đ Faster, Please!: Week in Review+ #6
The non-demise of globalization, the politics of Elon Musk, AI artist DALL-E and tech unemployment, and much more ...
My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review+. No paywall! Thank you all for your support! For my free subscribers, please become a paying subscriber today. (Expense a corporate subscription perhaps?)
It was a week chock full of Substack goodness, and I covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Thursday (as well as a paywall-free issue on Wednesday). Good stuff. Enjoy both the recaps, as well as the bonus of new content!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
â Globalization is dead. Long live globalization. (April 4, 2022)
â Is Elon Musk left, right ... or something else? (April 6, 2022)
â DALL-E: Did picture-generating AI just make artists obsolete? (April 7, 2022)
Best of 5 Quick Questions:
â Alec Stapp, co-founder and co-CEO of the new Institute for Progress
â Stan Veuger, economist and senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
đĽ Special Bonus: A few more intriguing questions with economist Stan Veuger
Best of the Essays
đ Globalization is dead. Long live globalization. | The hard version of this thesis â a big move toward autarky â is silly. What economists call âinternationalized productionâ has been around for a long time. Archaeologists have found stone tools in the Levant made of volcanic rock quarried in Turkey. Long-distance trade in tin was common during the Bronze Age. Fast forward: The value of global trade reached a record $28.5 trillion last year, 13 percent higher than the pre-pandemic 2019 number. Globalization isnât over any more than cities are over. But doesnât mean globalization isnât changing. Some production will will come home, supply chains will shift, and there will be more stockpiling. Yet nations will continue to trade in great volumes, which is good for growth and innovation. Indeed, true resilience comes from being rich and technologically advanced, creating capabilities to effectively respond to dangers after they emerge.
⤴ Is Elon Musk left, right ... or something else? | Where do you place Elon Musk politically, on the left or the right? A few years ago, Musk described himself as âhalf Democrat, half Republican.â His Time magazine Person of the Year profile snarked that Mars-loving Musk has âdisavowed terrestrial political affiliations.â Like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and technologists, Musk isnât so easy to slot on the traditional left-right spectrum, much less place in the D or R bucket. I was asked the âleft or rightâ question by Time magazine reporter Molly Ball for her Person of the Year profile on Musk. My answer about his ideological leanings: âThe reason itâs confusing is itâs not on the traditional left-right spectrum. Itâs a politics of progress. Itâs a view that says the solution to manâs problems is growth and technological progress and maximizing human potential. Itâs not a view fully represented by either side in this country.â Not Left Wing. Not Right Wing. But Up Wing.
đ¨ DALL-E: Did picture-generating AI just make artists obsolete? | DALL-E is a new AI neural-network tool that, as described by creator OpenAI, can create and edit images from natural language instructions. A simple prompting phrase from a human to DALL-E can generate some stunning results. For example: â âA rabbit detective sitting on a park bench and reading a newspaper in a victorian settingâ:
Should illustrators start polishing their resumes? DALL-E types of AI will undoubtedly create some new tasks for artists while automating other ones, just as some skills will increase in value as others decline. One way to think about DALL-E and other AI systems is as technologies that generate answers. Carbon-based lifeforms, on other the hand, have long had a comparative advantage in asking interesting questions. Yet even if some future version of DALL-E is as smart and sentient as WALL-E, human-generated art â a manifested expression of artist souls to which we yearn to connect â will always have a special value just as handmade crafts do today.
Best of 5 Quick Questions
Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the new Institute for Progress, a ânon-partisan research and advocacy organization dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanityâs future.â Previously, Stapp was the director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Pethokoukis: What are the most overhyped and underhyped emerging technologies?
Stapp: The metaverse is overhyped and advanced geothermal is underhyped. People will not want to spend a large share of their lives in a VR world anytime soon. There are still many intractable problems with âvirtual reality sicknessâ that make spending long periods of time in the metaverse unpleasant. We need to focus on building things in the real world again. If we can get advanced geothermal to work, weâll have an abundant source of clean baseload energy that can be deployed anywhere in the world (it varies from place to place, but you can always reach heat resources if you drill deep enough!). Abundant clean energy will allow us to get off the âenergy dietâ weâve been experiencing since the 1970s, where a large share of engineering time is devoted to making processes more energy and resource efficient while holding performance constant. Once energy is too cheap to meter, weâll be able to unlock performance gains that were previously energy prohibitive.
Stan Veuger is an economist and senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the editor of AEI Economic Perspectives, as well as a fellow at the IE School of Global and Public Affairs and at Tilburg University. Along with fellow AEI scholar Michael Strain, Veuger recently published âEconomic Shocks and Clingingâ in Contemporary Economic Policy.
You find that the China trade shock tended to harden rather than change the social and political attitudes of certain White Americans. What is the nature of that change, and who was affected?
We find that it became more likely in areas hit by the trade shock for white Americans to identify as fundamentalist, but it appeared to have no effect on whether a person views himself as religious or not. Exposure to imports from China had no discernable effect on disapproval of gun regulation overall, but it made whites in areas where guns are popular even more opposed to gun regulation.
Similarly, aggregate attitudes toward immigrants and Blacks did not change much â but in areas with small immigrant populations, the trade shock both increased support for more restrictive immigration policies and triggered more negative views of immigrants among the white population. And the disruption led to a hardening of racial views in parts of the US with a history of racial tension. So in all of these cases, if you squint a bit, what you see is an intensification of attitudes, not necessarily an embrace of new attitudes.
đĽ Special Bonus: A few more questions with Stan Veuger
You are from the Netherlands. What do you think Americans misunderstand about social democracy there and in Scandinavia?
Here are two things I might highlight. First, how high tax rates are for middle-class households. In the Netherlands, the marginal income tax rate is 49.5% starting at around 70,000 euros. In addition, there is a reasonably broadly applied value added tax with a default rate of 19.5%. Second, these countries â and letâs focus on the Netherlands specifically again â have numerous policies in place that are not coded as left-wing or even center-left in the US. Parochial schools â Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim -- in the Netherlands receive taxpayer funding on par with government-run schools. There are broadly applicable restrictions on state aid, on the kind of company-specific subsidies that are the bread and butter of economic development in US states and localities. Finally, unions are both more powerful â institutionally, and in terms of their membership â and more moderate, embedded in a system with a more blunted form of capital-labor antagonism.
If there is no New Roaring Twenties of faster growth despite new technologies â AI, space economy, CRISPR, for example â what probably went wrong?
We are almost 25% into the 2020s and they have been pretty terrible so far. So if things continue as they are, perhaps you ought to start dreaming of the Thrilling Thirties instead. I suppose what I am saying is I donât think anything has to go wrong necessarily. Instead, for something like the space economy to make a material difference in peopleâs lives in the next few years, things will have to go incredibly right.
9/What is a pro-growth economic policy that deserves more attention? Or is helping workers deal with disruption a more important public policy goal right now?
As has been the case for years now, immigration policy is a disaster. The Biden administrationâs policies, while perhaps driven more by political cowardice than racial and religious bigotry, have not differed that substantially from where Miller, Sessions, and the Trumps left them.
What economic view or opinion of yours has been changed/altered by the pandemic?
We have gone from an era where aggregate demand shortfalls were a real concern to one where the supply side should be front and center instead of merely being extremely important. A great new dawn for your newsletter!