William Murphy: Who Rules America?

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This is a really interesting description of how our global “neoliberal” or “market capitalist” economic and financial system functions. I’ll try to summarize with a sprinkling of quotes for my own understanding, but the article really is quite eloquent and I recommend reading it.

  • The finance industry sits on top of everything and essentially sets to operating rules that everybody and everything else in the system must follow. When I think “finance” I picture banks and insurance companies, but he refers to “large institutional investors and asset managers”. These are the actual owners of capital, or the nervous system that sort of organizes networks of owners, which includes most of us I suppose through pension funds, etc.
  • Corporate management does the bidding of the finance industry, such as “decisions about automation, outsourcing, wage suppression, or expansion”. These determine how “value is captured”. It includes “[m]ajor corporations in technology, energy, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and defense”.
  • Governments provide essentially a predictable, enforced legal structure for this system. This includes “monetary policy, fiscal intervention, legal frameworks for property rights, and, crucially, the capacity for coercion through military and policing institutions”. The government also serves as a shock absorber in times of crisis, making the whole system more resilient.
  • Political leadership functions to essentially sell this system to the public, through acceptable forms of messaging and through a certain amount of misdirection so it is just not talked about too much, and so the public dialog does not range outside certain bounds that are acceptable to the system. No matter where the political winds seem to be blowing on the surface, this deeper, implicitly accepted ideology tends not to shift much over time.

From a light skim of the article, a reader might get the sense that Mr. Murphy admires this system. But he frames it in terms of a ruling class controlling the rest of society. I can admire this system to a certain extent – it certainly is good at “capturing value” that is potentially out there and probably would not be captured as thoroughly by another system. It also leads to “capture” of that value by a small minority, leaving a significant portion of society in relative squalor when there is actually plenty of value to go around. And some of the “value” it extracts is actually undermining the biophysical system that it sits inside, so that it will eventually kill the host it is feeding on. So the question in my mind is whether these two major flaws (distribution of wealth/value and environmental destruction) can be solved by tweaks to this system. If not, its apparent stability and efficiency on the surface is an illusion in terms of supporting the long-term well-being of the majority of humans on this planet.

This is where the singularity bros will tell us the “end of scarcity” will solve both of these problems in an almost magical way. I want to believe this, and I think we can hope for this but we better also have a plan for the case where it doesn’t happen.

David Chalmers, the “hard” and “soft” problems of consciousness, and could I be a zombie and not know it?

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This article is by a person who disagrees with David Chalmers, but it happens to have a good summary of what David Chalmers had to say.

The consciousness debate is often formulated in terms used in an influential talk given by a young David Chalmers in Tucson in 1994. Chalmers, a philosopher, distinguished two separate “problems of consciousness.” The first is the very hard problem described above: understanding the processes in the brain that give rise to the many aspects of our visible behavior and our inner behavior that we can report about. Chalmers christened this hard problem as the “easy” problem of consciousness. 

Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. Today, this so-called “hard problem” is mentioned in all debates on consciousness. According to many, it unveils the very limits of current scientific understanding. Chalmers claimed that even after hypothetically accounting for our entire behavior, and for all our reports about our inner life, there would still be an “explanatory gap” between brain processes and experience…

Chalmers asks us to contemplate what he calls a “philosophical zombie.” This is a hypothetical entity that looks and behaves like a human in all respects, including reporting emotions, feelings, dreams and experience, yet it has no consciousness. As Chalmers puts it, “There is nobody home.” This is a rhetorical trick that induces us to distinguish between behavior and a hypothetical reality accessible only by introspection. The very fact that a philosophical zombie could be conceived, Chalmers argues, shows that inner experience is intrinsically distinct from observable natural phenomena. 

The article has a link to a video of Chalmers’s original lecture, for people who have time to watch videos. Such people must either not have jobs, houses or children, or else their jobs, houses and children must be less demanding of time and attention than mine, or maybe they are wealthy enough to pay other people to deal with their houses and children while they do their jobs (but this raises some questions of priorities, in my view.

McKinsey on high-growth industries

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McKinsey has a post with a data visualization on industries it predicted in 2022 would be growing quickly by now (May 2026 as I write), versus how they actually turned out. I find it interesting both for the industries/technologies themselves and for which are overperforming and underperforming. Overperforming ones include, of course, “AI software and services” and semiconductors. Robotics, however, has not kept up with expectations at least in terms of widespread commercialization (I think it is still coming, just behind schedule). Electric vehicles are also both high-growth and overperforming, while “shared autonomous vehicles” are high growth and were not considered in the original study due to “negligible baseline revenue” – more evidence that in the U.S. we are being duped as this combination of technologies explodes globally. Interestingly, batteries have not kept up with expectations as a high-growth, profitable industry/investment even though we know the technology itself has seen massive improvements in cost-efficiency. Biotechnology is a mixed bag – “obesity drugs” have exploded while “non-medical biotechnology” has seen no growth in the profitable investment sense. The holy grail of turbocharging construction productivity by making it more like manufacturing (“modular construction”) is about 50 years behind schedule. Maybe the robots can help with this eventually. And finally, even with all our fossil fuel woes the nuclear energy industry never seems able to capitalize, probably because of its long lead times and public risk-aversion on this particular technology.

My big picture analysis – technological progress is slow and steady, but when it comes to which will “hit” in a widespread profitable commercialization/investment sense, it is hard to identify the needles in the haystack at least in any sense of precise timing. In a personal investing sense, you can either gamble and go for broke, or you can diversify and be patient. In a broader economic sense, governments can use policy to try to give a particular industry a nudge, but there is a gambling aspect to this too, and my view is they would be better off focusing on reducing economic friction (great infrastructure, ease of starting a business, predictability, level playing field in terms of taxes and regulation) while protecting the environment and workers. Maybe provide childcare, health care, and education so people can start a business without worrying about those things, and have healthy skilled workers available when they do.

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/The-race-takes-off-in-the-next-big-arenas-of-competition

Global Environmental Outlook 7

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The UN has a new UN-speak report on what we need to do to fix the global environment. The simplest take-home message is an economic one – the benefits greatly exceed the costs, but it requires up-front investment blah blah blah. UN-speak is off-putting to many, so talented politicians and other leaders need to translate it to platforms and policies that speak to us, and then do it. There’s a full report, an executive summary, and key messages from the executive summary. I’ll highlight just a few actions here in my own words:

  • Eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies in the energy, food, and mining industries.
  • Internalize external costs – the good old “Pigouvian taxes” that raise revenue and/or encourage behavior, and we win either way.
  • Alternative/supplemental measures of progress besides GDP
  • Circular economy – recycling and reducing waste
  • Renewable energy phase-in and fossil fuel phase-out
  • Electrify everything – transportation, manufacturing, housing/buildings, and agriculture

Nature-based solutions and conservation of natural ecosystems seem to be important things missing from from this list, but those are in other reports of course. Still, I find it strange to make a distinction between “ecosystems” and the “environment”.

exploratory data analysis

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There probably is no “one stop shop” for exploratory data analysis. I’d like to see some plots myself – box plots, cumulative distributions, time series – and why not put all those side by side with the relevant summary statistics? But still, this is a nice entry.

The describe() function from R’s psych package (Revelle, 2023) provides a comprehensive statistical summary of your dataset. Unlike R’s base summary() function, it includes additional metrics that are particularly useful for data exploration and assumption checking.

All this works best for data points you assume are independent of each other in time and space, which is not how the actual universe tends to work. And heah, I know there is a thing called machine learning, but I like to start simple to begin building a picture of a data set in my simple human brain.

bibliometrix

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Bibliometrix is an R package for literature review and synthesis of past research on a topic. It now has a Shiny graphical interface.

bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis

The use of bibliometrics is gradually extending to all disciplines. It is particularly suitable for science mapping at a time when the emphasis on empirical contributions is producing voluminous, fragmented, and controversial research streams. Science mapping is complex and unwieldly because it is multi-step and frequently requires numerous and diverse software tools, which are not all necessarily freeware. Although automated workflows that integrate these software tools into an organized data flow are emerging, in this paper we propose a unique open-source tool, designed by the authors, called bibliometrix, for performing comprehensive science mapping analysis. bibliometrix supports a recommended workflow to perform bibliometric analyses. As it is programmed in R, the proposed tool is flexible and can be rapidly upgraded and integrated with other statistical R-packages. It is therefore useful in a constantly changing science such as bibliometrics.

Has Trump pulled off the equivalent of a politically impossible global carbon tax?

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Well, certainly not on purpose! He almost certainly thinks he is advancing the agenda of nominally US-based multinational oil companies. But by limiting the supply of oil and gas world wide, he has at least temporarily brought about the peak oil scenario that seemed to be fashionable a decade or two ago, and then mostly forgotten as it looked like new fossil fuel discoveries and exploitation technologies, along with non-fossil-fuel technologies, might outstrip any hard limit in the (economically viable) geologic supply.

But now we get to find out what an actual hard limit on supply looks like. It won’t be permanent – we can speculate months to years. But electrification technology was already a snowball rolling downhill in Asia, and this will just accelerate the takeover of electric vehicles, even if effective propaganda is hiding this from the U.S. public. Governments like Thailand’s are making rational policy choices such as incentivizing trade-in of internal combustion engines for electric. The economic incentive to do this is there, and has been slowed down until now only by infrastructure lock-in and path dependence. Even if this disruption is measured in months or years, the technology will continue to progress even in that time, and rational governments will realize this shut-down situation can happen again in the future and that they can mitigate the risk. So thank you to the one-man wrecking ball who has made all this short-term pain (i.e., horrible suffering and death for many, many human beings which I don’t mean to make light of) and long-term gain possible! (Now, you could say, and I admit, that with electrification coal will be substituted for oil and gas in the near to medium term, and this is not a win for the environment. I actually don’t know if it is a net win or loss, when you consider the greater efficiency of electrification over mobile internal combustion engines. But the incentives still favor renewables longer-term, and the incentives get stronger and stronger as renewables continue to get cheaper while coal as far as I know does not.)

A coalition of the willing implementing an international carbon tax is still a theoretical possibility. Here is one article on what that could look like. It is hard for me to imagine politically, but let’s say a group of large non-oil-producing economies, led for example by China, India, and the Asian Development Bank, decided they were going to do this and impose equivalent border-adjustment taxes (legal under the WTO I think not that this seems to matter any more) on all trading partners not doing it.

An international plan for sustainable development

International cooperation on climate and taxation remains inadequate to deliver decarbonisation, reduce poverty, and finance sustainable development at the required scale. We propose a Sustainable Union among willing countries, combining carbon pricing, new taxes on wealth, polluting fuels, financial transactions, and corporate income, with international revenue-sharing and conditional cooperation mechanisms. Most revenues would remain with participating governments for domestic spending, while a defined share would be pooled internationally. Specifically, participating countries would contribute 1% of gross national income (GNI) to a common pool redistributed in proportion to population, generating net transfers from richer to poorer countries. Meanwhile, the remainder of the revenue would increase domestic fiscal space by on average 2.2% of GNI. Although politically ambitious, such a framework might be credible, as governments are already advancing related forms of voluntary cooperation, and survey evidence indicates that it would be supported by majorities worldwide.

SimCity in space

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Planetizen has a nice post on city-building games other than SimCity. I’m looking for a birthday gift for a kid who loves Minecraft and is interested enough in science to maybe add a little more hard sci-fi into the mix. The kid of mention is super smart and just not a reader – believe me, I’ve tried. I feel a little guilty giving kids these days more screen-based stuff, but then again I figure birthdays and Christmas are when you give them the things they want that you feel just a little guilty about.

Anyway, two games that are mentioned are Surviving Mars and Aven Colony, both space colony building games, the first looking like pretty hard science and the second more fantasy. These are both on Steam which we already have. From a little more research, Satisfactory is a less serious game but people seem to love it. So I have a bit more thinking to do and a choice to make.

The technological republic?

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Below is the Goodreads description of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Palantir’s CEO. I also read the summary of it posted by the company on X. It’s a lot of words that don’t add up to a lot of meaning, in my opinion, but my cynical synopsis is “The USA is exceptional and morally pure. AI and surveillance technology are the new weapons of mass destruction. Pay us to build them before our enemies (which is pretty much everyone else, because we are exceptional and morally pure) build them first and attack us with them. Our morally pure public service will be to get rich selling weapons and surveillance technology to the US government, and yours will be to sacrifice your children with a smile on your face when we draft them and send them to fight holy wars against our enemies.”

Silicon Valley has lost its way.

Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.

Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.

In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success.

Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance.

At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.

Where are we on longevity?

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This is a long excerpt from Peter Diamandis’s book We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance. The New York Post somewhat amusingly did not proofread and reports the subtitle of the book as “A Survival God…” – maybe they will correct before you read this? Or maybe nobody knows or cares. Anyway, it’s sort of a cheerleading piece but I found it interesting for a run-down of some of the longevity drugs and technologies that are out there:

CRISPR lets us edit the genome; Yamanaka factors, a set of four transcription genes, roll back the biological age of cells; cellular reprogramming, epigenetic editing, mitochondrial enhancement. Each of these technologies adds more possibility, and all of them are being accelerated by AI.

Enter senolytics, a new class of drugs that clears zombie cells from our system. In mice, they’ve already extended healthspan and lifespan. Human trials are underway.

Meanwhile, companies like Celularity are working on immune reinforcement. Founded by stem cells pioneer Robert Hariri, Celularity harvests NK cells from healthy placentas and transfers them into aging bodies, where they bolster immune function. They’re also developing T cell and stem cell supplements to reboot the body’s natural repair systems. Together, these advances shift the paradigm from treating age-related disease to preventing decline before it starts.

It goes on like that, and kind of transitions from the academic research to sales pitches for various companies. Probably some of their stuff will work out and some will turn out to be snake oil.