2024-05-21
what
Heartland Visa, via Noahopinion. The likely outcome of such a plan is that the high wage-preference means that it is taken primarily by remote workers, who primarily leave the county once PR is obtained (although this could be mitigated by an enterprising county which is especially welcoming and the starting of a family). Which I actually think is a great outcome. For the most part, each country’s economic output should come from their competitive advantage, in America that being the “information economy” and having lots of land and nature.
Jake Seliger links, including an interesting one on “elite colleges”. This is why I don’t care about the affirmative action debate one way or another. If it’s the wrong policy, then the relevance of these universities will decline, and if it’s right, they will remain the places where innovation comes from.
Vaish on Freddie de Boer’s socialism, arguing that socialism is equivalent to borrowing from the future due to decreased productivity. It’s confusing to me how arguments against capitalism seem to start with the talking point that capitalism creates unjust distribution of goods and imposes competition on us. It’s the universe that imposed scarcity upon us, and both capitalism and socialism are systems which attempt to manage this, one by bounding competition, another by attempting to eliminate it. As Vaish mentions and Freddie acknowledges, at present there is no system of socialism which is as productive as capitalism, but Freddie believes we are rich enough now that we can afford it. But even if we agree that we are now sufficiently post-scarcity that we can focus more on fairness, clearly this is not a view held by all countries, and so competition will still find us eventually.
Zvi on OpenAI departures.
Asterisk article on civtech. Unfortunately this is more about what the barriers are to government actually fixing things instead of examples of successes. I’d be interested in reading a profile of changes in Taiwan and/or Estonia to see if the vibes I get from there are overhyped or not. It’s actually inconceivable to me that after the benefits we see in India and Estonia that public key identification for each citizen still isn’t widespread. This isn’t even for anything fancy like voting or basic income, but rather that it’s still reasonable that politicians can be unsure what their constituents actually want, and have to parse (large volumes of automated) letters and phone calls to figure it out, as opposed to setting up something like pol.is with digital signatures to prevent sybils.
Seriously considering subscribing to the Diff, Byrne has been producing some great content lately. Here he provides a plausible explanation for Renaissance overperformance (epistemic certainty 70%). That being said, I have to disagree with his twitter post here regarding basic income. The reason you don’t have any examples of people who produced great art after gained financial independence outside of marriage or inheritance is: first off, that’s an incredibly rare phenomena, as is producing great art, so you should expect not to find it; secondly, the standards for what makes art valuable are much higher than being a policeman or firefighter, where even a below average specimen is still considered to be producing value. I actually think its very likely that we’ll all become novelists, sculptors, and philosophers (and bloggers) with basic income, it’s just that most of us won’t become notable. Economically speaking, clearly that’s a bad proposition, but from a utilitarian basis there’s still an argument to be made.
