I’ve been following Dr Mike Isratael’s youtube channel in my own quest to lose weight and (maybe) gain muscle. And as I said last time, Dr Mike says all the right words to make me think he knows what he’s talking about, but I’m afraid I only believe him because he knows the shibboleths, not because he’s actually right. What if he’s a charlatan like the rest, but his shibboleths are “basic biochemistry” instead of “pseudo-right wing culture,” and that’s why I believe him? What if what he’s saying isn’t correct, will I have the sense to know?
Well I’ve started… not disbelieving, but rather not following all the advice he gives. On the one hand, this could be proof that I’m a free-thinker, who takes all advice to heart and executes it not based on its source or shibboleths, but on its factual content. On the other hand, maybe that’s all cope and I’m not following it because I don’t want to.
The basic idea comes down to 1 thing: dieting. As I said, my primary goal is to lose weight, but I’m hitting the gym and I’d sure like to gain muscle on the way. Well Dr Mike has a video out about how that entire idea is a myth, and that the most productive way to do things is to eat a calorie surplus to gain weight (and go to the gym to make sure that’s muscle weight), while eating a calorie deficit in order to lose weight (and go to the gym to make sure that’s only fat weight). Trying to gain muscle on a calorie deficit, or lose fat on a surplus, is inefficient and possibly impossible.
Now Mike does caveat this with a few exceptions. If an exceptionally jacked individual was gravely injured and has lost muscle and gained fat while laid up in the hospital, then it’s much easier for them to gain back that fat and lose back that muscle once they get out of the hospital. It’s always easier to get *back* in shape than to get in shape *for the first time*.
Another caveat he talks about is “newbie gains,” where someone who is young and never went to the gym can start gaining muscle/losing fat together. But the caveat to the caveat is that this isn’t sustainable, eventually it will be one or the other.
So I’ve decided to believe that I’m in the “newbie gains” stage, the caveat to my own claim being that I did used to go to the gym a bit and I’m not actually that young. Regardless, I’m choosing to believe that Dr Mike is giving this advice to aspiring bodybuilders, people who are already fairly muscular and with a health amount of bodyfat, and therefore his advice doesn’t apply to me who is very unmuscular and with an unhealthy amount of bodyfat.
To reiterate, my goal is to lose weight and gain muscle. Dr Mike says that’s not usually possible and that I have to pick one and only one goal if I’m going to succeed, and I’ve decided to ignore that advice and believe that his advice is aimed at an audience that I’m not really a part of.
But maybe this is all wrong. Maybe for an obese person to become healthy, they need to lose a lot of weight, and during that time they simply won’t gain much of any muscle no matter how they try. And maybe that obese person is me.
If I were to take Dr Mike’s advice to heart, I would probably restructure my training with the understanding that I need to focus solely on the weight loss, probably by entering a more severe calorie deficit than I’m at now, in order to more quickly lose weight so I can then put on muscle. I’d probably spend a lot less time thinking about my gym technique and a lot more time working on my diet.
Am I ignoring Dr Mike’s advice because I’m a free-thinker making a rational conclusion about whether his advice is right for me? Or am I doing it because this is the first piece of advice I just don’t like?
I don’t know.
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Exercise and shibboleths
I’ve been trying to lose weight and gain muscle for years. But despite being in the target Young Male demographic, I never listened to Joe Rogan, or Logan Paul, or any of the exercise/fitness influences. Part of that was that they just didn’t interest me. Part of that was that fitness is filled with a lot of pseudoscience, and as a scientist myself I could see that almost everything said online was tinged with nonsense and falsehood. Everyone is looking for “one weird trick” to get abs of steel and 4% body fat, which leads to a proliferation of voodoo practitioners giving terrible advice and selling you supplements.
I stayed away from online exercise discussions.
But while idly scrolling one day, I found a video by Dr Mike Israetel of Renaissance Periodization. And for the first time in my life, I’m hooked. I’m watching his videos, I’m trying to learn his techniques, I’m putting into practice what he say I should be doing.
I think a large part of this sudden switch is that Dr Mike seems to have legit credentials. A teaching record at Lehman College, a genuine publication history, this guy is clearly doing science, not voodoo. But I think even more than his credentials are his shibboleths.
Put simply, Mike Israetel says all the right words as a scientist to make me (a fellow scientist) believe he knows what he’s saying. There are certain words that started out in science but have reached the mainstream: anyone can talk about carbohydrates and calories. But few people know what a motor unit is, or can accurately talk about the immune system. Dr Mike is saying things that pass the smell test to me (I am a fellow biology but not an exercise scientist specifically), and that helps me believe him when he says things I might otherwise be skeptical of.
And those shibboleths… make me nervous. Because I know I’m not actually doing research, I’m not actually seeking out all sides of the debate and forming my own rational conclusions. There’s hundreds of hucksters selling you on “the best way” to do exercise, so am I trusting Dr Mike for all the wrong reasons? Maybe he knows his biochemistry, but his exercise science is dogshit. I’d never know.
And even if Dr Mike is truly giving me the most accurate, up-to-date information in the scientific literature, that information could be wrong, and I could spend my time following baseless advice and getting less fit than if I’d just trusted the gymbro with a 6-pack and pecs.
I haven’t looked for any advice outside of Dr Mike, because to be honest I don’t have the time or the background necessary to know if he’s *really* got the goods or is a huckster like all the others. I have the background to know he knows his biochemistry, but beyond that I’m lost. But as someone without much time to exercise anyway, I feel like latching on to a charismatic Youtube professor is at least better than latching on to any other charismatic Youtuber, and is hopefully better than flying blind like how I used to exercise.
Time will tell.
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Healthcare needs to stop infantilizing its patients
I was once told a family story about one of my great-great aunts, let’s call her Clara. As a young adult, Clara was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or as it was known in those days “turning to stone.” Before Lou Gehrig made it noteworthy, the disease that bears his name was named after its most noticeable symptoms, a progressive atrophy of motor neurons until a person can’t even move at all. They feel like they’ve “turned to stone,” and death follows when the neurons controlling the heart or lungs also atrophy away.
Clara’s doctor told her sister about the diagnosis, but the sister was *adamant* that Clara not be told. “Turning to stone” was a horrific way to go, and conjured ideas of a person being trapped in their own body unable to move or call for help until at last they slowly, agonizingly, died. Clara was never told her diagnosis, and continued to see her doctor while being told lies that she was “improving” and “getting better.” Until at last she died.
And with the fullness of time, I guess she really will “turn to stone,” as will we all.
I don’t know what Clara thought as she was dying. Maybe she never really knew what was happening to her, or maybe she figured it out. Either way, her family probably thought they were doing her a favor by not telling her, and saving her the pain of knowing her inescapable fate.
But were they really saving her? Or did she pass away sad and frustrated that despite her efforts and all the encouragement, she only ever got worse and worse? Maybe knowing would have given her peace of mind, and made it easier for her to understand her condition.
Stories like Clara were common a century ago. It was not uncommon for doctors to hide a diagnosis from a patient, on the assumption that it was better they simply not know. Fortunately now we’re past that, and doctors are willing to treat patients with a lot more respect. Sometimes.
Recently I switched doctors and have been trying to continue taking the medicine I had been prescribed by my old doctor. My condition isn’t immediately life-threatening, but my live is much improved with the medicine. However I have had an absolutely terrible time of it, and have seen first hand how stupid the medical system can be when doctors get it into their heads that the patient is best kept in the dark.
The first thing that happened was that the doctors, with too little information in hand, misdiagnosed me and tried to brush brush off my condition. The medicine I’m taking has some slight psychoactive properties for some (although not for me) and is occasionally used to treat depression or insomnia. I have neither, and I wasn’t taking it for either.
I listed both my condition and the medicine I had been prescribed, and the doctor agreed to set up an appointment with me. But when I arrived for the appointment, the nurse did nothing more than take my weight before telling me that I was in the wrong place, *that* medicine is proscribed by psychiatric care, and I needed to get an appointment with an entirely different department. I made the appointment, but had no idea why I was even doing so.
The medicine isn’t psychiatric, nor is the condition. But because it has alternative affects, someone got it in their stupid thick skull that this was *only* a psychiatric medicine and that I couldn’t possibly be taking it for the *non-psychiatric* reason that I had put in the mandatory intake form. It’s clear neither doctors nor nurses ever read a damn word of the forms they ask you to fill out, because even glancing at mine would have told them what my condition *really* is. And if they *did* think I needed to visit psychiatric, then *they should have told me so before the damn appointment*. They should have realized “oh, this person is in the wrong place” and told me before they wasted my time!
As I said I scheduled the appointment with psychiatric, but after an angry phone call with the original doctor’s office, someone actually realized their mistake and got me a new appointment with someone who could treat my condition.
*Could* though, not *will*. Because see, my condition can also sometimes be treated with lifestyle changes, but I’ve worked on it for years with no luck before I got the medicine, and the medicine is the *only* thing that helped me. But the doctor I spoke to decided to treat me like someone who had never heard of their own condition, the condition *I had to tell these people about*, and started off with the whole lifestyle spiel before I had to cut them off and list off everything I’ve tried before medicine actually getting some help with medicine.
The doctor also decided that I had so *little* understanding of my condition that she had to list all the signs and symptoms, all the ways it will affect my health, even though *I already know all this, which is why I’m here for some god damned treatment*. These people were too stupid to read a form, and now are too stupid to listen to me and understand that I have had this for a while, I know what it’s all about, and I know I both need and want medicine to contain it.
They treated my like a child, quite frankly. They assumed that I was completely lacking in knowledge, that I didn’t know what I needed or wanted, and that I had zero understanding of my own health. I got a prescription but I’ve decided after filling it that I’m unlikely to ever visit this practice again, because for all the horrors of the healthcare system, infantalization of the patient is one thing that should have stayed in the 19th century.
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So just how *do* you get good at teaching?
As a scientist with dreams of becoming a professor, I know teaching is part of the package. Whether it’s a class of undergraduates or a single student in a lab, your knowledge isn’t worth anything if you cannot teach it to others. I always say: no one would have cared about Einstein if he couldn’t accurately explain his theories. It doesn’t matter how right you are, science demands you explain your reasoning, and if you can’t explain in such a way to convince others, you still have a ways to go as a scientist.
Einstein was a teacher. After discovering the Theory of Relativity, he wrote and lectured so as to teach his theory to everyone. Likewise I must be a teacher, whether teaching basic concepts to a class of dozens, or teaching high-level concepts to an individual or a small group, teaching is part of science, and mandatory for a professor.
But how do I get good at it?
The first problem is public speaking. I don’t think I get nervous speaking in public, but I do have a tendency to go too fast, such that my words don’t articulate what I’m actually thinking. It’s hard to realize that the concepts you know in your head will be new and novel to the whole world that lives *outside* your head. When teaching these concepts to someone else, you need to go step by step so that they understand the logical progression, you can’t just make a logical leap because you already know the intervening steps.
So OK, I need to practice speaking more, but beside that, what’s the best method for teaching? And here we get to the heart of why I’m writing this post, *I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does*.
Every decade it seems sociologists find One Weird Trick to make students learn, and every decade it seems that trick is still leaving many students behind. When I went to school, teaching was someone standing at the front of the class, giving a lecture, after which students would go home and do practice problems. This “classic” style of teaching is now seen as passe at best, outright harmful at worst, and while it’s still the norm it’s actively shunned by most newer teachers.
Instead, teachers now have a battery of One Weird Tricks to get students to *really* learn. “ACTIVE learning” is the word of the day, the teacher shouldn’t just lecture but should involve the students in the learning process.
For instance, the students could each hold remote controls (clickers) with the numbers 1 through 4 on them. Then the teacher will put up a multiple-choice question at random points during class, and the students will use their clicker to give the answer they think is correct. There’s no grade for this except participation, and the students’ answers are anonymized, but the teacher will give the correct answer after all the students answer, and a pie chart will show the students how most of their classmates answered. So the theory is that this will massively improve student learning in the following ways:
- Students will have a low-stakes way to test their knowledge and see if they’re right or wrong, rather than the high-stakes tests and homework that they’re graded on. They may be more willing to approach the problem with an open mind, rather than being stressed about how it will affect their grade.
- The teacher will know what concepts the students are having trouble on, and can give more time to those prior to the test.
- Students stay more engaged in class, rather than falling asleep, and likewise teachers feel more validated with an attentive class
The only problem is that the use of clickers has been studied, and has failed to improve student outcomes. Massive studies and meta-analyses with dozens of classes, thousands of students, and clickers don’t improve student’s learning at all over boring old lectures.
Ok, how about this One Weird Trick: “flipped classrooms.” The idea is that normally the teacher lectures in class and the students do practice problems at home. What if instead the students’ homework is to watch the lecture as a video, then in class students work on problems and the teacher goes around giving them immediate and personalized feedback on what they’re doing right or wrong?
In theory this again keeps students far more active, they’re less likely to sleep through class and the immediate feedback they receive while working through the problem sets helps the teachers and students know what they need to work more on. Even better, this One Weird Trick was claimed to narrow the achievement gap in STEM classes.
But another large meta-analysis showed that flipped classrooms *again* don’t improve student learning, and in fact *widen* the achievement gap between minority and white students. Not at all what we wanted!
In theory, science teaches us the way to find the truth. Our methods of storing information have gotten better and better and better as we’ve used science to improve data handling, data acquisition, and data transmission. I read both of those meta-analyses on my phone, whereas even just 30 years ago I would have had to physically go to a University Library and check out one of their (limited) physical journals if I wanted to read the articles and learn if Active Learning is even worth it or not.
But while we’ve gotten so much better at storing information, have we gotten any better at teaching it? We’ve come up with One Weird Trick after One Weird Trick, and yet the most successful (and common) form of teaching is a single person standing in front of 20-30 students, just talking their ears off. A style of teaching not too far removed from Plato and Aristotle, more than 2,000 years ago.
I want to get better at teaching, and I think public speaking is part of that. But beyond just speaking gooder, does anyone even know what good teaching *is*?
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The social side of science
To be blunt, I don’t know how to get better at the social side of science. There are many facets:
Starting a collaboration: getting people to realize you’re very interested in their work and they should be interested in yours, then making the logical leap that you should work together. OR recognizing that you have a strength paired with a deficiency that matches someone else, and seeing if you can work together on it.
Maintaining scientific connections. Collaborations don’t come from nothing, they are usually born from social connections, which need social maintenance like any other. I’m ok at introducing myself, but not good at maintaining connections.
Mentor/mentee. I want to be a good mentor, but don’t know how to put myself out there. I know I need to be a good mentee, but I don’t know how to find people to help me with what I don’t know.
Often times I realize I’m not living up to my own expectations and so I slink further and further into ignoring all social obligations because I don’t want to do them since I know I’ll do them badly. I need to break out of this if I’m going to succeed at science.
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More Arabic
كل يوم انا اشعر بالتعب جداً. هذا السبب الذي انا عم لا اكتب في هنا كل الاسبوع. لان اذهب الى الشغل بالدراجة، في هذا الوقت في السنة، اعود الى بيتي بعد الساعة الصباح.واركب في الظلام ايداً.
انا اتمنى عنضي الطاقة. اتمنى ان عندما اعود الى بيتي، في ذلك الوقت اراد ان افعل شي مثل اكتب في بلوغي واكتب برنامج كمبيوتر. لكن في هذا الايام، ليس عندي اي طاقة لاي شئ الا اشاهد شي في يوتوب.
اراد ان امارس اللغات ايضاً، هذا لان انا عم اكتب هذا بوست.
انا اشعر بااغضب ايضاً. الطريق في هذا المدينة خطيرة جداً. لكن المدينة تهتم.
ارادت ان اكتب اكثر من هذا لكن اراد ان بوست الان.
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Still can’t finish a game of Dyson Sphere Program
I blogged a while ago about losing interest in Dyson Sphere Program before I finished it. Well, I tried again and I still couldn’t finish. My reasons are many, some I think I talked about back then and some I think I didn’t. But they bear repeating because as much as this game is trying to claim the mantle of Factorio, it still comes up short in some important aspects.
First, I still don’t enjoy actually “building” things is DSP. In Factorio you start the game buildings things manually, which means you have to be physically next to whatever you want to build, but at least you can build everything as fast as you can run. Eventually you get little robots who will build things for you anywhere on the map, the only downside is that they’re a bit slower and use energy. DSP unfortunately has the worst of both worlds: you still have to stand next to whatever you’re building, but you *also* have to wait on slow little robots to build the stuff for you. You map out plans, and they *slowly* get to work.
This may seem a petty complaint, but it’s hard to overstate just how much this dampens my enjoyment. I never have the feeling of “let me throw down some massive blueprint that my robots will build, and then go do something else” because I know I’ll have to stand next to them while they build it. I can’t run off and let them do their thing, I have to *stand there*, not doing anything, or nothing gets done. And if the blueprint is big enough, I have to slowly shuffle along it so I can expand the robot’s radius, otherwise the outermost edges of the blueprint never get built either.
I also can’t just quickly build something like a massive transport belt stretching for miles, because I can’t build it at running speed, I have to *wait for the robots*.
OK, that’s a complaint I think I already covered in the previous post, but it bears repeating. What else? Oh yeah, flying in space is boring because again, there’s nothing to do but wait until you reach your destination. Oh, I already said that too?
Well there’s one complaint I’m pretty sure I *didn’t* cover last time but it’s a bit complicated. It has to do with multiple outputs.
In both Factorio and DSP, there are certain things you can build where you can’t build *just* item A, in order to build A you must *also* build an equivalent amount of B. And both A and B must have space to be built or neither can be, if you’re full up on A you can’t build B and vice versa. It’s a bit of a tough balancing act in a game where everything else is build on its own.
But I actually don’t think DSP handles this concept well, even though it has a lot more examples of it than Factorio.
In Factorio, the only time you have multiple outputs is in oil processing. When you start the game the only oil processing you can do is basic oil processing, which takes in crude oil and gives you petroleum gas (think methane and ethane). Basic is the right word for this, because it’s simple and easy with a 1-in-1-out setup. And it’s perfect for making the simple plastics (which you’ll need a lot of) because they require just petroleum gas and coal.
But you quickly research advanced oil processing, and that’s where you get multiple outputs. Advanced processing gives you petroleum gas plus light oil plus heavy oil. And if you don’t find some way to use up the light and heavy oil, you can’t get any more petroleum gas (so you can’t get more plastics). So why would you ever use advanced oil processing, when it complicates your life so much?
Well there are a few items (rocket fuel and lubricant) which *require* light and heavy oil. But also, if you crack all that light and heavy oil down to petroleum gas, you’ll end up with 50% more petroleum gas than what you’d get from basic oil processing.
So this recipe presents you with a trade-off: do you take the simple setup which gets you less total output, or the complicated setup which can get you more? Cracking heavy and light oil isn’t easy, it requires many more refineries and a lot of water, but when oil is scarce and plastic is in high demand, you need as much petroleum gas as you can get. On the other hand when oil is plentiful, maybe you don’t care about efficiency and just want the easier recipe.
DSP has a similar idea, except there’s no trade-off. DSP starts you off with their version of advanced oil processing, which has multiple outputs that you have to find a use for. Later on there are two recipes which can turn one output into the other or vice-versa. This has the same effect as the “cracking” I explained earlier, where it complicates your setup but allows you to have as much of one output as you can get. But in Factorio it’s a trade-off, and in DSP it’s mandatory.
DSP also have multiple outputs in some *exotic* recipes. DSP has all the “normal” raw materials (iron, copper, stone etc), but then it has fantasy ones like “Fire-Ice.” These fantasy materials can usually be processed to yield multiple outputs, at least one of which is a high-level output that normally requires an extremely complicated setup to create. This would be really cool, except on most maps these materials won’t be found in your starting star system, so you can’t even use them until you finish the tech tree anyway. And as I said about multiple outputs, you have to make sure you use up one of the outputs or it will back up your production of the other, and that’s kind of a pain.
I never got out of my starting star system in DSP. I did start launching a little Dyson Swarm and getting power from it. I even appreciated the swarm more this time than last time, as it fixed some of my power issues on my starting planet.
But I really did not enjoy shuffling back and forth between planets to build stuff. In Factorio you can get a bird’s-eye-view of your entire factory and slowly scroll around looking for issues. Or you can just look around for some bare area where you can stamp out more assembly lines. *Or* if you’re busy building that new assembly line, you can glance back at your factory to see how much extra material it can send your way or if you’ll have to make everything this line needs on-site.
I can’t do that in DSP. If there’s an issue on one planet such that it isn’t producing any science, I can’t diagnose that issue without flying all the way there (which takes a few minutes), then looking around for the cause. And perhaps the cause is that I need a few more items which are only produced on my *other* planet. So I have to fly back to the first planet, pick up those items, fly back to the planet with the issues, fix the issues, then fly back to wherever I started when I first noticed the issues so I can get back to what I was doing.
And I can’t build things at a distance, as I said in the first few paragraphs. When I finally got to the last kind of science, what I really wanted was to find somewhere fresh and empty to build so I could get away from the spaghetti I’d already created. There was a planet a few minutes away that I could have gone to. But it didn’t have all the raw materials I needed.
In Factorio that would be fine, I’d zoom to some empty part of the map in my bird’s-eye-view and start carefully planning out whatever assembly line I need to create that final type of science. I can then use a tool to count up how many and what kinds of machines I’ll need to build everything I’ve planned, and figure out what items I’ll need to import to other parts of the factory. Then I load up on machines and send the robots to build. While the robots are building, I can run to other areas and start sending the items needed over to that new area. By the time the robots are finished, everything has arrived and the assembly line can start producing science.
But in DSP this is a time-consuming and *boring* back and forth game of flying to the empty planet, planning out what I’ll build, flying back for machines, bringing them to the empty planet and *slowly* waiting for my robots to build everything while I stand around. Then I fly to whatever planets need to send materials this way and tell them to do so. Then I fly back to that planet where I built everything to make sure everything is working properly.
It’s a mess, it’s boring, and I just couldn’t be bothered to finish the game because of it.
I think if they give a Factorio-style map screen, along with robots who will build stuff when you aren’t standing next to them, the game would be improved just enough for me to finish it. But as long as everything takes so damn long, I don’t think I’ll ever finish it.
I unfortunately just went back to Factorio.
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Long time no post
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I keep having topics I do want to write about but don’t feel like I actually know enough to just sit down and start writing.
I wonder if that’s something I should just break past. This blog is anonymous, how much does it matter if I get things wrong? I don’t know, but it just doesn’t *feel* right to go shooting from the hip when I’m trying to talk about things I actually think are important.
I hope to have another post on Dyson Sphere Project up soon. Spoilers, I couldn’t finish a game again.
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Thomas Friedman’s the-world-is-flatitude
Flatitude is supposed to be a play on attitude
I remember reading about Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” thesis years ago. Put simply: he proposed that globalization meant the USA no longer enjoyed a by-default pre-eminance in the world economy. American companies and workers now had to compete with the entire world, and that inevitably would lead to worldwide wages equalizing and other companies rising up to meet American dominance. Gone are the days when an American can work for the world’s biggest company, headquartered in their hometown, and then go on vacation to places where “everything is so cheap!” The world’s biggest companies will be more likely to be headquartered in China and India than America, and wages worldwide will rise to the point that every country is as expensive to visit as America.
20 years on, none of that has happened.
At times and at places, global wages have risen relative to America. At times and at places, global companies have risen into industries once dominated by America. But in 2005, when Friedman published his book, the top 10 global companies by market cap were 80% American. In 2024, they’re 90% American. And in certain years (like 2016 and 2017), they’ve been 100% American. American companies still rule the global roost, and American wages are still the highest on earth. International workers still prefer to immigrate to America, despite the massive costs and uncertainties, rather than find a job with a global company in their home country.
I don’t know how Friedman himself portrayed his thesis in 2005, but in my part of the world (liberal and anti-American-by-default because the sitting president was a Republican), there was a lot of “take that America! You won’t stay on top for long and you’d better get used to it!” I think Friedman had a misread of history, and the readers had an even greater misread of the present.
There is a default mindset that I feel many people fall into when talking about economics. The idea goes: America used to be on top of the world because of unfair, random advantages. Those could be colonialism, those could be early industrialization. But now that the world is more fair (or once we *make it* more fair), America can’t coast on inertia, it will have to compete on a level playing field, and *of course* the rest of the world, which has 95% of the population to America’s 5%, will eventually out-compete it in *many* areas.
I think this belies a misunderstanding of the unfair advantages that America has *right now*. India, Nigeria, and China all have large populations, lots of natural resources, and growing middle classes. But it’s difficult to do business there because of import/export and currency restrictions, and often-times everything can be taken from you by government fiat, so it’s harder to create success and you’re more likely to leave the country if you do manage it. And when you leave the country, you can always go to Europe, but if you want to keep growing your business or your personal finances you go to America where the wages are higher and the business climate friendlier.
Friedman said that globalization, the technology that connects us and the legal/social willingness to offshore jobs and production will inevitably lead to a flattening of global economies and global wages. Why would Microsoft pay $100,000 to a programmer in America, when a programmer just as good in India will cost $10,000? They won’t. And so there will be more demand for Indian programmers and less and less demand for American ones. Law of supply and demand means American wages will fall and Indian wages will rise until the two equalize.
But alternatively, why would Microsoft put its money into India (as it must do in order to have the bank accounts, rental agreements, and so on which allow it to employ Indian workers), when capital controls will restrict its ability to get its money back out again? Companies don’t exist for a country’s good, they exist for their own good, and Microsoft wants to be able to move its money anywhere and everywhere at a moment’s notice. Capital controls, like what the developing world still employs, make it harder to do so, and make companies like Microsoft and others far more leery about investing in those countries.
An employee in America costs 10x as much, but at least your money will never get stuck in America with no way out.
And this is just the one example that leapt off the page at me. There are plenty more reasons why the world is not flat and probably won’t ever be. There are network affects to the USA that may take centuries to undo, such as the preeminence of the US stock markets at the expense of all others. India investors throw their money into the S&P more than the Indian stock markets, so an Indian company looking to grow fast with public money also needs to list on the S&P. That draws it further and further into connecting with the American economy, until it starts making more and more sense to just do its business in America as well. Oh it would never think of uprooting from India (and the government won’t allow it anyway), but it will invest more in American operations and less in Indian operations than it would if it didn’t get drawn to America by all the money that’s there.
Then there’s security. For all the internet memes, America is a safer place with a generally lower death rate than developing nations like India and Nigeria. There’s a whole lot of reasons for this, but it isn’t something that can be fixed quickly and easily with a bit more money. So an Indian worker would still prefer to make their money in America if it means they get to live in America as well, even if they could make the same amount of money in India.
I think there is a general under-estimating of what makes the American economy so strong. A lot of people assume it’s just inertia: America industrialized early, got to coast on colonialism, and then wasn’t destroyed in World War 1 and 2. That meant that it emerged in the 50s as the strongest economy on earth, but without those lucky breaks it has no reason to stay the strongest. So people assume America has just been coasting and the rest of the world will quickly catch up. I don’t think that’s the truth. A lot less attention is paid to just how much America’s laws and economic setup make doing business here easier than anywhere else.
There’s a separate meme about how “lucky” America is that it keeps finding natural resources everywhere. Coal, oil recently Helium, America just seems “lucky.” But while hydrocarbons certainly aren’t found everywhere, America isn’t *really* just lucky. The recent American oil boom is driven by fracking, and Europe could have joined in the boom except that they banned fracking entirely. There is plenty of frack-able (is that a word?) oil underneath Europe, even if there aren’t any Saudi-style oil fields there, but Europe can’t join the oil boom because its laws don’t allow it.
And American finds of lithium, helium and so on aren’t just luck either. In America, if you own a piece of land you generally own the mineral rights beneath it. That makes it economically viable to just start searching the land for any big piles of lithium/helium and so on, because if you find any its yours by default and you win a lot of money.
But in Australia, many mineral rights are held by the states. So why would I ever go hunting for lithium/helium on my land if I may not be able to get money out of it? If I have to pay the state a portion of my winnings? There’s probably just as much ultra-precious metals in Australia as there are in America, but less of it gets found because there’s less incentive. Not to say *nothing* gets found, Australia does have a mining-intensive economy, but less than if individuals had an incentive to go looking.
I just wanted to post this to say that the world is not flat, and America is not just lucky. Luck may play a role, but writers and commentators often don’t understand how America’s current laws and economic setup give it a *current* competitive advantage relative to all the other countries on earth. It isn’t just coasting on its *past* competitive advantage from the 1950s, and there’s no guarantee that the rest of the world *must* catch up to America unless they loosen their economic laws in turn.
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Streams of Consciousness 