This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A PMC Revolt Will Hold Us Back From The Glorious Automated Future
I've heard a few variants on this. When Tyler Cowen was on Dwarkesh, he said that people will be the bottleneck to automation. His prediction seemed part mechanistic, but part hearkening to the Luddites, that automatable members of the PMC will band together to do whatever it takes to save their weak, deplorable skins. Pass destructive policies, regulations, restrictions, maybe even try to physically break the machines. A minor variant on the Woke Capitalist Wrecker, if you will; the PMC wrecker.
Some might be concerned that these sorts of predictions are a bit vague. What will they actually do? What will it look like? How could we watch events unfold and categorize what is happening? Of course, as the old joke says, fascism comes with smiley faces and McDonald's, so it's unlikely that their activities will be immediately apparent on just a surface glance. Thus, I will turn to the impetus for this post and submit that one need look no further than current events.
This morning at the gym, I listened to Phil Magness, an economic historian who specializes in tariffs, on Reason's Just Asking Questions Podcast. Then, when I got home, I read Alex Tabarrok's latest on Marginal Revolution. They both pointed out something that I had not realized. America still manufactures a lot of value. More value than ever before in history. In real terms. So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs. And why are jobs somehow impacted? It can't be that China has stolen all of the manufacturing value add from us; we've already established, from the data, that we're doing more of that than ever before.1 Nah... it's automation. We're manufacturing gobs more value with fewer human laborers.2
This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away. This is just what it looks like. It doesn't say it on the tin. The talk is always about jobs, but the blame is misplaced for why they're going away. It's automation. It can cause people to reach for whatever tool can possibly cause shortages and contract the economy, just hoping that doing so somehow reverses the impacts of automation. Nevermind that the intermediate steps are "cause shortages" and "contract the economy".
If you're worried about how the PMC will eventually sabotage the progress of automation or just want to find a way to model how humans might be a bottleneck on the way to a glorious automated future, one might need look no further than current events.
1 - Perhaps one wants to just compare total manufacturing value add. China does have approximately double of that than the US does. China also has approximately four times the population of the US.
2 - It also does not seem to be purely a population growth phenomenon.
The PMC wants automation, typically of lower-skilled work.
Pundits have been predicting a white-collar jobs collapse for years, well before AI. In the past, it was due to computers and robots. Now it's AI. What they fail to grasp is that white-collar workers have transferable skills or attributes beyond the actual job description, such as high higher IQ. This means better adaptability to changing economic conditions. A coder can learn law ,for example; or a lawyer learn code. The PMC will , if anything , be protected from automation and other change, not hurt. less skilled workers are more vulnerable because they cannot adapt as well.
More options
Context Copy link
I have a counterpoint to the ‘this will crash the economy’ thesis- the longshoreman’s union, you know, the one we were discussing a few months back, those guys have successfully prevented port automation in the US. This is a drag on productivity but it’s basically fine.
Now the people who will be impacted by AI are mostly female, so there will be less, uh, deals with the mafia involved. But they won’t need to; western governments would rather see the Great Depression 2.0 than see the female LFPR decline. There’ll be regulatory barriers, dumb ones sure, but people will still get up and go to work and do… well probably nothing useful, but something.
I think the distinction I would make is between the means being used to prevent automation and the result of preventing automation. That is, for the longshoreman, the means they used to prevent automation was to threaten to shut down some amount of port traffic (I don't actually know how much; I assume a good chunk of it). This would be pretty damaging to the economy. Whereas, as you say, once they've come to a deal that prevents some amount of automation, the result looks more like a drag on productivity. In their case, it would say that their drag on productivity is mostly confined to just their little corner of the economy. Other countries' ports will continue to become more and more efficient than ours. This may impact the trade flowing through them to some extent, but it probably kinda just shows up as a sort of a ransom that has to be paid, which ultimately is not that huge; there's just not that many of them that need paid off in the end.
Tariffs are actually probably a bit of a lesser threat to the economy. I used the strong wording, but I recall that back during Trump I, I had a comment in the old place quoting Krugman making an estimate that a Trumpian trade war might 'only' cost about 3% of GDP.1 IIRC, Krugman was doing a back-of-the-envelope that assumed that Trump would follow some academic paper for "optimal tariffs", and my guess is that what Trump II has now actually done is, uh, probably not that. Of course, in the limit, as tariffs go to the moon, trade grinds to a halt almost entirely, and it sort of more closely resembles longshoremen shutting down the ports.
Now, what's the ransom that has to be paid in order to actually stop automation in manufacturing? My answer would be, "???". Unlike ports, which are very concentrated in space, amenable to discrete deals that stop specific automation from occurring, and not subject to much competition, manufacturing is everywhere and subject to intense competition. Tariffs don't actually have a mechanism to stop automation in all these places. It's just paying a temporary ransom to some existing manufacturers, who might use part of that ransom to keep a few marginal employees around a little bit longer. They're still going to adopt more automation; if they don't, their competitors will (foreign and domestic). Even if tariffs magically stopped all domestic manufacturing automation, the drag on productivity growth will gradually make foreign manufacturers more and more competitive over time, and uh, I guess we'll have to raise even higher tariffs?! The only real limit in sight would be once they're high enough that they've basically killed all US imports. Yes, a nice ransom to some domestic manufacturers, but if all that automation keeps chugging along overseas, that basically plays out as US GDP numbers dragging and dragging and dragging, while foreigner GDPs moon.
Tariffs probably won't actually wreck the economy in one fell swoop, but they won't fundamentally affect the process of automation in manufacturing, either. They'll just cause some folks to get a little ransom and long-term terrible growth. Even the difference between 1-2% GDP growth each year is getting close to a 2x difference over 50 years.
1 - I absolutely know that Krugman is a partisan hack. His article was actually trying to downplay how bad it would be, so I thought on balance it was reasonable to use him as an OOM estimate, given the context; it really did not feel like he was trying to super inflate the estimate, even though that what I would have otherwise expected from him. I recall it well, because I compared that to the estimates of the 'cost' of climate change in terms of GDP (as well as a few other things), and it was hilarious how little of a thing climate change was.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think it looks like this. I think it looks like Graeber’s fake jobs.
If the PMC succeeds in perpetuating itself / ourselves, then life in 10 years will look like millions of email job workers with fancy titles whose real job is getting AI to make PowerPoints to present to other ‘employees’ to discuss what the AI is doing. Perhaps other people will spend decades ‘studying’ the AI in case it magically stops working. They will all believe they are necessary.
How does that happen? Who hired them? Why did they hire them? Did somebody do something to convince them to hire them when they might not have otherwise? Did those folks use a carrot or a stick? What did that look like?
One way is mutual compliance - if everyone else has DEI, you look weird for not having it. Another way is just by not asking questions - you don't ask whether Fun Bill who's always at the office parties and tells great stories about fishing is really providing good value for money.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like all these issues are always multi-causal and overdetermined. To make a comparison, it seems clear to me that since the rise of Obama, there were a bunch of really powerful forces that decided they were interested in using the wedge of "spreading LGBTQ+ rights" as a pretext to push more American power and influence into lots of other countries. Or the cause of black Civil Rights in the aftermath of World War 2 gave much wealthier, more powerful Northern interests a pretext to push for massive development in the American South, fundamentally altering its character (in many cases against the will of many interests that were locally powerful but weak compared to Northern money and social power). In each case, there were obviously lots of true believers, but there were also powerful triangulators who massively amplified these narratives in the public because they could be used to pursue other goals they considered important.
I'm not sure if it makes me a conspiracy theorist, but I have this sense that there are very big, very powerful, very important forces - non-partisans ones - that are less noisy and fractious and attention-seeking than Trump + friends, who have come to see the giant gamble starting in the late 90s of integrating China into the world economic system as a world-historical gamble that has proven to be an existential mistake, at least on the terms that it has evolved. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get that sense. And so there needs to be some public, noisy, easy-to-understand narrative to walk parts of that back, and to rebuild America's military, and to get normie young men to identify with defending a homeland and to start families and to raise kids, and to convince Europeans that they need to defend themselves and to regain something like an internal sense of nationalism (which being pissed off at Americans might ironically inflame and facilitate, as seems to be happening in Canada) and a willingness to actually make material sacrifices to make that all possible. There needs to be something like the 1980s again, basically, in much of the West. If you ignore belief in universal principles and stick with realpolitiks, globalism seemed unambiguously useful to many powerful American interests in 1998, and now we've reached a point where, at least for certain aspects of it, that's not so clear. If you go along with this argument, local automation absolutely isn't a threat to these powers that be - in fact, it's crucial. Chinese manufacturing broadly (specifically where they can piggyback from it to engage in a massive military buildup that leverages it) absolutely has evolved to be a threat to such powers. And if you're onboard with this theory, you would expect the public narratives that get the most oxygen to be the ones that are most aligned with reorganizing America's global system to protect against a rising China, rather than ones that, say, take automation seriously.
I'm not saying that makes true believers in manufacturing=jobs fake or anything, any more than people for whom Civil Rights occupied a sacralized moral status were fake. That stuff is out there and it is real. The existence of decaying parts of the Rust Belt is real. Many families cultural memory of the role that well-payed manufacturing jobs played in buoying their communities and giving them a sense of pride are real. People with those concerns are always out there. But the question of why it's getting so much oxygen now, why the megaphones are amplifying the narratives they are, is a different story, or so it seems to me. That's my speculation, anyway.
One wrinkle that I wonder about, regarding its applicability… If you look at what customer service jobs have been outsourced, they’re jobs that interface with the general public. I’ve worked in finserv for a couple decades now, and there are still niche customer service jobs around provided the customer base is wealthy. This may be either for high net worth individuals, or for business to business customer service. The wealthy have made it be known to their service providers they do not want to talk to John unless John’s legal name is John, and not if it is actually Ramesh.
I speculate that we will see similar for AI. The masses will get chat bots named John. The wealthy will pay to speak to a meatspace John.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The manufacturing "real value added" number is simply a terrible statistic that no one who cites it actually understands. For instance, U.S. has lost its competitive advantage in microprocessors to Taiwan, and basically doesn't manufacture motherboards, memory, LCD panels, etc, but because overall computer quality has made such incredible leaps and bounds a "quality adjustment" is applied to overall nominal dollar value added of whatever US manufacturing remains and that quality adjustment is basically responsible for the entire increase in manufacturing. Worse, they don't even apply the same quality adjustment to the inputs (value added is output minus inputs) so the entire number is just FUBAR. And the same thing applies to other categories -- automobiles, clothes. The number is just a train wreck.
Compensating for these adjustments generates a lot of alpha in macro analysis. Imputed rent is 10% of US GDP, hilariously.
More options
Context Copy link
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I'm not even kidding. I'm very sympathetic to the concern that quality adjustments are inherently difficult (Russ Roberts talks about this a lot), but if you have any further explanation/data to show that this is specifically a problem in microprocessors as an intermediate good and is of sufficient magnitude to significantly change the reasoning, I'd love to know more.
Here is a paper on the problem but it is very academic and too understated: http://inforumweb.inforumecon.com/papers/conferences/2006/RealValueAdded.pdf
It does deserve a more publicly accessible write-up. Here is a more accessible article writing a somewhat different critique: https://americancompass.org/no-us-manufacturing-is-not-at-an-all-time-high/
Meade's paper seems reasonable, in terms of an academic squabble. What I struggle more with is turning it into a coherent critique at the current moment, especially trying to reconcile it with your other statements and your other link. For example, you focused on quality adjustments, which as I mentioned, I understand there are some difficulties there... but Meade basically didn't talk about those at all. American Compass seemed to embrace something like real value added with their first two "grounding factors", while their third seems to me to be irrelevant. It also sort of randomly shifted to focusing solely on output, but included some bollocks claims like, "...BEA significantly overstates the growth of the computer sector (NIACS 334) because it assumes that when a computer doubles in speed due to Moore’s law that actual production doubled..." when their citations for this claim do absolutely no such thing. I'm just really struggling to scrap together a specific, coherent complaint that I can just go look at and see, "Yes, right here is where the actually-claimed numbers actually go bollocks, and now I can see that I should be interpreting this entirely differently."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find it rather interesting to claim that the PMC, the class most opposed to Trump, is somehow wrecking things. That's some 5D Chess with multiversal time travel right there, not checkers.
Not to put words into the OPs mouth, but that's not what I took from the post. Rather, tariffs are an example of a generalized anti-automation protest which will provide an example for future PMC types to follow when AGI or similar eventually arrives
Just look at this sentence:
Not how the PMC are sabotaging progress, but will do so in future
More options
Context Copy link
What does Trump have to do with this?
There is an inherent contradiction between:
The most charitable interpretation is a proof-reading error, otherwise it clearly claims that the PMC are both currently "wrecking" things and this is the way they might wreck things in the future. Given that the PMC, as we understand that class, are not in charge of the stupid economic policies instituted by the Trump admin, and likely the ones most against it, it seems ridiculous to blame them for the latter's actions.
Unless, of course, someone has a convincing argument for why the PMC is somehow responsible that I'm missing.
No, it doesn't. Multiple other people read it correctly.
Fair enough. I can see what you meant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trump is presumably who OP says is instituting harmful policies
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link