Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 591

Very good sentences

"I'm one of the few people who went to Washington to get out of politics."

Can you guess who said it?  Hat tip goes to Felix Salmon.

Genetic Enhancement v. Artificial Intelligence

Will robots and artificial intelligences take human jobs? Perhaps but the nature of humanity is not carved in stone. Genetic enhancement (GE) is within a hairsbreadth of reality.

It's true that the practical applications of AI are moving faster than GE but GE has a head start of over a billion years. Moreover, although GE is still impractical, the costs of GE are falling fast. The costs of sequencing a genome (shown at right, click to enlarge), for example, are falling far faster than even Moore's Law would predict. Sequencing takes us only part of the way towards H+ but it's an important part.

Genetic engineering already works wonders, even when used haphazardly. My own efforts at GE (I had the help of a PhD microbiologist) have produced two promising NIs. When used in a more controlled manner the results of GE will be even better ("it's still us, only the best of us.")

I used to worry that religious objections would prevent the evolution of H to H+, especially in the United States. But should courage fail us, the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians or perhaps even the Singaporeans will move humanity forward. In this case, the slippery slope works in favor of progress: from avoiding genetic disease towards making improvements will prove irresistible. You can't keep a better man down.

The contrast of GE and AI in the title is meant to remind us that AI is not the only technology relevant to debates about future jobs but the opposition of GE and AI is obviously false. AI is helping to create GE, of course, but it's deeper than that. In the not so long run it's not about computers substituting for labor or even complementing labor, it's about designing labor to complement computers (and vice-versa). Think about how quickly the phone has migrated from the desk, to the hand, to the ear, to the ear canal. The technology to enhance humanity with access to the internet is literally burying itself into our heads, call it I-fi. There is more to come.

And now for some music.

*The Philosophical Breakfast Club*

The author is Laura J. Snyder and the subtitle is Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World.  This is an excellent book about the history and status of science in 19th century England and in particular the contributions of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones, the latter an economist and of course Whewell debated induction and scientific method with Mill.  Babbage too had writings on economics.  Here is an excerpt from Snyder:

De Prony had been commissioned to produce a definitive test of logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the newly introduced metric system in France, to facilitate the accurate measurement of property as a basis for taxation.

De Prony had recently read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations...Smith discussed the importance of a division of labor in the manufacture of pins...

De Prony was the first to see that a Smithian division of intellectual labor could be equally valuable in the work of computation of mathematical tables -- although his idea had been anticipated by Leibniz, who believed that talented mathematicians should be freed from tedious calculations that could be done by "peasants."

If you enjoy the history of science, this book stands a good chance of being the best one in that genre to come out this year.  Here is one good review of the book.

The elephant in the room

Paul Krugman writes:

Brad DeLong is mad at Tyler Cowen, with reason — for Cowen writes about US fiscal irresponsibility, fairly sensibly, without mentioning the elephant, and I do mean elephant, in the room: the role of the post-Reagan GOP.

Look: until 1980 or so the United States generally paid its way; the ratio of debt to GDP generally fell over time. Then starve-the-beast came to power, and fiscal realism went away. That's the story; anyone who glosses over that, who makes it a plague-on-both-houses issue or, worse, makes it seem as if Obama is the villain, is in an essential way misleading his readers.

Brad DeLong offers further comment.

Pre-order your Derek Parfit, *On What Matters*, volumes I and II

Yes, that Derek Parfit here, and here.  Remember how they used to ask about how good a Beatles reunion would have been?  This is an event.

*Time* magazine ranks the top financial blogs

The list is here, the descriptions are good ones (I wrote this on the blog Free Exchange), and the top rankings work from the bottom upwards; Krugman is #1, Felix Salmon is #2, and we are #3.  And I don't even think of MR as a financial blog.

It's time to reread Robin Hanson

Isn't it always?

"Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence."

Marketplace for retired economists

Via Al Roth:

The AEA is attempting to make another part of the job market thick: it is linked from the main JOE page at  http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/

Here is the direct link.

Available Retired Faculty Listing: "As an experiment, the AEA is initiating a listing of retired economists who may be interested in teaching on either a part-time or temporary basis. Individuals can add or delete their name at any time during the year. The listing will be active from February 1 through November 30 each year. Listings will be deleted on November 30; the service will be closed during December and January, re-opening on February 1."

Right now the list is waiting to be populated by retired faculty seeking part time or temporary work.

Assorted links

1. U.S. passport ownership by state.

2. Tim Harford's "Dear Economist" returns.

3. Modeled Behavior on TGS.  NPR Morning Edition on TGS.

4. Under- and overshooters in the NBA, using game theory.

5. Dialogue between Joseph Stiglitz and his wife.

6. Don't ignore the risk preimium, when it comes to state pension assets, and more here.

7. Brad DeLong on the fiscal illusion; it's about villains.

8. Reuters and Gary Leff on gas station tacos; it's not about villains.

9. David Brooks reopens his blog.

What to do about wage polarization?

I like this Paul Krugman column, but I would have given it a different ending.  Krugman writes:

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn't the answer — we'll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can't do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don't exist or don't pay middle-class wages.

I would suggest three different points of emphasis:

1. Trade unions, even if they could become strong again (which is hard to see), would likely accelerate this process of substituting capital for labor, rather than counteracting it.  A one-time union wage premium, even if it does not come at the expense of other workers, will put only a small dent in the long-term trend.

2. Let's reform education, so people either make effective teams with computers, or they specialize in areas where computers are not effective.  The nature of "education" is not carved in stone, even if the sector is hard to reform.

3. I have never seen it suggested that this "hollowing out" process will lead to lower output, quite the contrary.  Those gains go somewhere.  This is a reason to encourage the ownership of capital and on a quite broad basis.  Let's start by repealing Sarbanes-Oxley, but along these lines there is much more we could do.  How about low-load mutual funds backed by claims to intellectual property or whatever else will prove the scarce input for the future?  Identifying that scarce input is the key to making progress on this issue.