Results for “What I've Been Reading” 442 found
Noah Smith Substack interviews me
Here is the interview. Here is one excerpt:
N.S.: So how would you generally describe the zeitgeist of the moment, if you had to give a simple summary? What do you think are a couple of most important trends in culture and thought right now? My impression has been that we’re sort of in a replay of the 70s — a period of exhaustion after several years of intense social unrest, where people are looking around for new cultural and economic paradigms to replace the ones we just smashed. But maybe I’ve just been reading too many Rick Perlstein books?
T.C.: I view the 1970s as a materialistic time, sexually highly charged, and America running into some significant real resource constraints, at least initially stemming from high oil prices. Mainstream culture was often fairly crass — just look at disco, or the ascendancy of mainstream network television. The current time I see as quite different. Sexually, we are withdrawing. Society is more feminized. America has far more immigrants. And we are obsessed with the virtual and with make-believe, to a degree the 1970s could not have imagined. Bruno Macaes is one author who is really on the right track here, with his emphasis on how America is building virtual and indeed often “unreal” fantasies.
I think today the variance of weirdness is increasing. Conformists can conform like never before, due say to social media and the Girardian desire to mimic others. But unusual people can connect with other unusual people, and make each other much weirder and more “niche.” For instance, every possible variant of political views seems to be “out there” these days, and perhaps that is not entirely reassuring. A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity. But is it a positive development on net? We are going to find out.
Recommended throughout, and of course do subscribe to Noah’s Substack.
A cautionary note on Omicron
From my email from Ratufa:
I wanted to point out an issue with some of the metrics that are being used to assess the severity of Omicron.
The growth rate of an outbreak impacts the observed ratios of outcomes. Early in an outbreak those ratios will be biased towards lesser severity for faster spreading strains because more severe outcomes take longer to develop.
For example, it takes on average two days to be admitted to an ICU after hospital admission. The SA Omicron outbreak looks to have a growth rate of .21/day and the original Delta outbreak one of .1/day. Based on that we would expect the proportion of ICU admissions to hospital admissions to be ~20% lower [1-e^(-2*.11)] than Delta early in the pandemic. And incidental admissions have the potential to confound that number even more.
The impact on hospitalizations and deaths is more dramatic. Positive tests tend to lead hospitalizations by about 5 days and deaths by 2 to 3 weeks. So we would expect the ratio of hospitalizations to positive tests to be ~40% lower and deaths/positive tests to be ~80% lower than in the delta outbreak holding severity constant. Though both those estimates are quite sensitive to the lag and estimate of r.
The growth effect probably doesn’t explain the majority of the difference in outcomes that have been observed. But it is potentially material. And makes me more skeptical of claims of lesser severity I’ve seen so far.
A few observations on my latest podcast with Amia Srinivasan
I am reluctant to do this, as I have never offered ex post commentary on a Conversations with Tyler before. It seems unfair to the guest (who may or may not have comparable platforms), and perhaps it is the guest who deserves the last word? Still, I think I can at least try to clear up a few misunderstandings about the episode, as I see a number of important points at stake here. So here goes, with some trepidation:
1. The number, frequency, and extremity of reactions to the episode, both on Twitter and in the MR comments section, I think shows that women simply have a much, much tougher time in the public sphere. There is a much smaller intellectual and emotional space they are allowed to inhabit comfortably and without condemnation or excess judgment. Had the episode been with a man, and had been comprised of the exact same words, it would not have received nearly the same attention or criticism. But people don’t like women who argue back. I realize that is a kind of cliche, but it is largely true.
In this regard, even if you largely disagree with Amia Srinivasan, you should take the strength of the reaction to the episode as a sign she might have a valid point after all.
And to put it bluntly, if said female guest plausibly can be perceived as attractive, the reaction will be all the more disproportionate.
2. Some listeners are teed off about “disabled individuals” vs. “disabled men.” I’ve committed numerous tongue and memory slips in my time, and they are hardly ever pointed out. Now you might be upset that she insisted I said “men” (when I didn’t), but in fact my interior monologue at the time was something like this: “We all know this is mostly about men. But if I just say “men,” she will react to that word and drive the conversation in a different direction. So I will say “individuals.”” Maybe she gets points for insight?
3. If I challenge a guest directly, it is typically a sign of intellectual respect for said guest or person (just ask Bryan Caplan, though perhaps by this point he has suffered too much?). And if the guest comes back at me forcefully, I usually (and consistently) take that as a sign of respect. If I don’t seem frustrated, it is because I am not.
4. If a guest challenges my questions (or indeed anyone’s questions) for having sexist premises, I don’t consider this an illegitimate response. I may or may not agree, but I don’t think it should upset me (or you). I think a lot of people’s questions have for instance highly statist or collectivist premises (and should not). I may or may not be right, but surely that too is a response deserving of consideration, should I decide to raise it.
5. To be fully forthright, if you wish to hear my “negative take” on her responses, I don’t think she was very good at handling empirical evidence in the context of a discussion, and furthermore this is a major shortcoming. I find this to be common amongst philosophers, if I may be allowed to continue my moment of condescension. I also had the feeling she is not challenged sufficiently often with said evidence, and that may partly be the fault of Oxford. This is exactly the point where I feel bad/uncertain offering ex post commentary on the episode, but still leaving off this opinion would not be offering my honest assessment of what happened.
6. I have studied her work carefully, including reading her doctoral dissertation and some undergraduate work, and I then and still now fully believe she will be one of the more important philosophers over the next few decades. As I mentioned before, super-impressive in terms of combining intellect, depth, breadth, determination, and relevance, plus has the all-important “willing to put oneself out there.” And if you don’t trust me as talent-spotter, dare I point out that Oxford University has a not too shabby history choosing and developing philosophical talent? But to return a bit to boasting, I think my relatively strong ability to differentiate emotional response from the talent judgment is in fact one reason to trust my talent judgments.
7. You have to learn to learn from people who bother, annoy, or frustrate you. If you do, they will not in fact bother, annoy, or frustrate you. One central point under consideration is her view that even today in the Western or also Nordic countries, the treatment of women (among other groups) could plausibly be much, much better, and with general emancipatory effects for many other groups as well. You may or may not agree, but is that such a crazy question to ponder and think through? No.
So I thought it was a good episode. I would gladly do another one with her someday, and I hope the feeling is mutual.
What does QAnon stand for?
Here is my Bloomberg column on that question. This is not my central point, but it is the excerpt I have decided to give you:
There is the related possibility that QAnon’s main appeal is in the sheer complexity of the conspiracy itself, rather than the details. QAnon is often described often as a rabbit hole, offering users an initially simple story that gradually becomes more complicated. Some evidence suggests that conspiracy theories need to offer “uniqueness” to their adherents — that is, the promise of exclusive knowledge. The more complex and detailed the theory, the more likely that uniqueness becomes, and thus the greater the appeal. But just how big a factor is that?
Recommended. If you could do a factor decomposition on QAnon, which features of it really would matter to its adherents? (For instance, for most Christians I suspect Mother Mary holds much more appeal than John the Baptist, fine fellow though the latter may be.) I’ve been reading MR comments for long enough to know there is more here than might meet the eye.
Who is my favorite public intellectual?
Over the weekend I sat in on Anna Gát’s Interintellect Salon, which I enjoyed. Many of the participants were asked who is their favorite public intellectual. My answer was something like:
Alex Tabarrok, he’d better be, I’ve been working with him for thirty years! There would be something wrong if he wasn’t. And I always look forward to reading what he writes.
So there you go. None of the other answers, worthy though they were, had equivalent support in demonstrated preference.
Which figures from 1968/1969 look good in retrospect?
Andrew writes to me:
I just wanted to propose a question for your blog, which I’ve read since it launched. Given how the current atmosphere seems a bit like 1968, I was curious who you think comes out of 1968 looking good (or bad) in retrospect. I’m particularly interested in people at universities (my own case), but I’d be curious in general.
A former professor of mine (George Kateb) claimed that my generation (born 1970) was embarrassed by the sixties and I guess particularly by the more radical parts. That’s my impression as well and I assumed that the more radical parts of the sixties and the intellectuals who went along with them would come out looking the worst in retrospect. Is this right? Whose position at the time looks most “correct” today?
It is tough, if only because so many people from both parties then were bad on the Vietnam War issue. Here are a few who, in my judgment, came out of the era looking good, in no particular order:
1. Kareem-Abdul Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor), Billie Jean-King, and Curt Flood.
2. Bob Dylan: pro-civil rights and anti-war, and for all of his phases he never went in for the bad, crazy stuff.
3. Paul McCartney: universalist, anti-war, neoliberal integrationist, and the saner part of the Beatles. Some minus points on the drugs front, however.
4. Julian Bond. And a variety of other civil rights leaders, but MLK not living long enough to “fit” the question as stated.
5. Harry Edwards (who?).
6. Seán Lemass (who?) Elsewhere across the waters there is Raymond Aron.
7. Marshall McLuhan
9. Lucille Ball
9. Gene Roddenberry and the rest of Star Trek, including the script writers.
10. Thomas Pynchon: So many others look bad, at least he knew not to say too much or to hang around for too long.
11. Ayn Rand. With qualifications on a number of fronts, but yes. She was in fact good on the major issues of those years.
12. These people from the Bay Area. They are not public figures, but still they deserve mention.
Who else?
Notes: Marxists, Maoists, and advocates of violence are not going to win. There were plenty of excellent economists back then, but most had a different focus than commenting on the major events of those years, and if memory serves (please correct me if I am wrong) Milton Friedman’s very meritorious anti-draft work came slightly later. I would have to reread the major feminist book authors to pick the best one, but I do mean for at least one to be on the list, I am simply not sure at the moment which one. Ralph Nader too? The astronauts? They knew to keep their mouths shut once they were finished.
How to think about uni-disciplinary advice
Let’s say its 1990, and you are proposing an ambitious privatization plan to an Eastern bloc county, and your plan assumes that the enacting government is able to stay on a non-corrupt path the entire time.
While your plan probably is better than communism, it probably is not a very good plan. A better plan would take sustainability and political realities into account, and indeed many societies did come up with better plans, for instance the Poland plan was better than the Russia plan.
It would not do to announce “I am just an economist, I do not do politics.” In fact that attitude is fine, but if you hold it you should not be presenting plans to the central government or discussing your plan on TV. There are plenty of other useful things for you to do. Or the uni-disciplinary approach still might be a useful academic contribution, but still displaced and to be kept away from the hands of decision-makers.
Nor would it do to claim “I am just an economist. The politicians have to figure the rest out.” They cannot figure the rest out in most cases. Either stand by your proposed plan or don’t do it. It is indeed a proposal of some sort, even if you package it with some phony distancing language.
Instead, you should try to blend together the needed disciplines as best you can, consulting others when necessary, an offer the best plan you can, namely the best plan all things considered.
That might fill you with horror, but please recall from Tetlock that usually the generalists are the best predictors.
Ignoring other disciplines may be fine when there is no interaction. When estimating the effects of monetary policy, you probably can do that without calculating how many people that year will die of air pollution. But you probably should not ignore the effects of a major trade war, a budgetary crisis (“but I do monetary policy, not fiscal policy!”), or an asteroid hurtling toward the earth.
If that is too hard, it is fine to announce your final opinion as agnostic (and explain how you got there). You will note that when it comes to blending economics and epidemiology, my most fundamental opinion is an agnostic one.
This is all well-known, and it has been largely accepted for some time now.
If a public health person presents what is “only an estimate of public health and public health alone” to policymakers, I view it as like the economist in 1990 who won’t consider politics. Someone else should have the job. Right now public health, politics, and economics all interact to a significant extent.
And if you present only one of those disciplines to a policymaker, you will likely confuse and mislead that policymaker, because he/she cannot do the required backward unthreading of the advice into its uni-dimensional component. You have simply served up a biased model, and rather than trying to identify and explain the bias you are simply saying “ask someone else about the bias.”
If an economist claims he is only doing macroeconomics, and not epidemiology (as Paul Krugman has said a few times on Twitter), that is flat out wrong. All current macro models have epidemiology embedded in them, if only because the size of the negative productivity and negative demand shock depends all too critically on the course of the disease.
It is fine to be agnostic, preferably with structure to the opinion. It is wrong to hide behind the arbitrary division of a discipline or a field.
We need the best estimates possible, and presented to policymakers as such, and embodying the best of synthetic human knowledge. Of course that is hard. That is why we need the very best people to do it.
Addendum: You might try to defend a uni-disciplinary approach by arguing a decision-maker will mainly be fed other, biased uni-disciplinary approaches, and you have to get your discipline into the mix to avoid obliteration of its viewpoint. But let’s be clear what is going on here: you are deliberately manipulating with a deliberately non-truthy approach (I intend those words as a description, not a condemnation). If that’s what it is, I wish to describe it that way! I’ll also note I’ve never done that deliberately myself, and that is along many years of advising at a variety of levels. I’d rather give the best truthful account as I see it.
Friday assorted links
1, “New York acted as Grand Central Station for this virus…” (NYT)
2. An “economics of epidemiology” paper incorporating Lucas-like mechanisms.
3. Who is at most risk from Covid? A new study based on very good NHS data.
4. Further new data on transmission. And useful overview of how Covid-19 “works.” Maybe it seems a little late in the game to be reading this kind of short survey piece, but it is actually the best one I’ve seen and it is quite up to date, recommended.
6. Sidewalk Labs abandons Google smart city plans. And new coronavirus calypso (video and music).
7. Why are coronavirus survivors banned from the military? How can that possibly make sense?
8. After reopening, people from neighboring states have been flocking to Georgia.
9. John Carmack defends the Imperial College code. Correction: that was Carmack on IHME, here is Carmack on Imperial College code.
10. Epidemiological model from some data scientists at Stripe (but not a Stripe product). Do you have any comments or suggestions for improvements for them?
11. Alex discussing vaccines on the Dan Proft show. And Dan Wang on America can’t build any more (Bloomberg).
How I practice at what I do
Following up on my post a few days ago, about the value of deliberate practice for knowledge workers, a number of you asked me what form my practice takes. A few of you were skeptical, but it is long since established that practice improves both your writing and your memory, so surely it can do much more than that for your thinking. Here is a partial list of some of my intellectual practice strategies:
1. I write every day. I also write to relax.
2. Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own. I recommend this for most of you.
3. I do serious reading every day.
4. After a talk, Q&A session, podcast — whatever — I review what I thought were my weaker answers or interventions and think about how I could improve them. I rehearse in my mind what I should have said. Larry Summers does something similar.
5. I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes. I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate. For one thing, it makes me useful in a wide variety of situations where I have little background knowledge. This also helps me invest in skills which will age relatively well, as I age. For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list.
6. I listen often to highly complex music, partly because I enjoy it but also in the (silly?) hope that it will forestall mental laziness.
7. I have regular interactions with very smart people who will challenge me and be very willing to disagree, including “GMU lunch.”
8. Every day I ask myself “what did I learn today?”, a question I picked up from Amihai Glazer. I feel bad if I don’t have a clear answer, while recognizing the days without a clear answer are often the days where I am learning the most (at least in the equilibrium where I am asking myself this question).
9. One factor behind my choice of friends is what kind of approbational sway they will exercise over me. You should want to hang around people who are good influences, including on your mental abilities. Peer effects really are quite strong.
10. I watch very little television. And no drugs and no alcohol should go without saying.
11. In addition to being a “product” in its own right, I also consider doing Conversations with Tyler — with many of the very smartest people out there — to be a form of practice. It is a practice for speed, accuracy in understanding written writings, and the ability to crack the cultural codes of my guests.
12. I teach — a big one.
Physical exercise is a realm all of its own, and that is good for your mind too. For me it is basketball, tennis, exercise bike, sometimes light weights, swimming if I am at a decent hotel with a pool. My plan is to do more of this.
Here are a few things I don’t do:
Taking notes is a favorite with some people I know, though my penmanship and coordination and also typing are too problematic for that.
I also don’t review video or recordings of myself, for fear that will make me too self-conscious. For many people that is probably a good idea, however.
I don’t spend time trying to improve my memory, which is either very bad or very good, depending on the kind of problem facing me. (If I need to remember to do something, I require a visual cue, sometimes a pile on the floor, and that creates a bit of a mess. But it works — spatial organization is information!)
I’ve never practiced trying to type on a small screen, though probably I should.
I’ll close by repeating the end of my previous post:
Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?” If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?
Better training has brought big improvements to the quality of athletics and also chess, and many of those advances are quite recent — when is the intellectual world going to follow suit? When are you going to follow suit?
Why do right-wing authoritarian regimes allow so much citizen exit?
Derek Bonett emails me:
I’ve been considering the differences between left-wing authoritarian regimes and right-wing authoritarian regimes throughout history. One particular difference springs to mind that I do not believe has been explored:
Left-wing authoritarian regimes very frequently restrict emigration. Legal emigration from the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc was very difficult, same with Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, the DPRK, “Democratic Kampuchea”, Ethiopia under Mengistu, the list goes on.
But, strikingly, it seems to me that with the partial exception of the Third Reich, fascist/ultranationalist/right-wing authoritarian regimes generally do not restrict emigration. In the Third Reich, it seems that even Jews were allowed to emigrate until 1941. Mussolini’s Italy didn’t impose extensive emigration controls either. And, accordingly to my admittedly casual familiarity with these regimes, neither did Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Pinochet’s Chile, nor the more generic authoritarian regimes of Chiang Kai Shek’s Taiwan or Park Chung He’s South Korea.
Does your much more comprehensive reading of history confirm this difference? Has someone already written about this?
Perhaps the more “right-wing” regimes tolerate different sorts of income inequality. Cuba and the USSR had plenty of inequality, but the main earners, in terms of living standards, are restricted to people within the state apparatus. That means a lot of the talent will want to leave. Many fascist regimes, however, are quite willing to cultivate multi-millionaires and then try to co-opt them into supporting the state. Since you can still earn a lot in the private sector, exit restrictions are less needed.
What would be other hypotheses?
Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics
I’ve been reading the dissertation of that title by Amanda Askell, following her podcast with Robert Wiblin. And there is also the work of Nick Bostrom on “infinite ethics.”
In the thesis, Amanda considers the possibility that world-states might simply be incomparable when there are an infinite number of relevant beings and infinite total utility in the universe, as seems to be implied by some cosmologies.
That in turn conflicts with the notion that agents are “locations of goodness.” If you give me some chocolate ice cream, it seems I am better off, and that judgment ought to be allowed to proceed without undue attention being paid to the broader cosmos. Yet that will imply pairwise comparisons are possible in an infinite universe, if only through the Pareto principle. But when you compare two overall states of the (infinite) universe in pairwise fashion, it is hard to see what value the “new” ice cream cone brings, because both ex ante and ex post there is an infinite consumption of ice cream.
Maybe the view that agents are locations of goodness doesn’t make sense when paired with infinities. Might the apparent increase in ice cream mean — whether in some causal sense or not — that still the total number of ice cream-eating beings in the universe has not increased, because if it had the infinity would not have held in the first place? Metaphysically speaking, one ice cream might push out the other. Sadly, my (finite) mind cannot readily deal with the intuitions, nor what happens if you try to imagine what kind of infinities we are dealing with, a’la Cantor.
Still, I will gladly accept the assumption of incomparability across different world-states in an infinite universe. In fact I view incomparability in the infinite universe case as the friend of comparability in the world we live in. It is by no means certain that the universe is infinite, but there is some chance it is infinite.
When doing expected value calculations, we need to take account of both possibilitites, namely that the universe may or may not be infinite. But if the infinity scenarios all lead to incomparability across various options (if indeed they are “options” to begin with), you can argue that the calculations for the finite universe scenario dominate the final calculus that we face today, operating under agnosticism about the nature of the universe (infinite or not). Which brings us back to finite universe ethics and persons being locations of value. And chocolate ice cream.
Another way to put this is that worrying about infinities “too much” ends up meaning you don’t have to worry about them at all.
One smart guy’s frank take on working in some of the major tech companies
This is from my email, I have done a bit of minor editing to remove identifiers. It is long, so it goes under the screen break:
Background
I joined Google [earlier]…as an Engineering Director. This was, as I understand it, soon after an event where Larry either suggested or tried to fire all of the managers, believing they didn’t do much that was productive. (I’d say it was apocryphal but it did get written up in a Doc that had a bunch of Google lore, so it got enough oversight that it was probably at least somewhat accurate.)
At that time people were hammering on the doors trying to get in and some reasonably large subset, carefully vetted with stringent “smart tests” were being let in. The official mantra was, “hire the smartest people and they’ll figure out the right thing to do.” People were generally allowed to sign up for any project that interested them (there was a database where engineers could literally add your name to a project that interested you) and there was quite a bit of encouragement for people to relocate to remote offices. Someone (not Eric, I think it probably was Sergey) proposed opening offices anyplace there were smart people so that we could vacuum them up. Almost anything would be considered as a new project unless it was considered to be “not ambitious enough.” The food was fabulous. Recruiters, reportedly, told people they could work on “anything they wanted to.” There were microkitchens stocked with fabulous treats every 500′ and the toilets were fancy Japanese…uh…auto cleaning and drying types.
And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems. The level of entitlement displayed around things like which treats were provided at the microkitchens was…intense. (Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go” and take them home with them on the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free food.)
Now, most of all that came from two sources not exclusively related to the question at hand:
Google (largely Larry I think) was fearless about trying new things. There was a general notion that we were so smart we could figure out a new, better way to do anything. That was really awesome. I’d say, overall, that it mostly didn’t pan out…but it did once in a while and it may well be that just thinking that way made working there so much fun, that it did make an atmosphere where, overall, great things happened.
Google was awash in money and happy to spray it all over its employees. Also awesome, but not something you can generalize for all businesses. Amazon, of course, took a very different tack. (It’s pretty painful to hear the stories in The Everything Store or similar books about the relatively Spartan conditions Amazon maintained. I was the site lead for the Google [xxxx] office for a while and we hired a fair number of Amazon refugees. They were really happy to be in Google, generally…not necessarily to either of our benefit.)
I was there for over ten years. Over time, the general rule of “you get what you incent” made the whole machine move much less well and the burdens of maintaining growth for Wall Street have had some real negative impact (Larry and Sergey have been pushing valiantly for some other big hit of course).
So, onto the question at hand:
I know bits and pieces about Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. I’ve known some people who’ve worked at Netflix but generally know less about them. Google I know pretty well. I’ve worked at a bunch of startups and some bigger companies. I haven’t worked for a non-tech company (Ford) since I was 19 (when I was an undergrad I worked in the group that did the early engine control computers…a story in itself).
I think the primary contributions the tech companies make to organizational management are:
significantly decreasing the power that managers hold
treating organization problems as systems problems to be designed, measured, optimized, and debugged [as a manager, I, personally, treat human and emotional problems that way also]
high emphasis on employing top talent and very generous rewards distributed through the company**only possible in certain configurations of course.
What also went well at Google: Google avoided job categories that were, generally, likely to decrease accountability:
Google avoided the job class of architect — which was both high status and low accountability, making it an easy place for pricey senior people to park and not have much impact (Sun Microsystems was notorious for having lots and lots of architects)
Google avoided the category of project manager, which would have allowed engineering managers to avoid the grungy part of their job (and be out of touch with engineering realities). I don’t know the history of that particular orientation — we did have something called a TPM (“technical program manager”) who were intended to make deep technical contributions, not just keep track of projects.
Google exploited “level of indirection” to avoid giving managers power over their employees or the employees excess emotional bonds to their managers.
hiring committees who would remove the managers from the process of hiring and (mostly, especially in the early days) project assignment
promotion committees who would judge promotion cases, removing the power of promotion from the manager (didn’t scale well, as indicated by the link I sent you)
raises had a strong algorithmic component; promotions and bonuses were both linked to performance ratings in a way such that getting high scores (at the current level) led to big bonuses, so if an employee’s case wasn’t perfect for promotion they wouldn’t feel they were incurring a financial penalty. That gave promotion committees more liberty to say “no by default” and managers less incentive to fight like badgers to get their people promoted.
What didn’t go so well
The industry has its own weird relationship to business:product managers can be valuable if they have either strong business skills or a deep instinct for something amazing that should be built to create a business. Google (and others) explicitly treated product managers as “mini-CEOs” so they attracted a lot of people who…wanted to be a mini-CEO…but weren’t necessarily cut out for a CEO role. (At this point I have a generally low opinion of product managers and people who aspire to product management, with notable exceptions of course.)
Google- and software industry-specific: lots of developers want to make free software, lots of developers only know how to make things for other developers, so trying to be in a business where there’s deep domain knowledge required, or lots of actual business competition (where marketing, awareness, and business strategy are key) mean that overfocus on really, really smart software engineers as the almost exclusive hiring target makes it difficult to succeed.
Selling ads…I’m not in favor of it as an engine of commerce. Amazon has profound and distinguished power accrued over time by ruthless exploitation of scale in low margin industries where everyone is “making it for a dollar, selling it for two…” which makes them very dangerous for every competitor.
You get what you incent
product managers were rewarded for launching, which means they’d tend to launch and ditch
it’s hard not to reward managers for group size; Google was no different — this was the place where it was hardest to avoid fiefdoms that come with centralization of powerWhat degraded over time at Google:
Some things having to do with too much money, not necessarily related to tech management in particular:
sense of company mission vs. sense of entitlement.
pursuing company mission vs. individual advancement.
influx of people responding primarily to financial rewards (related).
Some things related to scale that might work better in an organization based on tight, interpersonal relationships (the opposite of the decreased manager power referenced above):
some processes implicitly dependent on people largely knowing one another or being one degree of separation apart (e.g., promotion)
the ability to reward creative, risky work; the ability to reward engineering work that had little visible outcome.Other companies in bits and pieces
As indicated I’m very admiring of Amazon’s strategic approach and its business-first focus. Google did a lot of awesome stuff, but it had incalculable waste and missed opportunities because of the level of pampering and scattershot approach. If you want a real tech company model, I’d pick Amazon (even though I’m not sure I’d ever work there).
Facebook is kind of nothing. It’s a product company and I (personally) don’t think the product is very compelling. I think they hit a moment and will see the fate of MySpace in time. I can’t pick out product innovations that were particularly awesome (other than incubating on college campuses and exploiting sex more or less tastefully). And, their infrastructure is pretty crude which means they’ll run into the problem, eventually, hiring the kind of people who can do the kind of scaling they’re going to need.
Apple — I don’t know a ton about them currently, but they’re old. Real old. I interviewed there some time ago and they told me they like to set arbitrary deadlines for their projects because once people are late they work harder. I didn’t pursue the job further, although I have no idea if that’s any sort of a broad practice or a current practice. What they *do* epitomize is the notion that new business models are more important than new technologies so things like flat rate data plans, $.99 songs, not licensing their OS, are real, interesting tech company contributions — I haven’t seen much of that sort of thing since Steve Jobs died, but I’m also not that close to them. That’s obviously not exclusive to tech companies, but something that may be more possible where you have new inventions.
Microsoft — the epitome of high pressure big software, abuse of market dominance, decline, and then pivot into new relevance. IBM II. I don’t know that there’s much about their culture or current business that’s particularly admirable. They’ve got this “partner” system that’s insane where they’ve set up a high stakes internal competition that just looks terrible for any kind of team cohesion or morale. I wouldn’t want to work there, either, although (like Amazon) I have a number of friends I really respect who work there. Generally, there are tradeoffs for having an environment with lots of competition for material rewards — I don’t personally like them so they won’t attract people like me… so I’d like to believe they’re terrible for business…although I’m not at all sure that’s true.
Netflix — little info, really. Competent and pivoting but I don’t know much good or bad.
Amazon — totally admirable, really scary, really effective, and very business-focused. Changing capex into opex via Cloud was one of those changes in business mode that I saw in Apple, along with “sell close to cost using Wall Street money so that no one can compete while you push down costs via scale so no one new can afford to enter the market.” They also are willing to ditch products that don’t work. It sounds like a hard place to work.
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Challenges I see in other industries: low imagination, fiefdoms / politics, inefficiency, communication problems…all could benefit from tech company input. If you’re in a low margin, low revenue business…it’s just going to be hard without the ability to attract and retain top talent, which is usually going to have a money component. But, best practices certainly help along with awareness of the importance of things like business model, systems design within the business, communication and culture, relationships to power, politics, and incentives…
Remaining challenges in tech industry: scaling and incentives (and incentives at scale :). I also see a major extrovert bias, which might seem a little funny for tech. But, again, product managers (or, God forbid, Sales people) are all really subject to the “let’s just get some people in a room” style of planning and problem resolution. I firmly believe some massive amount of productivity is squandered from people choosing the wrong communication paradigm — I think it’s often chosen for the convenience or advantage of someone who is either in an extrovert role or who is just following extrovert tendencies. Massive problem at Google, which is ironic given their composition. Amazon had some obvious nods to avoiding these sorts of things (e.g., “reading time”) but I don’t know how pervasive they were or how effective people believed them to be.
I thank the author for taking the time to do this, of course I am presenting this content, not endorsing it.
Why I write for Bloomberg View
A while ago I promised you my take on Bloomberg View [BV], and why I decided to work for them. They don’t know I am doing this post, I don’t in any official or even unofficial way speak for Bloomberg View or for the broader company, and I hope they don’t get mad at me for attempting this brief capsule treatment. And it is fine if you wish to dismiss this as biased pleading, because it is.
One of the most striking features of BV, from my personal point of view, is how many of the writers I was actively reading and following before they started with BV. For instance:
1. A few years ago I tracked down Adam Minter for a Sichuan lunch in Shanghai, to talk with him about recycling, China, the metals trade and used goods, and his general take on things. Adam is one of the very best writers for mastering small, apparently obscure details, based on years of personal travel and research, and then showing how they reflect broader and more important truths. Adam later started writing for Bloomberg.
2. Megan McArdle and I have had periodic lunches and chats since I first met her in 2004 (?), when I was presenting an early version of Stubborn Attachments to Victor Niederhoffer’s Junto seminar in New York City. She was one of the very first economics bloggers, along with John Irons and Brad DeLong. The next time I see her we will again debate when and whether the world is going to end, and whether Panda Gourmet really does have the best cold noodles in Washington, D.C. (yes).
3. I met up with Christopher Balding for a lunch in Hong Kong, as he came over from Shenzhen. I was a fan of his China blog and research, and lo and behold Christopher ended up writing for Bloomberg. Here are his New Year’s resolutions.
4. Cass Sunstein is one of the polymaths of our time, and the #1 cited legal scholar, not to mention a Star Wars fan, and I interviewed him for Conversations with Tyler. I don’t have to tell you where he writes now, or that his favorite musician is Bob Dylan.
5. I’ve had periodic email contact with Stephen R. Carter, of Yale Law School, as the two of us share many common interests and reading habits. He’s now with Bloomberg View.
6. Virginia Postrel is a “dynamist” thinker of major significance, and I’ve been following her work for more than twenty years. I hope she does more with the topic of textiles. Here is a 2014 video she and I did together (mostly her) on the topic of glamour.
7. A few years ago, Noah Smith and I decided to get together at the AEA meetings, most of all to talk about Japan (Noah is fluent in Japanese and lived there for a good while). He was then still a professor before he made the decision to work for Bloomberg full-time. Last year, I took a long Uber ride to meet Noah for Thai food in Berkeley.
8. Conor Sen started blogging, and I thought: “This guy is awesome and has unique perspectives rooted in finance and housing and demographics and Atlanta.” Soon enough, Bloomberg hired him. Conor deservedly made this list of the year’s most interesting people.
8. I was a fan of Stephen Mihm’s work on history and economic history, before he started with BV.
9. And now we have Ramesh Ponnuru and Michael Strain, two of the very best market-oriented, right of center yet also eclectic columnists.
I don’t mean to neglect all the other people who write for Bloomberg View, as this list is determined by whom I knew before there was any Bloomberg connection. As for some of the others, Leonid Bershidsky is an amazing polymath, the “every column is full of information” Noah Feldman has a new and wonderful book on James Madison, there is Joe Nocera and Justin Fox and Barry Ritholz, and I am trying to schedule a Conversation with the great Matt Levine, who always knows more than you think he does, even after taking this clause into account. When I met Matt I simply uttered: “Matt Levine, only you can do what you do!” Is any other greeting required?
One day I woke up and realized these people write for Bloomberg View, or that people like them were going to, and then it occurred to me that maybe I should too. And there are still Bloomberg View writers I haven’t really discovered yet. (By the way, one reason all these people are so good is because of the consistently excellent editors.)
What is the common element behind all of these writers? I would say that Bloomberg View tends to hire reading-loving, eclectic polymaths, with both academic knowledge and real world experience, and whose views cannot always be predicted from their other, previous writings.
Over the last year, I think I would nominate Ross Douthat as The Best Columnist. But overall I think Bloomberg View has assembled the most talented and diverse group of opinion contributors out there, bar none.
On top of all that, BV is perhaps the least gated major opinion website.
In addition to the writing, I also very much enjoy working for a great company. Not all media outlets can offer that.
Anyway, forgive the biased rant, that is my take for today! They also serve nice snacks and have an amazing art collection in the NYC building.
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
The gains from cutting corporate tax rates
Here is a recent paper by Stephen Bond and Jing Xing:
We present new empirical evidence that sector-level capital–output ratios are strongly influenced by corporate tax incentives, as summarised by the tax component of a standard user cost of capital measure. We use sectoral panel data for the USA, Japan, Australia and eleven EU countries over the period 1982–2007. Our panel combines internationally consistent data on capital stocks, value-added and relative prices from the EU KLEMS database with corporate tax measures from the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation. Our results for equipment investment are particularly robust, and strikingly consistent with the basic economic theory of corporate investment.
Via Henry Curr. Here is a piece by Fuest, Piechl, and Siegloch, forthcoming in the American Economic Review:
This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities. Administrative linked employer-employee data allows estimating heterogeneous worker and firrm effects. We set up a general theoretical framework showing that corporate taxes can have a negative effect on wages in various labor market models. Using an event study design, we test the predictions of the theory. Our results indicate that workers bear about 40% of the total tax burden. Empirically, we confirm the importance of both labor market institutions and profit shifting possibilities for the incidence of corporate taxes on wages.
Via Dina D. Pomeranz. I’ve been reading in this area on and off since the 1980s, and I really don’t think these are phony results.
“A Perfect Fit,” by Isaac Asimov
Gold said, “You underwent due process in great detail, and there was no reasonable doubt that you were guilty–”
“Even so! Look! We live in a computerized world. I can’t do a thing anywhere — I can’t get information — I can’t be fed — I can’t amuse myself — I can’t pay for anything, or check on anything, or just plain do anything — without using a computer. And I have been adjusted, as you surely know, so that I am incapable of looking at a computer without hurting my eyes, or touching one without blistering my fingers. I can’t even handle my cash card or even think of using it without nausea.”
Gold said, “Yes, I know all that. I also know you have been given ample funds for the duration of yoiur punishment, and that the general public has been asked to sympathize and be helpful. I believe they do this.”
“I don’t want that. I don’t want their help and their pity. I don’t want to be a helpless child in a world of adults. I don’t want to be an illiterate in a world of people who can read. Help me end the punishment. It’s been almost a month of hell. I can’t go through eleven more.”
That is from the short story “A Perfect Fit,” from 1981, reproduced in the volume The Winds of Change and other stories. I’ve been rereading some Asimov lately, in preparation for my chat with Andy Weir, and much of it has held up remarkably well.