Conversable Economist

The story of why it is called dynamic programming is pretty great: https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/08/24/why-is-it-called-dynamic-p…

> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore. I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy. What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide. The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage. On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because…

Copyright and patents are very different things. Lumping them under the disingenuous umbrella term "IP" only serves to muddle the waters and create FUD. They are not property rights. It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal. A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other. See…

The number of bank tellers did not drop after ATMs starting in use. https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/03/03/atms-and-a-rising-number-o… That said, yes, what about them? These are people with real skin the the game - people who spent years learning their craft expecting it will be their life-long career. Do we simply exclaim "sucks to be you!"? Do we tell out-of-work coal miners to switch to a career in programming with the promise it will be a lucrative career move? And when employment opportunities in software development collapse, then what? All while we increasingly gate health care on being employed?

(Almost) all Europeans take a long vacation in the summer, even if it only to some other point in Europe, either on the train or on intra-European air travel which is cheaper than domestic air travel in the US and the US and infinitely more humane. Many Americans take no vacations at all. See also https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/10/27/comparing-eu-to-us-output-…

> There are more people working in telecomms now than there were when we had buildings full of switchers. I don't think that's true. This blogpost [0] says there were 1.3m telephone operators in the U.S. in 1950. This BLS data [1] says that there are about half that many people in the entire telecom industry today. [0]: https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/02/telephone-switchboar… [1] https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag517.htm

For decades people paid 2 cents for a nail[1]. Why do nails cost 0.5 cents now? Because once you figure out a way to make them cheaper than 2 cents, you can make more profit by charging less -- you take market share away from producers who can't go under two cents. This is a steady process that has been going on for centuries in all kinds of different products. If it doesn't happen with EVs, it will be because government intervened to stop it. [1] - https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/04/price-of-nails.html

> But author is concerned about what this means for the state of supply chain verification. This is a brown M&Ms problem: https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-no-brown-m-story… If they missed something as obvious as this, who knows what other problems are going on in supply chain security or total lack of QA.

One interesting, and somewhat ironic, historical footnote to this, is that Milton Friedman was part of the group that conceived of and implemented employer withholding as we know it while he was working at the Treasury department. Though by his account it was introduced during WWII and not in the 1930s. ref: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.be/2014/04/how-milton-friedman-he…

Timothy Taylor had an interesting blog post on this topic : http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.ca/2016/08/higher-local-minimum-w… It is derived from a U. of Washington report found at: https://evans.uw.edu/sites/default/files/MinWageReport-July2016_Final.…

The American Economic Association site: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie This site uses cookies to improve performance. If your browser does not accept cookies, you cannot view this site. In black and red lettering on a dark purple background. A summary is available here. It's the usual economist hand-waving.[1] [1] http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/08/since-1986-my-actual-…

There are countries with much lower corporate tax rates. E.g. Ireland is 15%, Panama is 0% (on foreign income). I'd say the optimal strategy is what Facebook and Google do with the double Irish Dutch sandwich http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2014/07/double-irish-dutch-sa…

Paper towels are more hygenic as it turns out that friction after you wash your hands is essential for removing some dirt & germs. The environmental impact of paper towels is minimally worse than air dryers. http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/12/paper-towels-v-air-dr… Also have you ever tried to dry your face with an air dryer? Awkward is not nearly a strong enough term to describe it, let alone if there is someone watching you.

> State capacity has collapsed across many government functions that are essential for a functioning economy. Critical network industries, including electricity, transport infrastructure and services, security, and water and sanitation have experienced major deteriorations over the last 15 years [1] > While the racial composition of wealth at the top has changed, wealth concentration in South Africa has not and remains very high. [1] > while the standard of living has increased for a minority of formerly disadvantaged South Africans and a small black middle class has emerged, there are still huge disparities in both material and subjective well-being [2] > In 2010, the majority of citizens still hoped for basic necessities, income and employment, to enhance their quality of life. [2] So no, there is no mean reversion caused by a broader sharing of (the same set of) resources - in fact the policies leading to worsening infrastructure and economic disproportionally negatively impact the poor, black population [3] The examples I've given (blackouts, unemployment, etc.) are governance and capacity failures above and beyond any "regression to the mean" effect. [1] https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/11/20/south-africas-economy-30-y… [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-012-0120-y [3] https://qz.com/africa/1435910/blackouts-in-africa-affect-the-poor-more…

The finance sector contributes only 7% of GDP, correct. One of the sources I had in mind [0] cites 31%, but that was revenue as a proportion of GDP, which doesn't really make sense. However, the financial sector takes about 30% of US profits [1]. With respect to trading only once a day, I don't think your ad absurdum counterarguments hold water. The HK stock exchange used to trade 4.5 hours a day, from 10 to 12, and then after a generous 2 hour lunch break from 2 to 4:30. How is trading 8 or 12 hours a day better for pension funds? Price discovery with a limit order book that's cleared once a day might work just as fine as when it's spread out over hours, maybe even better. Think about some major event affecting a company happening on the weekend. Then everyone can put in buy/sell orders with adjusted prices, and they'll be cleared during the morning auction. How is that worse than if the event happens intraday, and only the most switched on automatic HFT will pick off people still quoting at the old price, then the professional traders in hedge funds will pick off people? As I said, the difference would be that the gains of the fast movers would instead be distributed among those on the "wrong side" of the news. Why should price discovery be worse? Finally, what makes you think that liquidity and bid-ask spread concentrated in a minute a day would be worse than spread out over many hours a day? [0]…

> I believe the user is referring to the iPhone here. The author of the book in a 2016 interview: > Q. As you note in your book, many of the inventions in the special century took as long as five decades to reach their full potential. Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, isn't it too early to say that smartphones aren't transformative? > A. I think the potential of smartphones has played out very rapidly. We're still at the dawn of payment systems based on the smartphone. We may 10 years from now look back and marvel at the fact that people had to pull credit cards out of their wallet. > But remember, the entire decade of the rollout of the smartphone and all the applications have not caused productivity growth to budge. There are many people who think we're missing the benefits of the smartphone in our measures of productivity and GDP. But we've always missed the benefits of new inventions. Economic growth has always been understated. But the degree of understatement was more important in the past, because the innovations were more transformative to every aspect of human life. * https://phys.org/news/2016-02-smartphones-lagging.html From a 2021 interview: > […] In the last 15 years, we’ve had the invention of smartphones and social networks, and what they’ve done is bring enormous amounts of consumer surplus to everyday people of the world. This is not really counted in productivity, it hasn’t changed the way businesses conduct their day-to-day affairs all that…

Queue theory suggests the more nodes you add to handle your queue then the longer your queue can survive (facing rising traffic) but the faster it will collapse when it finally runs out of capacity. Zach Tellman went over this in one of his talks and he had a nice graphic to demonstrate what this looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0 I suppose any complex system has dynamics like that, more capacity to absorb load, but then a faster collapse when capacity is surpassed. Hemmingway's Laws Of Motion applies: ”How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. ”Two ways,” Mike said. ”Gradually and then suddenly.” Put a bit differently by the economist Rudiger Dornbusch: ”The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” lifted from: https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-law-of-motio…

Absolute vs relative improvements, vs cost of attainment, are two different questions. The largest overall reductions, and increases in life expectancy, come from very basic interventions. The problem w/ efficiency measures generally is that there's progress to some theoretical maximum, and it comes with diminishing returns. Breaking down life expectancy gains by demographics, the've moved more for men than women (since 1920, far more the reverse before), largely due to workplace risk, violence, and military service), and the poor/minorities rather than wealthy/majority (access, preventive care, environment, violence, stress). The upper bound's moved little. Exceptional longevity is profoundly correlated geographically with poor recordkeeping. See: The difference in gains by age, here for England and Wales beginning 1700, through2013, w/ all ages from 1850: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-t… Note that whilst at-birth increases (1850) from about 40 to 80, a 40 year old gains only 67 - 82 or so (15 years). It's early-life mortality that's changed most. Similar US trends: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/qtYQp1x-ZF9iXc-zVh7Kg2xJBXGZE3Uzb0l3… By gender/race, 1970-2010, US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/101-150/db125_fig1.png An unusual presentation, showing mortality by age in 1950 vs. 2015. Note the double…

Public sector pensions are bankrupting states around the country and widely mismanaged. Not to mention extremely politicized and an easy way to get votes by over-promising and kicking the burden to the future. For all the faults of 401ks and such, they aren't destabilizing state budgets around the country, and the market is in fact relatively stable if you keep it simple. They also aren't dependent on your company remaining solvent for the rest of time. We can also relatively stabilize Social Security if we want to, but nobody is willing to make the hard choices to do so: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-plan-to-fix-social-… Until then, we'll suffer the consequences of turning anti-immigrant, years of property value getting held hostage by the few, and politicians who are fiscally irredeemable at this point (another bomb that will drop on our heads eventually)