My summary views on AI existential risk
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, written and edited by the way before…all that stuff happened at Open AI. Here is one excerpt:
First, I view AI as more likely to lower than to raise net existential risks. Humankind faces numerous existential risks already. We need better science to limit those risks, and strong AI capabilities are one way to improve science. Our default path, without AI, is hardly comforting.
The above-cited risks may not kill each and every human, but they could deal civilization as we know it a decisive blow. China or some other hostile power attaining super-powerful AI before the US does is yet another risk, not quite existential but worth avoiding, especially for Americans.
It is true that AI may help terrorists create a bioweapon, but thanks to the internet that is already a major worry. AI may help us develop defenses and cures against those pathogens. We don’t have a scientific way of measuring whether aggregate risk goes up or down with AI, but I will opt for a world with more intelligence and science rather than less.
As for the corporate issues, I am hoping for a good resolution…
The cross-sectional implications of the social discount rate
Maya Eden has a new paper on this topic, I believe it is forthcoming in Econometrica:
In this paper, I consider two normative questions: (1) how should policymakers approach tradeoffs that involve different age groups, and (2) at what rate should policymakers discount the consumption of future generations? I demonstrate that, under standard assumptions, these two questions are equivalent: caring more about the future means caring less about the elderly. Even small differences between the social discount rate and the market interest rate can have significant quantitative implications for the relative value placed on the consumption of different age groups.
To get to the paper, look here and then click on the first link. Some of you will recall that I make a similar argument in my Stubborn Attachments.
Elsewhere on the discount rate front, the OMB is calling for lower discount rates in policy analysis. I’m all for that, but the trick is to apply them consistently, not just use them to rationalize particular government expenditures. Will we at the same time start spending less money on the elderly and more money on the young? Otherwise obsess over growth-enhancing policies? To ask such questions is to answer. If only our institutions took their own work seriously on discount rates…
Saturday assorted links
Ken Opalo is more optimistic about Africa (from my email)
Just a quick note that the story isn’t a straightforward “lost decade.”
Human development indicators (health, education, housing) are up. Lots of infrastructure is being built all over the place. The real challenges behind the growth slowdown are:
1) productivity increases have stalled since about 2014 (and was higher than India’s for a while
2) delayed fertility transition continues to depress the per capita income measure.More on this here: https://kenopalo.substack.com/p/there-is-an-urgent-need-to-unlock
Best,
Ken
*Lineages of the Feminine*
That is the new book by Emmanuel Todd, subtitled An Outline of the History of Women and mostly on the feminization of society. It does not cohere, and spends too much time wallowing in pseudo-anthropology, but it has a number of interesting bits. Here is from the preface:
The feminist revolution is a great thing (I’m an ordinary Westerner on the point) but we are not yet able to see how much the emancipation of women has radically altered the whole of our social life. Because we always see women as minors, as victims, we do not place them, for better or for worse (i.e., like men) at the centre of our history: they are the protagonists, for example, in the rejection of racism and homophobia, but they are also the unconscious protagonists of our neoliberalism, or deindustrialization and our inability to act collectively….we must accept that the inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women
The original pointer was from Arnold Kling’s review.
What is your favorite book that no one else you know likes?
I do mean no one. You have to really like this book, have no other friends or colleagues who like it, and still think the book is very good, not just the product of your own contrarian snottiness.
I have my pick: Nancy Scheper Hughes’s 1992 study Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.
Part of the GPT-4 summary runs as follows:
The central premise is the apparent paradox that mothers in this region seem to accept the death of their infants without the expected level of grief or weeping. Scheper-Hughes explores the sociocultural and economic factors that have led to a situation where such high infant mortality is normative and somewhat “accepted” as a part of life. This acceptance is a survival mechanism in a context where the death of children is so common due to factors such as malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of adequate healthcare.
It’s not that I know people who reject this book, rather I don’t currently know anyone who would read a 556-page work on medical anthropology/conflict studies in northern Brazil.
A long time ago, I would have nominated Rene Girard here, perhaps Theatre of Envy. But he has since grown in popularity.
What are your picks, and why?
Two simple points
1. In a basic Cournot-Nash model, as the number of firms increases, price falls and very often the pace of innovation increases.
2. The more competitive a market, the more likely that a more “conscientious” firm is only epsilon “better” than its competitors.
Think about it! #Strauss
*Holy Spider*
A very good Iranian movie, the first half feels like David Fincher but in Farsi. It is about a serial killer, so you must be able to tolerate some difficult scenes. The second half takes some brilliant and creative turns, concerning broader Iranian society. I dare not divulge those for fear of spoiling the suspense for you. The movie also bears on the current role of Iran in the Middle East conflict and has a definite Straussian side. Recommended, for those who can. On Netflix.
Friday assorted links
Africa fact of the day
COLUMN: Sub-Saharan Africa has lost another decade.
The region's GDP per capita peaked in 2014, and since has fallen ~10%. On current trends, it would not retain the 2014 level until 2033, implying a second lost decade.#Africa #commodities via @Opinion https://t.co/FYFobDnCtF
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) September 12, 2023
*Look Again*
The authors are Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein, and the subtitle is The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. Excerpt:
The day is known as Högertrafikomläggningen, which translates to “the right-hand traffic diversion,” or H-day for short. It was the day Sweden changed from driving on the left side of the road to the right. The move was initiated to align Sweden with the other Scandinavian countries. The fear was that drivers would get confused, turning the wrong way or getting too close to other cars when attempting to overtake them. That would seem to be a perfectly reasonable fear. Surprisingly, however, the switch did not result in a rise in motor accidents, On the contrary, the number of accidents and fatalities plunged! The number of motor insurance claims went down by 40 percent.
A very interesting book, recommended, due out in February.
Bill Conerly at Forbes reviews GOAT
GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? is an intriguing book by the well-known economist Tyler Cowen in which he tries to determine who is the greatest economist of all time. This book will be enjoyed not only by economists but also those interested in understanding the world of people and their interactions. Importantly, the book emphasizes the non-financial implications of economic analysis in areas such as friendship, community and aesthetics…
In a startling advance for book publishing, GOAT comes with a chatbot in which a user can ask the AI to answer questions related to the book. In writing this review, I used the chatbot to refresh my memory about Tyler’s criteria for greatness and for examples of non-financial concerns. The chatbot uses the same technology that enables AI to answer specialized questions for customer service by accessing a company’s owners’ manuals, returns policy and troubleshooting guides.
Here is the full review.
England is underrated, a continuing series
The UK has said it will refrain from regulating the British artificial intelligence sector, even as the EU, US and China push forward with new measures. The UK’s first minister for AI and intellectual property, Viscount Jonathan Camrose, said at a Financial Times conference on Thursday that there would be no UK law on AI “in the short term” because the government was concerned that heavy-handed regulation could curb industry growth.
Here is more from the FT. And also from the FT: “UK approves Crispr gene editing therapy in global first.“
America’s top one percent has not been seeing a rising income share
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. The opener is this:
Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists? If the paper is the modestly titled “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” then the answer — with qualifications — is yes.
And this:
Now, in their latest study, they arrive at a conclusion that will be startling to a lot of people: “Increasing government transfers and tax progressivity have resulted in rising real incomes for all income groups and little change in after-tax top income shares.”
More concretely, looking at pre-tax income, the share of the top 1% has gone up only 2.6 percentage points since the early 1960s. For after-tax income, top income shares haven’t changed much at all.
Auten and Splinter have a methodological explanation for why their results differ. The share of true income missing in tax data has increased over time, and they attempt to adjust for that discrepancy, as well as for how income is sheltered in corporations has changed. Auten and Splinter also include cash and in-kind transfers for the lower income groups, to better measure their true incomes.
Recommended.