Brad DeLong

I'd suggest that the apparent shallowness of technology skeptics comes from two principle factors:

- The most readily-dismissed skeptics are those whose critiques are readily grasped ... and wrong. Effectively this is a strawman dismissal, as the strong criticisms are not addressed substantively. (Your own criticism fails to detail what specific elements of Malthusian though, either original or current, you disagree with.)

- Those who are prone to dismiss skeptics are themselves frequently falling victim to the biases I've mentioned.

The principle omission from Malthus's calculus was that humans would spend the next 200+ years consuming the great prize of stored fossil fuels in the Earth, a nonrenewable resource which would eventually overwhelm its environmental sinks as well, at rates of up to 5 million times those of formation.[1] Increases in net human productivity track very closely to per-capita energy usage.[2]

Note that in Adam Smith's own arguments over how nations grew their wealth, he also missed the role the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel powered machinery would play. That's a significant omission, because Smith was a Scott, living and working in Glasgow at the same time as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and more than that, arranged for Watt's appointment to the University of Glasgow and had intimate discussions with Watt about his work. The net result of this is one brief mention within Wealth of Nations, concerning the event by which…

> You mean like the great depression which happened not long after formation, which some prominent economists have argued was exacerbated by the fed?

The tight monetary policy of the Fed (dictated by the rules of then-orthodox gold standard) made the Great Depression worse:

* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-and-financial-crises/gold-standard-deflation-and-financial-crisis-great-depression-international-comparison

And it was only after leaving the gold standard that countries started to recover:

> In the end, recovery from the Great Depression does not begin until countries give up on the combination of the Bagehot Rule and of commitment to sound gold-standard finance. Those countries that have central banks willing to print up enough money so that people are willing to spend it--it is when you adopt such policies that your economy begins to recover. If you don’t, you become France, which sticks to the gold standard all the way up to 1937, and never gets a recovery. When World War II begins, Nazi Germany’s production--equal to France's in 1933--had doubled between 1933 and 1939. French production had fallen by 15%.

* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-great-depression-from-the-perspective-of-today-and-today-from-the-perspective-of-the-great-depression.html

It was the 'sound money' orthodoxy that everyone adhered to that made things bad, and not the Fed specifically. It's not like things were any more stable pre-Fed:

*…

“Would it not be a great satisfaction to the king to know at a designated moment every year the number of his subjects, in total and by region, with all the resources, wealth & poverty of each place; [the number] of his nobility and ecclesiastics of all kinds, of men of the robe, of Catholics and of those of the other religion, all separated according to the place of their residence? … [Would it not be] a useful and necessary pleasure for him to be able, in his own office, to review in an hour’s time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths?” — Marquis de Vauban, proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686.[1]

Others have noted powers that a country has, that a company doesn't.

The converse holds too.

It's interesting to re-read James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State" with social networks in mind. Facebook can “read” its users (and many non-users) in ways that states only wish they could.

“Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames.[…] Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might ‘distinguish them by families,’ and that their practice of adopting baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints’ names resulted in great ‘confusion.’ The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna,…

Well. There's enough quality content in this thread to start a dedicated cable television channel, a la Viceland ;)

Not sure if it's my favorite. And the subject is more technology than "tech". But the talk that keeps haunting me is Michael Dearing's lecture from the Reid Hoffman "Blitzscaling" class at Stanford:

Heroes of Capitalism From Beyond The Grave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8

Dearing draws upon an obscure letter by Daniel McCallum, superintendant of the New York and Erie Railroad, written to his bosses in the 1850s. In the report, McCallum bemoans the stress and frustration of operating a railroad system spanning thousands of miles. All of the joy and magic he used to revel in whilst running a fifty mile stretch back in his home town has long since dissipated. Furthermore, the unit cost per mile seems to be exploding rather counter-intuitively!

Dearing goes on to elucidate the absolute necessity of the railroads ("the thing to know about the railroads is: they were startups once") themselves. As guarantors of civilization and progress. Beacons bringing light and reason to the dark swamps of ignorance and inhumanity. And not just in the physical transport of goods, people and ideas across the continent. But as the wealth created from that creative destruction remains the best cure for all of our other inimical maladies: poverty, injustice, disease and stagnation.

So, no pressure. But civilization depends upon you!

Links to References in the…

> The key thing was the Fed mismanaging and misunderstanding how money worked.

The key thing was the Fed was (early on) complying with how the gold standard worked, which is a finite amount of cash being available, and only being able to be increased by having more of the shiny stuff.

> When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Fed’s instinct was to do little and let the economy and markets correct. But the Fed seemed to have no sense of how big the credit bubble from the 1920s was. Consequently, from 1929–1933, the Fed remained committed to a tight monetary policy. Under the gold standard then in force, when the gold balances held by the government contracted, the money supply did so as well. Faced with the increasing economic turmoil, US businesses and the public at large trusted gold more than paper currency. Overseas investors, fearing a potential devaluation of the dollar, preferred gold too. This created a gold drain. As the Fed’s gold stocks declined, the United States unwittingly reduced credit in the economy. Over the 1929–1933 period, the US money supply contracted sharply, declining by roughly one third between 1929 and 1933, and the country experienced its worst ever downturn, with unemployment soaring to roughly 25%.

* https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2015/09/17/the-ghost-of-1937-the-fed-stalls-on-rate-hike/

This is one of the reason why the gold standard (or any "hard" currency) is a bad idea:

*…

> I’m sorry, but, we’d be foolish to discard anything and everything that we can’t quantify due to complexity or a lack of understanding of what specifically to consider.

That's not the criticism here. The criticism is just getting a lot of stuff wrong including stuff he wouldn't have gotten wrong if he just did some basic fact checking.

Just look at this mishmash of uninformed summaries, howlers, and bold claims that are disconnected from an awareness of how the systems he describes actually work:

"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages"

"When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror."

c.f. https://savageminds.org/2013/02/09/delong-and-the-economists-on-debt-chapter-12/

You can find other examples…