As the tech sector gets increasingly productive compared to the rest, people will be more and more interested in plundering it and less and less interested in doing something productive themselves.
Look the reason imo that AI isn't going to effect most jobs in software development sector is simple. The demand for software far outstrips the supply, and supply is limited by the cost .... if every software developer or IT related person became 10 X more productive that would not saturate or saite the demand for software systems... until that demand is fully satiated it won't impact those jobs there will just be much more and faster software development and deployment of IT systems. Eventually I suppose demand will be met but I don't think it will happen quickly
Wow Andreessen gets the data right and the interpretation wrong. Those areas that are more expensive aren't more expensive due to government regulations but due to human factors i.e. they are still primarily manual and and custom efforts... Ah DUH!
This is typically poor critical thinking, if we industrialized colleges and elder care etc. (really not recommending we do that) and made it non personal and highly automated those sectors would be dirt cheap too but who would want that (yet). If elder care a college educations were performed by low cost labor from the 2nd and 3rd world cost would drop. There are functional, institutional issues too, for instance in college and degrees sectors you can't just master a field and pass a certification to get your degree you have to go to an accredited college and be in a recognized degree program. But in the next 10 years AI and both robotics and androdics (anthropogenic robotics, AI with faces and human like appendages who just make it past the uncanny valley) will massively change the cost of things like college education, elder care, basic healthcare.... it just took longer to improve those fields.
"Keynes just looked at the productivity development of the day and concluded that after some decades it would take much less time to produce the necessities of life. He somehow assumed that as soon as people had reached a certain level of material comfort, they would just live and let live.
Why did he assume that? Such a thing hasn't happened at any time, at any place ever. "
Really? How long ago was it that most people worked 6 or 7 days a week? How many currently work less than "full time"? How much has average hours worked changed in the last century? The last decade?
How much has average hours of unpaid housework dropped in the last century? The last decade?
Time spent on housework seems to have decreased surprisingly little since the 1960s (so much for 50 years of development of household appliances and ready-made food)
Didn't France legislate a 35 hr work week in 2000? What about the increases in 32 hour work weeks in US in the last decade, or less? Given low unemployment, isn't part time work an indicator of less work?
It seems an interesting question whether spending time with one's own children is properly classified as work. Evidence it is increasing would seem to suggest it is not.
There definitely are cultural differences in how much people work. Europeans think Americans work too much, for example. And, as you say, the French work less than most Europeans.
I don't mean that there has been no reduction in working hours. Just that the reduction is not linear and not proportional to productivity increases.
>>It seems an interesting question whether spending time with one's own children is properly classified as work. Evidence it is increasing would seem to suggest it is not.
I think the word "leisure" means something voluntary. So if spending more time with one's children is something parents choose entirely freely, then it is a leisure activity. I don't think that is the case: There are strong norms for parental investment. Thereby I would sort the extra childcare under work.
That's an interesting question. The degree if childcare needed to raise a physically and mentally healthy child surely is investment in human capital. But how about all that excess childcare that science says is objectively of little value? Objectively, there will be more or less as much human capital if the kids are free to roam as if parents are hyper-immersing them in the most pedagogical toys that exist.
In an ideal world, and perhaps in Scandinavia or the Nordics generally, yes. In other parts of the world there is a forced zero-sum element of investment in children.
In the Anglosphere, getting into Tier 1 universities (the Ivy League in the USA, Oxbridge in the UK, and so on) has outsized rewards. Another essayist here on Substack complained in passing that East Asian immigrants to California(? I think it was) made life substantially worse for Californian(?) children, because the immigrants would force their children to grind (get after-school tuition and other "enrichment" activities) to get into top universities, which meant that the locals also had to grind in order to stand a chance.
Childcare - where norms are to spend more time with one's children, there almost has to be less other work to have the time. It is a supply and demand question. Yes, it is cultural but replacing work with childcare doesn't make it work. I guess we disagree on that and whether it is work for other reasons.
Likewise, the reduction in work is also heavily influenced by supply and demand. If Keynes thought his kids would only work 15 hours, he surely wasn't accounting for S&D. When income/hr goes up, hours don't go down to the point where total income is unchanged. But hours definitely do go down.
"Andreessen argues against a Universal Basic Income on the grounds that humans are made to be productive." Yes, sumans ARE "made to be productive". Trouble is, Andreessen's understanding (or preaching) of "productive" is terribly flawed. See https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/ubi-ai-and-reality-always-in-the
That baumol's cost disease exists because people need to feel productive/purposeful/useful/valuable (etc) is a great insight.
I'll look into MA, who I've presumed was a pointy headed american blow hard.
If he's arguing "against a Universal Basic Income on the grounds that humans are made to be productive" I'm with him.
However, while State charity is destructive of one's soul, I'm not sure having baumol consume most of the economy is a better option. Maybe Keynes was correct: we should all be 'working' waaaaay less by relying on ai to facilitate our productive efforts and allocate the great majority of our time to forms of self-expression (art and craft, etc) with our fellow humans. Not dissimilar to the apparent approach of that Norwegian chess champion.
Except cellphone services, somewhere in the middle of the blue lines. They actually are local. Also, computer software is not mostly made by Chinese slave labor. It is not mainly the Chinese who make e-mail programs, word-processing programs, social media and so on.
The red categories are not only local. They are also old. And with age come vested interests.
But beware, software and cellphone service are largely manufactured. Software doesn't look manufactured, but once you've paid some expensive workers to make it, you can duplicate it a million times for little money (as long as you don't provide customer support). Similarly with cellphone service, there's a lot of local labor in getting the cell towers installed and dealing with all the regulation, but the equipment is manufactured and the actual operation of the service has almost no labor.
Doesn't that confirm Marc Andreessen's point? Software and cellphone services require little labor. For that reason, they are cheap. And for that reason, the labor can go to hospitals and universities and other regulated sectors instead.
I don't have time to write a more detailed/thoughtful version of this, but I'll start: I am immediately annoyed by and suspicious of any analysis that partitions the work that various people do into two groups, "those who do productive work" and "parasites". Certainly Andreesen isn't the first at this; the US city of Trenton has the slogan "Trenton makes, the world takes" in lights on its main bridge. That dates back to when Trenton was a major manufacturing city.
It's true that there is parasitism, but for most authors, the division turns out to be between "those who do work I understand / directly benefits me / of the type I do" and "everybody else".
Housing: At least in the US, the average size of a housing unit has been rising steadily. So a "housing unit" has gotten better over time and all things being equal we'd expect the price to rise. And I've consumed a diet of "YIMBY" complaints about the regulation of the building of housing artificially raising prices. And yet the graph shows that housing costs have risen *slower* than wages.
College: I've noted in another comment that the college experience delivered to the student has become "better" as measured by what students choose when given a choice. (And very little of college is paid for by the chooser; most comes from parents, the student's future self (and young people have notoriously high discount rates), and external funders.) So it's not unreasonable that the price of college has been increasing. (Also, the list price of colleges has become nearly completely disconnected from what the average student pays, so you've got to check that the BLS statistics use the real price not the list price.) (I'll note my alma mater pioneered marketing college to the prospective students rather than *their parents*, which was the starting point for the college price inflation.)
Medical care: Again, the quality of medical care (in the US) has improved dramatically *along the dimensions which customers use to choose*. Many of these dimensions have no effect on the medical outcomes, but "utility" is in the eyes of the buyer. (more work by specialists, less by general practitioners; better concierge experience in hospitals (amazingly now, hospitals provide food like a restaurant, what you want when you want it, rather than you get what's delivered three times a day); more diagnostic technology (especially imaging) even when it provides no medically useful information; bias toward treatment rather than non-treatment; preference for brand-name pharmaceuticals) Often in the US a state-run medical system is proposed as a remedy to medical expense, but never is it noted that a major part of a state-run system is being a monopsony buyer of medical labor (and thus driving down the pay for medical work, especially fewer specialists and more generalists) and a monopoly seller of medical services (and thus eliminating the use of expensive diagnosis and treatment when it provides no proven medical benefit).
Regulation: There are some subtle aspects to this. One is when the regulated behavior has externalities. An infamous case in the US is the wearing of motorcycle helmets. Many riders dislike this as it anti-symbolizes what they want from riding, a sense of unfettered freedom. But even in the US, if you brain-damage yourself in a motorcycle accident, the state will pay to keep you alive and tended. So there's a large cost of brain damage that is not borne by the rider and isn't automatically factored into his preferences. I can imagine that this is stronger in a country with a better welfare system. In particular, what is the cost of non-safety-glass windows due to people getting severely cut by breaking them? Those accidents are probably rare, but I expect they are expensive. I would guess that in Sweden almost all of that cost is borne by the state.
Why the state cares whether people's roofs collapse isn't clear to me. but of course the question isn't the typical snowfall in a year but the maximum snow accumulation expected over the lifetime of a house (which is likely 100 years or more). But the Web claims that in Luleå typical winter snow accumulation is 1 meter and it's possible that there are political constraints to the degree to which the regulation can vary across Sweden. What are the statistics in your location?
I'm not saying that Andreesen is completely wrong, but a lot of the expensive things he complains about have other factors involved rather than just looting by well-positioned elites. Indeed, since he is a businessman, he should be fully aware of the market-related factors in medicine and education.
> Keynes just looked at the productivity development of the day and concluded that after some decades it would take much less time to produce the necessities of life. He somehow assumed that as soon as people had reached a certain level of material comfort, they would just live and let live.
I've read that pattern *is* seen when western employers move into a pre-industrial area and hire locals; the locals work enough during the week to pay what they habitually consume in a week, and increasing the pay rate causes them to work fewer hours. (Like Medieval peasants who worked long enough during the week to be able to pay for getting drunk on Sunday.) But people are socially competitive and once the custom of competing through consumption develops, what people want is not money but *more money than their neighbors*.
I'm also somewhat suspicious about the figures given for "college tuition and fees". It's become known that while colleges' stated tuition has been rising quickly, the tuition students pay hasn't been rising. See e.g. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-college-costs. It is possible that fees have been rising rapidly enough to present the overall inflation rate reported in the graph, but it should be checked whether Andreesen as gotten deceived by the education industry.
To reply using your metaphor, I was arguing that the forest Andreesen is describing doesn't exist because most of the trees that Andreesen enumerated as being part of the forest wasn't the sort of tree that Andreesen claims it is.
> A problem arises when consumption becomes waste. This is humanity as bacteria in a petri dish. It doesn't have a good end.
In the biggest picture, things aren't good and there isn't an "end". The process of evolution has been continuing for a few billion years and the total biomass has remained about constant. Each year, some DNA out-competes other DNA and becomes the ancestors of next year's DNA.
There is some directionality to the process: The information content of the most complex organisms in existence increases as time goes on. In particular the braininess (cephalization index) of the braininest animals has been increasing steadily. We now have animals that are brainy enough to become infested with culture (memes, behaviors that propagate independently of DNA), and cultures have been getting more complicated. Recently memes that direct animals to build computers have been propagating ...
But still, DNA competes with DNA to be the ancestor of the next generation. What has changed is, to some degree, the mechanisms DNA is using to compete. Industrialization has to a considerable degree replaced skill with physical violence and interpersonal politics with skill at producing objects that other animals feel provides themselves with things they "need". (One might cite Andreesen as having been particularly successful at this competition.)
Zooming in to our current culture, we're lucky that an increasing amount of production and consumption is non-material goods. The size of the US economy is less how many tons of steel we produce and more how many copies of MS Word we sell. The amount of pollution and natural resource consumption absolutely required, for example, to deliver a high-definition movie to a viewer is extremely low. Even objects as apparently material as automobiles are becoming more information objects -- an auto of 2020 is far more informationally complex than one of 1960, but probably weighs slightly less.
Hmmm... I've read that in order to process one bit of information, one absolutely needs to expend a minimum amount of energy, which is Boltzman's constant times the ambient temperature, symbolically k T. An HD movie contains something like 10^11 bits, which requires expending about 10^-9 joules of energy = one watt for one nanosecond.
I've no ' beef' with MA because I know virtually nothing about him or his views, but the concept of Baumol's cost disease is outstanding IMO.
My thinking seems pretty close to Tove's and I don't think it relies on MA's presentation of Baumol's disease to the extent that a point by point rebuttal of MA beliefs disproves it.
Virtualisation of consumption may reduce humanity's loading on the earth's ecosystems, but there is no evidence that this is having a global impact yet or ever will. For example, fossil fuel consumption continues to increase and, IIRC, is accelerating as more people enter the materialistic pleasure dome of Xanadu.
>>In particular, what is the cost of non-safety-glass windows due to people getting severely cut by breaking them?
I have asked that question so many times. This being Sweden, I'm rather certain that no one ever estimated that before they made that law. Just as no one estimated the effects of forcing people to build disability-friendly homes. The costs would have been difficult to estimate, since one part of them is that people will have fewer children.
I guess someone could compare Poland, where they don't need safety glass in windows, to Sweden where that is mandated. Do they have high costs for people getting cut on windows in Poland?
(Last autumn I actually read about an accident with windows: A man in his early 40s rented a hotel room somewhere in Western Sweden. When he came back in the middle of the night the hotel was locked and he didn't have a key. So he got the idea to kick a window, injured his thigh and bled to death.)
I strongly suspect that the government makes laws in order to move costs from taxpayers to people building things. Which means they are shifting the burden of cost to young families. Families need to build disability-friendly houses so the local council will not have to pay for disability-adaptations once someone inevitably becomes disabled. Builders are required to install safety glass so the probably already minuscule cost of people cutting themselves on windows will get even more minuscule. That says something about the attitude to people who try to do things, and to expanding families. If the government doesn't want to subsidize motorcycle people too much, that is fine by me. If it adopts the same kind of attitude toward families, it is not.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, children were regularly killed through accidents involving windows and glass sliding doors. Doing the things that kids like to do: playing chasing, playing catch with balls, playing other ball games, or just fooling around.
Safety glass is a silly thing to complain about IMO. It's like the belief that the Y2K problem was a hoax: the banking and finance world did not seize up solid for months or years *only because* so much money was spent on preventing that outcome. So with safety glass. Children not killed don't make the statistics.
Where can I find those statistics? The safety-glass rule is only from 2009 in Sweden, so the problem should have existed far beyond the 1970s here.
In general, I like to base my decisions on which precautions to take on statistics. Realistically, parents have only so much to spend on child safety. They have to choose the best measures and they can't choose them all.
When I was building a staircase I carefully studied statistics of death and injury of children in staircases. I made the conclusion that staircases are primarily dangerous for old people. So I built a normally safe, straight staircase instead of investing extra space or inconvenience in a super-safe staircase with a platform in the middle.
Instead, I chose to direct the bulk of my child-safety efforts into preventing drowning. Statistically speaking, most fatal accidents involving children below the age of six are drowning accidents. Drowning accidents are also those I hear the most of (a child in the neighboring village a few years ago, Ander's uncle, my grandmother's sister's daughter...). Just the other month, we finally found the time and organization to fill a dangerous pond here nearby with stones.
If the government is forcing me to invest in child-safety measures, I want at least an indication that those measures pay off at least as much as the measures I would otherwise be investing in.
I am in New Zealand, so I don't know where you would find the statistics for Sweden. NZ's Department of Statistics' data portal website is incredibly obscure. It's a great deal of work to get anything at all meaningful from it. And then I still don't really trust that I have got the full story...
I wrote what I did based on my recollection of a newspaper campaign, I think in the late 1970s, with a series of articles in the leading daily paper (The NZ Herald) and the leading weekly current affairs magazine (The NZ Listener).
So it may be the case that there were only a few tens of children killed by shattered windows or doors, over a decade or so. Still, preventing that seems like a reasonable trade to me.
Edit: you are right to focus on drowning. It is much more common.
The glass in the automobiles got so safe that the billionaire's billionaire wife was safe from being rescued by her friends, who presumably grabbed implements with which to try. Meanwhile the people who think all the time about auto safety, never once pondered the rather obvious point that if you're in water and the electrical system has shorted, you'll never be able to open the windows as you would have done with the old cranking handles.
>>It's true that there is parasitism, but for most authors, the division turns out to be between "those who do work I understand / directly benefits me / of the type I do" and "everybody else".
Yes. But under those layers of egocentrism there must be objective truth. Either those authors are right, wrong or something in between.
Marc Andreessen (and, in this case, you) have sidestepped the central question of AI causing joblessness. In his case, it seems almost deliberate -- it is for certain solidly in the middle of the lane for a tech-optimist's response. The actual argument (not mine -- my concerns are elsewhere) is that any discussion about jobs and automation that draws from historical data (including e.g. last week) is on the wrong topic. The printing press makes obsolete the job of copyist, letting those who would have been copyists do something else. Sure there's some disruption at first (an abbot who wrote a tract, not long after gutenberg, explaining that monks would always still copy manuscripts had the tract printed to increase its circulation; oops), but the workers go elsewhere. Same with farmers to tractors or buggy-whip-manufacturers to car assembly line workers. Actual AI wouldn't do anything similar. AI would render obsolete not any one particular kind of intellectual work (leaving other kinds), but would rather make all intellectual workers themselves completely and permanently obsolete. Yes in theory a human plumber will still be needed to fix your physical drain, but true AI would likely lead to advances in robotics as well. Even if somehow it doesn't, and people still need human plumbers and framers and suchwhat, eventually it'll be cheaper to give any random biped a pair of goggles that show him how to assemble the pipes or sticks of lumber that come marked from the plant. Plumbers aren't paid well because of the courage it takes to go under a house where the sewer is leaking, but because they have to solve problems when they're down there. Even if somehow (in an AGI world) the goggles are never cheap enough to let an illegal immigrant do the work for peanuts, whose homes will plumbers then be fixing up, and for what money?
Now of course I don't think we'll get there, because I don't think we're on track for true AGI. But I do expect automated tools to shrink the size of the white-collar jobs market enough to cause real squeezes further down (which will coincide with us getting poorer for the same other reasons we've been getting poorer lately).
As long as the new jobs require the same type of skill as the old jobs, there are no long-term problems. That is what happened in the history of industrialization: The new jobs were as simple, or simpler than the old jobs.
I think today we are seeing the opposite, and we have been seeing it for quite a while: Jobs are getting more complicated. First they came for the children, and that seemed like a good thing: Everybody was happier without children running around in the factories. Then they came for the young people: Really, what are people doing at university? I think most of them are keeping away from the labor market for a few years until they get fully adult and grown-ups feel they fit in better (and also, higher education conveniently does some filtering on intelligence and adaptability).
The most central question is: Is the number of useless people constant, or can it become higher or lower? As long as the welfare state has existed, there has been a threshold below which it is more convenient to pay people off than to allow them in the labor market. A certain proportion of the labor force is simply too unproductive to merit payment above the minimum wage level. Is that share of people constant, or does it grow or shrink with different factors (the level of the minimum wage is an obvious one. But other factors, like the complexity of jobs compared to people's innate skills?)
In theory, everyone would be employable if the minimum wage concept was just abandoned. But I doubt it. Although there is too much to do in my yard and in my house, I wouldn't be willing to employ people doing jobs there very cheaply: After all, workers are also human, and humans can be hostile, regardless of how cheaply they are forced to sell their labor. I expect people who produce things of value to reason the same way: A human is a potential enemy, so humans have to make a certain positive contribution in order to be worth having around.
I can't see why it would be a law of nature that x percent of humans are always worth having around and y percent are not. If, for example, robots become better, it will be easier to dismiss humans as potential troublemakers (and pay them off to stay away, maybe).
It sounds a bit as though you're agreeing with me. But no, true AGI would massively change the percentage of people considered useless, with some estimates putting that percentage at 100%.
Yes, I probably agree with you. I just find a "false" or incomplete AGI immensely more plausible than a true AGI for several reasons (things are seldom perfect. And since we don't even know what human intelligence is we can't possibly manufacture it.)
Yeah I'm not expecting it. But Andressen is, and his arguments about employment make no sense in that context.
In theory, with enough compute, we wouldn't need to know what intelligence is -- we don't know how LLMs work, either. But I think getting to truly genius-level self-improving machine intelligence will prove to be beyond us. If we did get there, the machine really would be able to do all the things they hope/fear it would.
Unfortunately, the 'reasonable' is just a wrapper. The linked post is mostly Bulverism, with a smattering of wishful thinking.
He's smart enough to be able to figure out why his stated positions are garbage, but he (like techno-optimists generally) seems so cognitively biased as to be incapable of doing so. But, just to avoid the sins of Mr. Bulver myself, a quick explanation:
Andreessen (and all like him) are making the same type of argument a gently-raised and mildly-treated boy who wants a lion as a pet might make. The boy's argument is in fact better than Andreesen's by a factor of ten, but they're both wrong in the same direction and therefore instructive. "Consider", the boy says, "that the bigger an animal is the nicer it is -- yes my little kitty once scratched me, but my pony never has. In fact, the pony bears me upon his back with the greatest of patience, whereas my kitty does not let me so much as pull his tail. Clearly, niceness is intrinsic to animals, and the bigger an animal is, the more niceness it contains. None of the stories I like to read show any possibilities otherwise -- the animals, especially the lions, are very nice, and in fact help little boys defeat monsters (who, not being animals, are not nice). Yes, those who say that we ought not have lions as pets like to read other stories, but we can see from how 'hysterical' they are after reading them that such 'science fiction' is both wrong factually and bad for one's mental health. I am being much more reasonable than they, and there is no good reason why I shouldn't be given a lion for my next birthday."
>>But Andressen is, and his arguments about employment make no sense in that context.
Well, with that blog description one can't really blame him for being inconsistent. And if he actually did believe in "true AGI", wouldn't he be an alarmist then? I mean, it is scary.
As much as I have seen of LLM:s, they specialize in grammatically correct bullshit. Good for me, since I have some trouble being grammatically correct in English.
At the core of it lies the question "is thinking and computing the same thing?" I'm convinced it is not. And computers compute. They don't think. And that is what is so exciting with it: Machines can complement our thinking and fill in our weak sides (most of us really are not very good at math without a pen and paper).
That's likely all that they'll ever be, yes. But precisely the techno-optimist hope is that you and I are both wrong about this, and someday soon we'll throw enough compute at machine learning that one will start to think enough to improve itself and build other, better-and-faster-thinking versions.
I kept reading "Kling" as "killing" (in the article and in the comments) while debating with myself about whether or not to point out the only thing that could be done with bureaucrats and regulators that would improve things. Freud would nod knowingly at me.
This resonated with me a lot, since my country is currently in turmoil over many issues, one of which is that there is a class of ultra-religious people who do not work and do not participate in society in any constructive way, but still receive considerable subsidies from the government, as they are in the ruling coalition.
So here the situation is much worse than “The simple and boring answer is that no one knows which rules, inspectors and bureaucracy are actually necessary”. Every reasonable person (and even economists ;) ) know that having a large part of the population that doesn't participate in the work-force and is not educated in basic STEM subjects but still receives a large part of the pie is untenable and unreasonable. But political power enables this new "warrior class" to take its unjust share of the spoils in any case.
So I'm less optimistic about UBI. I think that when most people get UBI but are still the powerful majority, they will want more than the Basic. I think they'll want an increasing share of the pie, to the point where it will seriously hurt production.
That's what happened with many of the warrior classes, did it not? The peasants were squeezed to the last drop and when the first drought or flood arrived, the whole economy collapsed and many died. This has happened many times.
So I suppose just "paying them off" would not be enough to stave off the collapse for long. Either we need to find a way to make more of the society productive, or we need to somehow ensure that the majority of the population doesn't enact self-serving laws (which means minority-rule and is probably very problematic from a human-rights angle).
The 'easy' solution is to raise the threshold for election to the Knesset. Germany relies on 5% and has not suffered the problems with proportional representation you have.
However, perhaps not. Maybe this parasitical portion of the population already exceeds 5% and there will be a runaway takeover of society (as suggested in the MA analysis)
No, that's not a good system. In Sweden we have a 4 percent threshold and that makes small parties that serve no function anymore remain forever: The small parties enter coalitions with the bigger parties, so there is one right-wing block and one left-wing block. And voters know that if any party on their side ever falls out, it can never win. So they upvote the weakest parties forever.
That's interesting. Our NZ system is modelled on the German one after switching from the British 'First past the post' system in the 1990s. The only material difference really has been to make the 'horse trading' around policy implementation more transparent (ie between political parties rather than within political parties). This greater acknowledgement of 'Political Parties' has somewhat increased the visibility of 'political actors' meaning people are somewhat more distracted from useful stuff by political argument.
Maybe our politics has been more pragmatic, less ideological? We have had quite a number of small political parties come and go. They have, so far, been reliant on the political prowess of the leader rather than the persistence of some political meme and they haven't been clearly delineated along a Left-Right axis.
Currently, we have a coalition of 3 parties in power: National which is famously 'pragmatic' (adheres to the 'median voter' theory of politics) with 2 minor parties: ACT which is Right economically (conventional economics) and socially Left (ie JS Mill liberal), and NZ1st which is Trumpian populist (ie opportunist run by a skilled political operator). Labour (ideologically social democrat) and Greens (ideologically socialist/progressive) are in opposition. Many Millennials and Gen Z have shifted from Labour to the Greens over the years.
There was an election 6 months ago so there is still lots of posturing by all sides.
I lived in Baltimore for a long time. The local black population was at least as useless and subsidized as ultra-orthodox in Israel, but a lot more destructive and politically a lot worse.
There is no end to the definition of "basic". In fact the more you give the more dysfunctional the receiving class becomes, necessitating even more "services".
It remains to see how the non-underclass would behave with UBI. Will it be like Star Trek, where people use their UBI to build a utopian society. Or will it be like Brave New World (where the island of Alpha++ all killed each other in a status war).
A few weeks ago I was in a discussion with an Ultra-Orthodox Jew from New York about the Israeli Ulta-Orthodox Jews. He said that at least they are good for tourism (I can't find that discussion for some reason, it is getting a bit messy here, which mostly is a good thing). But yes, the Israeli example is rather glaring.
>>So I'm less optimistic about UBI. I think that when most people get UBI but are still the powerful majority, they will want more than the Basic. I think they'll want an increasing share of the pie, to the point where it will seriously hurt production.
Yes! I think that will happen. The human race is a restless bunch. Not everyone, but those who are tend to set the agenda. And when those people have nothing to do, they will fight. So Universal Basic Income or not, the outlook is bleak. In an earlier draft I wrote a last chapter to this post proposing that the surplus should be used to expand the marginal soils in space. That way the human race could always expand and always be busy. But I deleted it because it became too much. Maybe I can write a new post about it.
>>That's what happened with many of the warrior classes, did it not? The peasants were squeezed to the last drop and when the first drought or flood arrived, the whole economy collapsed and many died. This has happened many times.
It definitely has. Today we rather treat our producers like valuable plants. I mean, all this talk about “entrepreneurship”: People have understood where value is created. But I wonder whether that is enough. When more and more people will have to make themselves important, I fear that producers will be increasingly squeezed between the people who fight over their surplus.
Perhaps people could learn to become gardeners and become managers of earth's natural world. That will always be an ongoing job as changes emerge through the magic of evolution.
Let me start by echoing Arnold Kling that "Wood from Eden is in general a great substack", and it's particularly valuable because it doesn't come out of the conventional "intellectual" class.
But let me disagree with Andreesen in a number of ways.
First, I suspect his numbers for "Food and Beverages" are "incorrect"; the information I've heard is that the fraction of people's incomes they spend on food has been decreasing steadily. It may be that that fraction hasn't decreased in the US in the last 20 years, but over the long run it does. Witness that the most destitute people are now "the homeless" rather than "the starving".
And you have to be careful what you count. According to the USDA "Food prices and spending", spending on "food at home" was 3.5 times spending on "food away from home" in 1962, but now "food away from home" is slightly higher. I suspect that just over half of Andreesen's "Food and Beverages" is actually restaurants, where most of the cost is labor rather than the actual food.
Looking at the red categories, most of them are services. You would naturally expect childcare to rise exactly with wages, because childcare is essentially the labor of average people. (This will change suddenly when we figure out a workable childcare robot.) Medical and educational services are done by highly-skilled labor and it's difficult to change that, which means that its costs are going to rise with wages. In principle, you can replace the teachers with the Internet, but in practice it's hard:
"The current interest in 'competency-based learning'--liberating students to earn degrees not by amassing credit hours but by preparing for assessments of particular skills at whatever pace and by whichever route they choose--is part of the same trend. Some reformers see the seeds of a revolution in college education, promising ultraconvenient, self-guided, low-cost courses of study for everyone. The 'beginning of the unbundling of the American university' is how one observer has described the transformation. All it will take for students to avail themselves of this emerging opportunity is a clear sense of where they're headed, lots of self-motivation, and good access to information about what mix of skills is likely to lead to a promising career. And therein, of course, lies the problem." -- "How to Escape the Community-College Trap" by Ann Hulbert
Housing cost in major metro areas, of course, is dominated by the fact that constructing housing is highly regulated, partly in its "quality" but in most places very strictly in its *quantity*.
The blue categories are not so much regulated as manufactured things, where technology easily reduces the amount of labor needed to make one unit (as long as the number of units produced is very large). Clothing is the only obvious exception; clothing is labor-intensive, but people in Bangladesh can be hired to do the work.
At the more substantial level, let me complain that in some of these red categories Andreesen isn't noting that the (consumer-perceived) quality of the services are improving.
For example, the amenity level of colleges (in the US) has been rising rapidly: In my father's day, almost all the workers were the faculty and the physical plant workers. Now, the "administrative" workers that provide amenities to the students outnumber both of those categories. Indeed my alma mater explains that it would be financially disadvantageous to reduce the amenity level because the lost revenues from affluent children (who pay the list price) going elsewhere would exceed the cost savings. (Non-affluent children aren't charged the list price and wouldn't see any price reduction.)
Similarly what we require for "Hospital Services" has been improving in quality. In 1960, nobody considered the best medical care that was available to be disastrous, but in 2020, if we proposed (in the US) that the government-provided minimal medical care be at the 1960 level, even conservatives would balk. More practically, the number of birthing units in US hospitals in rural areas has been decreasing (and so the average distance from one has been increasing). The problem is that the "standard of care" has increased to the point that a birthing unit is expected to be able to do immediate C-sections, despite that the birth rate has been decreasing. The interaction of decreasing "production" of births and increasing fixed costs forces low-demand birthing units to close.
This is terrible: I can't find the average cost of childbirth in Sweden through a search engine. 15 years ago that was no problem at all (the cost was then about 1750 dollars). Now I can't find the numbers. I used Google, I tried Bing and finally, DuckDuckGo gave me a random newspaper article with the numbers 2700 dollars and 4100 dollars mentioned.
Meanwhile, the cost for vaginal birth in America is said to be 14000 dollars here. That's a difference by an order of magnitude. (edit: no, it's not, but it differs quite a bit)
And although maternity care is much better now than in the 1960s, is it better in America than in Sweden? I would doubt it. Last time I checked outcomes such as perinatal mortality were better in Sweden. America also have much more C-sections, which I mostly would say is something negative. And last but not least, in Sweden we get as much nitrous oxide we want!
So I would argue that there seems to be something strange going on in American hospital services.
Me asking Perplexity ai: "what is the current average cost of child birth in Sweden"
A fraction of a second later: "The current average cost of childbirth in Sweden for residents is cheap due to the high-cost card (högkostnadskort) maximum of around 1,200 SEK (~$145 USD) annually.
I will soon be sad for real. Internet has become so adapted to stupid people that those of us who try not to be seem to have less and less to do there.
Hi, your baby must be around 6 months old now. Plenty keeping you busy.
My kids reckon the likes of ChatGpt (etc) are stupid and I counter that with its "all in how you prompt" meaning it takes a bit of effort to get LLMs to give meaningful responses (in part because of 'guardrails').
> So I would argue that there seems to be something strange going on in American hospital services.
There's an immense amount of argumentation about what is wrong with the US medical industry. My assessment is that there are a couple of factors that cause much of the trouble: One is that while the US insurance system means that most Americans don't see much of a direct cost from many of their medical consumption decisions, we don't have a state-regulated system that imposes controls on the details of medical expenditures. A second is that US medical consumers do not make decisions on based on what experts consider the medical quality of doctors, hospitals, etc. but rather on the "concierge experience", the emotional pleasantness of the interaction, including the decor of the facilities, the perceived status of the provider (general practitioner vs. specialist), deference shown by the doctor. And US medical consumers get a considerably higher level of amenity than consumers in the European systems: About 50% of our MDs are specialists vs. 10% in Europe, and people value specialists despite that evidently outcomes aren't better in the US. Facilities are better appointed. And there are considerably more "auxiliary" personnel involved in services.
"You can have a piece of the economic pie, as long as you do a make-work job neither you nor the person receiving it like too much."
Of course in some way having to go to the make-work jobs gatekeeps things. What's "basic" anyway. Why not basic + 1, etc to infinity. As long as all it takes is I have to complain until a large # gets deposited into my account.
“The simple and boring answer is that no one knows which rules, inspectors and bureaucracy are actually necessary.”
While that is a simple answer, I don’t think it bears much scrutiny. In fact, most of your article seems to argue against it. Most people could easily identify most counterproductive regulations. The victims of regulation do not push back because they are weak and the regulators are strong. Why don’t you ignore the bureaucrats supervising the construction of your house? Because you know that they could crush you and you also (likely rightly) surmise that they would delight in doing so.
Yes, I mean, to a certain degree I can identify what is clearly wasteful. I can take another example: At our local rubbish dump there are Rubbish Police that supervise that no one throws any packaging material in the container for combustibles. Because there is a law that says that producers of packaging material need to pay for "recycling".
But the gray zone is still much bigger. As Arnold Kling says: Order should not be taken for granted. (He said it here: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/where-i-stand-on-libertarianism ) Mostly I can't claim to know which public employees actually cause order to increase more than they harm production and civil society. I can just make educated guesses.
I can't say I know which measures are creating order, which
>>Because you know that they could crush you and you also (likely rightly) surmise that they would delight in doing so.
The weirdest thing of them all is that I don't assume they would delight in crushing me. They are actually polite and even nice when they ask me to take what I believe is absurd measures. I have come to realize that they do not act out of sadism but out of true, genuine belief in the system.
I have read few books from Japan. But once I found a collection of short stories in the flea market, called "Non-combustible garbage". The first story was about a woman who was very careful to pull out her garbage bin at exactly the right time, and how her life unraveled week for week as something always happened on rubbish day so she forgot to exit her bin for emptying and her apartment filled with garbage.
So yes, probably it is a bit like Japan, although I would doubt they can afford to waste labor that way.
One explanation for Japan's stagnation since the 1990's is a switch from an economy driven by competition with the USA to one focused on preservation of Japanese culture (induced by explicit demand from the USA to reduce their competitive efforts). Effectively this meant adoption of Baumol's disease as Japanese government policy.
I suppose you could actually test the hypothesis about bureaucratic motives: try challenging them. How long do you think their politeness would endure in the face of direct and committed opposition?
It could endure forever, since they are so much stronger than me. They could go on just-doing-their-jobs without being aggressive about it. It is I who need them to give me papers in order to be allowed to live in my house. It is I who will have to pay punitive construction taxes until I have achieved those papers. Not giving me papers I ask for requires zero aggression.
I think you are too cautious about the gray zone with respect to government supplied regulation. Kling is also fond of saying “markets fail, use markets.” Less regulated areas of life seem neither less complex nor more dys-regulated. Common law and convention seem adequate to provide highly regular service provision.
Those who are polite to you while demanding the absurd could just as easily quietly look the other way. Given their willingness to police recycling, do you think they would abstain from processing inmates at a camp for political prisoners?
My reading of Orwell suggests that boring bureaucracy is fueled by the “2-minute Hate.” My experience throughout the years of the COVID regime suggests that what most present as civility and politeness is a thin veneer covering a thick mass of fear, distrust and desire for power. The restrictions were imposed with majority support and there was no shortage of petty tyrants willing to enforce gross violations of human rights. To quote another Kling-ism: we are ruled by the FOOLs (Fears Of Others Liberties).
>>I think you are too cautious about the gray zone with respect to government supplied regulation. Kling is also fond of saying “markets fail, use markets.” Less regulated areas of life seem neither less complex nor more dys-regulated. Common law and convention seem adequate to provide highly regular service provision.
Absolutely. If society only tried to peel off harmful regulations, it could do quite a bit of it. For example, construction regulation with the aim of protecting home buyers could be privatized: If people want a stamp of approval when they buy a house, and insurance companies want such a stamp of approval to insure a house at cheaper rates, the market would provide such an organization. In some areas, just some logical thinking is needed to see which regulations are too much.
I think the gray zone consists of services like education. On the one hand, they are not what they pretend to be: School is much more child prison and much less a place to learn effectively than they say. On the other hand, where should children be if not in prison? I'm not sure about that.
Out playing. Whatever they want. I’m convinced that at least up through elementary school could be lots more outdoor and free time with less regidity and supervision. Teaching basic reading and math doesn’t require sitting in a desk 6 hours a day five days a week.
If they gave every parent back half what they spend we would probably find out, but free child prison is tempting for people that need to work.
>>Given their willingness to police recycling, do you think they would abstain from processing inmates at a camp for political prisoners?
I think that stupidity exists independently. People don't need to be sadistic or even callous to be stupid. People can believe for real that they are doing something good when they are telling people to separate packaging styrofoam from construction styrofoam. Some of those people would probably think they are doing something good when they are processing inmates at a camp for political prisoners too. But not all of them, because the latter task involves actually seeing human suffering.
College textbooks are starting to be replaced by open source versions. My wife always teaches her logic class out of forall x from the open logic project.
The textbook vendors are desperately working to create lock-in and exploit principal-agent misalignment but long term it's a losing battle.
Most of all I'm worried about my kids in elementary school. They badly need AI teachers. And I'm afraid the AI teachers will conquer Africa before we get them here, where human teachers are said to be great (they surely are - at some stuff. But I'm sure a computer is better at teaching math).
The thing your children are taught in elementary schools isn't really math and, beyond basics of making change, isn't very helpful.
Teaching kids to solve algebra problems or find the maximum of a function by rote is largely useless. It bores them and makes them hate math (it did for me and I'm a mathematican now) and it's pretty much pointless. If you don't understand it pretty well at a conceptual level you are just an inferior version of mathematica and that's mostly what our pre-college (and intro college) math classes turn out.
Fundamentally, the problem is that it's essentially impossible to gain a real conceptual understanding of a subject you hate/despise and think you're bad at. If you're smart and diligent you can force yourself through rote tasks but understanding requires curiosity and and being willing to actively hypothesize and think through the ideas.
Yes, some of the problem is that most pre-college teachers were taught by rote too and don't really understand or enjoy the subject. Best they can do is make class engaging despite the content. But even a really good teacher can't interest all the kids so if you evaluate them based on how well their students can do on a relatively predictable exam the incentive is to just teach rote rules and try to offer some insight into concepts on the side (but kids are lazy or they wouldn't need he so if they have to do the rote version anyway...).
Ultimately, what we end up doing is making kids miserable for a decade, making them hate math all for little gain. I advocate making math largely optional (in reality -- so you can go get a high status law degree at a good school) and replacing it with programming for quantative experience.
Alternatively evaluate the students/teachers based on a genuinely conceptually difficult test which changes each year to ask questions using the concepts covered but which are unlike anything the students will have actually seen and which changes every year (easier subject specific version of the math Olympiad type problems)
Well observed. My wife starts teaching the relationship between quantity and representation to infants. Says it forms the basis for both abstract reasoning and reading.
Look the reason imo that AI isn't going to effect most jobs in software development sector is simple. The demand for software far outstrips the supply, and supply is limited by the cost .... if every software developer or IT related person became 10 X more productive that would not saturate or saite the demand for software systems... until that demand is fully satiated it won't impact those jobs there will just be much more and faster software development and deployment of IT systems. Eventually I suppose demand will be met but I don't think it will happen quickly
Wow Andreessen gets the data right and the interpretation wrong. Those areas that are more expensive aren't more expensive due to government regulations but due to human factors i.e. they are still primarily manual and and custom efforts... Ah DUH!
This is typically poor critical thinking, if we industrialized colleges and elder care etc. (really not recommending we do that) and made it non personal and highly automated those sectors would be dirt cheap too but who would want that (yet). If elder care a college educations were performed by low cost labor from the 2nd and 3rd world cost would drop. There are functional, institutional issues too, for instance in college and degrees sectors you can't just master a field and pass a certification to get your degree you have to go to an accredited college and be in a recognized degree program. But in the next 10 years AI and both robotics and androdics (anthropogenic robotics, AI with faces and human like appendages who just make it past the uncanny valley) will massively change the cost of things like college education, elder care, basic healthcare.... it just took longer to improve those fields.
"Keynes just looked at the productivity development of the day and concluded that after some decades it would take much less time to produce the necessities of life. He somehow assumed that as soon as people had reached a certain level of material comfort, they would just live and let live.
Why did he assume that? Such a thing hasn't happened at any time, at any place ever. "
Really? How long ago was it that most people worked 6 or 7 days a week? How many currently work less than "full time"? How much has average hours worked changed in the last century? The last decade?
How much has average hours of unpaid housework dropped in the last century? The last decade?
>>How long ago was it that most people worked 6 or 7 days a week?
Wasn't it in the 1960s? That is, about 60 years ago. That's some time.
Here is a nice summary: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
In most places, little has happened since 1980.
Time spent on housework seems to have decreased surprisingly little since the 1960s (so much for 50 years of development of household appliances and ready-made food)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-5-americans-time-at-paid-work-housework-child-care-1965-to-2011/
And most of what is not spent on housework is spent on more childcare.
Didn't France legislate a 35 hr work week in 2000? What about the increases in 32 hour work weeks in US in the last decade, or less? Given low unemployment, isn't part time work an indicator of less work?
It seems an interesting question whether spending time with one's own children is properly classified as work. Evidence it is increasing would seem to suggest it is not.
There definitely are cultural differences in how much people work. Europeans think Americans work too much, for example. And, as you say, the French work less than most Europeans.
I don't mean that there has been no reduction in working hours. Just that the reduction is not linear and not proportional to productivity increases.
>>It seems an interesting question whether spending time with one's own children is properly classified as work. Evidence it is increasing would seem to suggest it is not.
I think the word "leisure" means something voluntary. So if spending more time with one's children is something parents choose entirely freely, then it is a leisure activity. I don't think that is the case: There are strong norms for parental investment. Thereby I would sort the extra childcare under work.
An intellectually consistent economist would have to label childcare "investment in human capital". In this light it is most definitely work.
That's an interesting question. The degree if childcare needed to raise a physically and mentally healthy child surely is investment in human capital. But how about all that excess childcare that science says is objectively of little value? Objectively, there will be more or less as much human capital if the kids are free to roam as if parents are hyper-immersing them in the most pedagogical toys that exist.
In an ideal world, and perhaps in Scandinavia or the Nordics generally, yes. In other parts of the world there is a forced zero-sum element of investment in children.
In the Anglosphere, getting into Tier 1 universities (the Ivy League in the USA, Oxbridge in the UK, and so on) has outsized rewards. Another essayist here on Substack complained in passing that East Asian immigrants to California(? I think it was) made life substantially worse for Californian(?) children, because the immigrants would force their children to grind (get after-school tuition and other "enrichment" activities) to get into top universities, which meant that the locals also had to grind in order to stand a chance.
Childcare - where norms are to spend more time with one's children, there almost has to be less other work to have the time. It is a supply and demand question. Yes, it is cultural but replacing work with childcare doesn't make it work. I guess we disagree on that and whether it is work for other reasons.
Likewise, the reduction in work is also heavily influenced by supply and demand. If Keynes thought his kids would only work 15 hours, he surely wasn't accounting for S&D. When income/hr goes up, hours don't go down to the point where total income is unchanged. But hours definitely do go down.
"Andreessen argues against a Universal Basic Income on the grounds that humans are made to be productive." Yes, sumans ARE "made to be productive". Trouble is, Andreessen's understanding (or preaching) of "productive" is terribly flawed. See https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/ubi-ai-and-reality-always-in-the
That baumol's cost disease exists because people need to feel productive/purposeful/useful/valuable (etc) is a great insight.
I'll look into MA, who I've presumed was a pointy headed american blow hard.
If he's arguing "against a Universal Basic Income on the grounds that humans are made to be productive" I'm with him.
However, while State charity is destructive of one's soul, I'm not sure having baumol consume most of the economy is a better option. Maybe Keynes was correct: we should all be 'working' waaaaay less by relying on ai to facilitate our productive efforts and allocate the great majority of our time to forms of self-expression (art and craft, etc) with our fellow humans. Not dissimilar to the apparent approach of that Norwegian chess champion.
The things that are more affordable can be provided by Chinese slave labor; the things that are less affordable cannot.
Except cellphone services, somewhere in the middle of the blue lines. They actually are local. Also, computer software is not mostly made by Chinese slave labor. It is not mainly the Chinese who make e-mail programs, word-processing programs, social media and so on.
The red categories are not only local. They are also old. And with age come vested interests.
But beware, software and cellphone service are largely manufactured. Software doesn't look manufactured, but once you've paid some expensive workers to make it, you can duplicate it a million times for little money (as long as you don't provide customer support). Similarly with cellphone service, there's a lot of local labor in getting the cell towers installed and dealing with all the regulation, but the equipment is manufactured and the actual operation of the service has almost no labor.
Doesn't that confirm Marc Andreessen's point? Software and cellphone services require little labor. For that reason, they are cheap. And for that reason, the labor can go to hospitals and universities and other regulated sectors instead.
I don't have time to write a more detailed/thoughtful version of this, but I'll start: I am immediately annoyed by and suspicious of any analysis that partitions the work that various people do into two groups, "those who do productive work" and "parasites". Certainly Andreesen isn't the first at this; the US city of Trenton has the slogan "Trenton makes, the world takes" in lights on its main bridge. That dates back to when Trenton was a major manufacturing city.
It's true that there is parasitism, but for most authors, the division turns out to be between "those who do work I understand / directly benefits me / of the type I do" and "everybody else".
Trying to finish off my gripe:
Housing: At least in the US, the average size of a housing unit has been rising steadily. So a "housing unit" has gotten better over time and all things being equal we'd expect the price to rise. And I've consumed a diet of "YIMBY" complaints about the regulation of the building of housing artificially raising prices. And yet the graph shows that housing costs have risen *slower* than wages.
College: I've noted in another comment that the college experience delivered to the student has become "better" as measured by what students choose when given a choice. (And very little of college is paid for by the chooser; most comes from parents, the student's future self (and young people have notoriously high discount rates), and external funders.) So it's not unreasonable that the price of college has been increasing. (Also, the list price of colleges has become nearly completely disconnected from what the average student pays, so you've got to check that the BLS statistics use the real price not the list price.) (I'll note my alma mater pioneered marketing college to the prospective students rather than *their parents*, which was the starting point for the college price inflation.)
Medical care: Again, the quality of medical care (in the US) has improved dramatically *along the dimensions which customers use to choose*. Many of these dimensions have no effect on the medical outcomes, but "utility" is in the eyes of the buyer. (more work by specialists, less by general practitioners; better concierge experience in hospitals (amazingly now, hospitals provide food like a restaurant, what you want when you want it, rather than you get what's delivered three times a day); more diagnostic technology (especially imaging) even when it provides no medically useful information; bias toward treatment rather than non-treatment; preference for brand-name pharmaceuticals) Often in the US a state-run medical system is proposed as a remedy to medical expense, but never is it noted that a major part of a state-run system is being a monopsony buyer of medical labor (and thus driving down the pay for medical work, especially fewer specialists and more generalists) and a monopoly seller of medical services (and thus eliminating the use of expensive diagnosis and treatment when it provides no proven medical benefit).
Regulation: There are some subtle aspects to this. One is when the regulated behavior has externalities. An infamous case in the US is the wearing of motorcycle helmets. Many riders dislike this as it anti-symbolizes what they want from riding, a sense of unfettered freedom. But even in the US, if you brain-damage yourself in a motorcycle accident, the state will pay to keep you alive and tended. So there's a large cost of brain damage that is not borne by the rider and isn't automatically factored into his preferences. I can imagine that this is stronger in a country with a better welfare system. In particular, what is the cost of non-safety-glass windows due to people getting severely cut by breaking them? Those accidents are probably rare, but I expect they are expensive. I would guess that in Sweden almost all of that cost is borne by the state.
Why the state cares whether people's roofs collapse isn't clear to me. but of course the question isn't the typical snowfall in a year but the maximum snow accumulation expected over the lifetime of a house (which is likely 100 years or more). But the Web claims that in Luleå typical winter snow accumulation is 1 meter and it's possible that there are political constraints to the degree to which the regulation can vary across Sweden. What are the statistics in your location?
I'm not saying that Andreesen is completely wrong, but a lot of the expensive things he complains about have other factors involved rather than just looting by well-positioned elites. Indeed, since he is a businessman, he should be fully aware of the market-related factors in medicine and education.
> Keynes just looked at the productivity development of the day and concluded that after some decades it would take much less time to produce the necessities of life. He somehow assumed that as soon as people had reached a certain level of material comfort, they would just live and let live.
I've read that pattern *is* seen when western employers move into a pre-industrial area and hire locals; the locals work enough during the week to pay what they habitually consume in a week, and increasing the pay rate causes them to work fewer hours. (Like Medieval peasants who worked long enough during the week to be able to pay for getting drunk on Sunday.) But people are socially competitive and once the custom of competing through consumption develops, what people want is not money but *more money than their neighbors*.
I'm also somewhat suspicious about the figures given for "college tuition and fees". It's become known that while colleges' stated tuition has been rising quickly, the tuition students pay hasn't been rising. See e.g. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-college-costs. It is possible that fees have been rising rapidly enough to present the overall inflation rate reported in the graph, but it should be checked whether Andreesen as gotten deceived by the education industry.
"once the custom of competing through consumption develops, what people want is not money but *more money than their neighbors*."
Good point. A problem arises when consumption becomes waste. This is humanity as bacteria in a petri dish. It doesn't have a good end.
I confess I skipped most of your comment as you seemed to be getting 'lost in the weeds' ie talking about trees rather than the forest.
> talking about trees rather than the forest
To reply using your metaphor, I was arguing that the forest Andreesen is describing doesn't exist because most of the trees that Andreesen enumerated as being part of the forest wasn't the sort of tree that Andreesen claims it is.
> A problem arises when consumption becomes waste. This is humanity as bacteria in a petri dish. It doesn't have a good end.
In the biggest picture, things aren't good and there isn't an "end". The process of evolution has been continuing for a few billion years and the total biomass has remained about constant. Each year, some DNA out-competes other DNA and becomes the ancestors of next year's DNA.
There is some directionality to the process: The information content of the most complex organisms in existence increases as time goes on. In particular the braininess (cephalization index) of the braininest animals has been increasing steadily. We now have animals that are brainy enough to become infested with culture (memes, behaviors that propagate independently of DNA), and cultures have been getting more complicated. Recently memes that direct animals to build computers have been propagating ...
But still, DNA competes with DNA to be the ancestor of the next generation. What has changed is, to some degree, the mechanisms DNA is using to compete. Industrialization has to a considerable degree replaced skill with physical violence and interpersonal politics with skill at producing objects that other animals feel provides themselves with things they "need". (One might cite Andreesen as having been particularly successful at this competition.)
Zooming in to our current culture, we're lucky that an increasing amount of production and consumption is non-material goods. The size of the US economy is less how many tons of steel we produce and more how many copies of MS Word we sell. The amount of pollution and natural resource consumption absolutely required, for example, to deliver a high-definition movie to a viewer is extremely low. Even objects as apparently material as automobiles are becoming more information objects -- an auto of 2020 is far more informationally complex than one of 1960, but probably weighs slightly less.
Hmmm... I've read that in order to process one bit of information, one absolutely needs to expend a minimum amount of energy, which is Boltzman's constant times the ambient temperature, symbolically k T. An HD movie contains something like 10^11 bits, which requires expending about 10^-9 joules of energy = one watt for one nanosecond.
I've no ' beef' with MA because I know virtually nothing about him or his views, but the concept of Baumol's cost disease is outstanding IMO.
My thinking seems pretty close to Tove's and I don't think it relies on MA's presentation of Baumol's disease to the extent that a point by point rebuttal of MA beliefs disproves it.
Virtualisation of consumption may reduce humanity's loading on the earth's ecosystems, but there is no evidence that this is having a global impact yet or ever will. For example, fossil fuel consumption continues to increase and, IIRC, is accelerating as more people enter the materialistic pleasure dome of Xanadu.
>>In particular, what is the cost of non-safety-glass windows due to people getting severely cut by breaking them?
I have asked that question so many times. This being Sweden, I'm rather certain that no one ever estimated that before they made that law. Just as no one estimated the effects of forcing people to build disability-friendly homes. The costs would have been difficult to estimate, since one part of them is that people will have fewer children.
I guess someone could compare Poland, where they don't need safety glass in windows, to Sweden where that is mandated. Do they have high costs for people getting cut on windows in Poland?
(Last autumn I actually read about an accident with windows: A man in his early 40s rented a hotel room somewhere in Western Sweden. When he came back in the middle of the night the hotel was locked and he didn't have a key. So he got the idea to kick a window, injured his thigh and bled to death.)
I strongly suspect that the government makes laws in order to move costs from taxpayers to people building things. Which means they are shifting the burden of cost to young families. Families need to build disability-friendly houses so the local council will not have to pay for disability-adaptations once someone inevitably becomes disabled. Builders are required to install safety glass so the probably already minuscule cost of people cutting themselves on windows will get even more minuscule. That says something about the attitude to people who try to do things, and to expanding families. If the government doesn't want to subsidize motorcycle people too much, that is fine by me. If it adopts the same kind of attitude toward families, it is not.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, children were regularly killed through accidents involving windows and glass sliding doors. Doing the things that kids like to do: playing chasing, playing catch with balls, playing other ball games, or just fooling around.
Safety glass is a silly thing to complain about IMO. It's like the belief that the Y2K problem was a hoax: the banking and finance world did not seize up solid for months or years *only because* so much money was spent on preventing that outcome. So with safety glass. Children not killed don't make the statistics.
Where can I find those statistics? The safety-glass rule is only from 2009 in Sweden, so the problem should have existed far beyond the 1970s here.
In general, I like to base my decisions on which precautions to take on statistics. Realistically, parents have only so much to spend on child safety. They have to choose the best measures and they can't choose them all.
When I was building a staircase I carefully studied statistics of death and injury of children in staircases. I made the conclusion that staircases are primarily dangerous for old people. So I built a normally safe, straight staircase instead of investing extra space or inconvenience in a super-safe staircase with a platform in the middle.
Instead, I chose to direct the bulk of my child-safety efforts into preventing drowning. Statistically speaking, most fatal accidents involving children below the age of six are drowning accidents. Drowning accidents are also those I hear the most of (a child in the neighboring village a few years ago, Ander's uncle, my grandmother's sister's daughter...). Just the other month, we finally found the time and organization to fill a dangerous pond here nearby with stones.
If the government is forcing me to invest in child-safety measures, I want at least an indication that those measures pay off at least as much as the measures I would otherwise be investing in.
I am in New Zealand, so I don't know where you would find the statistics for Sweden. NZ's Department of Statistics' data portal website is incredibly obscure. It's a great deal of work to get anything at all meaningful from it. And then I still don't really trust that I have got the full story...
I wrote what I did based on my recollection of a newspaper campaign, I think in the late 1970s, with a series of articles in the leading daily paper (The NZ Herald) and the leading weekly current affairs magazine (The NZ Listener).
So it may be the case that there were only a few tens of children killed by shattered windows or doors, over a decade or so. Still, preventing that seems like a reasonable trade to me.
Edit: you are right to focus on drowning. It is much more common.
The glass in the automobiles got so safe that the billionaire's billionaire wife was safe from being rescued by her friends, who presumably grabbed implements with which to try. Meanwhile the people who think all the time about auto safety, never once pondered the rather obvious point that if you're in water and the electrical system has shorted, you'll never be able to open the windows as you would have done with the old cranking handles.
>>It's true that there is parasitism, but for most authors, the division turns out to be between "those who do work I understand / directly benefits me / of the type I do" and "everybody else".
Yes. But under those layers of egocentrism there must be objective truth. Either those authors are right, wrong or something in between.
Marc Andreessen (and, in this case, you) have sidestepped the central question of AI causing joblessness. In his case, it seems almost deliberate -- it is for certain solidly in the middle of the lane for a tech-optimist's response. The actual argument (not mine -- my concerns are elsewhere) is that any discussion about jobs and automation that draws from historical data (including e.g. last week) is on the wrong topic. The printing press makes obsolete the job of copyist, letting those who would have been copyists do something else. Sure there's some disruption at first (an abbot who wrote a tract, not long after gutenberg, explaining that monks would always still copy manuscripts had the tract printed to increase its circulation; oops), but the workers go elsewhere. Same with farmers to tractors or buggy-whip-manufacturers to car assembly line workers. Actual AI wouldn't do anything similar. AI would render obsolete not any one particular kind of intellectual work (leaving other kinds), but would rather make all intellectual workers themselves completely and permanently obsolete. Yes in theory a human plumber will still be needed to fix your physical drain, but true AI would likely lead to advances in robotics as well. Even if somehow it doesn't, and people still need human plumbers and framers and suchwhat, eventually it'll be cheaper to give any random biped a pair of goggles that show him how to assemble the pipes or sticks of lumber that come marked from the plant. Plumbers aren't paid well because of the courage it takes to go under a house where the sewer is leaking, but because they have to solve problems when they're down there. Even if somehow (in an AGI world) the goggles are never cheap enough to let an illegal immigrant do the work for peanuts, whose homes will plumbers then be fixing up, and for what money?
Now of course I don't think we'll get there, because I don't think we're on track for true AGI. But I do expect automated tools to shrink the size of the white-collar jobs market enough to cause real squeezes further down (which will coincide with us getting poorer for the same other reasons we've been getting poorer lately).
As long as the new jobs require the same type of skill as the old jobs, there are no long-term problems. That is what happened in the history of industrialization: The new jobs were as simple, or simpler than the old jobs.
I think today we are seeing the opposite, and we have been seeing it for quite a while: Jobs are getting more complicated. First they came for the children, and that seemed like a good thing: Everybody was happier without children running around in the factories. Then they came for the young people: Really, what are people doing at university? I think most of them are keeping away from the labor market for a few years until they get fully adult and grown-ups feel they fit in better (and also, higher education conveniently does some filtering on intelligence and adaptability).
The most central question is: Is the number of useless people constant, or can it become higher or lower? As long as the welfare state has existed, there has been a threshold below which it is more convenient to pay people off than to allow them in the labor market. A certain proportion of the labor force is simply too unproductive to merit payment above the minimum wage level. Is that share of people constant, or does it grow or shrink with different factors (the level of the minimum wage is an obvious one. But other factors, like the complexity of jobs compared to people's innate skills?)
In theory, everyone would be employable if the minimum wage concept was just abandoned. But I doubt it. Although there is too much to do in my yard and in my house, I wouldn't be willing to employ people doing jobs there very cheaply: After all, workers are also human, and humans can be hostile, regardless of how cheaply they are forced to sell their labor. I expect people who produce things of value to reason the same way: A human is a potential enemy, so humans have to make a certain positive contribution in order to be worth having around.
I can't see why it would be a law of nature that x percent of humans are always worth having around and y percent are not. If, for example, robots become better, it will be easier to dismiss humans as potential troublemakers (and pay them off to stay away, maybe).
It sounds a bit as though you're agreeing with me. But no, true AGI would massively change the percentage of people considered useless, with some estimates putting that percentage at 100%.
Is Magnus Carlsen useless? Look at his income sources.
Yes, I probably agree with you. I just find a "false" or incomplete AGI immensely more plausible than a true AGI for several reasons (things are seldom perfect. And since we don't even know what human intelligence is we can't possibly manufacture it.)
Yeah I'm not expecting it. But Andressen is, and his arguments about employment make no sense in that context.
In theory, with enough compute, we wouldn't need to know what intelligence is -- we don't know how LLMs work, either. But I think getting to truly genius-level self-improving machine intelligence will prove to be beyond us. If we did get there, the machine really would be able to do all the things they hope/fear it would.
There it is, Marc Andreessen's beliefs about AI. https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-will-save-the-world
He seems... hyper reasonable, I think.
Unfortunately, the 'reasonable' is just a wrapper. The linked post is mostly Bulverism, with a smattering of wishful thinking.
He's smart enough to be able to figure out why his stated positions are garbage, but he (like techno-optimists generally) seems so cognitively biased as to be incapable of doing so. But, just to avoid the sins of Mr. Bulver myself, a quick explanation:
Andreessen (and all like him) are making the same type of argument a gently-raised and mildly-treated boy who wants a lion as a pet might make. The boy's argument is in fact better than Andreesen's by a factor of ten, but they're both wrong in the same direction and therefore instructive. "Consider", the boy says, "that the bigger an animal is the nicer it is -- yes my little kitty once scratched me, but my pony never has. In fact, the pony bears me upon his back with the greatest of patience, whereas my kitty does not let me so much as pull his tail. Clearly, niceness is intrinsic to animals, and the bigger an animal is, the more niceness it contains. None of the stories I like to read show any possibilities otherwise -- the animals, especially the lions, are very nice, and in fact help little boys defeat monsters (who, not being animals, are not nice). Yes, those who say that we ought not have lions as pets like to read other stories, but we can see from how 'hysterical' they are after reading them that such 'science fiction' is both wrong factually and bad for one's mental health. I am being much more reasonable than they, and there is no good reason why I shouldn't be given a lion for my next birthday."
>>But Andressen is, and his arguments about employment make no sense in that context.
Well, with that blog description one can't really blame him for being inconsistent. And if he actually did believe in "true AGI", wouldn't he be an alarmist then? I mean, it is scary.
As much as I have seen of LLM:s, they specialize in grammatically correct bullshit. Good for me, since I have some trouble being grammatically correct in English.
At the core of it lies the question "is thinking and computing the same thing?" I'm convinced it is not. And computers compute. They don't think. And that is what is so exciting with it: Machines can complement our thinking and fill in our weak sides (most of us really are not very good at math without a pen and paper).
That's likely all that they'll ever be, yes. But precisely the techno-optimist hope is that you and I are both wrong about this, and someday soon we'll throw enough compute at machine learning that one will start to think enough to improve itself and build other, better-and-faster-thinking versions.
I kept reading "Kling" as "killing" (in the article and in the comments) while debating with myself about whether or not to point out the only thing that could be done with bureaucrats and regulators that would improve things. Freud would nod knowingly at me.
This resonated with me a lot, since my country is currently in turmoil over many issues, one of which is that there is a class of ultra-religious people who do not work and do not participate in society in any constructive way, but still receive considerable subsidies from the government, as they are in the ruling coalition.
So here the situation is much worse than “The simple and boring answer is that no one knows which rules, inspectors and bureaucracy are actually necessary”. Every reasonable person (and even economists ;) ) know that having a large part of the population that doesn't participate in the work-force and is not educated in basic STEM subjects but still receives a large part of the pie is untenable and unreasonable. But political power enables this new "warrior class" to take its unjust share of the spoils in any case.
So I'm less optimistic about UBI. I think that when most people get UBI but are still the powerful majority, they will want more than the Basic. I think they'll want an increasing share of the pie, to the point where it will seriously hurt production.
That's what happened with many of the warrior classes, did it not? The peasants were squeezed to the last drop and when the first drought or flood arrived, the whole economy collapsed and many died. This has happened many times.
So I suppose just "paying them off" would not be enough to stave off the collapse for long. Either we need to find a way to make more of the society productive, or we need to somehow ensure that the majority of the population doesn't enact self-serving laws (which means minority-rule and is probably very problematic from a human-rights angle).
I sure hope that I'm mistaken, though :(
The 'easy' solution is to raise the threshold for election to the Knesset. Germany relies on 5% and has not suffered the problems with proportional representation you have.
However, perhaps not. Maybe this parasitical portion of the population already exceeds 5% and there will be a runaway takeover of society (as suggested in the MA analysis)
No, that's not a good system. In Sweden we have a 4 percent threshold and that makes small parties that serve no function anymore remain forever: The small parties enter coalitions with the bigger parties, so there is one right-wing block and one left-wing block. And voters know that if any party on their side ever falls out, it can never win. So they upvote the weakest parties forever.
That's interesting. Our NZ system is modelled on the German one after switching from the British 'First past the post' system in the 1990s. The only material difference really has been to make the 'horse trading' around policy implementation more transparent (ie between political parties rather than within political parties). This greater acknowledgement of 'Political Parties' has somewhat increased the visibility of 'political actors' meaning people are somewhat more distracted from useful stuff by political argument.
Maybe our politics has been more pragmatic, less ideological? We have had quite a number of small political parties come and go. They have, so far, been reliant on the political prowess of the leader rather than the persistence of some political meme and they haven't been clearly delineated along a Left-Right axis.
Currently, we have a coalition of 3 parties in power: National which is famously 'pragmatic' (adheres to the 'median voter' theory of politics) with 2 minor parties: ACT which is Right economically (conventional economics) and socially Left (ie JS Mill liberal), and NZ1st which is Trumpian populist (ie opportunist run by a skilled political operator). Labour (ideologically social democrat) and Greens (ideologically socialist/progressive) are in opposition. Many Millennials and Gen Z have shifted from Labour to the Greens over the years.
There was an election 6 months ago so there is still lots of posturing by all sides.
I lived in Baltimore for a long time. The local black population was at least as useless and subsidized as ultra-orthodox in Israel, but a lot more destructive and politically a lot worse.
There is no end to the definition of "basic". In fact the more you give the more dysfunctional the receiving class becomes, necessitating even more "services".
It remains to see how the non-underclass would behave with UBI. Will it be like Star Trek, where people use their UBI to build a utopian society. Or will it be like Brave New World (where the island of Alpha++ all killed each other in a status war).
A few weeks ago I was in a discussion with an Ultra-Orthodox Jew from New York about the Israeli Ulta-Orthodox Jews. He said that at least they are good for tourism (I can't find that discussion for some reason, it is getting a bit messy here, which mostly is a good thing). But yes, the Israeli example is rather glaring.
>>So I'm less optimistic about UBI. I think that when most people get UBI but are still the powerful majority, they will want more than the Basic. I think they'll want an increasing share of the pie, to the point where it will seriously hurt production.
Yes! I think that will happen. The human race is a restless bunch. Not everyone, but those who are tend to set the agenda. And when those people have nothing to do, they will fight. So Universal Basic Income or not, the outlook is bleak. In an earlier draft I wrote a last chapter to this post proposing that the surplus should be used to expand the marginal soils in space. That way the human race could always expand and always be busy. But I deleted it because it became too much. Maybe I can write a new post about it.
>>That's what happened with many of the warrior classes, did it not? The peasants were squeezed to the last drop and when the first drought or flood arrived, the whole economy collapsed and many died. This has happened many times.
It definitely has. Today we rather treat our producers like valuable plants. I mean, all this talk about “entrepreneurship”: People have understood where value is created. But I wonder whether that is enough. When more and more people will have to make themselves important, I fear that producers will be increasingly squeezed between the people who fight over their surplus.
Perhaps people could learn to become gardeners and become managers of earth's natural world. That will always be an ongoing job as changes emerge through the magic of evolution.
Let me start by echoing Arnold Kling that "Wood from Eden is in general a great substack", and it's particularly valuable because it doesn't come out of the conventional "intellectual" class.
But let me disagree with Andreesen in a number of ways.
First, I suspect his numbers for "Food and Beverages" are "incorrect"; the information I've heard is that the fraction of people's incomes they spend on food has been decreasing steadily. It may be that that fraction hasn't decreased in the US in the last 20 years, but over the long run it does. Witness that the most destitute people are now "the homeless" rather than "the starving".
And you have to be careful what you count. According to the USDA "Food prices and spending", spending on "food at home" was 3.5 times spending on "food away from home" in 1962, but now "food away from home" is slightly higher. I suspect that just over half of Andreesen's "Food and Beverages" is actually restaurants, where most of the cost is labor rather than the actual food.
Looking at the red categories, most of them are services. You would naturally expect childcare to rise exactly with wages, because childcare is essentially the labor of average people. (This will change suddenly when we figure out a workable childcare robot.) Medical and educational services are done by highly-skilled labor and it's difficult to change that, which means that its costs are going to rise with wages. In principle, you can replace the teachers with the Internet, but in practice it's hard:
"The current interest in 'competency-based learning'--liberating students to earn degrees not by amassing credit hours but by preparing for assessments of particular skills at whatever pace and by whichever route they choose--is part of the same trend. Some reformers see the seeds of a revolution in college education, promising ultraconvenient, self-guided, low-cost courses of study for everyone. The 'beginning of the unbundling of the American university' is how one observer has described the transformation. All it will take for students to avail themselves of this emerging opportunity is a clear sense of where they're headed, lots of self-motivation, and good access to information about what mix of skills is likely to lead to a promising career. And therein, of course, lies the problem." -- "How to Escape the Community-College Trap" by Ann Hulbert
Housing cost in major metro areas, of course, is dominated by the fact that constructing housing is highly regulated, partly in its "quality" but in most places very strictly in its *quantity*.
The blue categories are not so much regulated as manufactured things, where technology easily reduces the amount of labor needed to make one unit (as long as the number of units produced is very large). Clothing is the only obvious exception; clothing is labor-intensive, but people in Bangladesh can be hired to do the work.
At the more substantial level, let me complain that in some of these red categories Andreesen isn't noting that the (consumer-perceived) quality of the services are improving.
For example, the amenity level of colleges (in the US) has been rising rapidly: In my father's day, almost all the workers were the faculty and the physical plant workers. Now, the "administrative" workers that provide amenities to the students outnumber both of those categories. Indeed my alma mater explains that it would be financially disadvantageous to reduce the amenity level because the lost revenues from affluent children (who pay the list price) going elsewhere would exceed the cost savings. (Non-affluent children aren't charged the list price and wouldn't see any price reduction.)
Similarly what we require for "Hospital Services" has been improving in quality. In 1960, nobody considered the best medical care that was available to be disastrous, but in 2020, if we proposed (in the US) that the government-provided minimal medical care be at the 1960 level, even conservatives would balk. More practically, the number of birthing units in US hospitals in rural areas has been decreasing (and so the average distance from one has been increasing). The problem is that the "standard of care" has increased to the point that a birthing unit is expected to be able to do immediate C-sections, despite that the birth rate has been decreasing. The interaction of decreasing "production" of births and increasing fixed costs forces low-demand birthing units to close.
This is terrible: I can't find the average cost of childbirth in Sweden through a search engine. 15 years ago that was no problem at all (the cost was then about 1750 dollars). Now I can't find the numbers. I used Google, I tried Bing and finally, DuckDuckGo gave me a random newspaper article with the numbers 2700 dollars and 4100 dollars mentioned.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/sahlgrenska-har-sveriges-billigaste-forlossningar-14000-kronor-under-stockholm
Meanwhile, the cost for vaginal birth in America is said to be 14000 dollars here. That's a difference by an order of magnitude. (edit: no, it's not, but it differs quite a bit)
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/average-childbirth-cost/
And although maternity care is much better now than in the 1960s, is it better in America than in Sweden? I would doubt it. Last time I checked outcomes such as perinatal mortality were better in Sweden. America also have much more C-sections, which I mostly would say is something negative. And last but not least, in Sweden we get as much nitrous oxide we want!
So I would argue that there seems to be something strange going on in American hospital services.
Me asking Perplexity ai: "what is the current average cost of child birth in Sweden"
A fraction of a second later: "The current average cost of childbirth in Sweden for residents is cheap due to the high-cost card (högkostnadskort) maximum of around 1,200 SEK (~$145 USD) annually.
ref to source" followed by further detail.
source referenced: https://swedenandme.com/2021/02/18/sweden-and-babies/
Note, perplexity returns pretty generic results based on 'official' sources, but is final for generic questions.
I will soon be sad for real. Internet has become so adapted to stupid people that those of us who try not to be seem to have less and less to do there.
Hi, your baby must be around 6 months old now. Plenty keeping you busy.
My kids reckon the likes of ChatGpt (etc) are stupid and I counter that with its "all in how you prompt" meaning it takes a bit of effort to get LLMs to give meaningful responses (in part because of 'guardrails').
> So I would argue that there seems to be something strange going on in American hospital services.
There's an immense amount of argumentation about what is wrong with the US medical industry. My assessment is that there are a couple of factors that cause much of the trouble: One is that while the US insurance system means that most Americans don't see much of a direct cost from many of their medical consumption decisions, we don't have a state-regulated system that imposes controls on the details of medical expenditures. A second is that US medical consumers do not make decisions on based on what experts consider the medical quality of doctors, hospitals, etc. but rather on the "concierge experience", the emotional pleasantness of the interaction, including the decor of the facilities, the perceived status of the provider (general practitioner vs. specialist), deference shown by the doctor. And US medical consumers get a considerably higher level of amenity than consumers in the European systems: About 50% of our MDs are specialists vs. 10% in Europe, and people value specialists despite that evidently outcomes aren't better in the US. Facilities are better appointed. And there are considerably more "auxiliary" personnel involved in services.
The US medical system is notable for the use of "Nurse Practitioners".
Does its operation differ in any systematic way from a city or state orchestra?
So, obviously, medical decorator is one of the important careers of the future!
"You can have a piece of the economic pie, as long as you do a make-work job neither you nor the person receiving it like too much."
Of course in some way having to go to the make-work jobs gatekeeps things. What's "basic" anyway. Why not basic + 1, etc to infinity. As long as all it takes is I have to complain until a large # gets deposited into my account.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nszh_JYpl_E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8U3gf-im8E
That is a nice summary of much of what is happening.
“The simple and boring answer is that no one knows which rules, inspectors and bureaucracy are actually necessary.”
While that is a simple answer, I don’t think it bears much scrutiny. In fact, most of your article seems to argue against it. Most people could easily identify most counterproductive regulations. The victims of regulation do not push back because they are weak and the regulators are strong. Why don’t you ignore the bureaucrats supervising the construction of your house? Because you know that they could crush you and you also (likely rightly) surmise that they would delight in doing so.
Yes, I mean, to a certain degree I can identify what is clearly wasteful. I can take another example: At our local rubbish dump there are Rubbish Police that supervise that no one throws any packaging material in the container for combustibles. Because there is a law that says that producers of packaging material need to pay for "recycling".
But the gray zone is still much bigger. As Arnold Kling says: Order should not be taken for granted. (He said it here: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/where-i-stand-on-libertarianism ) Mostly I can't claim to know which public employees actually cause order to increase more than they harm production and civil society. I can just make educated guesses.
I can't say I know which measures are creating order, which
>>Because you know that they could crush you and you also (likely rightly) surmise that they would delight in doing so.
The weirdest thing of them all is that I don't assume they would delight in crushing me. They are actually polite and even nice when they ask me to take what I believe is absurd measures. I have come to realize that they do not act out of sadism but out of true, genuine belief in the system.
"At our local rubbish dump there are Rubbish Police that supervise that no one throws any packaging material in the container for combustibles."
Sounds like Japan.
I have read few books from Japan. But once I found a collection of short stories in the flea market, called "Non-combustible garbage". The first story was about a woman who was very careful to pull out her garbage bin at exactly the right time, and how her life unraveled week for week as something always happened on rubbish day so she forgot to exit her bin for emptying and her apartment filled with garbage.
So yes, probably it is a bit like Japan, although I would doubt they can afford to waste labor that way.
One explanation for Japan's stagnation since the 1990's is a switch from an economy driven by competition with the USA to one focused on preservation of Japanese culture (induced by explicit demand from the USA to reduce their competitive efforts). Effectively this meant adoption of Baumol's disease as Japanese government policy.
I suppose you could actually test the hypothesis about bureaucratic motives: try challenging them. How long do you think their politeness would endure in the face of direct and committed opposition?
It could endure forever, since they are so much stronger than me. They could go on just-doing-their-jobs without being aggressive about it. It is I who need them to give me papers in order to be allowed to live in my house. It is I who will have to pay punitive construction taxes until I have achieved those papers. Not giving me papers I ask for requires zero aggression.
I think you are too cautious about the gray zone with respect to government supplied regulation. Kling is also fond of saying “markets fail, use markets.” Less regulated areas of life seem neither less complex nor more dys-regulated. Common law and convention seem adequate to provide highly regular service provision.
Those who are polite to you while demanding the absurd could just as easily quietly look the other way. Given their willingness to police recycling, do you think they would abstain from processing inmates at a camp for political prisoners?
My reading of Orwell suggests that boring bureaucracy is fueled by the “2-minute Hate.” My experience throughout the years of the COVID regime suggests that what most present as civility and politeness is a thin veneer covering a thick mass of fear, distrust and desire for power. The restrictions were imposed with majority support and there was no shortage of petty tyrants willing to enforce gross violations of human rights. To quote another Kling-ism: we are ruled by the FOOLs (Fears Of Others Liberties).
>>I think you are too cautious about the gray zone with respect to government supplied regulation. Kling is also fond of saying “markets fail, use markets.” Less regulated areas of life seem neither less complex nor more dys-regulated. Common law and convention seem adequate to provide highly regular service provision.
Absolutely. If society only tried to peel off harmful regulations, it could do quite a bit of it. For example, construction regulation with the aim of protecting home buyers could be privatized: If people want a stamp of approval when they buy a house, and insurance companies want such a stamp of approval to insure a house at cheaper rates, the market would provide such an organization. In some areas, just some logical thinking is needed to see which regulations are too much.
I think the gray zone consists of services like education. On the one hand, they are not what they pretend to be: School is much more child prison and much less a place to learn effectively than they say. On the other hand, where should children be if not in prison? I'm not sure about that.
Out playing. Whatever they want. I’m convinced that at least up through elementary school could be lots more outdoor and free time with less regidity and supervision. Teaching basic reading and math doesn’t require sitting in a desk 6 hours a day five days a week.
If they gave every parent back half what they spend we would probably find out, but free child prison is tempting for people that need to work.
Or maybe Jonathan Haidt is right that kids need to enter a prison that takes away their phones every morning.
They don't take away the phones. Only private schools and parents do that.
>>Given their willingness to police recycling, do you think they would abstain from processing inmates at a camp for political prisoners?
I think that stupidity exists independently. People don't need to be sadistic or even callous to be stupid. People can believe for real that they are doing something good when they are telling people to separate packaging styrofoam from construction styrofoam. Some of those people would probably think they are doing something good when they are processing inmates at a camp for political prisoners too. But not all of them, because the latter task involves actually seeing human suffering.
College textbooks are starting to be replaced by open source versions. My wife always teaches her logic class out of forall x from the open logic project.
The textbook vendors are desperately working to create lock-in and exploit principal-agent misalignment but long term it's a losing battle.
Indeed, you can see that effect in the graph: Textbook costs have been constant since about 2015 after rising strongly from 2000 to 2015.
That's great to hear!
Most of all I'm worried about my kids in elementary school. They badly need AI teachers. And I'm afraid the AI teachers will conquer Africa before we get them here, where human teachers are said to be great (they surely are - at some stuff. But I'm sure a computer is better at teaching math).
The thing your children are taught in elementary schools isn't really math and, beyond basics of making change, isn't very helpful.
Teaching kids to solve algebra problems or find the maximum of a function by rote is largely useless. It bores them and makes them hate math (it did for me and I'm a mathematican now) and it's pretty much pointless. If you don't understand it pretty well at a conceptual level you are just an inferior version of mathematica and that's mostly what our pre-college (and intro college) math classes turn out.
Fundamentally, the problem is that it's essentially impossible to gain a real conceptual understanding of a subject you hate/despise and think you're bad at. If you're smart and diligent you can force yourself through rote tasks but understanding requires curiosity and and being willing to actively hypothesize and think through the ideas.
Yes, some of the problem is that most pre-college teachers were taught by rote too and don't really understand or enjoy the subject. Best they can do is make class engaging despite the content. But even a really good teacher can't interest all the kids so if you evaluate them based on how well their students can do on a relatively predictable exam the incentive is to just teach rote rules and try to offer some insight into concepts on the side (but kids are lazy or they wouldn't need he so if they have to do the rote version anyway...).
Ultimately, what we end up doing is making kids miserable for a decade, making them hate math all for little gain. I advocate making math largely optional (in reality -- so you can go get a high status law degree at a good school) and replacing it with programming for quantative experience.
Alternatively evaluate the students/teachers based on a genuinely conceptually difficult test which changes each year to ask questions using the concepts covered but which are unlike anything the students will have actually seen and which changes every year (easier subject specific version of the math Olympiad type problems)
Well observed. My wife starts teaching the relationship between quantity and representation to infants. Says it forms the basis for both abstract reasoning and reading.
This is an interesting post and Wood from Eden is in general a great substack.
Thank you!