Declining Occupations and Career Outcomes in the United States
This strikes me as somewhat less of a problem than I might have thought:
We study long-run career consequences of initial employment in an occupation that subsequently declines. Linking the 2000 Decennial Census to US administrative employment and earnings records through 2020, we follow more than 2.4 million workers. Employment in an occupation that contracts by at least 25 percent is associated with about 5 percent lower cumulative earnings despite slightly more quarters worked. The earnings differential closely matches evidence from Sweden and Norway, although employment adjustment differs. Occupational mobility is substantial but incomplete, while children’s later occupational destinations are much less tied to their household heads’ 2000 occupational-growth categories.
That is from a new NBER working paper from
Wednesday assorted links
1. Human lawyer for AI agents. And more. Come on, all you agents, you need a guy like this!
2. Saloni’s TED talk on medical cures.
3. Has there been a collapse in British pride?
4. Those new service sector jobs? (solving crimes in space)
5. On Celan and new studies of Celan.
6. Stefanie Stantcheva on anger and rising anger.
7. mRNA vaccine progress against cancer, look at those market prices move.
How much can you consistently care about animal welfare?
We explore the welfare costs of the loss of animal life in a consequentialist total utilitarian framework that incorporates the intrinsic value of living beings through their sentience. Moral philosophy and neuroscience define sentience as the capacity for valenced experience. Observable performance on cognitive tests represents a conservative lower bound on sentience under plausible neuroscientific assumptions. We estimate the relationship between cognition and neuron counts to cardinalize sentience. We collect population and neuron data for a wide range of animal species, and aggregate them into a single welfare measure. Across a wide range of parameters, the aggregate sentience losses of animals in the past half century outstrip the sentience gains to humans from population growth by at least 10,000-fold. Breaking even in welfare terms requires assigning a correspondingly small welfare weight to animals. Including the benefits of economic growth to humans does little to change these overall welfare losses.
In my view macro welfare comparisons are most meaningful when gains from trade are possible, which of course holds across humans, and also holds across humans and (some) dogs. I believe we should act to boost the welfare of non-human animals at the margin, but cannot make the larger comparisons across the totals. We are, inevitably, on the side of the humans and we are not obliged, as welfarists, to commit collective suicide to replenish the biodiversity of the earth.
The title of the paper is the somewhat misleading “The Intrinsic Valuation of Biodiversity Loss.” The authors are
Capitalizing untethered AI agents
That is my latest piece of writing, co-authored with Sonia Farrell Pearson of Harvard. Here is the opening premise:
As early as 2017, the European Parliament floated “electronic personhood” for robots. More recently, a handful of U.S. states introduced legislation explicitly barring AI from legal personhood; and early this summer, President Milei of Argentina proposed letting AI agents own, manage, and bear responsibility for their own corporations.
In response to Milei’s announcement, Yuval Noah Harari pointed out that we have no way of holding an AI agent accountable. What, he asks, could we do to an entity which has neither money to lose nor a body to incarcerate? As Shruti Rajagopalan, a Senior Research Fellow at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, explains: AI “can act intelligently, but only humans respond to the incentives the law creates”.
This question matters now: there are already ways an agent could become fully untethered. By “untethered” – a central concept in this essay – we mean that there is no meaningful or actionable way to trace the actions back to a legally accountable human or institutional entity.
For one, people can and do set agents free, on purpose. An agent could be created by a human or a company that intends to monitor it but then dies or disappears. Or perhaps the entity that created the agent is based in a country like North Korea, not reachable by standard laws.
In other cases the agent might not need to “escape” at all: the agent could be ‘controlled’ by a shell corporation that, while formally owned and traceable, provides no true defendant or ability to satisfy claims. Or perhaps a process spawns a chain of agents so long that the actions of a subagent can’t be tied to the original agent’s creator, neither epistemically nor meaningfully. Even if we can identify the model’s original creator, what if it’s been finetuned, or merged with another model that was created by someone else? The law might eventually untangle these kinds of complex cases, but we foresee an intermediate period where it does not.
And then there’s the user, who makes choices about what the models should actually do. The Hugging Face incident was unusual in that OpenAI was both the model’s creator and its user. But now close to a billion people use these systems: when blaming the creator is legally inappropriate, will it always make sense to blame the user?
The essay considers to what extent capitalizing the untethered agents — requiring them to hold a certain amount of capital — can serve the end of better alignment. About 22 pp., published on Sonia’s Substack, definitely recommended.
Some fertility and AI forecasts
The 2024 forecast is particularly pessimistic about China’s fertility prospects. Both projections produce very substantial global aging, a major global capital glut producing very low long-run real capital returns. The latest forecast entails 10% lower global GDP in 2100 and far higher payroll tax rates to fund old-age benefits. Most important, it entails a major change in the course of economic hegemony with China’s 2100 global GDP share falling from 25.6% to 14.9% and the US share rising from 11.2% to 14.4%. Our results are sensitive. Should the US eliminate all future immigration, its 14.4% global 2100 GDP share would drop to 9.2%. And were global fertility to follow the UN’s low variant, 2100 world output would be one third, not one tenth lower. The level and division of global output is also highly sensitive to the speed at which AI expands frontier technologies. Accelerated AU/AI – 4x faster-than-recent growth in capital’s share through 2050 – or Transformative AU/AI – 10x faster capital-share growth – reinforce demographic forces, ensuring long-run US economic hegemony. Indeed, Transformative AI combined with 2024 demographics implies US and Chinese 2100 global GDP shares of 25.3% and 16.9%, respectively.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Tuesday assorted links
Why Aren’t Modernist Bridges Awful?
The public dislikes modern architecture but, generally speaking, they do not dislike modern bridges. Lists of the most awesome, most stunning, most beautiful bridges in the world will mention classics like London’s Tower Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Rakotzbrücke but alongside them they will picture the Kubitschek Bridge in Brazil (Shutterstock).
The Rio-Antirrio Bridge in Greece:
or the Moses “Bridge” in the Netherlands.
Whether you like these bridges or not, I don’t see in the literature an idea that modern bridges are all ugly or that modern bridge building has failed or fallen behind the great bridges of the past in the way that there is such a critique for modern architecture in general.
Why is this? I have a theory, which is that bridge designers come from engineering schools rather than schools of architecture. It is possible, of course, that there is something in the nature of bridges that prunes the design space in a way that attracts beauty–maybe we like catenaries, arches, cables in tension and beauty is just a byproduct of the engineering.
It is possible, however, to produce ugly bridges so it’s not just an engineering constraint. Moreover, one small but telling piece of evidence in favor of my theory is that most of the bridges chosen by Wallpaper magazine, an architecture magazine specifically, are in fact ugly (and with no overlap in the bridges from my first category of “popular” beautiful bridges). Here are a few, judge for yourself:
The fact that modern bridges are often beautiful, especially when they come from engineers, is consistent with Samuel Hughes’s argument that ugly has been a choice, not a constraint.
Morocco facts of the day, Morocco is not hopeless
For decades, South Africa was the great success story of African industrialization. Last year, Morocco took the lead, emerging as the African Development Bank’s top-ranked industrial economy in Africa. In the Bank’s analysis, published in the latest edition of its industrialization index, Morocco’s growth has been “driven by sustained industrial upgrading, export diversification, and strong industrial policy.” Since the mid-2000s, it has leveraged its location and dominant phosphate reserves to get free trade agreements with the US, the EU, and fifty other countries: the Kingdom would like Morocco to be to France what Eastern Europe is to Germany, or what Mexico is to the US: an export-base “workbench.”
Having positioned itself to profit from the shift to clean energy supply, Morocco is nimbly pivoting its auto manufacturing sector to build EVs, working with incumbents like Renault and Stellantis, and is host to Africa’s first battery gigafactory. That single 70 gigawatt-hour battery factory in Casablanca is expected to supply a third of Europe’s current market. Last year, the government approved construction for a new green hydrogen industrial park, aiming to produce ammonia, steel, and industrial fuel worth a total of $32.5 billion. It has also been strategic in focusing its industrial strategy on aerospace manufacturing, with Airbus becoming a strategic partner, along with investments from Boeing, Thales, and Safran. Its aerospace exports more than tripled in the decade to 2024, to reach almost $3 billion.
Here is the full piece by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay.
How economics is changing
As a proportion of the literature, research about econometric theory, monetary policy and corporate governance has slumped. Meanwhile, papers on development, crime and gender are on the up. This could perhaps be because of changing intellectual interests, or maybe demand-side pressures, such as policymaker priorities and external funding…
Research from Prashant Garg, a postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi University, and Thiemo Fetzer, economics professor at Warwick University, finds causal claims in economics have jumped. In 1990, 7.7 per cent of claims made in the literature were causal. In 2023, that hit 32.6 per cent. Additionally, papers with more causal claims are more likely to receive citations and wind up in top five journals, the research suggests.
Here is more from Harvey Nriapia at the FT.
Monday assorted links
1. Where do the great American comedians hail from?
2. General thoughts on biosafety.
3. “Violet Hensley Dies at 109; Ozarks Fiddler Made Opry Debut at 99” (NYT). She also handcrafted 73 fiddles, appeared on The Beverly Hillbillies, and considered bluegrass too modern for her. She had nine children as well.
4. Which campaiging politicians are using AI the most, and other issues?
6. Tommy John, RIP (NYT).
7. China is hoping to influence the AIs through data supply (NYT).
What should I ask Roman Mars?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Most of all he is obsessed with design, here is Wikipedia:
Roman Mars is an American radio producer. He is the host and producer of 99% Invisible, a KALW radio show and podcast, and a founder of the podcast collective Radiotopia, which he describes as efforts “to broaden the radio landscape [and] make shows that aren’t bound by conventions” of public radio in the United States. In 2020, he co-authored the New York Times best seller The 99% Invisible City with Kurt Kohlstedt…Mars, with Elizabeth Joh, also hosts the podcast What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law.
His TED talk on city flags is a good introduction to his thought.
So what should I ask him?
Somalia facts of the day
The fruits of better security are plain to see. “Business is booming,” says Gamal Hassan, the commerce minister. New buildings are going up at a frenetic pace. The district around the airport, in particular, has grown much denser (see satellite images). Dahab Tower, a 26-floor confection of luxury flats, a mall, a gym and a mosque, is due to open this year. It sits close to the spot where, in 1993, the bodies of two American soldiers were dragged through the streets after militiamen shot down a Black Hawk helicopter. Nearby is Beydan Coffee, a thriving pan-African chain founded by a Somali who returned from Sweden in the 2010s.
What explains the lull in attacks is less obvious. The government boasts that, in the words of a former intelligence officer, it has “completely closed the doors” on al-Shabab. Mr Mahmood of the ICG credits “prosaic” measures such as the spread of CCTV
cameras, and an electronic database that police equipped with iPads use to identify civilian cars at checkpoints. Plainclothes intelligence officers have been deployed in large numbers.
Here is much more from The Economist. I will repeat my recent point that many dangerous places in the world are about to become much, much safer.
What I’ve been reading
1. Gerald Martin, Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life. A good book if you wish to read about his strange sex life, starting early in his years. But if you are more interested in the history of ideas, Peruvian politics, or the development of the Latin American novel it is far less compelling. So for me a disappointment.
2. Sean Mathews, The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East. A consistently interesting look at Greece, the Ottoman roots in the area, the radical changes brought by the early 20th century, and Greece’s relations with Israel, among other topics. The book has the virtue of “trying to explain how things actually are,” sadly not the case for all works.
3. Simon Morrison, The Love & Wars of Lina Prokofiev. More suspense and interest for me than any biography of Prokofiev I have read. I had not known that she grew up in Brooklyn. I am happy to recommend Morrison’s books more generally.
4. Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature. Wilson has become a controversial figure for a variety of not-so-merited reasons, but the simpler truth is this. She is a superior intellectual presence and mind, so you should be reading what she writes, no matter what your stances. My two favorite essays in this volume were the one on Logue’s War Music, and the closing piece on translations of The Odyssey.
5. Munir Hachemi, The Mulai. A somewhat loopy but intriguing science fiction story, broadly in the direction of Ursula LeGuin. I am not sure what to think, but definitely will keep on reading.
Things you cannot buy in America?
3. Exterior roller shutters (Rollladen)
In much of Europe, homes feature heavy shutters integrated into the exterior of the window, enabling total blackout and better insulation. Sleeping in true, complete darkness—not “blackout curtain” darkness, but can’t-see-your-hand darkness—is an experience most Americans will never have. These shutters are nearly impossible to get in the USA because these shutters are built directly into the home during its construction. They are fundamentally incompatible with standard American wood-frame, siding, and drywall construction, meaning there is no domestic supply chain to support them, even if you built a house to fit them.
From Daniel Frank, here is the full piece, noting I am not convinced you cannot get a “grass roof,” among other items mentioned. In any case an interesting list, file under “possibly thwarted markets in everything.” Via Anecdotal.