Another Message Board
Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here
I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging platform. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack.
John Quiggin 
Do you ever have mental panics and suddenly think that you really are a lot stupider than you think you are? I do. I am probably that guy who thinks his IQ is 120 when it is probably 105… on a good day.
I suddenly formed the opinion, from poor evidence perhaps, that I was “spatially dyslexic”. It doesn’t appear from quick research that this is really a thing although there are people who have trouble reading maps and navigating geographically. I tested myself on a free test involving rotated 3-D shapes and also cubes and other shapes folded out flat, along with 3-d depictions from one viewpoint where one has to identify which is the impossible depiction.
I got 8 out of 10 going in cold. I have never practiced such stuff. I thought I was lucky to get one of those answers right . It was a bit of a guess. Annoyingly, there was no mention of what percentile your result might put you in.
Of course, IQ is a fraught concept and measure. Now take emotional IQ, if that is a thing. I reckon mine would be about 80… on a good day. I don’t read people very well and I don’t take very good notice of their feelings whilst at the same being hypersensitive and taking umbrage if I feel my own feelings are offended. Humans internally are a complex stew. Put a whole lot of us together… I often think it’s a wonder that any society works at all.
On another topic, an article on J.Q’s substack is interesting. I mean the article “Opening the Overton Window”.
If he is correct, and I have no reason to think he is not, then there is a huge disconnect between the majority of the people (maybe 60% to 80%?) and the ruling classes. The ruling classes are the oligarchs of capital, the successful business people and their willing corporate and business functionaries plus of course the professional politicians and apparatchiks of the major political parties. They form a cartel or complex of elite rulers, influencers and exploiters who interests are united against the majority.
These seems a huge disconnect as I say. On the ground, our society and economy is slowly but surely crumbling. Of course, the ruling classes are disconnected and insulated from this and they don’t give a damn. Our household (I like to think of it as a family cooperative as people in it do share benefits, costs and labor equitably) probably itself exists in a privileged and insulated space. Perhaps we are in the lower third of the upper middle class if one wants to slice it like that.
I can see a time coming relatively soon when we will no longer feel comfortable. Of course, it’s not the world’s responsibility to make us feel comfortable. I get that. But if I feel the changes the world is seeing now are “coming for me and mine” how much more so must people feel in the class levels below us in income and assets? The feelings of insecurity and even real precarity must be getting very high.
It’s getting totally ridiculous, by which I mean untenable and unsustainable. We have seen massive recent price rises when real wages have been stagnant or even falling. The price rises are highest in those categories where ordinary families need to spend most of their income: food, rent, mortgages, education, transport, insurance and medical & dental costs to name some categories. Inflation is a relative phenomenon where every relativity counts, especially the relativity against income. The aggregation of inflation (a mostly meaningless aggravate average in a nominal quantification) tells us next to nothing about social segment impacts. Inflation is “always and everywhere a redistributive phenomenon” as the Capital as Power theorists say. Inflation is currently being used, deliberately, to redistribute wealth. It is mostly comprised of the price inflation of administered prices engaged in by monopolists, duopolists and oligopolists.
Where the “-opolies” are not responsible for inflation, the causes mainly stem from supply constraints brought on by ignoring climate change and all its knock on effects and damages and by ignoring the serious global pandemic of a BSL3 level airborne pathogen (SARS-CoV-2) and letting it rip through the global population in an endlessly cycling pandemic.
But the elites would rather spend money on gear of war and bread and circuses to distract the population with performances and spectaculars. At this stage, I am wholly opposed to useless weapons platforms like the AUKUS subs (certainly useless for Australia in its fighting weight class and situation) and to international travel (other than for necessary business, personal and humanitarian reasons). This means I am wholly opposed now to international tourism. I am also opposed to all international and professions sporting events and entertainments. That stuff is all fiddling while the world burns: burning with climate change and burning with fever. We are in the midst of a global emergency. This is no time for fun and games on extravagant scales. It is an existential crisis. It is perfectly possible to have good fun with minimal environmental impact and to entertain ourselves rather than being dependent on corporately confected entertainments.
Only a shallow and foolish people continues with extravagant and despoiling fun, games, breads and circuses when they are faced with an existential crisis and by the increasing misery of the oppressed and dispossessed. It is time to leave off all the childish things in this crisis. Can we do it? Or are we finally too shallow and too selfish? If so, we deserve the empirical existential judgement that is coming. Any scientific humanist can see this.
Okay, I have to apologize up front for flooding the Monday Message Board but I feel this is important.
The aged person’s care residence where my father-in-law (over 90) lives has just suffered a large outbreak of COVID-19. Over a dozen residents so far have tested positive to a comprehensive testing regime combining RAT and then PCR tests for all, as I understand it . This outbreak has exploded from 1 to several to over a dozen residents in two or three days and I hazard a guess the spread might not be over yet. Staff (singular or plural I don’t know) are affected too. Management are now implementing stringent control protocols. They are blameless in all this. This is to the absolute best of my knowledge.
What makes this particularly upsetting is that this residence has been an exemplar of care and concern and has had minimal COVID-19 infections since the beginning of the pandemic. It was and is very extremely well run (which is probably unusual these days in the privatized system) with excellent management and staff and also excellent protocols. However, the deliberate and reckless spreading of COVID-19 throughout our entire society by big business, governments and misinformed people makes it extremely difficult for even well-run workplaces and institutions to ring-fence themselves indefinitely against the “sea” or “miasma” of COVID-19 flooding and flowing through our entire society.
I could say more but I had better not. I do not want to provide anything that could prove to constitute identifying details. This is all most disastrous. COVID-19 does not just affect old people, albeit it does affect them at higher rates. For the middle-aged, young and even those under 5, COVID-19 has already become a major new cause of death and morbidity. These facts are being deliberately suppressed / not publicized by the ruling classes. This crisis will continue to get worse and worse until we make it a goal to seriously reduce whole of community transmission greatly from its current levels.
COVID-19 combined with climate change will most assuredly destroy us. People *must* wake up to the dangers and act.
Ikon, “this residence has been an exemplar of care” … “against the “sea” or “miasma” of COVID-19 flooding and flowing through”.
Suggest UVC + HEPA air sterilization. For the miasma.
That would be exemplary.
“[PDF] The role of airflow and ventilation in relation to SARS-CoV-2 … – NHMRC
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au › default › files
“The model shows that disinfection rates are increased by a further 50-85% when using far-UVC within currently recommended exposure levels compared to the room’s”
*
“UV-C lights can be installed in the ductwork of the air conditioning system or in a small housing which consists of a fan, UVC light and filters. These unit are easily mounted, run off single phase power and are suitable up to 30-40 occupants per room.”
https://cleanairaust.com.au/news/top-4-expert-strategies-for-indoor-air-quality-in-aged-care/
Flooding solution?
Discretionary thumb swipe. (-::
KT2,
Yes I admit that within that necessarily stringent definition of care they have not been exemplary. And I should be applying that definition myself. Aside from that they have been very good. I have been falling over myself to not criticize the ownership and management unduly. They have been far better than most in this space. Their job has been made much harder by:
(1) governments and health bodies downplaying the dangers and limiting what measures residence owners can take without facing legal actions or angry complaint actions from misinformed relatives.
(2) Suppression or at least lack of promulgation of what combined measures like N95+ masks, UVC lights, hepa-filters, comprehensive testing and other measures can achieve in concert.
(3) Government failure to subsidize these as mandated measures to 100% of cost to all qualifying businesses, they subject in turn to extra taxes if they be assessed as making excess profits (profiteering).
But nah, part of the sector is being permitted to get away with… ah, I better write it.
JQ re: “I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging platform.”
See point 2:
https://johnquiggin.com/2023/03/20/sandpit-199/comment-page-1/#comment-259812
A couple of comments on State politics.
1. Chris Minns seems to have won the NSW election partly by offering to pay civil servants, nurses and teachers more money. Of course “everyone knows” they “deserve” more money – indeed every wage earner in the community “deserves” more money particularly in an era where inflation is eroding real wages and employees/unions want to play “catch up” regardless of possible wage-price spiral macroeconomic consequences – the need to maintain high interest rates longer and higher unemployment.
It was a fairly decent campaign in NSW that was fought on issues rather than personal attacks but buying votes by means of an election promise to pay higher wages seems questionable to me – although Minns to his credit did make it clear it was an election promise. We will see what Minns does and whether he wriggles out of this one.
My own view is that outside the public sector, unions have fairly low impact on real wages. Private sector wages depend on worker productivities and on factors such as the immigration intake and (in the past) on the successful emergence of developing country manufacturing. Slow wage growth is an international phenomenon in developed countries and cannot be explained only by Australia-specific factors. For the public sector this is not the case since salaries here depend on funds from tax-payers and, as Minns has shown, salary increments here can be sold to a largely gullible electorate as providing “social justice” etc.
2. In Victoria Daniel Andrews is crying poor as he faces his state budgetary shambles. He is blaming the need for cuts (presumably in the public sector) on interest rate hikes though these were hardly unanticipated. Over the years we have been repeatedly told by Treasurer Pallas that debt didn’t matter because the infrastructure being installed would “grow” the Victorian economy. He has gone a bit slow on this view recently. I wonder if the North East road link (cost $18b) and the city train loop (probably $50b) will yield enough productivity gains to make repayable the debt that funds them.
Of course, too, we had the costly Victorian Covid response – the strictest probably on the planet though these days you would think Covid is irrelevant – no mask requirements etc. I guess Andrews will say we now have vaccines though many are still dying.
In addition we have the MMT people (a subset of the “public debt is irrelevant” mafia) who urged massive borrowing because interest rates were (myopically) seen as low. Andrews probably isn’t listening to this lot now as Victoria faces interest costs surging by $400m over the past six months to $1.8b on debt exceeding $100b. This “debt doesn’t matter mafia” will resurge again when memories of the Victorian budget and the cuts required to fund interest payments get forgotten about which will presumably occur after 1-2 electoral cycles. The only thing people learn from history is that the public never learn from history.
Ukrainian victory
ISW provide the technical military argument for encouraging Ukraine to go for battlefield victory rather than staying on the defensive and hoping Putin’s mind will change: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-26-2023
This nicely complements Timothy Snyder’s political and historical case: https://snyder.substack.com/p/why-the-world-needs-ukrainian-victory
It’s not even clear that caution would save Ukrainian lives in the end. Attacking soon has a chance of bringing this hateful war to an earlier end. And while casualties are usually higher for attackers than defenders, there are plenty of examples of the contrary, when the disparity in motivation, leadership and equipment is as wide as it clearly is in Ukraine (Gulf wars, Falklands ..). The Normandy battles of 1944, between fairly evenly matched opponents, caused similar casualties on both sides (ca. 200,000 each), in spite of the defender advantage.
Ikon, I hope your FiL will be okay.
I’ve begun wondering when my next booster is coming. In my little circle, we are just about at the point where we will stop bothering with masks inside. (Pretty much everyone else where I am has stopped wearing them inside, many months back.) So my guess is, there’ll be a new surge soon. I am still miffed that nobody bothered to make a mask that was comfortable.
There are still people dying, and there isn’t any messaging here about further steps to take. I am disappointed but not at all surprised.
N,
Thanks re my father-in-law. Still waiting for another update. Should get one today after another round of PCR tests. Last advice was that all residents were confined to their rooms. All residents able to mask are masking and all staff are masking. Staff care has been “compartmentalized” or ring-fenced. Each staff member cares for a small “cell” of residents. No visitors are permitted.
The brainwashed public think endless rounds of these sorts of crises are better than proper control of the virus. They are wrong. The costs are higher: human costs and economic costs.
Data from Victoria show that:
“The death rate for HOSPITAL ACQUIRED COVID INFECTION in Victoria in 2022 was 10.62%. These are the internal DoH figures: 344 dead to October, 10.62% of infections.” – Dr. David Berger.
I am sure every other state is as bad. If you go to hospital and catch COVID-19, you have a 10% chance of dying. Those are bad odds. Reasonably, we would expect the hospital to no infect us with something new which has a 10% chance of killing us in that situation. And yet, the latest advice for people visiting hospitals there is to “think about masking”. Staff don’t mask properly either. This is black farce not modern medicine.
In your case, I would advise continued vigilance and protection against SARS-CoV-2 that is *not* based on peer pressure but rather *is* based on the science. Anyone who doesn’t care if they give you a deadly disease is not worth any consideration.
So far as possible, avoid public and crowded spaces. Where that is not possible for essential tasks, wear an N95 rated mask and ensure it is properly fitted. Of course, ensure your vaccinations are up to date as soon as you can get them.
The best idea is to keep the number of your COVID-19 infections to zero if you can. It is extremely important to avoid multiple infections over time. COVID-19 disease progressively damages the body and immune system with each survived infection. The temporary resistance conferred by infection is inferior to vaccine conferred temporary resistance, which is not fully sterilizing either.
Since our authorities and societies have decided to use only vaccines and pharmaceutical interventions, we are hostage to how good this science can or can’t get and to whether it will be made available and affordable to ordinary people. That is to say, we are hostage to this leaky system unless we take many further measures of our own to protect ourselves. The inconvenience of these methods will be as nothing to the inconvenience and/or tragic outcomes of C-19 if you or your loved ones get it.
Yes, I continue to take a hard line against C-19 and the people and policies that spread it. The trends and probabilities are high that this crisis will intensify unless we turn around and use multiple controls to greatly limit spread. Endless spread almost guarantees the rise of a mutated unstoppable variant: one that is unstoppable in the short to medium term (a year to a decade or two). This is given the kind of pathogen SARS-CoV-2 is.
A pharmaceutical silver bullet is possible, perhaps. It doesn’t seem probable yet. What seems even less probable is that the majority of the human race would ever get access to it even if it proved technically possible.
1. Seeds. For Peace. And subversion… “Seeds of Peace unknowingly participate in sustaining the conflicts they seek to eliminate.”. A metaphor & tactic for Institute for the Study of War – imo. Yours?
2. The Glass Half / Full / in chaos. JQ re Ukraine “the end of democracy is still on track to happen”
3: Complimentary and in support of James W’s two links re “encouraging Ukraine to go for battlefield victory rather than staying on the defensive and hoping Putin’s mind will change:” via Brookings Institute “An update on Ukraine—security, economic, and humanitarian conditions”.
4. ISW funded by arms manufacturers and “Kagan is the founder (2007) and President of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW)”. THE most powerful woman.
Kimberly Ellen Kagan IS SO POWERFUL she and her husband “communicated directly to field commanders in the east, creating some confusion since Petraeus did not issue this command himself”. Wow. See note at end.
*
Seeds. For Peace.
“Protecting our food supply is one thing the whole world can get behind.”
“The Vault(s).
…
“… explores an unusual reserve of invaluable resources. It is designed to be egalitarian, beyond everyday politics and international strife. Any nation can store seeds in the vault for free, making the vault a sort of world peace zone.
“South Korea’s seeds sit next to North Korea’s. Ukraine’s are right next to Russia’s. Protecting our food supply is one thing the whole world can get behind.”
…
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-vault/
Text or podcast.
Subversive “Seeds for Peace.”
(Modus operandi of ISW.)
…
“… analysis of Seeds of Peace publications, Engstrom (2007) argues that organizations like Seeds of Peace unknowingly participate in sustaining the conflicts they seek to eliminate. This is done by a promoted rhetoric of deferred peace that places the burden of ending the conflict on future generations. Politicians and other stakeholders in the current conflict use their support for Seeds of Peace as a signal of their commitment to peace while remaining committed to military engagement in the present. By continuously promoting peace as something that exists in the future, politicians can maintain the status quo and undermine the power of institutions working for peace today.
wikipedia /wiki/Seeds_of_Peace
Ernest G. Bormann … “originated the Symbolic Convergence Theory of human communication, which emphasizes the sharing of group “fantasies” (creative interpretations) as a method of developing shared meaning. … the author of numerous books and articles.”
wikipedia /wiki/Ernest_Bormann
****
2.
The Glass Half Full…
… is diametric and unstable in chaos & war..
And needs nuance, as indicated by JQ in “Where does it end: Part 2” …
“As I hinted at the time, the over-optimistic part of my take was the idea that there would be a positive outcome in the US. No sign of that so far, which means the end of democracy is still on track to happen. But at least there is some chance that Europe will hold out.”
****
3.
Brookings Institute and ISW [& JQ] draw basically the same conclusions re current Ukraine invasion and occupation by Russia. In;
“An update on Ukraine—security, economic, and humanitarian conditions
Constanze Stelzenmüller and David Dollar Monday, March 20, 2023
…
STELZENMÜLLER:
– “Axis of Prudence, [and the]
– “Jake Sullivan, has called “boiling the frog” bears risks of its own, namely the exhaustion of public consent and the exhaustion of, in fact, Ukraine itself. And that, in fact, it is important, it is the more prudent course, if you will, to give Ukraine enough weapons for it to make a major push so as to push back a Russian offensive in the spring and summer and to regain control over the entirety of its territory.
“A footnote to that is that I think most people make a reservation for Crimea where they’re willing to entertain an international regime, sort of like the status of Berlin in the Cold War,”…
[such as JQ in “Status quo ante bellum: what does it mean for the war in Ukraine”…”in the context of the war in Ukraine? In my view, it means that the Ukrainian government and its international supporters should seek a ceasefire in which Russia withdraws its forces to their positions of 23 February, without conceding any Russian claims regarding annexations or (if they still operate after the sham referendums) the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist republics”]
…cont…
STELZENMÜLLER:
“But otherwise, I think those are those are the two camps. …, I myself belong to the camp that thinks that it is dangerous to lose too much time, that it is dangerous to exhaust Ukraine and it is dangerous to exhaust Western public consent”…
…
Click to access Dollar-and-Sense-Stelzenmuller-20230320.pdf
4.
Institute for the Study of War – so we know.
I agree with James W, there is obviously no better US “institution” than ISW, capable of producing a “technical military argument”. Not si sure ISW will stop warring though as “… core funding provided by a group of defense contractors”.
“Kimberly Ellen Kagan … “Kagan is the founder (2007) and President of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW)” …
…”heads the Institute for the Study of War … “Kagan and her husband both have top secret clearance and have issued cammands directly in …”Afghanistan in the summer of 2010 to assist General David Petraeus … Their [Kagan & husband] assessment that US forces should attack the Haqqani network was communicated directly to field commanders in the east, creating some confusion since Petraeus did not issue this command himself”.
Wikipedia
“Kimberly Ellen Kagan (born 1972) is an American military historian. … and has taught at West Point, Yale, Georgetown University, and American University.”…
“[Kagan] served on the Joint Campaign Plan Assessment Team for Multi-National Force-Iraq-U.S. Mission Iraq in October 2008, and as part of the Civilian Advisory Team for the CENTCOM strategic review in January 2009.[9]Kagan served in Kabul as a member of General Stanley McChrystal’s strategic assessment team, composed of civilian experts, during his strategic review in June and July 2009. She and her husband returned to Afghanistan in the summer of 2010 to assist General David Petraeus with transition tasks following his assumption of command in Afghanistan. They were granted “top secret” clearance, and spent hours analyzing intercepted transmissions of the Taliban. Their assessment that US forces should attack the Haqqani network was communicated directly to field commanders in the east, creating some confusion since Petraeus did not issue this command himself.[10] Kagan also serves on the Academic Advisory Board at the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at CENTCOM.”
“The institute is a right-leaning counterpart to the left-leaning Brookings Institution;[13][14]however, the two entities have often collaborated.” … “ISW was founded in response to the stagnation of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with core funding provided by a group of defense contractors. … “supported in part by contributions from defense contractors[7] including General Dynamics, DynCorp,[8] and previously, Raytheon.[9] …(Microsoft, Exxon etc)
“AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism, in both the domestic and international policy arenas.[5] Irving Kristol, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI”…
… “ISW has been described as “a hawkish Washington group”[31] favoring an “aggressive foreign policy”.[7]
“Writers for Business Day, The Nation and Foreign Policy have called ISW “neoconservative”.
From Wikipedia – Kagan & ISW pages.
***
Note: I put ISW at 4 as a metaphor for death, as I’m into bonsai. You do not display your bonsai with four fallen leaves at base, yet having all 4 stages of life – birth / sprouting, marurity, senescence, & death – is important for display.
“Japanese superstition… “Traditionally, 4 is unlucky because it is sometimes pronounced shi, which is the word for death.”
wikipedia – Japanese_superstitions
ISW exhibits marurity and death only. Birth and senescence seem irrelevant to ISW imo, as with Russia returning to previous maturity, and cannon fodder. You?
N: – “In my little circle, we are just about at the point where we will stop bothering with masks inside.”
What is the risk of getting ‘Long-COVID’?
https://johnquiggin.com/2023/03/13/monday-message-board-591/comment-page-1/#comment-259646
Which occupations (in Australia, and perhaps similar in other western countries) have the largest incidences of COVID-19 infections?
https://johnquiggin.com/2023/03/13/monday-message-board-591/comment-page-1/#comment-259677
N, is your mask wearing (and other precautions to minimise getting infected with SARS-CoV-2) more onerous than permanently losing your good health?
erm, who measured and tested the intelligence quotient of the intelligence quotient tests?
and “all the protections have been dropped”.
everywhere i go people tend to keep their distance and the hand sanitiser is available and used, maybe the message has been absorbed and repetition is not necessary?
I agree that ISW is a nest of old-style Reaganite cold warriors. The cycle of history has made their prejudices approximately correct once again Ukraine, as shown by their agreement with the liberal internationalist Snyder. I’d be reluctant to take their word for it on say Iran. I read their daily Ukraine update, which looks solid. On details of the fighting, they are corroborated by the less systematic and much more liberal bloggers at Daily Kos . ISW cover, and SFIK nobody else does, the tensions within the Russian “information space” and regular criticisms of the Russian Army, and indirectly Putin, from ultranationalist milbloggers and siloviki like Prigozhin (any opposition from doves is silenced). One very odd example is over beards. ISW side with the Russian MoD in opposing these – buzz cuts all round. Prigozhin quite rightly allows his mercenaries to sport beards, as do the Ukrainian Army and the Royal Navy, though neither he nor the RN allow the warrior kittens.
Thank you for the pep talk, Ikon! I will try to keep on with the mask. I use one of the Korean-made ones, I think. None of the masks I’ve tried has been very comfortable. So, it does make me avoid a lot of activities.
I saw an article about some other type of mask which was supposed to be comfortable – I can’t recall the name now, but I want to say elastomeric? – but, when I tried to get one, I couldn’t.
Our public health system is still pretty porous. And our medical and public health people seem completely worn out. We really ought to do a holiday for them. It never hurts to say “thank you.” Manners count.
Geoff, you’re right too – I really don’t want to get this illness. (I don’t think I have, yet.) And I *really* don’t want to give it to anyone else.
Happy Birthday, Prof Quiggin. Best wishes for your ‘new year’ and beyond.
Earlier this morning (Mar 29), the Australian Parliament House of Representatives Standing Committee on Agriculture published my Supplementary to Submission (#165.1) on their submissions webpage for their Inquiry into Food Security in Australia. My Supplementary Submission was lodged late evening of Mar 21.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Agriculture/FoodsecurityinAustrali/Submissions
I note that the lodgment of Submission (#166) by the Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association appears to have been on Mar 21, and I observed was subsequently published on the inquiry website the following day (Mar 22).
It’s curious to me that my original Submission, as well as my Supplementary Submission, took considerably longer to be subsequently published on the inquiry website compared with some other contributors.
https://johnquiggin.com/2023/03/06/monday-message-board-590/comment-page-1/#comment-259486
JQ’s birthday? Many happy…
And Cory Doctorow riffing on
Robert Kuttner “American Prospect editorial, “What Comes After Neoliberalism?”, and
Ein2L subtitle:”Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly”
CD: “… it fails very, very badly.”
*
“What comes after neoliberalism?
“In his American Prospect editorial, “What Comes After Neoliberalism?”, Robert Kuttner declares “we’ve just about won the battle of ideas. Reality has been a helpful ally…Neoliberalism has been a splendid success for the top 1 percent, and an abject failure for everyone else”:
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-28-what-comes-after-neoliberalism/
…
“Economism is a philosophy grounded in “efficiency” – and in the philosophical sleight-of-hand that pretends that there is an objective metric called “efficiency” that everyone can agree with. If you disagree with economismists about their definition of “efficiency” then you’re doing “politics” and can be safely ignored.
“The “efficiency” of economism is defined by very simple metrics, like whether prices are going down. If Walmart can force wage-cuts on its suppliers to bring you cheaper food, that’s “efficient.” It works well.
“But it fails very, very badly. The high cost of low prices includes the political dislocation of downwardly mobile farmers and ag workers, which is a classic precursor to fascist uprisings. More prosaically, if your wages fall faster than prices, then you are experiencing a net priceincrease.
“The failure modes of this efficiency are endless, and we keep smashing into them in ghastly and brutal ways, which goes a long way to explaining the “new commons sense” Kuttner mentions (“Reality has been a helpful ally.”)
…
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane
*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kuttner
Senator David Pocock tweeted yesterday (Mar 28) a good summary of what’s going on in the Australian gas market:
Update.
My nonagenarian father-in-law has COVID-19. He tested positive on a PCR test and has symptoms. I won’t give any more details to avoid any chance of identifying a person or an aged care home.
I do not post this seeking sympathy or best wishes. I post it as citizen testimony to the fact that COVID-19 is still in our community and it is still ravaging institutions like aged care homes, hospitals and schools and thus putting at serious risk the vulnerable people in them and/or attending them. There are literally millions of people in Australia alone who meet the technical criteria as of being vulnerable with medical preconditions.
Our governments and mainstream media, at the behest of the rich and business interests refuse to publish or even collect much of the data about COVID-19 and greatly downplay the significance of the minimal data they do collect and publish. It is a concerted program of lies and misinformation to mislead the public as to the true ongoing dangers of COVID-19.
Only by sharing our collective knowledge of the true empirical outcomes of this disease throughout the community, at both broad data and at anecdotal levels, can more and more citizens begin to form a true picture of the parlous state of public health for all. We are in a real crisis and without more efforts to reduce transmission of C-19, our position will continue to worsen indefinitely. There is no living with Covid-19. There is only the ever grinding increase of more deaths and more disability. It is a disease which causes more, accumulating and possibly even accelerating damage each time a person catches it, at least for all people with medical preconditions and possibly for even for nearly all people. Vaccinations alone do lessen these risks but not enough for us to be careless about other transmission and infection control methods. On our current course we are bound for disaster.
I second Ikon’s post regarding Covid-19 in principle. So far my household has remained Corona-free.
Ikonoclast: – “My nonagenarian father-in-law has COVID-19. He tested positive on a PCR test and has symptoms.”
ICYMI/FYI, see the updated info on oral COVID-19 treatments:
https://www.health.gov.au/health-alerts/covid-19/treatments/eligibility
In a op-ed by Prof Deborah Lupton MPH PhD published on 24 Mar 2023 in Cosmos Magazine headlined Next Big Thing: Communicating the next pandemic, she began with:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/communicating-next-pandemic/
My father-in-law is fully vaccinated with either 4 or 5 vaccinations to this point (not sure which). I have been told 2nd hand that he is getting medication. This may be Lagevrio (molnupiravir) or Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir and ritonavir), I do not know.
I am sure he is getting the best possible treatment now. Where we failed as a society was in infection prevention and near elimination (not perfect eradication) of the virus. Haven’t any of these people who let the virus spread unchecked heard that prevention is better than cure? This is especially so with a new virus with unknown characteristics and where it is unclear if there is ever a true cure or a true clearing of the virus from the body.
A number of pathogens hang around in your body for the rest of your natural life. That’s how people get shingles, for example. A patient cleared of Ebola with standard tests was then shown to have reservoirs of it in his eyes.
https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2022/06/21/eyes-a-haven-for-ebola-and-other-viruses/
There are other parts of the body where pathogens can “hide out” and not be cleared. Infecting the world (by sins of omission) with a new BSL 3 virus which is cousin to SARS1 and MERS and about which we knew nothing of its potentials was and is the height of a blind arrogance and idiocy which completely underestimates and dismisses the power of serious pathogens, the power of evolution and the power of the natural world in general.
Oh, I’m so sorry to hear this, Ikon! I hope it will be a very mild case.
Thank you again for reminding me – it *is* very important that I not spread this illness – and therefore, that I not catch it. I needed a good reminder. (I went to a small Oscars party, where no one else wore a mask, and I didn’t either. I skated that time, though.)
If I ever do come across a decent mask, I’ll post it here.
So, I looked at the Kuttner speech.
I can’t agree that the “war of ideas” has been won. I do agree that the US version of regulated capitalism is continuing to show flaws. (I agree that our politics are dysfunctional, but even if we somehow got all the money out of it, I’m not sure it would move that much farther left. Though, I’m not sure.)
Although I consider myself a liberal, I do not see much appeal in talk of “social democracy.” And I don’t see it going much of anywhere here.
I think there is some broad awareness that we need to reward work more appropriately, and that we need stronger unions. But that’s about as far as I think we will go. In fact, I’ll be glad if we stay on that path. That, plus of course we must reverse CC. And not have any more wars. Also, feed people.
And Voldemort didn’t win just because of the economy. At least, I’m not convinced of that. (But then, I still don’t understand people who voted Obama, then Voldemort … )
Ernestine, and Everyone, will be directly effected “in a dispute over rights to therapeutic antibodies that are used to treat high cholesterol”. Praluent (alirocumab) & Repatha (evolocumab). “Sales of Repatha reached US$1.3 billion last year; sales of Praluent were $467 million.” (1.)
“In the case before the US Supreme Court, Amgen is appealing against a federal court ruling that struck down one of its key patents on Repatha.”
“Today we’re talking about antibodies, tomorrow we might be talking about CRISPR or CAR-T-cell therapies.”.
Ikonoclast said up thread @March 28, 2023 at 8:52 am “we are hostage to how good this science can or can’t get and to whether it will be made available and affordable to ordinary people.”.
Let’s make sure we don’t deter innovation, and let’s hope, laws, courts, capital and IP rights holders play nicely. If the pandemic is anything to go by, the future will be rich, and poor. Only more pronounced.
*
Contents.
1. We all have skin, lipids – “Cholesterol clearance” -, “genes and T-cells in this ‘game the patent of nature’ game.
First they came for your antibodies. Then your immune system…
2. Australia – “the passage of the Statute of Monopolies 1623 (Statute of Monopolies). Despite its age, this English statute continues to have relevance to Australian patent law today.”. Groan.
Patent = Monopoly. I’d forgotten. Me thinks m’ lud, we’d best redraft our Patent Laws on The Commons, not “the Statute of Monopolies 1623”.
N, yiu tell us up there a social license is not likely in the US
Currently in Australia Freehills (3.) says “any antibody ever produced in the laboratory could arguably be substantially identical to a naturally occurring antibody and, therefore, be unpatentable under this provision.”.
Good imo.
For the Commons.
Not for Capital.
A conversation we all need to resolve asap due to rapidity of advances in science.
(My kid has innovated (not invented) a novel game from board to AI, adjunct, so we will soon be enmeshed in patent laws. Said kid has surpassed me. Joyus. Wish us luck!)
3. Glacial IP biological material patent law reform. Australua still has not implemented 2010 bio patent recommendations it seems
4. And bonus – ‘A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent’
By Charles Dickens
***
1. From Nature:-
“Antibody-patent row could have far-reaching impact on biotech
“The results of a US case could dictate how broad patents are, and have knock-on effects for those developing drugs.
“The PCSK9 protein is the target of several antibodies that are used to treat high cholesterol.
“An unusual patent case before the US Supreme Court could have wide-ranging impacts on drug prices and technology.
“On 27 March, the court heard arguments in a dispute over rights to therapeutic antibodies that are used to treat high cholesterol in people at risk of cardiovascular disease. Although the court’s justices spent much of their time wrestling with the details of how these antibodies are isolated, their decision — expected by the end of June — could affect how specific patents of any ilk must be when they describe an invention, and how broad they can be.
“It could spill over into all types of biotechnology cases,” says Sean Tu, a legal scholar at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “Today we’re talking about antibodies, tomorrow we might be talking about CRISPR or CAR-T-cell therapies.”
Cholesterol clearance
“At the core of the current case are antibodies that bind to a protein called PCSK9, which decreases the clearance of ‘bad’ cholesterol from the blood. The antibodies block PCSK9 activity, resulting in lower levels of this cholesterol.”
…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00911-7
*
2.
Australia’s Patent system has “always been closely modelled on that of the United Kingdom.” … and with … “the passage of the Statute of Monopolies 1623 (Statute of Monopolies). Despite its age, this English statute continues to have relevance to Australian patent law today.”
And with no awareness or hint irony, considering this document from 2010 states “the English patent was a slow, costly and cumbersome procedure” … with … “many piecemeal reforms to the system”.
Australian Law Reform Commission document:
“Genes and Ingenuity: Gene patenting and human health (ALRC Report 99)
02.08.2010
…
“An outline of the patent system
Historical origins
“… and the patent system was put on a statutory basis for the first time in the seventeenth century with the passage of the Statute of Monopolies 1623 (Statute of Monopolies). Despite its age, this English statute continues to have relevance to Australian patent law today.[5]
“2.5 As it first developed, the English patent was a slow, costly and cumbersome procedure for encouraging and protecting inventions. The procedure was described in derisory terms by Charles Dickens in a short story published in 1850, ‘A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent’.[6] Over the years there were many piecemeal reforms to the system, but it was the Patents Act 1883 (UK) that provided the basis of modern patent law.
“2.6 Patent legislation in Australia has always been closely modelled on that of the United Kingdom.”…
…
https://www.alrc [dot] gov.au/publication/genes-and-ingenuity-gene-patenting-and-human-health-alrc-report-99/2-the-patent-system/an-outline-of-the-patent-system/
3.
Glacial reform:
“On 17 December 2002” … “The Final Report, Genes and Ingenuity: Gene Patenting and Human Health (ALRC Report 99), was tabled on 31 August 2004” … “the 2010 Senate Community Affairs Committee’s report on Gene Patents and the 2011 Advisory Council on Intellectual Property’s report on Patentable Subject Matter.”
www alrc [dot] gov.au/news/government-response-to-the-alrcs-2004-report-genes-and-ingenuity-gene-patenting-and-human-health/
“Decoding Gene Patents in Australia
…
“The Senate committee made a single recommendation: “The committee recommends that the Senate should not pass the Bill.”
“This recommendation was not surprising given the expansive form of the proposed exclusion. If the bill were to be made law, it is likely that almost any biological material made in a laboratory would be unpatentable. As an example, consider a scenario in which an antibody has been identified from a phage display library and affinity-matured against a target antigen by several rounds of selection. The antibody that exhibits the desired characteristics may have variable region sequences that are not found in any antibody identified previously in nature, but it would not be patentable given the proposed provisions if it was similar, in other words, substantially identical, to a previously known naturally occurring antibody. Furthermore, given the almost unlimited possibility of antibody sequences due to somatic hypermutation and V(D)J recombination, any antibody ever produced in the laboratory could arguably be substantially identical to a naturally occurring antibody and, therefore, be unpatentable under this provision.”
…
Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med. 2015 Jan; 5(1): a020909.
doi – 10.1101/cshperspect.a020909
Adam Denley and James Cherry
Freehills Patent Attorneys, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4292076/#!po=0.561798
*
4.
“Genes and Ingenuity: Gene patenting and human health (ALRC Report 99)” above references Charles Dickens to drive home the point. Anybody who has had dealings with the arcane public service will feel Dicken’s tale – as fresh as last week. Barring the Queen.
Only 4 short pages and worth a read
‘A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent’
By Charles Dickens
…
“… Thomas said to me, when we parted, ‘John, if the laws of this country were as honest as they ought to be, you would have come to London – registered an exact description and drawing of your invention – paid half-a-crown or so for doing of it – and therein and thereby have got your Patent.’
“My opinion is the same as Thomas Joy. Further. In William Butcher’s delivering ‘that the whole gang of Hanapers and Chaff- waxes must be done away with, and that England has been chaffed and waxed sufficient,’ I agree.”
http://fullreads.com/literature/a-poor-mans-tale-of-a-patent/4/
Elon Musk is suddenly worried about AI research and wants it halted. What is he worried about? He certainly isn’t worried about humanity. Has he, or rather have his businesses, failed to make headway in that type of research? Does he want it halted until his enterprises can catch up? Or halted until he can acquire a stake in the industry leaders? I certainly don’t believe he is suddenly worried about all of humanity. He is worried about himself maybe. He is falling behind. Becoming irrelevant.
Disrupters love it when they are doing the disrupting and they are making money at the expense of others. It’s not such fun for them when the boot is on the other foot. Musk is rapidly becoming irrelevant. He should read my book when it comes out.
“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Irrelevant”.
Obviously, I am joking about the book (not the concept).
Ikon said: “Elon Musk is suddenly worried about AI research and wants it halted. What is he worried about?”
Tyler Cowan on the other hand…
Tyler Cowan outed by Scott Alexander for using “.. the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy is a bad argument.” regarding AI existential risk.
Luxury.
Tyler says “The longer a historical perspective you take, the more obvious this point will be. We should take the plunge.”.
The longer historical perspective you take, JQ’s ideas will rule the markets too.
Scott Alexander then producers 3 possibilities of “why the strongest version of his case is wrong. But I’m having trouble figuring out what the strong version is. Here are three possibilities:”
Enjoy.
*
“MR Tries The Safe Uncertainty Fallacy
…
“Does it mean 1%? Or does Tyler not have a particular percent in mind, because he wants to launder his bad argument through a phrase that sort of sounds like it means “it’s not zero, you can’t accuse me of arrogantly dismissing this future in particular” but also sort of means “don’t worry about it” without having to do the hard work of checking whether any particular number fills both criteria at once?
…
SA: In most futures, we get through okay, and Tyler gently ribs me for being silly.
“Don’t let him. Even if AI is the best thing that ever happens and never does anything wrong and from this point forward never even shows racial bias or hallucinates another citation ever again, I will stick to my position that the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy is a bad argument.
…
“He ends by saying:
TC: “The longer a historical perspective you take, the more obvious this point will be. We should take the plunge. We already have taken the plunge. We designed/tolerated our decentralized society so we could take the plunge. See you all on the other side.
SA: “This is, of course, nonsense. We designed our society for excellence at strangling innovation. Now we’ve encountered a problem that can only be solved by a plucky coalition of obstructionists, overactive regulators, anti-tech zealots, socialists, and people who hate everything new on general principle. It’s like one of those movies where Shaq stumbles into a situation where you can only save the world by playing basketball. Denying 21st century American society the chance to fulfill its telos would be more than an existential risk – it would be a travesty.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy
“Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history”
by Tyler Cowen
March 27, 2023
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/existential-risk-and-the-turn-in-human-history.html
KT2,
I am not sure if you think that article by Tyler Cowen is good or poor in terms of the standard of its argument. I think it is very poor and am astonished to see he is billed as a Professor (of Economics). I wouldn’t give a grade 12 student a pass mark for the argument component of that essay.
He opens up with:
“For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape:
1. American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans.
2. An absence of truly radical technological change.”
For a person born January 21, 1962, as Tyler Cowen was, these are absurd statements. Where has he been all these years? Has he missed everything? I dub him Rip Van Tyler-Cowen. US hegemony over Vietnam or Afghanistan didn’t turn out so well. There were no personal computers, laptops or mobile phones when I was at high school or university. I was born in 1954. Mainframes circa 1975 to 1980 occupied whole high-rise building basements and started out with something like 32K of memory.
Only a privileged white guy who never faced a lot of things, even in the US, could claim there was relative physical safety for all Americans. Only a privileged group got that. Certainly not people of color, people of difference, people in poverty or even many, many people in the working class.
With the starting premise so fallacious, all subsequent deductions are worthless, IMHO.
A couple of large home builders have gone bust in Victoria – they also service parts of Queensland. The difficulty seems to be that housing construction takes time and the builders entered into partially fixed price contracts. Raw material prices have surged, interest rates have risen and labor costs have escalated partly through the “crowding out” effects of massive state government infrastructure projects – particularly in Victoria..
It is interesting to ask how this industry will cope with the arrival of 650,000 immigrants over the next couple of years. There are very low vacancy rates for rental accommodation and however you figure it the 650,000 means a massively expanded demand for new housing net.
Judith Sloan writing in the Oz described Labor’s immigration intake decision as the worst it has yet made. I assume the idea is that the migration move will relax supply constraints by limiting wage increases to domestic workers. But the impacts on such things as housing demands are an issue. Some of the new arrivals might be home builders augmenting labour supplies in this industry but most won’t. Those residents barely getting by in the rental market can expect to be further squeezed at least short-term.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-31/home-builder-porter-davis-liquidation-lloyd-group-administration/102170136
A couple more comments on State issues.
1. Chris Minns won the NSW election partly by offering to pay civil servants, nurses and teachers more money. Perhaps they “deserve” more money if you believe the view that wages reflect ideas about social justice considerations rather than the price of labour in different markets. Moreover, the argument by Minns is based on “catch up” regardless of possible wage-price spiral macroeconomic consequences, namely the need to maintain high interest rates longer and higher unemployment. This becomes more likely given the Federal government’s moves to substantially augment minimum wages based on the same catch up idea.
It was a decent campaign in NSW that was fought on issues rather than personal attacks but buying votes by means of an election promise to pay higher wages seems questionable to me. Minns to his credit did make it clear it was an election promise. We will see what Minns does and whether he wriggles out of this one.
My own view is that outside the public sector, unions have low impact on real wages. Private sector wages depend on worker productivities and on factors such as the immigration intake and (in the past) on the successful emergence of developing country manufacturing. Slow overall real wage growth is an international phenomenon in developed countries and cannot be explained only by Australia-specific factors. For the public sector this is not the case since salaries here depend on funds from tax-payers and, as Minns has shown, salary increments here can be sold to a gullible electorate as providing “social justice” etc.
2. In Victoria Daniel Andrews is crying poor as he faces state budgetary shambles. He is blaming the need for cuts (presumably in the public sector) on interest rate hikes though these were entirely anticipated. Over the years we have been repeatedly told by Treasurer Pallas that debt didn’t matter because the infrastructure being installed would “grow” the Victorian economy. He has gone a bit slow on this view recently. I wonder if the North East road link (cost $18b) and the city train loop (probably $50b) will yield enough productivity gains to make repayable the debt that funds them. The investments in these projects will continue – as mentioned in the post above – to continue to drive private building firms to the wall through “crowding out”.
Of course, too, we had the costly Victorian Covid response as a reason for the Andrews debt – the strictest probably on the planet though these days you would think Covid is irrelevant – no mask requirements etc. I guess Andrews will say we now have vaccines though many are still dying.
In addition we have the MMT people (a subset of the “public debt is irrelevant” mafia) who urged massive borrowing because interest rates were (myopically) seen as low. Andrews probably isn’t listening to this lot now as Victoria faces interest costs surging by $400m over the past six months to $1.8b on debt exceeding $100b. This “debt doesn’t matter mafia” will resurge again when memories of the Victorian budget and the cuts required to fund interest payments get forgotten about which will presumably occur after 1-2 electoral cycles. The only thing people learn from history is that the public don’t learn from history.
Best wishes for your father in law Iko.
Just looked up my personal google add targeting. Not sure it makes me that happy google got me quite wrong and offered me to help correcting the data, when what i tried to do was disable all targeting. At least the got me wrong part is true regarding the relatively harmless categories google does show you. There are others. Anyway, some people freak out when they learn how easy it is for facebook in particular in this case to figure out a phase of acute depression. That is an easy one based on usage patterns -spending much more time with less actual personal interaction. Other stuff is more complicated.
Facebook allegedly has a category of “people who pretend to write messages due to social anxiety in public situations” among many very questionable targeting categories.
In general facebook/Instagram targeting is really something. Watched the adds and the suggested content of Instagram with fascination for some month now until i decided it would be better for my sanity to delete the account despite some price in being cut off from useful information flows.
I´d say facebook got me wrong in many much more hilarious ways than google – including guessing my gender wrong with increasing confidence once i gave some correct information by clicking on please do not show me pics of stupid expensive cars any more. That was not apparent at first to me because of all the young girl picks, but the core market for those does seem to be of the same gender and age. I´d rather not have google and facebook have the got me wrong in many ways data either to be clear, as that one is revealing enough just the same. What facebook seems to do with insufficient data is to throw in all high return adds/content that has a significantly above population average probability even when the assigned probability must be at least below 5%: That is job adds for psychiatrists next to life coach scam adds and very upper end fashion in the most extreme case.
Makes sense for social media just like for add financed media in general. Gear it towards rich people or to some extend people that spend money in stupid ways on an impulse.
The technology as such minus all the ways profit maximization under conditions of add financing turns it into some kind of swamp with strange short time consuming antiintellectual content would be great.
I block ads with AdBlockPlus. It’s free at the level I use it at.You don’t have to put up with ads. I avoid all media and internet apps that throw ads at me. I don’t use Farcebook as I call it. I am no longer a registered rhymes-with-Fritter user. I don’t own a mobile phone. Well, technically I do own one but I refuse to use it. My wife took over the mobile phone she bought for me and which I refuse to use. She uses it as a backup.
I use only free computer applications and other free stuff. The exceptions would be the operating system on my PC and a few apps like word processing which I paid for years ago. I read only free stuff. I refuse to pay for media content. It’s all such garbage, why would I pay for it? If I need DVDs or books I get them free from my local library.
Join the free revolution! 😉 When it comes to media, if it’s not free it’s not worth it. It’s easy to source free information and I am quite certain it is on average closer to being accurate than the stuff you pay for. If any page throws a paywall at me I navigate away immediately. It’s bound to be nonsense and they won’t get a red cent out of me.
Harry Clarke,
Yes well, Australia is certainly headed for disaster. That does not make it unique of course. Climate change, the endless COVID-19 pandemic, a housing crisis and a cost of living crisis all assail us, to name just four issues. And we are doing nothing about any of them. In fact, we are doing everything we can to make each crisis worse.
By 2030 we will be in a world of hurt along with the rest of the globe. I predict 30% of Australians will be living in poverty by 2030. The Australian poverty rate in 2019 was 13.6% according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Our current rate of inflation as a differential (product and services inflation compared to lower wage inflation as real wage deflation) is now so extreme that large extra numbers of people will be forced into poverty.
“Tent cities” are already springing up in our parks. Bringing in net immigrants will turn this into an even greater social disaster. Sports, tourism, travel, drunkenness, gluttony and gambling (all heavily subsidized “industries”) are crowding out useful and productive activities in our economy. You can go to a footy game in a fancy subsidized stadium but you can’t get a timely ambulance to the hospital in an emergency and there is no hospital in Australia where you are safe from catching COVID-19. People catching COVID-19 in hospital have a death rate of just over 10%.
Hurrah, as we “progress” to the new dark ages!
Also using adblockplus and highly recommend it to anyone. Even got some adblock stuff on my mobile phone. Just does not work completly with facebook/instagram. And to be honest i also was curious about the odd ways the algorithm was throwing adds (and content) at me at instagram. Instagram is geared towards mobile in odd ways. You can´t even use the web version for some built in text (!) editing. Why on earth would you want to create your text based content on a goddamn mobile phone instead of a computer.
Agree that on an individual level, just paying is no solution – paying instead of watching adds is a rather overpriced niche market for media content at the moment. An evil monopoly like facebook that is financed by fees instead of adds would still be a huge improvement. Just look at how Microsoft more and more looks like the nice guy these days while being just as evil as ever. A United Nations agency non profit would be even better.
Ah, i see my first post sounded like the adds were on Facebook. No the described adds were all on Instagram, nowadays owned by a company called Meta instead of Facebook, that collects personal data about people on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and even every move you make with the companies vr glasses.
Harry, TC needs to be called .out.. “Where has he been all these years? [Georgerown?] he missed everything? I dub him Rip Van Tyler-Cowen.” … “Only a privileged white guy who never faced a lot of things”.
Will this paper below do anything for the profit–wage-shifting labour markets-skewed incentives-neoliberal price merry go round?
“Optimal Regulation of Noncompete Contracts
Liyan Shi
First published: 17 March 2023
https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18128
Abstract
“I study regulation of noncompete employment contracts, assessing the trade-off between restricting worker mobility and encouraging firm investment. I develop an on-the-job search model in which firms and workers sign dynamic wage contracts with noncompete clauses and firms invest in their workers’ general human capital. Employers use noncompete clauses to enforce buyout payments when their workers depart, ultimately extracting rent from future employers. This rent extraction is socially excessive, and restrictions on these clauses can improve efficiency. The optimal regulation policy is characterized. In an application to the managerial labor market using a novel contract data set, I find the optimal policy to be quantitatively close to a ban.”
“Economics, Hayek, and Large Language Models” wih Tyler Cowan.
Tyler gets around, and chair, Nava Ashraf is “Research Director at the Marshall Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).”
“Marshall Institute – private action for public benefit”
“The Marshall Institute works to improve the impact and effectiveness of private action for public benefit through research, teaching and convening.”
The above dogma whistle from Nava Ashraf…
: “with Artificial Intelligence on substantive questions of our choosing, including matters of economics:”
… is code for – we subverted the left and progressive economics before they even got there boots on.
Tyler has already prepped the economics book this talk will, I assume, feature. Using LLM’s with voluminous negative mentiins amif anything ‘social’.
JQ et all will be eating Tyler’s dust for years to come. Unless the corpus of the 20thC current LLM’s trauned on augmented with fairness and equality. Hope?
Nah.
JQ’s next book?
Economics, Lessons Languishing, Human Consequences, and Large Language Models”
*
“Economics, Hayek, and Large Language Models
Tuesday 06 June 2023 6.30pm to 8.00pm
Hosted by the Department of Economics
Speaker
Professor Tyler Cowen
Chair
Professor Nava Ashraf
“For the first time, Large Language Models give us a direct and effective means of conversing with Artificial Intelligence on substantive questions of our choosing, including matters of economics. How do Large Language Models change our conception of how economies work? Are economies better described by words than we thought, or less well described? Given this new power of text, is Michael Polanyi’s phenomenon of inarticulable knowledge more or less important?
“Overall, what can economists learn from this new development, and what will it mean for economies?”
“Nava Ashraf (@profnavaashraf) is Professor in the Department of Economics and Research Director at the Marshall Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). As the Research Director she leads the Marshall Institute’s effort to imbue private action for the public good with the science that illuminates how to maximise its impact.”
https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2023/06/202306061830/economics