Interesting and succinct critique from Tyler Cowen:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html

Seems compelling to me, although I’m very easily convinced by economists and should not be trusted.

In summer of 2020, you predicted that inflation was coming back and that we were looking at a prolonged period of financial repression. We currently experience 8+% inflation in Europe and the US. What’s your assessment today?

My forecast is unchanged: This is structural in nature, not cyclical. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the inner workings of most Western economies. In the past four decades, we have become used to the idea that our economies are guided by free markets. But we are in the process of moving to a system where a large part of the allocation of resources is not left to markets anymore. Mind you, I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital. The French would call this system «dirigiste». This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979. We have just forgotten how it works, because most economists are trained in free market economics, not in history.

Why is this shift happening?

The main reason is that our debt levels have simply grown too high. Total private and public sector debt in the US is at 290% of GDP. It’s at a whopping 371% in France and above 250% in many other Western economies, including Japan. The Great Recession of 2008 has already made clear to us that this level of debt was way too high.

…

What has triggered this process now?

Back in 2008, the world economy came to the brink of a deflationary debt liquidation, where the entire system was at risk crashing down. We’ve known that for years. We can’t stand normal, necessary recessions anymore without fearing a collapse of the system. So the level of debt – private and public – to GDP has to come down, and the easiest way to do that is by increasing the growth rate of nominal GDP. That was the way it was done in the decades after World War II.

My structural argument is that the power to control the creation of money has moved from central banks to governments. By issuing state guarantees on bank credit during the Covid crisis, governments have effectively taken over the levers to control the creation of money. Of course, the pushback to my prediction was that this was only a temporary emergency measure to combat the effects of the pandemic. But now we have another emergency, with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that comes with it.

You mean there is always going to be another emergency?

Exactly, which means governments won’t retreat from these policies. 

https://themarket.ch/interview/russell-napier-the-world-will-experience-a-capex-boom-ld.7606

This is an awesome little short story about one way that life might be post-uploading.

https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/chaser6.shtml?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Today I discovered that Samuel Becket made this short film (21 minutes) in 1965, nearly silent, starring Buster Keaton at 70, the year before his death. A summary of it seems right out of the infamous filmography footnote to Infinite Jest.

FILM (1965) : Samuel Becket : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Interesting short piece on whether the world is facing an extended period of greater economic difficulty:

Just how we got to this point was laid out to the world’s central bankers at their annual retreat in Wyoming last month by Agustin Carstens, head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) which effectively serves as the central banks’ banker.

According to Carstens, much of the world economy from the 1990s enjoyed three decades of solid, low-inflation growth due to benign tailwinds including stable geopolitics, technological advances, a spurt in globalisation and an ample pool of labour.

[…]

The 2008/09 financial crisis, pandemic and Ukraine war have revealed how fragile this growth fueled by cheap debt and just-in-time supply chains was. Now, the greater fear is that those tailwinds keeping it all up in the air are turning to headwinds.

Analysis: This might hurt: tectonic plates of global economy shift | Reuters

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2022/08/michael-mapes-collage-portraits/

Zvi Mowshowitz makes a pretty strong case that the new student loan forgiveness and program changes are net bad for everyone except universities, especially including future students. Nice for people who just had loans forgiven, of course, and I can’t blame them for liking it! But all the incentives here are for universities to raise tuition higher until students aren’t benefiting, and future taxpayers are taking a big loss. And of course transferring money to college graduates helps poor people much less than those who are (or will likely become) middle-to-upper-class.

Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, law graduates that go on to work in the public sector, which is a lot of them as the public sector employs many lawyers, only have to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 10 years in order to have their debt forgiven.

Law schools figured out many years ago that, for a student who is planning to enroll in PSLF upon graduation, prices and debt loads don’t matter. Ten percent of your discretionary income is ten percent of your discretionary income regardless of what the law school charges you and how much debt you nominally have to take on.

Law schools also realized that they could make the deal even sweeter by setting up LRAPs [repayment programs, AT] that give graduates money to cover the modest repayments required by the PSLF.

The LRAP schemes work as follows:

The school increases their tuition.

The student takes out federal loans to cover the tuition increase.

The school squirrels away the debt-financed tuition increase into an LRAP fund.

The school disburses money from the LRAP fund to cover PSLF repayments.

Summarized:

Did you get that? Here’s a stylized example. Suppose a student will make 150k per year for 10 years working in the public sector. If they have 200k in debt they pay 15k every year to the government for 10 years and then 50k is “forgiven.” But now the law school comes to the student and says ‘heh, I have a deal which will make both of us better off. We are going to raise the price of law school to 400k but don’t worry not only won’t that cost you a penny more than the 15k a year you are already obligated to pay it will actually cost you much less because we will pay your payments of 15k per year!’ This indeed is a great deal for the student who pays nothing and it’s a great deal for the law school which gets 200k more revenue immediately in return for 150k of payments paid out over the following 10 years. Win-win! Except for the taxpayer of course.

Grand Theft Education | Don’t Worry About the Vase

Fascinating article about Chinese citizens’ linguistic innovations for getting around the government’s internet censorship (2013).

Chinese netizens are still speaking in a heavily monitored environment, and so their demands for greater freedom of information and expression often find voice through coded language and metaphors that allow them to avoid outright censorship.

One of the most famous Internet puns has to do with a character called the cao ni ma or Grass Mud Horse. The term literally contains those three words—there are Grass Mud Horse comics, videos, and stuffed animals that bring the character to life. The joke is that with only a shift of tone the words can easily be made to sound very much like a certain highly provocative and insulting profanity. Playful images of the Grass Mud Horse are novelties that circulate within the relatively small circles of people who enjoy such things. But the term cao ni ma as a spoken word has a much broader range and reaches many more people both on and off the Internet. In a famous photograph, the artist Ai Weiwei leaps into the air, naked except for a stuffed-animal Grass Mud Horse held over the middle of his body at crotch level in order to block his genitals from view. The photo is a jab at the CCP regime, for the expression “the Grass Mud Horse covers the middle” can mean, with a shift of tone, “f___ your mother, Communist Party Central Committee.” The elegance of Ai’s art is that he can induce viewers to think that second phrase without uttering a single syllable. To the regime’s Internet police he can say, “You said it, not me!”

Another widespread term is hexie, which means “river crab” but is a near-homonym of the word for “harmony.” The regime of recently retired PRC president Hu Jintao, in its public rhetoric, put great stress on the idea of a hexie shehui or “harmonious society.” By recasting this official phrase to turn “harmonious society” into “river-crab society,” netizens are evoking Chinese folklore, in which the crab appears as a bully known for scuttling sideways. Netizens also use hexie as a verb as well as a noun. When a website is shut down or a computer screen goes blank, the victims might say “We have been river-crabbed!” or, in other words, “harmonized” into silence.

https://www.chinafile.com/china-tipping-point

I’m honestly not quite sure what she’s on about in the descriptions, but these are absolutely gorgeous <3

Wisdom Engines — TANYA P. JOHNSON

A nuanced look at a tough issue where, in my opinion, our culture has rather lost its way.

The first and most important takeaway from Kashmir Hill’s excellent article in the New York Times about Mark, the man flagged by Google as a purveyor of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) for taking pictures of his son’s penis and sending them to their family doctor, and who subsequently lost nearly every aspect of his digital life when Google deleted his account, are the tremendous trade-offs entailed in the indiscriminate scanning of users’ cloud data.

It links to an essay on a related topic, and one of the comments there struck me as an excellent encapsulation of where the topic of free speech stands in large segments of our culture:

https://stratechery.com/2022/rights-laws-and-google/