Category Archives: history

Doing the Possible: Musings on good governance

I’ve been reading “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon,” which is a book that attempts to explain why some government policy succeeds and some fails. The book outlines how public policy requires a clear objective, a clear plan to reach that objective, and the ability to follow through with it. It all seems rather obvious when you write it out like that, but the book offers some definite insights.

A clear objective seems obvious, but is surprisingly easy to overlook. Gerald Ford promised to “whip inflation now,” but how exactly did he expect to do that? Supposedly the government would politely encourage citizens to do things like grow more food and use less fuel, to increase supply and decrease demand. It’s a nice idea, but polite encouragement doesn’t move the economy, and Fords “WIN” policy went nowhere.

A clear plan is also something that seems obvious, but often gets overlooked. When California reformed its electric grid in the 90s, no one had really thought through how the new system would work. They set mandates to ensure that prices were capped for consumers, but did nothing to ensure adequate supply. It was legal, for example, to buy power at a low price in California and export it for the uncapped price in other states. Then, if California didn’t have enough power, the utility was obligated to import power from other states no matter the cost, but was not allowed to pass this cost on to customers. This lead to companies easily gaming the system by exporting power for cheap, then re-importing it at a higher price. 

People like to blame greedy companies for the failed California power experiment, but companies are always greedy in all cases. The government should create a system in which corporate greed leads to societal good, such as how tech companies have given us ever better computers at lower and lower cost. Failure to plan leads to a system that is designed to fail.

The ability to follow through is a common complaint, but it too has unexpected pitfalls. The political class has different incentives than both the bureaucrats and the people, but they all work together for a plan to succeed. Politicians have an incentive to pass a bill and say they “fixed” something, that’s why most celebration happens on when a bill is pass instead of 5 years later when its effects are being evaluated. Bureaucrats are just career workers like anyone, and have an incentive to do their job and get paid. They aren’t incentivized to go above and beyond for the benefit of a politician who might not be there in four years. 

This is why it’s so common for politicians to take office promising “big changes” but still not accomplish much. Once the bill is passed and the photo-op is finished, it’s out of their hands and they don’t has a reason to keep caring. And when someone comes in saying they’ll “upend the stuffy bureaucracy,” well if they don’t meet the career employees halfway they’ll engender resentment in a group that can drag its feet and wait for the political will to die down.

All told, the book does have a lot of prescriptions for good governance:

  • Have an idea for how to fix a problem, and don’t make a plan of action without a strong idea. Likewise, seek out good ideas from everywhere, and be willing to challenge your own ideas to see if they’re actually appropriate.
  • Make a rational design for how the problem will be fixed. Focus on the design, not just on getting buy-in from the right pressure groups. Stress-test the design and hire people to poke holes in it. Then fix those design holes before passing a new law.
  • Ensure oversight and continued evaluation even after a law is passed. The job doesn’t end after the vote and the signature.
  • Understand that government is different than any other sector, and that you have to meet people halfway. You can’t treat public employees or the public at large as workers in your company or as cogs in a machine. 
  • Don’t assume the success of a plan. And don’t assume that just because it hasn’t failed yet that it won’t in the future. Look for any signs that cracks are forming, and fix them before they get too big. The space shuttle Colombia flew 27 missions, many of which showed problem signs, before the fateful 28th mission that ended in disaster.
  • Keep re-evaluating. If a program is no longer fit for purpose, fix it, replace it, or kill it. Be willing to see that something isn’t working and be willing to change it. And don’t keep trying the same program over and over without change, be willing to go back to the beginning and look for new ideas and new designs.

That, in a nutshell is what the book is about (or at least my reading of it). It’s certainly more uplifting that what you expect from a book about governance, but without ignoring the data and the details. I’ll have more to say on it later, but I think anyone who likes this sort of thing should check it out.

Beware of maps that are just population density maps

Sorry for forgetting to post last week. I haven’t kept up with this blog as much as I should be.

XKCD has a well-known comic showing how we too often overanalyze what are really just population density maps. It’s very easy to notice a pattern and extrapolate silly things from it. I recently saw another such example of this on social media I wanted to quickly bring up.

The implications of this map seems obvious, there were way more battles in Europe than anywhere else on earth. People on social media had all sorts of explanations:

Population density: battles mostly happen where people are, see the big stretch of emptiness in the Canadian Arctic, for instance. Europe has been densely populated for most of its history, so of course it had a lot of battles.

Recency bias: Europe fought 2 World Wars within the last century or so. As the largest wars in human history these of course had the most battles in human history, so there’s a lot of data points from that.

Warlike nature: maybe Europeans are just more warlike than the peaceful people in other parts of the world?

But the most obvious explanation seemed to be missing: Wikipedia is edited by the global online community, which is dominated by the the Anglosphere and Europe. Anglospheric and European editors will naturally gravitate towards writing many many articles about Europe and it’s history rather than the history of the world outside of Europe. A battle of 3000 people in the middle ages will have been studied by students in whatever country it happened in, even if it wasn’t important globally. And if that student was European or from the Anglosphere it’s more likely that they’ll grow up to be a Wikipedia editor and so add this unimportant battle into the encyclopedia.

So while there are some trends on this map that do come from the underlying data (ie there are way less battles in places where few people live), most of it is a function of bias. People write what they know. If there was an Indian version of Wikipedia instead, I’m certain the density of dots would be a lot higher there and a lot lower in Europe.

“The Crime of ’73”

Boy, these posts aren’t quite coming out weekly now are they?

I might have posted on this topic before, but I wanted to write something down and this was on my mind. It’s interesting how the controversies of yesteryear always fade away, even though in their day they dominated the news and the mind-space of politically conscious voters.

Take the Silver vs Gold movement. When America was founded, it had a bi-metallic standard, meaning that both silver and gold were legal tender. Congress set down in writing how much weight of silver made a dollar and how much gold made a dollar, and so both could be used to buy and sell. But of course, as commodities the price of silver and gold in the market would fluctuate, but congress didn’t understand or act quickly enough to fix things.

For example, silver mines in Mexico continued to run and depressed the price of silver relative to gold. This created an arbitrage opportunity because the price of gold was higher than that of silver:

  • Take 10 silver dollars and exchange them for 10 gold dollars, as they are equivalent
  • Take the gold dollars to Mexico and melt them down.
  • Take that gold and exchange it for raw silver
  • Bring that silver back to the Mint in America and demand to have it struck into silver dollars. Because of the price difference between silver and gold, the silver you brought back will make more than 10 dollars worth, so you can pocket the extra as your profit.
  • Start back from the beginning, trading 10 silver dollars for 10 gold dollars

This happened because congress set a fixed value for a commodity who’s value changed on the market, and as that value changed there was arbitrage created. Gold flowed out of the country and was replaced with silver. When the California gold rush happened, the price of gold suddenly decreased and the whole process reversed. Congress didn’t understand what was happening, and so simply decided to remove the bimetallic standard to stop this from happening.

But now we get to “The Crime of 1873.” When congress removed the silver standard in 1873, silver miners could no longer have their pure silver struck into coins that could be used as tender. The mint was by far the largest purchaser of silver and so removing silver from the standard removed most of the demand and so killed the price. Congress therefore upended the livelihoods of thousands of miners and mining towns by changing the laws on coinage. And those people never forgave them.

For years this “Crime” was the hottest topic in certain political sections. It was the litmus test for candidates and parties. And it was the entire foundation of the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan. For years, certain voters would never vote for a candidate or party who had supported the “Crime,” and they may not have even kept polite company with voters who supported those candidates. In its time, the “Crime” was seen as the greatest betrayal possible, and plenty of people pointed to it as the reason for national or local economic problems. They blamed the “Crime” and hoped that overturning it would fix things.

Of course, America never regained the silver standard. For a time, the Federal government compromised and declared it would still buy silver from the miners directly, but in time even this subsidy was removed. The people affected by the “Crime” probably never forgave the Republicans (who passed the bill) for what they did. Indeed the “Crime’s” authors had a hard time defending their actions in the face of angry voters. Some authors claimed that the bill didn’t do what critics claimed, and that the US had technically been non-silver since 1853. Others claimed that ending the silver standard was an unintended biproduct. But this had the perverse effect of amplifying conspiracy theorists who believed the bill was passed with malicious intend, and giving ammo to those who wanted to overturn it.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the “Crime of 73” was as much a controversial topic as any political topic today. Friendships could be ended by it. But it too did pass. I think most of the controversies of our day shall also pass, these days even American History students will barely remember the “Crime.”

Choosing your facts based on your beliefs; everyone believes they are the rational one

It’s very common and very well-known that people will, to an extent, choose their facts to fit their beliefs. But for many the facts they choose aren’t necessarily even well-founded.

If you are a conservative, you probably prefer generally lower taxes, and you can find well-heeled economists who generally prefer lower taxes and lower spending over higher taxes and higher spending. Likewise a liberal or leftist can find economists who support higher taxes and higher spending. The issue is not “settled” and as with anything in economics (besides rent control, which is universally known to be bad) there are voices on either side.

But there are some things that are uncontroversially accepted as true by all the experts in their field, and for some reason there are people that argue against it for no reason whatsoever.

When I was in school, I remember a debate about teaching evolution. To cut to the chase, many Christians (not all by a long shot) have thought that evolution undermines their religion, and no matter how much evidence there is for it, these Christians will choose facts to fit their beliefs. That includes denying evolution, but also denying the fossil record (which supports evolution) and the age of the Earth (which supports evolution). This sometimes means denying modern microbiology and cancer biology (which are evolution in action). It’s fairly well-known by anyone who isn’t a Christian that this is a Dumb Thing To Do, and that picking your facts based on your beliefs just leaves you looking stupid.

But then I found that while the Christians do it, the anti-Christians do it too.

Let’s be clear: some atheists are just people who don’t believe in God. That’s fine, everyone has their beliefs. But some atheists are better termed anti-theists, they are people who oppose religion and its existence entirely. And it is these atheists that have constructed their own theories of “Intelligent Design” to support their ideas. Often these theories try to prove that Christianity is not only false, but that is is a complete con from start to finish and that no one truly believes in it anyway.

The Atheist version of Intelligent Design is the “Jesus Myth Theory.” This is the idea that not only was Jesus just a mortal man (not the son of God), but that there was never even a person called Jesus at all, and that this is proof that Christianity was an invented scam. To be blunt, this idea has no more credence than Intelligent Design, but so-called rational atheists who turn up their nose at the stupid Christians with their stupid Intelligent Design will still believe this idea because they have chosen their facts based on their beliefs. I may write a post later about the evidence for Jesus’ existence, but the point I’m trying to make is that even communities which are adamant in their own rationality can wind up being suckered into myths just because those myths agree with what they want to believe.

Let’s get one thing straight: EVERYONE believes that they’re rational. Everyone believes that their opinions are backed by evidence, backed by science, fundamentally true, and that only the dumb and misled would ever believe something different. That’s what makes the self-professed “Rationalist” community so misguided: claiming you’re the only community focused on rational beliefs is just admitting that you’ve never spoken to a community different than your own.

EVERY community believes they are the rational ones, believes they are driven by facts and not emotions, believes that the others are ignoring facts to suit their opinions. And the Rationalist community has it’s own Intelligent Design theories just as the Atheist and the Christian communities do. A good Rationalist, Atheist, or Christian should of course never believe something just because their compatriots believe it, or just because it would support some of their ideology, but a good Rationalist, Atheist, or Christian must also recognize that they probably have biases themselves and that their own community probably harbors an “Intelligent Design” theory all its own.

In the hallowed halls of Twitter and social media it’s widely believed that only the Left of the political spectrum knows and respects science, all right-wing beliefs are obviously false and dis-proven by data. The the exact inverse is believed on the right. I know both communities are havens of their own misinformation. I have seen too many on the Left tell me that supply and demand don’t exist, that building more housing doesn’t lower rent and cost and that inflation is driven only by corporate greed and not supply or demand. I have likewise seen the misinformation on the right over gun deaths, drug crime, vaccines and the like. I’m sure some of my own beliefs are misinformation, but we are all the heroes in our own stories and so self-reflection is very hard.

But I just wrote this post because even if I’m only screaming into the void I wanted to remind people that everyone thinks they are rational. Your political enemies who you consider irrational and emotional idiots are human just like you, and they arrived at their beliefs through the exact same human mechanisms you did. Are you sure anything and everything you believe is true? Are you sure there could never be any evidence that supports your opponents? Don’t dismiss people are idiots just because they believe something else, most humans are just as rational as you.

The Many Failures of Industrial Policy

“Industrial policy” is once again the word of the day. Much like how Margaret Thatcher’s greatest triumph was Tony Blair, Donald Trump’s greatest triumph will be Joe Biden. Thatcher forced her opponents to change their policy, socialism was nixed from Blair’s Labour, and Starmer it seems unlikely to bring it back. So too did Donald Trump make free trade into a dirty word for Democrats and American politicians in general. Whereas Obama, Clinton, and 2 Bushes all championed free trade agreements, Biden increased tariffs on everyone he could (even Canada). And instead of free trade and free competition, he has made directed subsidies of domestic industry his main economic plank.

Tariffs and subsidies make up the economic policy known as “industrial policy” and to be blunt, I hate it. Industrial Policy exactly what Servan-Schreiber proposed in his book “The American Challenge,” and I think looking at that book with a modern lens outlines industrial policy’s biggest flaws. You can’t predict the future, and so a government that tries to force its economy in certain directions often winds up funding dead ends and missing out on the next big thing. Look at what Servan-Schreiber thought governments should fund (supersonic planes, space industry), and look how much of it was bunk. Now look at all the things Servan-Schreiber didn’t think were worth a mention (genetics, the Internet, renewable energy) and look at how they’ve transformed our modern economies. And Servan-Schreiber wasn’t some rando, he was a French politician who could make actual decisions on French industrial policy.

The government just isn’t as good as the market in actually innovating. And a hands-on government is more likely to try to smother innovation to protect jobs rather than allow creative destruction to increase productivity and national happiness.

There’s also the inherent corruption that comes with the government funding industries. Why is Intel given so much money for making microchips when there are plenty of other chip companies out there? The excuse is that Intel is making “more important” chips, but it looks to me like they’re just plowing government subsidies right back into their dividend, handing that money to their billionaire share-holders. So billionaires receive billions of Federal Dollars, and we’re supposed to assume this isn’t corruption?

I don’t like the government giving handouts and bailouts to their favorite, politically connected billionaires. I’d prefer companies be forced to stand up on their own 2 feet like the workers have to. You want to corner the chip industry? Do it by providing a better product, don’t just demand ever more subsidies and protectionism.

This sort of policy is exactly the kind of failure that we learned about in Latin American history as well. Many countries in the 20th century instituted a policy of “imports subsidizing industrialization,” where they raised tariffs on foreign goods to subsidize domestic industry. This led to political capture by the industrialist however, as they realized it was far easier to protect their profits by demanding ever higher tariffs and subsidies rather than investing in producing better products. In the end these countries were left with bloated, uneconomical industrial sectors giving sub-par products to customers. The customers lost as they got less for their money than if they could just buy foreign products without the tariffs. Even today Brazil has extortionate prices on consumer electronics, higher than any other country, and the prices only go down on the rare occasions when the tariffs get cut.

So I don’t want industrial policy, and I want it even less knowing that my political opponents can control it. America currently has a divided government, but a united government that engage in industrial policy is by far the most likely to simply hand the money to the most politically connected industrialists at the expense of everyone else. If you’re a Democrat, would you want Trump to be handing billions of taxpayer’s dollars to his favorite industries?

And I don’t want the government to subsidize dead end industries at the expense of growing ones. I don’t want them to cut off creative destruction and leave us with hand-weavers instead of looms. I don’t want them to protect domestic manufacturers and leave consumers worse off. I don’t like industrial policy, and I think Biden’s greatest failure is that he has become Trump’s greatest triumph.

If the weavers get replaced by machines, who will buy the clothes?

I’ve seen way too many articles about AI casting doom and gloom that it will “replace millions of jobs” and that this will lead to societal destruction as the now job-less replacees have no more money to spend.  The common refrain is “when AIs replace the workers, who will buy the products?”

This is just another fundamental misunderstanding of AI and technology.  AI is a multiplier of human effort, and what once took 10 men now takes 1.  That doesn’t mean that 9 men will be homeless on the street because their jobs are “replaced.”  The gains reaped from productivity are reinvested back into the economy and new jobs are created.

When the loom replaced hand-spinning weavers, those weavers were replaced.  But they could eventually find new jobs in the factories that produced looms, and in other factories that were being developed.  When computers replaced human calculators, those calculators could now find jobs programming and producing computers.

For centuries now, millenia even, technology has multiplied human effort.  It used to take dozens of people to move a single rock, until several thousand years ago someone had the bright idea of using ropes, pullies, and wheels.  Then suddenly rocks could be moved easily.  But that just in turn meant the demand for moving rocks shot up to meet this newer, cheaper equilibrium, and great wonders like the Pyramids and Stonehenge were suddenly built.

The same will be true of AI.  AI will produce as many new jobs as it creates.  There will be people to produce the AI, people to train the AI, people to ensure the AI has guardrails and doesn’t do something that gets the company trending on Twitter.  And there will be ever more people to use the AI because demand is not stable and demand for products will rise to meet the increase in supply generated by the AI.  People will want more and more stuff and that will lead to more and more people using AI to produce it.

This is something that people get hung up on, they think that demand is stable.  So when something that multiplies human effort gets created, they assume that since the same amount of products can be produced with less effort, that everyone will get fired.  Except that demand is not stable, people have infinite wants and finite amounts of money. 

Technological progress creates higher paying jobs, subsistence farmers become factory workers, factory workers become skilled workers, skilled workers enter the knowledge economy of R&D.  These new higher paying jobs create people who want more stuff because they always want more stuff, and now have the money to pay for it.  This in turn increases demand, leading to more people being employed in the industry even though jobs are being “replaced” by machines.

To bring it all back to weavers, more people are working in the textile industry now than at any point in human history, even though we replaced weavers with looms long ago.

AI will certainly upend some jobs.  Some people will be unable or unwilling to find new jobs, and governments should work to support them with unemployment insurance and retraining programs.  But it will create so many new jobs as well.  People aren’t satisfied with how many video games they can purchase right now, how much they can go out to restaurants, how much housing they can purchase, etc.  People always want more, and as they move into higher paying jobs which use AI they will demand more.  That in turn will create demand for the jobs producing those things or training the AIs that produce those things. 

It has all happened before and it will happen again.  Every generation thinks that theirs is the most important time in the universe, that their problems are unique and that nothing will ever be the same.  Less than three years ago we had people thinking that “nothing will ever be the same” due to COVID, and yet in just 3 short years we’ve seen life mostly go back to normal.  A few changes on the margins, a little more work from home and a little more consciousness about staying home when sick, but life continued despite the once-a-century upheaval.

Life will also continue after AI.  AI will one day be studied alongside the plow, the loom, and the computer.  A labor-saving device that is an integral part of the economy, but didn’t lead to its downfall.

AI art killed art like video killed the radio star

Everyone knows the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, it was one of the earliest big hits on MTV (back when it was still called Music Television). The song is pretty good, but it also speaks to a genuine fear and wonder about our world, that changing technology upends our social fabric and destroys our livelihood. The radio star who just wasn’t pretty enough for video, or couldn’t compete with the big production values of music videos, or just didn’t like dancing and being seen at all. That radio star is the Dickensian protagonist of the modern age, as they are tossed aside and replaced when new technology comes along.

This Luddite fear has pervaded throughout history. The loom-smashing followers of Ned Ludd are only the most famous, but there were silent actors who never made it in talkies. There were photo-realistic painters who could never compete with a camera. John Henry died trying to beat a steam drill. In each case, an argument could be made that the new technology removed some important human element. The painters could claim that photography wasn’t “true art”. And the loom smashers too probably believed that their handcrafts were more “real” and more deserving of respect than the soulless cloth that replaced it.

So why is AI art any different? Why should we care about the modern Luddites who want to ban it or restrict it? I say we shouldn’t.

AI art steals from other artists to make its images

common argument

No more than any artist “steals” when they learn from the old masters. It is a grievous misunderstanding of how AI works to claim that it cuts and pastes from other images, and an AI training itself on a dataset of art is no different than an art student doing the same whether in university or on their own. The counter-argument I’ve heard is “why are you ascribing rights to an AI that should only belong to humans! Yes humans can learn from other art, but AI shouldn’t have the right to!” I’m not ascribing anything to AI, the person who coded the AI and the person who used the AI have the right to use any images they can find, just as an artist does. And just as the output of an artist learning from old masters is itself new art, so too is the output of coding or using an AI that has been trained on old works.

AI art is soulless

common argument

As soulless as loom-made fabric is compared to hand-made. Or as soulless as a photograph is compared to a hand-painted picture. Being made with a machine doesn’t detract from something for me, and I think only bias causes it to detract from others.

AI art takes money out of artists’ pockets, it should be banned to protect the workers’ paychecks

common argument

Why is the money of the workers more important than the money of the consumers? Loom-made fabric competes with hand-spun fabric, should we smash looms to keep the tailors’ wages up? Are we ok with having everything cost more because it would hurt someone’s business if they had to compete against a machine? The counter-argument I’ve seen to this is that the old jobs replaced by AI were all terrible drudgery and it’s good that they were replaced, whereas art is the highest of human expressions and should never be replaced. Again I think this is presentism and a misreading of history. I’m sure there were tailors and seamstresses who though sewing and making fabric was the absolute bomb, who loved their job and though that their clothes had so much heart and soul that they were works of art in and of themselves. And I know there are artists in the modern day for whom most of their work is dull drudgery.

Thinking that your job and only your job is the highest form of human expression and should never be replaced, well to me that just shows a clear lack of empathy towards everyone else on earth. No one’s job is safe from automation, but all of society reaps the benefits of automation. We can all now afford far more food, more clothing, more everything, since we started automating manual labor. Labor saving creates jobs, it doesn’t destroy them, it frees people to put their efforts towards other tasks. We need to make sure that the people who lose their jobs due to automation are still cared for by society, but we should not halt technological progress just to protect them. AI art allows creators and consumers to have more art available than they otherwise would. Game designers can whip up art far more quickly, role-players can get a character portrait without having to pay, this lets people have far more art available than they otherwise would. In the same way that the loom let us have far more clothing available than we otherwise would.

AI art is always terrible

common argument

I find it funny that this often comes paired in internet discourse with “I’m constantly paranoid and wondering if the picture I’m looking at was made by AI or not.” There’s a very Umberto Eco-esque argument going on in anti-AI spaces. AI is both terrible and easily spotted, but also insidious and you never quite know if what you’re seeing is AI, and also everyone is now using AI art instead of “real” art.

If real art is better than AI art, wouldn’t there be a market for it still? There’s still a market for good food even though McDonald’s exists, if AI art is terrible and soulless than it isn’t really a danger to anyone who can’t make good art themselves. And if AI art is always terrible, then why are so many people worried about whether the picture they’re seeing is AI-made or not? Shouldn’t it always be obvious?

This is very obviously an emotional argument. If you can convince someone that a picture was not made with AI, they’ll defend it. If you convince them it was made with AI, they’ll attack it.

This was a vague disconnected rant, but I’ve become sort of jaded to the AI arguments I’ve seen going on. I had thought that modern society had somewhat grown out of Ludditism. And to be frank, many of the people I see making anti-AI arguments are supposedly pro-science and pro-rationalism. But it seems that ideology only works so long as their “tribe” doesn’t ever get threatened.

So, what exactly was the metaverse?

This may just prove that I’m an out of touch old fogey, but I never cared for the metaverse hype and am not surprised it failed. Yes Meta, the company which renamed itself for the metaverse, hasn’t yet admitted defeat, but at this point I’m willing to say it failed. The metaverse was never explained to me in a way that made it seem both feasible and viable. “Imagine you could train surgeons in the metaverse, they wouldn’t need to train on Cadavers and Patients!” Yes, imagine the quantum leap in technology that would be required to allow for that kind of haptic feedback. Because it isn’t enough to know where everything is and what it looks like, knowing how much resistance the body gives to you as you force your way into it is also very important, and you don’t get that playing VR Surgery. “Imagine you could go to the office in the metaverse!” Why would I want to do work with a VR headset on my head?

I know I’m more than a year late to the party, but I never understood just what the metaverse was supposed to be or accomplish. To some people it was a Sci-Fi future like the matrix (impossible). And to others, it was clearly just a solution in search of a problem. But the most audacious thing is that for a while, it seems every company wanted to be a Metaverse company. I was recently pointed to a hilarious ETF themed for the metaverse. They’ve got Meta in their, that’s fine. They’ve got AMD and nVidia, yeah I guess graphics cards would be needed. Then they have Coinbase. Why the hell is Coinbase a metaverse company? I looked it up and some people were trying to tie “Web3” to the Metaverse, and that crypto would be the currency of the Metaverse. Crypto cannot even reliably operate as a currency of any kind, so it sure isn’t taking over the Metaverse.

Then it seems that every gaming company of any size was a metaverse company. EA, Take Two, Nintendo? Yeah, they made the Virtual Boy, so I guess they know what a shitshow VR headsets can be. But if the best people could think of for the metaverse was VR gaming then that says a lot about how little though was even put into the concept.

Now, Web3 and Crypto in general are already their own solution in search of a problem, but nothing every dies with a bang, it just fades away. And I think we’ll have a long time yet before Crypto and “The Metaverse” finally fade. Even after Facebook realizes how terrible their new name is, some other company will probably take up the banner to scam investors. But I cannot ever see myself replacing my gaming PC or any human interaction with a VR headset.

Socialism Betrayed: Racist Great Man theory of history strikes again

There was some mid historian who once said: “The history of modern Europe can be defined by 3 men: Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler.” This plithy remark sums up much about the “great man” theory of history.

For those who don’t know, the great man theory believes that history is moved not by economic or societal or any large scale forces, but by the actions of individuals, the “great men” (almost never women). This theory opines that it was Napoleon, whose conquests spread republicanism throughout Europe and whose terrorizing of European monarchs lead to the Concert of Europe, it was this Napoleon who defined the course of the 19th century. And in just the same way, Lenin and Hitler in their own ways defined the course of the 20th century, pulling Europe in their directions of communism or fascism, remaking the modern world through their life and death. NATO and the Warsaw pact, whose presence defined Europe for half a century, came about because of Hitler. And Leninist communism, which defined the ideological struggle between East and West, came about obviously due to Lenin.

This great man theory has been attacked by much better historians than I, but I want to focus right now on how it completely invalidates the role of any individual in society except the Great Man himself. Napoleon without an army to command and a state to lead is nothing, and yet his soldiers, his bureaucrats, and the entire nation he inherited are meaningless in the great man theory of history. And the revolutions which toppled the monarchy and allowed Napoleon to begin his rise were not the actions of solitary great men, but a great mass movement of the French people as a whole. It is likely that even if Napoleon had never existed, the conflict between revolutionary republicanism and monarchism which defined much of his legacy would still have happened. And if Lenin had not existed, the conflict between capitalism and communism would likely still have been present.

I’m reading “Socialism Betrayed” by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny and it’s startling how in the very first pages of the book, they define their thesis that the great man theory is true and the people of society do not matter.

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not occur because of an internal economic crisis or popular uprising. It occurred because of the reforms initiated at the top by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev

Socialism Betrayed

Really?! It didn’t happen because of nationalist movements among the subjugated peoples of the USSR, like the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians? It didn’t happen because of mass movements which defined the collapse of every other Warsaw Pact nation in Europe? It didn’t happen because of the well-documented shortages and flailing USSR economy propped up almost entirely by oil and gas money? How easy it is to do history when you can define your villain and ignore all context!

I can already tell that this book will be dumb. Real dumb. Probably as bad as “The End of Growth” for how much it will ignore the facts to suit and opinion. Why are all the dumbest books I read the anti-capitalist ones?

Joel Kurtzman is the opposite of Richard Heinberg

I just wanted to start by saying I’ve become much more lackadaisical about these posts recently. My work is getting interesting, so I’m not putting as much time and effort into my research prior to posting. I’m mostly shooting from the hip based on whatever comes to mind. I still enjoy this though so I’ll keep doing it, and I hope my couple of readers don’t mind the decline in quality.

With that said, it’s so interesting that Joel Kurtzman detects the exact opposite problem as Richard Heinberg. For those who remember, Richard Heinberg wrote “The End of Growth” in which he posited that there would be no more economic growth after 2010 (lol, lmao even). He claimed that this was because the world had entered an inextricable supply crunch, there just wasn’t enough stuff to go around (especially oil!) and our economy was already well past the carrying capacity of the planet. This meant that we couldn’t keep growing, because without more stuff to put in our factories we couldn’t make products to sell to people. We would all have to get by with less.

Hilariously, Joel Kurtzman detects the opposite problem from his vantage point in 1987. He detects a severe overproduction of commodities and finished goods caused by the industrialization of the global south and its competition with America, Europe and Japan. In Kurtzman’s thesis, we are entering an inescapable race to the bottom where wages will continue to fall further and further as companies try to make money while the prices of goods fall. Not only that but the nations of the world have financed their overproduction through the accumulation of debt, which they won’t be able to pay off as prices fall meaning there will be a debt collapse and further unemployment.

I’m sure both authors would think me uncharitable towards their theses, but that was my reading from their books.

The point is, I think both of them are suffering from extreme recency bias. Heinberg was writing after a decade of constricted oil supply had caused a rise in prices and had been followed by an economy crash. He thought the constricted supply would continue forever and the low-growth era following the crash was permanent.

Kurtzman was writing after a supply crunch had turned into a supply glut. OPEC’s oil embargo of the 70s had forced the world’s economies to become more efficient and induced many companies to step up their own oil production. In the late 80s, rising oil investment turned into an oil boom, and to maintain market share OPEC countries increased production without the consent of the entire group. This, alongside new technologies to make oil use more efficient, led to an oil glut and depressed prices. Add to this that prices were falling in other sectors, and Kurtzman thought this trend would continue forever.

Both Kurtzman and Heinberg astutely identified trends in their immediate present, and then extrapolated those trends infinitely into the future to arrive at their desired policy goals. For Heinberg: it was degrowth. For Kurtzman: it was protectionism. Both of them failed to understand that actions change with changing conditions. Heinberg didn’t realize that a rise in oil prices would spur investment into new extraction methods (fracking) and more efficient usage of oil (hybrid/electric cars). Kurtzman didn’t understand that falling commodity prices allows companies to produce more for less, nor did he understand that the American economy didn’t need manufacturing jobs to stay highly paid. If more stuff is being produced while still profitable, then consumers win because prices go down. And American consumers won most of all because tech jobs were replacing laborious manufacturing jobs.

I know pontificating is a hard job, I think all the pontifications I’ve made on this blog have been off the mark (though I don’t ask for money). But I find it fascinating that these two authors erred in exactly the same way to arrive at completely divergent answers. I’d love to have Kurtzman from 1987 debate Heinberg from 2010. Don’t let them use historical data, just explain to each other why will commodity prices have to remain high/low for the foreseeable future? I wonder whose head would explode first.