Tag: analysis

Revisiting retirement

we’ve run out of options for economic stimulus. it is time to raise the retirement age, commensurate with huge increases in life expectancy since social security was enacted.

We investigate the options for policymakers given this shortage of traditional ammunition, including: (i) reducing the risk of recession; (ii) reverting to quantitative easing; (iii) moving away from inflation targeting; (iv) using fiscal policy to replace monetary policy; (v) using fiscal and monetary policy together in a bid to introduce so-called “helicopter money”; and (vi) pushing interest rates higher through structural reforms designed to lower excess savings, most obviously via increases in retirement age. We conclude that only the final option is likely to lead to economic success. Politically, however, it seems implausible. As a result, we are faced with a serious shortage of effective policy lifeboats.

Dinosaur Marriage

This is why the deal makes so much sense, AOL provides the technology to target individuals instead of content, and Verizon the ability to track those individuals — at least the over 100m customers they already have — at arguably a deeper level than anyone else in digital advertising (for non-Verizon customers, AOL’s ad platform is still useful, albeit not as targeted; rates would be commensurately lower). The talk of this mashup joining Facebook and Google to form a “Big 3” of digital advertising is not unrealistic.

Low housing supply

Rent Will Remain Too Damn High for the Foreseeable Future

But as the US economy has improved, people have been bursting out of their parents’ basements. Estimates of new household formation have surged in recent months. The thing is, these folks don’t go from 0-to-homeowner in a matter of months. They rent. And that’s why rental vacancy rates also have fallen back to levels last seen in the early 1990s.

YouTube Tacit Knowledge

Today, Khan Academy has 15m registered students in 190 countries. The YouTube channel has racked up over 500m views. Khan’s vision for the future has been endorsed by everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama; he’s working with institutions like Stanford University and the Tate.

While Khan is perhaps YouTube’s biggest success in the field of learning, the platform is saturated with instructional videos. There are YouTube tutorials for changing a light bulb, assembling baby buggies, learning the guitar. Shawn Mendes, the 16-year-old Canadian singer hailed as the “next Justin Bieber” taught himself guitar entirely via YouTube.

It’s easy to see the appeal: instead of puzzling over an instruction manual written in 15 languages, you can just watch someone show you. “Our toilet got stuck the other day,” Khan tells me. “Normally, you would hire a plumber. But I watched a YouTube video, which said this was a case where you need an auger – I’d never heard of that – and I went to the hardware store and bought one and I was able to fix it.”

2019-09-20: The YouTube revolution in knowledge transfer

Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate how to use multimeters and how to assess breaker boxes, to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn basic knife-handling techniques from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has grown 70% year-on-year.

2022-02-01: For me, the way Sandy Munroe and crew break down vehicles to explain the engineering tradeoffs is a great tacit knowledge example. I could never have guessed that i’d enjoy engineering breakdowns of a Tesla, but these videos are now some of my favorites.

Selfdriving dealbreakers

Are today’s challenges of making robocars dealbreakers? short answer: no

Maps are too important, and too costly

Google’s car, and others, rely on a clever technique that revolutionized the DARPA challenges. Each road is driven manually a few times, and the scans are then processed to build a super-detailed “ultramap” of all the static features of the road. This is a big win because big server computers get to process the scans in as much time as they need, and see everything from different angles. Then humans can review and correct the maps and they can be tested. That’s hard to beat, and you will always drive better if you have such a map than if you don’t.

Any car that could drive without a map would effectively be a car that’s able to make an adequate map automatically. As things get closer to that, making maps will become cheaper and cheaper.

Naturally, if the road differs from the map, due to construction or other changes, the vehicle has to notice this. That turns out to be fairly easy. Harder is assuring it can drive safely in this situation. That’s still a much easier problem than being able to drive safely everywhere without a map, and in the worst case, the problem of the changed road can be “solved” by just the ability to come to a safe stop. You don’t want to do that super often, but it remains the fail-safe out. If there is a human in the car, they can guide the vehicle in this. Even if the vehicle can’t figure out where to go to be safe, the human can. Even a remote human able to look at transmitted pictures can help the car with that — not live steering, but strategic guidance.

Economic analysis

this a a super wordy, but still interesting, overview of the changes around on demand services.

Instant, pervasive access to goods and services, tailored to individual needs, often without the burden of long-term ownership or commitment Combining the best of the village economy with the best of modern commerce

VC for the people

usually basic income proposals stop at the feasibility analysis. not here:

the state could provide venture capital to the people. If ordinary citizens had a small but reliable annuity, too modest to live comfortably but enough to prevent destitution, then at the margin, we’d expect people who currently seek or accept unfulfilling, underpaid work to opt for entrepreneurship, or education, or art, or child-rearing, or just hold out for a better gig. “VC for the people” would combine a reduction in labor supply with a lot of new labor demand, forcing employers to increase wages and encouraging substitution of capital for the least desirable jobs. Both the wage effect and the annuity itself would increase the share of national income available to those without direct claims on capital, reducing inequality.