Social media’s effect is clearly not endogenous. Humans have always been nutty but we also have a natural negative feedback mechanism in nuttiness, which is our desire for conformity. When we feel we’re the only one with a view, we revert towards the mean.
The earlier internet (eg pre 2010) revealed that every nutty view had many adherents which broke that feedback loop.
But social media – where the nuttier you are, the *more* likes you get – turned it into a positive feedback loop.
The fact that nuttiness existed prior to social media doesn’t absolve it for turning a negative feedback into a positive one.
Tyler makes the hilarious claim that the Woke are not liberal - the same liberals who have re-defined marriage (man+woman to create children) into the legally required normalization of same-sex coupling, which NEVER results in conception of a child of the married couple. The lack of "children" in his discussion about needing more human rights for women is glaring for those looking.
"Marriage" is defined by what people call it - "liberals" are those who are called liberals, formerly welfare liberals or politically correct liberals.
Tyler transcripts are far far better than Brian Chau's, so far.
Among the 5 questions asked, you've highlighted your weakest response to "what would fiscal & monetary policy look like"? Yes, policy makers should be more humble, with humility, but NOT doing X, Y, or Z does not describe what IS done, or what it looks like. The Taylor rule on Fed Policy, would be part of a better answer. Nationalization instead of bankruptcy for Too Big companies might be another.
US colleges should have at least 20% of their professors and administrators be Republican, pro-life, anti-illegal immigration, pro-capitalism.
Seems like Chau's mistake is black and white thinking. Institutions aren't either legitimate or illegitimate full stop, they can be better or worse by degrees. And you're right, the ones we have now are far from the worst ones possible.
I used to tell myself the same story Tyler Cowen is trying to tell- that the internet didn't increase the number of nuts in the world, it simply gave them a connection to each other that previously didn't exist. This might still be true, but there is definitely an increase in craziness in both the population and especially in the governing class at all levels. Something has changed in the last 25 years, and it is gathering speed day by day.
I think I should clarify that maximum tent populism doesn't involve delegitimizing the rules (i.e. elections), but rather justifies using rules which already exist against the ruling class (i.e. passing laws limiting the power of executive bureaucracies). I don't think there is widespread support for the former nor would it be productive.
I might have an article coming out on this in detail at some point, using Balaji's framework of constraint vs. restraint. It's already written down in a notebook for a future book, but I'm holding off on it for now.
Best new rule would be to limit "Public Service" to a maximum of 10 years as an employee of the gov't. Term limits for bureaucrats.
The world is better off if more higher quality thinking people are in private, peaceful employment, or as employees, rather than tax-funded non-competitive gov't jobs.
Any movement opposing the ruling class needs three immediate principals.
1) Civil Rights Law/AA needs massive and meaningful curtailing with teeth. Institutions need to understand that discrimination against whites/asians/males/straights carries as much risk as the opposite. Ultimate goal is to get back to "Republicans buy sneakers too."
2) Real K-12 educational freedom is fundamentally necessary. Mediocre but non-ideological was OK when I was a kid, but that consensus didn't hold. If you don't hurt school districts in the wallet, your proposal is useless.
3) Immigrations needs to be drastically slowed for anyone IQ < 130. It's fundamentally difficult to achieve these meaningful objectives while in constant demographic flux. We are at the same % of foreign born as the last immigration pause. There is likely a fundamental limit to assimilation.
I'm not much of a joiner of movements in any case, and I'm certainly not willing to join a movement opposing the ruling class until I know what I would get in its place. As for your proposals, I like 1) and 2), but 3) looks very bad; the history of the U.S. suggests that assimilation works well enough, and I think biotechnology is on the point of raising IQs across the board (if that is what people want, which, I think, it is).
The history of the USA is assimilating white people from slightly different parts of Europe that could afford an expensive Trans Atlantic boat trip and no welfare state. Even under those favorable conditions, it reached its limit by the 1920s.
If biotechnology is about to raise IQs, the case for immigration collapses completely. The third world is what it is because of low IQs. People immigrate to flee low IQs. If technology can fix it, they can just stay where they are and wait for the technology.
The most important thing we can do is make sure that technology happens. The biggest threat to it happening is mass immigration destroying the first world technology capability before it gets there.
The answer to EK Does this mean more than make marginal changes based on CBA? Presumable not entirely, since that has nothing specifically to do this Specialization and Trade. [Or I guess I should say, _I_ don't see the relation.]
1) Big data on multiple actual individual lifetime wage changes is very different in practice than assumed, wrongly, in macro models
2) Gaussian (normal) distributions are often assumed without enough data to justify them, and Big Data is showing them to be wrong.
my own conclusion
3) all macro models based on disproven normal distribution assumptions of wage behavior have been wrong, are wrong, and will continue to be wrong. The actual math is too hard for good macro without 100 million+ worker wages yearly Big Micro Data.
>> Because if you have a small sample, a lot of noise to get to learn anything from it, you have to impose some restriction like the Gaussian distribution. ...
what was changing was the skewness and you cannot capture that with a Gaussian because Gaussian is restricted to zero skewness. ...
these discussions came up before the great recession, right? There were all this pricing of the CDSs with the AIG and other companies. And there was a lot of Gaussian modeling that went into those. And there was some criticisms of that. Yes. So economists, statisticians, we love Gaussian modeling traditionally because just like in math, we have linearity in statistics. We have Gaussianity. It simplifies a lot of analysis and it's everywhere. ...
You lose your job and you stay unemployed for most of the year. In a Gaussian world, this happens very, very rarely. And in the real data the likelihood of this is 20 times, 25 times higher than in data. So what we show is, if you just stare at the data, okay, do non parametrically unplotted, you'll see that the features of the data are very, very different than Gaussian.
--
The above quotes are part of the debunking of 4 (of 5) econ myths Alison discussed with Fatih before running out of time.
Good readable transcript, tho a couple typos.
The most scientifically reproducible reason that Arnold Kling's Specialization and Trade framework has been a better guide to the macro economy than the last 50 years of academic macro with math and lots of inaccurate Gaussian distributions assumed for math tractability, allowing very precise wrong numbers to be calculated.
“But a coalition that is united around what it is against and divided about what it is for strikes me as unstable and not particularly helpful.” Amen.
We need more principled positions and less critical theory (a movement purely “against”). The problem is critical theory has been so successful in tearing down America that we no longer have a shared set of principles to rally around. Where do we go from here as a society?
I think the answer to Evan Kasakove's fifth question is: Policymakers' policies would not be much affected by their having a better knowledge of economics; they are interested in politics rather than in any of the sciences.
Ineffectual nihilism is no worse than ineffectual opposition, which is what we appear to have today. In my opinion, the only way forward now is to refuse give the ruling class any legitimacy gained by my participation in its selection. My feeling is that people being ruled aren't wake up until they are kneeling before the the trench they were just forced to dig. That grisly choice won't come in my lifetime, but it is coming, and my nieces and nephews and their children are going to live the consequences of my generation's inaction.
I am enamored with Substack, but I know it won't last in its present form. At some point, its leading management will consist of the same social/political class that runs Twitter, Facebook, and Google- it is inevitable.
For this sort of reason, I hope substack does not successfully build a moat.
However, there is a structural difference. Facebook, Google and initially even Twitter build their network effect on "normie" users who aren't there for the politics. This means they can (or think they can) afford to sacrifice the small minority of political disident users if that is a winning move in office politics.
Substack is basically dependent on being a republic of letters, the comercial backbone of which is political dissidents. So in that view, Substack is more likely to break than bend. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and the government of New York are the players to watch.
I have to admit that I was skeptical that your move to Substack would be successful, especially after some of the stuff you posted on Medium. I can't describe why, but I really did not like Medium and I assumed Substack would be very similar.
I actually stopped reading your stuff for a while, and came back to Substack via another writer that moved over here. Having used it for a while the concept has grown on me.
I really hope they continue to be successful, and that you'll continue writing. I look forward to the emails in my inbox.
AK's comment on Chau. Agree. Arguing FOR issues is potentially helpful. Criticizing some part of the existing policy set and those supposedly responsible for it w/o at least nodding toward an alternative seem to me to go nowhere and is not even persuasive to very many people who need to be persuaded. My quibble would be with the idea that there IS a homogeneous "ruling class."
Social media’s effect is clearly not endogenous. Humans have always been nutty but we also have a natural negative feedback mechanism in nuttiness, which is our desire for conformity. When we feel we’re the only one with a view, we revert towards the mean.
The earlier internet (eg pre 2010) revealed that every nutty view had many adherents which broke that feedback loop.
But social media – where the nuttier you are, the *more* likes you get – turned it into a positive feedback loop.
The fact that nuttiness existed prior to social media doesn’t absolve it for turning a negative feedback into a positive one.
Prime example: Hanania. Some of his written stuff is interesting. A huge portion of his Tweets are ... not.
Tyler makes the hilarious claim that the Woke are not liberal - the same liberals who have re-defined marriage (man+woman to create children) into the legally required normalization of same-sex coupling, which NEVER results in conception of a child of the married couple. The lack of "children" in his discussion about needing more human rights for women is glaring for those looking.
"Marriage" is defined by what people call it - "liberals" are those who are called liberals, formerly welfare liberals or politically correct liberals.
Tyler transcripts are far far better than Brian Chau's, so far.
Among the 5 questions asked, you've highlighted your weakest response to "what would fiscal & monetary policy look like"? Yes, policy makers should be more humble, with humility, but NOT doing X, Y, or Z does not describe what IS done, or what it looks like. The Taylor rule on Fed Policy, would be part of a better answer. Nationalization instead of bankruptcy for Too Big companies might be another.
US colleges should have at least 20% of their professors and administrators be Republican, pro-life, anti-illegal immigration, pro-capitalism.
Seems like Chau's mistake is black and white thinking. Institutions aren't either legitimate or illegitimate full stop, they can be better or worse by degrees. And you're right, the ones we have now are far from the worst ones possible.
I used to tell myself the same story Tyler Cowen is trying to tell- that the internet didn't increase the number of nuts in the world, it simply gave them a connection to each other that previously didn't exist. This might still be true, but there is definitely an increase in craziness in both the population and especially in the governing class at all levels. Something has changed in the last 25 years, and it is gathering speed day by day.
I think I should clarify that maximum tent populism doesn't involve delegitimizing the rules (i.e. elections), but rather justifies using rules which already exist against the ruling class (i.e. passing laws limiting the power of executive bureaucracies). I don't think there is widespread support for the former nor would it be productive.
I might have an article coming out on this in detail at some point, using Balaji's framework of constraint vs. restraint. It's already written down in a notebook for a future book, but I'm holding off on it for now.
Best new rule would be to limit "Public Service" to a maximum of 10 years as an employee of the gov't. Term limits for bureaucrats.
The world is better off if more higher quality thinking people are in private, peaceful employment, or as employees, rather than tax-funded non-competitive gov't jobs.
Any movement opposing the ruling class needs three immediate principals.
1) Civil Rights Law/AA needs massive and meaningful curtailing with teeth. Institutions need to understand that discrimination against whites/asians/males/straights carries as much risk as the opposite. Ultimate goal is to get back to "Republicans buy sneakers too."
2) Real K-12 educational freedom is fundamentally necessary. Mediocre but non-ideological was OK when I was a kid, but that consensus didn't hold. If you don't hurt school districts in the wallet, your proposal is useless.
3) Immigrations needs to be drastically slowed for anyone IQ < 130. It's fundamentally difficult to achieve these meaningful objectives while in constant demographic flux. We are at the same % of foreign born as the last immigration pause. There is likely a fundamental limit to assimilation.
I'm not much of a joiner of movements in any case, and I'm certainly not willing to join a movement opposing the ruling class until I know what I would get in its place. As for your proposals, I like 1) and 2), but 3) looks very bad; the history of the U.S. suggests that assimilation works well enough, and I think biotechnology is on the point of raising IQs across the board (if that is what people want, which, I think, it is).
The history of the USA is assimilating white people from slightly different parts of Europe that could afford an expensive Trans Atlantic boat trip and no welfare state. Even under those favorable conditions, it reached its limit by the 1920s.
If biotechnology is about to raise IQs, the case for immigration collapses completely. The third world is what it is because of low IQs. People immigrate to flee low IQs. If technology can fix it, they can just stay where they are and wait for the technology.
The most important thing we can do is make sure that technology happens. The biggest threat to it happening is mass immigration destroying the first world technology capability before it gets there.
The answer to EK Does this mean more than make marginal changes based on CBA? Presumable not entirely, since that has nothing specifically to do this Specialization and Trade. [Or I guess I should say, _I_ don't see the relation.]
The Allison Schrager transcript with Fatih Guvenen is FANTASTIC.
https://www.city-journal.org/wage-stagnation-and-income-risk
Most important points:
1) Big data on multiple actual individual lifetime wage changes is very different in practice than assumed, wrongly, in macro models
2) Gaussian (normal) distributions are often assumed without enough data to justify them, and Big Data is showing them to be wrong.
my own conclusion
3) all macro models based on disproven normal distribution assumptions of wage behavior have been wrong, are wrong, and will continue to be wrong. The actual math is too hard for good macro without 100 million+ worker wages yearly Big Micro Data.
>> Because if you have a small sample, a lot of noise to get to learn anything from it, you have to impose some restriction like the Gaussian distribution. ...
what was changing was the skewness and you cannot capture that with a Gaussian because Gaussian is restricted to zero skewness. ...
these discussions came up before the great recession, right? There were all this pricing of the CDSs with the AIG and other companies. And there was a lot of Gaussian modeling that went into those. And there was some criticisms of that. Yes. So economists, statisticians, we love Gaussian modeling traditionally because just like in math, we have linearity in statistics. We have Gaussianity. It simplifies a lot of analysis and it's everywhere. ...
You lose your job and you stay unemployed for most of the year. In a Gaussian world, this happens very, very rarely. And in the real data the likelihood of this is 20 times, 25 times higher than in data. So what we show is, if you just stare at the data, okay, do non parametrically unplotted, you'll see that the features of the data are very, very different than Gaussian.
--
The above quotes are part of the debunking of 4 (of 5) econ myths Alison discussed with Fatih before running out of time.
Good readable transcript, tho a couple typos.
The most scientifically reproducible reason that Arnold Kling's Specialization and Trade framework has been a better guide to the macro economy than the last 50 years of academic macro with math and lots of inaccurate Gaussian distributions assumed for math tractability, allowing very precise wrong numbers to be calculated.
“But a coalition that is united around what it is against and divided about what it is for strikes me as unstable and not particularly helpful.” Amen.
We need more principled positions and less critical theory (a movement purely “against”). The problem is critical theory has been so successful in tearing down America that we no longer have a shared set of principles to rally around. Where do we go from here as a society?
I think the answer to Evan Kasakove's fifth question is: Policymakers' policies would not be much affected by their having a better knowledge of economics; they are interested in politics rather than in any of the sciences.
Ineffectual nihilism is no worse than ineffectual opposition, which is what we appear to have today. In my opinion, the only way forward now is to refuse give the ruling class any legitimacy gained by my participation in its selection. My feeling is that people being ruled aren't wake up until they are kneeling before the the trench they were just forced to dig. That grisly choice won't come in my lifetime, but it is coming, and my nieces and nephews and their children are going to live the consequences of my generation's inaction.
I am enamored with Substack, but I know it won't last in its present form. At some point, its leading management will consist of the same social/political class that runs Twitter, Facebook, and Google- it is inevitable.
For this sort of reason, I hope substack does not successfully build a moat.
However, there is a structural difference. Facebook, Google and initially even Twitter build their network effect on "normie" users who aren't there for the politics. This means they can (or think they can) afford to sacrifice the small minority of political disident users if that is a winning move in office politics.
Substack is basically dependent on being a republic of letters, the comercial backbone of which is political dissidents. So in that view, Substack is more likely to break than bend. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and the government of New York are the players to watch.
Sad, but likely true. There was a time when Twitter claimed to be a supporter of free speech. It didn't last.
I have to admit that I was skeptical that your move to Substack would be successful, especially after some of the stuff you posted on Medium. I can't describe why, but I really did not like Medium and I assumed Substack would be very similar.
I actually stopped reading your stuff for a while, and came back to Substack via another writer that moved over here. Having used it for a while the concept has grown on me.
I really hope they continue to be successful, and that you'll continue writing. I look forward to the emails in my inbox.
AK's comment on Chau. Agree. Arguing FOR issues is potentially helpful. Criticizing some part of the existing policy set and those supposedly responsible for it w/o at least nodding toward an alternative seem to me to go nowhere and is not even persuasive to very many people who need to be persuaded. My quibble would be with the idea that there IS a homogeneous "ruling class."