Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2334

Robots and Utopia

There's something very strange about the fact that two persist worries I hear about the advance of technology are that robot labor will be able to replace human labor in market production and also that digital copying will make it impossible to get paid to create cultural products. Well, if robots are able to drastically eliminate the need to pay human beings to provide physical goods and services, then there'll be plenty of people with plenty of time and their hands to create cultural goods for free.

We're talking about a future in which there's neither a shortage of goods nor a shortage of people. We're talking, in other words, about utopia. For whatever reason, optimism is coded as a rightwing attitude in the contemporary United States, but people with their origins on the right ought to recognize these trends as the abundance of goods that makes it both possible and necessary to transcend capitalism and move to a world of from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Market exchange is a response to scarcity, and in many domains we're moving past scarcity.

Our main troubles come not from these fields impacted by technological change but precisely from those areas where we do face scarcity but aren't applying market price mechanisms. The atmosphere, for example, has only so much capacity to absorb carbon dioxide emissions. Only so many cars can fit on the 101 at rush hour. Pricing those things would improve quality of life and generate some of the revenue we need to build utopia.

Why It's Hard To Cut Military Spending

Ezra Klein says "There's something about the way we defer to the military on military matters in ways that we don't defer to other agencies on their areas of expertise that makes me very, very uncomfortable."

Unfortunately for America, he's more or less alone in this. As Gallup is always finding, Americans have enormous confidence in the military while they despite both members of congress and reporters. So even though in the abstract cuts to defense spending poll decently, the basic reality is that a member of congress who goes toe to toe with a bunch of generals is going to get creamed. One of the most telling incidents in recent American politics was that hearing where Senator Barbara Boxer chided Brigadier General Michael Walsh for not addressing her by her proper title. This was universally regarded as a gaffe by Boxer. After all, she's just a lowly Senator, who is she to disrespect a hard-working general?

Decomposing The GDP Numbers

Some useful insights from Karl Smith who says the Q1 internals "don't look as bad" as the headline figure would indicate:

— Government knocked over 1 point off GDP. About .69 of that was defense spending. State and local continued to drag at .41 percent. This represents important drag but when thinking about the conditions facing private business, GDP looks better.

— Equipment and software continues to be strong, adding .8 points to GDP. We have experienced a strong rebound in equipment and software, that would be indicative of a mini-boom if there wasn't the drag from construction.

— Residential and non-residential structures continued their drag on GDP, knock .7 or so off of growth.

— The fundamentals still seem like they are shifting towards stronger growth. We are not seeing depressed personal consumption expenditures. We are not seeing industrial production stall out. We are not seeing no new investment in equipment and software.

Which is to say that if we managed to avoid austerity budgeting in the public sector, we'd be doing okay, and if we managed to do that and repair housing finance we'd be having a real recovery. Of course an unemployed family can't feed itself with hypotheticals but this serves to remind us that it's not like there's something mysterious and broken in the economy. With appropriate public policy we'd be in much better shape.

It's Hard To Have Inflation When So Few People Have Jobs

When you hear people worrying about inflation, keep in mind that currently the employment:population ratio is way below the trough of the last two recessions:

Also note that very high peak around 1999. Even at that level, there was no dangerous inflationary spiral. Maybe one was lurking around the corner and the Fed preempted it by raising interest rates. Or maybe even then the interest rate hikes were unwarranted and we could have had more job growth. But in the last expansion, we never even got that high.

Science, Copyright, and Free Inquiry

We primarily talk about copyright policy in the context of things like music and movies, but it also has an important impact on learning and scholarship. That's the subject of this great Lawrence Lessig presentation:

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

As he observes, the extent to which bad intellectual property policy stymies inquiry and science can be easily obscured to members of the faculty of an American university. These universities generally pay for subscriptions to JSTOR and all the rest on behalf of their professors. But there are lots of people in the world who might like to know things—and might even contribute to the world's stockpile of useful knowledge—and who aren't in a position to benefit from these institutional memberships. One of the perks of having over 20,000 Twitter followers is that if I ever want to read something that's behind an academic paywall somewhere, I can normally just tweet that I want to read it and someone will email me a copy. But that's illegal, even though enforcing the law more rigorously would generate nothing but deadweight loss.

America's Infrastructure Gap

An anonymous Economist writer who seems to share Ryan Avent's interests and policy preferences has an excellent article about the sorry state of American transportation infrastructure, noting that we spend less per capita on such things than Western Europe despite having a larger land area, faster-growing population, and more money:

America is known for its huge highways, but with few exceptions (London among them) American traffic congestion is worse than western Europe's. Average delays in America's largest cities exceed those in cities like Berlin and Copenhagen. Americans spend considerably more time commuting than most Europeans; only Hungarians and Romanians take longer to get to work (see chart 1). More time on lower quality roads also makes for a deadlier transport network. With some 15 deaths a year for every 100,000 people, the road fatality rate in America is 60% above the OECD average; 33,000 Americans were killed on roads in 2010.

Something to think about is that this is a problem that gets worse and worse as time goes on. Not that the commutes become longer (though they have) but the actual disutility of traffic delays increases. That's because even as we get richer and invent more and more things you could be doing with your time (iPod! Netflix!) we're not actually adding hours to the day. In a rich country like the United States we ought to be focused less on marginal increases in wealth as such and more on problems that lead to inconvenience and ill-health.

The Origins of Political Order

I really enjoyed Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution and am very much looking forward to additional volumes. This is big picture history, à la Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World or Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. I like those books, and if you like them too you'll probably like Fukuyama, although the subject matter covered is more similar to the less-known (but also excellent) multi-volume History of Government by SE Finer.

Of course the problem with all these "here's my theory of everything that matters for world history" books is that their theses are mutually incompatible, largely because all such efforts at totalizing explanation wind up being false. As far as I'm concerned, that's not a huge problem. It's worth trying to make the effort and trying to understand the efforts.

One nice thing about Fukuyama is that he tries to take the story of political development out of the Anglo-centric paradigm. He starts the book with China, where the modern state first developed, then does India, then the Islamic world before considering anything European. And the Europe section notes that while Anglophone political development has been more globally influential, there's also something very non-rotten in Scandinavia and has been for a while:

inally, England and Denmark were able to develop both strong rule of law and accountable government, while at the same time building strong centralized states capable of national mobilization and defense. England's development of parliamentary institutions is the most familiar story, but the same outcome occurred in Scandinavia through a rather different political process. By the end of the nineteenth century, one had a liberal state, the other the foundations for a social-democratic one, but the principles of law and accountability were extremely well anchored in both. [...]

The development of democracy and a modern market-based economy was far less conflictual and violent in Denmark than it was in England, not to mention France, Spain, and Germany. To get to modern Denmark, the Danes did indeed fight a number of wars with neighbors including Sweden and Prussia, and there were violent civil conflicts in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But there was no prolonged civil war, no enclosure movement, no absolutist tyranny, no grinding poverty brought on by early industrialization, and a far weaker legacy of class conflict. Ideas were critical to the Danish story, not just in terms of Lutheran and Grundtvigian ideology but also in the way that Enlightenment views about rights and constitutionalism were accepted by a series of Danish monarchs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Interesting stuff. The main theme, I would say, is the struggle throughout history against the tendencies toward nepotism that are built into human nature. If you don't want to read the book, you can see the book talk here.

In Defense Of Entertainment

Ann Friedman and Dylan Lathrop have an amusing "Should You Care About The Royal Wedding" flowchart at GOOD. To steal the punchline, they say you shouldn't care because there are important things in the world!

And so they are. But I think this kind of humorless worldview deserves a bit of pushback. I'm not interested in the royal wedding. In part that's because I'm spending time on my job as a writer about American public policy. In part that's because I'm reading a book about the economics of severe global poverty. But in part that's because I'm following the NBA playoffs, watching Season One of Bones, listening to the new Thao & Mirah album, attempting to cultivate an interest in professional hockey, etc. I could pretend, I suppose, that it's Esther Duflo's book on global poverty that's crowding out any interest in Kate Middleton, but that would be a lie. Indeed, I've even spent at least a few minutes being amused by this Kate-themed Tumblr.

The point is that while nobody has an obligation to be interested in any particular frivolity and everyone has an absolute right to mock and disparage other people's frivolous interests, there's something really off about pretending to disparage other people's frivolous interests on the grounds that they're frivolous. Everyone living even slightly above the subsistence level expends some time and resources on entertainment (the point is made clearly and forcefully in Duflo's book) and that's an integral part of human existence. You don't need to be a nihilist to want to watch a spectacle, you just need to be a human being.

State-Level Economic Policy

(cc photo by Ken Lund)

NC asks:

Today you tweeted about a Cato article about GOP led Ohio industrial policy, basically that was giving away massive tax credits and general subsidies. And I know you've come out against state level film credits. So basically, the topic I want to know more about is: what is optimal state policy to encourage economic growth?

I don't think there's a real answer to that question. In part that's because state-level policy is kind of like SimCity, in that it's clearly possible to lose but the victory conditions are fairly undefined. On top of that, different states are really quite differently situated. The general thing I would say is that state governments ought to think more about people and less about states as such. On the one hand, all the people of the planet earth are free and equal moral agents entitled to consideration in our thinking. On the other hand, if elected officials in Michigan have special Michigan-related responsibilities those are responsibilities to the people of Michigan not to its land area. If the upshot of your policy initiative is to move a factory from State A to State B so that people don't move from State B to State A then the upshot is that you haven't actually accomplished anything. Unless you're creating new opportunities on net, including opportunities for people to move to your state (by reducing the cost of housing) and for people to get the skills needed to leave your state (by providing quality education) then you're not really accomplishing anything.

I sometimes hear people say that states have incentives to pursue policies that are individually rational but collectively harmful. But the idea that those are the incentives is driven by poor habits of thought. Better journalism and more rational modes of thought can create a dynamic in which this kind of thing isn't seen as desirable policy.

Crash of the Titans

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Well, we know Zack Snyder won't be able to resist a washed-out color palette or a lot of abs, but maybe he'll make Henry Cavill less shouty as Superman than it appears he's going to be as Theseus?

I find the minor trend of gods-interfering-in-human-affairs movies intriguing, both because it doesn't appear that anyone has a good idea about how to do them well, and because they're becoming a funny little step in credentialing promising young action stars. Mads Mikkelsen aside, Clash of the Titans felt like the result of a bunch of prestige actors getting left alone with a large supply of disposable pie tins, effects dudes, and high-grade weed. Troy is mostly a chance for Brian Cox to snark and Brad Pitt to be mean to little kids/naked with the ladies. Percy Jackson & The Olympians drags the gods down to the high school level rather than imbuing them with any real majesty.

There are two really obvious challenges in making gods-come-to-earth movies. First, while a lot of people believe in the work of the divine in the world these days, it's less common to believe that the gods are dropping in for a date with the local hottie or to jump into conflict zones for the hell of it. It's hard to resonate to the idea of gods who are not just approachable, but mercurial, interventionist. Second, superheroes have basically taken on the roles of Greek-style gods in our movies. And while we approach them with awe, we don't exactly accord them reverence. It's hard to code the difference between gods and superheroes when they're doing essentially the same things on screen: kicking ass and getting chicks. And I wonder if that's part of the problem Thor, Kenneth Branagh's movie adaptation of the Marvel comic about the Norse-god-turned-superheroic-Avenger, has been having connecting with audiences overseas (of course, it could just be that Australians like watching Vin Diesel steal things and the Rock punch things, because who doesn't). In a world where movie science can transform a nerdy teenager or replace a man's broken heart and broken conscience, it's hard to elevate audiences to an even higher level of wonder.