Links to Consider, 5/20

Brink Lindsey and Tim Carney; Listener on new money-printing; Noah Smith on the devolution of the Internet; Ruxandra Teslo on the Internet's autistic heroes; Jason Crawford and me on Big Tech

Brink Lindsey interviews Tim Carney. Carney, talking about a visit to Israel a few years ago, says,

Kids are everywhere and it's normal to have them everywhere. So that's part of what I mean by pregnancy is contagious, is that it's just you expect to see kids and kids are an expected part of adulthood. And that's a contrast to a lot of Western Europe and the US where again, we are so deliberate and intentional about planning our lives. Are you going to get married? That's entirely up to you. Are you going to have kids? It's entirely up to you. Now, obviously, these things should be entirely up to the individuals.

And we've had some cultures that have erred in the side of expecting and demanding these things from people, but my ideal is a sort of norm that you can opt out of. When you're a grownup, you get married and have kids. If that's not for you, that's not for you but that's kind of the path.

There is a lot of truth to the aphorism “pregnancy is contagious.” I think that describes the postwar baby boom. Young people could opt out of getting married and having children, but marriage and children were seen as the norm.

So absolutely what you will find in Mormon communities, in Camp Mill, Maryland, in Israel, and then in a more abstract way in my own Catholic schools, which sprawl across the DC area, is this idea that we will help you raise your kids. You don't have to watch them every minute. And it's not just some individual choice that you made that's your own problem. You're part of the whole ... you're doing what you're supposed to do and so, we're going to back you up in that.

I think that Lindsey conducted the interview masterfully.

Incidentally, the largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood that Carney refers to in the interview, mis-spelled in the transcript as “Camp Mill,” is my neighborhood. My wife and I are not Orthodox. But we raised our three daughters on a cul de sac where kids ran in and out of each others’ houses, not requiring scheduled “activities” for parents to arrange and supervise.

Listener writes,

Japan has ~$1 Trillion in U.S. Treasuries they can sell. They would get dollars for these and then use them to buy back Yen.

The Bank of Japan buys Japanese debt, because otherwise the interest rate would go up and bankrupt the government (Japan has an enormous ratio of government debt to GDP). Apparently, to fund this debt purchase, they do not want to just print Yen, because that would weaken the Yen in foreign exchange markets. So they could sell U.S. Treasuries instead, as described above. But instead,

The Fed has opened a “Swap Line” with the Bank of Japan. They can swap Yen for Dollars with the Fed.

So instead of Japan’s money supply increasing when the Bank of Japan buys Japanese government debt, our money supply will increase. At least if I understand how this will work.

Also, the Fed recently allowed a slowdown in “quantitative tightening,” which means that they are not going to let their balance sheet run down as quickly as previously.

Recall from Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus that central banking originated to help the government float its debt. It is my cynical view that this remains the top priority for central banks. It takes precedence over controlling the money supply. I continue to take the “over” on inflation prediction.

Noah Smith writes,

the internet as we know it — social media sites and the Web — is becoming a generally worse place to hang out. Wading through oceans of advertisements, algorithmic randomness antisemitic Russian bots, Tiktok-poisoned shouters, AI slop, and deepfakes is just not a fun way to spend anyone’s precious limited lifetime.

Better, perhaps, to simply withdraw from the public internet, to spend one’s time chatting directly with friends and having fun offline, and maybe watching TV or reading a book or a Substack. That sort of human interaction worked fine before the internet, and it will probably work just fine today. Maybe someday historians will look back on the era when we lived our lives on social networking sites as a brief anomaly.

With their advertising-based revenue model, at some point the only way for Google and Facebook to grow revenue is to worsen the consumer experience. People have shown a preference for content that they don’t pay money for, and now they are getting what they want good and hard.

Stock buybacks are another sign that the tech giants have run out of compelling ideas. As Tyler Cowen points out, stock buybacks are the firms’ way of saying (my words, not Tyler’s), “At the margin, we cannot earn an above-average return on investment.”

Ruxandra Teslo writes,

The traits that make autistics better at questioning the Monoculture are obvious: an explicit premium placed on transcending common cognitive biases (indeed, one of the more influential rationalist blogs is called Overcoming Bias), a keen desire to systematise information across a broad range of topics and a commitment to engaging with points regardless of their provenance. But these are not the traits that make a movement successful: if anything, they seem designed to scare away normal people and drive any movement into the ground. The drivers of success must be sought in other places.

I would caution against describing Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and others as autistic. I think that this application of the term “autism” or “autism spectrum” is more misleading than it is useful.

The people Teslo is describing have high IQ. Most autistics do not. Previously, she used “weird nerd” as a shorthand. That is a better term but still not the best choice.

I think that what distinguishes the weird nerds from other people with high IQ is low agreeableness. It is this low agreeableness that leads us to challenge one another and also to resist a monoculture.

We do not play the mainstream status game—which is by no means to suggest that we are above playing status games. Far from it.

Issues of terminology aside, I agree with her main point that the Internet does at least as much to empower heterodox thinkers as it does to amplify a monoculture. From our perspective, it looks as though mainstream elites are dangerously wrong-headed, arrogant, and conformist. If that is the case, then the Internet may be part of the problem, but it also may be part of the solution.

Jason Crawford and I offer perfect foresight on the future of the big tech firms in the era of AI disruption.

substacks referenced above:@

Autism & the Internet will defeat the Monoculture

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Tim Carney on America's "Family Unfriendly" Culture

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The death (again) of the internet as we know it

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Shenanigans!