Vaclav Smil on the technology slowdown; Nathan Cofnas gives Heterodox Academy an F; John Cochrane and me on the Social Security Trust fund; Emil O.W. Kirkegaard on IQ and political orientation;
On Smil’s article: I don’t agree at all. My brother and I were having a conversation last night about a scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers that involves pressing the “button” of a receiver in an old-school telephone and leaving the phone “off the hook” so a person couldn’t call again. This sequence of events completely baffled by teenage niece. If you went back in the 1970s and said “what part of the movie will people be confused about in 2023?” they would never pick out the telephone. But in fact, the “phone” qua phone will be a remarkably short-lived technology in the grand scheme of human technological progress, and what our children and grandchildren will call a “phone” bears only a passing resemblance to its namesake.
And this is my problem with the entire premise of the article: he cherry picks areas that match his conclusions, and proceeds from there. But we will not understand what technologies today will make a significant and lasting impact on tomorrow, and which will vanish. My experience, in my lifetime, is that human technical achievement accelerates at a phenomenal pace. The world that my children, now teenagers, were born into would be foreign to them today. No iPhone, no iPad, no TikTok, no Netflix, no electric car, no mRNA vaccines, no space x reusable space rocket synchronized landings, no video calling, no AI chatbots, etc.
And his semiconductor comment is purely trash, I have to say. That’s the sort of comment you’d expect to see from someone with a New-York-Times-tech-journalist level of understanding of the technology and related industries. Sure, the size of the features you can etch onto a silicon wafer is approaching the point where, you know, there just aren’t many atoms left to play with anymore. But the true innovation, the semiconductor itself and the notion of sequential lithography shrinking as a means to improve performance, was understood half a century ago and the industry has been riding that horse ever since. The fact that a very good (but old) idea is bumping into physics is not a sign of slowing progress or innovation.
To some extent, the semiconductor industry and the industries who benefit from semiconductors have been able to lazily rely, year-after-year, on the steady improvements in power / performance delivered by lithography shrinks. So now what do we do? Well, the very simple answer is make more and bigger chips. The fact that you can only pack so many billions of transistors into a square mm doesn’t say that you can’t add more square mm to get more billions of transistors. It doesn’t say that you can’t put another chip next to the first chip. There are other problems, heat, loss through communication, more complex packaging, etc. that emerge, but those are new opportunities to improve performance. And the incredible amount of money being invested in increases in semiconductor manufacturing capacity around the globe, perhaps for geopolitical reasons but maybe with collateral benefits, should make all of this silicon cheaper than ever before.
You can also change the functionality that you design on a chip to improve performance. Because of lithography shrinkage, the best vector for performance improvement has been the general purpose computing device, programmed through software to execute specific tasks, shrunk as quickly as possible to a smaller transistor size. But that doesn’t have to be the case at all, and we will see more-and-more custom semiconductor development and purpose-built semiconductor designs going forward, because design will become a better vector for improved performance than simple lithography shrinks. The biggest issue here is that students aren’t studying semiconductor design in large enough numbers, but that presumably will evolve.
And he also doesn’t take into account what people *do* with the semiconductor capacity they already have. First off, the centralization of massive computing power into the cloud means that each cycle of compute power is available to be rented out when it’s needed, rather than sitting idly in a corporate datacenter. That on its own represents a tremendous improvement in the efficiency of use of what we already have. Second, what programs are you going to write to run on the computing capacity you already have? It matters a lot. People will use the existing resources to do ever more interesting things, the explosion in AI/ML applications being the most hyped (probably justifiable).
So, in sum, I’ll bet on progress. The question should be, rather, how do we bring greater innovation to areas where there could be tremendous returns for humanity, e.g., energy production, education, human health and well-being, and so on? How do we uncover the lessons of areas where profound progress has been made (e.g., the semiconductor industry, for one) and transfer as much of what we learn from those areas to other areas where progress is needed? That’s the interesting question, rather than bemoaning a supposed “lack of progress” based on some analysis of patents. Please!
Cochrane: The Original Sin of SS (forgivable in the '30's but copied by Medicare in the 60's) was to finance "retirement" payments and health care in "retirement" with a tax on wages. Wages are at least partially saved so payments to supplement consumption in "old age) should be financed with a consumption tax, a VAT. A "Trust Fund" is just a way of not having to adjust the tax rate frequently (although one of it's advantages is that rate adjustments to keep the systems deficit neutral should be less fraught as they apples more widely and are not aimed at "workers.") [Obiter Dicta: The same goes for "unemployment" (periods of lost income) insurance: Trust Fund, VAT funded at a rate to roughly deficit zero over the business cycle, but with parameters of how soon after lost income and how many weeks of insurance set according to macroeconomic variables]
Agreed, SS should be indexed to longevity maybe something like 70-72 nowadays. Medicare could follow or be separately indexed to some presumed age inflection point in health care costs.
As for how all this affects grandchildren, it does not except as how different arrangements affect the deficit which drains resources from private investment and reduces future growth.
Confas seems totally correct - the Woke lies about race & sex equality, and the unwillingness to fight for the truth, dooms HxA or any other "alternative" college system.
I'm against all censorship, including censoring of lies - but it's important to be able to call them lies.
Haidt & especially Rauch seem particularly obtuse about their acceptance of dishonest demonization of Republicans while claiming to support free speech.
Truth is more important than style, which is why I liked and still like Steve Sailer, whose style Arnold really doesn't care for. Recently he noted the Dem policy of letting criminals out of jail is a big part of the increase of crime. As expected by prior data, it's mostly Black young males doing the crimes and victimizing the innocents - very unPC / unWoke.
I do enjoy all of the libertarians that come out to pat themselves on the back when the data suggest they are the smartest breed, as if that validates that their politics.
That smart people may share the same political outlook doesn’t mean that the political outlook is smart for people.
My guess is that if proper libertarianism (socially liberal and economically conservative policies) were given a shot with, say, running a failing inner city or rust belt town, it wouldn’t work out.
With entitlements as with many other things, it will only be addressed when it explodes and the legislative branch can pretend that it had no idea that it was going to happen.
The Social Security Trust Fund was created as a way to push the knowing bagholders well into the future. The people who created it may have believed their own bullshit, but the simple fact is that it really is a Ponzi Scheme with one key difference- the government can put a gun to your head and force you to "invest". In any case, the bagholders have arrived- essentially no one above median income under the age of 50 will ever get out as much as they have put in via payroll taxes, and their support simply rides on their adherence to the sunk-cost fallacy.
Squaring this circle probably won't ever be easy- you either start to cut the benefits of the people nearing the present retirement age, or you tell much younger workers that they won't be able to collect until they are 70-75- neither plan is going to be politically popular. The most likely path is simply borrowing more and more money to cover the unfunded liabilities, at least until it all falls apart.
Longevity is different for many people. My father did a difficult physical job. His body was done by age 65 (before that really). We shouldn't assume that the fact that comfortable professional office workers can work to 70 means everyone can.
I think what makes more sense, especially on Medicare, is to spend less on the back end (the useless years of life at the very end).
The theory behind the trust fund is that the excess revenue was “invested” in future productivity. The same way when you buy stocks in your 401k you are investing in plant and equipment, etc.
Perhaps you are cynical that all of the things the government spent the money on were productivity enhancing investments.
And yet, people buy treasury bonds knowing that the government often blows the money, but also knowing that it has a monopoly on force and can tax the productive to pay them first.
Think of the Trust Fund like funding a Viking raiding party. You give it money up front and they promise to give you a share of the spoils if the raid is successful. Maybe they have hit up the monestaries too much and there is nothing left to loot, but you kind of had the impression that you would be forced to make the investment no matter what anyway.
RE: the post on IQ and political ideology, is the data based on self-reported IQ? If so, is there any reason to believe the data is an accurate measure of actual variance in IQ, as opposed to an artifact of who’s reporting? Curious if there any corroborating data.
Virtue signaling is fine as long as what's being signaled is a virtue, as free speech is.
I'd guess that HxA folks are less squeamish about making common cause with Republicans than Republicans are at making common cause with them
There are no "Never DEI buttons" as there are "Never Trump" buttons becasue "Trump" id not a good thing just sometimes pursued in ways damaging to other good things.
Arnold, Thanks for the simple, incisive explanation of the real economics of social security and medicare benefits.
On Smil’s article: I don’t agree at all. My brother and I were having a conversation last night about a scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers that involves pressing the “button” of a receiver in an old-school telephone and leaving the phone “off the hook” so a person couldn’t call again. This sequence of events completely baffled by teenage niece. If you went back in the 1970s and said “what part of the movie will people be confused about in 2023?” they would never pick out the telephone. But in fact, the “phone” qua phone will be a remarkably short-lived technology in the grand scheme of human technological progress, and what our children and grandchildren will call a “phone” bears only a passing resemblance to its namesake.
And this is my problem with the entire premise of the article: he cherry picks areas that match his conclusions, and proceeds from there. But we will not understand what technologies today will make a significant and lasting impact on tomorrow, and which will vanish. My experience, in my lifetime, is that human technical achievement accelerates at a phenomenal pace. The world that my children, now teenagers, were born into would be foreign to them today. No iPhone, no iPad, no TikTok, no Netflix, no electric car, no mRNA vaccines, no space x reusable space rocket synchronized landings, no video calling, no AI chatbots, etc.
And his semiconductor comment is purely trash, I have to say. That’s the sort of comment you’d expect to see from someone with a New-York-Times-tech-journalist level of understanding of the technology and related industries. Sure, the size of the features you can etch onto a silicon wafer is approaching the point where, you know, there just aren’t many atoms left to play with anymore. But the true innovation, the semiconductor itself and the notion of sequential lithography shrinking as a means to improve performance, was understood half a century ago and the industry has been riding that horse ever since. The fact that a very good (but old) idea is bumping into physics is not a sign of slowing progress or innovation.
To some extent, the semiconductor industry and the industries who benefit from semiconductors have been able to lazily rely, year-after-year, on the steady improvements in power / performance delivered by lithography shrinks. So now what do we do? Well, the very simple answer is make more and bigger chips. The fact that you can only pack so many billions of transistors into a square mm doesn’t say that you can’t add more square mm to get more billions of transistors. It doesn’t say that you can’t put another chip next to the first chip. There are other problems, heat, loss through communication, more complex packaging, etc. that emerge, but those are new opportunities to improve performance. And the incredible amount of money being invested in increases in semiconductor manufacturing capacity around the globe, perhaps for geopolitical reasons but maybe with collateral benefits, should make all of this silicon cheaper than ever before.
You can also change the functionality that you design on a chip to improve performance. Because of lithography shrinkage, the best vector for performance improvement has been the general purpose computing device, programmed through software to execute specific tasks, shrunk as quickly as possible to a smaller transistor size. But that doesn’t have to be the case at all, and we will see more-and-more custom semiconductor development and purpose-built semiconductor designs going forward, because design will become a better vector for improved performance than simple lithography shrinks. The biggest issue here is that students aren’t studying semiconductor design in large enough numbers, but that presumably will evolve.
And he also doesn’t take into account what people *do* with the semiconductor capacity they already have. First off, the centralization of massive computing power into the cloud means that each cycle of compute power is available to be rented out when it’s needed, rather than sitting idly in a corporate datacenter. That on its own represents a tremendous improvement in the efficiency of use of what we already have. Second, what programs are you going to write to run on the computing capacity you already have? It matters a lot. People will use the existing resources to do ever more interesting things, the explosion in AI/ML applications being the most hyped (probably justifiable).
So, in sum, I’ll bet on progress. The question should be, rather, how do we bring greater innovation to areas where there could be tremendous returns for humanity, e.g., energy production, education, human health and well-being, and so on? How do we uncover the lessons of areas where profound progress has been made (e.g., the semiconductor industry, for one) and transfer as much of what we learn from those areas to other areas where progress is needed? That’s the interesting question, rather than bemoaning a supposed “lack of progress” based on some analysis of patents. Please!
Cochrane: The Original Sin of SS (forgivable in the '30's but copied by Medicare in the 60's) was to finance "retirement" payments and health care in "retirement" with a tax on wages. Wages are at least partially saved so payments to supplement consumption in "old age) should be financed with a consumption tax, a VAT. A "Trust Fund" is just a way of not having to adjust the tax rate frequently (although one of it's advantages is that rate adjustments to keep the systems deficit neutral should be less fraught as they apples more widely and are not aimed at "workers.") [Obiter Dicta: The same goes for "unemployment" (periods of lost income) insurance: Trust Fund, VAT funded at a rate to roughly deficit zero over the business cycle, but with parameters of how soon after lost income and how many weeks of insurance set according to macroeconomic variables]
Agreed, SS should be indexed to longevity maybe something like 70-72 nowadays. Medicare could follow or be separately indexed to some presumed age inflection point in health care costs.
As for how all this affects grandchildren, it does not except as how different arrangements affect the deficit which drains resources from private investment and reduces future growth.
Confas seems totally correct - the Woke lies about race & sex equality, and the unwillingness to fight for the truth, dooms HxA or any other "alternative" college system.
I'm against all censorship, including censoring of lies - but it's important to be able to call them lies.
Haidt & especially Rauch seem particularly obtuse about their acceptance of dishonest demonization of Republicans while claiming to support free speech.
Truth is more important than style, which is why I liked and still like Steve Sailer, whose style Arnold really doesn't care for. Recently he noted the Dem policy of letting criminals out of jail is a big part of the increase of crime. As expected by prior data, it's mostly Black young males doing the crimes and victimizing the innocents - very unPC / unWoke.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/setting-so-many-jailbirds-free-in-2020-backfired-into-higher-crime/
Republicans should insist on colleges with tax exempt status having at least 30% of Reps (& of Dems) to maintain tax advantages.
Also RE: the post on IQ and political ideology:
I do enjoy all of the libertarians that come out to pat themselves on the back when the data suggest they are the smartest breed, as if that validates that their politics.
That smart people may share the same political outlook doesn’t mean that the political outlook is smart for people.
My guess is that if proper libertarianism (socially liberal and economically conservative policies) were given a shot with, say, running a failing inner city or rust belt town, it wouldn’t work out.
With entitlements as with many other things, it will only be addressed when it explodes and the legislative branch can pretend that it had no idea that it was going to happen.
The Social Security Trust Fund was created as a way to push the knowing bagholders well into the future. The people who created it may have believed their own bullshit, but the simple fact is that it really is a Ponzi Scheme with one key difference- the government can put a gun to your head and force you to "invest". In any case, the bagholders have arrived- essentially no one above median income under the age of 50 will ever get out as much as they have put in via payroll taxes, and their support simply rides on their adherence to the sunk-cost fallacy.
Squaring this circle probably won't ever be easy- you either start to cut the benefits of the people nearing the present retirement age, or you tell much younger workers that they won't be able to collect until they are 70-75- neither plan is going to be politically popular. The most likely path is simply borrowing more and more money to cover the unfunded liabilities, at least until it all falls apart.
Longevity is different for many people. My father did a difficult physical job. His body was done by age 65 (before that really). We shouldn't assume that the fact that comfortable professional office workers can work to 70 means everyone can.
I think what makes more sense, especially on Medicare, is to spend less on the back end (the useless years of life at the very end).
The theory behind the trust fund is that the excess revenue was “invested” in future productivity. The same way when you buy stocks in your 401k you are investing in plant and equipment, etc.
Perhaps you are cynical that all of the things the government spent the money on were productivity enhancing investments.
And yet, people buy treasury bonds knowing that the government often blows the money, but also knowing that it has a monopoly on force and can tax the productive to pay them first.
Think of the Trust Fund like funding a Viking raiding party. You give it money up front and they promise to give you a share of the spoils if the raid is successful. Maybe they have hit up the monestaries too much and there is nothing left to loot, but you kind of had the impression that you would be forced to make the investment no matter what anyway.
RE: the post on IQ and political ideology, is the data based on self-reported IQ? If so, is there any reason to believe the data is an accurate measure of actual variance in IQ, as opposed to an artifact of who’s reporting? Curious if there any corroborating data.
Cofnas:
Virtue signaling is fine as long as what's being signaled is a virtue, as free speech is.
I'd guess that HxA folks are less squeamish about making common cause with Republicans than Republicans are at making common cause with them
There are no "Never DEI buttons" as there are "Never Trump" buttons becasue "Trump" id not a good thing just sometimes pursued in ways damaging to other good things.