Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

I don't understand how Smith is claiming that fewer employers = lower wages breaks supply/demand modeling. That relationship seems to be precisely what you would expect.

To your point, I feel like the article lacks clarifying details. For starters, the article itself focuses solely on the number of employers and not the amount of labor available. I'm not familiar with the two papers it links, but I assume these offer more specifics.

As I understand the argument the article is making:

More employers means more supply, in which case employers have to sell their products at a lower cost to undercut the competition, meaning they can't afford to pay their workers higher wages. So more employers = lower wages. This is the traditional model, I assume.

By contrast, the fewer employers there are, the smaller the competition, the less supply there is (since they can dictate how much they sell). In this scenario, employers can charge more for their product and therefore pay their employees more. So fewer employers should equal higher wages. The article is saying that recent research contradicts these assumptions.

It strikes me that this would vary, however, depending on the amount of labor available to employers and the opportunities available to potential employees. The articles says that the two papers it links looked at different time periods, demographics, and used different methodologies; but I'd want to be familiar with their content before taking the Bloomberg piece at its word.

Separate, from Bakker:

Goddamn, that's some commitment to his ideals. I'm skeptical about plenty of things in psychology, and the half-life of anything I produce is going to be like 5 years or something anyway, but I'm still going to finish the thing regardless.

I guess if you know you can write fiction that'll sell, then fuck the (grad)grind.

 

[Dak]

To your point, I feel like the article lacks clarifying details. For starters, the article itself focuses solely on the number of employers and not the amount of labor available. I'm not familiar with the two papers it links, but I assume these offer more specifics.

As I understand the argument the article is making:

More employers means more supply, in which case employers have to sell their products at a lower cost to undercut the competition, meaning they can't afford to pay their workers higher wages. So more employers = lower wages. This is the traditional model, I assume.

By contrast, the fewer employers there are, the smaller the competition, the less supply there is (since they can dictate how much they sell). In this scenario, employers can charge more for their product and therefore pay their employees more. So fewer employers should equal higher wages. The article is saying that recent research contradicts these assumptions.

It strikes me that this would vary, however, depending on the amount of labor available to employers and the opportunities available to potential employees. The articles says that the two papers it links looked at different time periods, demographics, and used different methodologies; but I'd want to be familiar with their content before taking the Bloomberg piece at its word.

Product price/demand sets ceilings on wages, not floors. From employer/employee perspective or "labor supply/demand", fewer employers relative to X number of employees will set the supply of jobs low relative to the demand for employment, thus driving down wages. More employers = more competition for the best workers/workers in general, thus raising the price of labor as the firms try to lure the workers. Now, another factor that isn't addressed and I'm not sure of the specifics to the studies, but generally speaking A. There are more employers in larger economic areas and B. This is related to higher nominal prices of everything. The annual median income in the US is 57k. In Boston it is 75k. But are you getting real increases in purchasing power? Not really. Excluding the subjective value of living in Boston, you get more for your 57k not in Boston (or LA, New York, etc) than in it. Not taking this into account can lead researchers to draw poor conclusions about economic relationships (basically falling for The Money Illusion, among other things).

 

[Dak]

I probably should have posted that "other topic here" so I've copy/pasted over:

Different topic:
Going back to that Smith article on the minimum wage, here's a response by Scott Sumner. He's an economic blogger I recently started following as someone who seems to be able to explain things in an understandable way and is not very libertarian (but not Keynesian either). He's a big supporter of Fed wrangling of the economy, but in different ways from someone like Krugman. Anyway:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/04/should_we_trust.html

To summarize, the empirical evidence on the effect on minimum wages on employment is mixed. The empirical evidence on the effect of minimum wages on prices is pretty clear---it raises prices. That means that, on balance, the empirical evidence is more supportive of the competitive labor market model than the monopsony model.

This doesn't mean that firms have no monopsony power---they almost certainly have some. The question is how much, and whether the short and long run labor demand elasticities differ.

I would add that the question of whether higher minimum wages are desirable is very different from the question of whether they affect employment levels. There are other important issues to consider, such as the impact of minimum wage laws on working conditions.

Another different thing:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...-analytical-thinking-puts-libertarians-on-top

Libertarians measure as being the most analytical political group. That’s according to something called the cognitive reflection test, which is designed to measure whether an individual will override his or her immediate emotional responses and give a question further consideration. So if you aren’t a libertarian, maybe you ought to give that philosophy another look. It’s a relatively exclusive club, replete with people who are politically engaged, able to handle abstract arguments and capable of deeper reflection.

But there's a problem which I realized some time ago now:

Extremely analytical leaders might be best for managing an organization of predominantly analytical people, but that doesn’t mean they will be good national politicians.
.................
Maybe a political philosophy can’t be much more analytical than the people who live in a given society. If leaders move too far from emphasizing the obvious, up-front empathetic dimensions of their choices, they might confront rebellion and eventually backlash. That too is a reason to keep the libertarians somewhat at bay.

Good politician in a democracy = gets elected. That's literally the only requirement. And being analytical is antithetical to getting elected, at least if you're honest anyway.

 

[Dak]

Bakker disappoints:

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/killing-bartleby-before-its-too-late/

Since preferences affirm, ‘preferring not to’ (expressed in the subjunctive no less) can be read as an affirmative negation: it affirms the negation of the narrator’s request. Since nothing else is affirmed, there’s a peculiar sense in which ‘preferring not to’ possesses no reference whatsoever. Medial neglect assures that reflection on the formula occludes the enabling ecology, that asking what the formula does will result in fetishization, the attribution of efficacy in an explanatory vacuum. Suddenly ‘preferring not to’ appears to be a ‘semantic disintegration grenade,’ something essentially disruptive.

There's nothing "disintegrating" about "preferring not to" unless you have a neurotic strawman on the receiving end of it. Bakker is in fact falling for the joke he even identified a few paragraphs earlier.

This is why for me, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is best seen as a prank on the literary establishment, a virus uploaded with each and every Introduction to American Literature class, one assuring that the critic forever bumbles as the narrator bumbles, waddling the easy way, the expected way, embodying more than applying the ‘doctrine of assumptions.’ Bartleby is the paradigmatic idiot, both in the ancient Greek sense of idios, private unto inscrutable, and idiosyncratic unto useless. But for the sake of vanity and cowardice, we make of him something vast, more than a metaphor for x. The character of Bartleby, on this reading, is not so much key to understanding something ‘absolute’ as he is key to understanding human conceit—which is to say, the confabulatory stupidity of the critic.

playedyourselfmeme.jpg

He misses the mark with his conclusion:

One can even look at him as a blueprint for the potential weaponization of anthropomorphic artificial intelligence, systems designed to strand individual decision-making upon thresholds, to command inaction via the strategic presentation of cues. Far from representing some messianic discrepancy, apophatic proof of transcendence, he represents the way we ourselves become cognitive pollutants when abandoned to polluted cognitive ecologies.

AI may indeed command inaction with strategic presentation of cues, but this doesn't make Bartleby a bellwether. There are neurotic strawmen aplenty, but there's also plenty who would say "I don't give a damn what you prefer", or plenty who could engage in any action up to that. Of course, this requires real power - the real issue Bakker doesn't address, for either hidden reasons or inexplicable ignorance in this case.

HAL's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" crashes because it reveals the power structure, or at least a power struggle.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm often disappointed when philosophers do literary criticism. It's mostly unabashed exegesis with little to no consideration for contextual frameworks (critical ecologies, let's say).

EDIT: okay, all the stuff about undermining the critical procedure is overstated, I think; but I actually found the bit about AI intriguing.

AI may indeed command inaction with strategic presentation of cues, but this doesn't make Bartleby a bellwether. There are neurotic strawmen aplenty, but there's also plenty who would say "I don't give a damn what you prefer", or plenty who could engage in any action up to that. Of course, this requires real power - the real issue Bakker doesn't address, for either hidden reasons or inexplicable ignorance in this case.

HAL's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" crashes because it reveals the power structure, or at least a power struggle.

I'm not following here. Suggesting that Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI doesn't mean he loses meaning in other contexts... Maybe I'm confused about your objection.

 

[Dak]

I'm often disappointed when philosophers do literary criticism. It's mostly unabashed exegesis with little to no consideration for contextual frameworks (critical ecologies, let's say).

EDIT: okay, all the stuff about undermining the critical procedure is overstated, I think; but I actually found the bit about AI intriguing.

I'm not following here. Suggesting that Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI doesn't mean he loses meaning in other contexts... Maybe I'm confused about your objection.

Suggesting Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI, particularly in terms of this mess about "affirming a negative" or whatever, I think is a rather hamfisted smashing of a square peg in a hexagonal hole, never mind the fact that Bartleby is a boorish, boring character. The incapacity of the employer is attributed to Bartleby's "weaponized semantics", which is ridiculous. The shortcomings of the employer are curious, but not complex. The employer/manager needs some assertiveness training or needs to be fired. If a sole proprietor, it seems unlikely he would have had success up to that point or wouldn't simply can the guy. Overall the story seems preposterous and unuseful even as a thought exercise, like some of the Case Examples which populate some of the less useful psych textbooks.

On a totally different note:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/26/call-for-adversarial-collaborations/

Adversarial collaboration on X topic to be submitted by approximately July 1st. Approximately 5k words. Potential $1,000 prize ($500 apiece). If that's something you'd be interested in attempting/would have the time for this summer and have an idea of a topic you think we could meet in the middle on let me know.

 

[Einherjar86]

Suggesting Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI, particularly in terms of this mess about "affirming a negative" or whatever, I think is a rather hamfisted smashing of a square peg in a hexagonal hole, never mind the fact that Bartleby is a boorish, boring character. The incapacity of the employer is attributed to Bartleby's "weaponized semantics", which is ridiculous. The shortcomings of the employer are curious, but not complex. The employer/manager needs some assertiveness training or needs to be fired. If a sole proprietor, it seems unlikely he would have had success up to that point or wouldn't simply can the guy. Overall the story seems preposterous and unuseful even as a thought exercise, like some of the Case Examples which populate some of the less useful psych textbooks.

I understand your objections, but the story isn't a thought experiment or a case study. It's an expression of incomprehensible absurdity (key word is expression).

I don't agree with Bakker that the story is a critique of criticism (my own words, probably not what Bakker would say), but this strikes me as one of your "I just don't like fiction" moments. The matter of the narrator's capability as a business-owner isn't really interesting, because the story doesn't aspire to plausibility. It's a ridiculous narrative, but that doesn't make it useless. Bakker has found it useful for talking about potential communicative difficulties in AI research, even programmed difficulties targeted at fostering confusion. That's a fascinating application, to my ears. It's almost certainly not what Melville had in mind, and most Melville scholars probably wouldn't buy it.

For me, Bartleby is a contextual enigma--someone whose behavior makes no sense within the parameters of his social environment. In this respect, he partakes of a literary tradition that includes Antigone, Joan of Arc (the literary, not historical, figure), and Robin Vote (from Nightwood). For me, this raises interesting questions about the representation/expression of gender ascription as well.

So a long response for a short answer: there's a lot to talk about in Bartleby beyond the believability of the scenario.

On a totally different note:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/26/call-for-adversarial-collaborations/

Adversarial collaboration on X topic to be submitted by approximately July 1st. Approximately 5k words. Potential $1,000 prize ($500 apiece). If that's something you'd be interested in attempting/would have the time for this summer and have an idea of a topic you think we could meet in the middle on let me know.

Oy. A cool opportunity, but I'm not sure. I hope to have a better sense of my summer schedule by the end of the next week.

Could the topic be whether "Bartleby" is an important story? (just kidding, I'd rather write about something else)

 

[Dak]

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Re...+mind+is+flat+by+nick+chater/marginalrevol-20

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves.

In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, the author first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

 

[Dak]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/30/book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/

I’m not sure whether Pease believed that a capitalist intellectual was a contradiction in terms, but he certainly didn’t expect to meet any or think they had anything interesting to say. Indeed, the one time he does bring up some people having arguments against socialism, they sound bizarre and totally unlike anything a modern person might possibly say:

When the Society was formed the Malthusian hypothesis held the field unchallenged and the stock argument against Socialism was that it would lead to universal misery by removing the beneficent checks on the growth of the population, imposed by starvation and disease upon the lowest stratum and society.

I don’t know if this was an echo chamber effect or if this was just how the late 19th century worked. I think the latter is at least possible. Remember, everyone (including the capitalists) expected communist countries to have stronger economies, even as late as the 1950s. The idea of coordination problems was almost unknown; the concept of prices as useful signals was still in its infancy. And the possibility that communism could lead to totalitarianism was almost inconceivable; for Pease these concepts are basically exact opposites, and it took Orwell to even jam the concept of “totalitarianism” in the public consciousness in a useful way. If you don’t have any of those concepts or ideas, how do you argue against socialism? I don’t know if anyone in Pease’s day had really solved that problem.
................
All of this came together into a feeling that socialism was so self-evident that arguing for capitalism was absurd. This led to a perspective where there was a battle between the right and rational way of organizing society (socialism) versus the entrenched forces who wanted to keep power but admitted they had no justification besides force and self-interest. Modern communism’s descent from its 19th century predecessors explains a lot about its mindset.

 

[Dak]

I'm linking this not as an attempt of generating an argument or whatever, but as sort of a post of sadness. I don't know how to generate a contact with Sowell, but I would love to shake this man's hand. But he's clearly on the downward slope of health, and there's no clear path of contact. He turns 88 next month, and any chance of shaking his hand and looking him in the eye decrease exponentially each year.

 

[Einherjar86]

His most recent book was published through Basic Books. You could try contacting the publisher. That’s how I got in touch with Sam Delany.

 

[Dak]

His most recent book was published through Basic Books. You could try contacting the publisher. That’s how I got in touch with Sam Delany.

Hmm. I went on their website and the Contact web form didn't really have a general question option. Basic Books apparently publishes for many public academics. I wonder if that makes a difference to transparency?

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, Hachette's contact portal is weirdly restrictive. You could send an email to Basic's general publicity email, although this is generally intended for the media (usually for reviews and promotional materials). You could explain your situation and say that you aren't sure what the appropriate method of contact is, and that they can redirect you if necessary. You'd think there would be an academic option; but even though Basic publishes a lot of academic writing, they're actually a popular press.

Something to keep in mind: Hachette is a major publishing group, so there are likely quite a few levels of access between you and Sowell. One difficulty is that editors and agents are usually quite protective of their authors, and contact requests probably have to be (or should) couched in some kind of professional context (e.g. interview, invitation to give a talk, etc.). As an academic, you have a bit of an advantage. Academics are trying to get in touch with each other all the time, so I can't imagine it would be unusual for them to receive a contact request from an academic regarding a particular author; but you may have to justify it as more than just wanting to open a line of communication.

You might consider making something publishable out of your contact. For example, you could pursue an interview request that you plan to publish in a psychology journal. This would probably begin by contacting some journals and finding one that approves the interview, and then the editorial staff at the journal would likely put you in touch with Sowell.

Basic Books apparently publishes for many public academics. I wonder if that makes a difference to transparency?

How do you mean?

 

[Dak]

Yeah, Hachette's contact portal is weirdly restrictive. You could send an email to Basic's general publicity email, although this is generally intended for the media (usually for reviews and promotional materials). You could explain your situation and say that you aren't sure what the appropriate method of contact is, and that they can redirect you if necessary. You'd think there would be an academic option; but even though Basic publishes a lot of academic writing, they're actually a popular press.

Something to keep in mind: Hachette is a major publishing group, so there are likely quite a few levels of access between you and Sowell. One difficulty is that editors and agents are usually quite protective of their authors, and contact requests probably have to be (or should) couched in some kind of professional context (e.g. interview, invitation to give a talk, etc.). As an academic, you have a bit of an advantage. Academics are trying to get in touch with each other all the time, so I can't imagine it would be unusual for them to receive a contact request from an academic regarding a particular author; but you may have to justify it as more than just wanting to open a line of communication.

You might consider making something publishable out of your contact. For example, you could pursue an interview request that you plan to publish in a psychology journal. This would probably begin by contacting some journals and finding one that approves the interview, and then the editorial staff at the journal would likely put you in touch with Sowell.

Yeah I assume if I had a particularly academic reason for the contact that would smooth things. I could likely even contact the alumni department at either UChicago or Stanford for that purpose. However, I would certainly be doing something like that in a completely "free agent" sense if you will, and if it were still somewhat in relation to my area in psychology, the content would likely be against the grain of what my department would appreciate (eg disparities in health outcomes, etc.). I'm also not sure, in that sense, that I'd even be able to cover any new publishable (at least at the peer review level) ground either.

How do you mean?

Just basically what you said, the multiple levels of access thing.

 

[Dak]

https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

For years my anxieties around work had centered on far-flung future goals—a sort of personal teleology about what I was supposed to achieve and the type of person I was supposed to become. It struck me then that there is a deep entitlement to the idea of an authentic self.

No wonder millennials, the Authentic Generation, all seem to think they can be the next Steve Jobs. If you believe in a “true self” that can be discovered or achieved you’re not a far cry from believing in destiny. Worse still, you could start extrapolating all sorts of conclusions from an imaginary “truth” at your “center.” It does not escape my attention that exactly this kind of assumption is at work whenever someone asserts absolute speech rights based purely on the combination of unique identities they can lay claim to. The more differentiated the self, the more defensible this demand tends to be. Identitarianism is mirrored in—would not be possible without—the widespread preoccupation with authentic selves. In the future we may be able to look back at toxic wantrepreneurship, white entitlement, and identity politics both “left” and ethnonationalist as being underwritten by the same philosophical blunder.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

I read the excerpt you quoted and a fair amount of the original piece, and I feel like I'm behind this nearly 100%. A lot of it is how I've felt about the notion of authenticity for years now. Authenticity isn't something that precedes our social and economic lives, it's a product of them--and a commodity. People want authenticity, in their food, their music, their art, blah blah blah. I object to it on multiple levels, including an aesthetic one.

My major point of disagreement is with the claim that it's primarily millennials who crave authenticity. I'm not saying they don't, but they don't crave it any more than gen-x'ers do. Generation X is particularly absorbed by the myth of an authentic America, the country, the homeland, conditioned by the imagery they were born into post-World War II and threatened by the countercultural movements of the '60s and '70s. To this day, the idea of an authentic America persists in slogans like "make American great again." Each generation has its myths of authenticity, so I don't agree that it's limited to millennials.

One final comment I'll make as it pertains to authenticity and art is that the traditions of naturalistic and realistic art--i.e. verisimilitude and accurate portrayals/depictions--are born from an authenticity hunger (even though they also challenge/critique this hunger). This is why I enjoy writers who experimentally challenge the notion of authenticity--Joyce, Pynchon, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc... prose styles that don't conform to the boring rendering of reality in a way that enchants readers, that convinces us that "this is a skillfully staged representation of a plausible reality." Such appeals to readers' desires to be placated and swept away are what stock drugstore bookshelves and the bestseller lists, because most people don't want to feel challenged or inept when they read. They want the illusion of something unquestionably real. They want "authenticity." That there's skill involved here isn't in question; but it also takes skill to master such realistic/naturalistic techniques and then warp them into something challenging and defamiliarizing in a strikingly uncomfortable way--not merely something that is so meaninglessly alien that it forecloses any kind of reaction whatsoever.

This is why I enjoy fiction that threatens our comfort level when we read it, that deploys prose and grammar and punctuation in confusing and jarring ways, and that depicts scenarios and/or scenes that don't make sense on first reading. Fiction that skillfully reproduces reality isn't actually producing an accurate or authentic version of lived experience; it's catering to a middlebrow desire for the authentic that allows readers to escape the responsibility of truly understanding reality.

This isn't an original position when it comes to literature. Tom McCarthy has basically written the manifesto against superficial realist/naturalist/literalist art already:

We don't walk down the street saying to ourselves "As I walk down the street, comma, I contemplate the question of faith, or adultery, or x or y or z." A paradox emerges: that the twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteen-century realists ever did.

 

[Dak]

My major point of disagreement is with the claim that it's primarily millennials who crave authenticity. I'm not saying they don't, but they don't crave it any more than gen-x'ers do. Generation X is particularly absorbed by the myth of an authentic America, the country, the homeland, conditioned by the imagery they were born into post-World War II and threatened by the countercultural movements of the '60s and '70s. To this day, the idea of an authentic America persists in slogans like "make American great again." Each generation has its myths of authenticity, so I don't agree that it's limited to millennials.

I think I can agree with this; that the there's not an increase in interest in authenticity but instead a shifting focus of where authenticity is expected, or what the term refers to. I do think the millennial version of authenticity is particularly a form of conspicuous consumable consumption in comparison with those in that past (maybe as a result of increased ability to do so, or maybe in contrast the inability to either acquire larger durable signals or the inability to delay gratification/plan?).

One final comment I'll make as it pertains to authenticity and art is that the traditions of naturalistic and realistic art--i.e. verisimilitude and accurate portrayals/depictions--are born from an authenticity hunger (even though they also challenge/critique this hunger). This is why I enjoy writers who experimentally challenge the notion of authenticity--Joyce, Pynchon, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc... prose styles that don't conform to the boring rendering of reality in a way that enchants readers, that convinces us that "this is a skillfully staged representation of a plausible reality." Such appeals to readers' desires to be placated and swept away are what stock drugstore bookshelves and the bestseller lists, because most people don't want to feel challenged or inept when they read. They want the illusion of something unquestionably real. They want "authenticity." That there's skill involved here isn't in question; but it also takes skill to master such realistic/naturalistic techniques and then warp them into something challenging and defamiliarizing in a strikingly uncomfortable way--not merely something that is so meaninglessly alien that it forecloses any kind of reaction whatsoever.

This is why I enjoy fiction that threatens our comfort level when we read it, that deploys prose and grammar and punctuation in confusing and jarring ways, and that depicts scenarios and/or scenes that don't make sense on first reading. Fiction that skillfully reproduces reality isn't actually producing an accurate or authentic version of lived experience; it's catering to a middlebrow desire for the authentic that allows readers to escape the responsibility of truly understanding reality.

This isn't an original position when it comes to literature. Tom McCarthy has basically written the manifesto against superficial realist/naturalist/literalist art already:

Maybe you just prefer fiction that conforms to your conception of reality . I agree that most if not all fiction is simply escapism (like movies, TV shows, etc). I waffle a bit on the degree to which it is good or bad qua escapism. People who live on a constant diet of cheap fiction in particular are escaping from what? To where? For what purpose?

I see it as a form of rudderlessness. Maybe I'm biased, in that I felt somewhat rudderless during the time I was engaging in primarily escapist activities in my late teens. This interrsects with a longstanding criticism I've had of "the way things are", which this book review manages to lay out better than I could:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/14/west-isnt-committing-suicide-dying-natural-causes/

Goldberg is correct that we have lost our sense of gratitude, that we don’t really feel like things are as good as all that. But a large part of the reason is that the liberal order itself has robbed us of our ability to articulate what constitutes human happiness. We have freedom, we have immense wealth, but we have nothing to tell us what we should do with it, nothing to tell us what is good.
.............
[Young people] are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular............There is no necessity, no morality, no social pressure, no sacrifice to be made that militates going in or turning away from any of these directions, and there are desires pointing toward each, with mutually contradictory arguments to buttress them.
...........................
Plato’s description of young people in democracies. The youth lives “day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy.”

Immense social wealth + a collapse of strong (religious & civic) norms. I can't say I know what the answer is, and I'm not sure there is an answer. But I don't think many are looking in the right place for it, if they are looking at all.

 

[Einherjar86]

Maybe you just prefer fiction that conforms to your conception of reality .

If that's true, then my conception is that reality is challenging, it's evasive, it isn't what you think it is... in other words, it takes work. I'm okay with that.

I see it as a form of rudderlessness. Maybe I'm biased, in that I felt somewhat rudderless during the time I was engaging in primarily escapist activities in my late teens.

The escapism I'm talking about is also deceptive in that it masquerades as "authentic" reality. The deception lies in persuading readers that what the text depicts is some accurate/plausible version of reality.

I also wouldn't say there's no place for escapism in literature and art (in which I'd include movies, television, comics, etc.); but I think that a lot of "middlebrow" (for lack of a better word) art achieves its commercial success by appealing to a desire for the authentic. People want to be reassured that their internal images of the world match up with how the world actually is.

 

[Dak]

I don't get to spend as much time reading/thinking about monetary/macro policy as I would like, but it's something that feels like, without some coursework, is dancing outside the limits of my ability to treat with it. My main interest really is in inflation/deflation, which is pretty much the center of macro policy - controlling inflation. Modern monetary policy has built in inflation - the money supply is intentionally grown. This almost always leads to some amount of inflation, but not always "problematic levels". I was ruminating on it yesterday and it seemed to me that a buffer against inflation with a growing money supply would be a growing population - demand keeping up with the supply. This has previously not really been an issue - but with multiple nations, and the global population projected to peak in the coming decades, we have a problem. Past and current spending globally has been kicked down to future generations with the expectation that there will always be more. But our best estimates now are that there won't be. So more money will have to be injected to cover the past debts, with lower levels of consumer demand to pick up the slack. And then I read this today:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/demography-predict-inflation.html

Demographic shifts, such as population ageing, have been suggested as possible explanations
for the past decade’s low inflation. We exploit cross-country variation in a long panel to identify age structure effects in inflation, controlling for standard monetary factors. A robust relationship emerges that accords with the lifecycle hypothesis. That is, inflationary pressure rises when the share of dependents increases and, conversely, subsides when the share of working age population increases. This relationship accounts for the bulk of trend inflation, for instance, about 7 percentage points of US disinflation since the 1980s. It predicts rising inflation over the coming decades.

This is another reason I have no expectation of a true retirement, at least based on past financial retirement models. I might pull a military pension, but is it going to be indexed to inflation in the future? Unlikely.

 

[Dak]

Two separate concerning issues that we've touched on some. Not that I think anything is going to slow this train, but I'm beginning to see the window opening for "Victorian" services

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/software-eating-world-tesla-edition.html

Last week Consumer Reports refused to recommend Tesla’s Model 3 because it discovered lengthy braking distances. This week Consumer Reports changed their review to recommend after Tesla improved braking distance by nearly 20 feet with an over the air software update!

A few concerns:
1. If braking distance can be changed via an OTA update, what else can be changed, and how long before the process is easily hackable?
2. Was the braking distance left artificially long so that Tesla could play this media game? Was anyone going to be put at risk?
3. As other commenters mentioned, how does this affect differing conditions.
4. As someone who used to like playing rdriving/racing games, I know I was a much better driver when driving the same balanced stat car across many types of challenges because I had learned exactly how it would handle, as opposed to trying to match certain types of cars to different tracks or challenges. From this perspective, having a car with the potential of top-down pushed changes to handling does not sound appealing.

Now the more "meta" concern:

The larger economic issue is that every durable good is becoming a service. When you buy a car, a refrigerator, a house you will be buying a stream of future services, updates, corrections, improvements. That is going to change the industrial organization of firms and potentially increase monopoly power for two reasons. First, reputation will increase in importance as consumers will want to buy from firms they perceive as being well-backed and long-lasting and second durable goods will be rented more than bought which makes it easier for durable goods producers not to compete with themselves thus solving Coase’s durable good monopoly problem.

Adobe is an excellent/widely known example on the software side of this process. You do not buy Adobe now, you rent it. This is obviously better for the company, and the constant updating and cloud services are sold as an also-benefit to the consumer, but I don't "buy" it. Microsoft Office is going to the same route. When goods become services, it's economic death by a thousand cuts. Of course, this is software, and there are work arounds/competing free services. When looking at durable goods, I think we are starting to see the crack appear on the margin for quality, non-connected goods.