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The “robot bombs” and “robot planes” used by the Nazis later in the war were reported to be ineffective.43
FIGURE 14.1. Percentage of Articles Containing the Words Automation and Artificial Intelligence in News and Newspapers, 1900–2019 The automation and artificial intelligence narratives have recurred several times, with variations in the story each time. Source: Author’s calculations from ProQuest News & Newspapers.
The term singularity began to be used after Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1915. The word denotes a situation in which some terms in the equations became infinite, and it was used to describe the astronomical phenomenon of what came to be called the black hole: a “singularity in space-time.”
later the glamorous term singularity came to be defined as the time when machines are finally smarter than people in all dimensions.
Singularity with respect toachines and humans .
shifted attention from the muscles being replaced by electrical machines to the brain being replaced by artificial intelligence.
The term automation differs from labor-saving in that automation suggests no one is near the production process, except perhaps for a technician in a distant control room who presses buttons to start the process. Automation was then described starting in the 1950s not just as machines, but rather as “machines running machines.”
Change in the meaning of the word autoation.
The 1957–58 recession was then dubbed “the automation recession.”
In 1963, labor leader George Meany tied a demand for a thirty-five-hour workweek to concerns about automation.
In 1965, the Wall Street Journal ran a story by Alfred L. Malabre, Jr., titled “Automation Alarm Is Proving False.” The article noted that people in 1965 seemed just to have forgotten about automation.
Use of the word robot, coined in the 1920s, also shows an enormous spike in the early 1980s.
A company called The Robot Store began manufacturing and selling humanoid robots in 1983.
In fact, robots in movies precede even the word robot coined by Čapek, the Czech playwright, which started to go viral in 1922. Notably, film robots (or automatons) were called dummies (as in The Dummy, 1917) or mechanical men (as in L’uomo meccanico, 1921).
These mostly silly movies probably did not have much impact on economic activity except where they may have lent emotional color to fears about the automated future.
The Internet, first available to the public around 1994,
from 1974 to 2000, stock prices rose more than twentyfold.
According to Google Trends, the latest wave of automation/technology-based fears began around 2016 and continues unabated at the time of this writing.
Apple bought Siri from its creator, SRI (Stanford Research Institute) International,
Rogons of Siri.
We might imagine preferring Siri as a conversation partner to a human, because Siri’s information is much more comprehensive and reliable.
tabula rasa
Taxing companies that use robots, the argument goes, will provide revenue to help the government deal with the unemployment consequences of robotics.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
Book.
perennial narrative about the scarcity of land and its value.
real estate confidence is very different from confidence in the state of the economy, because people tend to view the two as very different things.1 Real estate is regarded as a personal asset, which one might have useful opinions about, while the economy is seen as the product of myriad forces.
In 1926, Charles Ponzi, who is said to have invented the Ponzi scheme in 1920, was released from jail. (Also called a circulation scheme, a Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment fund that pays off early investors with money raised from later investors, creating a false impression of profits to lure yet more victims.)
There is also a tendency for people who already own homes in a city to try to block further construction of homes, particularly of affordable housing. They have an economic incentive to do so, for limiting housing supply boosts home prices.
By the 1990s, the term flipper was commonly used to describe people who bought shares in initial public offerings (IPOs) and resold them quickly. People often described the flippers in admiring terms, as people who understood that IPOs were typically underpriced on the offering date. When the share price popped up soon after the IPO, the flippers made a quick profit. A famous 1991 article by Jay Ritter showed that the initial IPO price pop tended to be followed by weak performance over subsequent years, so the optimal strategy appeared to be buying IPOs at the offering and then flipping them.
ostentation
whetted
The crash of 1929 is not best thought of as a one- or two-day event, though the narrative usually suggests that it was. The combined October 28–29, 1929, crash brought the Standard & Poor’s Composite Index down only 21%, a fraction of the decline over the next couple of years, and this drop was half reversed the next day, October 30, 1929. Overall, the closing S&P Composite Index dropped 86% from its peak close on September 7, 1929, to its trough close on June 1, 1932, over a period of less than three years.
1955 book The Great Crash, 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith
The principle of psychology called the affect heuristic, discussed in chapter 6, predicts that such narratives make people temporarily more fearful about everything.8
Suicides were attributed to the 1987 crash too, but these stories do not seem to have formed long-term memories, for a strong narrative did not develop and there was no reinforcing story of depression after 1987.
engender
boycott narrative and others in its constellation tend to recur when there is a broad-based undercurrent of social opprobrium, and they are economically important because they affect people’s willingness to spend and willingness to compromise.
The moral authority of boycotts disappears when most people begin to express suspicion and annoyance with them.
Profiteer is a play on the much older word privateer, meaning a pirate ship that has government support to prey on enemy foreign shipping.
1918, the last year of World War I,
smote
conflate
rapacious
sordid
effrontery
gouging.
Labor union representatives did not have any incentive to explain the employers’ predicament to their members. Rather, they found it in their interests to keep alive a story about evil management.
acquiescent
I have read enough predictions by economists to convince me that my guess is as good as anyone’s on the future trend of prices. A housewife plays the falling commodity market just as an investor plays the falling stock market; she sits tight and waits for prices to settle before buying anything but actual necessities. But I do not need to be an economist to realize that if all the twenty million housewives do that, business recovery will be indefinitely delayed.
speculators,
the history attributed everything to important decisions made by male presidents, bankers, and business leaders, but the critical decisions that brought on the depression (that is, the postponement of purchases) may have come more from women.
Perspectove on depression does not cover women's side of the story.
“Buy Now” campaign was an attempt to counter the “prices will fall” narrative that had taken hold.
After the war ended in 1945, the US authorities maintained the wartime price controls for a while to prevent the kind of inflation experienced in 1919 after World War I.
