PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XIX: America Today: A Zero-Sum Society?

"Hexapodia" Is the Key Insight: by Noah Smith & Brad DeLong

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Biscuits & Jam Returns on March 4th for Season 6 with The War & Treaty! 1:42

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Join us for the launch of Season 6 of Biscuits & Jam on Tuesday, March 4th, 2025 with The War and Treaty’s Michael and Tanya Trotter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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* Hexapodia!

* Periodically, America has had “the frontier has closed, now scarcity rules!” panics—& they have been bad, but so far they have all been false alarms.

* The “new frontier” to alleviate scarcity in America is intensive growth, right here, but more: economic poldering.

References:

* John F. Kennedy (1960): “The New Frontier”: Liberal Party Nomination Acceptance Speech <https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/liberal-party-nomination-nyc-19600914>

* William H. Kilpatrick & al. (1933): The Educational Frontier <https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/705648?journalCode=schools>

* Perry Miller (1956): Errand into the Wilderness <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Errand_Into_the_Wilderness/oKfCbW3B1xkC>

* Mancur Olson (1982): The Rise & Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, & Social Rigidities <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rise_and_Decline_of_Nations/vKxxtjJz--wC>

* Rick Perlstein (2001): Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater & the Unmaking of the American Consensus <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Before_the_Storm/6jb9AgAAQBAJ>

* Rick Perlstein (2008): Nixonland: The Rise of a President & the Fracturing of America <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nixonland/dM_enWzoghoC>

* Noah Smith: America's Scarcity Mindset: Is Our Society Turning into a Zero-Sum Competition for Survival? <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-scarcity-mindset>

* Lester Thurow (1980): The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution & the Possibilities for Change <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Zero_Sum_Society/V5uBbTOzYOAC>

* Frederick Jackson Turner (1893): The Significance of the Frontier in American History <https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-(1893)>

(Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here:

There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

63 episodios

#Science #Business #Social Sciences #Brad DeLong

PODCAST: "Hexapodia" Is þe Key Insight XIX: America Today: A Zero-Sum Society?

"Hexapodia" Is the Key Insight: by Noah Smith & Brad DeLong

52 subscribers

published hace 4 años

MP3•Episodio en casa

Key Insights:

* Hexapodia!

* Periodically, America has had “the frontier has closed, now scarcity rules!” panics—& they have been bad, but so far they have all been false alarms.

* The “new frontier” to alleviate scarcity in America is intensive growth, right here, but more: economic poldering.

References:

* William H. Kilpatrick & al. (1933): The Educational Frontier <https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/705648?journalCode=schools>

* Perry Miller (1956): Errand into the Wilderness <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Errand_Into_the_Wilderness/oKfCbW3B1xkC>

* Mancur Olson (1982): The Rise & Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, & Social Rigidities <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rise_and_Decline_of_Nations/vKxxtjJz--wC>

* Rick Perlstein (2001): Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater & the Unmaking of the American Consensus <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Before_the_Storm/6jb9AgAAQBAJ>

* Rick Perlstein (2008): Nixonland: The Rise of a President & the Fracturing of America <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nixonland/dM_enWzoghoC>

* Noah Smith: America's Scarcity Mindset: Is Our Society Turning into a Zero-Sum Competition for Survival? <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-scarcity-mindset>

* Lester Thurow (1980): The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution & the Possibilities for Change <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Zero_Sum_Society/V5uBbTOzYOAC>

(Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here:

There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)

Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

63 episodios

#Science #Business #Social Sciences #Brad DeLong

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Key Insights: * Brad’s microphone is dying, and a new one is on order. * However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear. * Although Noah has not yet read Acemoglu & Johnson’s Power & Progress , he nevertheless has OPINIONS! * Friedrich von Hayek was right when he pointed out that we could not know the shape of future technologies * Particularly, we cannot know where, as new technologies develop, they will settle in the balance between tacit-local and formal-generalizable-centralizable knowledge with respect to what is needed to make them actually work. * Thus the ex ante error rate in figuring out in advance whether a branch of knowledge is labor-augmenting or labor-replacing is high. * Better not to try to channel R&D in labor-augmenting directions: we have powerful, well-known, useful, and reliable tools for improving equity: use them rather than trying to guide future technologies in a labor-augmenting equality-promoting direction. * Noah will read Power & Progress before mid-August. * Brad will try to come up with examples of technologies other than the power loom that we wish had been adopted more slowly. * Hexapodia! References: * Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson : Power & Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity < https://www.amazon.com//dp/B0BD4DV59F > * Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo : “The Race Between Machine & Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares & Employment” < https://www.nber.org/papers/w22252 > * Daisuke Adachi, Daiji Kawaguchi, & Yukiko Saito : Robots and Employment: Evidence from Japan, 1978-2017 < https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/etidpaper/20051.htm > * Jay Dixon, Bryan Hong, & Lynn Wu : The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms * Karen Eggleston, Yong Suk Lee, & Toshiaki Iizuka : Robots and Labor in the Service Sector: Evidence from Nursing Homes * Katja Mann & Lukas Püttmann : Benign Effects of Automation: New Evidence from Patent Texts < https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2959584 > * Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens: The zombie robot argument lurches on: There is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness or inequality < https://www.epi.org/publication/the-zombie-robot-argument-lurches-on-there-is-no-evidence-that-automation-leads-to-joblessness-or-inequality/ > * Arjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang : “Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve” < https://thegradient.pub/why-transformative-artificial-intelligence-is-really-really-hard-to-achieve/ > * Noah Smith : American workers need lots and lots of robots: With the power of automation, our workers can win. Without it, they're in trouble * Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte : The fear of technology-driven unemployment and its empirical base < https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/fear-technology-driven-unemployment-and-its-empirical-base > * Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte : Technology and jobs: A systematic literature review < https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/technology-and-jobs-a-systematic-literature-review/ > +, of course: * Vernor Vinge : A Fire Upon the Deep < https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up > Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe…

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PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLVIII: The "Late-Antiquity Pause" 1:14:12

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Key Insights: * Rome did fall. It did not merely “transform”. * Across Eurasia, from 150 to 800 or so there was a pronounced “Late-Antiquity Pause” in terms of technological progress and even the maintenance of large-scale social organization. * There was a proper “Dark Age” only in Britain, Germany, the Low Countries, and France—with Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia being edge cases. * There was no Dark Age at all in what had been the Roman East—what became what we call the Byzantine Empire and what called itself the βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων — Basileia Rhōmaiōn— but the Byzantine Empire was definitely caught up in the “Late-Antiquity Pause”. * The Roman Empire starts to decline in the 165-180 reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Population, levels of production, trade, construction, the sophistication of the division of labor, political order, the ability of the army to protect the people from barbarian and Persian raids and armies—all of these begin a pronounced downward trend. * After 450 there was no real thing called the Roman Empire in what had been its western provinces—no Roman tax-collecting bureaucracy, no administrative bureaucracy to try to make decrees of Roman governors facts on the ground at other than sword’s point, no army large enough to keep any barbarian tribe from going wherever it wanted whenever it wanted. * After 476, there was nobody even claiming to be Roman Emperor in Italy—not even in the swamp-protected Adriatic coastal fortress of Ravenna, to which Emperor Honorius had fled from the Visigoths in 402. * The city of Rome itself was never a capital after 476, and was only garrisoned by Byzantine soldiers from 536 to 774. * After the Fall of Rome, in what had been the western provinces of the Roman Empire trade, the division of labor, urbanization, production of conveniences and luxuries, population, and total production were at a much lower level indeed—it truly was a “Dark Age”. * But thighbones tell us that the adults who lived in the Dark Age were taller and better-fed than their predecessors under the Roman Empire. * Perhaps this was because the end of the Roman Empire had seen the end of a cruel and oppressive aristocracy, and was a liberation of the people—there were many fewer slaves, and many many fewer plantation slaves worked to near-death. * But it is more likely that life became nastier and brutish and more dangerous, but that depopulation did increase farm and pasture size and so produce better nutrition even though the collapse of the Roman Empire’s economic network meant lower overall average living standards—the average farmholder was distressed enough by the collapse of the Pax Romana that he was willing to give up his and his family’s free status and become a bound serf of the local landlord, * Brad believes that Gregory of Tours was much worse as a prose stylist than Cicero or Tacitus—or great-great uncle Ernest, for that matter. Noah is neutral. * King Roger the Scylding at his hall of Heorot in the early 500s had no books, and was really happy whenever a bard would come around. * “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” is perhaps the best sentence of English prose ever written. * People should not overclaim with respect to the depth and spread of the post-Western Roman “Dark Age”. * People should not pretend that the Roman Empire in the west did not fall, and that there was no “Dark Age”. * Non-economic historians need to do the reading—to consider what we know and can learn about population levels, and about the productivity levels, trade patterns, and commodity types that were the fabric of the lives of the people who actually lived. People count, so you need to count people. * Economic progress is real progress. * Literacy is a good thing, not a neutral thing. * People who claim that valuing literacy is “frankly, kind of racist” should delete their accounts and go away. * Hexapodia!! References: * Erich Auerbach : Mimesis * Cicero : In Catalinam I * Brad DeLong : Þe Late-Antiquity Pause, & þe “Bright Ages!” * Brad DeLong: Yes. Rome Did Fall * Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry: You Gotta Do the Reading, Man * Gregory of Tours : History of the Franks * Ernest Hemingway : A Farewell to Arms * Willem Jongman : Gibbon Was Right * Willem Jongman : The new economic history of the Roman Empire * Willem Jongman & al.. : Health and wealth in the Roman Empire * Noah Smith : Was there such a thing as a “Dark Age” in Europe? * Noah Smith : Why didn’t they write anything down? * Ronald Syme : Tacitus * Tacitus : Annals of Imperial Rome +, of course: * Vernor Vinge : A Fire Upon the Deep < https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up > Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe…

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