J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 303
September 15, 2018
Tim Duy: Fed Interest-Rate Debate Misses the Bigger Pictu...
Tim Duy: Fed Interest-Rate Debate Misses the Bigger Picture: "The federal funds rate currently sits in a range of 1.75 percent to 2.0 percent. The median policy maker estimate of the neutral rate is 2.9 percent... the next rate increase widely expected to come Sept. 21...
...Talk of a pause is currently more about hope than reality. Incoming data remains far too strong for the Fed to contemplate an end to rate increases. Job growth continues at a rate the Fed believes will eventually be consistent with an overheated economy. And there is no reason to expect pressure on the labor market to alleviate anytime soon.... Moreover, there is internal pressure from Fed staff to keep boosting rates, and this pressure is likely grow. Contained inflation only goes so far in moderating policy tightening. It can hold the Fed to a gradual path, but won���t stop hikes as long as the economy expands at a pace well in excess of the Fed���s estimates. For the Fed to initiate a sustained policy pause, they will need a solid reason to believe that past rate hikes are sufficient to temper the pace of growth to more sustainable levels. We aren���t seeing that yet. Consequently, remember that whenever a Fed official looks to future and sees a specific end to rate hikes, that���s just a prediction and not a promise...
#shouldread
Pedro da Costa: Wage growth should be much stronger by no...
Pedro da Costa: Wage growth should be much stronger by now given low jobless rates: "Federal Reserve policymakers who continue to argue they must keep pushing interest rates higher in earnest because the unemployment rate is so low that it risks generating runaway inflation as workers ask for big pay raises...
...The unemployment rate is at 3.9% and average hourly earnings rose 2.9% last month, the strongest since the Great Recession. But that pace of income gains is still paltry compared to past recoveries.... "Full employment means employers should really be begging for workers rather than workers begging for jobs," said Josh Bivens.... "The definition of full employment is low- and moderate-wage workers actually get raises. We are not at full employment until that happens. If that's not happening, that means we should push unemployment lower. That means we are not at full employment yet." Take this startling statistic: Excluding more highly paid managers and supervisors, who make up 20% of the workforce, workers actually saw [real] hourly wages slip 0.1% over the last year....
#shouldread
#monetarypolicy
September 14, 2018
Shame on editor Ian Buruma: Jeet Heer: The New York Revie...
Shame on editor Ian Buruma: Jeet Heer: The New York Review of Books Lets Jian Ghomeshi Whitewash His Past: "Though guaranteed to generate backlash for its personal exculpation marinated in self-pity, the piece���s egotistical approach also obscures the facts of the case...
...A key paragraph runs:
In October 2014, I was fired from my job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after allegations circulated online that I���d been abusive with an ex-girlfriend during sex. In the aftermath of my firing, and amid a media storm, several more people accused me of sexual misconduct. I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and���the most serious allegation���nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002. I pleaded not guilty. Several months later, after a very public trial, I was cleared on all counts. One of the charges was separated and later withdrawn with a peace bond���a pledge to be on good behavior for a year. There was no criminal trial...
In fact, the trigger for his firing was the pending publication of reported news story in The Toronto Star, one of Canada���s oldest and most respected newspapers.... There are 24 separate allegations of sexual assault, many involving brutal behavior such as choking and punching. Later in the essay, he suggests that his misconduct was an outgrowth of becoming a celebrity. But in fact, some of the allegations against him date to his days as a university student. Nor does Ghomeshi mention that the charge that was withdrawn was done so on the condition that he admit to wrongdoing. The statement made by the complainant Kathryn Borel after Ghomeshi acknowledged his misconduct is worth quoting because it is far more specific and detailed than the narcissistic reverie that the New York Review of Books published:
My name is Kathryn Borel. In December of 2014, I pressed sexual assault charges against Jian Ghomeshi. As you know Mr. Ghomeshi initially denied all the charges that were brought against him. But today, as you just heard, Jian Ghomeshi admitted wrongdoing and apologized to me. It���s unfortunate but maybe not surprising he chose not to say much about what exactly he was apologizing for. I���m going to provide those details for you now. Every day over the course of a three-year period, Mr. Ghomeshi made it clear to me that he could do what he wanted to me and my body. He made it clear that he could humiliate me repeatedly and walk away with impunity.... The one charge he just apologized for, when he came up behind me while I was standing near my desk, put his hands on my hips and rammed his pelvis against my backside over and over, simulating sexual intercourse...
Ghomeshi presents his experiences of being accused as ���a crash course in empathy.��� But the essay he wrote shows very little empathy. Instead, he continues to minimize his misconduct and spends thousands of words trying to elicit pity for the figure he seems to see as the true victim of the story: himself...
#shouldread
One would not think that it would be difficult for the ri...
One would not think that it would be difficult for the rich to understand that enabling kleptocrats with little respect for the rule of law in an attempt to fend off democratic waves of social democracy is very unwise: Harold James: Ten Weimar Lessons: "The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the emergence of the Nazis' Third Reich in the early 1930s still stands as one of modern history's most powerful cautionary tales...
...Its lessons are as relevant today as ever.... Economic shocks... are challenges to all governments, everywhere and always.... Under extreme economic conditions, proportional representation (PR) can make matters worse.... Eight further lessons....
Referenda are dangerous, especially when they are rarely used and the electorate has little experience with them....
Dissolving parliaments prematurely when the law does not require it is risky....
Constitutions don���t necessarily protect the system....
Business lobbyists can play a baleful behind-the-scenes role in undermining agreement between parliamentary factions.
A political culture in which leaders demonize their opponents erodes democracy....
The president���s family can be dangerous....
An insurgent group does not need to have an overall majority to control politics, even in a PR system....
Incumbents can survive by buying off a discontented populace for some time, but not forever....
It is often assumed that countries with majoritarian electoral systems like those in the United States or the United Kingdom are more resilient than countries with PR systems. After all, America and Britain���s democracies are older, with more deeply entrenched cultures of political civility. In reality, though, these systems can still become vulnerable...
#shouldread
Martin Wolf: Why So Little Has Changed Since the Financia...
Martin Wolf: Why So Little Has Changed Since the Financial Crash: "What happened after the global financial crisis? Have politicians and policymakers tried to get us back to the past or go into a different future? The answer is clear: it is the former...
...The chief aim of post-crisis policymaking was rescue: stabilise the financial system and restore demand. This was delivered by putting sovereign balance sheets behind the collapsing financial system, cutting interest rates, allowing fiscal deficits to soar in the short run while limiting discretionary fiscal expansion, and introducing complex new financial regulations. This prevented economic collapse, unlike in the 1930s, and brought a (weak) recovery. Note how closely these actions hewed to the pre-crisis policy consensus. Central banks acted as lenders of last resort, as they should. They also played the dominant role in macroeconomic stabilisation, as pre-crisis thought suggested. Their principal instrument remained interest rates, though they included long rates this time, because short rates reached zero. Shortly after the worst of the crisis had passed, fiscal policy turned towards austerity. The financial system is much as before, albeit with somewhat lower leverage, higher liquidity requirements and tighter regulation. Efforts to lower debt in the private sector were modest. (See charts.)
The financial crisis was a devastating failure of the free market that followed a period of rising inequality within many countries. Yet, contrary to what happened in the 1970s, policymakers have barely questioned the relative roles of government and markets. Conventional wisdom still considers ���structural reform��� largely synonymous with lower taxes and de-regulation of labour markets. Concern is expressed over inequality, but little has actually been done. Policymakers have mostly failed to notice the dangerous dependence of demand on ever-rising debt. Monopoly and ���zero-sum��� activities are pervasive. Few question the value of the vast quantities of financial sector activity we continue to have, or recognise the risks of further big financial crises. It is little wonder populists are so popular, given this inertia, not to mention the miserable experience of so many citizens since the crisis and, in important cases, before that....
The persistent fealty to so much of the pre-crisis conventional wisdom is astonishing. The failure of Keynesianism in the 1970s was significant but certainly no greater than the combination of slow economic growth with macroeconomic instability produced by the pre-crisis orthodoxy. What makes this even more shocking is that there is so little confidence that we could (or would) deal effectively with another big recession, let alone yet another big crisis. What explains the complacency?... An all-embracing new ideology may be unavailable today. That is probably a good thing. But good ideas do exist. A more likely cause of inertia is the power of vested interests. Today���s rent-extracting economy, masquerading as a free market, is, after all, hugely rewarding to politically influential insiders. Yet the centre���s complacency invites extremist rage. If those who believe in the market economy and liberal democracy do not come up with superior policies, demagogues will sweep them away. A better version of the pre-2008 world will just not do. People do not want a better past; they want a better future...
#shouldread
Last January Trump told friends that Manafort had the pow...
Last January Trump told friends that Manafort had the power to incriminate him. And it looks like Manafort just has: Marcy Wheeler: Checkmate: The Manafort Cooperation Is Pardon Proof: The plea deal Manafort is pleading to today would include cooperation���and I was correct. Andrew Weissmann told Amy Berman Jackson that the deal does require Manafort cooperation.... the fact that no media outlet was able to confirm whether or not the plea would include cooperation could only be possible if Mueller had made silence about that fact part of the deal...
...Otherwise, Manafort���s lawyers would have confirmed that it included no cooperation to placate the President.... And at this point, the deal is pardon proof. That was part of keeping the detail secret: to prevent a last minute pardon from Trump undercutting it. Here���s why this deal is pardon proof: Mueller spent the hour and a half delay in arraignment doing��� something. It���s possible Manafort even presented the key parts of testimony Mueller needs from him to the grand jury this morning. The forfeiture in this plea is both criminal and civil, meaning DOJ will be able to get Manafort���s $46 million even with a pardon. Some of the dismissed charges are financial ones that can be charged in various states. Remember, back in January, Trump told friends and aides that Manafort could incriminate him (the implication was that��only Manafort could). I believe Mueller needed Manafort to describe what happened in a June 7, 2016 meeting between the men, in advance of the June 9 meeting. I have long suspected there was another meeting at which Manafort may be the only other Trump aide attendee. And Manafort has probably already provided evidence on whatever Mueller needed.
So here���s what Robert Mueller just did: He sewed up the key witness to implicate the President,��and he paid for the entire investigation. And it���s only now lunch time...
#shouldread
From my perspective, here we have Mariana Mazzucato picki...
From my perspective, here we have Mariana Mazzucato picking up on themes (not original to us by any means!) of Steve Cohen's and my Concrete Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1422189821: _*Mariana Mazzucato*: _Who Really Creates Value in an Economy?: "Investment remains weak... [because] economic policy continues to be informed by neoliberal ideology... rather than by historical experience...
...In Europe, in particular, governments were lambasted for their high debts, even though private debt, not public borrowing, caused the collapse. Many were instructed to introduce austerity, rather than to stimulate growth with counter-cyclical policies. Meanwhile, the state was expected to pursue financial-sector reforms, which, together with a revival of investment and industry, were supposed to restore competitiveness. But too little financial reform actually took place, and in many countries, industry still has not gotten back on its feet. While profits have bounced back in many sectors, investment remains weak, owing to a combination of cash hoarding and increasing financialization, with share buybacks���to boost stock prices and hence stock options���also at record highs....
Growth requires a well-functioning financial sector, in which long-term investments are rewarded over short-term plays. Yet, in Europe, a financial-transaction tax was introduced only in 2016, and so-called patient finance remains inadequate almost everywhere.... Contrary to the post-crisis consensus, active strategic public-sector investment is critical to growth. That is why all the great technological revolutions���whether in medicine, computers, or energy���were made possible by the state acting as an investor of first resort. Yet we continue to romanticize private actors in innovative industries, ignoring their dependence on the products of public investment....
The inequality-normalizing notion that those who earn a lot must be creating a lot of value. It is why Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein had the audacity to declare in 2009, just a year after the crisis to which his own bank contributed, that his employees were among ���the most productive in the world.���... When flawed ideological stances about how value is created in an economy shape policymaking, the result is measures that inadvertently reward short-termism and undermine innovation...
And I would also note: Friedrich Engels (1843): Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: "According to the economists, the production costs of a commodity consist of... rent... capital with its profit, and the wages for the labour.... A third factor which the economist does not think about���I mean the mental element of invention, of thought...
...alongside the physical element of sheer labour. What has the economist to do with inventiveness? Have not all inventions fallen into his lap without any effort on his part? Has one of them cost him anything? Why then should he bother about them in the calculation of production costs? Land, capital and labour are for him the conditions of wealth, and he requires nothing else. Science is no concern of his. What does it matter to him that he has received its gifts through Berthollet, Davy, Liebig, Watt, Cartwright, etc.���gifts which have benefited him and his production immeasurably? He does not know how to calculate such things; the advances of science go beyond his figures. But in a rational order which has gone beyond the division of interests as it is found with the economist, the mental element certainly belongs among the elements of production and will find its place, too, in economics among the costs of production. And here it is certainly gratifying to know that the promotion of science also brings its material reward; to know that a single achievement of science like James Watt���s steam-engine has brought in more for the world in the first fifty years of its existence than the world has spent on the promotion of science since the beginning of time...
#shouldread
The Rise of the Robots: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads
From my perspective, here we have Mariana Mazzucato picking up on themes (not original to us by any means!) of Steve Cohen's and my Concrete Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1422189821:Mariana Mazzucato: Who Really Creates Value in an Economy?: "Investment remains weak... [because] economic policy continues to be informed by neoliberal ideology... rather than by historical experience...
Susan Athey: The Impact of Machine Learning on Economics: "ML does not add much to questions about identification... but rather yields great improvements when the goal is semi-parametric estimation or when there are a large number of covariates relative to the number of observations...
Long-run changes in the nature of work and jobs happen, but they happen in the long run. In the short run in which we live, low-pressure and high-pressure economies dominate. Why does anybody find this surprising?: Larry Mishel: "One reporter told me there���s quite a ���furor��� over the new BLS Contingent worker data. Not sure why that should be, except if you bought the hype about a rapidly changing nature of work and an explosion of freelancing and gig work. @EconomicPolicy...
The rise of the factory���shift from home production to production under the eye of a boss, at a workplace���was underway, long before mechanization, in numeric calculation as well as in craft piecework: Lorraine Daston (2017): Calculation and the Division Of Labor, 1750-1950: "On an August morning in 1838, the seventeen-year-old Edwin Dunkin and his brother...
What I am going to be trying to figure out this weekend: Daniel M. Sullivan: Econtools Documentation: "0.1...
The Economy: Humans as an Anthology Intelligence
This is the most hopeful take on American productivity growth relative stagnation I have seen. I thought it was coherent and might well be right 20 years ago. I think it is coherent and might possibly be right today. But is that just a vain hope?: Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald (1997): Managing Our Way to Higher Service-Sector Productivity: "What electricity, railroads, and gasoline power did for the U.S. economy between roughly 1850 and 1970, computer power is widely expected to do for today���s information-based service economy...
I concur with Noah Smith here that the biggest dangers of machine learning, etc., are not on the labor but on the consumer side. They won't make us obsolete as producers. They could make us easier to grift as customers. Consider that nearly all of Silicon Valley these days is seeking not to make electrons get up and dance in circuits or to make circuits get up and dance in applications that accomplish tasks users wish done, but rather in trying to hack users' brains so their eyeballs will stay glued to screens: Noah Smith: Artificial Intelligence Still Isn���t All That Smart: "Machine learning will revolutionize white-collar jobs in much the same way that engines, electricity and machine tools revolutionized blue-collar jobs...
Brent Simmons: I���m a Goddamn Social Media Professional: "I���ve joined Mastodon, and I find myself constantly confused.... The apps I���ve tried (including the web app) are difficult to use and/or don���t do the things I want them to do, or do them confusingly...
This may, to some degree, be the growing pains of new technology. There were people who strongly objected to printing, on the grounds that the only way to truly grok a book was to copy it out word-for-word by hand. In their view, printing produced a bunch of shallow intellectual poseurs who would have only a surface and inadequate knowledge of the books that they had not really read but only skimmed. And Sokrates's attitude toward writing as a greatly inferior simulacrum and inadequate mimesis that could not create the true knowledge obtained through real dialogue is well known. Nevertheless, we believe that we have managed to adapt to printing and indeed to the creation of manuscript rather than just the oldest oral master-and-apprentice intellectual technologies. Perhaps we will find different things to be true once we will have trained our information-technology networks to be our servants as trusted information intermediaries and intellectual force multipliers, rather than (as they know are) the servants of the advertisers that pay them and thus that try to glue our eyeballs and attention to screens whether having our eyeballs and attention so-glued helps us become more like our best selves or not. But as of now the empirical evidence has become overteherliong: Susan Dynarski: For better learning in college lectures, lay down the laptop and pick up a pen: "When college students use computers or tablets during lecture, they learn less and earn worse grades. The evidence consists of a series of randomized trials, in both college classrooms and controlled laboratory settings...
Dan Davies: "If Amazon's marketing department were a bit sharper, they wouldn't rub my face quite so aggressively in the fact that their signature device is unreliable and breaks:
Jamie Powell: Who cares if Elon is incinerating capital?: "The great American railways provide a helpful illustration...
Put me down as somebody who is now not feeling sorry at all for these entitled clowns who greatly overestimate smarts and skill vs. luck. And F--- you, @jack, especially: Cathy O'Neal: Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth: "I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They���re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created...
I am confident that there will be jobs. I am much less confident that there will be enough middle-class jobs: Adam Ozimek: Robots and Jobs: A Check on Fear: "When it comes to discussing the effects of automation on labor markets, I see far too much partial equilibrium thinking...
Very wise words from close to where the rubber meets the road about how the Rise of the Robots is likely to work out for the labor market over the next generation or so: Shane Greenstein: Adjusting to Autonomous Trucking: "Let���s come into contact with a grounded sense of the future.... Humans have invented tools for repetitive tasks, and some of those tools are becoming less expensive and more reliable...
The answer is: probably in the late 1960s: Joe McMahon: When was the last time all the computing power in the world equaled one iPhone?: "When was the last time all the computing power in the world equaled one iPhone?...
IMHO, the "long run" problems Martin discusses need to be postponed: we don't know enough about the future to even begin to think intelligently about them. The "medium run" problems, by contrast, deserve a lot of attention right now: Martin Wolf: Work in the age of intelligent machines: "How do you organise a society in which few people do anything economically productive?...
Wikipedia: FLOPS
Kevin is, I think, wrong here. Radiologists are not (yet) in trouble. Radiologists as image-reading 'bots are in trouble: Kevin Drum: Puny Humans Crushed By Machines Yet Again: "Radiologists are already in trouble, and if a robot can pass a medical licensing exam summa cum laude then how much longer can it be before robots are making house calls? Everybody thinks of truck drivers and retail clerks as the first victims of the coming robot revolution, but that isn���t necessarily the case. Jobs that require no tricky physical proficiency but very deep analytical skills are going to be some of the first to put people permanently out of work. In a sense, though, this is a good thing, since it means the challenge ahead will finally get some serious attention...."
Ben Thompson: Intel and the Danger of Integration: "Intel... has spent the last several years propping up its earnings by focusing more and more on the high-end, selling Xeon processors to cloud providers...
Neither Adam Smith���s nor Henry Ford's picture of the economy is relevant for us today. What thumbnail picture is relevant? We do not know, but Bill Janeway thinks harder and more successfully about this question than anybody else I have seen... William H. Janeway: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, 2nd Edition
Seth Godin: Failsafe tip: "The last thing to add to an important email is the email address...
Necessities become things that are beneath our notice. Conveniences become necessities. Luxuries become conveniences. And then we invent new luxuries���like feeling put upon yesterday because a new 2 terabyte backup disk cost $70 and took 8 hours to get delivered to my door so I couldn't get all of my backups done last night: Jeff Bezos: Divine Discontent: Disruption���s Antidote: "One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent...
Paul Krugman says that the public sphere���even the good part of the public sphere���has gone wrong because of the threat and the menace that is twitter: Paul Krugman: Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "This discussion is taking place marks a kind of new frontier in the mechanics of scientific communication���and, I think, an unfortunate one...
Note to Self: I am pretty good at making sure Twitter does not seize my attention and hack my brain. But many other people are not. Platforms so that you can control aggregators. How was it that Tim Berners-Lee's Open Web crushed the Walled Gardeners in the 1990s? And how have the Walled Gardeners made their comeback? And what can be done?: Manton Reece (2014): Microblog Links: "Brent Simmons points to my post on microblogs and asks...
An interesting and complex argument: Ben Thompson: The Moat Map: "Aggregators and Platforms.... Apple and Microsoft, the two ���bicycle of the mind��� companies... platforms.... Google and Facebook... products of the Internet... not to platforms but to aggregators.... Platforms need 3rd parties....Aggregators attract end users by virtue of their inherent usefulness and, over time, leave suppliers no choice but to follow the aggregators��� dictates.... [But] what of companies like Amazon, or Netflix?... Clearly both have very different businesses ��� and supplier relationships ��� than either Google and Facebook on one side or Apple and Microsoft on the other, even as they both derive their power from owning the customer relationship.... Owning the customer relationship remains critical: that is the critical insight of Aggregation Theory. How that ownership of the customer translates into an enduring moat, though, depends on the interaction of two distinct attributes: supplier differentiation and network effects..."
With respect to U.S. technological leadership, it may be time to start quoting John Donne: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..." And remember England, starting a centurty and a half ago Dan Wang: How smartphones made Shenzhen China's innovation capital: "Companies have invested millions of dollars in figuring out how to make them small, cheap, and light enough to include in smartphones. And most of these chips have proven useful well beyond the smartphone market. As a result, we're in the midst of a hardware renaissance, in which it's easier than ever to develop and market new gadgets. The center of this renaissance is Shenzhen..."
Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...
OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech���s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind��� companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms.
Jason Rhode: What tech calls ���AI��� isn���t really AI: "We're in the dark ages of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, to say nothing of the philosophical riddles...
We call them "AI", but that confuses and distracts us: Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence���The Revolution Hasn���t Happened Yet: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra... intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike...
Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...
Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg���s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn���t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook���s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines��� Rodrigo Duterte...
Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren���t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook���s... core advertising business.
Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...
A. Michael Froomkin, Ian R. Kerr, Joelle Pineau: When AIs Outperform Doctors: The Dangers of a Tort-Induced Over-Reliance on Machine Learning and What (Not) to Do About it: "Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors...
David Autor and Anna Salomons: Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share: "Is automation a labor-displacing force?...
Sean Gallagher: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones: "A New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site...
Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...
Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn���t Be In the Driverless Car Business: "The fact that it���s an Uber car doesn���t surprise me. They���re exactly the kind of company that would cut corners..
A Question About the Future of Work...: I have no sense of what kinds of things the masses of displaced workers will do in the future at the level of "microprocessor", "robot", "accounting software 'bot"...
Charlie Stross: Test Case: "There are ramifications...
Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump���s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as ���psychographs���...
Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...
Matt Townsend et al.: America���s ���Retail Apocalypse��� Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn���t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...
Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...
Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...
Cory Doctorow: Let���s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech: "In 2018, companies from John Deere to GM to Johnson & Johnson use digital locks and abusive license agreements to force you to submit to surveillance and control how you use their products...
Janelle Shane: Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?: "Neural network[s]... used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition...
Kenneth Rogoff: Economists vs. Scientists on Long-Term Growth: "Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence...
Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney: Explaining the Decline in the U.S. Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence: "Within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important...
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers: On the link between US pay and productivity: "More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth...
Kenneth Rogoff: When Will Tech Disrupt Higher Education?: "Universities and colleges are pivotal to the future of our societies...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Andrew Wachtel: Universities in the Age of AI: "Over the next 50 years or so, as AI and machine learning become more powerful, human labor will be cannibalized by technologies that outperform people in nearly every job function..
Dan Davies and Others: Chris Hanretty: LRT: study in most recent APSR suggests getting people to take perspective of marginalised group...
Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox...F
Charlie Stross: Dude, you broke the future!: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion...
#riseoftherobots
#publicsphere
I missed this!: Ed Cara: Fed-Up Hospitals Are Starting Th...
I missed this!: Ed Cara: Fed-Up Hospitals Are Starting Their Own Drug Company so They Can Lower Generic Drug Prices: "A coalition of U.S. hospitals... is going to start its own drug company to compete with big pharma...
...���This is a shot across the bow of the bad guys,��� Dr. Marc Harrison, the chief executive of Intermountain Healthcare, the Utah-based nonprofit hospital chain that is leading the initiative, told the New York Times. ���We are not going to lay down. We are going to go ahead and try and fix it.���... he other chains involved are Ascension (the largest Catholic hospital system), SSM Health, and Trinity Health, which collectively represent more than 300 hospitals around the country. But the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is also acting as an consultant, along with a long list of outside researchers and drug policy experts. Already, Axios reports, other hospitals have reached out to Intermountain Healthcare expressing their interest in joining the coalition...
#shouldread
September 13, 2018
J. Bradford DeLong's Blog
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