Podcasts about Solow

Send us a textPokémon's patent of spherical objects throwing of cartoon creatures threatens Palword's lifeblood, while Tim Sweeney has lifted, at least a percentage point, in total gaming GDP with its injunction success.How does Apple's rent-seeking rate change in the face of this ruling? Should Apple lower its rate to 15%, like it did in subscriptions? Remember, it faced competition primarily from "webstores" too. We premier a new segment: SOLVE that for EQUILIBRIUM.We discuss the marginal *monetization* effects and debate the benefits of personalization opportunities (hint: there are none) with webstores.@Chris is intrigued by Joost's piece on rising game costs, while AI's effects on the industry are measured in the Solow model. @Phil insists rising game costs mean rising revenue and stable margins, while Eric has his own doubts.Eric's on IP Laws: https://substack.com/home/post/p-161276950Joost's On Gaming Costs: https://superjoost.substack.com/p/gamings-billion-dollar-gamble

Пиратская Станция заряжает слушателей позитивными вибрациями новых релизов drumandbass на радио Рекорд. Каскадом сабжанров и энергией танцполов пусть пронесется этот выпуск и найдет свое место в ваших плейлистах.. всем огонь! GVOZD vibez: 1.John B, Wyld Dogz & The Young Punx - Somebody's Watching Me (Dnb Club Mix) 2.S9 - Nothing To Prove 3.The Mind Hackers - High 4.All Fires & KJ Sawka - Ignite VIP (VIP Version) 5.Fox Stevenson - Exile Is A Habit 6.Friction- Set Me Free (T & Sugah Remix) 7.Armin van Buuren, Pendulum & Rob Swire - Sound of You 8.Blooom & Mila Falls - The Way I Roll 9.CHASER/Malstrom/Smoky D - Po Nizam! 10.Fade Black - Pharaoh 11.Dr. Apollo & Jordan Grace - Take Me Away 12.Jon Void & Wolf Pax - Like A Puppet 13.Bad Syntax - Wildfire (Diode Remix) 14.High One - Contusion 15.Mythic Image - Like This 16.Zigi SC/Karpa - Childsplay 17.Den Blacky - Ghost 18.Akov - Fake Blood 19.AURELIAN - Cheat Code 20.AKOV - Catalyst 21.MaLTeS - Memory VIP 22.Den Blacky & Muwa - Saw 23.Canceled Culture - Legacy 24.Chris.su - Time Goes By 25.Arcando - California Dreamin' 26.30Hz - Heavy Metal 27.Hologram - Digital Seagull 28.Emperor - Death Tax 29.NOGE/MadRush MC - Screech (No Joke) 30.Valmer - Like This 31.Mooncat - Kombucha 32.Thematic - Dirty Talker 33.Drelio & Ammon - Cafeina 34.Need For Mirrors, Young Gho$t - Red Alert 35.Oneda - Set It Off (EMCD + Seeka Remix) 36.Replete - Stimulating 37.So-Low, Trafic MC - So On 38.Gouki & G3MC - Dojo (Lexed Remix) 39.Bigm - JACK RUSSEL 40.Atmos - Dutty Gyal 41.Formula/Drz - Hypno Toad 42.Upgrade - Yoi Gi Oh 43.Hexa - Swagga 44.Jam Thieves - Botswana 45.Pruf - Dirty Vibes 46.GGrossy - You're Done 47.Jedi - Next To Me 48.Herbz, Premium, Noir Dnb - CTRL Me 49.Coastill - Do It 50.Gifta - Unhinged 51.Conrad Subs - Fatboi 52.Modulizer - Mad Ting 53.Onside - Jungle City 54.DJ Hybrid - Listen Sweet 55.DJ Remixx/Mr Quest - Ghost 56.Arttu/Richie Culture - Shot One Down (Conrad Subs Remix) 57.Dreadnaught - Back to the village 58.Dj Zent & TherapyDNB - Journey 59.DSP - Voices 60.Glitch City, Blaxx - Babylon 61.Freddy B, So-Low, VEX - Read My Mind (Exile Remix) 62.Kyng of ThievezPhat Bam 63.Blasio Kavuma - Reverie vs Machine_ Chris’ Rotterdam Rerun (Remixed by Chris Inperspective) 64.Taelimb & Molife - Chama 65.Unknown Artist - Electric Relaxin 66.Command Strange & Intelligent Manners - In My Mind 67.Bella Renee - Jaded 68.Linx - Hold You Again 69.Radiata - Locker Lover 70.Rafau Etamski - Good Day 71.Dangeon, Fri3ndship - Tides

1.John B, Wyld Dogz & The Young Punx - Somebody's Watching Me (Dnb Club Mix) 2.S9 - Nothing To Prove 3.The Mind Hackers - High 4.All Fires & KJ Sawka - Ignite VIP (VIP Version) 5.Fox Stevenson - Exile Is A Habit 6.Friction - Set Me Free (T & Sugah Remix) 7.Armin van Buuren, Pendulum & Rob Swire - Sound of You 8.Blooom & Mila Falls - The Way I Roll 9.CHASER/Malstrom/Smoky D - Po Nizam! 10.Fade Black - Pharaoh 11.Dr. Apollo & Jordan Grace - Take Me Away 12.Jon Void & Wolf Pax - Like A Puppet 13.Bad Syntax - Wildfire (Diode Remix) 14.High One - Contusion 15.Mythic Image - Like This 16.Zigi SC/Karpa - Childsplay 17.Den Blacky - Ghost 18.Akov - Fake Blood 19.AURELIAN - Cheat Code 20.AKOV - Catalyst 21.MaLTeS - Memory VIP 22.Den Blacky & Muwa - Saw 23.Canceled Culture - Legacy 24.Chris.su - Time Goes By 25.Arcando - California Dreamin' 26.30Hz - Heavy Metal 27.Hologram - Digital Seagull 28.Emperor - Death Tax 29.NOGE/MadRush MC - Screech (No Joke) 30.Valmer - Like This 31.Mooncat - Kombucha 32.Thematic - Dirty Talker 33.Drelio & Ammon - Cafeina 34.Need For Mirrors, Young Gho$t - Red Alert 35.Oneda - Set It Off (EMCD + Seeka Remix) 36.Replete - Stimulating 37.So-Low, Trafic MC - So On 38.Gouki & G3MC - Dojo (Lexed Remix) 39.Bigm - JACK RUSSEL 40.Atmos - Dutty Gyal 41.Formula/Drz - Hypno Toad 42.Upgrade - Yoi Gi Oh 43.Hexa - Swagga 44.Jam Thieves - Botswana 45.Pruf - Dirty Vibes 46.GGrossy - You're Done 47.Jedi - Next To Me 48.Herbz, Premium, Noir Dnb - CTRL Me 49.Coastill - Do It 50.Gifta - Unhinged 51.Conrad Subs - Fatboi 52.Modulizer - Mad Ting 53.Onside - Jungle City 54.DJ Hybrid - Listen Sweet 55.DJ Remixx/Mr Quest - Ghost 56.Arttu/Richie Culture - Shot One Down (Conrad Subs Remix) 57.Dreadnaught - Back to the village 58.Dj Zent & TherapyDNB - Journey 59.DSP - Voices 60.Glitch City, Blaxx - Babylon 61.Freddy B, So-Low, VEX - Read My Mind (Exile Remix) 62.Kyng of Thievez Phat Bam 63.Blasio Kavuma - Reverie vs Machine_ Chris’ Rotterdam Rerun (Remixed by Chris Inperspective) 64.Taelimb & Molife - Chama 65.Unknown Artist - Electric Relaxin 66.Command Strange & Intelligent Manners - In My Mind 67.Bella Renee - Jaded 68.Linx - Hold You Again 69.Radiata - Locker Lover 70.Rafau Etamski - Good Day 71.Dangeon, Fri3ndship - Tides

1.John B, Wyld Dogz & The Young Punx - Somebody's Watching Me (Dnb Club Mix) 2.S9 - Nothing To Prove 3.The Mind Hackers - High 4.All Fires & KJ Sawka - Ignite VIP (VIP Version) 5.Fox Stevenson - Exile Is A Habit 6.Friction - Set Me Free (T & Sugah Remix) 7.Armin van Buuren, Pendulum & Rob Swire - Sound of You 8.Blooom & Mila Falls - The Way I Roll 9.CHASER/Malstrom/Smoky D - Po Nizam! 10.Fade Black - Pharaoh 11.Dr. Apollo & Jordan Grace - Take Me Away 12.Jon Void & Wolf Pax - Like A Puppet 13.Bad Syntax - Wildfire (Diode Remix) 14.High One - Contusion 15.Mythic Image - Like This 16.Zigi SC/Karpa - Childsplay 17.Den Blacky - Ghost 18.Akov - Fake Blood 19.AURELIAN - Cheat Code 20.AKOV - Catalyst 21.MaLTeS - Memory VIP 22.Den Blacky & Muwa - Saw 23.Canceled Culture - Legacy 24.Chris.su - Time Goes By 25.Arcando - California Dreamin' 26.30Hz - Heavy Metal 27.Hologram - Digital Seagull 28.Emperor - Death Tax 29.NOGE/MadRush MC - Screech (No Joke) 30.Valmer - Like This 31.Mooncat - Kombucha 32.Thematic - Dirty Talker 33.Drelio & Ammon - Cafeina 34.Need For Mirrors, Young Gho$t - Red Alert 35.Oneda - Set It Off (EMCD + Seeka Remix) 36.Replete - Stimulating 37.So-Low, Trafic MC - So On 38.Gouki & G3MC - Dojo (Lexed Remix) 39.Bigm - JACK RUSSEL 40.Atmos - Dutty Gyal 41.Formula/Drz - Hypno Toad 42.Upgrade - Yoi Gi Oh 43.Hexa - Swagga 44.Jam Thieves - Botswana 45.Pruf - Dirty Vibes 46.GGrossy - You're Done 47.Jedi - Next To Me 48.Herbz, Premium, Noir Dnb - CTRL Me 49.Coastill - Do It 50.Gifta - Unhinged 51.Conrad Subs - Fatboi 52.Modulizer - Mad Ting 53.Onside - Jungle City 54.DJ Hybrid - Listen Sweet 55.DJ Remixx/Mr Quest - Ghost 56.Arttu/Richie Culture - Shot One Down (Conrad Subs Remix) 57.Dreadnaught - Back to the village 58.Dj Zent & TherapyDNB - Journey 59.DSP - Voices 60.Glitch City, Blaxx - Babylon 61.Freddy B, So-Low, VEX - Read My Mind (Exile Remix) 62.Kyng of Thievez Phat Bam 63.Blasio Kavuma - Reverie vs Machine_ Chris’ Rotterdam Rerun (Remixed by Chris Inperspective) 64.Taelimb & Molife - Chama 65.Unknown Artist - Electric Relaxin 66.Command Strange & Intelligent Manners - In My Mind 67.Bella Renee - Jaded 68.Linx - Hold You Again 69.Radiata - Locker Lover 70.Rafau Etamski - Good Day 71.Dangeon, Fri3ndship - Tides

It's no secret that we usually disagree with IMDB and think that a movie should be rated much higher. But sometimes, there are movies that are rated SO LOW that we have to step in and say something. On today's brunch, we each give 5 movies that are a 7.0 or lower on IMDB and then tell you what the proper rating should actually be. ****LawnBright- Go to http://getlawnbright.com and use code CONFUSED for 15% off your first order Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send me a Text Message here.Life balance? First, we need to find the center of gravity to put the fulcrum.Sharon Neumann Solow shares more about how her new book Powerful Interpreting: Build Your Skills in 5 Steps, can develop the skills we need to strengthen. From students to experienced interpreters can be supported in their practice by just trying to focus on the 5 areas laid out in Sharon's book.But more importantly, she shares her personal story throughout the 60 years of her professional career. Let's take a few lessons from her happy example.LINKS mentioned:IW Community Discount until Dec 31, 11:59:59pm.10-50% OFF workshops, seminars. Earn CEUs, CPD, and professional development hours.And much more.Sharon's new book! (Use promo code IWCurry for 10% Discount.)Give a note to ask for a signed copy!Support the showDon't forget to tell a friend or colleague! Click below! IW Community Buy Me a Coffee Get extras with a subscription! Share the PODCAST Listen & follow on many other platforms. Send me a voicemail! [TRANSCRIPTS ARE HERE] Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.Take care now.

Send me a Text Message here.WHAT?! I'm gob smacked!There are moments when our whole perspective is changed. We usually remember those moments vividly.Sharon Neumann Solow shares one such moment that stayed with her for a long time as she perfected and developed the concepts she realized at that time. It culminated in the publishing of her latest book, Powerful Interpreting: Build Your Skills in 5 Steps. Learn of that moment and more about the new book in this episode.LINKS mentioned:IW Community Discount until Dec 31, 11:59:59pm.10-50% OFF workshops, seminars. Earn CEUs, CPD, and professional development hours.And much more.Sharon's new book! (Use promo code IWCurry for 10% Discount.)Give a note to ask for a signed copy!Support the showDon't forget to tell a friend or colleague! Click below! IW Community Buy Me a Coffee Get extras with a subscription! Share the PODCAST Listen & follow on many other platforms. Send me a voicemail! [TRANSCRIPTS ARE HERE] Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.Take care now.

Send me a Text Message here.SHE's BAAaaaack! We had a "crackin'" good time!Sharon Neumann-Solow shares her thoughts as she describes the 2024 CIT conference. We discuss the beginnings of CIT, the major stars of that generation, and some of the impacts CIT has had on the training of signed language interpreters in the U.S. and abroad. [SECRET: Sharon has a new book! Check it out.]LINKS mentioned:IW Community Discount until Dec 31, 11:59:59pm.10-50% OFF workshops, seminars. Earn CEUs, CPD, and professional development hours.And much more.Sharon's new book! (Use promo code IWCurry for 10% Discount.)Give a note to ask for a signed copy!Support the showDon't forget to tell a friend or colleague! Click below! IW Community Buy Me a Coffee Get extras with a subscription! Share the PODCAST Listen & follow on many other platforms. Send me a voicemail! [TRANSCRIPTS ARE HERE] Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.Take care now.

Many companies strive to automate by using more technology and fewer humans. But does their productivity really improve? Does it keep them agile? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz share stories of companies that improve productivity because they focus on processes instead of tech alone. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize-winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores applying Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number five, the Myth of Tech Omnipotence. Jacob, take it away.   0:00:29.8 Jacob Stoller: Great, Andrew. Thanks. Great to be here again. Yeah. Tech omnipotence. Well, it's quite a myth. We sort of worship technology. We have for a long time, and we tend to think it can solve all our problems, and sometimes we get a little too optimistic about it. What I wanna talk about is in the context of companies adopting technology and go through some of the stories about that and how that relates to productivity. Really, the myth of tech omnipotence is kind of like a corollary to the the myth of segmented success. In other words, people have believed that you can take a chunk of a company. Now we'll take Dr. Deming's pyramid, and we take a chunk out of that and say, oh, well, that fits so and so in the org chart, let's automate that.   0:01:28.1 JS: And they don't consider what happens to the rest of the organization. It's just this idea that you can superimpose automation. So this has a long checkered history. And the way technology gets justified in organizations is generally what it's been, is reducing headcount. And I used to work in a tech firm, and we used to do this. We would do these studies, not really a study, but you do a questionnaire and you figure out if we adopt this, if we automate this workflow, let's just say, I don't know, it's accounts payable. So you automate accounts payable and you say, well, you got so many people involved, we think we could cut this by three people or something like that. So that becomes your business case. Now, they had categories in these little questionnaires where you would try to get other benefits from the technology, but they tended to be what they call soft benefits.   0:02:35.4 JS: And you know what that word means. Soft benefits means, well, okay, nice to have, but it's not going to get budget money or it's not gonna get approved. So anyway that's really been the kind of standard way of getting tech projects justified. And that goes through pretty much any industry. So what would happen is people adopt these technologies without looking at the whole system. And guess what? You put the software in, you start to implement it, and you run into problems. Doesn't quite work. Doesn't work the way it was supposed to. And so the tech people tended and still do tend to blame the company. They say, well, they had user problems. Users weren't really adjusting to it. These people are sort of way behind. We're a tech company. We've automated the same process for 50 different companies, we know what's good for them. We have to educate them, but they don't seem to want to be educated. So that was kind of the way it was. And I'll give you an extreme example. I did some freelance work for research firm, and one of the studies I worked on, I'm not making this up, it was called Aligning the Business with IT. So it was trying to get people to smarten up with their business and align it to what the smart people are doing with IT. So that's how extreme that kind of feeling was.   0:04:17.3 AS: As opposed to maybe aligning with the customer or something like that.   0:04:21.1 JS: Well, yeah, wouldn't that be crazy? Or how about aligning IT with the business? Finding out what the business wants. So anyway, that whole way of thinking has had, it's sort of filtered into manufacturing in the same way. And I found this out really researching Productivity Reimagined as I interviewed Ben Armstrong from MIT Industrial Performance Center. And what I learned from him is the whole history of automation and manufacturing in North America. And really, what he told me is that between 1990 and 2010, there were increases in productivity, but those were always from reducing headcount. They never found ways to actually grow the value of the business by using automation. So around 2010 or leading up to 2010, manufacturing started to change, and we started to transition into what they call a high-mix, low-volume type of markets.   0:05:33.3 JS: And I've talked to manufacturers that have said, 10 years ago, I only had to make two or three variations of this part, now I have to make 50 or 60. So you're getting shorter product cycles, larger mix. And the big buzzword now in manufacturing is agility. You've gotta be agile. So there was a study MIT, I think this Performance Center did a study. And they found that when you actually try to grow productivity, and this is really since 2010, you actually lose agility at the same time. You're kind of caught in that situation because you can't... That you lose agility when you let go of people. But that was the only way they could increase productivity. Does that make sense?   0:06:29.1 AS: Yeah. So I'm thinking about that's interesting because agility means being flexible, being able to accommodate. And when you think about the typical automation, it's about repetitive, repetitive, repetitive.   0:06:46.5 JS: Yeah.   0:06:47.3 AS: And so I can kind of get that picture about the agility versus, let's say automation or repetitive processes.   0:06:56.3 JS: Yeah. And I think that people are longing for this golden age. You go from the 1920s to 1960s, and manufacturers made incredible gains in productivity with automation. You put in these huge welding lines where they just weld. You look at the body welding, say in a plant, and it's at lightning speed. There's no question about that. But they basically ran into a plateau with that. And one of the robotics companies told me, he said, we learned decades ago how to automate these mass production processes, but now we're getting into a different kind of age where as somebody put it, we're moving from the industrial mass production age into what they call the process age, where processes are becoming more and more important. So to...   0:07:50.8 AS: And I'm thinking about the automation. I've seen videos on like online about let's say a fulfillment center with all these little robots going around and picking, putting things on them and packaging them, and all of that. So I'm thinking, well, automation has become definitely more maybe, I don't know if the words agile, but it's definitely, it's gone beyond like just automating one little part of the process.   0:08:21.4 JS: Yeah. It's gone away from the let's replace people type scenario. And so what the fastest growing segment right now in robotics is collaborative robots, which can work with people. So to put it very simply, instead of a human replacement, they're becoming tools. But these things are amazing. A worker online on the shop floor can programming these, and they have to be able to because things are changing so fast. So a worker, a welder can actually hold the robotic arm and guide it through a weld and thereby program it so it can learn how to do that weld. So then you can get the robot doing all the dangerous parts. If they're welding something large where they might have to get up on scaffolds or something, they might be able to get the robot to do some of the more dangerous types of positions. So that's when you get the real benefit.   0:09:27.7 AS: Yeah. I would think like in a paint booth, which we had in factories I worked at, now you can seal it off and have a robot in there, and all of a sudden lung problems and other things like that just go away.   0:09:40.8 JS: Interesting. Well, so anyway, we're still in a, I think in a rough spot generally with manufacturing because between 2010 and present day, at least in North America, productivity's gone down. And it's because people haven't been able to... They've depended on those people to keep their agility, but they haven't learned how to add value.   0:10:08.3 AS: Can you discuss that just for a second about productivity going down? That's a little bit of an odd thing because I think most people think that productivity's probably going up. What is the measure you're talking about, and how long and why is that happening?   0:10:23.5 JS: I think it's basically... At least I'd have to look at the study that they have, but it's basically output in proportion to the number of hours. I think that's pretty well accepted. So they're losing ground as the demands for agility are increasing. And their attempts to automate have been, caused problems. You automate and you lose your people, and then you're gonna have a heck of a time getting them back right now because that's really hard in manufacturing. But yeah, I would have to look at the study in detail to understand how they got that number, but I was taking it on faith that this is from Ben Armstrong, who's the director of the Industrial Performance Center.   0:11:11.8 AS: Yeah. You just mentioned something that I was just recently talking with another person about, and that was, one of the downsides of an aging workforce is that you're losing really senior people and you're replacing 'em with people that may not have the skills. Also, US kind of is notorious in America for a declining education. And with education coming down for the last 30 years or so, it's also hard to find, let's say, engineers and people that... There's not a deep market in some of these places where there's need. So that's a real challenge that businesses are facing.   0:11:55.2 JS: It is. Yeah.   0:11:56.3 JS: Yeah. And now what they're doing is they're looking at manufacturing from that standpoint. They're now acknowledging that the scarce resource is the human. And we have to actually build, if we're gonna automate, we have to build those processes around people. And that's... I'm gonna just read you a description here. There's, I think you heard of Technology 4.0, where they talked about putting sensors all over the place and having smart factories and that kind of thing.   0:12:27.7 AS: Yeah.   0:12:28.3 JS: Well, we now have something called Industry 5.0, and I'm just trying to get the wording here 'cause this has been around for a couple years, but it's on the EU website. It says it's "a vision that places the wellbeing of the worker at the center of the production process and uses new technologies to provide prosperity beyond jobs and growth while respecting the production limits of the planet." So they're really trying to center technology around that so you're not doing your sort of environmental and your DEI and all that independently of your production, it's all integrated part of it, which is I think something I'm sure Dr. Deming would have advocated.   0:13:17.8 AS: I'm still kind of fascinated by the productivity, and I just look at here in Asia, productivity is just rising. Education levels are rising. Engineering skills are rising. Competency in certain areas, specialties is just rising. And I oftentimes, I think that one of the things why this... One of the reasons why this is a good discussion that we're having is because in the West, in particular in the US, there's a new challenge. And that is how do you bring business... How do you bring jobs back to the economy when you're facing a very, very different workforce from when, let's say I left Ohio in 1985, roughly. It's a very different workforce nowadays.   0:14:07.1 JS: Well, yeah. And I think a lot of the offshoring arguments were about, well, we'll keep the smart jobs here 'cause we're all well educated and we'll export the low paying, less skilled jobs abroad, and we'll all win. But now, of course, we're finding that people overseas are getting darn well educated, so you can't have a more expensive labor force and have people that maybe aren't even as well educated.   0:14:40.0 AS: Yeah.   0:14:40.2 JS: So it's... Yeah, I think the West is in a very tight spot right now.   0:14:45.3 AS: Yeah. So speaking of automation and technology, I was just typing as you were speaking, and looking at productivity, it says... I was using ChatGPT and that says, US productivity growth average 2.7 annually from 2000 to 2007, but slowed to 1.4% from 2007 to 2019. There was a brief pickup in 2020, and then it's been slow since then. And they talked about this productivity paradox that I think is what you're referencing what Ben is saying.   0:15:21.3 JS: Solow's paradox? Yeah.   0:15:22.6 AS: Yeah. So that's interesting. Yep.   0:15:25.8 JS: Yeah. Solow's paradox, what does it say, that you can see the impact of technology everywhere except in the productivity numbers. I think that's what he said.   0:15:36.8 AS: Yeah, so he said that...   0:15:37.2 JS: He said that by the way in 1987. So anyway, yeah, maybe we're slow learners or something like that. But no, that's really fascinating. But I think that there's a difference between GDP growth and the growth of productivity in manufacturing. I think probably the ones that Ben Armstrong quoted were a little closer to actual manufacturing. But right now, GDP includes financial intermediation, it includes... If you own a home in North America, they include imputed rent, the rent you would have been paying as part of the GDP. So I think there's a bit of inflation, I guess, in the GDP over the years. So I think we have to take that sometimes with a little bit of a grain of salt and look a little more carefully at what the numbers are telling us.   0:16:32.8 AS: Yeah. The main ways that we typically look at it outside of GDP is like non-farm productivity, like non-farm worker, what's the output? And the other one is total factor of productivity. So yeah, GDP can be quite distorted for sure.   0:16:50.4 JS: Yeah, for sure. And anyway, and also just taking GDP per worker can be a very misleading number.   0:17:00.5 AS: Yeah.   0:17:01.3 JS: But anyway, yeah, it's fascinating. But again, the myth is... This myth that technology will solve everything is all over the place. I think with autonomous vehicles, the idea of being able to replace drivers is a just enormous economic cherry, I guess, that everybody wants to pick. You think about it what that would mean if you could... If you bought a car and then you could rent it out as a taxi at night, or what it would do to Uber if they didn't have to have people driving the cars. It's just enormous. But it's been very, very frustrating to get to that point. And when you look at a lot of the forecasts, it's still a long way away. So I think we have to be more conservative about that and talk about more the benefits really of technology and people working together. And I think the automatic driving features they have on cars now are fantastic. You can make a car a lot safer. You can slow down if you're tailgating somebody, it alerts you of just even the simple things that if there's a car to your left passing on the freeway, you get an alert, and that's... This is all really, really good stuff, but I still think that the self-driving part is maybe longer off than people think.   0:18:39.4 AS: Yeah. I think regulators too get panicked and then people want action when there's an accident or something like that. You also mentioned something about the computing power that's required for some of what this is doing, and that's a fascinating topic because it's funny, it's just amazing how much computing power is really going to be required over the next 10, 20 years.   0:19:05.0 JS: Yeah. I think there's a bell curve around some of this stuff, and I'm just gonna talk and I'm gonna jump to regenerative AI, which everybody is talking about. And they're saying, how long before I can have regenerative AI write a document that we could actually be held liable for? It can write documents, but you can't trust it. So they keep trying to improve it, but it's a kind of an exponential problem here where the wider you make your bell curve, the exponentially more power you need to do that. To the point where Microsoft is talking about buying Three Mile Island nuclear plant and rebuilding it to power all this AI stuff. So it's just phenomenal amount of power. I think that's somewhat... I don't know, relying purely on more computer power seems like it might not be a winning strategy.   0:20:13.3 AS: Yeah. It's the regenerative AI and all that's going on is also... I like to say when proponents talk about it and its strengths, which it definitely has strengths, I'm not arguing against that, I use ChatGPT almost every day. And I can say I used to have an editor sit next to me a lot of times and now I don't need that because I can go back and forth. But what I can say is that when a proponent of AI gets accused of murder and they're innocent and they're gonna go before a judge, is that proponent of AI gonna use purely AI to build their defense or would they prefer to have a lawyer who's using AI as a tool. I think I would argue we're far away from the trust level of being able to walk in there and say, I trust AI to get me out of this situation that I've been accused of murder and I'm innocent and it can get me out. There's no way any of the proponents of AI would take on that I would argue.   0:21:23.3 JS: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I very recently had to write an affidavit and my lawyer was being a little slow on it, so I tried ChatGPT just for the heck of it and I created what I thought was pretty convincing. I gave it the facts and it gave a pretty convincing sounding affidavit, but then the lawyer did it and I saw what she did and it was so much... She had it... It was almost a human touch to it. It almost looked a little less like an affidavit. It was more of a sort of a document that had some meaning to it. That was an eyeopener for me.   0:22:10.8 AS: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.   0:22:13.6 JS: But anyway, yeah, I'm wondering if we could jump back to automation and manufacturing because there's a story I wanted to share with you about some of the followers here of Toyota and, of course, company that's strongly dedicated to Deming's principles as well. And this is a company called Parker Hannifin. And what they do, and this is in the Lean tradition, is they're very conservative about adopting robots or any kind of automation. And they realize, when you bring in robots, you're bringing in software, you have to upgrade the software, you have to maintain it, you gotta train people, there's a risk of obsolescence or whatever, there's all that risk. So you really wanna be very, very careful. So what they do at Parker is you have to, but if you're gonna present a business case for a robot, you gotta be able to show that that's the only way that you can get the improvements you want.   0:23:22.3 JS: And by the way, you gotta have a target. You don't just say I wanna automate this, you say I wanna make this process better, here's how. So I got an example from Stephen Moore who's... He's retired now, but he was the VP I think of operations. So he was certainly the top person in terms of all the Lean initiatives that they did. But he told me and gave me an example. He said that somebody came to them, they had a cell with three people and they wanted to use the robot, one, so that they could reduce from three to two because they needed another person in another area. And secondly, there was a safety problem with that cell with loading and unloading the machines. So they came to Stephen and Stephen said, okay, let's divide our team into two groups. One group can sort out, plan the robotic implementation, how it's going to be done. The other group is gonna see if they can achieve the same objectives without a robot. So by the end of the week, the team that was without the robot team was able to achieve both objectives. They were able to reduce it down to two people and they solved the safety problem over the loading. So just by thinking it out by really going deeply into the process, they were able to do everything that people expected the automation to do.   0:24:58.3 JS: So that is a philosophy, I think is a lesson I think to anybody that's automating. 'Cause remember, we've got lots of companies that are just thinking about replacing people, whereas Parker Hannifin is talking about increasing the value of processes. They're concerned about safety here as well as headcount. And very often, they're looking at processes to improve the quality. So we've gotta look with a broader lens.   0:25:29.1 AS: That's fascinating. And for those people that don't know Parker Hannifin, I had mentioned before that was one of my father's big accounts when he was working in DuPont in the old days.   0:25:37.4 JS: Oh yeah.   0:25:38.4 AS: He was living in Cleveland. We were living... I grew up near Cleveland. But Parker Hannifin is about a $77 billion company. It's got a net profit margin of 14% versus the industry average of about 11%, which is already pretty high. And that's pretty impressive. But what's really impressive about Parker Hannifin is that it is the 11th most... If you look at all companies in America and you ask them which has been consecutively producing dividends since 1957, so about 66 years, Parker Hannifin has been producing an annual dividend. And in fact, they've been increasing that dividend ever so slightly every single year for 66 years. That is a very, very impressive feat. And very few companies are out there. In fact, only 10 companies are better than that, that are listed in the stock market. So there's some fun information from a finance guy.   0:26:35.4 JS: Well, of course, and the fact they've... We talked about some of the productivity challenges in the last while and the fact that they've sustained this. We're talking post 2010 when the productivity has been slowing down, and they've clearly kept things going, which is... We've seen that with Toyota and a lot of companies that follow these principles. It's a way of sustainable growth.   0:27:03.3 AS: Yeah. One of the things about Toyota is it's so fascinating is that they're not sold on automation, they're sold on improving processes. And if automation can help that, that's impressive. That do it, but otherwise, fix the process before you automate.   0:27:21.5 JS: Absolutely. And that's again I think this isolation of operations is a sort of a black box of the corporation where people sit in the boardroom and they just say to the operations person, well, that's your problem, solve it. We don't wanna know about it. So they see things outside the box in a sort of a financial lens. I think we talked about that in myth two.   0:27:45.2 AS: Yeah.   0:27:45.8 JS: Whereas the things that go on with process actually defy financial logic. We're improving quality and productivity and timeline very often too, delivery at the same time.   0:28:03.3 AS: Yeah.   0:28:04.2 JS: 'Cause it's a better process. It's simpler, it's better and it's a powerful concept. But I think a lot of people that are not inside process or not inside operations, aren't aware of that.   0:28:17.8 AS: Yeah. So how would you sum up what you want people to take away from this discussion?   0:28:25.3 JS: Okay. Well, I think there are a few, I guess, bullet points I would emphasise. First of all, there's no question that technology has potential to help companies get significant productivity gains. But you shouldn't see it as a technology-only solution, I think again like we were saying, you have to look at it as a way of improving processes and that's where the power of it really is. I think it shouldn't be about replacing people, but it should be combining the strengths of people and the strengths of technology. I think that's where a lot of the high potential is right now. But that means you've got to know how to optimize your process. And that's what Dr. Deming, what the Lean folks all work very hard on. And I kind of think this is a time when companies maybe need to think more seriously about that. And finally, last but not least, I think one of the wonderful things about technology is you can use it to remove the dull, dangerous aspects of work and you can make the jobs more, you know, safer and more human, I guess, more friendly for human workers by using technology. So I think that's a big hope there.   0:29:55.5 AS: Well, that's a great discussion of myth number five, The Myth of Tech Omnipotence. Jacob, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. You can find Jacob's book Productivity Reimagined at jacobstoller.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming and I hope you're living it right now. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Tuesday has us in Louisville where we meet singer songwriter and music instructor Shannon Vetter. Songs include Love You Better, So Low and Boundaries Baby

Was kann Technologie bewirken? Dieser Frage gehen Miriam und Léa in der neuesten Episode anhand zwei konkreter Beispiele auf den Grund. Zuerst stellen die beiden unterschiedliche Prognosen über die Zukunft der KI gegenüber und diskutieren im Anschluss, warum sie immer noch glauben, dass KI immenses Potential hat. Dann geht es um die aktuelle Lage im Libanon. Die beiden erklären, wie zivile Technik zweckentfremdet und zu Waffen umfunktioniert werden kann, und wie verwundbar unsere globalen Lieferketten in der Hinsicht sind. Abschließend überrascht Miriam Léa mit einer KI, die ohne Änderungen in der Infrastruktur grüne Wellen produziert und so nicht nur den Verkehrsfluss für Autos erleichtern sondern auch die Umwelt schonen soll.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Growth theory for EAs - reading list and summary, published by Karthik Tadepalli on September 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Economic growth is a unique field, because it is relevant to both the global development side of EA and the AI side of EA. Global development policy can be informed by models that offer helpful diagnostics into the drivers of growth, while growth models can also inform us about how AI progress will affect society. My friend asked me to create a growth theory reading list for an average EA who is interested in applying growth theory to EA concerns. This is my list. (It's shorter and more balanced between AI/GHD than this list) I hope it helps anyone who wants to dig into growth questions themselves. These papers require a fair amount of mathematical maturity. If you don't feel confident about your math, I encourage you to start with Jones 2016 to get a really strong grounding in the facts of growth, with some explanations in words for how growth economists think about fitting them into theories. Basics of growth These two papers cover the foundations of growth theory. They aren't strictly essential for understanding the other papers, but they're helpful and likely where you should start if you have no background in growth. Jones 2016 Sociologically, growth theory is all about finding facts that beg to be explained. For half a century, growth theory was almost singularly oriented around explaining the "Kaldor facts" of growth. These facts organize what theories are entertained, even though they cannot actually validate a theory - after all, a totally incorrect theory could arrive at the right answer by chance. In this way, growth theorists are engaged in detective work; they try to piece together the stories that make sense given the facts, making leaps when they have to. This places the facts of growth squarely in the center of theorizing, and Jones 2016 is the most comprehensive treatment of those facts, with accessible descriptions of how growth models try to represent those facts. You will notice that I recommend more than a few papers by Chad Jones in this list. That's because he is by far the best writer in the growth literature. His exposition of complex ideas and coverage of the big picture is just not matched by any other growth economist. Jones 2005 While Jones 2016 focuses on the facts of growth, Jones 2005 is an overview of the most common kind of long-run growth model - the idea-based model. Historically, economists used models like the Solow model, in which growth came from accumulating capital. But capital-based models are basically incapable of predicting sustained long-run growth. The now-canonical Romer model made a breakthrough by refocusing growth on ideas. Unlike machines, ideas are infinitely reusable. So if growth comes from creating new ideas, and ideas don't get used up, we can generate sustained long-run growth. This is another demonstration of the aesthetic of growth theory: theories are celebrated if they can match facts that economists think are important. The idea-based growth model is way too canonical to leave off this list. But I personally think it is overrated by EAs and not necessarily applicable to the issues we care about (AI or global development). I include it because working through it will help you understand the mechanics of growth models more generally, including the more complicated ones covered below. Growth theory for AI progress The growth theory that focuses on AI progress builds off the canonical growth work listed above, but with important advances from it. Few papers really apply their framework directly to AI, so it's important to try and extrapolate what the model implies about AI. The three papers below are the ones whose frameworks I think are most applicable to thinking about AI ...

George Jano & The Feels are back with two new singles, "So Low" and "Rocking Horse," offering a taste of their upcoming EP Under the Sun Vol. 2. These tracks, dripping with laid-back charm and expert craftsmanship, showcase a band that's not just riding the wave of good vibes but steering it with intention and heart. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wewriteaboutmusic/support

Greg and Jon discuss Greg's career and main contributions to economics. This includes the development and limitations of New Keynesian models in the 1980s and 1990s as a tool for central banks to understand how the macroeconomy works. Jon and Greg also discuss economic growth, growth accounting and the Solow model. They conclude by talking about Greg's time in government, including his time leading the White House Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush as well as Greg's advocacy for carbon taxes. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Gregory Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. As a student, he studied economics at Princeton University and MIT. As a teacher, he has taught macroeconomics, microeconomics, statistics, and principles of economics. He even spent one summer long ago as a sailing instructor on Long Beach Island. Professor Mankiw is a prolific writer and a regular participant in academic and policy debates. His research includes work on price adjustment, consumer behavior, financial markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic growth. His published articles have appeared in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and in more widely accessible forums, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He has written two popular textbooks—the intermediate-level textbook Macroeconomics (Worth Publishers) and the introductory textbook Principles of Economics (Cengage Learning). Principles of Economics has sold over two million copies and has been translated into twenty languages. In addition to his teaching, research, and writing, Professor Mankiw has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and a member of the ETS test development committee for the advanced placement exam in economics. From 2003 to 2005 he served as Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Mankiw lives in Boston with his wife, Deborah. They have three adult children. Jon Hartley is a Research Associate at the Hoover Institution and an PhD candidate in economics at Stanford University, where he specializes in finance, labor economics, and macroeconomics. He is also currently a research fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Jon is also a member of the Canadian Group of Economists and serves as chair of the Economic Club of Miami. Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as well as in various policy roles at the World Bank, the International Monetaty Fund, the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada. Jon has also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes, and the Huffington Post and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the  New York Times, USA Today, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star among other outlets. Jon has also appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, Bloomberg, and NBC and was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 under 30 Law & Policy list and the 2017 Wharton 40 under 40 list, and was previously a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

Sprawdź ile przepłacasz i odbierz 100 zł pod tym linkiem: ⁠⁠⁠http://mubi.pl/bonus-zurnalista-2

Multifamily sales are at the lowest point in the past four years. We haven't seen transaction levels this low since the start of the pandemic and after the last housing crash. But, for buyers, this could point to some tremendous opportunities. With fewer sales could come higher cap rates, lower prices, and more profit per dollar spent on your next multifamily deal. The question is, how low will prices go, and when WILL be the right time to buy? Xander Snyder, Senior Commercial Real Estate Economist at First American, joins the show to give us the latest update on multifamily sales, prices, cap rates, and even a prediction for 2025. Xander strongly argues that multifamily price declines could be far from over. With buyers patiently waiting for sellers to drop their prices and the cost of capital still so high, motivated sellers must act quickly to get a buyer, which could mean more price cuts. We'll also discuss why cap rates are expanding and how they've already jumped fifty percent in some markets. Plus, what could happen to rents as the “oversupply” of multifamily investments hits the market? An even better question is what happens when all that supply gets used up? We're answering it all in this episode. In This Episode We Cover 2024 multifamily transaction volume updates and why sales are so low Cap rate expansion and why this is great news for buyers (but NOT for sellers) Why multifamily price drops aren't even close to finished Rent price growth predictions and why multifamily investors shouldn't be too sure that they can increase rents How our multifamily “oversupply” could quickly become an undersupply  What to expect from the multifamily market in 2024 and into 2025 (significant changes!) And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Agent Find a Lender BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Agent BiggerPockets Bootcamps Join BiggerPockets for FREE On The Market Join the Future of Real Estate Investing with Fundrise Connect with Other Investors in the “On The Market” Forums Subscribe to The “On The Market” YouTube Channel Dave's BiggerPockets Profile  Dave's Instagram Property Manager Finder See Dave at BPCON2024 in Cancun! Multifamily Is Likely To Start Recovering in 2024—Here's Why Follow Xander on X Why Apartment Rents are Poised to Decline in Former Pandemic Hot Spots (Graph) Jump to topic: (00:00) Intro (01:03) Multifamily Transactions at Rock-Bottom (04:34) Why Volume is So Low (06:29) Buyers Are Waiting for This (08:38) Cap Rates Expand  (13:53) Investors Will Have to Wait (14:57) Will Prices Keep Declining?  (17:38) Multifamily Rent Forecast (19:36) The "Oversupply" Could Flip (23:26) 2025 Predictions  Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and  https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/on-the-market-226 Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim “The Red Hawk” Welch is joined by UFC Middleweight Jared Cannonier and the vet, Joe "Diesel" Riggs. The boys look back at a critical mistake made by Jason Herzog at Jared's fight this past weekend vs Nassourdine Imavov. They also broke down some exciting Middleweight action on the horizon: Whittaker vs Khamzat and Adesanya vs Dricus Du Plessis. Jared shares some health tips, insight on how he beat Sean Strickland, and more!Weekly Newsletter!https://timwelch.substack.com/Confidential Podcast!https://www.patreon.com/redhawkacademyTimestamps:0:00 Welcome Jared and Joe!0:59 Terrible Stoppage in Jared's Fight vs Imavov5:12 Whittaker vs Khamzat Breakdown6:34 Strickland vs Costa/How Jared Beat Strickland7:45 Jared Never Hurts People in Training 8:50 Jake Paul vs Mike Perry Breakdown9:18 Cannonier vs Imavov Breakdown14:42 Naval Ravikant Clip Reaction (What is True Intelligence)17:32 Our Attention Spans are SO Low 18:15 Tim Can't Stop Surfin'19:26 Jared Homeschools His Kids22:52 The Challenges of Homeschooling Your Kids24:53 Why You Need to Take Care of Your Body26:24 Jared Used to Way 300 lbs27:19 The Importance of 8 Hours of Sleep28:49 Joe's Dad Has Purple Feet? 29:53 What was Jared's Childhood Like?30:34 How is Riggs' Diet Coming Along? 31:14 You Will Lose Friends When You Are Successful 31:47 Should You Cut Out Toxic People Form Your Life?33:20 Why You Shouldn't Read Negative Stuff Online34:10 Jared's Crystals 34:41 Jared's Meditation Practices35:52 Tim is Struggling with Surfin' Pt. 236:55 Jared Has 18 Chickens37:45 The Herbs is a Meditation Hack?38:09 Tim's Chicken's Update38:35 It Takes a LONG Time to Be Successful 39:12 Does Jared Still Enjoy Training? 41:23 How to Have a Successful Relationship 43:07 What is True Wealth?43:57 How to Handle Criticism 44:57 How to Determine a Successful Day45:21 Jared and Joe are SWEATY46:11 Apple's INSANE New AI Technology 47:27 Jared is Coaching at the MMA Lab48:16 Joe and Tim's House Flipping Business Update48:51 Jared's Outside of the Cage Investments49:54 Jared's Recovery Routine50:55 Joe is VERY SWEATY on the Pod52:03 Joe's Plan for the Rest of the Day52:30 Izzy vs DDP PREDICTIONS54:34 Tim's Been Watching Film on Merab56:08 Joe Takes a Dip in the Cold PlungeAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

En marge des discours sur l'Homme augmenté par l'IA, une autre question se pose : le numérique fait-il de nous des grosses feignasses ?

 I've been in the cleaning business for 17 years. I was a solo cleaner for 15 of those 17 years. As I was first exploring the cleaning groups in 2016, I got the impression that solo was viewed as "so low". We are just trunk slammers that buy our cleaning supplies at Walmart and advertise our services on the laundry mat tack board. We are amateurs without any real knowledge of how to run a business. In fact, we aren't real businesses at all. We have cleaning jobs and yet we say that we own a company. A solo cleaner is thus a lowly title to many. If this is you, you're not alone. There are over 50,000 new cleaning companies entering the industry each year right now. In all likelihood, probably 40,000 or 80% are new solos. There are definitely companies that start with the intention to build teams from the onset as well. My point is that we are an army and for the most part feel like we're alone and the minority. We really feel like we're below the other companies. We are SO LOW cleaners. Do you relate? I know you do because I surveyed over 100 solo cleaners in 2019. I found the top struggles then to be #1 lack of money & time, #2 loneliness, and #3 feeling so low.This was tough for me too. I was a highly educated mechanical engineer and part of the corporate leadership team at one of the biggest companies in the world from 2000-2005. I seemed to have it all from the outside. But I wasn't happy. I felt so low there. This caused mild depression and ultimately lead us to start our first side-gig businesses. A few years later, I was fired from my engineering job and fought each day to put scraps on the table and drops in the gas tank to survive through a new job of cleaning houses for a profession. I was embarrassed. I felt so low and I was. My friends from high school and college were buying houses and I was barely able to afford rent. My friends were becoming managers in their companies and I was cleaning toilets. I even ran into old work colleagues looking for house cleaners. I felt so low. Why would I go through this? Why would I sacrifice the prestige of the corporate life for the so low life?The answer is simple. I wanted freedom. If you're listening to this podcast and you feel like I did. You have a really good job by the world standards. Your family is proud of you, just like my grandparents and parents would brag about their son and grandson working for GE in his big time job. But if you're also like me with all of that status and accomplishment you feel trapped. You don't know what you want to do, but it's not what you're doing now. That was me. I never knew I would ever in a million years end up in the cleaning industry. But I did. I went from an engineer to a solo cleaner. There wasn't a lot of money in the solo cleaning business in the beginning. I tried to go back to my engineering degree a couple times with no success. Even though my income was about half as much as my corporate job, I had something I didn't have before. Choices. My children were young and I didn't have to go to work at 8:00, 5 days a week, bring my laptop home and do more at home. I didn't have to think about the job on nights and weekends. I didn't have to ask for time off. I called the shots. I made my own choices as to when I wanted to work and which jobs I wanted to take. I traded income and status for a small dose of freedom. Was it really so low? Not at all. As I started gaining more choices and freedom and income, I started feeling more hope and excitement on the potential of this solo business that wasn't so low anymore. I stopped caring what others in my family thought of what I was doing for income after nearly completing a masters degree in mechanical engineering.Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

David Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is also an emeritus professor of economics with the Naval Postgraduate School. Today, we talk about another famous economist who has recently passed, Robert Solow. Henderson tells us about the Solow model, a still relevant model used in macroeconomics relating to economic growth, and we discuss its origin and its flaws. He talks to us about Solow's career, his reputation, and his attitude (Solow had a career-long grudge against Milton Friedman). Henderson leads us on a multi-media experience, where he reads us quotes from a book containing and interview of Solow about Friedman, and you can listen to it here, on the podcast!Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

David Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is also an emeritus professor of economics with the Naval Postgraduate School. Today, we talk about another famous economist who has recently passed, Robert Solow. Henderson tells us about the Solow model, a still relevant model used in macroeconomics relating to economic growth, and we discuss its origin and its flaws. He talks to us about Solow's career, his reputation, and his attitude (Solow had a career-long grudge against Milton Friedman). Henderson leads us on a multi-media experience, where he reads us quotes from a book containing and interview of Solow about Friedman, and you can listen to it here, on the podcast!Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Purchasing a home, whether it be your first property, an upgrade to a larger home, or downsizing to a smaller home, can be very stressful. However, working with professionals throughout the process makes it easier and more bearable. There is help along the way in the form of organizers, stagers, photographers, and real estate agents, but what about after the contract is signed and the home is yours? This is when it can be helpful to utilize the services of an interior designer.   This week, I'm joined by Mara Solow of Mara Solow Interiors, a designer known for her meticulous attention to detail and innate sense of scale and proportion, both of which enable her to create casual yet sophisticated timeless interiors. She's here to talk more about the value that working with an interior designer can bring. Find out why the work of an interior designer is so much more than choosing pretty furniture and Mara's advice to anybody hiring a designer for their home.   Get full show notes and more information here: https://harrietlibovhomes.com/43

Hvordan kommer AI til at påvirke webudvikling og programmering? DataSnak har sat Peter Solow i stævne til en snak om fremtiden for IT-arbejdet. Er AI godt eller dårligt for dig som arbejder professionelt med IT? Tiprunder: Adam: Dublin Jeppe: En smal bro over afgrunden  Peter: The Storm Is Upon Us by Mike Rothschild   Praktisk Husk at du kan blive medlem af vores Discord-server på https://discord.gg/QJeXHAQNjF DataSnak har fokus på it-faglige og it-politiske emner, og nørder igennem med alt fra automatisering over sikkerhed til uddannelse i den digitale verden. Podcasten behandler også SAMDATAHKs relevante aktiviteter såsom kurser, faglige initiativer, kommunikation og værktøjer og tilbud, som man kan få, når man er it-medlem i HK. Formål er at gøre lytterne klogere på hvad der sker i deres arbejdsliv her og nu og i fremtiden, og gå i dybden med problemstillinger fra it-professionelles hverdag. Tovholderen på podcasten er it-faglig konsulent Jeppe Engell. Den anden vært er Adam Bindslev. DataSnak udkommer hveranden mandag. Tak fordi du lytter med! Får du lyst til at komme med ris og ros, kan du sende en e-mail til jeppe.engell@hk.dk - og hvis du har tekniske spørgsmål eller kommentarer kan de sendes til adambindslev@gmail.com

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission. Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission. Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor.  Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission.   Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree]]>

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School.

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission. Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission. Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission. Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree

Economic giant Robert Solow died in December 2023. He was a Nobel laureate, and four of his PhD students went on to also receive the Nobel. He is known for the growth model named in his honor. Garett Jones of GMU joins Bob to discuss the work of Solow, focusing on the possible tension between the Solow model's conclusions about capital accumulation vis-à-vis the Austrian School. Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February 17: Mises.org/Tampa2024Use code "Action24" for 15% off admission. Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State: Mises.org/HAPodFree

The One About: Curriculum Champions vs. the Teacher Defenders with Kata Solow“Right now, the Curriculum Champions are winning politically. But if they're going to succeed in the classroom, they need to win over teachers on the ground. This piece is about how to do that.” – Kata SolowArticle:Comprehensive Reading Curricula and Teacher Expertise: We Don't Have to ChooseNovember 30, 2023 by Kata Solowhttps://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/comprehensive-reading-curricula-and-teacher-expertise-we-dont-have-chooseKata Solow Bio:Kata Solow is the Executive Director of the Goyen Foundation where she led its multi-year transformation process and created the Goyen Literacy Fellowship to recognize exceptional reading teachers. She is a former classroom educator, school administrator and field organizer.Goyen Foundation Website:https://www.goyen.io/Support the showThe Literacy View is an engaging and inclusive platform encouraging respectful discussion and debate about current issues in education. Co-hosts Faith Borkowsky and Judy Boksner coach teachers, teach children to read, and hold master's degrees in education.Our goal is to leave listeners thinking about the issues and drawing their own conclusions.Get ready for the most THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND DELICIOUSLY ENTERTAINING education podcast!

This is the sixth and final episode in the special 2023 Symposium Edition Podcast of STLR Conversations. We are sharing the recordings of our Symposium titled “Accountability and Liability in Generative AI: Challenges and Perspectives."   Author: Alicia Solow-Niederman, Associate Professor of Law, The George Washington University Law School Commentator: Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Sol Goldman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School Moderator: Matthew Tracy, Columbia Law School, J.D. '24   A link to slides will be posted here when available.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Will Swinton over Zoom video!Auckland singer-songwriter Will Swinton recently released his new EP, Better Days, via 10K Projects/Capitol Records. Raw and stripped-back, the release is elevated by the 22-year-old's gravelly, soulful delivery as he lays out his thoughts and feelings over lush, rapturous compositions that mix and meld a dizzying array of elements and influences—showcasing a poise and presence well beyond his years. To complement the EP Will Swinton releases a captivating visual to the title-track which finds Will hanging with his friends in New Zealand.On the EP Will Swinton says, “Better Days is a journey through past mistakes, lessons learned, and moving on. I'm really starting to develop my sound, and I'm excited to share this EP and all the upcoming music I've made.” Better Days is started off with “So Low,” a palm-muted crowd-pleaser with a momentum that sneaks up on you. It's followed by “Go Wrong,” a mournful look back at romance gone awry. Showcasing Swinton's mumble rap-inspired delivery, the ethereal anthem is as surprising as it is touching. Also included is “All for You,” a gentle folk-pop that will surely get hearts pitter-pattering at concerts and “Wasted You,” a tender love letter to someone special built around gentle guitar plucking.Other highlights include “Missing You,” and of course the somber title-track “Better Days.” His latest single “Leave in the Morning” is included in the EP too and features a raw visual depicting the essence of love's vulnerability and desire to hold on.The EP arrives amid a flurry of excitement for the up-and-comer, who Rolling Stone is already celebrating. Not long ago, Swinton withdrew his savings and flew to Los Angeles from Auckland to chase a dream. He wound up sticking around. In 2022, his very first independent single “All For You” cracked the Top 10 of the Hot 20 New Zealand Singles Chart, while “Wasted You” and “Leave In The Morning” landed in the Top 15.Thus far, he has tallied north of 100 million views on TikTok. Beyond collaborating with the likes of Claire Rosinkranz and finding a fan in MGK, he has performed everywhere from SXSW in Austin, TX to The Great Escape in Brighton, UK, and Primavera in Barcelona, Spain and a sold out a hometown show in New Zealand. Now, with Better Days, Swinton carves out a special place for himself in the music world, one which will soon be a much-sought-after destination.We want to hear from you! Please email Hello@BringinitBackwards.comwww.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #WillSwinton #BetterDays #NewMusic #ZoomListen & Subscribe to BiBhttps://www.bringinitbackwards.com/followFollow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpodThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4972373/advertisement

Today, Hunter is once again joined by two amazing advocates from Partners for Justice. Rebecca Solow, Founder and Co-Executive Director, and Vichal Kumar, Director of Capacity Building, join us today to discuss the amazing progress of their partnerships with state and local public defender offices around the country. The best part of these Partners for Justice programs is the way they build the capacity of Public Defense by responding to the individual needs of each office and jurisdiction. From California, Missouri, Kansas, and Cook County, Partners For Justice is a leader in finding innovative, cost effective ways to create better, more vibrant public defender offices.   Guests: Rebecca Solow, Founder and Co-Executive Director, Partners for Justice Vichal Kumar, Director of Capacity Building, Partners for Justice   Resources: Partners for Justice https://www.partnersforjustice.org/ PFJ Twitter https://twitter.com/PFJ_USA     Contact Hunter Parnell:                                 Publicdefenseless@gmail.com  Instagram @PublicDefenselessPodcast Twitter                                                                 @PDefenselessPod www.publicdefenseless.com  Subscribe to the Patron www.patreon.com/PublicDefenselessPodcast  Donate on PayPal https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5KW7WMJWEXTAJ Donate on Stripe https://donate.stripe.com/7sI01tb2v3dwaM8cMN  

Key Insights:* The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn't…* If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally have…* Or maybe it won't: China today is not Europe in the 1600s…* We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Nobility After Louis XIV to dive more deeply into analogies & contrasts…* Southeast Asia's future is very bright because of friendshoring…* India's future is likely to be rather bright too—it looks like a much better economic partner for the rest of the world over the next two generations than does China…* You can get pretty far by just massively forcing your society to build lots and lots and lots of capital…* Especially if you have an outside country you can point to and say “give me one—or five—of those!”…* But quantity of investment has a quality of its own only so far…* We think of technology as the hard stuff…* But actually the hard stuff is institutions, property rights, government—people actually doing what they said they would do, rather than exerting their social power to welsh on their commitments…* We are surprised and amazed at China's technological excellence in electric vehicles, in battery and solar technology, in high-speed rail, and so forth…* But those are relatively small slices of what a truly prosperous economy needs…* For everything else, we have reason to fear that the logics of soft budget constraints and authoritarian systems are not things China will be able to evade indefinitely…* Is that a middle-income trap? It certainly functions like one…* Hexapodia!References:* Brad DeLong: DRAFT: What Is Going on wiþ China's Economy?:* Daniel W. Drezner: The End of the Rise of China? * Daniel W. Drezner: The Rising Dangers of a Falling China* Daniel W. Drezner: Can U.S. Domestic Politics Cope With a Falling China?* Arpit Gupta: What's Going on with China's Stagnation? * János Kornai, Eric Maskin, & Gérard Roland: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint * Adam S. Posen: The End of China's Economic Miracle * Kenneth Rogoff: The Debt Supercycle Comes to China * Noah Smith: Real estate is China's economic Achilles heel* Noah Smith: Why is China smashing its tech industry? * Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part I - Authoritarian impasse? * Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part II - Posen v. Pettis or "authoritarian impasse" v. "structural dead-end” * Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part III: Policy hubris and the end of infallibility * Lingling Wei & Stella Yifan Xie: China's 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next? +, of course:* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep  Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

More information about Brain Lenses at brainlenses.com.BL supporters receive an additional episode of the show each week. Info about becoming a supporter at the above address, or at Understandary.com.Read the written version of this episode: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brainlenses.substack.com/subscribe

Rating: 85% - Worth Watching So many highs and lows. SO HIGH! SO LOW! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aedoubleback/message

Welcome to the Ideas Untrapped podcast - and my guest today is Development Economist Lant Pritchett. He is one of the most incisive and insightful scholars in the field, and his influence at the frontier of development research cannot be overstated. His research mostly focuses on economic growth, its contributing factors, and the development implications for peoples and countries. It was a privilege for me to talk to Lant, and I took the chance to ask him questions about some of the big themes of his research like Migration, Education, and State Capability. This is a two-part conversation. In this episode, we discussed Migration and Education. Lant provides insights into how the demographic transition in many rich countries has now pushed the migration debate to the forefront, as opposed to when he was writing about it two decades ago. How the Solow model might explain the absence of migration on the development agenda, and why he thinks the ‘‘brain drain'' is ‘‘mostly a myth''. He also explained to me how we ended up with the wrong dashboard in education policies and the distinction between assessment and examination in measuring learning. I want to thank Lant for talking to me, and thank you all for always listening. I hope you enjoy it.TranscriptTobi;My guest really needs no introduction. There's nowhere in the world of development, global development, and development economics, where Lant Pritchett is not a household name. So I'll like to say welcome, and it's a pleasure to talk to you.Lant;Thanks for inviting me.Tobi;On a light note, let's start on a very light note. What have you been working on recently?Lant;So recently I've been doing two things. I've been wrapping up a large research project on basic education in the developing world, sort of K to twelve, and that had been an eight year research project that's just wrapping up. But more recently, I'm trying to ramp up my engagement on labour mobility. The world is facing a real demographic transition point, with the rich industrial world, particularly workforce age populations, just in constant decline while their aging population is increasing. And at the same time we have this massive youth bulge in parts of, not all of, but in parts of the developing world. And, you know, I'm an economist, whenever you see huge differences, you think, well, here's an opportunity for exchange. So the world's biggest opportunity for exchange right now is the West, as we call it, desperately needs workers, Africans definitely need the hide productivity income and jobs. And it's a great opportunity for exchange, but it's blocked by laws and policies that just make migration next to impossible. And I'm working to break that gridlock and get some sensible ways in which we can put willing workers into needed jobs.Tobi;I think that's a good launchpad to start the conversation on migration, which you've worked quite a lot on. I read your book Let Their People Come a couple of years ago. As a general question, what do you think we have learned from the time you wrote that book and you were compiling that research and now? Because definitely to me, it doesn't feel like much has changed in terms of the debate. And like you said, migration is such a big issue with economic and political consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. So what have we learned? And if nothing, why is that so? Why is there such a resistance to thinking differently about migration?Lant;What have we learned is a great question. Let's start with the demography of this. That book was written in 2006. One thing about demography is you can predict it very far into the future, right? Everybody who's going to be a 30 year old worker in 20 years is ten years old today. And so it's really not that hard to know what the future, the 20-, 30-year future of the labour force is going to look like, because everybody gets a year older. So on one level, we've learned nothing. But on another level, I think there's a current ongoing night and day shift in the urgency of the issue, because things were easily forecastable when I wrote the book - what is it, 2006? 2023 - 17 years ago. 17 years ago, I was saying, look, there's going to be this demographic crisis in the West and you're going to need these workers, but it was far away. So when you ask has anything been learned, it's like, no, but all of the projections for what was going to happen 17 years ago are now 17 years closer. And now, all of a sudden, the Prime Minister of Japan, I don't know if you've seen this, but the Prime Minister of Japan gave a speech a couple of days ago saying, “for the demographic future of Japan, it's now or never.” And it's like, no, it's never. The opportunity you might have had to address your labour force crisis through fertility was 30 years ago. It's over now.Now the only issue is how are you going to get workers to work in the Japanese economy to fill the jobs that you need, given that you have the demographic crisis you have, which you now can't fix? I wish I had a good word for this or a clever way to put it, but it's sort of like when a child touches a hot stove, do you say they learned something? Well, yeah, kind of. They learned that the stove is hot. But people had been telling the kid, the stove was hot, don't touch it for years. So, you know, did they learn something? Well, kind of. They know it in a different, more intense way than they maybe knew it before, but they didn't learn anything new. So my first response is, I was just way premature with Let Their People Come in 2006 because the problem was still too far away for politicians and policymakers really to focus on it. But now it's like, boom, it's in your face. labour shortages in the West aren't like this hypothetical going to come thing. They're here, they're now. They're everything I do, everything I look at, I think it's here now. And now, like I said, the prime ministers of countries are going, “we really need to worry about this demographic thing.” So on one level, nothing learned. On another level, radical change and attention to the issue because what was easily predictable and was predicted is now happening in a way you can't ignore it.Tobi;But even with that, you still hear many of the standard objections to more migration, whether it's in the wages of domestic workers in the host countries and things around cultural integration. So, just do a quick recap for me why these objections are false or untenable at best. Because a lot of people are still susceptible to the same arguments even with copious evidence and years of research debunking them, you still hear these things. And in the age of social media, where information travels very very fast, you know, and it's also easy to appeal to people who might be affected by this and politically weaponize their disaffection. So the standard arguments to migration, whether we're talking about the work of Borjas and people who are built on the back of that, why are they untenable?Lant;I mean, we can talk about why they're untenable or many of the factual claims are false, but I think we want to start a step before that. I think the biggest problem with conversation about migration is fundamentally, and I'm talking mainly about the rich industrial West, which West includes Australia and West includes Japan, the rich industrial world. Okay. The problem is, since the early 20th century, these countries have forced two questions to have the same answer. And they're radically different questions. One question is, who are we as a sovereign entity that control a border? Who are we going to allow to be physically present on our territory and perform labour services? That's a clear question. It's a policy question. It's a legal question. It's a regulatory question. You can have an answer to that question. Then there's the separate question which is, who is the future of we? Who are we going to allow to come to our country and on the premise that they're going to become a citizen, become a future one of us and determine the future of who is us? Right? And I feel that forcing these two questions to be the same, you get a complete distorted discussion of the first question. So I think nearly everybody who's arguing about the impact of migration or labour mobility, which is by the way, I try and use two different words…I try and always use the words labour mobility because when I use the word labour mobility it's clear I'm talking about the first question [which is] who are you going to allow under what terms and conditions to be physically present on your territory and what kinds of work are you going to allow them? What kinds of contracts and labour are you going to allow them to engage in? That's a question we can debate and have independently, in my view, of the question - who are the future citizens of the country? Right? But when you force those questions to be the same, I think nearly all the discussion of wage impacts is complete subterfuge b******t. Because the problem is if you say, oh, I don't want people coming to my country because I just don't feel they're going to fit in with us, boy, that sounds racist. That sounds exactly why whites in America had restrictive covenants that wouldn't allow African Americans to move into their neighborhoods because they're not like us. They'll change the nature of our way of life. And so most intellectuals in the West are reluctant to actually deploy cultural-based arguments for migration, but it's much more politically acceptable to say, “oh, well, I'm not saying that I am racist and that I don't want people of different races or ethnicities in my country, but it would be terrible for our workers. And therefore, that's why we're not going to do it.” And I think for the most part that's just b******t. It's just subterfuge. It's just substituting an argument that's politically acceptable but false for an argument that's true but not politically acceptable.So, I think the reason why these false arguments, quite untenable arguments persist is exactly that. It's that these arguments are factually untenable, but it's easier to justify action in terms of those rather than deal with the concrete issue. And the way in which I'm proposing countries can deal with a concrete issue is start to think about separating these questions. So we have legal mechanisms for people to come and work in the country that perhaps have some path to citizenship, but you don't have to decide the citizenship question immediately when any work authorization is granted.Tobi;Of course, there are also people on the other side of these arguments who advocate for more migration and letting more people travel and be able to work. And like you said, they often mix up these two arguments as you have delineated them. So my question then is, is it time for advocates of more migration to maybe swallow some bitter pills, especially on questions of rights? Because I think that is where some of the hot buttons lie. What rights would people have? What are the benefits they are entitled to in their host country? And some of the fiscal implications of that, you know, even though some of you may be a cover to hide larger cultural or behavioral argument. So is it time for advocates of migration to, I dunno, maybe, embrace more pragmatic arrangements, so that we can move this issue forward a bit, you know? What do you think?Lant; Absolutely. I think that's a very perceptive question because I feel in the space of people that are debating and talking about migration, refugees and labour mobility, those three kind of different channels, the kind of if we use the word migration just to mean the intent that somebody is going to move permanently from one country to the other country and acquire different citizenship, then there's refugees, and then there's labour mobility. I think there's this tension between more and better. And I'm advocating that the path to better runs through more. Whereas a lot of people in this space want better, but it's not at all obvious that they aren't willing to sacrifice more for better. So I'm an economist, so I believe that if the price price of something is higher, people will do less of it. So I feel if you go to countries and you say every person who you allow into your country to do labour services of any kind automatically has to be entitled to the following long list of entitlements. They'll say, “gee, no, we're not going to do that then, we're going to have robots or we'll do without.” No one really should be talking about abrogating fundamental human rights. I mean, I've never say, oh, people should be expected to in any way, shape or form sacrifice fundamental human rights in order to move to another country. But there's a huge space in between. I like that you use the word entitlements versus rights. I feel a lot of human rights are negative rights. These are things that you can't have done to you. It's just immoral, illegitimate to ask you to sacrifice the privileges against these negative things being done to you. Suppressing your freedom of speech, suppressing your freedom of association, forcing you to change your religion, et cetera. But citizens of the West enjoy this huge amount of entitlements which they're entitled to legally as citizens. But migrants don't necessarily need to become endowed with the full panoply of entitlements that citizens have just because they're in the country. And we accept that for students. If you go to study in the United States, no one says, oh, because he's in the United State as a student, he's entitled to every social program available to any citizen in the United States or a tourist. I guess it's the lack of imagination here and I love the title of Ideas Untapped. I think there's a lack of imagination here because we're not making the right analogy.It's like, look, we allow people to be in countries for all kinds o f reasons, like tourism, for students, for passage, to do high level business deals, and we don't expect that to come with this huge array of the complete entitlements of the citizens of the country they happen to be in. And, you know, there's kind of a fetishism about work. Like, if you happen to go to another country and work for three months, that needn't come with the full entitlements of every entitlement every citizen of that country has. And then we just need to have an open and untapped conversation about what is the right line between, for sure protection of rights, for sure limitation of reneging on contracts, of abusing migrants because they're in a difficult legal situation of not being in their home country, but the array of entitlements is a hard question to answer, and countries need to take that on. Okay, if we're going to let people come to our country, what does that entitle them to and in what sequence and how? It's a hard question that countries need to deal with but I don't think it's impossible question. But it is often made impossible by the insistence of like, no, it has to be perfection immediately. Because if you say that, you act as if you're advocating for better, but I feel you're not advocating for more, and lots and lots of people would love more.And second, it's not obvious that there is a path to better that doesn't go through more because a lot of the abuse that people suffer is that they're being trafficked to reach these labour opportunities in illegal and informal and undocumented ways, which puts them at even more risk of abuse. So the analogy I use is prohibition in the United States. At one point in the United States, we passed a constitutional amendment, we banned the sale and production and import and everything of alcohol. But then what did we end up with? We ended up with a whole bunch of alcohol being marketed illegally and everybody marketing alcohol was, by definition, breaking the law. And so we ended up with a really, really crappy regulation of alcohol. And the only path to better regulated alcohol was to end prohibition and have it be legal. And I feel we're in this prohibition mode, vis a vis labour mobility, and it just isn't viable.Tobi; Sometimes the context within which these debates happen is also ideological, especially in America the right, the left. There's a tiny section of the right that I would like you to respond to their argument, or I should say their sentiments. Maybe I'll fit someone like Tyler Cowen in this category, who are pro immigration but who largely favors high performing technical talent from other countries and not people that can work in the jobs that you argue are actually badly in need of workers in the industrial world, what you call the hard non-tradables. Right? So how would you respond to that? What would you say to them who favour more immigration, but what they want is basically the stem talents of other countries? You know, let them come. Perhaps, they argue, that, productivity is stalling in the United States and to keep pushing the technological frontier, it has to be a large absorption of technological talent from other countries.Lant;My first response is that's exactly the inevitable consequence of bundling the two questions. If you bundle the question who are future citizens? And the question, who's going to be allowed to work in our country? It inevitably leads to we should allocate the few scarce slots we're willing to allocate, that inevitably leads to global war for talent kind of migration policies where you're going to attract the best and the brightest out of Nigeria, out of India, out of other places to come to America. And that makes economic sense. My point is there shouldn't be two categories. There should be three categories. Currently the debate happens as if there's two categories. There's migrants and there's refugees. Those are the two kinds of people that move. Whereas my point is we need a third category. In part, we need a third category because as you point out, and as I point out, and this is something that is, I think, completely absent from the debate in the West so far is that the change in occupational demand with respect to some measure of underlying skills in those occupations, it's U-shaped. There's actually been more increase in demand for the low skill, physical, non routine activities and an increase in demand for the super high skill. So if you look at change in wages or change in occupations in Europe, in the US, there's more demand for things that aren't easily amenable to technology and aren't repetitive, like, just to use a prosaic example, like cleaning a hotel room.Cleaning a hotel room is a very hard, it's not an easily automatable thing because it's different every time, you walk in, things are in different places. And so the result of the technological changes in the West is that everybody's complaining about the falling wages because the middle of the wage distribution has been hit hard by technological changes. But we have a whole bunch of jobs that are needed at the low end that the domestic citizens don't want to fill, and in the US, there's going to be something like a million more needed people in home health care. It's not a job that any American middle class family is, oh, you need to grow up and be a home health care aid. It's not a super attractive job to the emerging youth, and we just don't have any youth coming into the labour market, so we need to fill those jobs. But if you say to a country, oh, you should determine who you are as a people and who you are as a nation and who your future citizens are, in order to meet your needs for home health care, they're like, no, we want computer scientists, we want data engineers, we want doctors. So what I'm saying is, Tyler's argument is inevitable if you accept the premise that what we're talking about is immediate and expected path to citizenship, labour mobility and the only form of labour mobility is migration.If you look at what's happened with Canada and Australia, who adopted points systems for their immigration, that's exactly the way it went. You gave points for higher levels of education. You gave points for speaking the language. You gave points for things that were cultural match. Canada has massively benefited from global war for talent kind of recruiting through a points-based system. But there's a whole bunch of other jobs in Canada that you also need to fill. And Canada is dealing with this. It's like, okay, how do we deal with all of these existing [jobs] native born Canadians don't necessarily want and so you're not taking them away from anybody by having more people in here working on those, but on the same type, it's a very difficult political discussion to say, we are going to, in some sense, put the future of who we are as a people at the hostage of the immediate needs of the labour force. So Tyler's arguments make a ton of sense if you accept the premise there's no temporary mobility. Once you allow for rotational or temporary or time limited mobility, which can include path to citizenship, then the whole conversation changes. A fundamental principle of economics that is often ignored is instruments to targets. If you have two different targets, you need two different instruments. And so if we've have multiple needs for immigration, we need multiple pathways. And I think Tyler is right about one pathway. I'm a big advocate of the other pathway. Because I am a development economist, if I say what would really benefit Africa, it's not Tyler Cohen having aggressive American policy to take the best and brightest out of Africa, it's creating multiple pathways for Africans.Tobi;On Africa, I don't want to draw into any particular comments on that, but let's move the debate closer. Which is, we also worry about migration in Africa, especially… Lant; Oh, within…Tobi;Yeah. For example, in Nigeria, there is always a huge debate about the number of Nigerian doctors that leave for the UK every year. Canada is also a big competitor now. Another industry that is causing quite a bit of domestic disruption in Nigeria is software talents, which is a new and burgeoning industry with lots of investments but the talents are moving in droves, which inevitably brings up the issue of the brain drain. Right. I usually cite Sandefur and Clemens work on the Philippines, but I encounter some resistance to that argument that no, no, no, don't tell us about Filipino nurses. So now, is the brain drain, is it a myth or reality? I know that's a bit of a vague question, but… [Laughs]Lant;Well, like, it's mostly a myth, but at the same time, most myths have some grounding in some deep aspect of human reality. Myths that persist are capturing something deep and important. Right. So let's start with the way that it's not a myth. The way that it's not a myth is that if a country is not yet in the position in which there's really rewarding ways for the high talent workers to use their skills, then people are going to leave the country and not come back. And then brain drain is, I think, a significant problem because a lot of the pathway of the the education of the people to become the superstars in software and medicine, capable of moving to Canada, Germany, and the US, was publicly funded. So there is a legitimate concern. The whole premise is we'll educate our people because we'll recoup our investment through taxes when they become more productive people. But if that productivity happens in another place, then, yes, there's a serious problem there. But I think what we've learned from lots of experiences with India, where I live and have been working on and off for over 30 years, eventually there's another rhyming thing that's never going to become as popular as brain drain, and I call it cortex vortex. I think one reason brain drain gets so much attention is the two words rhyme, which is not a good reason for an argument to have credibility. But I'm afraid it's like people [go] “brain drain, oh, yeah. Brain drain, oh, yeah. Rhymes. It must be true.” So I want to contrast that with cortex vortex, your brains moving back and forth. There's a vortex of movement, and I think India undoubtedly has benefited from the fact that the early migration out of India into America was permanent. These people left India. But then, as India changed its economic policies, became a more dynamic place, the rotational mobility that there were trained Indians in both places that you could establish the connections, that you could create essentially huge software firms that were essentially US firms based in India. Meaning. All of the revenue was in the US. All of the work was in the US. But the work was being done in India. That was a consequence of the previous establishment of connections.So I think, on net, the benefits of vortex cortex, when countries become sensible and viable places to do business, exceed the risks of brain drain. So, not that there can never be a brain drain situation, but the brain drain situation is often a much deeper problem with the country. And when the country changes, you can move from brain drain risks to cortex vortex benefits. And I think that as a country, in Nigeria, I would be saying, well, look, we really should be thinking about why software engineers aren't setting up businesses in Nigeria much more than worry about losing Nigerians to the US. And moreover, the more Nigerians we have going and working in the US, eventually it is going to benefit Nigeria in the long run by creating the possibility of connections. The third issue. I realize I'm giving long answers, but the third issue is an issue that Michael Clemens has raised and has documented is if there were viable, again, time limited pathways, then the net effect of investment in training in these things can far exceed the drain and hence you actually get more skilled people from the possibility of migration. So if you look at the Philippines as an extreme example, like if brain drain were true, Philippines should be desperately short of nurses because there's Filipino nurses all over the world. Exactly the opposite, because Philippine nursing schools train a whole bunch of people with the promise and premise that some of them are going to go work and get jobs as nurses in other places. But the net number of nurses trained versus the net number that actually go abroad is very small. So the opportunities for Filipino nurses to work abroad have dramatically increased the supply. And so there's way more nurses, we need to think of the long-run endogeneity of the number.So again, people's ability for counterfactual is often very limited. They see a Filipino nurse working in the Gulf and think that nurse could have been working in the Philippines, so therefore it's created less nurses in the Philippines. And they have a very difficult time imagining the more complex counterfactual of well, that nurse actually created five or six additional trained nurses who are in the Philippines because they got trained as nurses and went abroad for a while and then came back and worked in the Philippines. Or never got the opportunity to work abroad. So the net brain creation is a huge driver to the extent that these very high returns to possibility of going abroad increase the total creation of supply often gets completely ignored in the brain drain discussion. So I'm sure a lot of Nigerians are investing in their software skills in the hopes of working abroad. And the net effect of software skills available in Nigeria may well be hugely positive, even though you can point to lots of individuals who leave.Tobi;One evidence that you're having a conversation with Lant Pritchett is if his answers always lead you to your next question. Speaking about the cortex vortex now. There are people who argue, and sometimes they toy with a very horrible idea of limiting emigration in African countries, especially emigration of highly educated, highly skilled people because of the fear of brain drain. And one argument that I've heard is that there is less incentive for national development if your brightest and the best leaves. The political incentive is for the ruling class to keep looting. They have no incentive to fix anything. I mean, citizens get educated, they grow up, they leave. Nothing about the political dynamics of the country changes. How would you respond to such people? How would you tell me to respond to such people?Lant; I have to say there's two levels to this. First kind of this is getting beyond my pay grade, so to speak. It's like the true dynamics of how countries come to do national development in this fourfold transformation that I talk about, of the politics, the society, the economy, and the administration, it's a huge, complicated historical transformation. And I'm not at all convinced forcing your best and brightest to stay in the country because they'll be really unhappy, and therefore, by being unhappy, they're going to play a positive role in the political dynamics is a plausible story to first order at all? I don't know. Maybe. But it's hard to point to the cases where by not allowing these people to migrate, they instead of becoming a Nigerian doctor working in Canada, they became this path-breaking political transformational figure. And a very striking counterexample is Gandhi in India. Came back to India when he was in his 40s, having spent a significant amount of time in the UK and a significant amount of time in South Africa. You could have said, oh, man, if we had just forced Gandhi to stay in India, things would have been so much better. And there are a number of significant examples of people who went abroad for a period and then came back and made a positive difference, too. So that first one, it's like, kind of on first order sounds plausible, but I don't know of any either historical, or social or political or economic solid evidence that it's true.Part of my brand is skepticism. Just because it sounds plausible doesn't mean it's true. First of all, yeah, that sounds plausible, but I'm not sure it's true. Had Gandhi not been allowed to go study law in the UK, would India have in the long run historical trajectory, be in a better place? I don't know. The actual historical thing was, and I feel embarrassed as someone who has lived in India for a long time, but I think he was 44 years old before he came back and became a prominent and effective political advocate in India. And who's to know that that experience of living broad didn't radically increase his productivity as a transformational political leader? So that's the first thing I'd say. Second thing I'd say is I have these fundamental liberal tendencies that forcing people, even if it's good for the country, forcing people to do it, makes me nervous.Tobi;Yeah.Lant;Even if I did accept that it were true, that it would be marginally better for Nigeria if these people didn't go off and work in other countries, putting that burden in a coercive way on the individual makes me nervous. Just makes me nervous. Because how did the burden of Nigeria's national development transformation fall on this person just because they happen to be a good programmer? That's not at all an obvious thing. And then the last point I want to make is, you know, I sometimes want to promote the analogy that human capital is a lot like physical capital, right? And on this, both sides have been completely hypocritical in the sense that when Westerners make this argument, I go, hey, until you guys start refusing to take Nigerians physical capital, when Nigerians want to invest in Swiss banks or British banks and say, no, this physical capital should be forced to remain in Nigeria to promote the national development of Nigeria and so we should ban Nigerians from being able to put money in Switzerland because it would be better used there than in Switzerland. Until you're willing to make that same argument, I'm pretty sceptical that your argument a Nigerian should be forced to remain in Nigeria is really a principled argument. Because analytically, it's exactly the same. And yet the West is like, oh, yeah, yeah, all of the money that wants to roll out of Africa into Swiss, and British and other banks [we're] super happy to take it, even though exactly the analytically same argument can be made as, oh, this money should be better invested and if we force people to invest their money in Nigeria, they'd be more aggressive about creating a better investment climate. But the West is fully complicit in taking all the money that wants to come out of Africa, and yet when it's people, all of a sudden they acquire principles. And then, secondly, the same thing for the country, it's like, look, if you're losing physical capital, you might want to look at why people don't want to invest in Nigeria and create a better investment climate.Tobi; My final question on migration, before we move on to another baby of yours - education. So as a development economist, and also you've written about this, why isn't migration so much on the “development agenda”? I don't know any development organization or any communique or report that is so big on migration as a development policy. Policy that radically increases the welfare and the incomes of the people, like you said. Because sometimes development is usually framed more as a country thing than the people. So why is it missing on the agenda?Lant; I think there are lots of reasons. And let me start with the one that is less, I think, discussed and deserves more consideration. And the answer is the Solo model.Tobi;Okay.Lant;So let's talk economics first, right? The Solo model, which I don't know how many of the listeners are actually into economics, but it was the dominant model of economic growth. And it said that economic growth is a combination of this thing called investable stuff. We'll call it capital. And that includes human capital and infrastructure and all kinds of physical stuff. I'm taking human capital as a physical stuff. So there's capital and then there's the productivity with which capital is used, which we'll call A. And that was kind of the dominant model of economic growth when development organizations in the 1950s and 60s came into being. Now, in the Solo model, and I had the privilege of actually being taught by Bob Solo, so I can speak with some authority about how Bob Solo talked about it. A, was regarded as blueprints. This total factor productivity that interacted with capital was ideas that were in the air. It was regarded as technical. Now, if you think about, therefore, how the dynamics of growth were going to work, is A, this technical blueprints of how to do stuff was going to diffuse very fast, right? Because after all, if I have a blueprint for how to build a power plant or build a dam or build a highway or run a coffee processing plant, that blueprints can transfer across countries really fast. So if you scratch what was the intellectual kind of environment in which the bones and DNA of places like the World Bank were built? They were built on a model that ideas were going to diffuse fast. Well, if ideas diffuse fast, then the productivity of factors in the places that now have high A but have low human capital and low physical capital was going to be super high. And so the whole problem was how do we invest in this super high productivity, physical and human capital in these places with high A and low K? That was the whole model of development. Right? Now, what we have learned and this we really have learned in the sense that we didn't know it and now we know it, is what we have learned from five decades of research on economic growth is that model isn't exactly wrong. Exactly wrong. A, is what hasn't converged. If you ask why hasn't Nigeria had the gross prospects that we would have hoped and anticipated for Nigeria, it's because A stayed low. Not because Nigeria and we'll get to this when we get to education in two minutes, but not because Nigeria has necessarily had radically underinvestment in human capital or radically possibility for investment in physical capital. It's that A didn't diffuse, and it turns out A isn't blueprints. A is much deeper things about how you can make factor productivity in a country which go way beyond do you have the blueprint to build a power plant? Right. So the first reason why development wasn't originally part of the development agenda is that in the Solo model, we should have had human capital flowing to Nigeria because the return to factors should have been super high, because A should have been super high relative to the level of K and HK. So before we get into more cynical, and hence probably more realistic and true positive models of why it's not on the agenda, I think there was an intellectual flaw about economics itself and how it thought about growth that I don't think we've pointed out strongly enough, how completely, totally wrong it is, and how it leads to radically different assumptions with how important migration is going to be. And in the Solo model, there was no need for migration. Like, once A was there, the returns to HK were going to be phenomenally high, not low.So we really have learned from constructing data sets and just decades and decades of growth research, that A doesn't converge. And that is a huge, huge puzzle. Right. Because if A were, as Bob Solo thought it was, a set of blueprints, it should have diffused very fast, and instead it's been not diffused. So that's an economic-based argument for why it wasn't on the development agenda. And the problem is, like I say, the DNA and bones of the World Bank were built because if you ask, why does the World Bank focus on moving money? Well, again, in this model that A has converged and we need K and HK to catch up, what these countries need is money. Right. Anyway, and it's very hard to change an organization's DNA. Then there are the obvious, and I just want to point out, I'm not being completely silly and naive… it's also the case that most of the development organizations have their intellectual agendas dominated by the rich donors, and the rich donors never really wanted it. Since they never really wanted it, it was always easy to push it off the agenda. Now, on the plus side, the World Development part of the World Bank, which is often a very flagship document, is this year on migration. So for the very first time, the World Bank is going to solidly bring development issues and migration issues side by side. This is another way in which I think the overall environment for discussing migration is going to change radically, I think, in the next ten years. And I think this is a harbinger of that.Tobi; I look forward to reading the document.Lant;  I've seen drafts of it, and it will be good.Tobi;  Okay, moving to education now. Yeah, so I'll start this way. It's one of those things that is super sexy to talk about politically. We are in [an] election season now in Nigeria, and every candidate is saying, I'm going to invest in education. We need to fix basic education. We need to make our education work. If we make it work, then this and this and X and Y will not happen. There will be no crime. People will no longer kidnap. They can, you know, a lot of things. The benefits of education seems intuitive.  But what frustrates me, whether you're talking to policymakers or investors or even my friends who talk about education, is, other than researchers like yourself who are working in the field, almost nobody stops to look at the evidence. Nobody. And then we've ended up with this, to use one of your phrases, we ended up with the wrong dashboard for education, where we are basically measuring schooling and not learning. How did this happen? You can't talk about human capital without talking about education. So how come we are still measuring the wrong things? How come countries are putting in money, and there's basically nothing to show for it? Lant; Wow, okay, well, that was a long set-up. So I'm writing, like, one of these efforts where a variety of people are getting together, writing about different topics, people are writing about infrastructure and other things, and I'm writing about education. And I start by saying I feel that the field of education is the field in which more false things get set than any other domain. Just completely, totally, obviously false things. Perfect people are perfectly happy to repeat them again and again, year after year, decade after decade. So let me start with the most positive possible spin on it. The most positive spin on what's happened with schooling and education is that if you go back again to the origins of decolonialisation and these newly independent national governments come in and they have control of policies for the first time, it was obvious to everyone and completely accepted that the education level and if now by education we mean mastery of certain capabilities. If we define education in some sense as a vertical axis of, we want them to have skills and capabilities and values and dispositions that are going to contribute to national development, how many years of schooling are going to do, right? There's two ways to increase the stock of, kind of, skills and capabilities. One is more kids in school. One is more learning per year. Well, in the 1960s, it was obvious more kids in school was an easily available, doable, and viable way to do that. You could just push more kids through school, and as long as you push them through at roughly the same level of skills per year, you've got more of it. Right? And every time either national leaders or global leaders or people raised the quality issue, the response is, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. There was a lot of nervousness that a lot of the early pushback against excessive expansion in the education system was really elitist nonsense, right, that, oh, these people don't really need to be educated and we should reserve education for the elite. And so it was easy to create this debate where the people talking quality were hidebound traditionalists that were anti-egalitarian, and the only acceptable position was [to] expand schooling. And so to some extent, people kept saying, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.So the reason for starting with this positive thing is, hey, we're now at the bridge. Like, around the world, nearly every kid goes to school. Like, something like 3% of children don't go to any school ever in their life. And most kids are going to school for a very long time now. And we haven't ever really come back to say, by the way, in the 1960s, it was obvious more kids in school and at constant learning per year was okay. In 1980s, there was still a lot of kids not in school, girls were out of school, et cetera, poor kids were out of school, et cetera. But in 2020, it's like, hey, we're at the bridge. The scope for increasing a country's stock of human capital or the stock of learning and skills and capabilities by expanding the years of school is over. It's just over. It's just over. The additional marginal gain from pushing out on the quantity of schooling access just doesn't hold any promise in most countries of the world. So to some extent, the discourse has to change because the facts have radically changed. Like, I don't want to go back and say people in 1960 were wrong to radically and rapidly expand education or that free primary education in 1970s was a mistake, because there were still lots of kids not with the opportunity or access to school. But that world is gone. That world is gone. And our views and attitudes and discourse hasn't changed nearly as much as the facts on the ground have changed. And so we just have to recognize that, look, the only real viable possibility for substantial, sustained improvements in the level of skills and capabilities of youth is now from more learning per year. We have to radically change that.Tobi;So I mean, pivoting to learning, I get that. But I want to talk a bit about testing. Right.Lant;About who?Tobi;Tests.Lant;Oh, okay, let's not talk about tests.[Laughs]I'm being quite serious, because there's two radically different things.Tobi;Okay.Lant;One is assessment and one is examinations.And then tests, I'm not quite sure what you mean. I'm preempting you here because I was just literally writing about this two days ago.Tobi;Okay.Lant;Most education systems relied radically too much on high-stakes for-the-student-late-in-the-cycle examinations. But they relied radically too little on assessment of learning. And so when you say testing, I want to be clear, are we talking about grade ten school leaving high stakes for the student examinations, or are we talking about assessments of, in third grade, can kids read and how do we use assessment of learning? Because within the education community there's this huge negative stigma around testing, which then I think leads in radically unproductive directions, because assessment gets thrown into the bundle with high-stakes examinations. And everybody hates high-stakes examinations, particularly because they're often unbelievably crappy examinations, meaning they're examinations of how much can you memorize? And hence we're allocating future opportunities to go to college on the basis of a really crappy assessment of learning. So everybody hates examinations, but I think everybody should love assessment. Sorry, so I've answered a question you haven't asked yet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics," said Nobel laureate economic Robert Solow in 1987. A decade later, the '90s productivity boom was in full swing. Likewise, it took decades for electrification to have an impact on productivity growth in the early 20th century. Today, artificial intelligence can write a coherent paragraph or generate an image from a simple prompt. But when will AI show up in the statistics, boosting productivity and then economic growth? Avi Goldfarb joins Faster, Please! — The Podcast to discuss that question and more.Avi holds the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare at the University of Toronto's Rotman School Of Management. He's also co-author, along with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans, of 2022's Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence.In This Episode* Prediction at scale (1:34)* How AI has transformed ride hailing and marketing (5:37)* The potential for “system-level” changes (11:26)* When will AI show up in the statistics? (16:12)* The impact of ChatGPT and DALL-E (19:46)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.Prediction at scaleJames Pethokoukis: What this book is about—and then you can tell me if I've gotten it horribly wrong—this is a book about machines making predictions using advanced statistical techniques. 1) Is that more or less right? And 2) why is that an important capability?Avi Goldfarb: That's more or less right. The only place where I [would offer] a little correction there is, the reason we're talking about artificial intelligence today is almost entirely due to advances in computational statistics. Yes, it is just stats and that sounds kind of unexciting. But once we have prediction at scale, it can be really transformative to all aspects of business in the economy. There's a reason why we're calling computational stats “artificial intelligence” and we didn't use to.Prediction at scale. That's a great three-word description. Probably why you used it. To what extent is that now happening? The name of the book is Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Is this prediction at scale already disruptive to some degree or is it, will be disruptive?The technology, for the most part, is pretty close to there, in the sense that we can do prediction at scale because we have the data and we have computational power to do all sorts of amazing things. For the most part, it hasn't been disruptive yet. And it hasn't been disruptive yet, just because we have the technology doesn't mean we know how to use it well and we know how to use it productively in our processes and systems in order to get the most out of it.Are there sectors currently doing this, but they're not doing it well yet? It's in a variety of sectors, but not enough companies doing it? Lots of companies are already using these machine learning tools, but they tend to be using them for things they were already doing before. If you had some prediction process to predict, if you're a bank, whether somebody's going to pay back a loan. In the very old days you'd have some human, the loan officer, look the customer up and down and go with their gut. And then, starting in the 1960s and especially in the ‘90s and beyond, we started to use scoring rules, partly your credit score and partly other things, to get a sense of whether people are going to pay them back. And so we were already doing a prediction task done by a machine. And now increasingly we're using these machine learning tools. We're using what we're calling AI, over the past five to 10 years, to predict whether people are going to pay back a loan. We're seeing those kinds of things all over the place, which is: You had some prediction, maybe you've used even a machine prediction before, and now we're using machine learning. We're using AI to make those predictions a little bit better. Lots of companies are using that.That sounds incremental. That sounds like an incremental advance.It's absolutely an incremental advance. We call these point solutions, which is, you look at your workflow, you identify something that a human is doing. You take out that human; you drop in a machine. You don't mess with a workflow because it's always easier to do things when you don't mess with a workflow. The problem is, when you don't mess with a workflow, there's only so much gain you can get. We've seen AI-based point solutions, prediction point solutions, all over the place. We haven't seen real transformation in very many industries. We've seen it in a couple. We haven't seen it in very many industries because real transformation requires doing things differently.How AI has transformed ride hailing and marketingDo you think that it has happened in one or two industries that you think would actually meet that bar of transformational? Can you give me an example?Absolutely. If you wanted to be a cab driver in the city of London 20 years ago, or even today, it takes three years of schooling. Learning to navigate those streets is really, really hard. And especially learning to navigate and predict where the traffic is going to be is really, really hard. And so there is a really rigorous process to screen people to be taxi drivers. In the US 30 years ago, there was something like 200 or 300 taxi drivers in the whole country. About 15 years ago, two technologies came about. The first one being digital dispatch, which is essentially tools for drivers to find riders, sometimes through prediction and sometimes through other tools. And then the second part was what's been disruptive with respect to that three years of schooling in the city of London, which is prediction tools for navigating a city. This is your GPS system.In the early days, many people selling digital dispatch and navigational predictions were selling them into professional driving companies, into taxi companies. “Hey, your taxi drivers can be 15 percent more efficient if they know the best route at this time.” That's what we call a point solution. You're already doing this, you take out some part of the human process, you drop in a machine, and you do it a little bit better. A couple of companies realized that digital dispatch combined with navigational prediction could create an entirely new type of industry. And this is the ride-hailing industry led by Uber and Lyft and others. That's a totally new kind of way to do personal transportation that made millions of amateur drivers as good as professional because they could navigate the city and find riders.Example number one is the taxi industry. Personal ride-hailing, for lack of a better word, has been transformed partly through digital and really those maps are important—and a big part of those maps is machine learning tools and figuring out where the traffic is, etc. So industry number one.Industry number two is advertising. I don't know if you've seen the TV show Mad Men. That was really how the advertising industry operated well into the ‘90s. Maybe not the soap opera aspect of it. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But the idea that there's a lot of wining and dining and charming people to convince them to spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign. And whether a campaign worked or not was largely based on gut feel. And which kinds of customers you targeted and which TV show and which magazine, all of that was priced based on intuition and not much else.Digital advertising came along in the late 1990s, and the first ways we thought about digital advertising was that it was like the magazine industry. So instead of advertising in People magazine, you're going to advertise on Yahoo using the exact same processes you did in People magazine. There was a rate card and it was going to be so many dollars per thousand users. And if you were doing general search, it might be $10, and if you're looking for real estate, it might be $50. And that's exactly how the magazine industry was priced. Some magazines were more than others based on readership and topic. And it was all based on personal selling, intuition, deals, etc.Then people realize that digital advertising created an opportunity to predict who the user was, who might see your ad. A user arrives at a publisher and an ad needs to be served, and you can predict who that user is and what they might want and when they might want it. Based on those predictions, rather than just do the magazine industry old way of doing things, you can now serve the right ad to the right person at the right time. Starting around 2000, there were all these innovations in online advertising that led to an industry that today looks almost nothing like the industry that you saw in Mad Men. Every time a user goes to a website, there is a real-time auction, in fractions of a second, between, in effect, thousands of advertisers for that user's attention. And there are all these intermediary steps, lots and lots of intermediaries—largely led by Google, but some other players that complement Google in that process—to create an entirely new kind of ad industry. The ad industry has had a system-level change because we can now predict, for a given impression or given user who's looking at a page, what they might want and when they might want it. Predictions changed the industry.The potential for “system-level” changesHow confident are you that this technology is powerful enough that we'll see system-level changes across the economy? That this is a general-purpose technology that will be significant? And do we have any idea what those changes will be, or is it, “They'll be big, but we don't know exactly what they are.”The technology itself is pretty extraordinary. And so in lots and lots of contexts, I'm pretty confident the technology's going to get there. There are some constraints on it, which is that you need data on the thing you're trying to predict in order for the predictions to work. But there are lots and lots of industries where we have great data. The technology barriers, I think, are being overcome. In some industries faster than others, but they're being overcome in lots and lots of places.That's not the only barrier. The technology is barrier number one. Think of an industry that I'm particularly excited about the potential of the technology, which is healthcare. Why is it so exciting for healthcare? Because diagnosis is at the center of how healthcare operates. If you know what's wrong with somebody, it's much easier to treat them, it's much less costly to treat them, and you can deliver the right treatment to the right person at the right time. Diagnosis, by the way, is prediction. It wasn't obvious, the way we thought about that in the past. But really, what it is, it can be solved [with] statistical prediction by using the information you have, the data on your symptoms, to fill in the information you don't have, which is what's actually causing your symptoms. If you do a Google Scholar search for something like “artificial intelligence healthcare,” you'll get a few million hits. There are lots of people who've done research producing AI for diagnosis. The technology, in many cases, is there. And in lots of other cases, it's pretty close.That doesn't mean it's going to transform healthcare. Why not? What's an AI doing diagnosis? They're doing a thing that makes doctors special. Yes, a good doctor in their workflow does all sorts of other things — they help patients navigate the stress of the healthcare system, they provide some treatments, etc. — but the thing that they went to school for all those years for, and for many of them the thing that they have that nurses and pharmacists and other medical professionals don't, is the ability to diagnose. When you bring in machine diagnosis into the healthcare system, that's going to be very disruptive to doctors. There are lots of reasons why, then, doctors might resist. First, they might be worried about their own jobs. Second, they might just not trust the machines and believe they're good enough. Because [in] the medical system doctors are a core source of power—they help determine how things work—they're going to resist many of the biggest system-level changes from AI-based diagnosis.And so you may have regulatory barriers, you may have organizational incentive barriers, and you may have barriers from the individual people on the ground who sabotage the machines that are trying to replace them. All of these are reasons — even if the technology is good enough — that AI in healthcare may be a long way away, even though we can see what that vision looks like. In other industries, it might be closer. In lots of retail contexts, you're trying to figure out who wants what and when — Amazon's pretty good at that in lots of ways — and in-store retailers can do that too. And so there are reasons to think that disruption in many retail industries will come faster.I just want to be a little careful here. I see the technology is there. There are some barriers on the technology side. If the payoff is big enough, I think most of the technology-related barriers can be overcome. To give you a sense of this: We hear a lot something like, “We don't want to do AI in our company because it's just so difficult to get the data organized and get the right data to build those predictions.” Well, yeah, it's difficult. But if the payoff is going to be transformative to the company and make the company millions or billions of dollars, then they'll spend thousands or millions in order to make it happen. And so a lot of the challenges aren't tech specific. They're incentives and organization based.When will AI show up in the statistics?I think of the classic Paul David paper about the dynamo. It took a while before factories used electricity, and they actually had to redo how the factory was designed to get full productivity value. And you say that we are sort of in the “between times.” And that makes me think of a classic Solow paradox: We see computers everywhere but in the statistics. He said that in '87. Are we, like, in the 1987 period with this technology? Or are we now in the late ‘90s where it's starting to happen and the boom is about to begin?I think we're in the early ‘80s.Not even the late ‘80s?He said that in 1987. By 1990 it was showing up in the data. So he just missed it.[We're in the early 1980s] in the sense that we don't quite know what the organization of the future looks like. There are reasons to think for many industries it might take a long time, like many years or decades, for it to show up in the productivity stats. While I do say we're in the early ‘80s because we haven't figured it out yet, I'm a little more optimistic that maybe it won't be 30 years to really have the impact. Mostly because we just have the lessons of history. We know from past technologies, and business leaders know from past technologies, electricity and the internet and the steam engine and others, that it requires some system-level change. And we now have the toolkits to think through, how do you build system-level change without destroying your company?When electricity was diffusing in the 1890s, there wasn't really any idea that this might take 40 years to figure out what the factory of the future looks like. It just wasn't on anybody's mind. The management challenges of redesign were unstudied, and there was no easily accessible knowledge to figure that out. Jump forward to the ‘80s and computing: Again, we hadn't even learned the lessons of electricity back then. Paul David's paper came out in 1990. It was a solution to the Solow paradox.But since then, we have a much better understanding of what's required for technological change. There has been decades of economics literature Erik Brynjolfsson, Tim Bresnahan, Paul David, and others. And there's been decades of management literature taking a lot of those ideas from econ and trying to communicate them to a broader audience to say, “Yes, it's hard. But doing nothing can also be a disaster. So being proactive is useful.” Then there's another piece about optimism here, which is that the entrepreneurial ecosystem is different than it used to be. And we have lots and lots of very smart people building tech companies, trying to make the system-level change happen. And that gives us more effectively more kicks at the can to actually figure out what the right system looks like.The impact of ChatGPT and DALL-EChatGPT and these text-to-image generators like DALL-E, are these significant innovations that can cause system change? Or are they toys that can't figure out how many arms people have and are able to produce B-level middle school essays?They're both. What do I mean by that? The technology is incredible. What ChatGPT can do and DALL-E can do is really, at least to me, it's amazing. Especially what ChatGPT can do. It's much better than I… That came much faster than at least I thought it was going to come. When I first saw it, I was blown away. So far it's a toy. So far, most applications have been “Hey, isn't this cool? I can do this kind of thing.” In a handful of places, it's moved beyond a toy to a point solution. Joshua [Gans], Ajay [Agrawal], and I wrote a piece in HBR. We drafted it out, and rather than reread it and edit it 60 times like we normally do, we sent it into ChatGPT and said, “Write this in a way that's easy to read.” And it did. We had to do some final edits afterwards. But like, we are already doing the same thing. It made a piece of our workflow a little bit more efficient. Point solution.A lot of the talk here in universities, “Uh-oh, we have to change the way we do final exams because ChatGPT can write those exams for our students.” Sure. But that's really not thinking through the potential of what the technology can do. What we've seen so far are toys and point solutions, but I do see extraordinary potential for system solutions in both. Both DALL-E and ChatGPT, and all these generative models. ChatGPT, if you think about it, what does it do? One thing it does is it allows anybody to write well. Like I told my students, you no longer have an excuse to write a bad essay with terrible grammar and punctuation that's not structured like a five-paragraph essay. No excuse anymore. It used to be, okay, maybe there's an excuse because there was some time crunch and you had other things due. Or your language skills — you're a math person, not an English person. No excuse anymore. ChatGPT upskills all those people who are good at other things but whose opportunities were constrained by their ability to write. So what's that new system? I don't know. But there are a lot more people around the world who are bad at writing English than are good at writing English. And if now everybody is a B high school-level student, able to write an essay or able to write well in English, an email or whatever it might be, that's going to be amazing. We just have to figure out how to harness that. We haven't yet.You've sort of given us a potential timeframe, broadly, for when we might see this in the data. When we see it in the data, how significant do you think this technology can be? What is, do you think, the potential impact once you can find it in the data, the productivity growth, which is kind of the end goal is here?That's a great question. Let me reframe it and say, the thing I'm worried about is that it won't reach its potential. A lot of people are worried about the impact of AI on jobs and what are people going to do if machines are intelligent? Jason Furman attended our first Economics of AI conference. This was in 2017. He was formerly chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. And the thing I'm worried about is that there's not going to be enough AI. The productivity booms that we've had in history from way back to the steam engine and then electricity and then the computer age and the internet have been driven by system-level change, where we've figured out how to reinvent the economy. And that's led to sustained productivity growth: first the steam engine at 0.5 percent and then maybe 1 percent with electricity and then 2 percent after the war or more. I don't know what the number is going to be. I know you wanted me to give you a number. I don't know what the number's going to be. But this technology has potential to be like all those others, assuming we figure out what that system-level change looks like and we overcome the various sources of resistance.To sum it up, your concern is less about, can we solve the technical problems, versus, will society accept the results?Exactly. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

The Newbies love their slow Saturday mornings to sip coffee and discuss all things Bach related and much more!  With Zach's season being SO LOW in drama, the Newbies tend to ramble about plenty of adjacent topics. Leane finally learns what raw-doggin' it means; Claire and Phoebe learn which books are in the Top 25 of 2022; the trials of carpet beetles; will the younger generation stop getting married?; and more! On the Bachelor front, the Newbies spend a lot of time talking about Zach's chest hair, the manufactured drama between Kaylee and Anastasia, and who they think will make it to the Final Four and more! Here's to LOVE!!! Rate and review us wherever you listen!! 

Welcome to Ideas Untrapped. My guest today is Vincent Geloso who is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He studies economic history, political economy, and the measurement of living standards. In today's episode, we discuss the differences between democracies and dictatorships, and their relative performance in socioeconomic development. The allure of authoritarian governance has grown tremendously due to the economic success of countries like China, Korea, and Singapore - which managed to escape crippling national poverty traps. The contestable nature of democracies and the difficulty many democratic countries have to continue on a path of growth seems to many people as evidence that a benevolent dictatorship is what many countries need. Vincent challenges this notion and explains many seemingly high-performing dictatorships are so because their control of state resources allows them direct investments towards singular objectives - (such as winning Olympic medals or reducing infant mortality) but at the same time, come with a flip side of unseen costs due to their lack of rights and economic freedom. He argues that the benefits of dictatorships are not as great as they may seem and that liberal democracies are better able to decentralize decision-making and handle complex multi-variate problems. He concludes that while democracies may not always be successful in achieving certain objectives, the constraints they place on political power and rulers mean that people are better off in terms of economic freedom, rights, and other measures of welfare.TRANSCRIPTTobi;You made the point that dictatorships usually optimise, not your words, but they optimise for univariate factors as opposed to multiple factors, which you get in democracy. So, a dictatorship can be extremely high performing on some metric because they can use the top-down power to allocate resources for that particular goal. Can you shed a bit more light on that? How does that mechanism work in reality?Vincent;Yeah, I think a great image people are used to is the USSR, and they're thinking about two things the USSR did quite well: putting people in space before the United States and winning medals at Olympics. Now, the regime really wanted to do those two things. [That is], win a considerable number of medals in [the] Olympics and win the space race. Both of them were meant to showcase the regime's tremendous ability. It was a propaganda ploy, but since it was a single objective and they had immense means at their disposal, i. e. the means that coercion allows them, they could reach those targets really well. And it's easy to see the Russians putting Sputnik first in space, the Russians putting Laika first in space. We can see them winning medals. It's easy to see. The part that is harder to see, the unseen, is the fact that Russians were not enjoying rapidly rising living standards, they were not enjoying improvements in medical care that was commensurate with their level of income, they were not enjoying high-quality education. You can pile all the unseens of the ability of the USSR as a dictatorship to allocate so much resources to two issues, [which] meant that it came with a flip side, which is that these resources were not available for people to allocate them in ways that they thought was more valuable. So, the virtue of a liberal democracy, unlike a dictatorship, is that a liberal democracy has multiple sets of preferences to deal with. And in a liberal democracy, it's not just the fact that we vote, but also that people have certain rights that are enshrined and which are not the object of political conversation. I cannot seize your property, and it's not okay for people to vote with me to seize your property. And in these societies, the idea is that under a liberal democracy, you are better able to decentralize decision-making, and people can find ways to deal with the multiple trade-offs much better. Whereas a dictatorship can just decide, I care about this. I am king, I am president, I am first secretary of the party, I decide this and we'll do this regardless of how much you value other things that I value less than you do.Tobi;Two things that I want you to shed more light on. Depending on who you talk to or what they are criticizing, people usually selectively pick their dictatorships. If someone is criticizing, say, for example, capitalism, they always point to the Cuban health care system in contrast to the American health care system. How the American system is so terrible, and how capitalism makes everything worse because of the profit motive. And how we can do better by being more like Cuba.  On the other end of that particular spectrum, if you're talking about economic development, critics of democracy like to point to China. China is not a democracy. And look at all the economic growth they've had in the last 40 years, one of the largest reductions in human poverty we've ever seen in history. I mean, from these two examples, what are the shortcomings of these arguments?Vincent; Let's do Cuba first, then we can do China. So, the Cuban example is really good for the case I'm making. Because the case I'm making is essentially that the good comes with the bad and you can't remove them. So, people will generally say with Cuba, “yes, we know they don't have political rights, they don't have economic freedom, but they do have high-quality health care.” And by this they don't mean actually health care, they mean low infant mortality or high life expectancy at birth. My reply is, it's because they don't have all these other rights and all these other options [that] they can have infant mortality that is so low. That's because the regime involves a gigantic amount of resources to the production of healthcare. Cuba spends more than 10% of its GDP on health care. Only countries that are seven or ten times richer than Cuba spend as much as a proportion of GDP on health care. 1% of their population are doctors. In the United States, it is a third of that, 0.3% of the population are doctors. So, it's a gigantic proportion. But then when you scratch a bit behind, doctors are, for example, members of the army. They are part of the military force. The regime employs them as the first line of supervision. So, the doctors are also meant to report back what the population says on the ground. So, they're basically listening posts for the dictatorship. And in the process, yeah, they provide some health care, but they're providing some health care as a byproduct of providing surveillance.The other part is that they're using health care here to promote the regime abroad. And that has one really important effect. One of those is that doctors have targets they must meet, otherwise they're penalized. And when I mean targets, I mean targets for infant mortality. [If] they don't meet those targets, the result is they get punished. And so what do you think doctors do? They will alter their behaviour to avoid punishment. So in some situations, they will reclassify what we call early neonatal death. So, babies who die immediately after exiting the womb to seven days after birth, they will reclassify many of those as late fetal deaths. And late fetal deaths are in-utero deaths or delivery of a dead baby so that the baby exits the womb dead. Now, if a mortality rate starts with early neonatal death [and] not late fetal ones, so if you can reclassify one into the other, you're going to deflate the number total. And the reason why we can detect this is that the sources of both types of mortality are the same,[they] are very similar, so that when you compare them across countries, you generally find the same ratio of one to the other. Generally, it hovers between four to one and six to one. Cuba has a ratio of twelve to 17 to one, which is a clear sign of data manipulation. And it's not because the regime does it out of, like, direct intent. They're not trying to do it directly. It'd be too easy to detect. But by changing people's incentives, doctors' incentives, in that case, that's what they end up with.There are also other things that doctors are allowed to do in Cuba. One of them is that patients do not have the right to refuse treatment. Neither do they have the right to privacy, which means that doctors can use heavy-handed methods to make sure that they meet their targets. So in Cuba, you have stuff like casa de mata nidad, where mothers who have at-risk pregnancies or at-risk behaviour during pregnancy will be forcibly incarcerated during their pregnancy. There are multiple cases of documented, pressured abortions or literally coerced abortions. So not just pressured, but coerced. Like, the level is that the person wants to keep the infant, the doctor forces an abortion to be made. Sometimes, it is made without the mother's knowledge until it is too late to anything being done. So you end up with basically the infant mortality rate, yes, being low, but yes, being low because of data manipulation and changes in behaviour so that the number doesn't mean the same thing as it does in rich countries. And now the part that's really important in all I'm saying is [that] what people call the benefits for Cuba is relatively small. My point is that, yeah, maybe they could be able to do it. But the problem is that the measures that allow this to happen, to have a low infant mortality rate are also the measures that make Cubans immensely poor. The fact that the regime can deploy such force, use doctors in such a way, employ such extreme measures, it's the reason why Cubans also don't have property rights, don't have strong economic freedom, don't have the liberty to trade with others. Which means that on other dimensions, their lives are worse off. That means that, for example, their incomes are lower than they could be. They have higher maternal mortality. So, mothers die to [a] greater proportion in labour than in other countries or post-labour. There are lower rates of access to clean water than in equally poor countries in Latin America. There are lower levels of geographic mobility within the country, there are lower levels of nutrition because, for example, there are still ration services. So that means that, yes, they have certain amount of calories, but they don't have that much diversity in terms of what they're allowed or are able to eat without resorting to the black market. Pile these on. These are all dimensions of life that Cubans get to not enjoy because the regime has so much power to do that one thing relatively well. Let's assume it's relatively well, but the answer is, well, would you want to make that trade-off? And most people would probably, if given the choice, would not make the choice of having this. So, those who are saying, “look at how great it is,” are being fooled by the nature of what dictatorships are. Dictatorships can solve simple problems really well, but complex multivariate problems, they are not able to do it in any meaningful way.The other part that is going to be of also importance is when you look at Cuba, before we move on to China, the other part about Cuba that's worth pointing out is, I was assuming in my previous answer that the regime was actually doing relatively well. Even without considering all the criticism, it still looks like it has a low infant mortality rate. But when you actually look at the history of Cuba, Cuba was exceptional in terms of low infant mortality. Before the Castros took over, Cuba already had a very low level of infant mortality even for a poor country. And so with a friend of mine, a coauthor, Jamie Bologna Pavlik, we used an econometric method to see if Cuba has an infant mortality rate that is as low as it would have been had it not been for the revolution. So, ergo, we're trying to find what is the effect of the revolution on infant mortality and we're trying to use other Latin American countries to predict Cuba's health performance. And what we find is that in the first year of the regime's, infant mortality actually went up, so it increased relative to other Latin American countries, but it gradually reverted back to what would be the long-run trend. So that Cuba is no more exceptional today in terms of infant mortality than it was in 1959. That is actually a very depressing statement because it's saying that the regime wasn't even able to make the country more exceptional. So even if it's able to achieve that mission quite well, it's not clear how well they've done it. At the very least, they haven't made things worse in the very long run, they only made things worse in the short run. So when you're doing, like, kind of, a ledger of goods and bads of the regime, all the bad trade-offs I mentioned: lower incomes, higher mortality rates for mothers and maternity, lower rates of access to clean water, lower rates of access to diverse food sources, lower rates of geographic mobility - pile these on, keep piling them on, that's the cost. What I'm saying is what they call the benefits, they're not even as big as it's disclaimed. The benefits are relatively small.And now with regards to China…Tobi;Yeah.Vincent;The Chinese case is even worse for people because they have a similar story with GDP. So, in China, a regional bureaucrats have to meet certain targets of economic growth. Now, these same bureaucrats are in charge of producing the data that says whether or not there is economic growth. You can see why there is a who guards the guardian's problem here? The person who guards the guardian is apparently one of the guardians. So you could expect some kind of bad behaviour. And there is an economist, Luis Martinez, out of the University of Chicago. What he did is he say, well, we have one measure that we know is a good reflector of economic growth and it is artificial light intensity at night. Largely because the richer a country is, the more light there will be at night time. And so if you have like 1% growth in income, in real numbers, you should have some form of commensurate increase in light intensity during night time. If the two deviates, it's a sign that the GDP numbers are false, that they're misleading. Because if they deviate, the true number, the always true number will be the light intensity at nighttime. So, when Martinez used the nighttime light to compare GDP in Chinese regions overall and the actual GDP, he found that you can cut the growth rate of China by, maybe, two-fifths, so it is 40% slower than it actually is. So, China is not even as impressive as it is. And the thing is now think about the pandemic, think about how extreme the measures that China deployed to restrain this has been, no liberal democracy would have been able to do that, no free society would have tolerated forcibly walling people into their houses. And there are massive downsides to the communist regime in China. Like, yes, the regime is free to do whatever it wants, but it also means that it can put Uyghur Muslims into concentration camps. It also means that it can wall people into their houses when they do not comply with public health order. It also means that people are under the social credit system where they are being largely surveilled on a daily basis. It also means that the government can allocate massive resources to the act of conquering Taiwan or flexing muscles towards Japan. All things that when you think about it, is that really an improvement in welfare? Obviously, you can say that, oh yeah, they're doing X or Y things really well but here are all the bad things that come with this. And those bad things are on net much worse than the good things.Tobi;Now, you keep emphasizing liberal democracy and I want to get at the nuance here because I've seen several results. Either it is from Chile and other countries that say unequivocally that democracies are better for growth than dictatorships, even in the case of Chile, despite all the reforms of Pinochet regime. But what I want to get at is, what exactly about democracies make them better? Because, for example, we can think of Nigeria and Nigeria as a democracy. We've had uninterrupted election cycles for over two decades now, but there's still very weak rule of law. Successive governments still rely on extracting oil rents, basically. And, the degree to which people enjoy rights vary depending on who is in power or their mood on any particular day. And, of course, Nigeria is a democracy. So is it liberal democracy? Is that the key factor?Vincent;So, think about it this way.Tobi;Yeah.Vincent;Think about it this way. Inside the big box of liberal democracy, there is for sure democracy. But the part that makes the box liberal democracy is not only the smaller babushkadal inside that box which is a democracy one, it is the other constraints that we put on the exercise of political power. The true definition of a liberal democracy, at least in my opinion, is that not only are people allowed to vote, but they are restraints on what we can vote on. So, for example, if it's not legitimate for me to steal from you, it is no more legitimate for me to vote with two other people to steal from you. The act of democracy should warrant some acts that are outside the realm of political decision-making. There are also constraints that exist on rulers, so it's not just that there are some rights that are not subject to conversation. There could be also incentives that prevent rulers from abusing the powers they have. That would mean, for example, checks and balances, where there are different chambers that will compete with each other, different regional powers of government that will compete with each other for jurisdiction, and so they will keep each other in balance. It could also be some form of external constraint, because a liberal democracy can also rely on external constraints upon political actors. It could be the fact that people can leave the country, the fact that taxpayers can migrate to another country, puts pressure on politicians to not abuse them. People can move their capital out of the country, [this] creates a pressure on politicians to not try to steal from them, because people will just remove all the productive capital and the ruler will be left with very little to exploit as a result, regardless of whether or not the ruler is elected or not. So the way to think about this is liberal democracy is, you want to have a system where there are rules, incentives, constraints that make it so that we are not betting on a man or a woman, for that matter, being the correct man and woman for the moment. We care about a set of incentives, constraints, and rules that will make sure that even the worst human being possible will feel compelled or compulsed [sic] to do the right thing. So, that's like the old Milton Friedman thing, it's like “I don't want the right man. I want to have a system that makes sure that even the most horrible person on earth is forced to do the right thing.” That's what a liberal democracy is.Now, it is a broad definition that I've provided. It is not narrow in any way. It is not specific, largely because I don't think it can be what works. It's not everywhere the same. The general family to which this belongs is universal. But the way it can work is not the same everywhere. A homogeneous, small, Sweden probably doesn't need as much level of, say, breakdown of provincial versus federal powers. Whereas, from what I understand, Nigeria is a somewhat multinational country, multiethnic country with multiple groups east and west from what I understand the divide is in Nigeria. There, it might be good to have a division inside the country where things that are most homogeneous, you leave to the federal government, to the highest level of power. Then the things that you can delegate to the local level, [it is] better to do it that way. Countries that are incredibly heterogeneous maybe need even more federalism. What is optimal for one place won't work elsewhere. So I couldn't take Belgian institutions and then just dump them in Nigeria. Same as I couldn't just say, well, let's take Swedish institutions and dump them into Canada. But what makes generally Sweden work better in terms of institutions than Nigeria, for example, is the fact that Sweden does fit in that general box of liberal democracy. There are clear constraints, there are restrictions, there are constitutions that are well respected, there's a strong rule of law, and politicians are compelled to not fall prey to their own baser instincts.Tobi;  A couple of months ago, I had Mark Koyama on the show.Vincent; Great guy. He's a colleague of mine.Tobi;Yeah. So, we were talking about state capacity. We're talking about his book with Noel Johnson. So I did bring up your paper on state capacity, [in] which, basically, one description that stuck with me is that you never really find a poor, but highly capable state in history…Vincent;You mean backwards. A rich society with an incapable state?  Tobi; Yes, a rich society with an incapable state. Thanks for that. So, I've been trying to disentangle this state capacity thing, I know Bryan Caplan basically dismissed it as a sleight of hand. Right. So, like, how does it work and how is it a necessary ingredient for economic development, so to speak?Vincent; I am actually quite respectful of the state capacity literature in one way. So let me do like kind of a quick thing. State capacity says that you want the state to be able to do certain missions. Right, so we're not making judgments as to whether the mission is good. State capacity is about the abilities of the state. The reason why that literature has emerged since the 2000… here's a story of economic thought really briefly: in the 1950s, Samuelson and others show, ‘oh, well, there are market failures' and then a few years later there are the public choice rebuttals, where the public choice economists say, ‘well, you're kind of wrong. There are also government failures.' And the state capacity crowd tries to come in between these two and say, ‘yeah, there are market failures and there are government failures. How do we get a state to solve the market failures but not fall into government failures?' Okay, straightforward, good argument. The part that I'm sceptical of is that the argument of the state capacity crowd is that you will have a lot of rich societies that will have strong states, you will have much fewer societies that have strong states but are very poor (the USSR would be a good example of that), [and] you will have a lot of societies that are poor and have weak state. The thing is that they can't seem to explain why it is under their theory that there are no societies that are relatively weak state but rich. Even though in history we do have many examples of these and they collapse all the time.The argument that I make with my colleague, Alexander Salter, is that societies that have weak states will fall prey to predation because their neighbours with stronger state will try to capture their wealth by conquest. If they are conquered, they grow immensely poor, they are made poor. Basically, it's a terrible event for them. Or they resist, and if they resist ably, the result from resistance is that they have to build a strong state themselves to resist predation by other rulers. And so in the argument me and Alex build, it boils down to: the state is not necessary for development, but it is inevitable as an outcome. So, the task of political science, of political economy, is understanding if we are going to be stuck with one of them, how do we make it that we get the least terrible one? If it's not necessary, but it is inevitable, then how do we get to one that will maybe do some benefit, or at least, we can get the best kind possible? Well, that's where the liberal democratic answer gets into. [It] is [that] we need to find sets of constraints, rules, incentives that force the politicians to make it too costly for them to engage in predatory behaviour, in redistributive behaviour, and that they concentrate on what you could call productive behaviour. That would be like solving externalities. Like dealing with pollution or producing public goods stuff that markets have a harder time to produce. Getting into that category is the task of what liberal democracies are trying to do. That is a much harder proposition. Daron Acemoglu in his somewhat awful book, The Narrow Corridor, calls it a narrow corridor. (I don't like that book that much. I think it's a horrible piece of literature. He should have kept it at Why Nations Fail, we had everything we needed with Buchanan, and it was much better in the other version. He was a much worse version of that.) So, Parenthesis over on Daron Acemoglu, but his point is still relatively okay. There is a narrow corridor on which we evolve. That is a very narrow equilibrium that we want to stay on to, to avoid veering either into more territorial forms of government or into different types of authoritarian[ism], in a certain way. So the corridor for a liberal democracy is very, very, very, very narrow.Tobi; I like that description. The state is not necessary but inevitable. Whereas with the traditional state capacity crowd, the state is often assumed and never justified.Vincent;Actually, that's a bit unfair to them. The state capacity crowd, a lot of them are interested in state capacity as a story of the origins of states. That, I think, is a much-valued contribution. However, the issue of whether or not state capacity is linked to growth, I think this is where there's overstretching. My point is “no, there's very little reason to believe that state capacity is related to growth.” State capacity is more the direct or indirect result of growth in the past. So, either you are getting state capacity because you get conquered and you get imposed it by somebody else, or you get state capacity because you want to protect your wealth from other predators.Tobi; For the record, I'm not talking about your colleagues. There's this industrial policy school in development economics who are also big on state capacity, who think the state has to do this heavy lifting. They sort of assume the state and not justify it. But I won't let you go without asking you this final question. You recently published a paper - talking about the work of Thomas Piketty, the French economist - with Phillip Magness, I should say. What is your critique of his work? Because so far as I can tell, yes, I read the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, [but] everybody else is sort of pretending that a critique of Piketty does not exist. And the political coalition around their research, along with [Emmanuel] Saez and [Gabriel] Zucman is moving rapidly apace, whether it is in taxation or other forms of agenda. So, what is your critique? I know there have been others in the past Matthew Rognlie, I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name.Vincent;Yeah. Our argument is actually very simple. And to be honest, I don't really care about the political conversation where, [for] the political people who are using Piketty's work, I ignore them. There may be a motivation for doing this work because it tells you the importance of his work, but the person I'm trying to talk to is Piketty himself. And the point we make in the paper is that he [not only] massively overestimates inequality in terms of levels, but he also misses times a lot of changes. In the article that me, Phil, another Phil, and John Moore published together in the Economic Journal, we find that there is a very different timeline of inequality in the United States. The most important part is that unlike Piketty and Saez, who can assign most of, and later Zucman… who can assign most of the changes in inequality to tax policy, we find that actually half the decline in inequality that happens between, say, 1917 and 1960, half of it is because of the Great Depression. And just as good economists, we should not be happy that, okay, the rich are growing poor faster than the poor, but the poor are also growing poor. That is not a decent outcome. So we're minimizing the role of fiscal policy and tax policy in doing inequality, but also the other changes that we find give a very different story of what matters in changing policy rather than being taxes, it has more to do with labour mobility within the United States. With capital mobility within the United States. So poor workers from the south, mostly black Americans, move to richer northern cities where wages are higher. Capital moves from the rich north to the poor south where workers are made more productive. So, the levelling has to do with a very standard force in economics - it's a Solow growth model - capital goes to where the returns are greatest, labour goes where the wages are greatest. Most of the convergence is explained by this, not by tax policy changes. So that's the critique we make of them. And there's a lot of other people who are joining in, Gerald Holtham, David Splinter, a lot of people are actually finding that their numbers don't make much sense and they're actually in violation of a lot of other facts of economic history, even though they're correct in the general idea that inequality fell; fell to 1960 and rose since the 1980. The problem is that all they got right is the shape, but they got wrong the timing, the levels, the extent of the changes. They got most of it wrong. They just got the general shape right. And that's no great feat.Tobi;Thank you so much for joining me.Vincent;It was a pleasure. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

 I've been in the cleaning business for 17 years. I was a solo cleaner for 15 of those 17 years. As I was first exploring the cleaning groups in 2016, I got the impression that solo was viewed as "so low". We are just trunk slammers that buy our cleaning supplies at Walmart and advertise our services on the laundry mat tack board. We are amateurs without any real knowledge of how to run a business. In fact, we aren't real businesses at all. We have cleaning jobs and yet we say that we own a company. A solo cleaner is thus a lowly title to many. If this is you, you're not alone. There are over 50,000 new cleaning companies entering the industry each year right now. In all likelihood, probably 40,000 or 80% are new solos. There are definitely companies that start with the intention to build teams from the onset as well. My point is that we are an army and for the most part feel like we're alone and the minority. We really feel like we're below the other companies. We are SO LOW cleaners. Do you relate? I know you do because I surveyed over 100 solo cleaners in 2019. I found the top struggles then to be #1 lack of money & time, #2 loneliness, and #3 feeling so low.  This was tough for me too. I was a highly educated mechanical engineer and part of the corporate leadership team at one of the biggest companies in the world from 2000-2005. I seemed to have it all from the outside. But I wasn't happy. I felt so low there. This caused mild depression and ultimately lead us to start our first side-gig businesses. A few years later, I was fired from my engineering job and fought each day to put scraps on the table and drops in the gas tank to survive through a new job of cleaning houses for a profession. I was embarrassed. I felt so low and I was. My friends from high school and college were buying houses and I was barely able to afford rent. My friends were becoming managers in their companies and I was cleaning toilets. I even ran into old work colleagues looking for house cleaners. I felt so low. Why would I go through this? Why would I sacrifice the prestige of the corporate life for the so low life?The answer is simple. I wanted freedom. If you're listening to this podcast and you feel like I did. You have a really good job by the world standards. Your family is proud of you, just like my grandparents and parents would brag about their son and grandson working for GE in his big time job. But if you're also like me with all of that status and accomplishment you feel trapped. You don't know what you want to do, but it's not what you're doing now. That was me. I never knew I would ever in a million years end up in the cleaning industry. But I did. I went from an engineer to a solo cleaner. There wasn't a lot of money in the solo cleaning business in the beginning. I tried to go back to my engineering degree a couple times with no success. Even though my income was about half as much as my corporate job, I had something I didn't have before. Choices. My children were young and I didn't have to go to work at 8:00, 5 days a week, bring my laptop home and do more at home. I didn't have to think about the job on nights and weekends. I didn't have to ask for time off. I called the shots. I made my own choices as to when I wanted to work and which jobs I wanted to take. I traded income and status for a small dose of freedom. Was it really so low? Not at all. As I started gaining more choices and freedom and income, I started feeling more hope and excitement on the potential of this solo business that wasn't so low anymore. I stopped caring what others in my family thought of what I was doing for income after nearly completing a masters degree in mechanical engineering.Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

Have you ever seen an offer SO LOW in price that you could not pass it up? Welcome to the Black Friday effect. At first you may think you got a great deal, but the truth is that most people don't even open up a Black Friday mini-course, bundle or offer at all. Just the act of buying it seems to be enough to make us feel like we took action. So, are Black Friday offers a good deal or just a distraction? I'm in the business of developing amazing coaches who are empowered to make smart decisions with their investments. And I don't think that spending even a penny for something you'll never use is a good investment. So in this episode I will give you the gift of X-RAY vision so you can look right through other people's Black Friday offers, and you can learn what it takes to create a great offer yourself and also not let yourself be taken for a ride whenever this commercial holiday comes along. And on this episode, our focus will be on: 3 traits of an irresistible Black Friday offer, and 3 things you can do to not get carried away by them.   Episode links: GET CLIENTS FIRST 30 Days : 30 Leads Lead Generation Bundle (DM me the word "bundle" to get it half off!) Master Genuine Conversations Online Access the FULL LENGTH interviews with all your favorite online coaches for FREE by requesting access to The Global Phenomenon Podcast UNCUT VAULT! Get access right now! Go to: theglobalphenomenon.com/uncut   Watch the video version of the podcast on The Global Phenomenon YouTube channel Follow me on Instagram Contact our team at: info@theglobalphenomenon.com Credits: Music by Jared Lebel Photo by Mira Whiting Photography

We have three guests today, an editor and two contributors of When There Are Nine, a poetry anthology in tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Rebecca Evans, one of the anthology's editors, is a Jewish poet, memoirist, radio show cohost, writing instructor, war veteran, and mother. Carla Schick is a Queer activist for liberation and education as well as a lover of jazz and language. Harrison Solow is an award-winning author, university lecturer, Hollywood adviser, and former Franciscan nun. Both Schick and Solow contributed poems to the anthology. We're so thrilled to speak to this diverse and incredibly accomplished group of women today on Episode Seven of Season Four. All three share and discuss poetry from the anthology. We also talk about the ongoing struggle for equal rights, using words to paint our pictures, living and creating in the midst of terrible grief, and collecting poems both timely and timeless.

While late with our second summer series installment, we are right on time for a spooky Halloween time film. Dave offers up Guillermo del Toro's stylish ghost story "The Devil's Backbone" to see if Mike, Solow and JBone thinks it sucks, now.

Three Tier is hosted by Jacob Gluck and Taylor Foxman.---Mike Solow is a Partner at 99 Proof.99 Proof Partners (“99 Proof”) is an investment firm that organizes and manages investments in the craft spirits space. We work with individuals and family offices that desire to invest in private deals for exceptional returns without the high fees and infrastructure costs often associated with traditional private equity funds.99 Proof organizes and manages direct investments in early stage, growth stage, and established businesses with high-caliber teams, attractive valuations, clear growth paths, and lucrative exit opportunities.  

What do Solow sportswear, Black Label Society and Carmen Electra have in common? They are all part of this wildly diverse episode of Honest AF... but that's not all. Daniella throws an 80th birthday party for Gilby's mom that turns into an amazing sing-a-long and presents Barbaranne with a hot off the line pair of shoes from Italy, Barbaranne went to the Black Label Society show with Anthrax at the Palladium, discoasis is heading to Central Park in NYC and the girls will be joining, Daniella reviews the film "The Metal Lords" and tells a great story featuring Carmen Electra and of course, let's not forget Barb's BAg of Tricks and listener questions! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The boys run solo for the first couple of segments and talk about going So-Low with Stroker Lotion and then Mark Parrish joins for Dual Of The Decades.