Results for “self-recommending” 168 found
Martin Ford’s *The Rise of the Robots*
Of all the moderns who have written on automation and rising joblessness, Martin Ford is the original. His Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future is due out this May, you can pre-order here. Self-recommending.
Here is my earlier post Will you lose your job to a robot?
Favorite popular music of 2014
By now I’ve bought and heard most of the top CDs recommended by sources such as Pitchfork and Spin, and overall I find them to be a well executed but fairly uninspired group of recordings. (Best of all, try the Ben Southwood music aggregator.) What I really enjoyed this year was:
1. Aphex Twin, Syro. Especially impressive after such a long hiatus because his later recordings were not always first-rate.
2. D’Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah. Self-recommending.
3. Calypso Craze, 1956-57 and Beyond. From the Bear label, this is by an order of magnitude the best Calypso compilation ever. Seven CDs, and you don’t need to buy any more Calypso again. You’ll also learn how much influence Calypso has had on subsequent popular music, including Chuck Berry (“Havana Moon“), Harry Nilsson, and a good deal of rap, among others.
Run the Jewels 2 and St. Vincent I might pick as runners-up.
I’ll listen to some Swans in the year to come.
Does natural resource wealth imply technological stagnation?
Peter Thiel tells us:
Look at the Forbes list of the 92 people who are worth ten billion dollars or more in 2012. Where do they make money? 11 of them made it in technology, and all 11 were in computers. You’ve heard of all of them: It’s Bill Gates, it’s Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, on and on. There are 25 people who made it in mining natural resources. You probably haven’t heard their names. And these are basically cases of technological failure, because commodities are inelastic goods, and farmers make a fortune when there’s a famine. People will pay way more for food if there’s not enough. 25 people in the last 40 years made their fortunes because of the lack of innovation; 11 people made them because of innovation.
I also liked this bit:
One of the smartest investors in the world is considered to be Warren Buffett. His single biggest investment is in the railroad industry, which I think is a bet against technological progress, both in transportation and energy. Most of what gets transported on railroads is coal, and Buffett is essentially betting that after the 21st century, we’ll look more like the 19th rather than the 20th century. We’ll go back to rail, and back to coal; we’re going to run out of oil, and clean-tech is going to fail.
This very useful post collates and presents all of Peter’s evidence for his view that modern technology has been stagnating. It is both “interesting throughout” and “self-recommending.” It is from this blog by Dan Wang.
I very much liked Peter’s new book, Zero to One: Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future.
Arrived in my cyberpile
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Due out September 3, 2014, self-recommending.
Assorted links
1. The fox and the hedgehog, literally.
2. Are today’s teenagers the best-behaved of all time?
3. Gordon Tullock on the economics of slavery.
4. James Hamilton on Piketty (self-recommending).
5. The gadget that makes sure you never lose anything again (there is no great stagnation, perhaps this time for real).
Assorted links
1. Martin Feldstein on Piketty. And Wojciech Kopczuk and Allison Schrager on wealth taxes. Piketty and survivorship bias.
2. Poland will institute biometric ATMs.
3. The new Peter Thiel book (self-recommending).
4. The record of Andrew Cuomo — worth a ponder.
5. Why don’t octopus arms stick together?
6. Is falling household consumption behind secular stagnation?
*Microeconomics: a very short introduction*
Do you know the Oxford University Press “very short paperback books” series? This is the latest entry, by Avinash Dixit, self-recommending.
*The Tyranny of Experts*
The author is William Easterly and the subtitle is Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.
This is Easterly’s most libertarian book, self-recommending. It is due out March 4.
*The Essential Hirschman*
Jeremy Adelman, Hirschman’s biographer, is the editor behind this one, and you can pre-order your copy here. It contains many of Hirschman’s best known essays, with an afterword by Amartya Sen and Emma Rothschild.
Self-recommending, to say the least. I find only the title strange, as I would have preferred “Some of the essays by Albert Hirschman which perhaps we are not still underrating,” though I grant that might sell fewer copies.
*The Why Axis*
That is the new, excellent, and self-recommending book by Uri Gneezy and John List. The subtitle is Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life, and the core of the book revolves around the authors’ use of field and natural experiments to tease out what is causal and what is not. List is in my view a candidate for a future Nobel Prize.
Here is one excerpt from the book, concerning the experience of trying to buy a car at auto dealerships:
In this experiment, we worked with our colleague Michael Price in assigning pairs of men to pose as our secret agents: straight men acting as friends, straight men playing loving partners, gay men acting as friends, and gay men portraying partners. Each of these pairs visited various car dealerships to negotiate the purchase of a new car. Every “couple” bargained at different randomly determined dealerships, and every dealership was approached twice. We observed not only what kinds of offers the various “couples” received, but also how often they were offered niceties like a test drive and a cup of coffee.
Our results showed that the people acting as gay partners got shabbier treatment. Many dealerships rejected offers from buyers they perceived as gay, while accepting identical offers from our straight buyers. More than 75 percent of the time, dealers quoted the gay couples higher initial prices, when the gay couples extended counter offers, they were much more likely to be rejected and the salespeople ended the negotiations.
You can pre-order the book here.
*The Second Machine Age*
The authors are Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and the subtitle is Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
It is due out January 2014, self-recommending, and it is likely to be the best and most important economics book of the forthcoming year.
TED talks on innovation and automation
Here is Robert Gordon’s talk “The death of innovation, the end of growth.”
He stakes out the untenable position that economic growth is over (please do note that my TGS is relatively optimistic about the future). To make one quick point in rebuttal, Gordon considers only national demographics. Ask yourself a different question: circa 2013, are there more young global geniuses with a chance to make a difference, as compared say to 1969 or for that matter 1995? People sometimes caricature my views as suggesting we have run out of new discoveries (the subtitle of my book should belie that), but that description actually seems to fit Gordon.
Erik Brynjolfsson has a contrasting talk, “The key to growth: The race with the machines.” I mostly agree with Erik about the future (though not about the last forty or so years), but I worry about how he conflates “restructuring productivity” with the actual creation of new ideas as we attempt to measure them through total factor productivity. I also don’t think that free goods much overturn the measured wage stagnation of recent times, infovores aside of course.
In any case both talks are very much worth a view, self-recommending as they say.
*Here’s the Deal*
That is a new Kindle single by David Leonhardt, self-recommending!
Here are comments from Matt Yglesias.
Gates, Thiel, Summers, and Thrun on on-line education
The video is here, Thomas Friedman moderates, and for the pointer I thank MG. I have yet to view it (starting right now), but it is fair to call it self-recommending.