DISQUS

KJ · 4 months ago

"For now, we should try to hasten the arrival of this post-human economy."

As I suspected, Will Wilkinson is merely a libertarian robot from the future sent here to hasten robot world domination.

EoT · 4 months ago

Merely?

Dan · 4 months ago

Not sure what's going on, but the link titled "Greg Ransom" looks like it's actually by Tim Worstall.

Will Wilkinson · 4 months ago

Thanks. Fixed it.

Unnamed Commenter · 4 months ago

"Were low-income families to have access to a competitive market in educational services, there is every reason to believe the quality of training would rise, the real level of ability of high-school graduates would rise, and the the number of students prepared to benefit from higher education would rise."

Actual voucher experiments, e.g. in Milwaukee, generally don't show large effect sizes on learning outcomes. Vouchers could save money by bypassing public-sector unions and regulatory burden, lead to happier parents (especially religious parents who want to pass on their religion to their children) and enable more radical innovation (although the existing private school market has not been a hotbed of innovation), but simply transferring students from poor backgrounds into the schools attended by students from higher-SES backgrounds via vouchers doesn't seem to be very effective.

Libertarians seem to get over-excited about vouchers as a chance to claim moral superiority over liberals, and then get caught up in their valorization and the affect heuristic until they start claiming miraculous powers.

Will Wilkinson · 4 months ago

The prediction is for systemic changes over a generation or two. The status quo apartheid public school system is an integral part of the culture of urban poverty and it is unreasonable to expect isolated, short-term experiments to make much of a dent. The fact that the results are as good or better and that parents are more satisfied when there are small gestures toward choice should be more than enough to convince decent people to expand efforts toward legalizing markets in education, but alas.

Unnamed Commenter · 4 months ago

So you're saying that maybe given heroic (and extremely politically difficult) educational reforms in a couple generations there will be big changes (time to reform the schools, for those graduates to do slightly better, for that to rebound back to the culture, and so on and so forth) through nebulous indirect positive feedbacks about which we have little scientific knowledge? And so Greg Clark is silly to think that we might still have a large low-skill underclass to deal with in coming years? Your model seems to predict the same thing with high probability.

Unnamed Commenter · 4 months ago

But I'll assume you were just arguing against quietism.

SB · 4 months ago

Isn't it a little unfair to say Will is advocating heroic and politically difficult policy changes? My impression was Greg Clark was advocating massive increases in redistribution, and apparently, i.e., before we have any evidence that for once the broken clock happens to be right and this time economic and technological growth will actually turn out to be bad for the poor. Is this not a heroic and politically difficult change? At least Will is responding to a problem that isn't merely speculative.

[Not to mention that Clark infers from the health care debate that there exists massive demand for equality of outcomes, despite (a) having already pointed out that Americans have no such desire with regard to most other things, suggesting that maybe people's political notions about health care are radically different from those about other issues, and (b) that there is growing evidence that Americans want lower costs a lot more than they want universal coverage, to say nothing of equality of coverage.]

TGGP · 4 months ago

So what evidence does exists contradicts your claim that the private sector will solve everything because government is the source of all ills, and yet it makes not a dent in your claims (for which you have no supporting evidence, much like the liberals who think we can fix it by pouring in more money or just clapping our hands and believing real hard). I'm a radical libertarian who wants to abolish public education, but I'm not going to claim more for private schools than is warranted just because it fits my ideological presuppositions. The mere fact that public schools are unpleasant places to have to spend 7 hours a day is enough, no need to claim they actually do a worse job of educating children than any alternative we've seen.

You often reply to the inequality doom'n'gloomers that consumption data gives a different picture. However, the poor are able to consume as much as they are precisely BECAUSE of transfers. Libertarian optimists like Stephen Moore acknowledge this. Many government jobs and "private sector" make work (such as we see with various jobs bills like the latest stimulus) are essentially that kind of transfer in disguise. The unemployment rate would also look a lot worse if the incarcerated were included. The explosion in imprisonment occurred around the same time as the divergence in income.

Although IQ is correlated with economic success, it is not the only factor. In fact, Clark's book is premised on a different trait of individual variation (time preference) causing the industrial revolution. To learn that other traits are important is not to conclude that they are any more malleable. Executive function is actually far more heritable than IQ (which is not to say we know it can't be improved, but that makes it less likely).

pushmedia1 · 4 months ago

He's wrong, to the extent a "chair of my department" can be wrong, because he assumes there's a fixed class of idiots. Even if you accept stagnant wages at the bottom, which you shouldn't, the people at the bottom yesterday aren't the same as the people at the bottom today. Much of the increase in inequality in recent decades can be attributed to an increased volatility of wages within individual people's lifetimes. Furthermore, it turns out much of this increased volatility is insurable. This is why consumption inequality isn't rising much, if at all.

Derek · 4 months ago

What's the argument against "blood-born idiocy"? The evidence from twin studies seems to suggest a significant genetic component to intelligence.

pushmedia1 · 4 months ago

Intelligence is only one skill workers supply in the labor market.

M · 4 months ago

There are, uh, a lot of methodological problems with twin studies. They can "suggest" a significant genetic component to intelligence if that's what you want to read from them, but heritability is totally logically independent of genetic causation.

D · 4 months ago

The trick is use language in a hyperbolic and sarcastic way, e.g., " blood-born idiocy", so that decent but uniformed people will assume that anyone who talks about cognitive differences being largely due to genes -- something anyone who's looked into will find impossible to deny -- can be looked at as someone who is just a mean, cold-hearted, name-calling jerk.

John · 4 months ago

I thought Economist bloggers were supposed to remain anonymous. :)

John Brothers · 4 months ago

First, I feel that if you talk about Hanson, you should also acknowledge that generally he thinks that pushing education onto people isn't particularly effective - i.e. Gregory Clark is generally correct that morons will remain morons, if they have a degree or not.

Second, while it is certain that eventually computers will be able to replicate high-skill jobs, for the moment, we have absolutely no idea how to do that. We do know how to make computers do basic tasks, perform consistent physical labor and recognize standard objects. Drawing a straight line between those points is like saying "it takes 1 hour to walk up to the top of Stone Mountain, and Stone Mountain is 1/15th the size of Mt Everest so it should take about 15 hours to reach the top of Mount Everest... what's the big deal?

I am optimistic about our ability to use ever-smarter computers to improve our growth rate, but I don't think we should base public policy on that concept. On the other hand, the destruction of unskilled labor seems to be ongoing at a fairly rapid pace.

Don · 4 months ago

"Why hasn’t technological change so far created much higher rates of unemployment? Does Clark think this is a historical fluke? Why does he think this pattern is about to be broken? Why does he think technological change is finally reaching a tipping point? His failure to address this obvious point at all is glaring."

It is glaring.

So much that gets written about skill biased technological change is simplistic -- written as if 'skill' was unidimensional (ie skill=IQ). There was a time when many people thought that playing chess was a uniquely human ability -- a true test of the intellect. But now computers play chess better than most people.

But at the same time, it doesn't seem like we're anywhere close to getting a machine that can drive a taxi cab, run a cafe or do simple household chores like replacing light bulbs, changing tap washers or hanging doors. As for interpersonal skills ...

And it's amazing that anyone would claim that we've reached the limits of what education can achieve. The US hasn't even managed to get many low income kids through early childhood without squandering their potential.

This reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian novel Player Piano -- a story that must have seemed much more plausible when it was written in 1953.

ryan yin · 4 months ago

Excellent point. Some of the literature seems to acknowledge that unidimensional skill might not be a reasonable approximation but points out that modeling with multiple dimensions is just too complex to be tractable.

(Sometimes it's suggested that if you say "skill" has multiple dimensions, it's really hard to get clear policy prescriptions like "cut taxes" or "make taxes more progressive." Which I suppose might be kind of damning about the whole business.)

stephen · 4 months ago

The debate about education, intelligence distributions and how much they can be shifted aside, I think Greg has a pretty strong point about the shift from cyclical unemployment risk to structural unemployment risk. No matter how smart or educated a person is it takes a long time to build up a certain kind and amount of human capital, and if demand for that capital permanently declines the probability of retraining is low and inversely proportional with age. If automation starts to replace large segments of the labor market at a fast enough rate this could be a problem, at least in theory.

Anyway, I think we are seeing a shift from cyclical to structural unemployment as a result of hyper-specialization and I think it is a real difference from the last 200 years. Arnold Kling has been making this point for a while now and I am curious to hear what he has to say about Greg's Op-ed.

On a lighter note, I certainly welcome the overlords crowding us all out so we can play music and tennis all day. Work is boring after all.

stephen · 4 months ago

On second reading, I see that Greg never made this point. Sorry about that, I read his piece yesterday. Sometimes I really have no idea how my memory of what I read is what it is.

fhapgood · 4 months ago

While I totally accept the idea that over long enough periods supply and demand equilibrate, it seems worth noting that there is a technology coming up over the horizon that could cause a *lot* of short-term turmoil in the unskilled and semi-skilled labor markets: cheap, flexible, vision-based categorization or sorting software. Once you have categorization down you can do most assembly operations, and once you can automate categorization and assembly both maybe 30% of the jobs in the labor force will vanish into the machines. This is a well-identified problem that is attracting billions in R&D around the world, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why it won't get to where it wants to go in a few years.

DavidP68 · 4 months ago

The massive wealth transfer payments that Clark recommends from his ivory tower would squelch the innovation and entrepreneurship needed to create the capital in the first place. It would take place gradually, but it would occur.

pattibreckenridge · 4 months ago

I just want to interrupt for one minute to thank all of you for a very stimulating discussion. If the web was filled with more quality dialogue like this, it would be a much better world.

thehova · 4 months ago

ugghhh. Clark sounds annoyingly paternalistic.

thehova · 4 months ago

I'm not surprised that Ezra Klein likes Clark's op-ed.