commonplace book redux

2019-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Baumol effect is easy to explain but difficult to grasp. In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010.

Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experienced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approximately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising implication: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive. In 1826, the average wage of $1.14 meant that the 2.66 hours needed to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 had an opportunity cost of just $3.02. At a wage of $26.44, the 2.66 hours of labor in music production had an opportunity cost of $70.33. Thus, in 2010 it was 23 times (70.33/3.02) more expensive to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 than in 1826. In other words, one had to give up more other goods and services to produce a music performance in 2010 than one did in 1826. Why? Simply because in 2010, society was better at producing other goods and services than in 1826.

The 23 times increase in the relative price of the string quartet is the driving force of Baumol’s cost disease. The focus on relative prices tells us that the cost disease is misnamed. The cost disease is not a disease but a blessing. To be sure, it would be better if productivity increased in all industries, but that is just to say that more is better. There is nothing negative about productivity growth, even if it is unbalanced.

Helland, Eric, and Alexander T. Tabarrok. “Why Are the Prices So Damn High?” (2019).

2019-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

What am I? I’m a bunch of bones. I get to wiggle my bones around for a few years, and then I die. And I’m supposed to affect the light cone? It’s like being a worm in a back yard, wiggling around, and hoping to maximise the price of tea in China.

Anonymous, February 2019, Oxford

2019-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

A hyperforeignism is a type of qualitative hypercorrection that involves speakers misidentifying the distribution of a pattern found in loanwords and extending it to other environments, including words and phrases not borrowed from the language that the pattern derives from. The result of this process does not reflect the rules of either language. For example, habanero is sometimes pronounced as though it were spelled with an <ñ> (habañero), which is not the Spanish form from which the English word was borrowed. […]

A number of words of French origin feature a final <e> that is pronounced in English but silent in the original language. For example, forte (used to mean “strength” in English as in “not my forte”) is often pronounced /ˈfɔːrteɪ/ or /fɔːrˈteɪ/, by confusion with the Italian musical term of the same spelling (and same Latin origin, but meaning “loud”), which is pronounced [ˈfɔrte]. In French, the word “forte” is pronounced [fɔʁt], with silent final <e> […].

Wikipedia Contributors, Hyperforeignism

2018-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

Among the world’s thousands of wild grass species, Blumler tabulated the 56 with the largest seeds, the cream of nature’s crop: the grass species with seeds at least 10 times heavier than the median grass species (see Table 8.1). Virtually all of them are native to Mediterranean zones or other seasonally dry environments. Furthermore, they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Fertile Crescent or other parts of western Eurasia’s Mediterranean zone, which offered a huge selection to incipient farmers: about 32 of the world’s 56 prize wild grasses! […] In contrast, the Mediterranean zone of Chile offered only two of those species. California and southern Africa just one each, and southwestern Australia none at all. That fact alone goes a long way toward explaining the course of human history.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Chapter 8, 1997

2018-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Der gewöhnliche Probierstein: ob etwas bloße Überredung, oder wenigstens subjektive Überzeugung, d. i. festes Glauben sei, was jemand behauptet, ist das Wetten. Öfters spricht jemand seine Sätze mit so zuversichtlichem und unlenkbarem Trotze aus, daß er alle Besorgnis des Irrtums gänzlich abgelegt zu haben scheint. Eine Wette macht ihn stutzig. Bisweilen zeigt sich, daß er zwar Überredung genug, die auf einen Dukaten an Wert geschätzt werden kann, aber nicht auf zehn, besitze. Denn den ersten wagt er noch wohl, aber bei zehn wird er allererst inne, was er vorher nicht bemerkte, daß es nämlich doch wohl möglich sei, er habe sich geirrt. Wenn man sich in Gedanken vorstellt, man solle worauf das Glück des ganzen Lebens verwetten, so schwindet unser triumphierendes Urteil gar sehr, wir werden überaus schüchtern und entdecken so allererst, daß unser Glaube so weit nicht zulange. So hat der pragmatische Glaube nur einen Grad, der nach Verschiedenheit des Interesses, das dabei im Spiele ist, groß oder auch klein sein kann.

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781

The usual touchstone, whether that which someone asserts is merely his persuasion – or at least his subjective conviction, that is, his firm belief – is betting. It often happens that someone propounds his views with such positive and uncompromising assurance that he seems to have entirely set aside all thought of possible error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes it turns out that he has a conviction which can be estimated at a value of one ducat, but not of ten. For he is very willing to venture one ducat, but when it is a question of ten he becomes aware, as he had not previously been, that it may very well be that he is in error. If, in a given case, we represent ourselves as staking the happiness of our whole life, the triumphant tone of our judgment is greatly abated; we become extremely diffident, and discover for the first time that our belief does not reach so far. Thus pragmatic belief always exists in some specific degree, which, according to differences in the interests at stake, may be large or may be small.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

2018-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Suppose you’re an administrator here in Oxford, you’re working in the Computer Science department, and you’re the secretary there. Suppose you find some way to make the department run slightly more efficiently: you create this mailing list so that everybody can, when they have an announcement to make, just email it to the mailing list rather than having to put in each person individually in the address field. And that’s a useful thing, that’s a great thing: it didn’t cost anything, other than one-off cost, and now everybody can go about their business more easily. From this perspective, it’s very non-obvious whether that is, in fact, a good thing. It might be contributing to AI—that might be the main effect of this, other than the very small general effect on economic growth. And it might probably be that you have made the world worse in expectation by making this little efficiency improvement. So this project of trying to think through this it’s in a sense a little bit like the Nietzschean Umwertung aller Werte — the revaluation of all values—project that he never had a chance to complete, because he went mad before.

Nick Bostrom, Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy, Good Done Right conference, 2014

2018-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

So, “maximize expected value”, say, is a quantity we could define. It just doesn’t help us very much, because whenever you try to do something specific you’re still virtually as far away as you had been. On the other hand, if you set some more concrete objective, like maximize the number of people in this room, or something like that, we can now easily tell like how many people there are, and we have ideas about how we could maximize it. So any particular action we think of we might easily see how it fares on this objective of maximizing the people in this room. However, we might feel it’s very difficult to get strong reasons for knowing whether more people in this room is better, or whether there is some inverse relationship. A good signpost would strike a reasonable compromise between being visible from afar and also being such that we can have strong reason to be sure of its sign.

Nick Bostrom, Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy, Good Done Right conference, 2014

2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

I think what the […] the people who are concerned about the excessive sacrifice argument are likely to say here is like, “Well, in so far as you’re right about morality being this extremely demanding thing, it looks like we’re going to have reason to talk about a second thing as well, which is maybe like watered down morality or pseudo morality, and that the second thing is going to be something like […] what we actually plan to act according to or what is reasonable to ask of people, or what we’re going to issue as advice to the government given that they don’t have morally perfect motivations or something like that and then, by the way, the second thing is the thing that’s going to be more directly action guiding in practice. So yeah, you philosophers can go and have your conversation about what this abstract morality abstractly requires, but nobody’s actually going to pay any attention to it when they act. They’re going to pay attention to this other thing. So, by the way, we’ve won the practical argument. I think there’s something to that line of response.

Hilary Greaves, 80,000 Hours Podcast, 23 October 2018

2018-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats. The Second Coming, 1921

2018-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

This training ground for punks and thieves
Home of poor white retirees
Who didn’t bail
And couldn’t sell
When color made the grass less green

Tracy Chapman, “3000 Miles”, 13 September 2005