Some recommended links
My latest book review; Austin Vernon on AI and logistics; Henrik Karlsson on creativity and agency; Frank Distefano on the 1960s and protests
My latest book review covers The Measure of Progress, by Diane Coyle.
In a chapter called “Value,” Coyle points out that the measurable sector of the economy consists of goods and services for which we can observe quantity, quality, and prices. For many consumer online activities, we do not observe quantity. For rapidly-changing consumer items, such as smart phones, it is difficult to assess improvements in quality. And in the digital world, where much is provided for free, we do not observe prices. And for many items, prices are artificial: hospital charges, college tuition, and the imputed rent of housing services.
phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are “supposed to do,” playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them, or working on things that do not in a meaningful way address the problem.)
The post seems to be about agency in general, but the examples focus on the specific problem of someone who is creative. How do you reconcile doing your creative thing with making an ordinary living? Probably the best way to do this is to have a day job that pays the bills while you pursue your creative activity. I have typically worked this way. One of my creative enterprises, the web site I built in 1994, eventually paid off, but only after I had almost given up on it.
Karlsson’s central example is movie producer Werner Herzog.
Herzog, after founding his company at 17, spent the final two years of high school working the night shift at a steel factory to save up money for productions
Austin Vernon writes about the potential for technology to improve logistics, especially in trucking.
The first-order answer for cost reductions is clear. Remove the driver with software and reduce fuel costs with batteries. Automated driving is improving rapidly. LFP battery packs for autonomous semi-trucks are already theoretically cheap enough except in the US. Trucking would see significant cost declines. I think this result is already a given, especially since AI drivers can use small battery packs that charge more often than human driver hour rules allow.
The second-order optimization is much more interesting. The minimum cost of any size shipment plummets by removing the human driver and using a versatile electric powertrain. Haulers can use lower minimum costs to break up shipments into smaller chunks. That means more point-to-point, eliminating much of the distribution that today's truck logistics require. Prices for some categories, like less-than-truckload, could decline by 80% to 90%. These changes are extreme enough to reorganize goods-oriented businesses.
Pointer from Tyler CowenEvery time we drive from DC to New York I am struck by the number of trucks on the road. Trucking seems like a really large part of the American economy, so that an improvement in productivity there would move the needle for overall productivity. By the same token, it could mean a loss/rearrangement of a lot of jobs.
In reality, what we remember as the ’60s was two entirely different periods of history. Most of what we remember as the 1960s in reality happened in the 1970s. A lot of the Civil Rights Movement that we also remember as the 1960s in reality happened in the 1950s. The dividing line between these eras is 1964. On one side is the Civil Rights Act and Great Society of 1964, which we can think of as the culmination of reform efforts of the ’50s. On the other side are the explosive protests and public upheaval of 1968, which ushered in a new era of radicalism that American society is still, in many ways, attempting to recover from.
White people saw the Civil Rights legislation as the endpoint for the racial protest movement. In 1965, they moved on to the antiwar movement. But Black radicals escalated their demands, and urban riots took place from 1965 through 1968. Part of the antiwar movement took a violent turn during and after the 1968 election. This turned out badly for the center-left.
Politically, the New Left so discredited itself with America that, on a national level, it destroyed the Democratic Party for a generation. The New Left was so unpopular by 1980 that Reagan won 489 electoral votes to 49. Reagan was re-elected in 1984 with 525 electoral votes to 13. The New Left and its antics had driven a winning coalition out of the Democratic Party, and a Republican Party that had struggled in the minority since FDR was now in the national driver’s seat.
If history repeats, then “globalize the intifada” will not end well for today’s Democratic Party.
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As every dad who insists on making good time by getting the family started on a road trip by leaving the house at 4am knows, the obvious potential huge gain for logistics is getting around the bottleneck of bad road congestion and vastly improving the infrastructural-capital utilization efficiency by using those roads at off-peak times of minimum demand, usually in the middle of the night, when most human-transport competition is off the road. And sure, there's a bit of this happening. However, to date, this strategy has proven infeasible or uneconomical enough that it still not nearly as widely employed as it could be. Mostly this seems to be due to human workday coordination (even the Soviets found they couldn't do very much about that to spread labor activity and and availability around) and the risks and other inefficiencies caused by impairment of vision by lack of solar illumination, and it being really expensive (and perhaps illegal) to equip humans with the best low-illumination visual augmentation tech. Limited congestion pricing also doesn't encourage nearly as efficient a utilization of road infrastructure as could be achieved with better tolling.
But now, with robot drivers with high resolution maps and all kinds of sensors across multiple spectrums that can operate nearly as well at night, the former human and tech roadblocks to shifting logistics to night may be significantly mitigated or, maybe soon, simply neutralized. That opens up tons of cheap, spare capacity on existing infrastructure and without the need for substantial additional investments in new roads beyond some extra maintenance and repair to handle the new load.
So, the business case seems solid, and it could be a huge deal.
"The first-order answer for cost reductions is clear. Remove the driver with software and reduce fuel costs with batteries."
Austin Vernon apparently knows how an entire industry should be fixed. While he's at it maybe he can fix how we buy and store groceries and prepare food and how we build and clean our homes and toilets and, well, you get the idea. Everything in life has inefficiencies and there are experts willing to tell us how things really should be.
sigh
I remember having conversations with technology providers in the early 2000s about their frustration with trucking companies not buying their driver management systems. The complaint being that the companies were too cheap and undercapitalized and didn't want to spend the money.
Well yeah. Trucking is a highly competitive, low margin business. Is it inefficient? Maybe. But what if that inefficiency is because it is so relatively cheap to put a truck in service? Increasing the cost of truck operation might actually improve efficiency, but this would require shifting the industry from a low cap to high cap business (ie make it a technology business instead of a human services business).
So if the trucking industry was wiped out - both trucks and drivers - and replaced with million dollar autonomous vehicles and ecosystem to support those vehicles then VOILA! the inefficiency of the industry could be fixed. Except inefficiencies would still exist because there is no perfect order in the human ecosystem. Which means the ultimate answer is to get rid of the humans everywhere.