Results for “age of em” 17234 found
The Battle over Junk DNA
Last year the ENCODE Consortium, a big-data project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, announced with great fanfare that 80% of the human genome was functional or as the NYTimes put it less accurately but more memorably “at least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed.” What the NYTimes didn’t say was that this claim was highly controversial to the point of implausibility. A fascinating, sharply-worded critique, On the immortality of television sets: “function” in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE has recently been published by Graur et al. Here is some of the flavor:
This absurd conclusion was reached through various means, chiefly (1)
by employing the seldom used “causal role” definition of biological function and
then applying it inconsistently to different biochemical properties, (2) by committing
a logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent,” (3) by failing to appreciate
the crucial difference between “junk DNA” and “garbage DNA,” (4) by using
analytical methods that yield biased errors and inflate estimates of functionality, (5)
by favoring statistical sensitivity over specificity, and (6) by emphasizing statistical
significance rather than the magnitude of the effect. Here, we detail the many logical
and methodological transgressions involved in assigning functionality to almost
every nucleotide in the human genome. The ENCODE results were predicted by one
of its authors to necessitate the rewriting of textbooks. We agree, many textbooks
dealing with marketing, mass-media hype, and public relations may well have to be
rewritten.
Graur et al. make a number of key points. ENCODE essentially defined “functional” as sometimes involved in a specified set of biochemical reactions (I am simplifying!). But every microbiological system is stochastic and sooner or later everything is involved in some kind of biochemical reaction even if that reaction goes nowhere and does nothing. In contrast, Graur et al. argue that “biological sense can only be derived from evolutionary context” which in this case means that functional is defined as actively protected by selection.
There are a variety of ways of identifying whether a sequence is actively protected by selection. One method, for example, looks for sequences that are highly similar (conserved) across species. Once evolution has hit on the recipe for hemoglobin, for example, it doesn’t want that recipe messed with–thus the chimp and human DNA that blueprints hemoglobin is very similar and not that different from that of dogs. In other areas of the genome, however, even closely related species have different sequences which suggests that that portion of the DNA isn’t being selected for, it’s randomly mutating because there is no value to its conservation. When functional is defined using selection, most human DNA does not look functional.
It’s also interesting to note that the size of the genome varies significantly across species but in ways that appear to have little to do with complexity. The human genome, for example, is about 3GB, quite a bit more than the fruit fly at 170MB, But the onion is 17GB! (One of the reasons that onions are used in a lot of science labs, by the way, is that the onion genome is so big it makes onion nuclei large enough so that you can easily see them with low-powered microscopes.) Now one could argue that this lack of correlation between genome size and complexity is simply a result of an anthropocentric definition of complexity. Maybe an onion really is complex. Two points counter this view, however. First, similar species can have very different genome sizes. Second, we know why the genome of some species is really large. It’s filled with transposons, so-called jumping genes, sometimes analogized to viruses, that cut and paste themselves into the genome. Some of these transposons, like Alu in humans, are short sequences that repeat themselves millions of times. It’s very difficult to believe that these boring repetitions are functional (n.b. this is not to say that they don’t have an effect.) The fact that it’s this kind of repetitious, not-conserved DNA that accounts for a large fraction of the differences in genome size is highly suggestive of non-functionality.
Why discuss such an esoteric (for economists) paper on a (nominally!) economics blog? The Graur et al. paper is highly readable, even for non-experts. It’s even funny, although I laughed somewhat sheepishly since some of the comments are unnecessarily harsh. Many of the critiques, such as the confusion between statistical and substantive significance, arise in economics and many other fields. The Graur paper also makes some points which are going to be important in economics. For example they write:
“High-throughput genomics and the centralization of science funding have enabled Big Science to generate “high-impact false positives” by the truckload…”
Exactly right. Big data is coming to economics but data is not knowledge and big data is not wisdom.
Finally, the Graur paper tells us something about disputes in economics. Economists are sometimes chided for disagreeing about the importance of such basic questions as the relative role of aggregate demand and aggregate supply but physicists can’t even find most of the universe and microbiologists don’t agree on whether the human genome is 80% functional or 80% junk. Is disagreement a result of knaves and fools? Sometimes, but more often disagreement is just the way the invisible hand of science works.
Hat tip: Monique van Hoek.
From the comments
Hazel Meade wrote:
The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most. Those are the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase. Everything else on the market is a perverse by-product of the employer-based insurance system.
Worst case scenario with a catastrophic-only plan is you end up with $10,000 in debt. That’s a debt load many times smaller than what the Federal government thinks students should take out to get a college degree. We’ll let you borrow $100,000 to get a sociology degree but, we think that $10,000 is an unconscionable amount to pay for medical expenses? So unconscionable that we have to FORCE YOU to buy a plan with more extensive coverage?
Of course, we all know the real reason for this. it’s meant to force healthy young people to subsidize healthcare for older sicker people. Just force them to pay more for insurance than they ought to, and force them to buy more extensive coverage than is rational.
Assorted links
1. Honeybees trained to find land mines.
2. Felix Salmon on bubbles, and Alen Mattich on bubbles, more from him here. And here is Krugman on the Japanese stock market plunge.
3. Ross Douthat, on the relationship between social and economic inequality.
4. Is this what an interview with a very smart person looks like?
5. On the origins of Paul Scott’s masterpiece.
6. www.thecorner.eu, new English-language site on EU economics, from Spain.
When will most universities teach in English?
Higher Education Minister Genevieve Fioraso this past week introduced a bill that would allow French universities to teach more courses in English, even when English is not the subject. The goal, she explained, is to attract more students from such countries as Brazil, China and India, where English is widely taught, but French is reserved largely for literature lovers.
“Ten years ago, we were third in welcoming foreign students, but today we are fifth,” she said in a Q&A in the magazine Nouvel Observateur. “Why have we lost so much attraction? Because Germany has put in place an English program that has passed us by. We must make up the gap.”
The reaction?
Yet it has sparked cultural and nationalist outrage — not only from Paris intellectuals but also from several dozen members of Parliament, opposition as well as Socialist, who insist that learning French should be part of any foreign student’s experience in France.
From Jacques Attali:
“Not only would such a reform be contrary to the Constitution (which provides in its Article 2 ‘the language of the Republic is French’), but you cannot image an idea that is stupider, more counterproductive, more dangerous and more contrary to the interest of France,” he intoned in a blog.
There is more here. On one hand, on-line education makes fluency in English more important for plugging into dominant networks. On the other hand, technologies of easier subtitling and dubbing may keep other languages in contention. Still, I predict the former effect will win out, just as the internet has boosted English more generally, with or without Google Translate. The internet has indeed done a good deal to preserve, record, and ultimately transmit true minority languages, Nahuatl being one example of many, but it has not elevated them into general media of instruction.
Are we living in a time of asset bubbles?
Here is one typical complaint about bubbles, from Jesse Eisinger, excerpt:
We are four years into the One Percent’s recovery. Now, we are in Round 3 of quantitative easing, the formal term for the Fed injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy by purchasing longer-term assets like Treasury bonds and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac paper. What’s that giving us? Overvalued stocks. Private equity firms racing to buy up Arizona real estate. Junk bond yields at record lows. Ratings shopping on structured financial products.
These are dangerous signs of prebubble activity.
Here is a Krugman rebuttal. I will offer a few points on a series of debates which in general I have stayed away from.
1. I don’t find most predictive discussions of bubbles interesting, while admitting that such claims often will prove in a manner correct ex post. “OK, the price fell, but was it a bubble? I mean was there froth, like on your Frappucino?” Or to quote Eisinger, it might also have been “dangerous signs of prebubble activity” (what happens between the “prebubble” and the “bubble”? The “nascent bubble”? The “midbubble”? The “midnonbubble”?)
2. Good news and improving conditions may well bring more bubbles or greater likelihood of bubbles, but that is hardly reason to dislike good news and improving conditions.
3. Relative to measured real interest rates, stocks look cheap right now. That doesn’t mean they are, but reread #1.
4. No one understands the term structure of interest rates, no matter what they tell you. Reread #1.
5. I don’t see why anything particular about the current state of affairs, at least in the United States, needs to be “unwound.” I sometimes draw a distinction between those of us who have been thinking about interest on reserves since S. Tsiang, Fischer Black, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and those of us who have not.
6. One coherent definition of bubble is that of a hot potato, traded in a world of heterogeneous expectations, but which must ultimately pop, because eventually the price of that asset will consume all of gdp, a bit like those old Tokyo parking spots. Fair enough, but I don’t see that in many asset markets today if any (Bitcoin for a while?).
7. Another coherent definition of a bubble has less to do with a dynamic price path and ongoing resale for gain, but rather there may be a (temporary) segmentation across classes of asset market buyers. The obvious candidate here is that many people and institutions have been frightened into Treasuries and away from almost everything else. That could mean we have a real interest rate bubble, but it also could mean that lots of other assets are undervalued, at least if the liquidity effect defeats the higher real interest rate effect of moving out of Treasuries. (It would be odd to think that a shift of funds out of Treasuries and into stocks would cause stock prices to fall, but perhaps some people fear this.)
I don’t agree with this view, but I do feel I understand it. The most likely “bubble” is then in real interest rates, due to a (temporary?) skewing of the risk premium. That all said, I do not think this should be called a bubble. Changes in the risk premium and “bubbles” have traditionally been considered alternative explanations for asset prices. Reread #1, and reread #4 while you’re at it.
8. Ruchir Sharma made some interesting points yesterday:
Far from fighting off a deluge of foreign capital, leaders from India to South Africa are struggling to attract a greater share of global capital flows in order to fund widening current account deficits. Over the past decade, the foreign exchange reserves of the developing world grew at an average annual rate of 25 per cent, swelling from $570bn in 2000 to $7tn in 2011. But over the past year, the average rate slowed to a crawl of barely 5 per cent.
The idea that money is still flooding emerging markets misses the big picture, which is that global cross-border capital flows are down 60 per cent from their 2008 peak. The largest shares of cross-border capital flows are in bank loans, trade and foreign direct investment, which are slowing worldwide.
9. I expect the real economy over the next twenty years to be more volatile than it was say in the 1990s. In that sense, many current asset market prices may be revised and quite dramatically. Still, I don’t find the bubble category to be so useful in this regard. We really don’t know what is going to happen and that is why the current prices are wrong, not because of a “bubble.”
10. I am probably done blogging about bubbles for a while. Satisfying you was not the goal of this post, but that is in the nature of the subject area, not out of any desire for spite.
Assorted links
1. Is Bernanke right about the great stagnation?
2. Stanislaw Lem’s major non-fiction work is now in English, Amazon link is here. I have ordered it of course.
3. Find your sheep more easily.
4. More on the guy who bridged the prime gap, and more here, and here.
5. Why do rational people buy into conspiracy theories?
6. Spending on pets. And the most expensive pigeon in the world.
The ABCs of Bitcoin Secrets
You may perhaps have heard of the intriguing mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki who has produced an alleged proof of an important theorem that is so difficult and involves the creation of so much original mathematics and notation that no one is sure whether the proof is valid. Here is one description:
On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.
The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.
Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.
…The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.”
This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well.
“Looking at it, you feel a bit like you might be reading a paper from the future, or from outer space,” wrote Ellenberg on his blog.
“It’s very, very weird,” says Columbia University professor Johan de Jong, who works in a related field of mathematics.
Mochizuki had created so many new mathematical tools and brought together so many disparate strands of mathematics that his paper was populated with vocabulary that nobody could understand. It was totally novel, and totally mystifying.
But there may be more secrets, secrets upon secrets because Ted Nelson has recently argued that this same mathematician, Shinichi Mochizuki, is also the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto who unleashed bitcoin on the world and then disappeared. Now this is almost too delicious to be true so take it with more than a grain of salt. Mochizuki, for example, has bona fides as a mathematician but he does not appear to have a record of sophisticated software creation. But if true, this would be awesome.
Hat tip: Barry Klein
David Brooks on the words we use
Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine [TC: the paper is here]…On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”
Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.
So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.
This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.
Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.
Here is more, interesting throughout.
On recoveries, elasticities, and Portuguese exports
In response to this post, Paul Krugman writes:
Suppose that I could wave a magic wand (or play a few notes on a a Magic Flute) and suddenly increase all German wages by 20 percent. What do you think would happen to the value of the euro against the dollar and other currencies? It would drop a lot, yes? And Portuguese exports would become a lot more competitive everywhere, including non-German and indeed non-Euro destinations.
I guess I thought this was obvious. Apparently not.
Let’s start with the data. Portuguese exports have indeed gone up since 2009, with the weaker euro likely being one reason. Here is a recent positive report. Still, this experience shows higher exports are unlikely to prove their salvation. Last year Portuguese shipments outside Europe rose by twenty percent, but that is from a fairly small base. The country continues to have high unemployment and falling gdp, doing worse than does Ireland on the test which Krugman repeatedly applies to Irish recovery. The Portuguese forecast for this year is 2.3% gdp shrinkage and 18% unemployment, and that is with an export performance described as “surging.” “Surging” isn’t enough.
[A digression: If you are tempted to argue that “exports arising from inflation in Portugal would be so much more potent than the export boost from the status quo,” keep in mind that we are dealing here with the postulated scenario, accepted by Krugman for the sake of argument, where the euro falls, stimulating exports, as indeed has happened, but the inflation stays in Germany and does not spread to Portugal.]
To dig deeper, we might ask how strong the additional export elasticity, with respect to euro devaluation, is going to be. The leading export partners of Portugal are Spain, Germany, France and Italy, not a surprise. So a weaker euro won’t much help them on those fronts. Around 71% of their exports go to the EU and most of that will be to the eurozone. Next in line is the UK but the pound has fallen too and according to many should (will?) fall even further. The BRICS are ailing on the growth front. Team USA is not going to turn Portugal around, we just don’t buy enough cork.
The main import of Portugal from outside the eurozone seems to be petroleum, so a weaker euro hurts them on that front.
Portugal is also a victim of what is called “the gravity equation,” namely that distance hurts the prospects for trade and in a manner which is strongly non-linear. Think about the map or failing that read Saramago’s The Stone Raft — Portugal is close to other eurozone countries and to some (relatively poor) parts of Africa, otherwise it is pretty far from most places.
As an aside, it is strange for Krugman of all people to so stress the real exchange elasticity of exports. To do a bit of history of economic thought (pdf):
In particular, the seminal paper by Baldwin and Krugman (1989) shows that the existence of a sunk entry cost into the export market generates a persistent effect of real exchange rate movements on bilateral exports. The model also suggests that a larger sunk entry cost generates a more persistent effect, or equivalently a lower reaction of exports to real exchange rate movements [emphasis added]. We specifically test this theoretical prediction by making use of various measures of trade costs that can be associated to the sunk entry cost.
In other words, real exchange rate movements are not a panacea, and furthermore this is all the more true for countries which are in a disadvantageous position due to…the gravity equation. The higher export elasticity for Portugal may well be through the dreaded internal devaluation, because that is at least relative to their close and most likely trade partners.
Krugman’s own words on the topic were “huge swings in the exchange rate have had only muted effects on anything real,” to cite one claim out of numerous similar passages.
[Now that sentence is from 1989 and perhaps now you will leap up and accuse me of not allowing Krugman to change his mind, or of thinking he wanted to raise marginal tax rates in 1959, or of seeing 1978 as a liquidity trap. Please. This is a fairly general result, but, if the relevant elasticities have indeed gone up significantly since 1989, and indeed that is possible, that is worth discussing. But rather than making a case for such a change, Krugman’s response of “Portuguese exports would become a lot more competitive everywhere, including non-German and indeed non-Euro destinations. I guess I thought this was obvious. Apparently not.” is little more than a self-parody of his own style of argumentation.]
In sum
We can all agree that inflation centered in Germany has some positive spillover effects to Portugal. But let’s go back to the initial question, a positive rather than normative one. Can a German prime minister credibly promise that significantly higher inflation would set things straight in the eurozone periphery or for that matter fix Portugal? I don’t think so, though it may have worked in 2009, as indeed I argued at that time.
Krugman amended his initial post to state the following:
Again, as Ryan [Avent] says, the crucial difference between German/ Portuguese economic relations and, say, US/
El Salvador(whoops: some central American countries have dollarized. But that was their choice, not part of a grand project like the euro) relations is that Germany and Portugal share a currency. This creates obligations for Germany, whether it likes them or not.
That’s a good example of “distraction by introducing or stressing a moral issue.” (You can track some of Ryan’s related tweets here.) One can indeed argue the extent of Germany’s moral obligation to its fellow parties in a “we’re all in this together but no bailouts and price stability” treaty. But the issue on the table was how much more inflation would help Portugal and other nations of the periphery; surely an understanding of that question should come first.
If someone argues “it may not help as much as you think at this point,” and the response is “Germany must be morally (and financially) committed to the grand project,” that is an object lesson in precisely why Germany and some other nations are insisting on so many limits and rules within the eurozone and EU. Krugman is fond of saying he wants to change the world and not just engage in polite dinner table conversation, but may I suggest his framing is not likely to prove an advance marketing beachhead for the ideas of fiscal union and banking union in Berlin much less Helsinki or for that matter Paris?
As for myself, when the Krugman/Avent case for the German moral obligation so frequently and so quickly jumps to what Daniel Klein has called “The People’s Romance (pdf),” and so infrequently gets into the nitty-gritty of the positive economic argument, that makes me nervous too.
There is the usual snark in Krugman’s post, but if you read it through you will notice it does not cite a single fact or estimate.
The Adam Smith segment of the Great Economists course is underway
You will find it here, at MRUniversity.com. We have recorded videos covering, annotating, and explaining every single chapter of Smith’s masterwork Wealth of Nations, along with some coverage of surrounding historical material. Having to explain a book “along the way” is a very interesting way to read, and I was surprised how much Wealth of Nations rose in my eyes as a result of this project. I would like to do Keynes and Hayek and perhaps Marx in this manner as well.
Assorted links
1. Ryan Avent on liquidity leaks, Paul Krugman also.
2. Some positive results on microcredit.
3. Some not very surprising claims about Joseph Beuys. I am still waiting for a good book about the massive influence of Rudolf Steiner.
4. Where is the euro breaking point?
5. Is Greece turning the corner?
6. “Tsundoku”, and Abenomics: the show so far.
Do peer effects have inegalitarian implications?
By now it is well known that hanging out with healthy peers predicts (causes?) good health, and unhealthy peers predict (cause?) bad health, for instance as it applies to weight and diet. So what might that mean?
But perhaps medical care should indeed be given preferentially to those who, in receiving such care, will yield a better return on the investment? Maybe people with families, or people who are merely very popular, should get more care?
That is from Nicholas A. Christakis, who also notes:
Taking network effects seriously means that we should value socially connected people more. From a policy perspective—if not from a moral perspective—the connected should get more healthcare attention.
That is a speculation and a question, so I don’t think you should read him as necessarily endorsing that as a final conclusion. There is more here, as pointed out by the still under-followed @jflier.
Indeed, once you take peer effects seriously, the popular become very busy people indeed, adding to their already-existing popularity-related busyness. All sorts of things must be done to help them and to improve them, and for the same reason that people worried about Charles Barkley as a role model. Of course on average the well-connected are successful and relatively well known or even famous, so the medical attention is not going to the poor or for instance to those unemployed whose weaker networks make it harder for them to get jobs.
I would stress the general point that utilitarian theories are less egalitarian than we often like to think. The differential marginal utility of money point is very popular, and often true, and it does generally point in an egalitarian direction. You hear somewhat less about many of the other implications of utilitarianism.
EU survey shows how much people dislike inflation
As reported by the excellent Carola Binder:
Personally, what are the two most important issues you are facing at the moment?
This question was only asked in May 2012. For the EU as a whole, by far the most common response was rising prices/inflation. In fact, 45% of people in 2012 said that inflation was one of the top two most important issues they were facing. The pie graph below shows, for the EU as a whole, the responses people chose. Only 15% of people chose the financial situation of their household as a top issue. Health and social security also had a mere 15%. I was stunned that three times as many people consider inflation a top issue as consider health and social security a top issue.
Of course the survey respondents are wrong (see the link for more details, including on national distribution of answers). I believe that a) they are confusing a tight standard of living with “inflation,” and that b) they missed the post on Scott Sumner’s blog where he mentioned nominal gdp as a way of thinking about monetary policy, gobbling up only the items on Swedish liberalism, Chinese economic growth, and Asian cinema. The best case you can make for their response is that they understand they have privileged/protected service sector jobs, they know they will not see many more nominal wage hikes, they feel more or less protected against nominal wage cuts, they do not like the idea of renegotiating their labor contracts, and so they understand that a higher “p dot” does indeed lower their real wage more or less forever.
In any case, people really do not like “inflation,” as they understand the concept. They are not keen to hear that “inflation” should be higher, simply on the basis of a theory held by some economist.
By the way, according to one measure cited in the comments on Binder’s post, measured EU inflation is running at about 1.2%.
On the proper interpretation of “The Great Stagnation”
Will Hutton writes:
At least Summers sees some underlying economic dynamism. For techno-pessimists such as economist Professor Tyler Cowen the future is even darker. It is not only that automation and robotisation are coming, but that there are no new worthwhile transformational technologies for them to automate. All the obvious human needs – to move, to have power, to communicate – have been solved through cars, planes, mobile phones and computers. According to Cowen, we have come to the end of the great “general purpose technologies” (technologies that transform an entire economy, such as the steam engine, electricity, the car and so on) that changed the world. There are no new transformative technologies to carry us forward, while the old activities are being robotised and automated. This is the “Great Stagnation”.
Such views make for a convenient target, but that is not close to what I wrote in The Great Stagnation. For instance on p.83 you will find me proclaiming, after several pages of details, “For these reasons, I am optimistic about getting some future low-hanging fruit.” Those are not Straussian passages hidden like the extra Nirvana audio track at the end of Nevermind. The very subtitle of the book announces “How America…(Eventually) Will Feel Better Again.”
I also argue in the book that the internet is the next transformational technology, and that it is already here, though it needs some time to mature and pay off. I devoted an entire separate book to this theme, namely The Age of the Infovore, which suggests that for autistics and other infovores massive progress already has arrived.
It is also odd that Hutton mentions robots and automation. My next book considers those factors in great detail, but you won’t find either term or variants thereof in the index of The Great Stagnation. Nor do I have the dual worry that both everything will be automated and there is nothing left to automate, as stated by Hutton.
The lesson perhaps is that if a book has a pessimistic-sounding title, mentions of optimism will go unheeded, even if they are in the subtitle. Might that be an example of the fallacy of mood affiliation?
Assorted links
1. Memoir of an internet troll.
2. Photo of Iceland, via GH.
3. Restrictions on doctor-owned hospitals.
4. How Laura and John Arnold wish to give away their money (recommended, and cameo by Steve Levitt).
5. “…the Colorado cannabis industry is purely cash-based…” You also can take on-line classes about how to grow marijuana.
6. Ben Bernanke gives a whole speech discussing the great stagnation and the “grandma test.”