Sunday assorted links
1. Most of the claims in this Evgeny Morozov NYT Op-Ed are wrong (for a start, he doesn’t realize that current public libraries are largely empty), but it makes the interesting point that AI represents the fulfillment of a neoliberal vision, as on that turf government simply cannot keep up. Also from NYT here is Rabbi Wolpe, much better and saner than BAP and a lot of the other stuff people are looking to.
2. The weirdest political video I ever have seen? See #7 for background!
3. They are solving for the new no affirmative action equilibrium.
4. Massive phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway. Julian Simon ascendant.
5. Why Would Anyone Collect 150 John Deere Lawn Tractors? Why not I say!?
6. Folsom Prison Blues (instrumental).
7. Niall Ferguson on the 17th century (Bloomberg). Close to my own views.
Cultural values and productivity (rooftops)
This paper estimates differences in human capital as country-of-origin specific labor productivity terms, in firm production functions, making it immune to wage discrimination concerns. After accounting for wage and experience, estimated human capital varies by a factor of around 3 between the 90th and 10th percentile. When I investigate which country-of-origin characteristics correlate most closely with human capital, cultural values are the only robust predictor. This relationship persists among children of migrants. Consistent with a plausible cultural mechanism, individuals whose origin place a high value on autonomy hold a comparative advantage in positions characterized by a low degree of routinization.
That is by Andreas Ek from Lund University, recently accepted to the Journal of Political Economy. I do not currently see ungated versions of the paper.
Markets in everything Alaska regulatory arbitrage edition, tribal qualifier added
The shrinking village of Karluk, on the western shore of Kodiak Island, is trying to keep its school viable. So it’s willing to pay a couple of families with three or four children apiece to move there of a year, so that it can draw down state education funds.
Public schools in Alaska need to maintain an enrollment of 10 students to get state funding. Karluk, which had a population of 37 during the 2010 U.S. Census, is now down to about 21 people. The demographics are Native American: 82.14%; two or more races: 17.86%; White: 0%; Black or African American: 0%.
Karluk Tribal Council’s ad says that it will pay a couple of families with enough kids — three or four — to move to the village, all expenses paid, for a year, and will even provide jobs. That money, without question, is passed through from the U.S. and State taxpayer, to pay families so that the village can draw down more government money and open its school.
If this were any other kind of enterprise other than a tribe, these definitions for acceptable applicants would be considered a federal equal opportunity violation. But this is a tribe.
Here is the full story, including means for contacting the village. Via Martin Kennedy.
Saturday assorted links
1. Janan Ganesh on the Americanisation of Britain (FT).
2. “You Hurt My Feelings” is a good Hansonian movie about how most people are mediocre at their jobs, and how society deals with that fact, and what happens when those protective mechanisms break down. The starring role of Julia Louis-Dreyfus also makes for good meta-commentary on Seinfeld, a show where the characters speak the brutal, honest truth to each other.
3. Austin Vernon update on geothermal.
4. The world’s largest gas station has 120 pumps.
5. TikTok will enter book publishing? (NYT)
People Hire Phone Bots to Torture Telemarketers
Whitebeard has a bad habit of talking in circles. That is by design. Whitebeard is a digital contraption that only sounds human. He is the creation of Roger Anderson, a real-life 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., who employs chatbots and AI to frustrate and waste the time of telemarketers and scammers.
“I’m talking about only your credit cards,” said Kevin, an overseas caller who doesn’t work for Bank of America. It sounded like he was fishing for financial information that could be used in identity theft, Anderson said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” said Whitebeard, who speaks in the cloned voice of Sid Berkson, a Vermont dairy farmer and a friend of Anderson’s. “What’s your name, buddy?”
Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4, the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. Once ready, the AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.
Here is the full WSJ article.
Canada is Poaching US Talent!
Here is Noahpinion on Canada’s recent immigration policies and how Canada is poaching US talent!
[I]n recent years, the Canadian government has begun to set hard targets for immigration, such as last year’s target of 1.5 million more by 2025. And the country is deliberately encouraging more people to come, with one of the world’s most aggressive recruitment strategies.
First, let’s just take a look at the results Canada is achieving. The country’s population has just passed 40 million — a 14% increase from when Doug Saunders published Maximum Canada. The national statistics agency loudly celebrated the achievement. And the country’s population growth rate has just shot up to over 3.5%, which is among the world’s fastest:
This isn’t quite Maximum Canada yet, but it’s clearly headed in that direction.
…And Canada’s zeal for greater population inflows is matched by its determination to recruit the best and the brightest en masse. The country’s points-based immigration system, the Federal Skilled Worker Program, is well-known, as is the Provincial Nominee Program that allows individual Canadian provinces to recruit immigrant workers to specific locations. But the country keeps adding more programs for grabbing talent. Its latest idea includes an offer of permanent residency to people working in the United States on H-1B visas — basically, poaching America’s own skilled immigrants!
Happy Canada Day!
Hat tip: Carl Close.
*The Monetarists*, by George S. Tavlas
The key here is the subtitle The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927-1960. Have you wondered about the oft-underrated macroeconomics of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, Lloyd Mints, Paul Douglas, Clark Warburton, and many more? By no means did monetarism start with Milton Friedman, and this is the new go-to book on the topic.
*The Ruble: A Political History*
That is the new, highly useful, and thorough book by Ekaterina Pravilova, here is one excerpt:
Reutern was adamant about exterminating private currencies, but not everyone in the government shared his view. The minister of justice, Konstantin Pahlen, argued, for instance, that the right to issue private notes should be granted “to all Russian subjects.” Anyone willing to issue private monetary units should simply inform that local governor about the amount of issue, denominations, and the place these notes could be exchanged for state credit bills. The issue should also place an “exchange fund” consisting of state money or securities at the disposal of the local administration and order the printing of notes at the Expedition for the Production of State Papers, which would guarantee them against counterfeiting. In other words, private money should mirror the system of state credit bills and compensate for their deficit…
The debate between the opponents and the proponents of private money revealed an interesting ideological paradox. Private money in Russia stood for the ideological legacy of serfdom: a system that substituted an entire structure of local administration, p olice and judicial authority, and financial management, all concentrated in the figure of one landowner.
Of course most of the rest of the book covers the rather different directions that we taken. You can buy it here.
Privacy-invading horse nationalism (ask and ye shall receive)
The census will request information on each horse’s equine identification document (passport) number, microchip number, age, current residence, second career, and more to provide a robust view of the 2023 British retired racehorse population.
The six-month census has been launched in partnership with Retraining of Racehorses (RoR), British Racing’s official aftercare charity, funded by the Racing Foundation, and is supported by World Horse Welfare and Weatherbys General Stud Book.
Here is the full story, and here are previous installments in “Horse Nationalism.” And here are the British organizations authorized to issue horse passports. A’la Orwell, someday they will subject humans to this indignity as well!
Friday assorted links
1. The history of Japanese stock prices.
3. Who are the top 15 liberal economists of France, 1695–1776?
4. New Netflix trailer, “They Cloned Tyrone.”
5. Young people are leaving big U.S. cities.
6. The accelerationists were always going to win.
7. Coleman Hughes piece. Note #9 And Kevin Bryan. Solve for the equilibrium!
Update Schedule A!
Since 1965, the U.S. has maintained a list, known as Schedule A, of occupations experiencing shortages. Employers recruiting foreign workers in these occupations are eligible to receive streamlined authorization from the federal government….because the federal government already recognizes that workers in Schedule A occupations are in short supply, employers do not need to prove it themselves. That will mean faster processing times — cutting an average of 300 days worth of red tape.
Makes sense! But get this. DOL has not updated the list of occupations experiencing shortages since 1991! Today, the only jobs on Schedule A are nurses and physical therapists. That can’t possibly be right. Many of today’s jobs didn’t even exist in 1991 including:
-
- Data Scientist
- UX Manager
- Cloud Services Specialist
- Drone Operator
- Renewable Energy Engineer
- Machine Learning Engineer
and there must be other jobs that have experienced shortages since that time! Thus, Lindsay Milliken and Josh T. Smith writing in the Salt Lake Tribune have a proposal.
Our proposal is simple — DOL should update Schedule A through a transparent, data-driven process every year. Government agencies already collect data about supply and demand conditions in occupations across the country. This data should be used to help speed the visa process for occupations in shortage and make sure our immigration system addresses today’s labor market needs.
Hat tip: Alec Stapp.
GRE scores by university major
Which university major is the smartest? A study of composite GRE scores by PhD program subject found that physicists were the smartest, followed by engineers and mathematicians. pic.twitter.com/pgtsmAPlfS
— Joseph Bronski (@BronskiJoseph) June 29, 2023
Via Diana S. Fleischman. If you click and read the entire tweet, you can see who comes in at the very bottom.
Should the NIH allow AI for peer review?
Of course, as a partial aid. Instead we get this, as outlined to me by correspondent Raghuveer Parthasarathy:
On the same day of your post on a Nature editorial on AI the NIH blogged about its new policy statement, “The Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Technologies is Prohibited for the NIH Peer Review Process“; its blog post is “Using AI in Peer Review Is a Breach of Confidentiality“. It’s bizarre. There are legitimate arguments to be made for avoiding AI when reviewing grants, but these aren’t present; rather, it’s that using AI would violate confidentiality:“Reviewers are trusted and required to maintain confidentiality throughout the application review process. Thus, using AI to assist in peer review would involve a breach of confidentiality. In a recently released guide notice, we explain that NIH scientific peer reviewers are prohibited from using natural language processors, large language models, or other generative AI technologies for analyzing and formulating peer review critiques for grant applications and R&D contract proposals. Reviewers have long been required to certify and sign an agreement that says they will not share applications, proposals, or meeting materials with anyone who has not been officially designated to participate in the peer review process. “The comments at the blog are good, with nearly everyone pointing out that one can host AI locally, avoiding sharing confidential information. The official policy (second link above) is as unclear as the blog post, prohibiting AI, ” the NIH prohibits NIH scientific peer reviewers from using natural language processors, large language models, or other generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies”, but then later referring to “online generative AI tools”. The lack of understanding, or of clear writing, is striking. My own blog comment: “As others have pointed out, this policy rationale makes little sense, regardless of one’s thoughts on whether AI should or shouldn’t be used in peer review… Presumably the authors mean non-local AI services, but if so, that should be stated. Or do the authors mean ideas that come from unsourced others? (If that’s the case, why is confidentiality the issue?)”
He is absolutely correct, and dare we expect just a wee bit better from our scientific authorities?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK takes a step toward us
To escape our predicament, we cannot just cling to multi-party liberal democracy. Rather, we must find new ways of building social consensus and establishing active links between political parties and civil society. The immediate task is to oppose the new left-right populists, and that may require aligning with exponents of capitalist liberal democracy – just as WWII-era Communists fought alongside Western “imperialist” democracies against Fascism, knowing full well that imperialism was their ultimate enemy. These were strange bedfellows, but they at least could see what was really going on.
Here is the full piece, via Arthur Wright.
Tiny markets in everything
A minuscule handbag measuring just 657 by 222 by 700 microns (or less than 0.03 inches wide) sold for over $63,000 at an online auction Wednesday.
Barely visible to the human eye, the fluorescent yellowish-green bag is based on a popular Louis Vuitton design — though it is the work of a New York art collective, not the luxury label itself.
Dubbing its diminutive creation “Microscopic Handbag,” the Brooklyn-based group MSCHF claims the bag is narrow enough to pass through the eye of a needle and is smaller than a grain of sea salt (though that may depend on how coarse you like your salt).
The object was made using two-photon polymerization, a manufacturing technology used to 3D-print micro-scale plastic parts. It was sold alongside a microscope equipped with a digital display through which the bag can be viewed.
There is a (blown-up) photo at the link. Via Anecdotal.