143 Comments

On your tech thing:

Your antipathy towards Facebook has been very well documented, but at this point it's getting a bit silly how you go out of your way to deny credit. I work on Messenger, and I am proud that we've maintained and grown reliability as a means of communicating despite a huge spike in usage. We and Whatsapp make up a huge percentage of the global messaging market, the two most used messaging platforms in the world, We are also a pretty sizable portion of the global Real Time Communication (calls and video chat) market. The usage of both of those shot straight up when covid started, and despite having to stop data center production and roll out whole new covid themed products for better RTC it has all gone very smoothly in messenger. The WhatsApp people are similarly quite proud of their work, and rightfully so.

You can do the "Facebook newsfeed is bad" takes and frankly I don't disagree. But we are a large company that does a lot of things, and a lot of very smart people worked their asses off to ensure some very useful, market leading products worked even better with hugely increased usage.

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Speaking to the IT bit, I live in a remote, isolated rural county in the northeast corner of Minnesota, between Lake Superior, Canada and Boundary Waters. We have 5,200 people total spread over a huge area. More than 10 years ago, we secured a grant-loan package under Obama's stimulus program to develop a fiber-optic system that would bring high-speed broadband to everyone on the electrical grid. Until then, we all depended upon undependable dial-up or satellite with its latency defects. Fortunately, we did not have a commercial provider to protest, so we were given the go-ahead. It was actually a bad "stimulus" because it took way too long for that. But it provided us a level of broadband service that is the envy of much of Minnesota. We enjoyed it in a prosaic way until the pandemic hit. All of a sudden, folks in the Twin Cities discovered they could work from the beauty and relative safety of Cook County. Plus, distance learning, while not terrific, was at least not a technological challenge. It is too early to tell what the lasting impact of covid+broadband will have on our community, but I suspect it will change us in some important economic and societal ways.

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Virtual city/county meetings are *infinitely* better than sitting around waiting for the thing you care about to happen. In high school I was paid to film a very small cities council meetings for local access and I can say with certainty nobody tuned in, and nobody came just to watch.

But with this I can tune in, make dinner, and virtually mute myself which is way better than physically muting myself.

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The bit about the desirability to blunt anti-billionaires sentiment strikes me as a bit short-sighted. Your frequent pragmatic posture that contends that “good things are good,” feels ill-suited to considering second order impacts. The democracy-distorting effects of massive wealth inequality should really not be undersold.

I don’t think anybody with the idea for DoorDash or Zoom would be disinclined to found them if they could count on a net worth only $400M, and the very real wealth transfer effects of gig economy work should not be rah-rah’d as the glorious dynamism of capitalism.

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You call out purchase commitments as "a proof of concept for the kind of thing we could be doing in the clean energy space", but we've already been doing this for at over a decade in clean energy! It's the entire reason why solar and wind are cheap now! I participated in the early solar market in California that was centered entirely around state mandated purchases of solar electricity; they added a couple of twists in the bidding process to try to encourage price competition but the core idea is the same. Those mandates still exist today, have been greatly expanded, and were absolutely critical in taking solar from being a very expensive source of electricity to a shockingly cheap one.

Economists don't talk about these programs much because their models work better with carbon taxes but to spur sector specific innovation you need policies that target a specific sector. Achieving the same ends with a carbon tax would have been incomprehensibly expensive.

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Best thing about this is it can be pursued at a state and local level. If you're careful about writing procurement standards, there's not even a political downside for big cities to just stop buying non-electric vehicles. If police departments could convince Ford to keep making Crown Victorias forever, no reason to think they couldn't convince them to build more electric cars too.

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"These kind of gains are badly overlooked by “populists” who think you can promote economic equality by starving the labor market of immigrant workers in some kind of desperate plot to trick central banks into sustaining full employment."

I get what you are saying here - the real cause of getting closer to full employment in the Trump era was lax monetary policy, not his immigration restrictions - but attempting to trick central banks is not where populist support for immigration restrictions comes from, obviously.

They oppose immigration because they don't like immigrants and think they're stealing their jobs. My mom (a Trump supporter who is an immigrant herself) reports that many times massive amounts of H1b immigrants would be hired at the company she worked for and then she'd get laid off. Others just don't like immigrants because they are different.

I don't think we can fix people who hate immigrants, and they're a minority in America anyway. But anytime layoffs happen directly as a result of immigrants coming in, that's a policy failure, not "innovative companies realizing efficiencies by shifting their human capital to lower-cost resources" or however corporatists like to justify policies which lead to layoffs of American workers. Do that enough times, and you get someone like Trump elected who shuts it all down.

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I teach a high school class called Computer Science Principles, which is mostly an intro to coding class but also teaches how computers and the internet work, and explores the impact of technology on society. I’m going to assign the first couple of paragraphs of this as reading for them today. Teenagers could use a little perspective on how much the world has changed in the last 30 years- how could they know unless we tell them?

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The progressive position gets real sticky when the root cause of the failure is union power. I don't know how you solve that cleanly. Bankruptcy was needed for GM to get out from under their pension liabilities but that was catastrophic for retirees like my grandparents who were forced to downsize and greatly adjust their retirement plans.

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One thing to note about NZ is their biggest export (by far) is tourism. They are enduring enormous economic sacrifice in order to stop covid. And their size doesn't let them take on unlimited debt to ease the pain.

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I also like have COVID has shown that making an impact on Global Warming really is possible!

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/10/tackling-climate-change-seemed-expensive-then-covid-happened/

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I’m an educator in Philly. Say more on Zearn math...never heard of it.

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“One difference, of course, is that we don’t have a pro-virus lobby.”

Sure we do, it’s called the Trump Administration.

Good post though. I thought it was pretty shocking that the House decided to hold antitrust hearings on Big Tech (and release a complete and total mess of an antitrust report) during a pandemic which saw public trust in and appreciation for tech skyrocket. There are plenty of strong arguments that we should better regulate tech (though antitrust isn’t one of them), but the politics of taking a bold public stance against the companies that are keeping us relatively sane throughout this nightmare we’re living in seemed really bad and probably set back the cause of better tech regulation for a while to come.

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You do not address the deflationary impact of technology adoption, which I suspect is a significant driver of current economic trends. I've been a programmer for 20 years at multiple stops, and my employers have generally hired me to increase efficiency by substituting software for labor. For example, in my current job we replace expensive kerosene with cheap solar lanterns in off-grid sub-Saharan Africa by providing software to financialize the capital tied up in the lantern. The result is that lighting services get cheaper. Before that, it was using batteries to displace fossil fuels. Before that, it was reducing the cost of making special effects in movies. The general theme is: tech companies pay me a high salary, consumers get similar goods and services at lower prices, and various forms of labor and fossil fuels (themselves extracted from the earth with great amounts of labor, durable goods, etc) are displaced.

Then there's the famous image of all the machines an iPhone replaces.

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The successes around the vaccine really confirmed for me a lot of what Mariana Mazzucato has written about the systems of innovation approach to research and development and the role of governments in actively balancing the risk-reward nexus. Specifically it strikes me that the approach here -- investment in a "portfolio" of researchers allows for broader and riskier research; specific institutions to build opportunity space; clear guidance for commercialization markets and process-- were all effectively employed and seem adaptable to green energy space.

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Democrats need to find a way to synthesize the point that immigration is a net benefit to the country into a more "populist" message. I am convinced by David Shor's analysis of the 2016 election that Obama -> Trump voters were mostly motivated by the campaigns' emphasis on immigration. Trump's populism here will persist within the views of the electorate and I suspect be codified as a pillar of Republican policy. Any attempt at a technocratic point here, like an X% increase of immigrants correspond to a Y% increase of productivity/innovation/etc. is not going to cut it I'm afraid.

Projecting out elections for the foreseeable future (a fraught task admittedly), this is a existential question to ponder: Democrats will need to court rural white voters! Hope to see this tackled in the blog.

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