
Patrick Collison's Questions - apsec112
https://patrickcollison.com/questions
======
hyperpallium2

      Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
    

"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control
class"[1]

As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how
can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?

As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they
cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work...
mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no
clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.

Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could
account for 2σ?

OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a
valuable real-world skill.

The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt
certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.

What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We
appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic
productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.

PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their
children, conferring this outsize headstart.

[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem)

~~~
paxys
I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago.
He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending
lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later
doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures,
presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources,
limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when
they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to
the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?

~~~
bschne
> helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized
> help.

This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a
problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole
and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of
course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through
questions and targeted hints where you're going wrong, and thus make the
concepts stick in a more lasting way.

I wonder if there's potential for some sort of digital learning medium which
actively tries to "figure out" where the student's misunderstandings and gaps
lie and addresses them in a more targeted way (optional hints are a first
step, but there must be better).

~~~
082349872349872
I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own
adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address
misunderstandings and gaps.

~~~
gwern
That's called "programmed learning":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning)

~~~
082349872349872
Sounds somewhat familiar, but the difference to programmed learning (at least
as discussed in that article) is that the book contained error paths as well
as the happy path.

------
paxys
The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by
it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years
for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11
workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most
modern projects.

In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been
under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years,
and is estimated to cost ~$250 million.

Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?

~~~
calinet6
I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect
for workers.

We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for
the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do,
disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something
they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten
times more than we did before, and even more when they fail and need to be
replaced—surely installing a new CEO is the answer.

It is no surprise at all.

Deming tried to lay it out for us, but no one really listened.

~~~
zachware
It's entirely possible that you are right _except_ for construction and civil
project jobs.

I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in
California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states.

I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you
that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage
labor. This is universally true for civic projects.

Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional
training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop
signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups.

These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell
you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you
made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.

~~~
onion2k
_It 's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil
project jobs._

It's all very well to pay someone well and expect good results for the money,
but that person is still a member of society and will be affected by the
things around them. I'd argue that someone who hears constant negativity in
the media about how everyone is underpaid and living in poverty, and sees the
person serving their coffee at a diner working their third job, and knows that
their wife is working longer hours than they are for much less money, is going
to be less productive as a result _no matter how they 're treated as an
individual_. Poverty is a structural problem in society. It doesn't just
affect poor people.

~~~
dredmorbius
The Golden Gate Bridge was built during the Great Depression.

Poverty may have been prevalent.

~~~
onion2k
The Golden Gate bridge was one of many public works that arose from the
government trying to spend its way out of the depression through the creation
of jobs.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration)

~~~
dredmorbius
Oh, I'm not disputing that at all. Just that the bridge's enduring quality
(much as with other Deoression-era / WPA works) is at odds with your
observation on poverty. Though that does seem to have some validity otherwise.

Maybe focus more on inequality and uneven reward? The Depression seems to have
often been, as with the WWII recovery, something of a leveller.

------
pchristensen
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human
labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health,
education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we
want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers
requires housing, but that's supply constrained in much of the country, and
they have be educated, but college cost is rising, and their employees need
child care, and the child care workers need to go to the doctor ...

If there was a way to reduce the cost of living (my hobby horse is
dramatically increasing the amount of by-right housing permitted to be built
in an area), then that would ripple through all of these industries. High and
increasing costs and wages make labor-intensive industries much more expensive
by comparison.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
The answer linked to in Collison's question,
[https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-
why-...](https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-
why-33bf4b891be2) , is really insightful and interesting in my opinion and
goes to a deep level of analysis.

~~~
bohemian99
Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical
procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all
unpublished information.

Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book,
then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that.

As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by
accreditation systems to limit new entrants.

~~~
dalbasal
Starting from Patrick's question, and working through the list...

It suggests that some of our market-thinking has been off mark. Free-market
economic policies have tended to define things in terms of market "freeness."
How much intervention, etc. This is commonly how we think politically, because
it relates directly to policies.

The way these affect reality is through the market structures themselves. We
can regulate or deregulate barber shops and restaurants... but within wide
margins they are likely to remain pretty good market structure. Lots of
choice, competition, churn, etc. Hospital services or college tuition are
structurally different. If we are "laissez faire" with hospitals, and have
heavy handed regulation for restaurants... Restaurants would still behave like
a more free market, just because of innate structure.

It would take a truly byzantine accreditation system to make restaurants look
like textbooks or pharmaceutical drugs. Someone would literally have to assign
you a dinner reservation.

~~~
aeternum
I think you're right that some industries are more conducive to competition in
general. However shouldn't we be more careful then in terms of creating
barriers to competition?

If we treated restaurants like hospitals/healthcare we would give your
employer a tax break in return for determining the set of restaurants you may
dine at. Any new recipe or cooking method used by a restaurant would need to
first be approved by the FDA. Restaurant chains would not be allowed to
operate across state lines. Restaurant would have to accept below-market
pricing for some proportion of customers (medicaid). Each restaurant would
need to hire a law service to ensure they comply with HIPPA, and staff a
department to allow import/export of your dining history.

~~~
dalbasal
Possibly.

But, I think a lot of economics gets stuck in a sort of theoretical mud. In
theory, barriers to competition, entry or always have negative effects. Those
negative effects can be small, big, or irrelevant relative to other effects
related to the same policy.

What i am suggesting, is that industry structure determines these. So yes,
there are theoretical policies that might make hairdressing worse or hospitals
better in this regard. In reality though, policies are very often acting
within margins where competitiveness doesn't move the needle much either way.

Assuming a thriving restaurant market exists, it will probably remain pretty
competitive under any "normal" policy regime. No one is really going to
implement FDA approvals for recipes or tax related employer funding schemes.

No one is going to implement a totally nonaccredited hospital system, where
doctors & nurses don't have to be trained or licensed. At the very theoretical
end, laissez faire dynamics might yield a market-based regulation system that
accredits doctors and such without government intervention. But once again (a)
that's very unlikely and (b) if it did happen that would still be regulation.

For 99% of real life scenarios, restaurants lend to a free market dynamic
while hospitals do not. Governments are involved, but they do not create this
reality. It is innate. One policy regime or another (short of communism or
such) is not going to change that.

~~~
aeternum
Does licensing of doctors and nurses really add much? Don't hospitals have
sufficient incentive even without licensing to ensure that their doctors and
nurses have the necessary skills?

Uber/Lyft have their problems, but one takeaway is that a simple rating system
works better than complex licensing and medallions.

------
akirakurusu
"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?"

Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of
great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are
in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness,
the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is
just amazing. Anyone here have more insights on this question? What are the
non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon that seemingly makes
Japan an outlier?

~~~
ta1234567890
> What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon

It's simply impossible to detach Japan from their culture.

The main thing that stands out to me is their selflessness.

One anectdata: Tokyo feels pretty much the opposite of NYC. In NYC it feels
like people are obstacles to avoid on the way to where you are going. Nobody
waits for anybody. At first it seems rude, then you realize "it's not
personal" and just assume the same stance. It's ok to quickly walk in front of
someone who's not paying attention, it's ok to not say hi and just quickly ask
what they want. You end up thinking a city that big and with so many people
can only be that way. Then you go to Japan and are completely blown away.
Everybody is aware of everyone else on the street, even if it's packed people
will give you the right of way, they'll wait for you if you are distracted,
they'll stop and try to help you if you seem lost, and seemingly everywhere
people will be super polite. To me the difference is that in NY (and maybe the
US in general), I'm always first and most important, whereas in Tokyo (and
probably Japan in general), everyone is more important than just myself.

Two small stories about Japan: 1) a friend was trying to find a place to
exchange some USD and got a bit lost, he asked a random person about it, this
person walked my friend for 3 blocks to the currency exchange shop. 2) when
going through a bus station in Tokyo, one of the escalators was closed for
cleaning, when I walked by, the janitor was laying down flat on the floor,
holding a special brush, meticulously cleaning the yellow metal mat at the
entrance of the escalator, completely absorbed in what he was doing. I've
never seen anyone, anywhere else in the world, put so much care into cleaning
a public space.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I worked for a Japanese corporation for decades; regularly traveling to Tokyo.

Japanese culture is really unique; even for East Asia.

They aren’t a “warm and fuzzy” bunch, but every Japanese person is aware that
they are a member of Society, with the ensuing obligations and personal
boundaries.

Every person in Japan takes their vocation _seriously_. Quality is absolutely
stunning, and is deeply personal to each worker; bordering on obsession.
Quality is almost a religious obligation. I feel like a slob, in my own work,
compared to them, but most Americans seem to think that I’m way too
overbearing about Quality.

That said, it’s no utopia. Management techniques can be difficult to endure,
working hours and stress are _insane_. There aren’t many stress-free jobs, and
the nation has a high suicide rate.

I liked to visit, but I don’t think I could live or work there.

~~~
noirbot
Something I think may be related, but I don't have strong evidence for, is
that I think some of the high Quality shown in Japanese work is also evidence
of a tendency towards not trying to do everything. Things I've noticed in a
lot of Japanese products, both software and hardware:

1\. Barebones UI/UX that I would guess isn't very accessible for blind/non-
traditional users. 2\. Poor user manuals and often even worse translations.
3\. Proprietary systems where there's no interoperability outside of that
company's ecosystem.

To me, this points to a system that does a very good job making things for the
80% case, and often doesn't even try to accommodate the 20% case.

~~~
wenc
I have another hypothesis. Japan is a nation of craftsmen. As such, Japan
excels at enterprises involving the manipulation of physical objects, like
producing cars, cameras, knives, industrial equipment, computer hardware, etc.
If you've ever been to Japan, you'd notice that it is a nation where physical
objects/systems are very much prized.

On the flip side, Japan doesn't seem to do as well with abstract objects. I'm
specifically thinking of software here.

You see, the modern practice of software development is heavily tied to
American/European culture, where technology norms, though ostensibly
universal, find a natural home in the English language. Consider concepts like
generics, devops, dependency injection, static vs dynamic typing: all of these
were conceived in English-centric environments. Sure there's nothing
linguistically specific about them, but they reflect discourses that happen
primarily in English-speaking spaces.

If software development were more mathematical (and maybe more like
electronics... somehow less tied to English), I suspect the Japanese would do
much better than they are doing right now. (Ruby's Matz is a notable
exception, and I suspect his fluent English had something to do with it)

But the fact is, the practice of software development is as much sociology as
it is engineering. Large swaths of it are inextricably linked to the culture,
norms, and languages of Americans/Europeans. Without a good command of
English, one finds oneself merely consuming content but unable to influence
the discourse.

~~~
ta1234567890
Video games is a pretty big counter example to that hypothesis. Japan has been
a huge leader and pioneer in that industry, which is all software + art.
Another counter example is robotics, which is software + hardware.

~~~
wenc
I don't know about robotics (still pretty physical, and robot software is very
bespoke and specialized).

But video games definitely defeats my hypothesis, as well as anime/manga.

------
ajju
“ Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using
mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The
results were replicated. "

Does anyone know if this also true of learning & development in companies? For
example sales training or training

~~~
sudhirj
Feels like the Khan Academy apps do something like this. You progress through
a tree of knowledge and can’t move to any next node until you master the one
you’re on, demonstrated by solving problems. It also gives you all the help
you need to achieve that mastery.

~~~
raverbashing
> and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on

Oh that's the absolute worse way of teaching people (or, ok, that's my pet
peeve in education)

"but how do you expect to learn stuff without knowing the basics blah blah
blah" well, because maybe actually knowing how it is used in the end helps
with learning. Instead education seems to focus on wasting a lot of time with
"basics" disconnected from reality then finally teaching things how it is.

~~~
esc_colon_q
Calculus was the worst for this: in my first class we spent literally two
months dissecting the minutiae of limits and Lipschitz conditions and
infinitesimals and blah blah etc, only to get the the punchline, "and you find
the slope of a function by doing the obvious thing, which works in the obvious
way every time you'll actually be using it in practice". I get it in a college
level analysis class or something, but as an intro in high school that's just
a great way to make students hate what is at its core a very simple and useful
subject.

------
foolinaround
One common answer for many questions comparing past to present : "More
regulations"

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it is becoming a nightmare of
labyrinthine proportions to navigate, which hinders new entrants.

~~~
xoxoy
huh? there’s plenty of colleges to choose from and yet costs go up every year.

to me it seems like a distortion caused by a Federal Gov that guarantees
payment to universities in the form of federally backed student loans.

~~~
peacefulhat
Subsidized corn is not rapidly and consistently increasing in price.

~~~
grandmczeb
I don’t necessarily buy the idea that student loans are driving price
increases, but there’s a tangible difference between subsidizing producers
versus consumers (corn subsidies are generally the former, student loans are
the latter).

~~~
dantheman
If people couldn't get the loans the price wouldn't be that high, people don't
have the money to pay it.

------
nazgulnarsil
A few of interest to me:

1\. Is steelmanned buddhism wrong in important ways? Can some sort of minimal
set of claims version of buddhism even be steelmanned consistently?

2\. The joint-stock corporation appears to be the most scalable coordination
tech ever invented. What is the embedding space of the things that make it
possible and what else is in the space?

3\. Does most progress come from pairs of people in high bandwidth
collaboration? How could we test this and how could we scale the matching
problem implied? If this is true why aren't there more famously successful
twins? (also mentioned by Gwern)

4\. Are dramatically better matching algorithms possible (lemon markets,
costly signal bandwidth saturation)? Ones good enough that they would
encourage more geographic mobility?

5\. What's the natural embedding space of 'values'? If discovered and rendered
tractable would this solve problems with our current attempts at formalization
(VNM, Arrow's impossibility, various decision theory gotchas etc)?

6\. Why are all the general purpose 'how to navigate life' resources so poor
in quality? (also mentioned by Patrick)

7\. Does DNA (and RNA?) transcription error rate emerge as a natural kind in
large scale biological prediction? Does this create natural limits on
malleability of biological systems?

8\. Is there low hanging fruit in CNS imaging? Would this directly lead to
dramatically better mental health interventions?

9\. Can research stagnation be undermined by funding more research review
enabling more cross collaborative legibility of researchers into each other's
work?

~~~
leobabauta
Can you say more about the steelmanned buddhism questions? I'm interested but
not clear on what you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism" or
what important ways you think it might be wrong about.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm familiar with the idea of steelmanning, but not
what set of buddhist ideas you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned
buddhism".

------
ISL
On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade.

In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The
underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our
institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is
causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There
is literally no path forward.

In the decade that I have watched my world-leading research group wither, our
Chinese colleagues have expanded their laboratories by 4-5x, appear to be
well-resourced, and are poised to lead the world on all fronts within the
decade.

An excellent colleague of mine, who had done _excellent_ work for US particle-
physics experiments, went to China for a high-energy physics faculty
interview. On arrival, he was surprised to find that there appeared to be
another candidate competing for the position. He did his best, as did the
other candidate. As he prepared to depart, he asked whether or not it had been
a competition for the open position. The reply? "We had one position, but we
liked both of your talks so much, we are extending offers to both of you."
There was no matching US offer of which I am aware: he accepted.

That essentially never happens these days in the United States. It is a story
the likes of which one might have heard from 1950-1970.

Chinese physics results are continuing to gain in reliability. Where once we
saw quite a bit of copy-catting, Chinese fundamental science research is
beginning to transition into regularly breaking new ground.

Wait a decade.

We should welcome this development with open arms. A billion smart people,
with equal potential, should be able to turn out roughly three times as much
research as the 0.34 billion smart people in the US. We can encourage that
research at the same time that we must stand against the regime's attacks on
democracy in Hong Kong, the atrocities occurring in Xinjiang, their
surveillance state, threatening the independence of Taiwan, enabling North
Korea, and more. ( The US has dirty laundry, too: Our President is
incompetent. _Vote!_ )

~~~
apsec112
If academia is structured the same way in China as it is in the US, that
situation won't be sustainable for long there, either. If each professor
produces ten new PhDs, the only way for them to all find academic jobs is
through very rapid growth in faculty size, which can't be sustained for that
long.

~~~
ISL
Agreed -- one can only hire like crazy in a growth phase. The frequently
promulgated expectation that every new PhD can become an R1 professor is
incorrect, unwise, and unhealthy. If that expectation _alone_ were altered in
the undergraduate consciousness, a lot of sadness could be averted.

The contrast here is that the US (in particular -- the EU seems to be more
thoughtful) doesn't seem to be maintaining its robust research program, while
China seems to understand that leadership in basic research has compounding
benefits on decadal timescales.

~~~
analog31
I got my physics PhD in 1993. By this time, this expectation was already held
in disregard. Most students were aware of what we called the "birth control
problem." My dad got his PhD in the 1950s, and told me that it was common
knowledge back then too.

But while students vaguely knew that most of us would not end up on this path,
we got little or no guidance on what else we could do. A common aspiration was
to teach at a lower tier school, but the academic job market was saturated
from top to bottom. I was ready to go into some kind of engineering. A lot of
us became programmers.

I got lucky -- a friend of a friend owned a company, and hired me.

~~~
ISL
My experience is that the understanding of the problem is apparent to post-
graduates and older, as well as a number of people outside of academia. Among
my undergraduate class and my entering first-year graduate class,
understanding of that reality -- that many of them (which, probabilistically
meant _you_ ) would not become professors -- was limited at best.

~~~
analog31
That's fair. It may be something that students have been told but don't really
internalize. Everybody at the tournament wants to believe that they stand a
chance. I know this is true of students in the humanities too. Everybody is
actively putting off facing the reality.

One thing I do remember is that as undergrads, we were advised to maintain a
pretense of wanting to pursue an academic career, even if we had other plans.
If you told them that you intended to finish with a masters and go into
industry, you would probably not get accepted, would not get funding, and
would be treated as a second class citizen. So students were pretty much told
to inflate their expectations. That was a long time ago, and I don't know how
it is now.

I didn't become a good enough research scientist to compete for a trophy gig
in academia. What I saw is that my own university was hiring up, i.e., only
considering applicants from higher ranked schools. That meant my chances were
somewhere close to zero. I got to know the post-docs and understood their
grind. But also, I became more interested in gadgets and making things work,
than in directing fundamental research.

------
Balgair
> Why is there no canon for life's most important questions?

There is!

Well, sorta, but a very good attempt at least: Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works
of the Western World, 1965 (a bit dated by now).

It's the supra-compilation of 'western' thought, and the works in there do
come close to a canon for the most important questions in life. That list of
questions does need to be formalized first, unlike, say Electromagnetism;
you're dealing with more than just charged particles after all.

Still, the best thing about Adler's work was the _Syntopicon_ : a 'quick'
reference of the great works based on ~100 topics (Astronomy, God, Justice,
Family, Dialectic, etc.). Each of those topics was further subdivided into
specific areas (The nature of Jesus' human form, Ellipses, Jurisprudence of
Judges, etc.). It's a huge work.

Most critically, these specific areas listed a where you could find the
relating pages in the great works.

For example: Under the topic of 'Mind' and the subtopic of 'The condition of
the human mind when the soul is separate from the body', you have a listing
for 'GIBBON: Decline and Fall, 233d' and a _lot_ of other listings too.

It's not _exactly_ what the question asks, but it is as good a starting point
as I think you can get shipped to your door.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World)

[https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-
weste...](https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-
world) (pricey, but the search feature is essential)

------
anonu
> Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more?

We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice
neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of
modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think
about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape
this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of
"vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by
their city or municipality.

------
swyx
i wonder what pc thinks of
[https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) \- is this a
cherrypicked statistical fluke or is this an actually important long term
economic trend worth exploring?

~~~
counter_point
One thing I have found about HN in general is a refusal to ponder the meaning
of money itself.

1 Why is a small amount of inflation considered a "good thing"? In just one
generation, inflation targets reduce the purchasing power by nearly 50%. What
if you knew that assumption lead to all kinds of terrible outcomes, but they
only surfaced after 7-8 election cycles?

2 Why is a gold standard considered impractical? After all, today, the
technology actually exists to at least make this a worthwhile pursuit (that
is, a digital gold standard which doesn't involve the actual movement of
physical gold)

3 Why is there so little discussion on the "amount of currency units your
central government printed this year"? I find it remarkable, and somewhat
amusing frankly, that there could be so many intelligent people on a forum
(compared to the average online forum) and how few of these folks have asked
themselves this question.

4 Why is there so little discussion on the possibility of currency deflation
being a very good thing for the people on the margins of society?

It certainly doesn't help that 99% of the folks who ask these questions happen
to be both male and white, which just makes people auto-associate these ideas
with racism, privilege etc. I don't think the core ideas themselves have been
given sufficient thought for a few decades.

And as for Patrick Collison, I am willing to bet he hasn't read a single book
written by Thomas Sowell (whose books will at the very least force you to
_ask_ these questions, even if you might come to different conclusions to
others who read his books).

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
It’s very challenging to ponder these questions in a public forum, because so
many people hold uninformed or nonsensical views on them. Whenever I’ve tried
to discuss them, I’ve had to fight off very basic misunderstandings like:

* The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500 billion means banks are $500 billion richer.

* The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar.

* Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money.

I’m sure you understand the problems here, and I certainly don’t hate
educating people about them. But it’s hard to have a deep discussion
punctuated by constant breaks into monetary theory 101.

~~~
triangleman
> The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500
> billion means banks are $500 billion richer.

This is a straw man, $500 billion in loans (normally above market value for
collateral) means banks could be anywhere from 0-500 billion dollars richer
but they are certainly not _poorer_.

>The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can
spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar.

Have you seen the stock market lately? Investors have done well in this new
easy money economy and until that money trickles down they certainly have it
much easier than they otherwise would.

>Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be
inflation if we didn’t create more money.

In the long run this is true. Especially the second statement, it's almost
trivial to prove: Imagine an island with 10 dollars in circulation. The amount
of goods produced doubles, and everyone is able to trade and consume all the
goods. The price of the goods must necessarily be cut in half on average, so
that the 10 dollars are able to pay for all the goods.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
> This is a straw man, $500 billion in loans (normally above market value for
> collateral) means banks could be anywhere from 0-500 billion dollars richer
> but they are certainly not poorer.

It's not universally a strawman. I've had people propose to me, in all
apparent seriousness, that we should just take the QE funding and give it to
individuals instead.

> Have you seen the stock market lately? Investors have done well in this new
> easy money economy and until that money trickles down they certainly have it
> much easier than they otherwise would.

I've seen this theory, but it fundamentally doesn't make sense. Money is
fungible; there's no trickling barrier dividing the money supply into
"investment dollars" and "consumption dollars". (It is of course true that
monetary policy can affect asset prices in other ways.)

> In the long run this is true. Especially the second statement, it's almost
> trivial to prove: Imagine an island with 10 dollars in circulation. The
> amount of goods produced doubles, and everyone is able to trade and consume
> all the goods. The price of the goods must necessarily be cut in half on
> average, so that the 10 dollars are able to pay for all the goods.

This isn't so, because you're missing the critically important concept of the
velocity of money. If everyone buys and sells things twice as often to match
the doubling in total production, prices won't need to be cut. It may help
with the intuition here to imagine playing a video of the island at 2x speed;
the number of goods they produce in any given time interval will double, yet
the total number of dollars in circulation won't change.

------
nojvek
The question about healthcare, infrastructure, college, housing is a major
one.

The explanation I’ve come up with is that they aren’t machine scalable
problems and that the barrier to entry is so high that existing incumbents
have little incentive to do “more with less $” when due to increased demand
they are racking in billions.

Matt Stroller’s BIG newsletter goes deep into the little monopolies and
consolidation of markets by private equity.

There’s also insurance and loans that comes into play. You can charge obscene
amounts of money when it’s other people’s money. In a complex system,
accountability is hard, so it’s ripe for rent seeking and corruption by the
few people who are the bottleneck.

------
donw
It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services
didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA.

One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you --
was to control rising healthcare costs.

Costs might still rise, but the rate of rise should be lower than before.

This graph doesn't seem to show that.

What am I missing?

~~~
dragonwriter
> It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services
> didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA.

No one expected it would.

> One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you
> -- was to control rising healthcare costs.

The immediate reason was to address broad consumer affordability, especially
for the people that could least afford it and needed it most.

Long-term, overall cost containment was a long-term goal, but it wasn't
expected to have that effect in the short-term, and the pieces that contribute
to that either weren't implemented at all, weren't implemented fully, or
weren't maintained. (And, heck, a lot of the other pieces weren't in place
long before they too started being chipped away at.)

For example, the pieces building on the HIPAA Administrative Simplification
provisions designed to by increasing the coverage of transaction standards and
doing regular modernization so that incompatible _ad hoc_ approaches wouldn't
be needed as extensively were largely unimplemented, with the most important
mandated standard operating rules never adopted and the mandated regular
(3-year, IIRC) update cycle for the standards and standard operating rules
never begun. There are mandated dates in law, but HHS never adopted the
required regulations. (That's actually one of the more minor unimplemented
cost containment measures, but the one I'm most intimately familiar with
because I spent a lot of time those rules were in limbo being involved in
planning compliance catch-up and forward looking planning for a component of a
state Medicaid system.)

------
Anon4Now
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

> * College textbooks

I've always felt that textbook pricing is predatory and should be subject to
price gouging laws.

~~~
bumby
I think it was Freakanomics that had an episode about textbook cost. Their
idea was it was a disparity between those choosing the textbooks (professors)
to those bearing the costs (students). In other words, it is much easier to
increase the cost of a product if those bearing the cost don’t have a say.

~~~
aeternum
I definitely had a few classes in which the professor wrote the text-book
which while impressive in some ways also yields a conflict of interest.

~~~
analog31
Oddly enough, one of my professors wrote textbooks for his classes that he
gave to us for the cost of copying them. He was outraged by the price of
textbooks.

------
dalbasal
I like the way " _Is Bloom 's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we
do about it?_" is loaded. Touches on several "questions" in the vein of this
article.

One load is " _why don 't we know this with more certainty?_" It's a useful
thing to know. What is achievable? What's the bar? How good could education
be, regardless of resources and other limitations. If true, that can be our
100% marker for instructional effectiveness.

From there, we cold say that average school instruction is 10% effective or
60% effective.

Realistically, this needs to be tackled with a lot of force to make progress.
Change is likely inconvenient, in a real world environment with limited
resources. Maybe school should be 3 hrs per day, not 8.

In any case, I think it's notable that high-end private education, which has
more resources available, have not pursued these kind of goals any more than
public education.

~~~
cloogshicer
There's an assumption in this line of thinking which I think is unlikely to be
true: that this stuff is measurable, at least in principle.

I think 'instructional effectiveness' can't ever be clearly and unambiguously
defined, much less measured. As with anything that involves people. In my
experience, most attempts to do so only cause more harm than good.

~~~
dalbasal
There are different kinds of measurable, and the purpose of the measure is
important. Measuring for the purpose of management (eg creating incentives for
teachers and schools), measuring for the purpose of most academic publishing,
etc. Each have their own pitfalls, and I agree with you on these.

That said... there is clearly such a thing as better and worse instruction.

Where the 2-sigma claim gets interesting is scale. We're not concerned with
marginal differences (management measures) and we're not concerned with
legibly identifiable causal relationships (academic publishing). We're just
concerned with establishing a high watermark.

The simple measures (eg testing) we have, work fine for that... in the context
of math, reading/writing, foreign language, etc. Stuff that's easy to test
for, and assuming we're only interested in big differences.

Two sigma implies that within 1 year of instruction, the two sigma group will
have progressed by several years. 12th grade math level by grade 10. This
doesn't have to be achievable by every teacher, it just has to be achievable
at the high end.. assuming a random sample of students.

Agreed though.. we have a history of insisting that the unmeasurable be
measured... and its a very common, long term failure mode. more harm than
good. I'm not suggesting implementing anything, let alone implementing
anything using measures. Just setting that watermark, so we know what awesome
looks like.

------
jl2718
Quick answers just for fun: 1\. Technological abundance vs regulated scarcity
2\. Complexity outpacing human understanding. Plus regulation/approvals. 3\.
Because the FOMC controls it. 4\. Reduce legal barriers to entry. 5\. Reduce
central control. 6\. Risk minimization. 7\. Trust by common identity. 8\.
Maybe. Pace tracking classes. 9\. Money is cheap enough now for investors to
fund most science for profit. 10\. No programming. AI queries (e.g. “Her”)
11\. Audiobooks 12\. Arxiv / citation ranking 13\. No. Too easy to ignore ads
on text. 14\. Nobody’s paying for IDEs anymore. 15\. See #7. 16\. See #15.
17\. See #7. 18\. Political vs scientific incentives. 19\. contra to #7. 20\.
See #7. 21\. It’s more lucrative to fail than to succeed. 22\. I’ve heard it
was due to mass burning by humans. Fire/regrowth fixes more carbon than it
releases.

------
jariel
Some of these are odd questions.

"How do we help more experimental cities get started?

It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong
Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, "

???

HK and to a lesser extent Singapore are some of the most inegalitarian places
in the world, that thrive because they have established Western commercial
practices in a sea of otherwise more obvious corruption. There is a very dark
underbelly to HK.

Dubai is an Oil Rich state, with a fairly ruthless totalitarian leadership
wherein the pay Indian workers 10's of cents an hour in a form of indentured
servitude. An Arab Dubai resident could kill one of these workers and probably
get away with it.

They also are nice places for rich people to hide their money.

There are no mysteries here.

Dubai is the 'anti civilisation' \- maybe one of he worst examples of 'what to
build'.

As for 'why some things are more expensive'?

Some things are commodities, some are not, some things have price
inelasticity, some do not.

Why was the P43 made in a few months?

Because WW2 planes are very simple, and it was during war, and we didn't care
about safety back in the day. 'Crash tests' for cars? We didn't even wear seat
belts. No emissions standards. etc.. Most of today's projects are much more
complex. It takes government 10 years to do anything because those systems are
complicated, we have strong government unions, and a kind of civic dysfunction
in many places.

The GDP is _not_ consistent - it just looks like that in the chart.

The GDP naturally, is not going to change that much year over year - because
we are largely engaged in the same patters of activity. But the rate of growth
swings a lot. There is no mystery to solve here.

------
lisper
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

Different risk postures. If you're willing to sacrifice a few lives and limbs
and not worry about the disposition of toxic waste, you can get things done
just as fast today as yesterday.

------
apsec112
There was a thread on this back in 2018, although I think this page has been
updated since then:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129)

------
simonebrunozzi
In relation to the Golden Gate Bridge construction, it was mostly financed by
the son of Italian immigrants turner banker, Giannini; his bank also lent to
people devastated by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The "Bank of Italy"
changed its name to "Bank of America" [0].

From the article linked at the bottom of my comment [0]:

> A. P. Giannini, President of Bank of America, was legendary for his
> dedication to the development of the San Francisco region. A native of San
> Jose with a blue-collar background, Giannini believed that banks should lend
> more freely to working-class people, whom he believed to be fiscally
> responsible. Following the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San
> Francisco, most banks closed up shop, but Giannini set up a makeshift desk
> and issued credit "on a handshake and a signature" to families and small
> businesses in immediate, desperate need. His investments built a foundation
> for San Francisco's economic recovery.

Also, it's ironic that A.P. Giannini was what we would call today a "college
dropout", which is particularly "cool" and "popular" in the San Francisco Bay
Area. From [1]:

> Giannini attended Heald College but realized he could do better in business
> than at school. In 1885, he dropped out and took a full-time position as a
> produce broker for L. Scatena & Co.

[0]: [https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-
the...](https://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/building-the-most-
photographed-bridge.html)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini)

------
andrewstuart
(I chose to delete this because it's not a sufficiently positive response.)

~~~
apsec112
"Where will the money come from to get the car fixed?" is a very personal
question; answering it well would require knowing a lot about the person
asking, and what their life circumstances, talents, resources, and obstacles
were. This makes it harder to discuss on HN (or most other Internet sites),
since these are very large groups who are mostly strangers, and don't know
that much about each other. Questions about economic equality, the cost of
housing, career advice, and so on _in general_ are reasonably well represented
here, I think.

------
twoodfin
For the first chart/question it’s important to distinguish _cost_ from
_spending_. For example, “food and beverage”: Americans are (at least pre-
Covid) eating out a lot more than they were 20 or 30 years ago, so that
category presumably now covers a very different basket of goods than in the
past, even if they add up to roughly the same number of calories.

------
zuhayeer
I find the replacement rate question really interesting. Is there an aligned
way we can allow companies to decay once they have stalled in innovation? What
do we do about companies that have reached a point of monopolistic advantage
but provide no real new innovation (PG&E comes to mind)? In some cases like
Internet access, is competition the only driver of affordability or do we
eventually have to find a way to regulate pricing on things that evolve to
become general public needs. This question likely comes up a lot in healthcare
and pharma, but I'm not sure there's a good answer. It's sort of muddled in
between providing enough incentive to creators to start things and ensuring
that once things do get created, that privatized commercial interest doesn't
work to remove the very value it helped create (which happens when the company
stops innovating).

~~~
aeternum
I believe regulation is often the cause rather than the solution to stalled
innovation. If you look at areas where innovation has stalled, high barriers
to entry for new companies is typically a primary cause and in many cases
regulations contribute to that barrier.

We should make it a goal to lower those barriers and encourage competition
wherever possible. NASA's commercial crew program is one example of this.
Another is how Illinois forced their electric companies to open access to the
power lines, fostering healthy competition.

------
totetsu
on "What's the right way to understand and model personality?"

Personality is an outdated concept, personality types triply so. There is no
fundamental stability of personality, just behavior context.

Christian Miller - The character gap
[https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-
the-...](https://philosophybites.com/2019/02/christian-miller-on-the-
character-gap.html) [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2016/06/24/4818596...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2016/06/24/481859662/invisibilia-is-your-personality-fixed-or-can-you-
change-who-you-are)

Robert Sapolsky - Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA)

~~~
hcta
If you taboo the word 'personality', the underlying question here is still
interesting. Do different people in the "exact same" situation always behave
/identically/? (Obviously not.) What are the most informative features of the
person explaining the divergence in response?

~~~
totetsu
Christian Miller is arguing that while we do have phycological character
traits and motivations, that persist between situations, how we actually
behave is a complex interaction between these and our contexts. Divergence can
maybe be explained as much by contexts as by characteristics. If I were to
meet someone who works a similar job, has a similar social and familia
situation, but divergent motivations, I might have more in common with them
than I would have if I met the university student version of myself.

------
jonny_eh
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Not anymore! [1]

[1] [https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
updates/2020/07/30/896714437/3-months-of-hell-u-s-economys-worst-quarter-ever)

------
jacquesm
Lovely list. As for real estate and housing prices: interest rates are
ridiculously low, once you account for that the price increase from the 1970's
to today makes really good sense. Corrected for inflation it is now _much_
cheaper to own rather than to rent real estate even though the sticker price
of the houses went up.

Rents then predictably increased because houses/apartments that got bought
reduced the supply available for renting out. Especially in the bigger cities
where the economy is a bit better rents have skyrocketed.

But the cost of owning a house as a function of take home pay has dropped. The
same house that cost my parents a ridiculously high mortgage (10% was pretty
normal in the 70's here) can now be had for a fraction of the inflation
adjusted wages today. Even though the on-paper value of the house is roughly
10x what it cost back then.

To fix the rental market a lot of new housing would have to be built, but then
you run into zoning issues, transportation issues, the price of land and other
limitations that make it hard to expand affordable housing for cities.
Historically institutional investors (for instance: pension funds) would fund
these developments but since they now have shorter time horizons for their ROI
and want higher returns they are not as interested as they used to be to pick
this up.

This problem will not resolve easily or even at all as long as people are
willing to pay high rents and the market is as restricted as it is I would
expect rents to continue to go up. Even an increase in interest will likely
not return all that many houses to the rental market because that would
require the sticker price of houses to come down, which hardly even happens.
Even in the 2009 financial crises housing prices reacted only in a limited
way: people had bought in at a certain price level and could not let go of
their properties without ending up with a debt to the bank, a situation best
avoided.

------
thundergolfer
P Collison comes across pretty well in his 'thinking in public' type stuff.
The questions are all pretty interesting and important, or at least important
to the class of society that he occupies.

------
known
Social ills in Japan [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
asia-34615972](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972)

------
eganist
> How do people decide to make major life changes? Most days, people don't
> decide to change their lives in big ways. On a few days, they do. What's
> special about those days? How much is it about the stimulus versus their own
> inner state?

A recognition of self was what it took for me. Changed my life situation
pretty recently for the better after a realization following a personal
conversation with a close friend. The realization undermined a lot of my
assumptions about how I was living my life, but it took substantial input and
questioning from them for me to understand it; it was akin to pulling a thread
and unraveling a tapestry, so to speak.

Can't say this is true for everyone, but it was for me.

tl;dr a bit of both.

~~~
streulpita
Can you elaborate on the "recognition of self" bit?

~~~
eganist
I'm being deliberately obtuse, but in essence I recognized that I was mentally
working around growing in a certain area rather than tackling it head on.

------
raldi
_> Sublime's built-in ⌘-T works better than every third-party Emacs package._

What's this about? Google's not helping.

------
keiferski
_What does religion cause?_

There has been considerable philosophical work on this topic. Contemporary
scientific studies (such as the ones in the link) are not particularly useful
here, as they are too trapped in the current societal context to understand
deeper cultural trends. _Religion_ as a word is so broad as to basically be
meaningless. Separating religion from culture or history is a modern legacy of
academic and industrial specialization.

In any case, some reading suggestions, if you're interested in this topic.

\- Max Weber. Pretty much the founder of modern social science, particularly
with regards to religion. He originated the idea of “The Protestant Work
Ethic” and argues that specific features of Protestantism lead to market
capitalism arising in Northern Europe, rather than in India or China.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism)

\- Charles Taylor, _A Secular Age._ This book really changed the way I think
about the modern world and what I'll call "the preference for scientistic,
humanistic atheism". Taylor essentially argues that modern secularity is not
merely the subtraction of religious belief, but a new historical situation
where religious beliefs are co-existent both with each other and with immanent
beliefs (entirely focused in the world.) This book is huge, so I recommend
starting with _How Not to Be Secular_ by James K. A. Smith, as it's a
condensed summary of Taylor's book.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age)

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-
Reading/dp/0802867...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Secular-
Reading/dp/0802867618)

\- Friedrich Nietzsche. A philosopher quite interested in this problem. His
main goal was to trace the development of moral ideas and subsequently create
new, healthier (to him) ones. Too many books to list, but I recommend _The
Genealogy of Morality_ and _Beyond Good and Evil._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil)

------
cryptica
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

Because we have been shifting responsibility away from individuals who have
the best knowledge to complete a task (I.e. engineers) towards managers. In
software development, this can be seen by an increased focus on frameworks,
statically typed languages, 100% test coverage, CI pipelines, code analysis
tools; all designed to relieve developers from a sense of responsibility and
ownership over the code and to give managers extra visibility.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Because there is no growth. What looks like growth is just inflation of the
dollar relative to the value of goods and services which underlie the GDP
calculation.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no
> natural way to die?

Abolish the Federal Reserve, introduce UBI. Trickle-up economics will bring
back the free market because companies will compete to actually satisfy people
instead of competing to manipulate them at the behest of their institutional
paymasters.

> How do we help more experimental cities get started?

This is an artificial concept which does not align with free market dynamics.
Does the market need experimental cities to begin with?

> How do people decide to make major life changes?

When they become deeply unhappy with their current situation.

> Could there be more good blogs?

Only in a free market. If visitor numbers are being shaped and suppressed by
algorithms, there will not be any good blogs. It will devolve to mindless
hedonistic garbage.

> Why are programming environments still so primitive?

Because simple tooling is essential. Complex programming environments will
create more reliance on tools which will pull back the sense of responsibility
from developers which will make them produce inferior work. No amount of
tooling can make a developer care more about the work; the more you automate a
developer's work, the less they will feel as if it is their own work and the
less they will care. No tool cannot ever compensate for lack of care.

> What does religion cause?

It's a very positive force. People need to share ideals related to altruism
and fairness in order to allow social contracts to remain coherent. People
need to believe that if they do nice things for others, they will be rewarded
with eternal life. Without this, most people will work only in their own self-
interest and the whole capitalist system, which is rooted in the exploitation
of the altruism of others, won't work.

Pervasive, single-minded self-interest is not compatible with capitalism.
Capitalism needs somebody altruistic to exploit; religious people, young
people, etc...

When capitalism runs out of altruists, it runs out of fuel.

> What influences when people act in accordance with their self-interest and
> when they don't?

People always act in accordance with their self interest or in the interest of
their kin. If they think otherwise, they're lying to themselves.

------
dalbasal
What great questions. I've had pub debates about 3/5 of these over the last
year. Reminds me a lot of pg during his prolific periods.

What makes a lot of these interesting is that most have bad answers. Some (eg
the inflation question) have answers were sustainable 10-20 years ago, but
grew out of them. Some have cliched or even ideological answers. Again, time
has changed the strength of these answers. Time to re-ask and re-answer.

Some (eg progress in science) have no obvious or common answer, but are
commonly discussed at a smaller scale. Academic incentives, publishing & such
are commonly discussed, but no ways forward seem to emerge.. even
rhetorically.

In any case, I think the first one (inflation by sector) hits squarely at a
major blindspot in most economic thinking. I think it's responsible for a lot
of the divergent views of economists (relying on measurements) and non
economists relying on intuition.

Your answer to this question may relate to GDP growth consistency. Again, I
feel this is a blindspot in most theoretical economics. One of Thomas
Picketty's controversy bombshells was treating GDP growth and rate-of-return
(r>g) as basically constant. Almost all other theories (even Marx) treat these
as determined by everything else in the theory. All that doesn't seem
consistent with consistency, as patrick points out.

I would have also asked, "what is the successor to the university" since
several of these questions could be answered if you had an answer to that.
It's a loaded form of a question, but other questions take that form.

How you load questions can be the most important thing. _" What's the
successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?"_ is loaded in
an opposite way to "* How do we help more experimental cities get started?*"
I'm not saying questions shouldn't be loaded, just that they should be loaded
carefully.

Great read. i will come back for the links.

------
CyberRabbi
The answer to every question is either “because of smart and/or virtuous
people” or “because of Stupid and/or immoral people”

Japan’s cleanliness, healthcare costs, etc

------
huevosabio
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

Alex Tabarrok argues that this is largely do to Baumol cost disease [0]: "rise
of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor
productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have
experienced higher labor productivity growth". He has a book about it [1]

This aligns well with Patrick's graph: healthcare, college, childcare are all
labor intensive and have seen little to no productivity increase in the last
23 years.

The story for housing is different, though. We are consistently concentrating
economic opportunity in the urban centers. However, through NIMBYism, we have
made it very difficult to build new housing. The "surprising" result: very
expensive housing. Relatedly, Matt Rognlie found out [2] that the increase in
the capital share of income since 1970, as noticed by Piketty, can be mostly
explained by the housing sector.

The solution to both, in my view, are related. We need to reduce barriers for
labor movement. We can reduce labor cost by liberalizing immigration to the
USA and by liberalizing (re-zoning) and incentivizing (via Land Value
Taxation) housing production within the main US urban areas.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

My suspicion is institutional ossification in the USA. With time we accumulate
rules / regulations / procedures that increase the complexity of the task at
hand. Eventually, the marginal procedure increases complexity such that our
competence is exceeded, making the task impossible.

I think the solution is related to his other question "How do you ensure an
adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?". We
should have a way to replace these institutions. Market forces are a great way
to do so for private endeavors, startups being the prime example. But for
public institutions, it is less clear what could be the proper approach. If
there was a way to have states compete for citizens in a non-violent way, that
may help.

> Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more?

I think it is a mixture of i) survivorship bias (as he suggests), ii) car-
oriented development (as he suggests), and iii) the fact that attractive
neighborhoods have an organic feel to them that only time can give. Thus, in
the car-era we built new neighborhoods but they were car-oriented so they
never aged into nice, walking neighborhoods. We are trying to rectify that
with new walking-oriented developments, but they have a synthetic feel to them
that will only go away with time.

> What's going on with infrastructure?

I would say this is a combination of the Baumol cost disease and the
ossification of our institutions (both mentioned above).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease)

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-
pri...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46013009-why-are-the-prices-so-
damn-high)

[2] [https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf)

