J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 90

Definitely this week's most important must-read: Dylan Ma...

Definitely this week's most important must-read: Dylan Matthews: Should the Minimum Wage Be Raised? The Economic Debate, Explained https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/20/20952151/should-minimum-wage-be-raised: 'There���s still disagreement. But it looks like in many cases, pay raises swamp any lost jobs.... Dube, Cengiz, Lindner, and Zipperer find that much of the disagreement between the Card/Krueger and Neumark/Wascher approaches is attributable to a quirk in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During that period, blue states experienced an economic downturn relative to red states that predated the biggest blue state minimum wage increases; that made it look like minimum wages were lowering employment growth, when what was really happening was that blue states both had lower employment growth and separately increased their minimum wages. ���In our QJE paper we showed that the specifications under argument (lot of controls, little controls) actually all suggest little job loss in the post 1995 period; and that this appears to be driven by the quirky 80s boom/bust,��� Dube told me. ���None of us knew this until recently. This is actually progress.���... Dube notes in his review that the best evidence we have suggests minimal job impacts on minimum wages of up to 60 percent of the median wage. The median hourly wage in El Centro, California is about $15.50, meaning the $13 an hour minimum (effective January 1 of next year) is over 80 percent of the median wage there. The effects there might be very different...

#noted #2019-11-26

Prolegomenon to a Reading Course on Karl Marx: Hoisted from the Archives

Prolegomenon to a Reading Course on Karl Marx https://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/12/2014-12-18-th-oaeg-atwm-reading-about-marx-thursday-virtual-office-hours.html: These days, when people come to me and ask if I will run a reading course for them on Karl Marx, this is what I tend to say:

The world is divided into those who take Karl Marx's work seriously and those who do not.

On the one hand, those who do not take Karl Marx's lifetime work-project seriously are further divided into three groups:

Those who ignore Marx completely.

Those who use selected snippets from his work as Holy Texts, and

Those modern "western Marxists" who find inspiration in the works that Karl Marx wrote exclusively before he was thirty.

Of the first group there is, of course, nothing to say.

Of the second group, the late Louis Althusser can serve as our example and principal poster child. And I will leave him to Michael Berube and Bill Lazonick.

Of the third group, Chris Bertram provides as good an example as any:

?Start by discussing... the Manifesto... revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie... their transformation of technology, social relations... global economy... Marx���s belief that... the appearance of freedom and equality... [masks that] some people end up living off the toil of other people... [who] spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and [so are not] living truly truly human lives... Marx���s belief that a capitalist society would eventually be replaced by a classless society run by all for the benefit of all...

In short, start with the Communist Manifesto���written when Marx was 30���and then go back to the impenetrable and jargon-filled Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "Theses on Feuerbach", The German Ideology, and "On the Jewish Question" written he was 25-28. Maybe read the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written when he was 30-38, maybe not. And add on two paragraphs���ripped from their context���from his written-at-57 "A Critique of the Gotha Program". The Eighteenth Brumaire���and how its analysis of the relation between economic classes, economic interests, political fractions, and the coming of the Second Empire dictatorship in France over 1848-1852 was wrong? Nope. The Grundrisse? The rest of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy? Theories of Surplus Value? Capital, vols. I, II, and III? The abbreviated arguments of Capital in Wage Labour and Capital and Value, Price, and Profit? Not to be wrestled with.

It has always seemed to be that the "western Marxists" still floating around today have decided that Marx's life and work end at 30. It seems to me that that is as damning a judgment of his lifetime project as the one made by those who ignore him completely.

Then, on the other hand, there is us.

We���people like Joan Robinson, Paul Samuelson, and me���take Karl Marx throughout his life as a mighty and mightily flawed thinker, worth grappling with and treating with respect.

My take, in brief: We need to talk about Marx the moralist-prophet, Marx the political activist, and Marx the economist. Marx did not divide himself into those three. But we find it useful to do so:

Marx the Economist:

Among the very first to get the industrial revolution right and understand what it meant for human possibilities and human destiny.
Got a lot about the economic history of the development of modern capitalism in England right--very much worth grappling with as an economic historian of 1500-1850.
Believed, probably wrongly, that a capitalist market economy with wage labor is an insult to humanity, delivered low utility, and was sociologically and psychologically unsustainable.
Believed, certainly wrongly that a capitalist market economy with wage labor was incapable of delivering an acceptable distribution of income.
Among the very first to recognize that the fever-fits of financial crisis and depression that afflict modern market economies were not a passing phase but rather a deep and chronic malady of the system.

Now we modern neoliberals respond that (5) on the business cycle we have economic policy quinine to manage if not banish the disease, (4) Beveridgism or Myrdahlism���social democracy, progressive income taxes, a very large and well-established safety net, public education to a high standard, channels for upward mobility, and all the panoply of the twentieth-century social-democratic mixed-economy democratic state���can keep capitalist prosperity must be accompanied by great inequality and misery, and (3) a market economy can easily be a good thing even if a market society generally is not, and that the forecast of utopia--that we jumped-up monkeys with big brains will become perfectly happy���belongs in the Book of Daniel or of the Apocalypse, not in political economy. Whether our responses are convincing is for you to judge.

Marx the Activist:

Marx the political activist had five reasons he thought it necessary and possible to work to overthrow the capitalist market economy and socialize the means of production, believing that:

Technological progress and capital accumulation that raised average labor productivity also lowered the working-class wage.
Globalization inherently increased inequality in the world economy's core and hence raised pressure for working-class revolution.
While previous systems of hierarchy and domination had hypnotize the poor into believing that the rich in some sense "deserved" their high seats, capitalism replaced masked exploitation by naked exploitation--and without ideological legitimation, unequal class society could not long survive.
Even though the ruling class could appease the working class by sharing the fruits of economic growth, they could not organize themselves to do so. Hence social democracy would inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-wing assault, income inequality would rise, and the system would be overthrown. (The Wall Street Journal editorial page works day and night 365 days a year to make this one of Marx's predictions come true. But I think they will fail.)
Factory work would lead people to develop a sense of their common interest and of class solidarity, hence they would be able to organize, and revolt, and establish a free and just society in a way that they could not back in the old days, when the peasants of this village were suspicious of the peasants of the next village. Here I think Marx mistook a passing phase for an enduring trend: active working-class consciousness as a primary source of loyalty and political allegiance was never that strong; nation and ethnos seem to trump class much more often than not.

Thus I conclude that while there is a lot in Marx-the-economist worth grappling with and thinking about, there is very little in Marx the political activist that is worth paying attention to today.

Marx the Prophet:

Let's listen to a sample:

Great Britain['s]... aristocracy wanted to conquer [India], the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it.... Now the... millocracy...intend now drawing a net of railroads over India... [to] extract... the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures.... The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.... All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people.... But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises to do so].... Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?.... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain...

Were live in this fallen sublunary sphere. In it, the New Jerusalem does not descend from the clouds "prepared as a Bride adorned for her Husband." In it, a Great Voice does not declare:

I shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away...

But Marx clearly thought at some level that they would.

He never got to the island of Patmos on which John the Divine lived. But there is a sense that he, too, got too much into the magic mushrooms.

And here is more that I at least think is very much worth reading. And if you finish this and still want more, I'll send you the course reading list:

My Stuff:

Understanding Karl Marx http://delong.typepad.com/20090420_stanford-talk_karl-marx.pdf 2009-04-20

Relevance of Marx? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/03/over-at-the-new-york-times-room-for-debate-relevance-of-marx.html 2014-01-30

What Was Karl Marx's Principal Contribution? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/04/what-was-karl-marxs-principal-contribution.html 2011-04-03

Marx's Half-Baked Crisis Theory and His Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/05/marxs-half-baked-crisis-theory-and-his-theories-of-surplus-value-chapter-17.html 2011-05-01

Keynes, Marx, Trotsky, Yglesias< http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01... 2007-01-16

Unstructured Procrastination: Why Is Structural Marxism Desirable? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/08/unstructured_pr.html 2005-08-11

The Relevance of Marx http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/afternoon-coffe.html 2008-03-20

Evaluating Karl Marx as Political Activist http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/evaluating-karl.html 2008-03-21

Introducing Serious, Permanent Bugs into Your Wetware http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/introducing_ser.html 2006-08-26

Why Everybody Should Be Short Louis Althusser and His Intellectual Children http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/why_everybody_s.html 2007-06-11

Lire le Capital: Mail Call http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/lire_le_capital.html 2005-04-05

Department of "Huh?": In Praise of Neoclassical Economics: Exhibit 1: David Harvey http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/department-of-huh-in-praise-of-neoclassical-economics-department.html 2009-01-14 | Why, Thank You Mike Begg: Yes, the Argument Back in 2009 That Fiscal Expansion Would Lead to Large Rises in Interest Rates and Be Offset by Crowding Out Was Simply Wrong http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/01/why-thank-you-mike-begg-yes-the-argument-back-in-2009-that-fiscal-expansion-would-lead-to-large-rises-in-interest-rates-an.html 2011-01-05

Plus:

Communism/Resources: A Reading List
Other People's Stuff:

Fred Halliday: What Was Communism? https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/what-was-communism 2009-10-16

Matthew Yglesias: Can Social Democracy Explain Its Own Success? http://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/31/can-social-democracy-explain-its-own-success/ 2006-10-31

Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism: Leszek Kolakowski tells English historian E.P. Thompson what he thinks of him... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/main_currents_o.html 1974-03-01

Paul Samuelson: On Paul Samuelson on Karl Marx http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/robert-paul-wolff-on-paul-samuelson-on-karl-marx-thursday-whiskey-tango-foxtrot-bang-query-bang-query-weblogging.html http://www.jstor.org/stable/1823476 1962-03-01

Joan Robinson: Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/07/joan-robinson-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-tuesday-sixty-years-ago-on-the-non-internet-weblogging.html 1953-07-30

Edmund Wilson To the Finland Station https://db.tt/ZqZJDcBd 1940-06-01

Karl Marx: On Say's Law: Theories of Surplus-Value, Chapter 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/03/karl-marx-on-says-law-theories-of-surplus-value-chapter-17.html 1863-01-01

Wikipedia: Karl Marx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

#hoistedfromthearchives #2019-11-26

I recommend reading Kurt Vonnegut, as perhaps more releva...

I recommend reading Kurt Vonnegut, as perhaps more relevant and informative for our times than he was for the post-WWII era in which he wrote. I found Mother Night striking me harder than Slaughterhouse 5, but mileage will vary:

Daniel Kennelly: A Triumphant Failure: "There���s nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, wrote Kurt Vonnegut of his book about the firebombing of Dresden. So why are we still reading it a half-century later?.... Re-reading Vonnegut���s collected works from the vantage point of 2019, I had the strange experience of believing that all along Slaughterhouse had somehow been reaching its way backward in time into Vonnegut���s literary career. It was as if the book were to Vonnegut what Billy���s wartime experiences became to him: a moment in time, trapped in amber, surfacing randomly in his work, unbidden, frequently unwelcome. Dresden haunted Vonnegut���s life, and Slaughterhouse haunted his career���this 'short and jumbled and jangled' book, a 'failure'. So how does an understanding of the three unique temporal perspectives contained in Slaughterhouse-Five���our own, Billy���s, and the Tralfamadorian one���help us appreciate this 'failure' of a book?.... We are the Tralfamadorians, collectively, creating nuclear weapons because 'if we don���t, someone else will'.... And we are Billy, each of us as individuals. We could stand up and yell, 'Don���t get on that plane! It���s going to crash!' But Billy 'didn���t want to make a fool of himself by saying so', and we don���t want to sound like fools either...

...What makes Slaughterhouse both a failure and a masterpiece is the fact that it���s an anti-war book that knows it���s engaged in a hopeless quest: ���an anti-glacier book.��� And despite it all, it laughs, and makes us laugh too.... At the end of the first chapter Vonnegut calls to mind the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in particular the fate of Lot���s wife. She knows the people back there behind her were bad, that the world is better off without them. She knows that God himself has warned her not to look back. Likewise the godlike Tralfamadorians counsel Billy to ���concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones���to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.��� But trauma doesn���t work like that, for Billy or for us.... All in all not bad, as failures go...

#noted #2019-11-26

The extremely smart Ricardo Hausmann has good ideas for t...

The extremely smart Ricardo Hausmann has good ideas for the reform of public-policy school education: Ricardo Hausmann: Don���t Blame Economics, Blame Public Policy https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/blame-public-policy-not-economics-by-ricardo-hausmann-2019-08: "Public-policy schools, which typically have a strong economics focus, must now rethink the way they teach students���and medical schools could offer a model to follow.... Economics is to public policy what physics is to engineering, or biology to medicine. While physics is fundamental to the design of rockets that can use energy to defy gravity, Isaac Newton was not responsible for the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Nor was biochemistry to blame for Michael Jackson���s death. Physics, biology, and economics, as sciences, answer questions about the nature of the world... generating... propositional knowledge. Engineering, medicine, and public policy, on the other hand, answer questions about how to change the world.... Although engineering schools teach physics and medical schools teach biology, these professional disciplines have grown separate from their underlying sciences.... Public-policy schools, by contrast, have not undergone an equivalent transformation.... Policy experience before achieving professorial tenure is discouraged and rare. And even tenured faculty have surprisingly limited engagement with the world, owing to prevailing hiring practices and a fear that engaging externally might entail reputational risks for the university. To compensate for this, public-policy schools hire professors of practice, such as me, who have acquired prior policy experience elsewhere.... The teaching-hospital model could be effective in public policy.... Consider, for example, Harvard University���s Growth Lab, which I founded in 2006 after two highly fulfilling policy engagements in El Salvador and South Africa...

#noted #2019-11-26

Comment of the Day: Brad DeLong: "Yes, the Communist Mani...

Comment of the Day: Brad DeLong: "Yes, the Communist Manifesto Is Worth Reading. Why Do You Ask?" https://twitter.com/delong/status/1198452201531703296 Ashton Kemerling: "If you can���t read things you disagree with, you���ll never ever get anywhere. Besides, Marx had a pretty good critique of capitalism, even if you���re not sold by his recommendations. Dad, Capital is a really hard read though." Brad DeLong: "Which is why when I control the syllabus I assign the Manifesto; Wage Labor & Capital; the Gotha Program; (maybe) On the Jewish Question; and Value, Price, and Profit..."

#commentoftheday #2019-11-25

Very Briefly Noted 2019-11-24:FRED: Employment Rate: A...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-11-24:

FRED: Employment Rate: Aged 25-54: All Persons for the United States https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LREM25TTUSM156S,...

hoakly: macOS Catalina Boot Volume Layout https://eclecticlight.co/2019/10/08/macos-catalina-boot-volume-layout/: 'One valuable trick for always using the right path in Terminal is to locate the folder or file in a Finder window, and drag and drop that into the command line. macOS then magically performs any path conversions for you. You may also find my utility Precize useful, as it gives paths, inode numbers, and a great deal more. For details of the roles and purposes of these folders, and those within the Home folder, please refer back to the previous article detailing the volume layout of macOS 10.14 Mojave...

Piotr Wozniak: SuperMemo https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/history: 'The true history of spaced repetition...

FRED (DeLong): Four Key Components of Aggregate Demand https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=524363&rn=654...

John Mack Faragher: A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland https://archive.org/details/greatnoblescheme00fara...

Hans Mu��hlestein (1948): Marx and the Utopian Wilhelm Weitling https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40399878.pdf...

Marx/Engels Internet Archive: The Communist League https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/index.htm...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-11-24

Dwight Eisenhower (1954): Letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhow...

Dwight Eisenhower (1954): Letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower: "You say that the foreign policy of the two Administrations is the same.... It is well for us to have friends... to encourage them to oppose communism... to promote trade... and to attempt the promotion of peace in the world, negotiating from a position... strength.... The party... in power... must perforce follow a program that is related to these general purposes and aspirations. But the great difference is in how it is done and, particularly, in the results achieved. A year ago last January we were in imminent danger of losing Iran, and sixty percent of the known oil reserves of the world. ��You may have forgotten this. Lots of people have. But there has been no greater threat that has in recent years overhung the free world. That threat has been largely, if not totally, removed. I could name at least a half dozen other spots of the same character. This being true, how can anyone be so unaware of what is happening as to say that this Administration has conducted foreign affairs under the same policies as did the former Administration?...

#noted #2019-11-24

Adam Smith: Wealth Inequality Prevents More Damage

2.5.2) Wealth Inequality Prevents More Damage: Adam Smith���s second way of minimizing the importance of economic inequality is to claim that it is a relatively gentle alternative to other forms of inequality that will emerge if economic inequality is reduced. Smith argues in Book III of the Wealth of Nations that the rise in inequality in market income and consumption went along with reduced inequality in social status and hierarchy���and in reduced societal violence as well. Great landlords who cannot earn and spend their wealth in the city will focus on arming and maintaining retainers, and the result will be that they will ���make war according to their own discretion, almost continually upon one another, and very frequently upon the king; and the open country still continued to be a scene of violence, rapine, and disorder���. But once there are luxuries to be purchased by wealth earned by selling produce to the growing cities, ���it was impossible that the number of their retainers should not as gradually diminish, till they were at last dismissed altogether���, and so peace came to the countryside.

As John Maynard Keynes was to write a century and a half later: ���It is far better for a man to tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens������

Here the full files are���unfinished: https://www.icloud.com/pages/0howtV7CndvjkSCCLmtjmq_SA

And the course slides:

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0osOOsPvSrTaiK4__D5MghPVA

#books #highlighted #history #historyofeconomicthought #moralphilosophy #politicaleconomy #2019-11-24

Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen: How Can We Develop Tr...

Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen: How Can We Develop Transformative Tools For Thought? https://numinous.productions/ttft/: 'One of the ideas motivating Quantum Country is that memory systems aren���t just useful for simple declarative knowledge, such as vocabulary words and lists of capitals. In fact, memory systems can be extraordinarily helpful for mastering abstract, conceptual knowledge, the kind of knowledge required to learn subjects such as quantum mechanics and quantum computing. This is achieved in part through many detailed strategies for constructing cards capable of encoding this kind of understanding. But, more importantly, it���s possible because of the way the mnemonic medium embeds spaced repetition inside a narrative...

...That narrative embedding makes it possible for context and understanding to build in ways difficult in other memory systems.... We believe memory systems are a far richer space than has previously been realized.... We���ve taken to thinking of Quantum Country as a memory laboratory.... We���d like to answer questions such as: (1) What are new ways memory systems can be applied, beyond the simple, declarative knowledge of past systems? (2) How deep can the understanding developed through a memory system be? What patterns will help users deepen their understanding as much as possible? (3) How far can we raise the human capacity for memory? And with how much ease? What are the benefits and drawbacks? (4) Might it be that one day most human beings will have a regular memory practice, as part of their everyday lives? Can we make it so memory becomes a choice; is it possible to in some sense solve the problem of memory?...

Cards are fundamental building blocks of the mnemonic medium, and card-writing is better thought of as an open-ended skill. Do it poorly, and the mnemonic medium works poorly. Do it superbly well, and the mnemonic medium can work very well indeed.... Most questions and answers should be atomic.... Make sure the early questions in a mnemonic essay are trivial: it helps many users realize they aren���t paying enough attention as they read.... Avoid orphan cards... which don���t connect closely to anything else.... For the mnemonic medium to work effectively, spaced repetition must be deployed in concert with many other ideas....

It���s common for people to have the simplistic model ���good memory system = spaced repetition���. That���s false, and an actively unhelpful way of thinking. Indeed, thinking in this way is one reason spaced-repetition memory systems often fail for individuals.... How to encode stories in the mnemonic medium? People often find certain ideas most compelling in story form.... The benefits... seem well worth violating atomicity, if they can be encoded in the cards effectively.....

The mnemonic medium is not a fixed form, but rather a platform for experimentation and continued improvement. One useful metaphor for thinking about how to improve the mnemonic medium is to think of each mnemonic essay as a conventional essay accompanied by a kind of ���reflected essay���.... By developing good card-making strategies we can make the reflected essay a nearly faithful reflection of all the important ideas, the ideas a reader would ideally like to retain....

There are ideas about memory very different from spaced repetition, but of comparable power. One such idea is elaborative encoding. Roughly speaking, this is the idea that the richer the associations we have to a concept, the better we will remember it. As a consequence, we can improve our memory by enriching that network of associations.... It���s part of the reason it���s so much easier to learn new facts in an area we���re already expert in....

One particularly common negative response to the mnemonic medium is that people don���t want to remember ���unimportant details���, and are just looking for ���a broad, conceptual understanding���. It���s difficult to know what to make of this argument. Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. Imagine meeting a person who told you they ���had a broad conceptual understanding��� of how to speak French, but it turned out they didn���t know the meaning of ���bonjour���, ���au revoir���, or ���tres bien���. You���d think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious. If you want to understand a subject in any real sense you need to know the details of the fundamentals. What���s more, that means not just knowing them immediately after reading. It means internalizing them for the long term. A better model is that conceptual mastery is actually enabled by a mastery of details.... By largely automating away the problem of memory, the mnemonic medium makes it easier for people to spend more time focusing on other parts of learning, such as conceptual issues....

People with little experience doing good technical writing often complain about this dry, bottom-up approach. They will complain that writers should instead stay closer to the fun material, and use less technical notation and nomenclature. But when competent writers attempt to follow this prescription, invariably it works poorly. One problem is that a person can spend years reading analogies about black hole evaporation, quantum teleportation, and so on. And at the end of all that reading they typically have��� not much genuine understanding to show for it. The analogies and heuristic reasoning simply don���t go far. They may be entertaining and produce some feeling of understanding. But the reasoning won���t scale out; it can���t be applied to other phenomena, at least not without lots of caveats, caveats the reader is in no position to understand or apply. As a result, good technical writers instead mostly build things up from first principles, with occasional digressions to the broader motivating picture. And that means starting with a lot of detailed, technical minutiae.

It���s striking to contrast conventional technical books with the possibilities enabled by executable books. You can imagine starting an executable book with, say, quantum teleportation, right on the first page. You���d provide an interface ��� perhaps a library is imported ��� that would let users teleport quantum systems immediately. They could experiment with different parts of the quantum teleportation protocol, illustrating immediately the most striking ideas about it. The user wouldn���t necessarily understand all that was going on. But they���d begin to internalize an accurate picture of the meaning of teleportation. And over time, at leisure, the author could unpack some of what might a priori seem to be the drier details. Except by that point the reader will be bought into those details, and they won���t be so dry.... Begin an executable book with material the users already care about, can connect to easily, and find motivating. For instance, you could begin by exploring teleportation or the Big Bang. But such an opening won���t suffer the drawback of popular science, of being vague and imprecise. Rather, the interface would be completely well specified. And, with some care, the interface could be scaled out, applied in ever-expanding contexts. The understanding would be transferable...

#noted #2019-11-23

A Note: Read Oxford "Very Short Introductions" as a Way of Studying for the Econ 105 Exam...

In general, I am not a believer in studying by rereading things you have read before. I am a believer in reading new things, related to but different from those already assigned in the course. This seemed (and seems) to work far better for me than going back over what I have already read. (Some clues as to why this works can be found in Andy Matuschak: Why Books Don���t Work https://andymatuschak.org/books/: "People [who] do absorb knowledge from books... are the people who really do think about what they���re reading.... If they take some notes, they���re not simply transcribing the author���s words: they���re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing. Unfortunately, these tactics don���t come easily..." It comes easily to me if I am reading something new but related.) If you are like me, you might find it more productive in studying for the exam not to reread already assigned passages, but rather to take a look at three books from Oxford's Very Short Introduction series:

Christopher J. Berry (2028): Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction https://www.google.com/books/edition/Adam_Smith_A_Very_Short_Introduction/B_lyDwAAQBAJ...
Robert Skidelsky (2010): Keynes: A Very Short Introduction https://www.google.com/books/edition/Keynes_A_Very_Short_Introduction/ji7qS75PtMYC...
Peter Singer (2000): Karl Marx: A Very Short Introduction https://www.google.com/books/edition/Marx_A_Very_Short_Introduction/j1WsDAAAQBAJ...



#berkeley #books #cognition #history #historyofeconomicthought #notetoself #2019-11-23