Some of Caplan’s ideas dovetail with the thoughts I’ve had myself since childhood on how to make the school experience less horrible—though I never framed my own thoughts as “against education.” Make middle and high schools more like universities, with freedom of movement and a wide range of offerings for students to choose from. Abolish hall passes and detentions for lateness: just like in college, the teacher is offering a resource to students, not imprisoning them in a dungeon. Don’t segregate by age; just offer a course or activity, and let kids of any age who are interested show up. And let kids learn at their own pace. Don’t force them to learn things they aren’t ready for: let them love Shakespeare because they came to him out of interest, rather than loathing him because he was forced down their throats. Never, ever try to prevent kids from learning material they are ready for: instead of telling an 11-year-old teaching herself calculus to go back to long division until she’s the right age (does that happen? ask how I know…), say: “OK hotshot, so you can differentiate a few functions, but can you handle these here books on linear algebra and group theory, like Terry Tao could have when he was your age?”
Tag: economics
Retail Future
All the mockery of the idea of Apple Stores as “town squares” multiplies 10x—though malls, at least, must incorporate public bathrooms. No loitering policies, parental escort policies, and curfews explicitly exclude homeless people and teenagers from the mall. The economic mix of stores and the food options presents an implicit form of exclusion, as does the presence or absence of seating. The new urban malls must be responsible about the semi-public part of the equation.
Technological Unemployment
The argument against: we’ve had increasing technology for centuries now, people have been predicting that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it’s never come true. Instead, 1 of 2 things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see Vivarelli for a review.
The argument in favor: look, imagine there’s a perfect android that can do everything humans do (including management) only better. And suppose it costs $10 to buy and $1/hour to operate. Surely every business owner would just buy those androids, and then all humans who wanted to earn more than $1/hour would be totally out of luck. There’s no conceivable way the androids would “augment” human labor and there’s no conceivable way the displaced humans could go into another industry. So at some point we’ve got to start getting technological unemployment.
This is a look at which of those arguments is right. Part I will investigate whether unemployment is getting worse. Part II will investigate whether that is because of technology. Part III will investigate what longer-term trends we should expect.
Collective Action Kills Innovation
More and more the sphere of individual action shrinks and that of collective action grows. Thus, I do not laugh at the Oregonians and their fear of gas pumping freedom. We are all Oregonians in one form or another.
Inferring lost cities
In a stunningly original paper Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem A. Coşar, and Ali Hortaçsu use the gravity model of trade to infer the location of lost cities from Bronze age Assyria! The simplest gravity model makes predictions about trade flows based on the sizes of cities and the distances between them.
Roman Industrial Revolution?
Historians have long argued that the ubiquity of the chattel slavery was an insurmountable barrier to the adoption of labor-saving technology. In response to this argument, Dale locates her Roman Industrial Revolution in the early and mid-2nd century BCE, before the large-scale influx of slaves from the conquests of Greece, Carthage, and Gaul. The Middle Republic provides a window in which, she argues, it is plausible to imagine a machine-based culture taking root. In the world Dale envisions, an industrialized Roman empire then follows a British-style path towards a constitutional monarchy (under Augustus).
Maps economic impact
Privatize bus systems
Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Fully privatizing all bus transit would generate cost savings of $5.7b, or 30% of total US bus transit operating expenses. The corresponding increased use of public transit from this cost reduction would lead to a gain in social welfare of $524m, at minimum, and at least 26k additional transit jobs.
Urban Revitalization Factors
the system compared 1.6M pairs of photos taken 7 years apart to test several hypotheses about the causes of urban revitalization. Density of highly educated residents, proximity to central business districts and other physically attractive neighborhoods, and the initial safety score assigned by the system all correlate strongly with improvements in physical condition. Raw income levels, housing prices or neighborhoods’ ethnic makeup do not to predict change.
AI taxation
if most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable AI companies to subsidize their workers, what options will they have? I foresee only one: Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their AI software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country’s economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the “parent” nation’s AI companies continue to profit from the dependent country’s users. Such economic arrangements would reshape today’s geopolitical alliances.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 