1. The Portugal 3-year note is now yielding over 20 percent.
2. Profile of Deirdre McCloskey.
3. Is cap and trade dead in California?
4. The globalization and stagnation debate in the UK.
Assorted links
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Link #4 seems to be broken.
Link #4 is http://www.economist.com/node/21543529
But it doesn’t mention the effects of automation. Our stagnation is partly caused by globalisation and partly by robots.
It’s not just steel plant labourers and miners who are affected. High street lawyers have to compete against online will drafting, or the pro forma contracts available in supermarkets. Translators have to compete with both Indians and translation software (not to mention Google translate). Apps let you order from your restaurant table and are beginning to make waiters redundant. Software currently in universities and research labs is about to appear and give better diagnoses than doctors can.
The industrial revolution may have eventually created more jobs than it destroyed. In contrast, this automation revolution may simply represent the end of work.
Hence Cameron’s universal credit, a first step towards a citizen’s income.
I follow some British blogs, and the idea of some sort of universal guaranteed income seems to be taken seriously there, much more than in the U.S. It could be that having been ahead of the curve with the first industrial revolution, they could also be ahead on how to respond to the age of automation.
One difference is that the original industrial revolution did things like allow someone to own several machine made sets of clothes, instead of one good hand-tailored set and one bad hand-tailored set, which they would wear until they wore out. It provided genuinely new goods and services, or at least allowed people to afford what they wanted to have, but couldn’t at hand-crafted prices, allowing for employment to ultimately expand.
But if you can go to a store and self-checkout using a machine, so you don’t need a checkout clerk (just one person to help with the machine and keep it in good repair), this doesn’t mean you start going to the store more often. The increased profits from savings on checkout clerks salaries may not even get passed on in the form of lower prices. What you get is increased efficiency at providing a good or service that was going to be provided anyway.
As this continues, I think it will be good for society, depending on what happens to the redundant workers. The obvious answer seems some sort of guaranteed income, tied to incentives to have smaller or no families. Science fiction authors have tackled this but not many mainstream economists.
I think the economists of the conservative shade squirm when they hear “guaranteed income” because they get bogged down by the moral angles of it.
Yeah, my experience has been that, perhaps counterintuitively, libertarians (at least of the more utilitarian variety) are often less frightened than are conservatives of many social welfare schemes, particular guaranteed minimum income (or the related concept of a negative income tax, as championed by Milton Friedman). Also, libertarians tend to be less frightened of cash transfers (thinking is that if we are going to have transfers at all, we may as well maximize utility and autonomy by giving cash) as opposed to conservatives who often prefer in-kind welfare e.g. food stamps, housing vouchers.
I get bogged down by the moral angles of it too. I mean… giving somebody money for the provision of no value in return… is that right?
Part of me says who cares, the robots producing all this almost-free stuff don’t want value in return. Just electricity.
I’m curious as to what people think would be the economic effects. If you give everyone a hundred dollars, won’t that injection of money be the equivalent of raising aggregate prices by a hundred pounds x the number of citizens? In which case, everybody’s citizen’s wage is wiped out, no?
Correction: “raising aggregate prices by a hundred dollars”
#5: Any place you can get to in a balloon is, pretty definitely, Not Space. Yes, putting a Lego man in a high altitude balloon is pretty cool, but how about claiming credit for what you’ve actually done and leaving the “Lego man in space” title for someone to properly claim in the future. And, while we’re at it, leaving at least a few words with actual meanings that people can use to communicate with each other.
The Juno mission had some metal lego figurines on board.
+1
The link verbiage is an Epic Fail, Tyler.
Yeah, 78000 feet is less that 1/3 of the way to even the lax USA standard of “Space”.
Re 2, “Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce” had a lot of veru interesting content and sound arguments, but was hopelessly written — far too long (the same points could have been made in a third the space), full of rambling anecdotes. I think if Prof McCloskey wants to hit a wider audience, she needs to find a good, tough editor.
I assume from what I’ve read, Deirdre is on a one person Crusade to restore eloquence and sesquipedalianism to American English rhetoric.
Ayn Rand needed a good editor.
No, the “style” of these two works (I use them) is not one of long words, but of multiple deft references and a desire in “Virtues” to acquaint the reader with certain value systems from history (Cliometrics) that carry through into the way our societies are organized and function “economically” today. The “audience” she seems to seek now are the students oncoming, to follow a path less “configured.” Do they criticize “Econometrics” writers for formulaic verbiage frosted with jargon?
No, unlike Roberto M. Unger, she does not deploy rhetoric to try to bring one into her way of thinking.
3: Dead as disco.
In ten years, you are going to pretend you never believed in Global Warming, just like you pretend you never owned a Bee Gees album.
Whoever’s left to think about it in 100 years, on their tropical plantations in Nunavut and Tierra del Fuego, will wonder at the ostrichlike insistence of today’s populace that we can ignore all of the scientific knowledge of the consequences of pumping CO2 into the air. The basic facts have been known for over a century.
Though not a lawyer, I will be surprised if the decision on carbon-taxing imported power stands, since it’s designed to level the playing field for in- and out-of-state power producers, not to benefit the in-staters.
“Whoever’s left to think about it in 100 years, on their tropical plantations in Nunavut and Tierra del Fuego, will wonder at the ostrichlike insistence of today’s populace that we can ignore all of the scientific knowledge of the consequences of pumping CO2 into the air. The basic facts have been known for over a century.”
This shows a really poor understanding of the science. You’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies.
JWatts, is this you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Watt?
How’s that rapture thing working out?
Not taking a side here, but I loved being reminded of all the ridiculousness of Secretary Watt. Like, if you put him in a movie as some kind of villain you’d be laughed at for such a preposterous caricature.
More evidence backing my quixotic desire for IQ minimums for high level federal officials (and voters).
“More evidence backing my quixotic desire for IQ minimums for high level federal officials (and voters).”
That would be shot down as racist.
And I wish I was kidding.
I will take my chances with the consequences of global warming over the machinations of global socialists. Humans survived an ice age, I’m sure we will survive a tropical heat wave. We won’t survive letting people like you being in charge.
No, you are definitely not a lawyer. Restrictions on interstate commerce are illegal. This doesn’t create a “level playing field.” It imposes a ridiculous restriction on operations within one state on operations in another. It is economically identical to imposing a tax on goods imported from another state.
You’ve got to be kidding, it is ignorant buffoons like you that are the reason so many people deny global warming has already happened. There is no basis for tropical climes in Nunavut or Tierra del Fuego, and even James Hanson and Michael Mann will agree with me on this. You clearly know nothing about the science at all.
While there are many math whiz-types in the profession, Deirdre McCloskey is one of the few deep thinkers that we have in economics.
Basically she says that the profession has over-focused on models of prudence = Max U, but that models of behavior should also study the role of these other virtues.
What the article fails to mention is that this idea arises from her redescovering her Christian faith.
Also, empiricists better read one of her papers of the misuse of statistical significance.
1. meanwhile, apropos of “the periphery’s” TGS, http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/01/hhmi-funds-28-young-scientific.html
Hi Tyler, love reading your site … sorry to bother you in this forum, but I found a little problem, and MR lacks a link at the bottom to report technical issues with the website. It arose when I was trying to look at past Assorted Links posts for a specific post I wanted to find from a few months ago. I noticed they are in category Uncategorized, so I selected that category to view. The first page worked fine but when I tried to look at previous entries the link took me to marginalrevolution/page/2 instead of marginalrevolution/uncategorized/page/2. I tried typing the correct url but that didn’t work either. I thought you should know. Good luck in all things!
#2 fails to mention Greg Clark’s competing theory of the Industrial Revolution, which McCloskey rejected in a review I found puzzling (as did Greg Clark).
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