The 21st century sucks
Can the 21st century get any worse?
I recently ran across an old NYT article from January 2001. What a breath of fresh air:
Basically, monetarists wanted to get the government out of the business of short-term economic management. First and foremost this meant rejecting the use of fiscal policy — discretionary tax cuts or spending increases — to fight recessions.
By and large this was an argument that the monetarists won on the evidence. . . . [A]lmost all economists now agree with the position that monetary policy, not fiscal policy, is the tool of choice for fighting recessions.
Almost all economists, that is, except those who have been or hope to be tapped for jobs in the new administration. Indeed, it’s remarkable how thoroughly George W. Bush’s people seem to have been converted to a crude Keynesian view of economic policy — a view that, it just so happens, offers them another justification for a tax cut that even moderate Republicans think is excessive. . . .
Lawrence Lindsey, who last weekend stood Milton Friedman on his head, declaring that monetary policy is ineffective and fiscal policy reigns supreme. Here’s what he said: “Let’s contrast the typical credit card borrower on monetary policy versus fiscal policy. The interest rate cut of last week helps the typical credit card borrower about two bucks a month, two dollars a month, whereas Mr. Bush’s tax cut for a family making $40,000, gets a $1,600-a-year tax cut, 32 bucks a week. That’s a much bigger heft.”
You have to admire Mr. Lindsey. It’s not often that an economist manages a triple play. But he did it: his statement was specious on three distinct levels. . . .
Finally, and most important, [Lindsey] misrepresented the way interest rate cuts work. Their main effect on demand isn’t via a reduction in the payments people make on the debt they already have; lower interest rates work by stimulating investment, that is, by inducing businesses and individuals to borrow more, or to put their money into real assets instead of parking it in bonds. That’s how rate cuts led to recovery from the last recession even while Bill Clinton was raising taxes. . . .
Yes, the good old days when what’s now called “market monetarism” reigned supreme, when new Keynesians believed monetary policy was more powerful than fiscal policy, and that using fiscal policy to stabilize the economy was a foolish idea.
The author of this NYT piece (Paul Krugman!) also had some choice words for the ethics of the Bush administration:
One little-noticed but important virtue of the Clinton administration was its honesty in economic analysis and reporting. In general — and in contrast to some of their predecessors — Mr. Clinton’s economists avoided misrepresenting the facts, using convenient but specious arguments, or employing scare tactics to sell their policy ideas.
Ah, the good old days when Bush level dishonesty was viewed as an outrage. I think even Krugman would admit that he never could have imagined an American administration sinking into the current abyss of dishonesty and corruption, where non-stop lying is considered part of the new normal.
I also imagine that back in 2001, Krugman would have had trouble imagining a world where new Keynesian economists began denying that unemployment compensation discouraged people from working, where minimum wage laws and rent controls and anti-price gouging laws were suddenly a good thing, where “crude Keynesianism” was back in vogue, where monetary offset was totally ignored (even when the central bank had plenty more ammo), and where the central bank allowed disinflation during the greatest adverse supply shock in global history.
Or a world where conservatives embraced nationalism, demagoguery, protectionism, bigotry, massive government spending programs, trillion dollar deficits during boom times, and all the rest.
It’s been all downhill since 2001.
You can have your stupid iPhones; I’ll take the late 20th century any day. Heck, I even prefer the grimy 1970s, which will eventually been seen as a golden age—the absolute point of “peak privacy” in the entire 2 million year history of human beings. An urbanized society where traditional so-called “morals” had recently collapsed and our overlords had not yet invented electronic surveillance.
Who you looking at?
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25. April 2020 at 10:25
“Quantity leads and velocity follows”. Cit. Dying of Money -By Jens O. Parsson. A small increase in Vt, which contrary to Vi, is very high, translates into a large delta, Δ, in M*Vt. Absent the G.6 release, how much momentum is left is unanswerable given the statistics currently reported.
Money flows [volume X’s velocity], are robust. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be distributed lags and concentrations in M*Vt. Since the distributed lag effect of money flows reflects mathematical constants for over 100 years, monetary policy, as American Yale Professor Irving Fisher pontificated, should be an exact science.
25. April 2020 at 10:35
September 11, 2001 and December 11, 2001 are the two most important dates. So the Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext to solve the impending global oil crisis…and then made everything worse. So December 11, 2001 is when China entered the WTO and that is when the commodity super cycle began. In order for the global middle class to expand the world needed more oil and that is why neocons became obsessed with Saddam in the late 1990s—Iraq was a major oil underperformer and so removing Saddam was a way to liberate Iraqi oil. I think Trump is a clown but we should have had a more adversarial approach to China in 2001.
25. April 2020 at 11:33
Gene, You said:
“I think Trump is a clown but we should have had a more adversarial approach to China in 2001.”
If we had, then things would be even worse today.
25. April 2020 at 11:46
Sumner, how does a commodity super cycle benefit America? So we knew what was coming when China entered the WTO and we knew a commodity super cycle would ensue. Remember the price of oil was an issue in the 2000 election and the recession and 9/11 merely delayed the inevitable oil price increase. Neocons had no problem talking about Iraq’s oil prior to Bush winning the 2000 election because they knew how important that oil was to not only the American economy but also the global economy. Plus America believed it was running out of natural gas in 2001 and so we thought we would need LNG to be imported and demand from China would make LNG more expensive.
25. April 2020 at 12:18
It is far, far easier to access information in every field than it was in the late 20th century when even as the internet was taking off in the mid 90s you still had to go to the library for almost all research. {shudder} Almost all written correspondence required a letter until the very end of the late 20th century.
And the early 21st century isn’t over yet. Right before coronavirus was a story in Wuhan, Harvard geneticist George Church told 60 Minutes there will be a genetic based age reversal for humans from around 2030. In the meantime, there will be many medical advances for those with heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, muscle decline, brain injuries, paralysis and dementia.
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear….
25. April 2020 at 12:47
Ah yes, the good ol’ days when Honest Paul was tall in the saddle:
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/nobel-laureate-paul-krugman-too-little-stimulus-in-stimulus-plan/
————–quote————–
The driver of the current recession is not a Fed-induced reaction to rising inflation. In fact, the problem is nearly the opposite. Today the real interest rates the U.S. government pays on key treasury instruments have been allowed to fall nearly to zero — a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP, as some call it). The key implication of ZIRP: It renders monetary policy impotent, according to Krugman. That eliminates one of the government’s chief levers of influence over the economy. “We did not appreciate how helpful persistent inflation could be.”
At the same time, the former engines of growth in the private sector have gone silent, he noted, including housing, exports (which had been rising but are off 20% in recent periods), business investment and consumer spending. That has created a huge spending gap, which Krugman pegged at $2.9 trillion.
With monetary policy a non-starter, “That leaves nothing but government spending” to prime the pump, Krugman said. “That’s pure Keynes.”
————–endquote—————
Paul’s big complaint against Obama, at the time, was not that he was laughably ignorant for saying, I thought it was the consensus of the economics profession that you fight recession with fiscal policy., but that the 2009 stimulus package of $800 billion was not big enough.
25. April 2020 at 13:29
Sumner’s hero is the anti-hero Travis Bickle of Taxi? Though I’ve never seen this film, a short review here: https://www.filminquiry.com/taxi-driver-flawed-protagonist/ indicates Sumner embraces a man who is misogynist, racist, prone to violence and pedophilia, and is mentally unbalanced. So Bickle represents the ‘good ole days’? I say the good old days, they were terrible.
25. April 2020 at 14:04
@Gene F: since all you ever talk about is oil prices, what does the massive oversupply of oil we see now (with basically nowhere left to put oil we draw out of the ground) mean for the future? We’re in great shape, right?
@Todd K: I have to admit I’m impressed by your commitment to the bit. Your posts are always about all this great health stuff we’re gonna get…in 10 years. So no way for us to prove you’re kind of a quack today. Pretty sure by 2025 you’ll be telling us age reversal gets here in 2035.
25. April 2020 at 14:36
@msgkings I think you have me confused with George Church. Two geniuses but in separate fields (grin). Also, I’ve maintained for twenty years that there will be major medical advances by the mid 2020s, not 2030.
By the way, a few days ago there was a pre-clinical study that suggests taking NR (Niagen) may help against coronavirus since that reduces a person’s NAD+ in cells whereas 300 mg of NR has been shown to boost NAD+ in healthy 45 to 79 year olds by 40%. It may be half a year or a year before more is known about that, though.
25. April 2020 at 14:50
Oh, in 2002, I wrote to friends and family that by 2020 – pretty close to today, actually – that death rates from disease would be slashed 70% to 80% relative to what they were in 2000, apart from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. In addition, cancer would be treatable for anyone who got it from 2015, so my crystal ball was a bit foggy then.
Still, there were tons of people who insisted then and in subsequent years that real breakthroughs were still decades away. For example, Tyler Cowen said in 2010 that he doesn’t think there will be any medical breakthroughs by 2030 yet the CRISPR era is here as Church reminds us.
25. April 2020 at 15:04
Todd, You said:
“It is far, far easier to access information in every field than it was in the late 20th century when even as the internet was taking off in the mid 90s you still had to go to the library for almost all research.”
Yes, that’s why the debate over issues today is at such a high intellectual level. (As Trump would say, I’m being sarcastic.)
25. April 2020 at 16:33
Scott,
The identity of the person in the picture is obvious, but the real question is why was he important from an economic perspective?
25. April 2020 at 17:07
The nice thing about macroeconomics debates is that no one is ever wrong.
25. April 2020 at 17:42
Scott,
isn’t nostalgia mostly a sign that one cannot keep up with the present anymore and is afraid of the future?
Todd,
you are so crazy, you have already made so many predictions here, of course nothing has ever come true, but that doesn’t stop you from making even more unrealistic predictions all the time. Today is a new low, you list two of your own crazy predictions, even with dates, 2015 and 2020, both are far from being true, but you just keep going.
Maybe you should wake up sometime, you crazy dog. We have a disease here that costs trillions of dollars and paralyzes half the world, and all our scientists can do is say that they may or may not be able to create a vaccine in 12-18 months (if ever) while they muddle through thousands of regulations.
25. April 2020 at 18:54
Of course the monetary policy consensus of 2001 had not watched the Fed maintain such tight policy that the price level drifted farther and farther off target after 2008 and not it look like the Fed intends re-accelerate the drift again.
25. April 2020 at 19:29
Scott,
every development I liked about the world since 1989 is gradually being undone – globalization, more and more freedom of movement of people and capital, cheap stuff from efficient supply chains and the like. Then again, the absolute level of these developments is still much better now than in 1989. And yes it can always get worse: the 20th Century started with a world war, then came the real crisis through a pandemic, then the global monetary crisis, along with decades of deglobalization. As I said before we’re doing it in reverse order now, hopefully not ending in the world war.
I still like the instant information access and connection to other people through phones. And internet search!! Much less boredom. All else probably not so useful.
But I’m totally with you on peak privacy in the 70s. Our lives are glass houses now. And the great moral liberation too at the time. Now we’re all condemned again to pretend our own infinite goodness and adherence to other people’s standards. The other meaning of the “global village” meme: just as overbearing on your life as the medieval one.
25. April 2020 at 19:59
The century wasn’t so bad in the rest of the world.
Bangladesh had steady economic growth. Chinese people are much better off, too. And unemployment in my own native Germany finally peaked in 2005 and has been in a mostly downward trend ever since.
And even the Americans mostly just like to complain. There’s more to life than an ever more ineffectual government. Even if that government is trying to take a bigger place in life.
Amazon and Wikipedia are amazing and low cost or free. Your private sectors keeps being the envy of the world. Global travel has become cheaper and more accessible. For Americans but even more so for the rest of the world.
Google Translate has become really good at translating. Generally more than good enough to understand, and occasionally on par with human translation. (At least for me. I recently used Google Translate to transform some English-language financial corporatese into German, and it usually did a better job faster than I did by hand. I just reviewed carefully at the end, instead of coming up with all the turns of phrase by myself.)
25. April 2020 at 20:48
@Christian List
I am open about my predictions but let me add one more. In 1988 I was a sophomore physics student who had been aware of Moore’s Law since I was 11 years old, and I predicted in a history class that anyone born in 2020 could easily live 300 years.
That is a bulls-eye as we will see in 2400. So is George Church crazy to think humans will start to reverse their age around 2030? I know that you are just a doctor with no serious science background but what is your opinion about Church?
25. April 2020 at 21:01
msgkings, the massive oversupply of oil and natural gas is irrefutable proof that the underlying problem of 2001-2008 was an energy crisis in America and an oil crisis globally. So why would all this capital be focused on energy if oil and natural gas weren’t important? Why did the economy of Texas pull America out of the Great Recession more quickly than most other economies? I thought 2016 was the year fracking proved it wasn’t a bubble but I failed to factor in a global pandemic into the equation…my bad.
Going forward I will factor in black swan events happening every 10 years into my equations. So WW1, Great Depression, WW2, post war boom, baby boomers enter workforce, women in workforce, invention of internet, 9/11, fracking developed, coronavirus. Going forward autonomous vehicles, supersonic passenger jets, fusion, AI.
25. April 2020 at 21:31
Christ you’re all a pack of lunatics. With a couple exceptions.
25. April 2020 at 23:27
By this stage in the C20th, Europe had blown itself apart in a war that killed maybe 20m people, rather more people where dying world wide in the Spanish Flu pandemic, Bolshevism was setting itself up in Russia, starting a process of tyrannisation via utopia-in-power that would kill more people than all the inter-state wars of the C20th, Fascism was being created in Italy …
I will take Pax Americana C21st over that any day.
We are in the midst of a decay of a policy regime. The social-democratic policy regime of 1948-1973 really did quite well, until it didn’t. The neoliberal policy regime of 1980-? really did quite well, until it didn’t. We are now in a process of working out what’s next. But if we cannot work out that the shift towards national populism is a massive symptom of the limitations of the existing policy regime, we are not going to get very far.
It is probably not a good idea to be sounding like 1970s or early 1980s traditional social democrats complaining that these market barbarians are going to destroy everything that has been built and we just need to do social democracy harder …
26. April 2020 at 02:14
When the facts change, I change my mind. I agree with Sumner and his friends that investment is the key to prosperity. But the facts of the Great Recession caused some folks to change their minds. What facts? Despite a capital glut and historically low interest rates, American business would not invest and would not borrow to invest. I know, Sumner sees different facts. Here’s another example of changed facts: a global pandemic and economic shut-down would have seemed like science fiction in the year 2001.
26. April 2020 at 07:11
Scott,
But if monetary policy did do it’s job – stabilizing NGDP growth rate – wouldn’t that mean that in every year in 21 century US would be partying like it’s 1999? (excluding supply side shocks)
1999 has a special place in my heart. Every guy who knew how to create basic html table had over 100.000$ that year.
Similar trend has happened in the last 10 years in tech sector, but not in that volume. Wages for software developers had risen quite a bit even though they could be easily outsourced. In my country in Europe wages for tech people had risen like 4 times due to outsourcing. Honestly, I would not know what to do with my self if I did not become a developer.
This all means that markets where right in 1999, Dot-Com was not a bubble, they rightly predicted what will happen in 20 years and what industry is the future.
This all does not mean that EMH is better argument than Walras’s law (Mill’s law) :D.
Thanks.
26. April 2020 at 07:30
It’s not all bad…Scott Sumner’s monetary policies increasingly gained acceptance 2010-2020..
26. April 2020 at 08:04
People that predict should be honest about their errors which I have done above. Tyler Cowen also predicted 1) low American productivity until the 2040s and 2) no medical brreakthroughs until at least 2030.
When I made the almost no deaths from cancer after 2015 prediction in 2002, a biologist polled her biologist friends when they thought almost no deaths from cancer was possible. Six thought not before 2100 and one thought maybe by 2070. Who was crazier?
You laughed at NR (Niagen), a vitamin B3 derivative, being good for anything, yet human trials have showed 1,000 mg a day for six weeks lowered systolic pressure by 10 points with those who have pre-hypertension. Another small trial showed that 1,200 mg of NR along with 200 mg of ptersotilbine slightly improved the condition of those with ALS after 4 months and one year. That beat the latest drug that was approved by the FDA in 2017 which only slows the decline of ALS patients by 30% over the same time periods.
I don’t know what age reversal would be like in 2032, but I’m pretty sure that one of the leading geneticists knows a tad bit more than you, an MD.
26. April 2020 at 08:46
dtoh, I give up–you tell me.
Christian, Perhaps, but why would anyone want to keep up with the present? Isn’t the past always better than the future, for almost any given individual? Who enjoys life more at age 80 than at age 12?
mbka, I agree.
Matthias, You said:
“The century wasn’t so bad in the rest of the world.”
I agree. But now I feel that even China’s getting worse, after getting dramatically better from 1978 to 2018. India too.
Lorenzo, Yes, just as the national populism of the 1930s was a reaction to the Great Depression.
Rayward, I have no idea what you are talking about.
Todd Kreider, Not sure who that final comment is directed to. . . .
26. April 2020 at 08:52
“Yes, that’s why the debate over issues today is at such a high intellectual level. (As Trump would say, I’m being sarcastic.)” – ssumner
Do others find it amusing that one who believes in free markets because the diversity of buyer opinions leads to best results, sees the diversity of opinion expressed in blog comments as anti-intellectual. (Yeah, I know – if it’s not what I believe, it can’;t be “intellectual”.) In reading economics blogs, I’ve found it most enlightening to skim the blog & read the comments.
26. April 2020 at 08:54
Benjamin Cole: “The nice thing about macroeconomics debates is that no one is ever wrong.”
We all like to issue ourselves the occasional “get out of jail free” card from time to time, but I think most of us try to be somewhat modest in doing so – maybe a card that would fit inside a wallet, as opposed to, say, one that was the size of the Ritz hotel.
Ray Lopez: “Sumner’s hero is the anti-hero Travis Bickle of Taxi?”
Maybe the true explanation or secret behind all super-successful and charismatic people is that they simply don’t understand the whole “joke” or “gag” concept. Maybe this confers or signals some sort of social advantage or superiority.
26. April 2020 at 09:25
I should have written @Christian List.
26. April 2020 at 11:40
It is true that when you make long term predictions based on Moore’s Law, almost everyone thinks you are crazy and as with Christian List, are not shy about letting you know this.
Matthias Görgens wrote: “Google Translate has become really good at translating. Generally more than good enough to understand, and occasionally on par with human translation.”
I’ve been a little off with MT. In 1996, I had been back from Japan for half a year and wondered how long it would take to get good enough at Japanese to translate. I was in a small computer lab while thinking about this and it occurred to me that Yahoo search that I was looking at would eventually be able to statistically match words extremely quickly and accurately so laughed and told a friend at a computer next to me: “There goes human translation!”
He was an econ student and didn’t seem to get Moore’s Law so explained how much more powerful computers would become by 2007 with much better machine translation but still many errors in Spanish, French and German. I added that Japanese and Korean would have maybe a five year lag in quality due to their grammar structures being far apart from English and Japanese will often omit a subject.
I said that in 2009, those who translate easier language pairs would start to see their jobs go away for newspaper articles and anything technical, that is, not if literature, and the end would happen around 2015 to 2019. For Japanese, the five year lag so the end around 2019 to 2024 except didn’t give the years for those to since unsure. A German translator heard what I said and wasn’t happy: “You’re a f***ing idiot! Computers will never think!” To which I politetly replied: “I wouldn’t say never and computers don’t have to be able to think for excellent MT.”
In 1998, I gave a broken 20 minute speech for an end of the year assignment at a Japanese language center in Yokohama and friends thought I’d lost it – even more than usual as I said that year the alarmism over climate change had been way over blown and ignoring the next 80 to 100 years of technological advances. Definitely not a popular opinion among the 50 humanities and social science grad students there.
A friend who translates Japanese asked me in 2002 to finally give years for when he’d lose his job, insisting not before 2030 so came up with not before 2008 and essentially over by 2015 for technical documents including patents, which is of course law as well. He met Ray Kurzweil in 2010, told him about my prediction and Kurzweil replied that he had nothing to worry about until 2029 when computers would be as smart as humans. (They took a picture of them together smiling as if they were poking fun of me and my friend replied: “That’s why we were grinning!”) But what about computer/MT power in 2028 or 2027? How about 2024?
People are still translating but in most cases wages have fallen a lot. With Japanese/English, by over 50% since 2000. From 2017, I’ve noticed veteran translators warning newcomers not to become heavily involved in translation yet many *still* think the end won’t be until 2050, 2100 or 2500. (IBM warned in January to expect significant changes in the workplace by 2025 due to improvements in A.I.)
26. April 2020 at 11:50
OT but fascinating and Dr. Ray Lopez may be onto something. The possibility that the Wuhan virus is artificial is certainly live.
https://youtu.be/0btLs9duOAc
Jump into about 15 minutes.
One thing that has always bothered me has been the demolition of the market where the Chinese government posits the COVID-19 virus emanated from. If the virus actually emanated from the Wuhan wet market (where bats were not sold) then destroying it is equivalent of destroying a crime scene.
Would not an earnest investigation require the preservation of the market to try to determine origins? There are wet markets all over China. And by destroying the Wuhan market you have learned nothing.
The destruction of the Wuhan wet market has the appearance of a PR stunt.
I understand that the Wuhan lab leak story plays into the hands of the anti-china crowd. But the truth is what the truth is.
26. April 2020 at 15:57
Scott,
I enjoy life more than I did when I was 12, at least not less. Life at 12 can seem very stressful. It’s not stressful, but it feels that way because you have less (illusion of) control as a child.
You used to be so optimistic about your ideas about market monetarism, and that they are now becoming more and more accepted. I hope my pessism wasn’t too contagious, the current blog entry sounds a bit like it was.
I think you can be very happy and very unhappy at any age. I know enough 80-year-olds who enjoy their lives, why not, they are retired, they can do whatever they want, of course they have ailments, but every age has its disadvantages.
Of course I also know 80 year olds who are very unhappy, but these people usually don’t live much longer. If your will to survive is no longer there, you often die relatively quickly, especially at this age.
But when you have made it this far, you often have a resistant positive attitude to life, not every person becomes 80 years old.
I also know 12-year-olds who are very unhappy because, let’s face it, for a great many people school was state organized violence in the form of extreme psychological and physical violence that leaves behind severe lifelong wounds.
There were phases in my youth as well which were absolutely horrorific, I don’t know anything similar from my adult life, because well, adults near me mostly act like adults now, not like children. But in school you have close to no control, and as we all know, children and teenagers can be extremely cruel.
What has really changed for me is the perception of time. As a child, a year is perceived as half of your life, because, well, it is almost half of your life. But since I’ve grown up, time is really flying. I feel like I just turned around twice, and bam, mid-30. What has happened? I really hope life doesn’t continue like this because then life would really be over in a blink of an eye.
And unfortunately, Todd’s unbelievably embarrassing advertising for his ineffective nutritional supplements, I bet he sells this junk, won’t help us with this problem either.
@Benjamin Cole
The theory by Ray sounds like junk from day 1 and that assessment has not changed since.
A still very plausible scenario is, of course, that there has been some kind of lab leak with a natural virus in Wuhan, for which we have quite some indications, while the other side has not yet presented convincing evidence of what else should have happened and where.
The leading German expert for coronaviruses has recently explained a new theory in the Guardian that does not sound implausible, and might for the first time take pressure off the lab theory:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist-christian-drosten-germany-coronavirus-expert-interview
26. April 2020 at 16:22
Scott,
According to Robert Mundell, Travis Bickle was responsible for adding between $5 and $15 trillion in increased output to the U.S. economy because popular sympathy for Reagan after he was shot by Hinckley dissuaded Democrats from voting against the Reagan tax cuts.
26. April 2020 at 16:26
@Todd Kreider
Hey. Did you go to the Center?
26. April 2020 at 17:39
Christian List—
But riddle me this: evidently, people who understand the topic of splicing viruses say that any first-rate virology lab could have spliced together the virus we now know as Covid-19, provided they had bat and pangolin viruses in house.
The above paragraph appears beyond dispute. Ergo, we have moved from the impossible to the possible. It is possible a virology lab splice together Covid-19. Evidently, splicing viruses together is commonplace.
A part of the initial rejection of the “artificially created virus” idea is that deniers said they saw no reason to create such a virus. Once you understand that, the whole story takes on a different color.
Watch the video I have linked to. It is a pleasant relief from the banal conversation one finds on popular media.
26. April 2020 at 17:43
We’ve certainly made it a lot suckier than it needed to be here in the US first with our overreaction to 9-11 followed by our financial mistakes during the Great Recession and topped off by our masterful handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It has been an incredible run of own goals.
26. April 2020 at 19:00
@dtoh
Yeah, I studied Japanese at Stanford’s Yokohama Center in 1997/98. My 20 minute speech at the end that we all had to give in public was: “Why We Will No Longer Need to Study Japanese.”
I was the only one with a physics/mathematics background and realized that year in terms of thinking about science and the future how little I had in common with humanities and social science grad students with respect to the future. Like Scott, they assumed that the year 1998 and 2098 will be “sorta the same.”
Oh, I think not.
26. April 2020 at 23:37
@Todd Kreider
I was there in 1979/80 back when it was in Kioicho. I was the only one who wasn’t either a doctoral candidate in Japanese poetry/art/drama or one in Chinese studies who needed to be able to read the academic work written in Japanese. (Also the only one who spoke decent Japanese at the end of the year.)
I can’t even remember my year end oratory. It was probably something about the shortage of recreational drugs in Japan. 🙂
27. April 2020 at 05:30
@dtoh
Oh, cool. Ken Butler was the director my year and I assume when you were there as well. he had sort of come out of retirement the year I was there.
My spoken Japanese didn’t improve very much that year but my listening and reading levels shot up – then I went to grad school in the U.S. and forgot a lot… dang.
27. April 2020 at 06:18
This is a classic “bad blog” entry by Scott—-and as such I like it immensely. I had forgotten that I “knew” things in 2000, that I have since long forgotten. While I knew zero about MM (maybe I know 10-15/100 today) in 2000 I thought I had a handle on Keynesian ideas. I do recall how shocked I was that 1930’s style Keynes was being pulled out of the crypt—-I could not believe it—-I recall writing some essays on it. I don’t know what one calls today’s actions——but all-in—-it is really difficult to find any precedent of its magnitude.
I assume people know PPP is easily scammed—-and easily misses the intended targets—-but when all pols are for it—-it surely must be crazed.
I wonder if Scott misses the horror show old days of 2019 when, despite the exaggerated braggadocio of the Pres. , we really did have a pretty great economy—-and all the loud people cared about was how Trump had to go—-personally, I long for those days of stupid and vapid accusations and counter-accusations.
Now we live in Tyler Cowen’s land waiting for the “irreversible non-linear” collapse to arrive on our doorstep—-but the best our great thinkers can do is blame Trump for recommendations about drinking Drano.
I lived on NYC’s west side in a 100 square foot room (burglarized several times) , was on food stamps, as a loner grad student from 1973-1979—Taxi Driver came out in 1975—it reflected reality—a bad one. The writer Paul Schrader (sp?) based the character partially on the diaries of the guy who shot George Wallace—-Bobby D got a cabbie license and was simultaneously filming some low rent film in Italy and would fly back weekly to prepare or shoots scenes and driving a cab—-he had just come off Mean Streets—-and was a phenomenal performer.
We thought things were bad because people hated Trump. Now things really are bad and Trump hate is fading somewhat—-as Cowen’s dead end world approaches.
So yeah, I can “dig it”—-perhaps the 70’s were not so bad. But New York was dying and imploding—-like today.
27. April 2020 at 09:47
Ed, Do you think the current debate over economic policy issues is at a higher level than in the 1990s? Really?
Ben, Yes, the best way to evaluate conspiracy theories is to watch videos. They are much more fun than scientific papers.
Christian, The young live in a world of color, and the old live in a black and white world. The world of the young has meaning, while the world of the old is mostly drained of meaning. My daughter lives; I watch movies of people living. Nothing else you say can make up for that difference.
dtoh, Interesting.
Michael, You said:
“I wonder if Scott misses the horror show old days of 2019 when, despite the exaggerated braggadocio of the Pres. , we really did have a pretty great economy—-and all the loud people cared about was how Trump had to go—-personally, I long for those days of stupid and vapid accusations and counter-accusations.”
Yup, and in 2016 we had a pretty great economy and the GOP said the Dems had to go.
27. April 2020 at 12:48
“while the world of the old is mostly drained of meaning.”
Scott, you and Ezekiel Emannual would be great bridge partners!
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/
27. April 2020 at 15:05
@Benjamin Cole – thanks for the video, but the article is more interesting: https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
@Christian List- you’re a fool, a German citing a German, how trite. Read the Medium article, though I doubt you can understand it.
For everybody: China in 1977 accidentally released from a bio lab an H1N1 virus that was a variant of the H1N1 Spanish Flu of 1919. It was temperature sensitive (cold air hinders it) and it’s documented by scientific papers, pre-Covid-19. The virus was being used, not unlike the suspected lab release of the Covid-19 virus, as a potential vaccine for H1N1 (the Covid-19 virus itself is thought by some scientists to be a potential HIV/Aids vaccine, as it has so many ‘functionalities’ –Gain of Function hallmarks not found usually in nature–, such as being more virulent to older people with co-morbidities, see the Medium article). Connect the dots. You’re not stupid. You’re not Christian List.
27. April 2020 at 19:49
“Ben, Yes, the best way to evaluate conspiracy theories is to watch videos. They are much more fun than scientific papers.”–Scott Sumner
Scott–The video is two scientists discussing scientific papers, not conspiracy theories. But the take-away is that any top-rate virology lab can splice viruses together. Evidently, graduate students are splicing together viruses.
In fact, in the video, one of scientists discusses one conspiracy theory, that is the remote possibility of a “false flag” operation. That is, one can imagine a US-intelligence affiliated scientist splicing together C19 and then releasing the new virus in Wuhan, to pin the blame on the Wuhan lab.
But the consensus seems to be that the presence of two virology labs in Wuhan, that were in the business of splicing bat viruses, and then the emergence of C19 in Wuhan….well, if you find radiation outside Fukushima, where do you think the radiation leaked from? Is that a conspiracy theory?
A serous question is, how compromised is US media in reporting the Wuhan lab-leak scenario?
The Atlantic magazine just published a story that, in passing, referred to C19 as coming out of Wuhan wet markets, where no bats or pangolins were sold. A market now demolished. Now that is a strange theory…or should we say, a theology?
28. April 2020 at 09:48
“Who you looking at?”
“The young live in a world of color, and the old live in a black and white world. The world of the young has meaning, while the world of the old is mostly drained of meaning. My daughter lives; I watch movies of people living. Nothing else you say can make up for that difference.”
The funniest moment or bit in the history of this blog; also the least funny. In one post! I thought someone should note this accomplishment.
28. April 2020 at 15:10
@Todd Krieder
Yep. Ken Butler was the Director when I was there. I had a blast. Ended up staying in Japan for a long time. In Tokyo now waiting out Covid.
28. April 2020 at 15:44
Todd, Yeah, 75 is about right. I won’t kill myself, but I sure as hell won’t do chemo for cancer at that age.
Ben, You said:
“That is, one can imagine a US-intelligence affiliated scientist splicing together C19 and then releasing the new virus in Wuhan, to pin the blame on the Wuhan lab.”
Yes, I can also “imagine” that the moon landing was faked.
anon, Thanks. I guess.
29. April 2020 at 17:39
Scott,
I do not believe that there is a “higher” meaning in life, so much is true. Of course you can find meaning in your job, so it is very difficult for these people to retire, I saw that in my father, he was an important civil servant, he retired and the first year was really difficult for him. But I think you can find meaning for yourself at any age. I don’t see what this has to do with age.
I don’t want to pathologize the opposite way, to see no more meaning, but when this view becomes too extreme, and lasts for a longer time, it sounds like a depression. Like I said, I don’t want to pathologize it, I think it’s okay to be depressed from time to time.
The old Woody Allen joke about food is actually an analogy to life, as Woody Allen himself explains:
Even if it sounds weird at first, he is right. And Camus was right with his Sisyphus analogy. Le’t keep rolling the stone up until we drop dead.
30. April 2020 at 09:35
Christian, Depression is a medical condition. “Melancholy” is a better term for people who see the world without comforting illusions.
3. May 2020 at 22:39
Over the past 10 years, some trends in technology have been observed. The salaries of software developers have grown significantly, although they could easily be outsourced. In my country, Europe, the salaries of technicians increased 4 times due to outsourcing. In general, we can work from anywhere in the world who previously could even think that this is possible.