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/

A troubled and somewhat troubling project that’s nevertheless fascinating:

In January 2021, MBS appeared on Saudi television to introduce Neom’s most far-fetched element yet, a “civilizational revolution” called the Line. A “linear city” 100 miles long, it would generate zero carbon emissions. Its 1 million residents would occupy a car-free surface layer, with no one more than five minutes’ walk from essential amenities; utility corridors and high-speed trains would be hidden underground, along with infrastructure for moving freight.

The concept carried echoes of an idea originated in the 1960s by Superstudio, an Italian architectural collective, for a structure so enormous it would wrap around the entire planet. This “Continuous Monument” was never a real building proposal; it was intended as a critique of excessive urbanization and of the modernist megaprojects then in vogue. One of Superstudio’s last surviving members, when asked about the Line by the New York Times, dryly noted that “seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabia/

EDIT: can’t forget to link Scott Alexander being snarky about it! https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122

This, a thousand times this.

So many political strategies are centered around “beating” the other side(s), and claiming victory over their defeat.  For evolutionary reasons, it is easy to see why these attitudes might have won out.  Yet in general those approaches are a sign of a narrow vision.  Beating the other side is a possible strategy, but it should hardly be the only strategy you attempt, even if we forget about the “you might be the one who is wrong!” worry.

Quite simply, a lot of the time you never beat the other side, though over time the terms of the debate do shift ground.

An alternative strategy is to try to make the other side better, even if you do not agree with the other side.  You might try to make the other side saner and more open, and I do not mean by telling them how wrong they are.  You do this, believe it or not, by supporting them in some ways, or at least supporting the best parts of the other side.

It is remarkable how few people pursue this strategy.  I do know two prominent people, both on the Left, who do this and I think they do it fairly effectively.  It is sad that I am reluctant to name them, for fear of getting them into trouble with their compatriots.

If the ongoing equilibrium is “the terms of the debate will be shifted,” why should “improving the other side” be any less important than “improving your own side”?  On average it should be symmetric, no?

Yet the unpopularity of this strategy once again suggests that politics isn’t about policy, in this matter it is more often about internal norms of group solidarity and intra-group status.

Learning to see that, and to internalize that knowledge emotionally, is often a better strategy — if only for your sanity — than trying to defeat the other side all the time.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/making-the-other-side-better.html

For a good example of someone doing this right:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans

As Garrison Keillor fans are well aware, all of the children in Lake Wobegon are above average. But newly published research suggests the presumption of exceptionality is hardly confined to rural Minnesota.

In fact, it is so widespread, it even applies to a most unexpected population: prison inmates.

A survey of convicts serving time in an English prison found they rated themselves higher than the average person on a range of positive characteristics, including morality and kindness. A research team led by University of Southampton psychologist Constantine Sedikides reports the one exception was law-abidingness—“for which they viewed themselves as average.”

Study: Belief We’re Better Than Average Holds True Even for Convicts

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It’s the Chinese Room of brains. It’s the Strandbeest of animals. It’s “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” as executed by evolution.

From this excellent article in Quanta.