Steve Keen in The Ideas Letter:

Daniel Susskind’s new book, Growth: A Reckoning (2024), opens with an important question about a remarkable fact: why did the real incomes of ordinary people in the United Kingdom rise so rapidly from the mid-1700s on, after many millennia of effective stagnation?

People struggling with the cost-of-living crisis today might not believe this is true, but Susskind illustrates this fact with data from the Bank of England’s excellent Millenium of Macroeconomic Data project. Using historical records on basic consumption items, the Bank of England indexed real wages to 100 in 1900, and showed that, though wages fluctuated over time, between 1200 and the late 1800s, the real wage never exceeded 80% of its 1900 level. Then, with a take-off that can be dated back to the mid-1700s, real wages rose dramatically, to six times the 1900 level by the year 2000, as Figure 1 illustrates.

Susskind observes that, though there had been 600 years of dramatic change before 1750, these changes did not increase the standard of living of the ordinary citizen of England…

More here.

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Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter in the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Liliana Doganova is Associate Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines Paris, PSL University, working at the intersection of economic sociology and Science and Technology Studies. Doganova spoke with Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter about her recent book, Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Zone Books, 2024), which explores the links between valuation and temporality through a historical sociology of the technique of discounting the future.

Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter: Besides “discounting,” the word that seems to recur the most often in your book is some version of “crisis.” You present your book as a conscious political intervention in the present as well as a historical and theoretical one. This seems to be performed by your conceptualization of discounting as both a political theory of action and an economic theory of value. Given that this book consciously intervenes in a moment of urgency, could you share what brought you to this topic originally and how these crises or your understanding of them have evolved during your research?

Liliana Doganova: The book opens with a scene of crisis: the forest fires that devastated France in the summer of 2022. It introduces discounting through its implications in the broader climate crisis. Discounting is an economic technique that derives the value of things (including corporate investment projects, public policies, or even human life or nature) by projecting the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future; flows that occur at different points in time are made commensurate by being “discounted” to their so-called “present value”: the more distant a flow in the future, the less its value in the present.

More here.

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Nurture

From a documentary on marsupials I learn
that a pillowcase makes a fine
substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.

I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescues.
They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims,
from an overabundance of female genes.

Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb,
lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn.
Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.

And had there been a wild child—
filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called
in one nineteenth century account—

a wild child to love, it is safe to assume,
given my fireside inked with paw prints,
there would have been room.

Think of the language we two, same and not-same,
might have constructed from sign,
scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:

Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

by Maxine Kumin
from Nurture
Viking, 1989

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Ashutosh Jogalekar and Charles Oppenheimer at Fast Company:

A few days after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer (one of the author’s grandfather) wrote in a letter to his old teacher, Herbert Smith, that “the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.” The promise that Oppenheimer was talking about was the promise that the horror of nuclear weapons might abolish war. The despair that he was talking about was the despair that mankind may not be wise enough to handle this millennial source of power without destroying itself.

In 1946, Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked the Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and soon-to-be Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, to compose a report analyzing the threat of nuclear weapons and proposing a plan of action for the United States to present to the newly created United Nations. As scientific and industrial counsel, Lilienthal appointed Oppenheimer and a small team of consultants to advise him and craft the report.

Unofficially led by Oppenheimer as the one with the most knowledge, the committee came up with a proposal that presented the peculiar juxtaposition of being both radical and logical. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report was presented to the president and secretary of state in March 1946.

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James Dinneen in New Scientist:

A growing number of the planet’s “vital signs” have reached record levels due to climate change and other environmental threats, according to a stark report by a group of prominent researchers.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” write William Ripple at Oregon State University and his colleagues. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled.”

The report is the fifth annual State of the Climate report led by Ripple in an effort to present a clear warning of what the researchers say is a crisis given the extremes measured across key climate indicators, from greenhouse gas levels to tree cover loss.

“The climate crisis isn’t a distant threat, it’s a here-and-now crisis,” says Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania, one of several well-known co-authors of the report, which also includes historian Naomi Oreskes, Earth scientist Tim Lenton and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf.

The researchers assessed 35 “planetary vital signs”, including the amount of heat in the oceans and the thickness of glaciers.

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Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “Creation Lake,” is set in rural France, but not the rural France of guidebooks and Peter Mayle memoirs. No one rhapsodizes over an escargot or a tarte Tatin. We’re in the country’s southwest, where the soil is rocky. More essentially, we are in what Kushner calls the proletarian “real Europe,” with vistas of “highways and nuclear power plants” and “windowless distribution warehouses.”

Kushner’s narrator is an American spy-for-hire. She’s 34, a dropout from a Berkeley Ph.D. program in rhetoric. She is working under an assumed name, “Sadie Smith,” that has unnecessary — for this reader — literary undertones. Sadie has come to this region to infiltrate a radical farming commune bent on violence.

More here.  And read an excerpt from the book here.

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Ed Park at Harper’s Magazine:

I started at the Voice while in grad school in 1994. I was new to the city, in love with it but slightly terrified. I was looking for part-time work, and a friend of a friend put me in touch with the copy chief at the paper. I passed the test, armed with Webster’s 10th and Chicago 14 and a much-thumbed xeroxed packet covering house style. I took a couple shifts a week, usually from 11 am to 7 pm, working in a sunny room on the third floor with the rest of copy and fact-checking—about a dozen people, most days.

We stared at our ATEX monitors, which had the scrapyard aesthetic of Seventies science fiction: amber letters on scuzzy screens, chunky keyboards that crackled like small-arms fire. When a new story hit the queue, we newbies raced to give it a read. I’d swoop in if I saw, say, a piece by the art-house film reviewer J. Hoberman or the gossip columnist Michael Musto or the soi-disant “dean of American rock critics,” Robert Christgau. None of them ever phoned it in. Other names invited hesitation, and the copy chief would prod us over ATEX. Once you entered corrections and queries, you’d type your initials in the “c1” field at the top and return it to the editor, who would process the changes and send it back to the queue for a second read.

more here.

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Han Kang at the NYT:

Seoul is a megacity, with a population of nearly 10 million and a name pronounced like “soul.” There were times when I couldn’t stand its scale and pace of change, but I have managed to find a tranquil corner and continue to live in this city. Although modern at first glance, Seoul has a long history. People first began to gather here 6,000 years ago. Over the centuries, the city was the center of dynasties that ruled the region, and it remains the capital of South Korea.

In other words, the city exists under thick layers of time. News of construction projects brought to a stop after digging in the city center unearthed drainage facilities from a thousand years ago or porcelain dating back hundreds of years is a reminder of that. As I walk past the stone markers of old buildings destroyed during the Japanese occupation, from 1910 to 1945, or a brutal ideological war, from 1950 to 1953, I see the royal palaces and traditional private houses that have survived, the apartment complexes built since the 1960s that have evolved into high-rises, the commercial skyscrapers dazzling with night lights.

more here.

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Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:

Malcolm Gladwell could have written a fresh book. Instead, he created a brand extension of his 2000 hit, “The Tipping Point.” The result, “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” is a genre bender: self-help without the practical advice, storytelling without the literariness, nonfiction without the vital truths, entertainment without the pleasure, a thriller without actual revelation and a business book without the actionable insights.

But it will be big! For Gladwell’s books belong to that special category where books are not books so much as advertisements. “Revenge of the Tipping Point” might get you to sign up for Gladwell’s MasterClass course on storytelling. It might lead you to Pushkin Industries, the podcast company he helped start. Or it could inspire a business to hire him to give the new talk his speaking agency is already marketing on “how not to miss the forest for the trees.” My criticism isn’t that Gladwell speaks to a wide audience. That is what I admire most about him. He is the literary equivalent of those politicians who get nonvoters to the polls. With legacy media eroding and book sales sluggish and disinformation spreading and truth under attack by some of our own leaders, millions of people live in idea deserts. For them, Gladwell is a farm stand.

More here.

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Ed Gent in Singularity Hub:

Aviation has proven to be one of the most stubbornly difficult industries to decarbonize. But a new roadmap outlined by University of Cambridge researchers says the sector could reach net zero by 2050 if urgent action is taken. The biggest challenge when it comes to finding alternatives to fossil fuels in aviation is basic physics. Jet fuel is incredibly energy dense, which is crucial for a mode of transport where weight savings can dramatically impact range. While efforts are underway to build planes powered by batteries, hydrogen, or methane, none can come close to matching kerosene, pound for pound, at present. Sustainable aviation fuel is another option, but so far, its uptake has been limited, and its green credentials are debatable.

Despite this, the authors of a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Aviation Impact Accelerator (AIA) say that with a concerted effort the industry can clean up its act. The report outlines four key sustainable aviation goals that, if implemented within the next five years, could help the sector become carbon neutral by the middle of the century. “Too often the discussions about how to achieve sustainable aviation lurch between overly optimistic thinking about current industry efforts and doom-laden cataloging of the sector’s environmental evils,” Eliot Whittington, executive director at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said in a press release.

More here.

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Tom Zoellner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The stories that a country tells itself are just as critical to its functioning as its army, its laws, its borders, and its flag. Where did the country emerge from, and where might it be heading?

Such questions of national mythology are especially fraught in the United States, still relatively young in the world, big, rich, powerful, multiethnic, and operating on a set of profoundly contradictory ideas. That it might be possible to make sense of American political division by naming those myths and interpreting the news of the day through their filter is the guiding ambition of Richard Slotkin’s exciting and detailed new decoder ring of a book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.

The title is an homage to the Wallace Stevens poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” which declares that “a great disorder is an order”—not just as a metaphysical statement but also as a tidy description of the contested historiography of the United States. Can we look into our past to find the white, Christian, hierarchical, free-market society of red America’s imagining? Or do we see the imperfect but ever-striving egalitarian and multiethnic vision of blue America? Both sides have told selective stories, which are neither completely true nor exactly false.

More here.

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Ethan Siegel at Big Think:

When most of us think of AI, we think of chatbots like ChatGPT, of image generators like DALL-E, or of scientific applications like AlphaFold for predicting protein folding structures. Very few of us, however, think about physics as being at the core of artificial intelligence systems. But the notion of an artificial neural network indeed came to fruition first as the result of physics studies across three disciplines — biophysics, statistical physics, and computational physics — all fused together. It’s because of this seminal work, undertaken largely in the 1980s, that the widespread uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning that permeate more and more of daily life are available to us today.

More here.

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Karthik Tadepalli in Asterisk:

To many people, “development economics” is synonymous with the randomized controlled trial: randomly assigning some group of people to an intervention, like cash transfers or malaria protection nets, in order to tell if it really makes the recipients better off. RCTs have revolutionized development economics and international aid policy. The RCT pioneers Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, and the chief economist of USAID, Dean Karlan, is a prominent RCT advocate. RCTs are influential because they are a powerful tool to cut through uncertainty and preconceptions. For example, international development practitioners long believed that providing textbooks in underfunded schools would help students learn more: but an RCT in Kenya showed that most students did not benefit from getting textbooks, primarily because they were already learning very little in school. RCTs can help us identify what works. Yet nearly everyone who thinks about development has, at some point, had a crisis of faith.

Skeptics argue that RCTs distort the focus of policymakers toward technocratic questions that lend themselves to studies of limited scope, and away from the hard problems that are ultimately more important. After all, aren’t RCT-driven solutions just Band-Aids over the fundamental reality that poor countries are poor? Shouldn’t we spend our time and money focusing on how to bring economic growth and prosperity to countries, rather than tinkering with partial solutions for a tiny number of people?

This argument is appealing, but it faces difficulties when the rubber meets the road. What would it look like to adopt a “growth strategy” for doing good?

More here.

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Alex Barasch at The New Yorker:

Bang is portly and good-humored. He was born in Seoul and was a solitary, bookish child until his parents, concerned about his shyness, encouraged him to take up the guitar as a hobby. “I went a little bit further than my parents intended,” he said, wryly. He memorized the Billboard charts, got into Led Zeppelin and heavy metal, and formed a band, sometimes skipping classes to jam. He set music aside to secure entrance to Seoul National University, but he soon returned to the scene as a producer. Bang held off on telling his parents until he’d become successful enough to give them an envelope full of cash. “Musicians can make money, too,” he said.

Three decades later, Bang is a billionaire. We spoke through a translator, whom he sometimes outpaced with references to such stars as Kendrick Lamar and Joey Bada$$; often, he became so animated that he switched to English. Bang got his start at JYP Entertainment, a Korean label. In 2005, he formed his own, calling it Big Hit Entertainment.

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Gary K. Wolfe at the LARB:

JONATHAN CARROLL’S The Crow’s Dinner, a 2017 collection of anecdotes, vignettes, and short essays (now republished in ebook form by JABberwocky Literary Agency, along with five other Carroll titles), offers a delightful and generous sampling of the American author’s thoughts about life, art, and living in his adopted hometown of Vienna, but it might seem a bit sparse when it comes to clues about the enigmas of his unique brand of fiction. There are some notable exceptions, though: one is a short piece titled “Impossible Realism,” a term he tells us “may sound like oxymoron” but “makes a great deal of sense when we permit ourselves to look beyond the quotidian and once again open up fully to wonder, like we used to as children.”

As a literary descriptor, “impossible realism” avoids the considerable baggage attached to “magic realism”—which has often been invoked to describe Carroll—as well as the more genre-oriented boxes of fantasy and horror, which Carroll has justifiably complained about, despite having won both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award (probably the most prestigious award for horror fiction).

more here.

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