Automation Where It Matters

Matt Yglesias writes

These days people are perhaps more likely to book a reservation or order a takeout meal with an app rather than a phone call, but the core work of serving and preparing food has seen very little progress.  

At the higher end of the salary spectrum, we still don't have robot doctors who can treat patients in lieu of costly and inconvenient human ones. Indeed, we can't even get medical records digitized properly.  

As it becomes clearer and clearer over time that smartphones and the internet simply aren't economic game changers on the same scale as air conditioning, jet planes, container ships, and televisions, it's become increasingly fashionable in Silicon Valley to simply retreat into denial.

          ...

Rather than hot business trends relating to new equipment that allows workers to deliver more value than ever before, one of the signal trends of our time has been a proliferation of online services that reduce the friction associated with having people get in their car and bring you things. Washio, for example, will send someone to my house to pick up my dry cleaning. Seamless will ping a restaurant and tell it to deliver takeout to my door. Postmates will send someone to get a takeout dinner from a restaurant that doesn't offer delivery. Homejoy will send someone to clean my house. These startups are okay business ideas, but they are not doing anything to advance the efficiency with which clothing is laundered, meals are cooked, or houses are cleaned.

Read the whole thing. As it turns out, one in fact cannot eat a smartphone. This ties into a recent conversation about inflation. To wit, the following:

That is, to a first approximation: prices of things you want are going down, and prices of things you need are going up.

The counter-argument is that these price increases are tied to meaningful increases in quality. I am not a subscriber to this for any of the "blue lines" above over the last ten years. For food, child care and vehicle maintenance, this is clearly nonsensical. For education, I am doubtful one could successfully argue that a four year degree today is of greater quality than in 2005.

Health care seems like the one area where this seems plausible. But cost of healthcare is another story.

Crispr-Cas9

"Dino....droppings?"

Amy Maxman writes

Using the three-year-old technique [called Crisper-Cas9], researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS.

My reaction:

Captive Audiences

Matthew B. Crawford writes

A FEW years ago, in a supermarket, I swiped my bank card to pay for groceries. I watched the little screen, waiting for its prompts. During the intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount and entering my PIN, I was shown advertisements. Clearly some genius had realized that a person in this situation is a captive audience.

The cheapest direct flights between Los Angeles and Toronto are run by United, operated by Air Canada. On the large 777 planes, seats have video displays embedded in the backs, with user controls.

In fact, I flew on such a plane today. Right before take-off, when no personal electronics are allowed, tray tables are in their upright and locked positions, and earbuds/headphones/earplugs have been removed to hear "safety announcements", I was greeted with a series of car commercials and wireless plan ads from "sponsors". It was borderline ... this. I'm not sure if these ads also run in business class.

I guess I prefer the less fancy planes.

Do What You Love?

Miya Tokumitsu writes

[Do What You Love] is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace ... “Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class.

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like nonwork?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. If we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.

Miya frames her argument around workers rights and employee exploitation. I think this misses the big picture. I view the DWYL mantra less as calculated elitist slang, and more as an attempt to hold on to a production/wage-based economic model in the face of increasing automation. That is, an alternative explanation is that most "work" is becoming unnecessary. Society consciously or subconsciously realizes this, and puts a folky, agreeable war-time slogan as a band-aid. Rather than a "perfect ideological tool of capitalism", I think DWYL is the equivalent substituting hamburger for steak.

In any case, my view on work engagement is the converse: do something first, become good at it, and later you'll love it. It's hard to love doing something you aren't at least decent at. 

Applying these ideas to academia, she writes

Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia. The average Ph.D. student of the mid-2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue his passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music. ... The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which about 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors—contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work.

Several points:

1. Over which set of PhD students is this average being taken? I can assure you that if your PhD is in electrical engineering or computer science, your best post-PhD career option is not an adjunct position. Nor is walking away from academia to industry a death sentence -- engineering departments greatly value scholars who have experience as practicing engineers. So this statement is at least not true generally.

2. Markets are not perfect algorithms for calculating economic valuations and punishing "unproductive" activity, but they are the best tools we have. With caveats in mind, markets appear to have decided that the study of certain sub-disciplines does not deliver significant economic value. Hence, even at the tenure-track level, salaries and available resources reflect this. Moreover, supply and demand for labour in these areas can very quickly come out of balance, driving down the acceptable level of wage for an adjunct struggling with sunk costs. I do not buy the argument that leaving for industry would signal a lack of dedication to the academic tribe -- this is a red herring to distract from the utter lack of walk-away options in certain disciplines. You can of course contend that markets are not properly valuing the activity, or are too short-sighted.

Some other thoughts came to mind regarding the underlying societal and macroeconomic forces driving these phenomena in academia, but I will explore those in another post.

Overall, I think the proper way to frame Miya's thoughts is in terms of giving individuals a walk-away option, such as a basic income guarantee.

Peter Thiel Cares Not For Your Bachelor's Degree

In another presentation he offers a critical perspective on education. In particular, he notes that ostensibly, the current education paradigm is a form of indeterminate pessimism, where a degree serves as an insurance policy against an uncertain-but-probably-not-good future. However, he suggests that more fundamentally education has become a zero-sum tournament, where a diploma from a top 10 school is a golden ticket and a diploma from a low-ranked institution is a dunce hat in disguise. The material taught at these institutions is of course not substantially different: the value of the degree from the highly ranked school comes from a system of exclusivity and vetting.

Note that his proposition is about the education industry at large, and not about any particular individual motivation. Observationally, the insurance policy hypothesis is consistent with the advertising strategies I see, especially with lower prestige institutions. 

His second hypothesis about the zero-sum tournament resonates with me. I've observed academic departments interviewing recent PhDs for Professor positions where, if your CV does not say Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, or MIT on it, you will not be interviewed. See also Flaherty, and Kling's comments on this phenomena.