Miscellaneous

Running a Nuclear Plant While Misunderstanding the Instruments Can be Hazardous

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…the same is true of establishing policy for a national economy and while misunderstanding the relevant economic indicators.

It has often been asserted, by economists and others, that the decline in US manufacturing employment is largely a result of great strides in automation-based productivity, and that offshoring and imports have had relatively little effect…some have gone so far as to say that the offshoring/import effect on jobs has been practically irrelevant compared with that of automation.

I was quite willing to believe that there have been great strides in manufacturing productivity, but the idea that offshoring & import effect on jobs was unimportant never sat very well with me…it seemed clear that the tens of millions of workers producing for export, in China and elsewhere, must have had a very material impact of American jobs, even given the greatly superior productivity of American factories to those located in most other countries.

But now it seems that even the assumption of a broad-based productivity improvement in American manufacturing must be questioned.  Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute, has done some interesting work in unpacking the productivity numbers.  Her analysis indicates that a very high proportion of the measured growth in US manufacturing productivity actually reflects productivity growth in a single sector:  computers and electronic products.  Excluding this sector reduces to overall productivity growth for US manufacturing reduces annual productivity growth from about 3% to a little less than 1%.  Moreover:  Houseman argues that the productivity growth in that computers & electronics segment is less a result of automation-driven manufacturing productivity than it is a result of (a) better product design, and (b) the way the price deflators are calculated to turn nominal into real numbers.  And in all segments, the handling of imported intermediate goods (parts, subassemblies, and materials) changes the productivity estimates in ways that may be questionable:

An article summarizing Houseman’s work, and an interview: Don’t blame the robots.

Also, direct links to some of her work:

2011:  Offshoring Bias in US Manufacturing

2014:  Measuring Manufacturing–How the computer and semiconductor industries affect the numbers and perceptions

2016:  Is American manufacturing in decline?

I learned about this work via Marginal Revolution…a few relevant comments at the link.

 

Po nan Jwèt la: Asymétri Kache nan Lavi Chak Jou

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Taleb, Nassim N., Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. New York City: Random House, 2018.

NB: precisely because I regard Taleb as a national treasure and have considerable respect for his work, I am not going to pull punches here. I get to do this because I have … skin in the game, and not only in Haiti[1] (where I wrote this post over the past ten days, thus the Kreyòl Ayisyen title), but in a couple-three moderately hair-raising situations back in KC, which I will relate when appropriate. Which might be never; see Matthew 6:1-4 (cited by Taleb on page 186).

Getting this out of the way—buy this book, read it, and recommend it to others. I say this very much irrespective of what might be called the Manifold-Taleb delta, which is not altogether trivial, as I will explain in some detail—again, as a sign of respect—below. Immediately below, in fact.

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The Attempted Trump Coup

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I am usually not interested in conspiracy theories but the present circumstances make me suspicious.

First, Hillary launched and persists in supporting a movement that refuses to accept the election result.

Hillary Clinton rallied the opposition Friday with a videotaped message urging “resistance plus persistence” that she delivered via President Donald Trump’s favorite form of communication — Twitter.

“The challenges we face as a party and a country are real,” a smiling Clinton said. “So now more than ever, we need to stay engaged in the field and online, reaching out to new voters, young people and everyone who wants a better, stronger, fairer America.”

This could be acceptable if it was only rallying the troops for next year. That is not all that is happening.

First, we have the Russia conspiracy theory.

Last year, before the election, a “Dossier” was assembled with the aid of a British former agent and a company formed by several former reporters called “Fusion GPS”

Russia may have been trying to undermine Trump. And it may have done so in collusion with the Democrats. The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel noted Thursday that Fusion GPS has ties to the Democrats — and will not reveal who paid it for the dossier. Strassel asked: “What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign?” The money could have passed through intermediaries, she added.

That means the real story of collusion in the 2016 election could be that Democrats were working with Russia. And that would make sense, given their long history of appeasing the Russians, under both Clinton and Barack Obama.

It appears that Fusion GPS may have paid reporters in addition to providing the ludicrous “Dossier” for their titillation with anti-Trump myths.

Secondly it appears that the FBI used the Fusion GPS “dossier” to seek warrants from the secret court for FISA.

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