#average is over

[arcticdementor]

Stone Age Herbalist on Twitter

“Part of why the 'creative slum' rhetoric is so menacing is that the bugman still defines poverty purely through the consumer-experience phenomenon. A quick thread... https://t.co/1MguBX00za”

Part of why the 'creative slum' rhetoric is so menacing is that the bugman still defines poverty purely through the consumer-experience phenomenon. A quick thread...

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The bugman believes his life is superior bc he has access to the fruits of the internet. Yet the slums are connected, not only from growing wifi connectivity, but the boom of cheap smartphones across the world.

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In fact, so many people in the slums have 4g enabled smartphones, academics and engineers are looking to use them for early warning fire signalling.

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Yes, they may not have the instant streaming power of Netflix at their fingertips, but is this really such powerful distinction?

The bugman likes his conveniences and ethnic foods, fortunately for him the slum provides. Every kind of street food, much made and caught locally, just don't mind the raw sewage in the  fisheries.

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The consumer Etsy life can also be had here - all women cooperatives recycling garbage into carpets, local handmade jewelry, unique pottery and repurposed metal for artisan knives.

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The reality is, the bugman, and the rest of us with him, could easily sink into a slum like existence. Working online, creating start ups, buying novel local foods, saying hi to your neighbour, being minimalist with your possessions and space.

The real infrastructure of a civilised society - water, housing, sewage, medical care, roads etc, can all disintegrate, but if you define the comfort and leisure of the modern world purely by electronic distraction and consumer novelty, then Lagos may be where we are heading.

[arcticdementor]

There are many other historical periods, including medieval times, where inequality was high, upward mobility was fairly low, and the social order is fairly stable, even if we as moderns find some aspects of that order objectionable.

Tyler Cowen, Average is Over

[arcticdementor]

There is one final way we will adjust to uneven wage patterns and that is with our tastes. Many of society’s lower earners will reshape their tastes – will have to reshape their tastes – toward cheaper desires. Caviar is an expensive desire and Goya canned beans is a relatively cheap desire. Don’t scoff at the beans: With an income above the national average, I receive more pleasure from the beans, which I cook with freshly ground cumin and rehydrated pureed chilies. Good tacos and quesadillas and tamales are cheap too, and that is one reason why they are eaten so frequently in low-income countries.

Tyler Cowen, Average is Over

[arcticdementor]

What if someone proposed that in a few parts of the United States, in the warmer states, some city neighborhoods would be set aside for cheap living? We would build some "tiny homes" there; tiny homes that might be about 400 square feet and cost in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. We would build some very modest dwellings there, as we used to build in the 1920s. We would also build some makeshift structures there, similar to the better dwellings you might find in a Rio de Janeiro favela. The quality of the water and electrical infrastructure might be low by American standards, though we could supplement the neighborhood with free municipal wireless (the future version of Marie Antoinette's famous alleged phrase will be "Let them watch Internet!"). Hulu and other web-based TV services would replace more expensive cable connections for those residents. Then we would allow people to move there if they desired. In essence, we would be recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment in part of the United States, although with some technological add-ons and most likely greater safety.

Tyler Cowen, Average is Over

[arcticdementor]

Random notes from a discussion of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over: Michael Mandel is optimistic. He thinks that the baby boomers are about to retire in droves (in part because of health reasons), hel...

Random notes from a discussion of Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over:

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Matt Yglesias wonders how, in a world that requires technical skill and social skills, those of us in the room have survived. It seems that most work for think tanks, newspapers, and other non-profits. Tyler replies that our presence in the room is indicative of marketing skills. Each of us has proven adept at marketing, with wealthy donors as our consumers in most cases. Steve Teles points out that as society’s rich accumulate wealth beyond what they can consume, their philanthropic ideas will, for better or worse, allocate society’s resources. Afterward, it occurs to me that this suggests that there will emerge a toady class, meaning people whose work in one way or another flatters the wealthy.

[arcticdementor]

So, I've been seeing this graph in a lot of places:

and a number of thoughts came to mind.

The first thing I noticed, of course, is that the only household income intervals with estimated TFR above replacement are those under $25k/year or over $1 million/year. I can't be the only one to find that concerning.

Then, I noticed that the horizontal axis is in income intervals, and that I had no real idea what fraction of the population each of these intervals represents. A quick online search, and I found that the Census Bureau reported that the median household income in 2016 was $59,039. Similarly, the interval with the lowest TFR, $150k-199k, is roughly the 90-95 percentile range. Though note, these are quantiles for households, not for population; converting from the former to the latter would require details of how the distribution of household sizes varies with income. A quick search online didn't give any good, hard data, but indicated that the effect would likely not be too large, and that the outcome would be roughly the same: with the horizontal axis changed to population quantiles, the points in the middle of the chart would be shifted massively rightward.

This changes the character of the graph from its present "u-shape" to one with a long slope of fertility correlating negatively with income up until the very top few percent, where one has a sharp, narrow upward spike. This leads me to suspect that, like many bimodal graphs, we're dealing with an issue of the composition of subpopulations with distinct behaviors; in particular, that there's probably some distinct traits involved with the "high-income, (relatively) high-fertility" spike.

[theinsectworld]

What if we look only at men in the age bracket 25-64? In the 1950s and 1960s, about 9 percent of this group was not working. Today the percentage of this group not working exceeds 18 percent. For purposes of comparison, in the severe recession of the early 1980s about 15 percent of men in this age bracket were not working, a better record than today. Adult males are seceding from the workforce -- or being kicked out -- in frightening numbers. Few of these individuals are wealthy playboys. It is no surprise that popular culture today has this image of the male slacker, a young man who lives at home, plays video games, is indifferent to holding down a job, and maybe doesn't run after young women so hard. Most of the measured declines in employment participation have been coming from younger men, not early retirees.

-- Average is Over (2013), by Tyler Cowen

[theinsectworld]

To understand intelligent machines and their future influence, we would do well to note Alexander Kronrod's idea that "chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." In other words, looking at chess is one way to make sense of the broader picture, just as the fruit fly (the Drosophila) has helped us to decipher human genetics.

After World War II, computer science pioneers Alan Turing and Claude Shannon both saw that computers would one day play chess, and wrote seminal articles on how it might happen; Turing was brilliant enough to figure out how computers would play chess even before other scientists had figured out computers. Later, chess was picked out as a test case for the development of computer intelligence and given a big financial boost by the computing giant IBM for publicity reasons. Their Deep Blue machine went on to beat the grandmaster, and perhaps the greatest chess player ever, Garry Kasparov. At that time, in 1997, Kasparov still was probably the better player, and he lost to Deep Blue in large part because he lost his cool, but my how things have changed. The last time a serious public contest was tried, in 2005, Hydra crushed Michael Adams 5.5 to 0.5. A half point indicates a draw, and Adams was lucky to come away with that one draw. In the other games he didn't put up much of a fight, even though he was ranked number seven in the world at the time -- among humans.

-- Average is Over (2013), by Tyler Cowen