In this episode, I talk with Alice Dreger, author of Galileo's Middle Finger and former Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago. She resigned from the position following a dispute over censorship of an issue of the medical humanities journal Atrium.
I first heard about Alice when she livetweeted her son's sex ed class, and in this episode we talk about the state of sex ed today, her work as an advocate for intersex individuals and conjoined twins, how she became interested in studying scientific controversies and contrarians, and answer some questions from listeners.
Listeners who have what used to be called a "sensitive constitution" may wish to avoid this episode, as we speak frankly about several adult topics, including genital anatomy, sexual behavior, and academic funding. Due to a higher than normal amount of email this month, any complaints about this episode must be hand-delivered to our Complaints
Department, located in the secret caverns underneath Ulaan Bator, Mongolia.
If you enjoy these podcasts, please use iTunes to download, subscribe,
rate and review each podcast, as this helps introduce us to new
listeners.
Today, I talk with Justine Simonson and Marcus Lehmann, filmmakers and creators of the YouTube series How To Make It In _________.
From Justine & Marcus:
How
To Make It In: Berlin is the premier season of a web series about small
businesses and the owners who took a risk in creating them. This season
features 10 unique entrepreneurs and small business owners from
Berlin's street food scene, tech startups, the service industry and
more. Each season will be filmed in a different city around the world;
Berlin is the premier location. Part travel show, part business series,
How To Make It In:________ presents an in-the-know guide to its location
while also delivering helpful tips for anyone who's ever dreamed of
quitting their day job and starting fresh.
If I'm going to die, I'm going to die economic on the Fury Road.
I have an interesting observation about wages and the attention we pay to different types of inflation:
An interesting reaction to prices: we would be terribly concerned about
6% wage growth, yet find 6% energy price growth (or growth in any other volatile price) perfectly acceptable, because we
have found a lot of volatility in the latter and less in the former in recent
decades. Following decades of increases in worker productivity coupled with an
absence of wage growth, we could have 30 years worth of catch up growth in median
worker wages before we really need to worry about runaway inflation. Yes, automatic labor price increases embedded into contracts in the 60's and 70's contributed to high inflation in the 70's; however, those automatic increases leading to wage spirals are gone for most workers. Yet, members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are having conniption fits over a tight(er) labor market, worried about "inflation" which has not appeared yet.
More than that, there remain substantial pools of workers who have passed in the opposite direction from "employment" to "unemployment" to the invisible category of "discouraged worker" who must be employed before we need to start worrying about labor costs increasing very much. Until then, the Fed should not raise its rates.
Live from the Columbus Idea Foundry makerspace and incubator, I talk
with Alex Bandar about protoyping products, neighborhoods, cities and
the Idea Foundry itself.
Alex
Bandar is an engineer with a specialization in materials science and
computer assisted design. In 2008, he founded the Columbus Idea Foundry,
which has recently moved into a new and larger space, becoming the
largest makerspace in the country. It is an anchor for the redevelopment
of the Franklinton neighborhood of Columbus, and an important part of
the Columbus entrepreneurial ecosystem.
IC3D Printers Printers and high spec filament developed at the Foundry.
"Scrape" the electric motorcycle,
designed by Todd Perkins, who also developed "The Inhaler", a high
speed electric car, and other high performance experimental vehicles.
Several things that needed to be said, but would not have needed to be said if the world was a better place: Chicago does not need a Katrina. New Orleans did not need a Katrina. Teachers are better at educating children than are random entrepreneurs. If you give away too much of your taxes as tax expenditures and/or fail to make pension contributions, your budget will break.
The John Feathers Map Collection, acquired by the Los Angeles Public Library, instantly doubled their map collection. Feathers had collected an entire house-full of maps. Maps on the walls, maps in filing cabinets, maps, maps, maps.
Ed Cooke is a Memory Grandmaster and CEO of Memrise, a company dedicated to making you better at learning and memory. Today, we talk about ways to maximize your memory, how get more out of life by paying better attention to it, and the Epicurian value of having good friends around you in life and work.
Links and transcript to follow.
Please subscribe, download, rate and comment through iTunes. This helps our ratings and allows us to reach more listeners.
andquitefrankly asked: 13. TRIVIA. GIVE ME ALL THE TRIVIA. please. :)
Ooh! Let’s see, here are some of my favourite bits
of classical trivia (I know no other trivia). I should warn you that my
idea of amusing trivia is quite… esoteric :’) (A couple of these are a
little gruesome)
Ancient Greek had a pitch accent (i.e. the
pitch of the syllable went up or down depending on the accent). This
mattered, because once during a performance of a tragedy, an actor got
the pitch accent wrong and said ‘weasel’ instead of ‘calm sea’ and we
are still laughing about it 2000 years later.
Once during a
battle between Argos and Sparta, the Argive generals told their troops
to do whatever the Spartan herald shouted. The Spartan generals figured
this out and ordered their troops to attack when the herald
shouted ‘have breakfast’
The tyrant Polycrates of Samos was so
lucky in everything that he did that his friend Amasis, king of Egypt,
advised him to get rid of the thing he valued the most. This was a
golden and emerald ring (?????). Polycrates threw it into the sea. Soon
afterwards, it turned up in the belly of a fish that a fisherman had
caught and presented to Polycrates. Amasis said, ‘That’s it, you’re too
lucky, I’m cutting off our friendship before the gods screw you over.’
The
tyrant Peisistratos of Athens married an aristocratic girl in order to
form an alliance with her family, but he thought the family was cursed,
so he would only have sex with her ‘not in the customary way’ and I
still do not know what this means because my Greek history tutor was the
most awkward person ever and would not tell me
An Ancient Greek word for ‘extravagant dandy’ was ‘someone who is obsessed with fish’
The great Greek general Pericles was mocked because he allegedly allowed his mistress to boss him around in bed
It is 100% true that Plato published a serious piece of work criticising Aeschylus for making Achilles top and Patroclus bottom
This
is the what the Greeks came up with to explain intersex people:
Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes & Aphrodite, was born a boy but
attracted the attentions of a rather obsessive girl who tried to force
herself on him. Fortunately for her, they were in a magic spring and she
prayed to be joined to him always, so they were joined together in one
body that was part male and part female
In Cyprus, the goddess Aphrodite was represented with both male and female sex organs
Alexander
the Great used to get foreign kings to line up their favourite
prostitutes and then he would make a big show of walking along the line
and acting disinterested
Allegedly, Alexander met the cynic
philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for
him. Diogenes said, ‘Get out of my sunlight.’ Alexander said, ‘If I were
not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes,’ and Diogenes replied, ‘If I
were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes.’
The Roman
playwright Terence, considered by later writers to be the best example
of ‘pure literary Latin’, might have been an African immigrant and is
widely thought to have been a slave
Julius Caesar annoyed the populace of Rome because he used to answer his mail during the races
Cicero
was told to change his name because it meant ‘chickpea’ and he
responded that he would make it the most glorious name in Rome
It
is 99.9% likely that it is actually the case that Cicero was not let in
on the assassination of Caesar because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut
Caesar once said, ‘I know I am the most hated man in Rome, because Cicero hates me, and God knows Cicero is easy to please’
Cicero and his brother Quintus seemingly spent an alarming amount of time chasing Cicero’s secretary around, asking for kisses
The
poet Vergil (Vergilius), for sadly modern-esque reasons, was nicknamed
‘Parthenias’ (which renders itself quite nicely as something like
‘Virginia’)
Augustus nagged all his poet friends to write an
epic about him, and when Vergil said he would do it, Propertius
published a poem saying ‘THANK THE GODS: someone else is doing it - and
it’s pretty good btw you should read it when it comes out’
The poet Ovid was exiled for a ‘poem and a mistake’ and we STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS
The emperor Augustus was teetotal and lame in one leg
As part of his propaganda against Augustus, Mark Antony claimed that Augustus singed off his leg hair
Augustus
responded that Mark Antony was a drunken hooligan. Antony wrote a
pamphlet defending himself, entitled ‘On the subject of my drunkenness’.
To me this is one of the greatest losses of antiquity
The emperor Tiberius was obsessed with pears and cucumbers
The
emperor Claudius allegedly ordered for his third wife to be executed,
then got so drunk that he had to ask why she was not at dinner
Claudius had a son who died when he threw a pear core in the air, tried to catch it in his mouth and choked
Augustus
complained that Tiberius used words in their strict etymological sense
(or used literal equivalents of phrases that were used in a
non-etymological sense), and the emperor Hadrian, when reading about
this, commented, ‘It sounds like Augustus was not very well educated if
he chose his words according to their usage and not their etymology.’
The
emperor Galba is the only Roman male who is explicitly said to have had
a sexual preference for adult males (i.e. of his own age) and not boys
Hadrian
and his wife went travelling with Hadrian’s lover Antinous and an
aristocratic woman named Julia Balbilla. At a tourist site in Egypt,
Julia Balbilla carved a poem in the style of Sappho on a famous statue.
One of my history professors said that this suggests Hadrian’s wife was a
lesbian and they covered for each other
The historian Tacitus
was a keen hunter. His friend Pliny went hunting one day and sent him a
letter, ‘You won’t believe it, Tacitus, I went hunting, and I enjoyed
it! I took all my books and I sat in the shade by the nets and it was so
peaceful, I got so much done. You should try it!’
The Greek finance ministry had a Grexit plan after all, involving hacking their own servers and setting up a system of tax reserve accounts. Perhaps understandably, this has the Greek opposition parties upset; on the other hand, they were also upset that no Grexit planning had taken place.
The government had made contingency plans for a temporary alternative
currency, in the form of electronic I.O.U.s. On June 30th, Greece missed
a payment to the I.M.F., joining three other countries in arrears:
Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Three days later, Klaus Regling, the head
of the European Stability Mechanism, which was managing the debt that
Greece owed to the countries of the E.U., e-mailed Varoufakis to remind
him that, because of the missed I.M.F. payment, the European Financial
Stability Facility had the option of asking for immediate repayment of
E.U. funds. “I personally owe €142.6 billion,” Varoufakis said. “It’s my
name on the contract.” He recalled that his response, delivered with
war-weary humor, and some contempt, was a two-word quotation of the King
of Sparta: “Molon labe,” or “Come and get it.” On the night of
July 3rd, Varoufakis was mobbed as he passed through a crowd of tens of
thousands of Greeks, to a final rally for the “no” cause. Walking
behind him, I saw a man in his seventies kiss Varoufakis’s shoulder.
Michel Thomas, the language teacher, was in his teens when he escaped the Nazis and joined first the French Resistance and then the US Army. In this interview with the BBC, he describes seeing people being loaded onto cattle cars to be taken away to concentration camps. He also describes that he felt at one point when he had been sentenced to death, as if Nature had reached out to embrace him and calm him in preparation for death, and that only by resisting that welcoming embrace was he able to survive.
Yanis Varoufakis gives his first interview since resigning as Finance Minister. “You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway.”
The new tech entrepreneurs and culture of Iran. I am not sure who is more representative of Iran, them or the hardliners, than I am sure who is more representative of America, us or our hardliners.
Scott: Hello again and welcome to the Startup Geometry
Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Gosnell. For more episodes of this series, please
visit iTunes or Stitcher and look for a Startup Geometry Podcast. For show
notes, please go to bottlerocketscience.net or to windcastlevc.com/podcast.
Today's interview is with Brad DeLong who is the chair of the Economics
Department at California, Berkeley and is a senior economist with the Center for
Equitable Growth in Washington, DC.
Brad: . . . intelligent swarm of
bees masquerading as a human being for purposes of preparing delay for alien
invasion. I thought everyone knew that.
Scott: You're perhaps the third
person who said that to me this week or at least in my presence.
Brad:
Bees?
Scott: Bees, yeah. John Scalzi said that on Twitter
yesterday.
Brad: I think Scalzi must be the source of the meaning
then.
Scott: It could be.
Brad: He is the person who has the
potential reach to do so to get that meaning into people's minds. So have you
read his latest?
Scott: I have not, no. Although I've been reading his
battles with the Sad Puppies.
Brad: I see. Well, yes.
Scott: And
the other puppies.
Brad: That's a sad story, or a rabid story, or simply
a crazy story. I suppose it's ultimately the craziest because the font and
origin of social justice warriorhood and weird gender presentation of self stuff
in science fiction is really not so much Joanna Russ who is always way out there
or Ursula Le Guin who was an elite taste, but rather Baen Books' Lois McMaster
Bujold who has been writing space opera and military science fictions. But it's
really about gender relations and similar things for three decades or so now,
and winning huge numbers of Hugo Awards doing it.
So it's just that a
lot of people who've been reading Lois McMaster Bujold's books from Baen Books
have simply not been understanding the authorial intent or indeed authorial
execution at all.
Claudia Azula Altucher is an idea machine; an accomplished yoga practitioner and teacher; and a popular podcaster, author and YouTuber. Today, she brings all of this to the podcast to help you get your life on the move. She'll teach you what you need to do to clean up your life, how to get your idea muscles sweating, and why she should be the next CEO of Twitter. You canfind her online at claudiayoga.com, through her podcasts, which include Ask Altucher and Claudia Yoga, and through the Claudia Yoga YouTube Channel. Her books, including, Become an Idea Machine: Because Ideas Are the Currency of the 21st Century are available through Amazon and, as they say, wherever books are sold. From the book's description:
HOW DO I TRANSFORM MY LIFE? The answer is simple: come up with ten ideas a day. It doesn't matter if they are good or bad the key is to exercise your 'idea muscle', to keep it toned, and in great shape. People say ideas are cheap and execution is everything but that is NOT true. Execution is a consequence, a subset of good, brilliant idea. And good ideas require daily work. Ideas may be easy if we are only coming up with one or two but if you open this book to any of the pages and try to produce more than three, you will feel a burn, scratch your
head, and you will be sweating, and working hard. There is a turning point when you reach idea number 6 for the day, you still have four to go, and your mind muscle is getting a workout. By the time you list those last ideas to make it to ten you will see for yourself what "sweating the idea muscle" means. As you practice the daily idea
generation you become an idea machine. When we become idea machines we are flooded with lots of bad ideas but also with some that are very good. This happens by the sheer force of the number, because we are coming up with 3,650 ideas per year (at ten a day). When you are inspired by an extraordinary idea, all of your thoughts break their chains, you go beyond limitations and your capacity to act expands in every direction. Forces and abilities you did not know you had come to the surface, and you realize you are capable of doing great things. As you practice with the suggested prompts in this book your ideas will get better, you will be a source of great insight for others, people will find you magnetic, and they will want to hang out with you because you have so much to offer. When you practice every day your life will transform, in no more than 180 days, because it has no other evolutionary choice. Life changes for the better when we become the source of positive, insightful, and helpful ideas. Don't believe a word I say. Instead, challenge yourself to try it for the 180 days and see your life transform, in magical ways, in front of your very eyes.
If you enjoy the show & would like to hear more episodes, please download, rate and subscribe through iTunes, as your enthusiasm for the show means a lot. Please comment below if you have suggestions for future episodes.
Brad DeLong visits Startup Geometry today to talk about economic currents and current economics. He may or may not have confessed to being a hyperintelligent swarm of bees in human form, a historian in disguise as an economist, and/or a Keynesian. He reviews the effects and effectiveness of US economic policies including the 2009 Recovery Act; the Trans-Pacific Partnership; tax, education, infrastructure and other proposals. We discuss the entertainment revolution and the fall of middle class security, and what to do if someone has a bigger yacht than you.
If you enjoy the show & would like to hear more episodes, please download, rate and subscribe through iTunes, as your enthusiasm for the show means a lot. Please comment below if you have suggestions for future episodes.
Note: I have to apologize for referring to Lois McMaster Bujold a "very competent writer" in the podcast. I tend toward understatement when in interview mode. She's a tremendous writer, and I read everything she publishes greedily, as soon as it comes out. I facepalm myself regularly.
[0.00.36] Brad DeLong is a hyperintelligent swarm of bees in human form, John Scalzi, Lois McMaster Bujold, gender politics in SF, Science fiction and economics as worldbuilding exercise.
[0.09.25] Trends in the economic profession, economics considered as the Nile delta. Ulrika Malmendier , Stefano DellaVigna, and Raj Chetty as leading researchers at the behavioral, individual scale. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez at the macro, sociological scale.
[0.13.58] Keeping in mind the lessons of the Great Depression. George Osborne and the perpetual budget surplus idea.
[0.16.00] Why is Ricardian Equivalence not a thing? Why should the government invest? What's the benefit to putting off our bills?
[0.21.19] What about tax cuts as stimulus?
[0.23.23] Why transfer payments, tax credits, infrastructure spending, are better than cutting taxes on the rich from either an efficiency and equity standpoint. The effectiveness and politics of the 2009 Recovery Act. Christina Romer, Barack Obama. $600B in stimulus, where we needed $4T. A fire engine intervenes.
[0.29.54] Prospects for improving the situation now. Impact of the social safety net on JK Rowling & entrepreneurs. "You get very few tightrope walkers without a powerful safety net."
[0.32.40] Hillary Clinton's agenda. Zero debt grads, infrastructure broadly defined.
[0.38.20] Costs and benefits, 20th c. vs. 21st c. Losing the secure middle class existence, gaining better entertainment and communication. Who's rich, and what does that mean psychologically? George Romney vs. Mitt Romney. Jann Wenner vs. Paul Allen. Spalding Gray on the Hamptons. The Buddha: "Desire is infinite."
[0.43.00] The end of the fundamental problems (fire, flood, famine, marauding Huns & water buffalo) as we climb the Maslow hierarchy. Noah Smith. The entertainment revolution.
[0.47.30] The trade deals. How the TPP could be improved, and what its flaws are. How to negotiate a trade agreement that's better in its distributional effects.
[0.55.45] One policy recommendation & one personal recommendation for the listeners. Obama's most costly mistake. The R statistical package. Controlling your infinite desires.
Read more from and about Brad DeLong at the Equitablog at the Center for Equitable Growth, or at his blog, DeLong's Grasping Reality, and is readily Google-able.
And why these trade deals on these specific terms? His reasoning and negotiating stance are opaque. This is never a good place to be on anything, especially if you are President.
Nearly every constituency in the Democratic Party
opposes it; and the more they learn about it, the more they oppose it.
And yet their leader, Obama, wants it badly.
But
why? Maybe it’s a better agreement—better for the American middle
class, for American workers—than it seems in the leaked drafts, where it
appears bent to the will of multinational corporations. John Kerry, the
Secretary of State, and Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense,
co-authored a column on Monday in USA Todayarguing,
in evangelical tones, that the T.P.P. will usher in a glorious new era
of American-led prosperity, a “global race to the top” for all parties.
Meanwhile, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sees only a race to the bottom. Organized
labor, by all accounts, plans to punish any elected Democrat who
supports the T.P.P., or even supports fast-track for Obama, in the next
campaign. It’s difficult, again, to evaluate the agreement when we can’t
see it. And it will be difficult for Congress to do its job if its
members can’t study each part of the many-tentacled T.P.P. on its
merits, but must simply vote yes or no on the whole shebang. What’s the
rush? Is it simply Obama’s wish to make his mark on history and to
complete his pivot toward Asia before his time is up? Politicians are
often accused of supporting pro-corporate policies to please wealthy
backers, looking toward the next campaign. That can’t be Obama’s motive
now.
On one of the specific issues Warren raised, about
whether the trade deal could be used to undermine the 2010 Dodd-Frank
financial reform act, Obama might be right, although we’ll have to take
it on trust; the text of the provisional agreement is classified. (When
Senator Barbara Boxer went to inspect it in a secure room at the
Capitol, a guard told her she couldn’t take notes.)
A number of legal experts, however, including Yale’s Judith Resnik and
Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, have raised similar concerns to the ones
Warren expressed, warning that the T.P.P. could allow corporations and
investors to challenge the laws and policies of member countries,
including the United States, outside the scope of their existing legal
system. In a recent letter
to congressional leaders, the experts referred to a known provision of
the T.P.P., which would see disputes resolved not by the courts but by a
new conflict-resolution panel, the prospective makeup of which is far
from clear. This panel “risks undermining democratic norms because laws
and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at
risk in a process insulated from democratic input,” they warned.
President
Obama hasn’t addressed all of these concerns, and he has also failed to
provide much backing for his assertion that the T.P.P. would be
beneficial to the middle class. The most widely quoted study
of the deal’s likely effect, which was carried out by three economists
associated with the pro-free-trade Peterson Institute for International
Economics, found that its impact would be modest. By 2025, the study
said, the deal would boost over-all U.S. income by about 0.4 per cent of
G.D.P. If this is accurate, the new trade deal won’t have much effect
either way on American incomes.
But that isn’t the full story. In an important recent paper,
Josh Bivens, of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, pointed
out that estimates like the one produced by the Peterson Institute don’t
take into account the distributional aspects of trade agreements. The
traditional argument for free trade is that it reallocates resources,
workers included, to their most productive uses, and that this causes
over-all income and output to rise. But this churning process doesn’t
only create winners, such as consumers who can buy lower-cost imported
goods. It also creates losers, such as the Maytag-plant workers in
Illinois and many others who make things that poorer countries can
produce more cheaply because they have lower wages.
In this short preview of my interview with economist Brad DeLong, we discuss the economic and social impact of the trade deals currently being negotiated by the US Trade Representative, including the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade Promotion Authority and related bills under consideration in Congress this month.
The full interview will be available next week. Please check back regularly, and please subscribe on iTunes to get all of our episodes.
A team from Massachusetts General Hospital under Harald Ott regrew rat and primate forelimbs ex vivo, and then transplanted it back into a host animal. They did it by removing all of the cells from an amputated arm, reseeding it with appropriate cell types for the various tissues in a bioreactor atop the existing extracellular scaffolding, and then reattaching it.
This is not quite as impressive as growing it up from nothing, but it represents a substantial step forward from existing technology which is capable of doing single or dual cell type tissue growth. This is multiple tissue, structured repopulation and regrowth of tissue. That's huge.
I had seen the photos of Karl Lagerfeld's enviable library before, so of course I could tell that most of the books are shelved horizontally. What I did not realize until Rain Noe pointed it out over on Core77 is that this is not just an eccentricity. It's an ergonomic hack, so Lagerfeld doesn't have to turn his head to read the titles. Note that in the closeup of the shelves below, all (or at least most) of the titles are turned for easiest reading.
I never have lunch, but when I do, I ask them to bring it to me in the
house. I actually have two houses. This house here, it's only for
sleeping and sketching, and I have another house two-and-a-half meters
away for lunch and dinner and to see people, and where the cook is and
all that. I don't want that here. Even if the place is huge, I want to
be alone. If I want something, I call them, and they're next door, they
come. The studio is next door, the office is next door. If I have guests
and butlers, I don't want them in my house. Everything is next door.
Adam Swartzbaugh, founder of the Genesis Network, works to defeat human trafficking and help rebuild local networks to help with disaster recovery. He's not only an active social entrepreneur, he's also a rapid language learner, world traveler and multi-sport athlete. He's also the only man I know who's won in hand-to-hand combat with a hawk.
In this episode of the Startup Geometry Podcast, I talk with Adam about:
What made him interested in the problem of human trafficking in Southeast Asia
How providing educational opportunities in remote locations is the key to interrupting trafficking networks
How finding a calling changes your motivational & energy levels
Why attending a highly creative university while doing a highly structured ROTC program made for a powerful combination of experiences
In this episode, I talk with Christoph Rehage, who filmed himself walking more than 5000km across China over the course of a year. Most of you will be familiar with him from the YouTube video that resulted from the trip:
He's also the author of three books, published in German and Chinese, an avid reader of travel books, collector of fine vodkas, filmmaker, photographer and newspaper columnist. We talk about his early travels, what China looks like beyond Beijing and the big cities, what Germany and China have to teach each other, and how travel improves our lives.
Paul Romer's endogenous growth model (which treats ideas as part of the economic model, rather than something which is set outside of, or "exogenous to", the economic growth process) offers what I think is one of the most useful macro frameworks; however, it seems to have fallen out of favor for some reason.
In this interview with Cloud Yip of iMoney Magazine, he talks about the importance of urbanization, his growth model, and why non-rival, partially excludable goods (like ideas) mean that the primary micro market model to study is that of monopolistic competition (many competitors, differentiated goods, neither price taking nor price setting completely):
Q: So are you not going back to work on growth theory?
Romer: Actually I am writing something about growth theory right now,
but it is mostly a commentary on what happened to growth theory. To be
honest, I think that a substantial fraction of the work that people are
now doing on growth has to be judged a failure from a scientific
perspective.
In particular – and I apologize if this relies too much on the jargon
of our field — monopolistic competition turns out to be just the tool
for understanding the economic ideas. (It also turns out to be the tool
for understanding international trade, economic geography, and
macroeconomics.) But there has been a series of models that are
associated with the University of Chicago – from what some people call
the freshwater camp in macroeconomics – that are continuing a fight that
George Stigler started in the 1930s to keep monopolistic competition
from being used in economics. It is hard to explain to an outsider why a
whole group of economists have ended up on the wrong side of scientific
progress, resisting the direction that all of modern economic theory is
taking, but they are.
In the economics of ideas, we have to be willing to at least consider
the possibility that someone could have some control over an idea,
hence some monopoly power associated with ideas. This could come from
patent or a copyright. It could also come from secrecy.
Then we can ask if it is a good idea or a bad idea to have more
intellectual property rights or more protection of ownership of ideas.
We know that the answer here is mixed. Sometimes some amount of it can
be good, but it can also be harmful if the property rights are too
strong or are given to the wrong types of ideas. But if you don’t even
allow for the possibility of ex post monopoly rents from the discovery
of ideas, you can’t even ask the question.
So it is scientifically unacceptable to have people who say, “We will
never, as a matter of principle, consider a model in which there are
ever any monopolies. We will dogmatically stick only to models of
price-taking competition.” I think this an untenable scientific stance.
I don’t think that this critique is going to reignite interest in
growth theory. But like I said, when it’s time for interest to come
back, somebody have a new take on growth theory, and work in this area
will start again. But in the meantime, we have to stop tolerating work
that is scientifically unjustifiable.
Q: I thought the endogenous growth model paved a new
direction for growth theory to further develop, yet the academic
interest in this theory just stopped. And even textbooks just briefly
mention the endogenous growth model. What is the problem?
Romer: Well, I think the thing we learn from endogenous growth is
something very simple. It is the notion of an idea as a nonrival good.
The statement that an idea is a nonrival good is very powerful because
what that tells you is the value of an idea is proportional to, or at
least scales with, the total number of people who can use it. So it
means that scale effects are at the heart of economic activity. This is
why globalization is so important, because it is now possible for any
idea to be used by everyone.
The Solow model already allows for a non-rival good, but the model
also made it nonexcludable – which means that no one could control or
own an idea. This turns a nonrival good into a public good. What
endogenous growth theory said is that, there are some nonrival goods
that can be at least partially excludable. This means that incentives
start to matter, both for discovering ideas and for spreading ideas. The
people who want to stick with price-taking never want to allow the
possibility of that a nonrival good could be even partially excludable.
Because of their untenable insistence on price-taking models, they have
tried to stop the spread of the key insight from endogenous growth
theory. And they have been at least partially successful in doing so.
Once you admit that there are some nonrival goods, globalization
becomes much more important than standard theory suggests. And if you
allow that some of them are partially excludable, then incentives matter
a lot more than standard theory suggests, for better and for worse.
So for example, there is a non-rival idea that a firm can control.
They can keep it secret. They can take it to work in a factory in India.
If they want to locate in India but there are no gateway cities there,
they may go elsewhere in the world. So the policies that make a place
like Mumbai so dysfunctional influence growth for the entire country.
What a government can do is influence the incentives for people to
bring ideas into a country. One way to think about why Shenzhen was so
powerful is that it created incentives for firms to bring ideas into
China and combine those ideas with Chinese workers.
You don’t even need a formal model for that. Once you see the
underlying idea, sometimes the words and the clarity of thinking are
what really matters, not the math. You can use the math to get there,
but once you got there, you don’t need that anymore. It is unfortunate
that these ideas are not being communicated to students in our
textbooks, because these are the exciting ideas.
Justin Fox has a nice review article in the Harvard Business Review which reviews the three major schools of decision-making (decision analysis, heuristics and biases, and "we're not as stupid as we look"). Particularly fascinating, in an inside baseball sort of way, is the bit about how Gerd Gigerenzer "fatigued" Daniel Kahneman with his arguments:
During an academic year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, in 1989–1990, he gave talks at Stanford (which had
become Tversky’s academic home) and UC Berkeley (where Kahneman then
taught) fiercely criticizing the heuristics-and-biases research program.
His complaint was that the work of Kahneman, Tversky, and their
followers documented violations of a model, Bayesian decision analysis,
that was itself flawed or at best incomplete. Kahneman encouraged the
debate at first, Gigerenzer says, but eventually tired of his
challenger’s combative approach. The discussion was later committed to
print in a series of journalarticles, and after reading through the whole exchange, it’s hard not to share Kahneman’s fatigue.
Welcome to the Startup Geometry podcast, where we talk to the creators, innovators and explorers who make the world what it is.
In this episode, I talk with Steven Brust, author of the Vlad Taltos/Dragaera novels. We talk about his writing process, important influences and future plans. I've been a huge fan of Steven's, ever since his first novel, Jhereg, introduced us to wisecracking assassin Vlad Taltos and his sidekick Loiosh back in 1983.
His latest books are Hawk and The Incrementalists.
You'll notice that I immediately mispronounce his last name (which is pronounced BROOST, though spelled BRUST), despite having pasted a note with the phonetic spelling of his name to the microphone I was using at the time.
Podcasting is HARD.
The Isaiah Berlin quote I referenced with regard to Incrementalist politics was in an interview with him which was excerpted in The 50 Year Argument, a documentary on the New York Review of Books, where I first saw and heard it. Similar sentiments could be found elsewhere in his work, for example in Crooked Timber, a collection of his essays and lectures.
by Marie Kondo.
