Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1]
As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?
As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.
Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ?
OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill.
The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.
What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.
PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart.
I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?
> helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help.
This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through questions and targeted hints where you're going wrong, and thus make the concepts stick in a more lasting way.
I wonder if there's potential for some sort of digital learning medium which actively tries to "figure out" where the student's misunderstandings and gaps lie and addresses them in a more targeted way (optional hints are a first step, but there must be better).
I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address misunderstandings and gaps.
Sounds somewhat familiar, but the difference to programmed learning (at least as discussed in that article) is that the book contained error paths as well as the happy path.
No more memories, sorry. That was way back when phone conversations were over wires and television was wireless.
The chain of concepts to be taught was linear, and for each concept there would be a few paragraphs of instruction, followed by a set question with multiple choice ("if you think the answer is X, turn to page Y") set. A correct choice would lead to the next concept, while the available incorrect choices would each lead to material clearing up that presumably common misunderstanding[1] (leaving the reader with uncommon gaps to reread the intro?).
I can no longer remember if the clarifications included check-up questions or just looped back to the original.
[1] In book form, this approach wouldn't work well if the concepts had long-tails of possible misconceptions. Online, that could be less of an issue.
Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow.
As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over.
I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.
Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to society. Just as Khan Academy has revolutionised explanations of complex topics (resolving the ambiguities from school), scaled tutoring in which everyone participates could augment traditional teaching with soft skills, conversation, expansive exploration of worldly topics, and specific technical help.
Imagine a norm where ~everyone, in some way, relays knowledge and experience to youth, freeing youth from the segregation of school. It's always been odd to me that we separate ourselves (especially in western culture) from people of a different age. There's not as much integration between children and adults (outside of formalised schooling) as there could be. This separation seems to limit the transfer of knowledge but also the transfer of culture. And I think it also prevents bridges of commonality and empathy from forming, further entrenching homogeneity and aversion to difference.
It's worth asking ourselves: what would a society look like if we ~all engaged in the education of our young?
I find this doubly interesting in the context of homeschooling.
Often the parent's goals are to make the student as capable of being self-taught as possible. After the early years, the parent essentially steps into the role of tutor. You look for shortcomings and help the student step through those knowledge gaps. Otherwise the student can go as quickly or slowly through the material as they need to
Not that this scales, we'd have to look elsewhere for that, but interesting to see this function in a small community.
The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects.
In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years, and is estimated to cost ~$250 million.
I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect for workers.
We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten times more than we did before, and even more when they fail and need to be replaced—surely installing a new CEO is the answer.
It is no surprise at all.
Deming tried to lay it out for us, but no one really listened.
It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.
I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states.
I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic projects.
Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups.
These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.
It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.
It's all very well to pay someone well and expect good results for the money, but that person is still a member of society and will be affected by the things around them. I'd argue that someone who hears constant negativity in the media about how everyone is underpaid and living in poverty, and sees the person serving their coffee at a diner working their third job, and knows that their wife is working longer hours than they are for much less money, is going to be less productive as a result no matter how they're treated as an individual. Poverty is a structural problem in society. It doesn't just affect poor people.
Oh, I'm not disputing that at all. Just that the bridge's enduring quality (much as with other Deoression-era / WPA works) is at odds with your observation on poverty. Though that does seem to have some validity otherwise.
Maybe focus more on inequality and uneven reward? The Depression seems to have often been, as with the WWII recovery, something of a leveller.
The issue might actually be the opposite. It would probably cost too much to employ the number of bridgeworkers that were employed for the Golden Gate Bridge.
I'm totally nitpicking on your style here, but IMO this line reduces the value of the rest of your comment. Without it, your comment could be interpreted as a call to action, eg to encourage people to take more pride in their work. With it, it's clear that you've already given up, and you're not really adding anything except maybe encouraging others to give up on stuff too. That makes me sad.
> We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of.
This fully embodies the experience of the modern-day Agile experience in software development. "I know you're a senior but I (a non-technical Product Manager/Scrum Master) am going to have to check in multiple times a day and dictate every single feature and how it's built."
This is something I've ruminated on a lot – but frankly, I'm in no way qualified to understand or make sense of it. The two things that I often come back to are:
1) the pathways that infrastructure would run through have more "things" (a scientific term) in the way, raising the time and cost of a project. My father often mentioned how when I-95 was built, many homes near where he grew up had to be physically moved to accommodate it. That was in the 1950s. That problem only grows more complex over time. It's no surprise that building a new subway in NYC would have been 'easier' and cheaper in 1900 than in 2000, despite advances in technology, per Patrick's question.
2) investment in infrastructure requires foresight and time. It demands a long view. Who wants to be the one responsible for allocating a huge chunk of change for a project that they won't be in office to get credit for?
Please tell me why I'm wrong or what else I'm missing, I'd love to learn more about this.
1) You would have to explain how the problem of existing structures account for the orders of magnitude cost of new construction.
2) Why is this any different now than at the times of the examples? It would seem as though, if you initiate a project, you would have an incentive to complete it within your term in office. This could have been accomplished with many of the historical projects cited - Empire State Building, Golden Gate bridge, man on the moon (mostly).
No-one died during the construction of the Humber Bridge in the 1970s, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Construction took nine years and cost £530 million (adjusted to 2016 prices).
No-one died during the construction of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (Dartford Crossing) in 1988-1991, which was the longest cable-stayed bridge in Europe. Construction took less than three years and cost £260 million (adjusted to 2016 prices).
So, in other words, your statement "a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects" is something you made up.
Bringing up the stadium in Qatar only further highlights that point: I remember that building project getting tons of press outlining how shockingly bad the safety record was compared to what should be expected.
Take some time to research safety and deaths in large construction projects happening today at the scale of bridging the Golden Gate back in the 1930s. E.g. Channel tunnel - 10 deaths, Panama Canal Expansion - 7, Three Gorges Dam - 100+, Gotthard Base Tunnel - 8, Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge - 19, Istanbul Airport - 55. I'm not sure what statistics you are looking for, but construction isn't a no-risk profession even in modern times. If you want to just look at America - 3 people died at the Hard Rock Hotel construction site in New Orleans last year. Two people have died in the last two months building the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Two more died digging a trench in Phoenix two weeks ago.
You're getting downvoted because more than half of your examples are from non-Western countries with appalling safety regulations.
We already know authoritarian dictatorships (China, Turkey) can still achieve amazing infrastructure projects, damn the cost to human life or displaced poor people.
Fromt eh Western examples, Gotthard Base Tunnel work began in 1999 and it opened almost 17 years later, so that's less than 0.5 deaths/year. The Channel tunnel is then probably the only remaining example.
The other examples prove the point - safety standards have gone up and very few people die during major construction projects
" but looking around the world the numbers aren't much better"
? Qataris use indentured servitude, paying subsistence wages, forcibly holding passports and people in work conditions, not letting them leave, no access to healthcare, making workers 'pay for their debt' of the 'flight from India to Qatar'.
So this is not remotely any kind of basis of comparison for 'why we have a hard time making bridges'.
Japan has a different attitude, they're able to 'make stuff safely' but it's a different culture.
> Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?
Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.
Therefore the changes have to be entirely legal, political and social. The specifics are probably things like increased environmental scrutiny, greater political impediments to forcing people out of their homes, requiring higher standards for construction, increased safety. Reduced political will to build infrastructure due to competing models of public/private ownership.
My personal theory; I suspect big chunks of modern infrastructure are now illegal to build. I don't know if it is still acceptable to sign off on a project where it is expected that 11 people to die. I know that would be wholly unacceptable in a mining context; for example. Probably construction too.
> Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.
Building could be harder over time when lands to build is used for other purpose. Railloads economics could be worse relatively over time when competitor(car, airplane) getting cheaper and improves quality.
I sometimes wonder about this too. When you walk through European cities and look at the decoration of those old houses, they were all handcrafted. I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details. Same with all those old chairs, where some woodworker sculpted everything by hand. You can't imagine that right now anymore.
Is it because we throw away stuff after 5 years? Or because we just have way more stuff to produce? Because we don't work as hard? I have no idea.
> I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details.
On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.
> Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power.
I don't think that's it, at least for public buildings like churches, theaters, town halls, museums, and so on. After all, veto power doesn't prevent awful buildings like the Walkie Talkie building[1] from being built, as long as they conform to the bland, in vogue architectural tastes. It's the cult of postmodernism, stripping away visually interesting features, even though humans gravitate to older buildings despite the "form over function" blind cult thinking. This has dominated architecture for the past few decades. Many older buildings are simply built with many intricate visual details that are architectural heresy nowadays. As mentioned, there was a briliant article and HN discussion on this recent-ish, I just cannot dig it up.
EDIT: This is the article, "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture":
I have not looked up the numbers, but would guess wealth inequality is a big part of it. Those houses were built for people who were richer, and they had people working for them who were poorer, than is common nowadays in the west.
There isn't really a concept of civic pride any more. The Victorians - for all their many faults - did have a kind of local-scale pseudo-patriotism which motivated some very impressive buildings.
When modernism decided that decoration was superfluous and forbidden, it also did a lot of damage to the tradition of civic building.
Buildings were no longer designed to be aesthetic. If private, they were supposed to be utilitarian money factories put up by capital as cheaply as possible for the generation of more capital. Or they were supposed to fill a social need - again, as cheaply as possible.
A few architects, like Calatrava, produce public statement buildings, but they're often poorly regarded and not necessarily designed to wear well. (Calatrava has a very striking visual style but is notorious for poor build quality.)
Modern corporate HQs - like Amazon's and Apple's - half buck the trend, but only half. They're modernist statement buildings, but they're still motivated by a kind of minimalist corporate narcissism rather than pride.
The only buildings that don't fit the trend are some of the religious mega-projects. They're designed to be awe-inspiring and spectacular, and they often are.
So the real culprit is penny-pinching modernist utilitarianism - mostly capitalist, but not exclusively. If you removed that you could recreate a 21st century aesthetic of imaginative but robust civic architecture at all scales, with high quality materials and handcrafted detailing and decoration.
In a very literal sense the entire culture is run on an ethic of ever-narrowing acquisitive miserliness. This started to become a serious problem in the 80s, and it's been hugely dispiriting - not just for the arts but for civics in every respect.
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"
That list is pretty much rank ordered by the amount of non-substitutable human labor involved per unit. Everything in red is a pretty universal need (health, education, child care, housing, food), while the blues are mostly wants. So we want medical care, but that requires a lot of labor, and each of those workers requires housing, but that's supply constrained in much of the country, and they have be educated, but college cost is rising, and their employees need child care, and the child care workers need to go to the doctor ...
If there was a way to reduce the cost of living (my hobby horse is dramatically increasing the amount of by-right housing permitted to be built in an area), then that would ripple through all of these industries. High and increasing costs and wages make labor-intensive industries much more expensive by comparison.
Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all unpublished information.
Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book, then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that.
As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by accreditation systems to limit new entrants.
Starting from Patrick's question, and working through the list...
It suggests that some of our market-thinking has been off mark. Free-market economic policies have tended to define things in terms of market "freeness." How much intervention, etc. This is commonly how we think politically, because it relates directly to policies.
The way these affect reality is through the market structures themselves. We can regulate or deregulate barber shops and restaurants... but within wide margins they are likely to remain pretty good market structure. Lots of choice, competition, churn, etc. Hospital services or college tuition are structurally different. If we are "laissez faire" with hospitals, and have heavy handed regulation for restaurants... Restaurants would still behave like a more free market, just because of innate structure.
It would take a truly byzantine accreditation system to make restaurants look like textbooks or pharmaceutical drugs. Someone would literally have to assign you a dinner reservation.
I think you're right that some industries are more conducive to competition in general. However shouldn't we be more careful then in terms of creating barriers to competition?
If we treated restaurants like hospitals/healthcare we would give your employer a tax break in return for determining the set of restaurants you may dine at. Any new recipe or cooking method used by a restaurant would need to first be approved by the FDA. Restaurant chains would not be allowed to operate across state lines. Restaurant would have to accept below-market pricing for some proportion of customers (medicaid). Each restaurant would need to hire a law service to ensure they comply with HIPPA, and staff a department to allow import/export of your dining history.
But, I think a lot of economics gets stuck in a sort of theoretical mud. In theory, barriers to competition, entry or always have negative effects. Those negative effects can be small, big, or irrelevant relative to other effects related to the same policy.
What i am suggesting, is that industry structure determines these. So yes, there are theoretical policies that might make hairdressing worse or hospitals better in this regard. In reality though, policies are very often acting within margins where competitiveness doesn't move the needle much either way.
Assuming a thriving restaurant market exists, it will probably remain pretty competitive under any "normal" policy regime. No one is really going to implement FDA approvals for recipes or tax related employer funding schemes.
No one is going to implement a totally nonaccredited hospital system, where doctors & nurses don't have to be trained or licensed. At the very theoretical end, laissez faire dynamics might yield a market-based regulation system that accredits doctors and such without government intervention. But once again (a) that's very unlikely and (b) if it did happen that would still be regulation.
For 99% of real life scenarios, restaurants lend to a free market dynamic while hospitals do not. Governments are involved, but they do not create this reality. It is innate. One policy regime or another (short of communism or such) is not going to change that.
Does licensing of doctors and nurses really add much? Don't hospitals have sufficient incentive even without licensing to ensure that their doctors and nurses have the necessary skills?
Uber/Lyft have their problems, but one takeaway is that a simple rating system works better than complex licensing and medallions.
This is especially true in the U.S. There's no market as such because there's no pricing signals. The barriers to entry are super high: education and licensing of doctors is extremely restrictive, while construction of hospitals requires prior political approval ("certificate of need"!). All the HMO/PPO in-network thing also adds opaqueness, and discourages any negotiation by the consumer. This is madness.
Medical care and education have seen a massive torrent of government funding and regulation over the last 60 years, while the things that get cheaper live mostly in free markets.
Housing, childcare, textbooks, and food and beverages seem strongly market based, and private college tuition has risen far more than public, challenging your characterisation.
I note textbook prices took a dive about the time book-sharing services became prevalent.
It's fairly well established by now that the most significant drivers of housing unaffordability is the preponderance of zoning regulations that restrict the supply of new housing construction.
When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of “prefabricated houses”, they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate, and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing structures. These banks and loan companies have been unwilling to finance prefabricated houses except in rare exceptions and then on a limited basis. Lumber companies and manufacturers of other materials which are being displaced in the production of prefabricated houses, have sought to prevent their construction through building-code restrictions and by organizing boycotts by dealers and building crafts. Moral and ethical rationalizations have been used against prefabricated houses....
Planned public housing projects such as slum clearance which afford the most efficient methods of utilizing advanced technologies in the building industry, crash against the wall of vested private-property interest. They meet the combined opposition of the owners of obsolete buildings, that nonetheless are still profitable, of landowners who demand prohibitive prices, of holders of mortgages who fear a depreciation of housing values through the increase in available homes. Achievements in building technology lie sterile in the face of the opposition of these interests.
Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937.
This little-known work detail instances and dynamics in which opposition to innovation occurs. As the author notes: "The most potent of the cultural factors are clearly economic: Efforts to maintain economic advantage and hegemony over competing classes, and over competitors in the same industry and rivals in the same market in allied fields."[1]
In the case of housing, it is both a financialised asset, of value to present property owners, landlords, banks and financial institutions; and a mode of social and political control, directed against class, race, and ethnic interests: the working class, poor, blacks, immigrants, non-WASPs, etc. The mechanism vary but may include zoning, redlining, availability of mortgages or insurance, restrictive covenants, building codes, leasing limitations, and more.[2] Even non-housing aspects such as transit service, walkability, and bikability impact on this.
Housing densities in the US are exceptionally low by European and global standards, even (or especially) within major cities. Unmet need could be met not by creating tower forests but simply through low-rise multi-family dwellings. San Francisco is overwhelmingly three floors or less, with large tracts single or two-storey construction, ground floor often garage. Five-floor structures could readily double available housing. Similar dynamics exist throughout the country.
The result is resisted by entrenched economic interests capable of exerting influence, which is to say, suppliers with a capability to restrict supply of a price-inelastic good, and thus, disrupting an otherwise "free market". The perversion is that it's the very mechanisms of markets, property, profit, and accumulation, whichend up distorting them. "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power", wrote Adam Smith.
"Markets" in this case eat themselves.
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Notes:
1. I'd learned of this through the graduate student who'd done literary research on the article, and went on to speak and write about it occasionally, including premising some of his own fictional works off the same principle of resistances to innovation: Isaac Asimov.
2. Regulation and governance mechanisms are not inherently bad. But they're extraordinarily prone to capture.
Being able to pass local regulations is a perversion of the term "markets". By that logic, the entire world is a free market, even those countries where national governments have been "captured" to suffocate markets like Cuba and North Korea.
Either that, or we need to then come up with a term to describe "property rights free of any regulation". One of my links even describes it as "laissez faire" land use policy, which is what we mean when we say "markets".
The solution to the problem is to actually strengthen property rights: by allowing property owners to build whatever they please on their land without the permission of their local community. We already do that for life and speech — you can't vote to kill somebody, nor can you vote to prevent someone from publishing something. Why then can you vote to prevent someone from building an apartment building?
Smith's opus is often read as a critique of Communism. That's anachronistic: Das Capital was a critique of Smith, or at least what emerged in his name.
Smith was a critique not only of mercantilism, as is commonly acknowledged, but what we would now call capture and monopoly.
In any case — it's a huge stretch to suggest that allowing other property owners to dictate what you can and can't build on your own property constitutes "property rights".
No rights are absolute, and most uss of land carry some externality. I'm not willing to entertain that no consideration be given these.
That's also spectacularly missing the main point that price-inelastic goods and services (those affording economic rents) increase in price where supply can be constrained by some means, setting up an intrinsic and wholly market-consistent dynamic of increasing prices and decreasing supply relative to demand.
The same dynamic is present for most of the price-inflated goods on Collison's list, and goes a long way to explaining the behaviour he ponders.
> No rights are absolute, and most uss of land carry some externality. I'm not willing to entertain that no consideration be given these.
This is a bit of a deflection, since it’s entirely reasonable to enforce some property regulations based around reducing externalities (eg. you can’t construct a building that will collapse onto the sidewalk and injure/kill a passerby), while preserving general property rights. The US’s speech rights are pretty close to absolute, with some notable exceptions (imminent lawless action). The argument is to get our property rights to look the same.
> That’s also spectacularly missing the main point that price-inelastic goods and services (those affording economic rents) increase in price where supply can be constrained by some means
Nobody denies this, and it is entirely orthogonal to the question at hand: “does zoning regulation constitute a market-based regime?”. The answer to that question is, resoundingly “No”. If you think that this is “the market” at work, then we need to come up with a new term to describe “system that allows free enterprise, property, and trade free from regulation”. Whatever term we agree upon: that’s what we’re pushing for.
Private college tuition is as heavily affected by the flood of federal college funding as public colleges. Textbooks are just another way for colleges to ride on the federal gravy train.
Housing prices have no where near the same price growth, and last time they did it was also due to heavy federal subsidies.
Lastly, Childcare, Food and Beverages? You are grasping at straws there.
It is 95%, not 100%... and amazingly that looks accurate.
As an example, a 32" CRT with remote control (eg Sony Trinitron) cost about $1500-2000 back in 1997.
Today, you can buy a 32" TV for $85, delivered. And even though this will be "Brand X" and not Sony, it will have better picture quality, more functionality, be more reliable and use less power to boot.
"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?"
Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights on this question? What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon that seemingly makes Japan an outlier?
> What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon
It's simply impossible to detach Japan from their culture.
The main thing that stands out to me is their selflessness.
One anectdata: Tokyo feels pretty much the opposite of NYC. In NYC it feels like people are obstacles to avoid on the way to where you are going. Nobody waits for anybody. At first it seems rude, then you realize "it's not personal" and just assume the same stance. It's ok to quickly walk in front of someone who's not paying attention, it's ok to not say hi and just quickly ask what they want. You end up thinking a city that big and with so many people can only be that way. Then you go to Japan and are completely blown away. Everybody is aware of everyone else on the street, even if it's packed people will give you the right of way, they'll wait for you if you are distracted, they'll stop and try to help you if you seem lost, and seemingly everywhere people will be super polite. To me the difference is that in NY (and maybe the US in general), I'm always first and most important, whereas in Tokyo (and probably Japan in general), everyone is more important than just myself.
Two small stories about Japan: 1) a friend was trying to find a place to exchange some USD and got a bit lost, he asked a random person about it, this person walked my friend for 3 blocks to the currency exchange shop. 2) when going through a bus station in Tokyo, one of the escalators was closed for cleaning, when I walked by, the janitor was laying down flat on the floor, holding a special brush, meticulously cleaning the yellow metal mat at the entrance of the escalator, completely absorbed in what he was doing. I've never seen anyone, anywhere else in the world, put so much care into cleaning a public space.
I worked for a Japanese corporation for decades; regularly traveling to Tokyo.
Japanese culture is really unique; even for East Asia.
They aren’t a “warm and fuzzy” bunch, but every Japanese person is aware that they are a member of Society, with the ensuing obligations and personal boundaries.
Every person in Japan takes their vocation seriously. Quality is absolutely stunning, and is deeply personal to each worker; bordering on obsession. Quality is almost a religious obligation. I feel like a slob, in my own work, compared to them, but most Americans seem to think that I’m way too overbearing about Quality.
That said, it’s no utopia. Management techniques can be difficult to endure, working hours and stress are insane. There aren’t many stress-free jobs, and the nation has a high suicide rate.
I liked to visit, but I don’t think I could live or work there.
Something I think may be related, but I don't have strong evidence for, is that I think some of the high Quality shown in Japanese work is also evidence of a tendency towards not trying to do everything. Things I've noticed in a lot of Japanese products, both software and hardware:
1. Barebones UI/UX that I would guess isn't very accessible for blind/non-traditional users.
2. Poor user manuals and often even worse translations.
3. Proprietary systems where there's no interoperability outside of that company's ecosystem.
To me, this points to a system that does a very good job making things for the 80% case, and often doesn't even try to accommodate the 20% case.
I have another hypothesis. Japan is a nation of craftsmen. As such, Japan excels at enterprises involving the manipulation of physical objects, like producing cars, cameras, knives, industrial equipment, computer hardware, etc. If you've ever been to Japan, you'd notice that it is a nation where physical objects/systems are very much prized.
On the flip side, Japan doesn't seem to do as well with abstract objects. I'm specifically thinking of software here.
You see, the modern practice of software development is heavily tied to American/European culture, where technology norms, though ostensibly universal, find a natural home in the English language. Consider concepts like generics, devops, dependency injection, static vs dynamic typing: all of these were conceived in English-centric environments. Sure there's nothing linguistically specific about them, but they reflect discourses that happen primarily in English-speaking spaces.
If software development were more mathematical (and maybe more like electronics... somehow less tied to English), I suspect the Japanese would do much better than they are doing right now. (Ruby's Matz is a notable exception, and I suspect his fluent English had something to do with it)
But the fact is, the practice of software development is as much sociology as it is engineering. Large swaths of it are inextricably linked to the culture, norms, and languages of Americans/Europeans. Without a good command of English, one finds oneself merely consuming content but unable to influence the discourse.
Video games is a pretty big counter example to that hypothesis. Japan has been a huge leader and pioneer in that industry, which is all software + art. Another counter example is robotics, which is software + hardware.
That point might be valid, but it could be simpler than that. It just might be too expensive to design and document for the world.
Documentation is often very complete; but at an extremely technical level, and not always translated. Japan is a nation of engineers. I think that they expect users to have a certain level of proficiency, and that is reflected in their UX and documentation.
I find that Japanese equipment can be very polished and aesthetically designed, but can be quite intimidating. They produce pretty space shuttle cockpits.
Translation is a fearsomely expensive and fraught process. I have done a lot of localization work. Chinese companies have a similar affect, where their customer documentation is often quite sparse. It's quite possible to get detailed documentation, but it will be in Chinese, from the company. I found that out while I was working in ONVIF (surveillance stuff). The docs that came with the cameras were terrible, but the engineers would be quite helpful, if I could track them down and ask questions.
Yea, I don't mean it to say there's no reason for it. That underlying issue tracks with what I'd expect.
This comes back to another point that's been made elsewhere in this thread - it's always going to be easier to design and build things for a community that's smaller and more homogeneous. A lot of the countries we think of as being good at building things are also fairly small.
There's probably a term for it, but it's almost the inverse of Economies of Scale. It's easier to make good country-wide standards when most of your country wants the same thing.
Well, my experience is that some (not all) Japanese companies are quite good at making high-quality stuff at enormous scale.
The company I worked for is renowned for making really nice cameras, and have been doing it for 100 years. People all over the world have wrapped their entire careers around the products of this company (I don't call them out by name, because I don't really want my social media rants to end up on their radar).
As noted above, however, I found that their production magic didn't really work so well for software. As I was one of their software managers, this was challenging.
> a friend was trying to find a place to exchange some USD and got a bit lost, he asked a random person about it, this person walked my friend for 3 blocks to the currency exchange shop.
This exact same thing happened to me. Two anecdotes don't make a pattern, but...Japan does have a magnificent culture of service.
It's not service in the sense that is commonly used. They're not "serving" you by helping you. It's more of a "helping me by helping us" attitude, I think.
The UK used to have this level of awareness of others, and almost this level of politeness. One of the complaints about American tourists was that they were so rude. I still find walking in a British city a pleasure (but not London, as it has lost this), because people are aware of everyone else around them, and make space for them. I find the same driving in the UK (but not London) - drivers co-operate together to keep the traffic going smoothly. People regularly let others in front of them, knowing that someone else will let them through in turn.
Walking in an Australian city is a nightmare by comparison - everyone is ignorant of others around them and annoyed if they have to alter their path at all. Driving is even worse. Australian drivers are incapable of merging at a junction because they point-blank refuse to let other people in front of them. Every other car is an obstacle to be got around, a competitor that needs to be "beaten" rather than co-operated with.
Are you sure this wasn’t because you seemed western/white privilege?
When I was backpacking it was shocking to see how other countries will perceive white people as superior and go above and beyond to help them while someone who is Asian gets treated like just another average Joe. It’s opposite for black folks.
It’s like decades of movies and media have built this implicit bias in our brains.
However, I did find it very strange and even a bit sad, that almost all posters at Uniqlo featured white/western models, inside their flagship store in Tokyo.
I visited Japan and was just astounded at how much better the society is run.
As a tourist, my obviously naive impression was of a place that is incredibly well organised, that seems to have no trouble investing in its own infrastructure, that is extremely safe and clean and generally prosperous. Where the people seem to have a sense of joy and fun.
Just. so. well. organised.
I really loved Japan. My favorite country in so many ways. I really wish I'd visited when younger and maybe lived there for a while.
I did feel unsafe and threatened during my trip there at one point when an Australian tourist became belligerent and angry when someone (not Japanese of course) stepped ahead of him in a queue. I felt ashamed at his behavior.
This. My experience in SE Asia has shown me this. Those really strong family links make people happy and provide a safety net that can't be beaten. But it comes at the cost of suppressing all individuality. No following your dream of being an artist - you need to earn money for the family. No marrying the weird guy your mum hates. No moving city because you need to find yourself.
It's shocking how HN is just overlooking this trait in addition to the very many related things in this regard that we would consider in America VERY "right-wing" to put it kindly. Having Japanese family members over there and listening to their remarks amuses me since I hear their candid opinions on race and such, but uh... Americans who idolize the country and identify as "progressive" or "liberal" would probably do well to think a bit more before praising their society while condemning the conservative wing of the US political alignment.
Well, unless your premise is that the less savoury aspects of some of Japan’s citizens’ views are responsible for the aspects of their country and society that we might admire (and I don’t think you are saying that) then this is tangential to the question we are discussing.
It’s not unreasonable to acknowledge or even admire some aspects of a person, a company, or a country, while also being aware that there are other aspects that are less admirable.
>> It’s not unreasonable to acknowledge or even admire some aspects of a person, a company, or a country, while also being aware that there are other aspects that are less admirable.
They are two sides of the same coin. You have the "nice" stuff because of the xenophobic policies. I'd be willing to wager the majority - if not all - of the people that loved Japan were white and didn't think about it at all.
The recent claim (maybe 10 ya) was that Yakuza influence forced inspectors to sign off on foundations that were not sound. So they do not have the required pilings. I don't know how that could be fixed, but I don't assert it couldn't be. I assume if it is, it would have been done by now.
> ..Coastal areas in the region have prepared tsunami evacuation plans in anticipation of a possible future Cascadia earthquake.
> However, the major nearby cities, notably Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Victoria, and Tacoma, which are located on inland waterways rather than on the coast, would be sheltered from the full brunt of a tsunami.
> These cities do have many vulnerable structures, especially bridges and unreinforced brick buildings; consequently, most of the damage to the cities would probably be from the earthquake itself.
> One expert asserts that buildings in Seattle are vastly inadequate even to withstand an event of the size of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, let alone any more powerful one.
> Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA's Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, put it quite dramatically: "Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast."
My sister's in law are up early and on a train for hours into the city where they work until well after dark and are home at about 11pm.
My wife who lives in my home country on the other hand runs her own business from home, sets her own hours and has a lot more free time and independence.
I feel pretty sorry for the workforce in Japan. It's pretty dystopian if you ask me.
It's amazing for kids, university students, senior citizens and if you ever get a day off.
> Where the people seem to have a sense of joy and fun.
I'm going to take issue with that one. Of course "a sense of joy and fun" is subjective, but the extreme social conformism of Japan definitely has its drawbacks.
I mean, take one measurable metric when it comes to "joy and fun": sex. Much as been written about Japan's extremely low birth rates, but that also extends to sex and even just romantic relationships. Decent article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/japan-m...
You're bang-on when it comes to culture, but it has nothing to do with being optimized for tourism.
Japan is a very conservative country. Change happens slowly here, and Japan does a lot to ensure that people raised here share a common culture, with a strong focus on stability and harmony.
To provide some examples:
- NHK, the national broadcaster, has several series of popular programs showing life across all of Japan -- rural, urban, suburban, every prefecture. There are also programs showing Japanese people living overseas, and showing how they have integrated into the local culture. There is no "rural vs urban" divide in Japan.
- Japanese schools focus heavily on structure and responsibility. Students maintain their classrooms, clean their bathrooms, staff the cafeterias, etc. All of this is under adult supervision, but the kids do the actual work. Discipline is strong as well -- there are real consequences for poor behavior.
- Japan follows the Prussian education model. Compulsory schooling ends at 14 (9th grade). From there, you can immediately begin working, go to a trade school, or go to high school. There is also a professional education track separate from university.
- There is a strong culture around keeping families whole and raising kids as a whole family in Japan. Often the wife will move back home and live with her family shortly before and after childbirth, and there's a lot of cultural reinforcement there.
- Parents are very active in the education of their children, and the locus of responsibility is first on the child, second on the parent.
- The Koban system is fantastic. Police live in their communities, and interact with people every day. You never want to end up on the wrong side of the law -- the conviction rate is well north of 90%, and the accused have very few rights here -- but overall, Japanese police are very polite and professional.
There are downsides to this -- everything comes with trade-offs -- but it delivers a very stable and safe society.
I never ever thought about it before but I see _exactly_ what you mean. And I think you're spot on. There isn't this idea/phenomenon of country folks being very different than city folks, rather there is an extremely strong cultural narrative around how a Japanese person behaves and what it means to be Japanese that transcends the settings in which one lives. The cultural machine just continuously markets Japaneseness to it's citizens.
I agree it comes with good and bad, but for sure when it comes to safety and stability it's huge factor.
Few questions, would be glad if anyone can answer these:
- Would you know of good companies which have a good work life balance in Japan?
- I know among the big tech, Microsoft and Google have offices there. Both seem to pay well as well. Do they have similar WLB as their US offices?
- I have heard of racism, like certain apartments being off limits for non Japanese people. Some clubs only allowing white caucasians among foreigners. How true is this in your experience?
- I have no problem in learning Japanese over time, but without it at the start, is it very difficult to get by?
- Do most people live in Tokyo/Kyoto(where Tech companies seem to be) itself or can you live a bit in outskirts(a bit of greenery) and commute using the fast public transport?
I'm not sure "work-life balance" is even the right concept in Japan.
Japanese companies are structured around the idea that you devote your life to the organization. Overtime and weekend work are common. In exchange, the company will take care of you: you will never be fired, you will be provided with access to a broad social network, a group of friends, a spouse should you desire, and enough salary for your station in life until you reach retirement.
If you are satisfied with that contract, you will be happy. If not, you won't.
Working for a big US-based tech company here, you get the best-ish of both worlds. Salaries are much higher -- although not on par with the US -- and your working environment will be much more familiar.
The downside is that you are very insulated from Japanese society as a whole. The "Gaijin Bubble" is a thing, and it's incredibly hard to break out of.
One of my buddies -- who "happens to be black" as George Carlin would say -- describes Japanese racism as "racism done right".
I'd say I agree with his assessment. I've been denied apartments, had an ex whose family hated foreigners, and been refused entry to a restaurant once, but that's all fairly uncommon. You are unlikely to experience violence, although the police will -- very politely -- pay more attention to you than they would natives.
Tokyoites are used to foreigners, and outside of that, you're a curiosity?
Also, speaking Japanese opens many doors. I once had a nightmare of a time getting a taxi, but they would stop to pick up Japanese people. Once I finally flagged one down, I asked the driver why.
He was thrilled that I spoke Japanese, and mentioned that, in that area, most foreigners (a) couldn't speak the language; (b) wanted a long taxi ride; and (c) often fought with the drivers and refused to pay (taxis are not cheap here).
Remote work is a thing now, but before that, you lived in Tokyo. You can easily live in a bedroom community and commute -- some people do 4+ hours per day on a shinkansen.
On the off chance that I do stay here, I will likely move to a semi-rural area and telecommute full time.
Your company (nominally) pays your commuting costs.
Japanese is straightforward to learn, but you really have to devote time to it. Plan a few years of total immersion.
Also, it's not a European language, so outside of the grammatical differences, there's just a ton of culture where there is no overlap -- I didn't really appreciate just how deep Christianity's roots were in Europe until moving here -- it's crazy.
As a tiny example, the little grill that you cook "Ghengis Khan" on is called a "shichirin" -- which is a specifically-shaped wheel from Buddhist teachings.
I've heard an anecdote from a colleague that speaking Japanese moves one from the category of "Gaijin" to "interesting Gaijin", at which point people start volunteering how "we do things." (this is probably true anywhere: it's the fundamental distinction between an expat and an immigrant.)
> Plan a few years of total immersion.
I'd say this is true (although closer to "a couple") even going between european languages and english.
On the other hand, anyone emigrating for cultural reasons might appreciate that learning a language in their host country will be an order of magnitude more rapid than raising and educating a generation or three[1] in their home country.
[1] Has the american character has changed significantly since the publication of The Canterville Ghost in 1887?
Hey, thanks for taking the time for answering that. Your answers are realy helpful.
- Definitely an interesting way to look at it, I am not sure whether I would be able to convince myself of this though, based on the cultural difference I have grown up with.
- The US company thing sounds great, even entry level tech roles have $150k+ comps, and I think in Japan that should still be really good.
- I can live with a little bit of racism and I think learning language of the land is kind of a good thing anyway, if I do plan to live long term.
- I think with Covid forcing companies to allow WFH possibly in the long term should definitely make it easier. Japan seems to have beautiful countryside and small towns, so it would be a shame if I don't get to experience that. :)
The culture bit is quite interesting indeed. Other than Buddhism, foreign religions haven't been able to get much foothold there it seems. Even Buddhism lives alongside Shinto and folk religions from what I have read.
I think one more good thing about Japan is their PR is points based and last I checked, I qualified for the fast track one based on points.
A bit worried about the Gaijin bubble thing, I would have assumed even the US company offices would have a lot of Japanese employees.
From one of your remark it seems like you are planning on moving out, are you planning to go back to your home country or some other place?
USD 150k is roughly JPY 16M, which is 2-3x an entry-level salary here. Google might be laying that down for new graduates, but they'd be the only ones that are.
Hmm maybe not divided like US but exists. Tokyo vs other big cities(Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Nagoya,..) vs others is popular conflict. Young people move to Tokyo to get jobs or go to univ and never goes back, meanwhile rural areas are losing younger smart people. And all govs and most news are in Tokyo so not considering others well.
I have never gotten the sense that Tokyo people think that Japan would be better off if everybody living in rural areas were to drop dead tomorrow.
Rather, in grocery stores, foods and fruit proudly proclaim their prefecture of origin -- Iwate, Aomori, Hokkaido.
Tokyoites go to the countryside for vacation, for hot springs, to visit farms, that sort of thing.
Popular sentiment is that Japanese are sad that the countryside is dying, and there's a lot of push -- albeit with very limited success -- to get younger people back out there, because at some point, somebody has to grow the food.
Japan only produces 50% of the calories it needs to feed the population -- the rest are imported. That's a scary place to be in the world right now.
Rural brain drain is a real phenomenon, and related to the fact that Japan... and maybe all governments and large organizations, when I think about it, have a strong centralization pressure, to pack everything together in one place.
It takes active measures to resist that. Distribution is hard, but it pays dividends in terms of resilience and awareness.
I've only been to Switzerland once and that was during a <2 hour layover in the Zurich airport. As an American used to frequently decrepit American airports/infrastructure, I was seriously shocked at how nice the entire airport was. The aesthetic of the airport was just quintessentially Swiss (aka beautifully minimalistic).
When I pay for something with an American credit card in Europe, the machine prints out a receipt for me to sign. I was buying a snack at a store in the Zurich airport and the clerk actually compared the signature on the back of my card to the signature that I scrawled on the receipt. That was the one and only time I've ever had someone do that.
I generally don't put any effort into those signatures so my signature looked nothing like what was on the back of my card so the clerk actually asked me to try again.
So they have an archaic system that requires comparing a signature? I'm pretty sure I couldn't match my credit card unless I were trying to do it while looking at the card signature. I hardly consider that a benefit.
And I've been through Zurich. I don't consider it anything special better or worse than going through most major European or American airports. [Oh. I take that back. I had my luggage lost on the way there by SwissAir and it was a nightmare finding who to talk to.]
Most Europeans either use a PIN or contactless (for smaller purchases). US credit cards however have no PIN, and contactless cards aren't yet common in the US, so terminals default to chip/magnetic-strip + signature. When a signature is required, one is supposed to check it against the signature on the card (I suspect we don't do it here in the US because everybody signs and it's too much of a hassle to do it for each transaction).
I've had my signature checked against the back of my card in many places around the world -- so it's not just Switzerland.
Most people abroad usually have this look of surprise when their terminal instructs them to obtain a signature. They usually have a face that says, "Oh! Americans".
p.s. this is changing with mobile contactless. I started using Apple Pay in Europe (before COVID that is). Most contactless terminals recognize my phone as simply another contactless card. (NFC)
They did that because they were unfamiliar with a system that requires such a check. Every time I've been to Europe and used an American card it's been explained to me that because American cards are so far behind the times they need to specially handle my card instead of using Chip and PIN
You perhaps didn’t go through the terminal for international transiting connections (terminal E?)
It is fantastic. Just about the best airport experience I’ve had. Easy to get from one point to another, nice lounges if you have access, and outdoor viewing decks.
The rest of the airport is just so so. And it’s confusing to get from one terminal to the next.
But terminal E is a marvel. Airports actually have internationally established minimum connection times for flights, based on how long transit is expected to be. Zurich’s is among the lowest.
The other comment covered the credit card issue so I won’t address that part.
We still have this antiquated notion that the more expensive good or service is better, because one gets what one pays for.
(A german doctor once told me a salient difference he noted between germany and switzerland is that if you run into an acquaintance in Aldi in germany, they don't immediately offer an excuse for why they happen to be shopping there that day.)
Likewise, I find understanding why Switzerland is so successful very interesting – especially as it differs dramatically in approach from the other countries in Europe held up as successful and happy societies (the more northerly Nordic countries).
I can’t give a full explanation, but there are a couple of unique aspects of Switzerland that I believe may influence the situation heavily:
1. A strong aspect of Swiss culture is to expect responsibility and interest in the affairs of Switzerland from its citizens. This is reflected, for example, in the very strict rules and tests implemented for foreigners wishing to assume Swiss citizenship, which include a wide variety of questions on the history and current affairs.
2. Allied to this, they have implemented probably the most direct form of democracy I’m aware of in the world. The country is divided into a number of cantons (roughly equivalent to American states) which are largely self governing and self determining, including (for example) setting dramatically different rates of taxation. Further, many issues are decided by way of referendum: votes take place relatively frequently. Lastly, in theory any citizen can generate a new law: a series of votes would be taken on a new suggestion, first at a local level, then at a cantonal level, and then potentially at the national level.
Economically though one aspect I don’t understand is how Switzerland can support such high salaries and high costs of living, in contrast to other countries. (What came first: the high cost of living, or the high salaries?) And therefore with it being an acknowledged expensive place for businesses to operate (in terms of salary costs) why do multinational businesses choose to open or continue operations there, in contrast to other more affordable locations? (Also noting that there is significant skilled inward migration, to support the needs of some of those large businesses.)
I always thought that the key reason Switzerland is richer than surrounding countries is their big financial sector + trickle down economics. And the financial sector got big because of their bank secrecy. Of course culture helps, but I'd wager that without the bank secrecy, they'd be a bigger Tyrol. Innsbruck is nice too but it doesn't lead every magazine's "best place to live in" list.
A cynic might say that Switzerland got rich by helping criminals all over the world get away with their crimes. So Switzerland getting richer ties in with everybody else getting a little poorer (because crime is a tax on society).
I think it's a foreign policy. A very cynical one, which says "we'll happily help other countries get worse, as long as we get better off it". It's not unlike America's offensive neorealism, but with money instead of guns.
_Gaijin_ is commonly used for non-Asian foreigner. Take a look at how citizens of non-Japanese heritage are treated if you want to understand what the parent comment is referring to.
For example, Korean or Chinese heritage Japanese, or Ainu (indigenous Japanese)
I don't think the parent comment was alluding to only foreigners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi is one of the unfortunate social phenomena that's notable in Japan from the culture and the pressure of conformity.
homogenous societies are inherently more efficient? the reality is the beauty of America is that we are a heterogeneous one, but there are of course some downsides to that.
Considering that I use at least four languages[1] every day, and am thankful[2] to be living someplace that has not yet been completely overrun by chains and big box stores, I'd argue the assertion of a "heterogenous" US might need defending.
On the original question: I think switzerland is nice for two reasons. (a) we didn't blow ourselves up twice last century, which meant that even with little absolute growth we went from being a relatively poor european country to a relatively rich one, and (b) putting more emphasis on quality of life than on hustle results in, well, more quality of life.
[1] It doesn't work for francophones, who have a general swiss (or at best cantonal) idiom, but in swiss-german there are several isoglosses just within my valley that allow me to place a speaker. Granted, my valley has been historically universally catholic, but these days that just means that our protestants and muslims get lumped together in the "not christian" bucket :-)
[2] a french friend put it this way, earlier this century: "Modern europeans are too busy feeling sorry for those poor benighted savages who had the misfortune to be born a few villages over, to bother travelling halfway around the world to bring their superior way of life to people at gunpoint." À mon avis, c pas faux.
In the city I grew up in, official notices were routinely made in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, and I regularly encountered people speaking Korean and Chinese as well. Even my grandma's rural town, with a population of under 5,000 and an hour's drive to the closest city, has people and restaurants representing four or five different nationalities. If you're perceiving the US as a country where everyone only speaks English and only eats at McDonalds, that's not accurate.
Aha, things have improved since last century. When in California I did use spanish as well as english, and in Louisiana french as well as english — but back then the concept of "melting pot" was still current, so one of these languages was clearly the prestige dialect.
Looking at the current cabinet, I'm sure if I scrolled enough in @SecElaineChao I could find some chinese. Sorry for my outdated impression.
but we utterly lack any mother-tongue sinophones. And although our current president, @s_sommaruga, has some romanche in her feed, she uses much more english.)
uh yeah you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that a country that is majority white isn't homogeneous because multiple languages are spoken
when I speak of homogeneity I'm talking about race, immigration, etc.
> uh yeah you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that a country that is majority white isn't homogeneous because multiple languages are spoken
Well, he convinced me. (Largely because I have lived in countries with communities like that).
[Out of curiosity, does my testimony change your mind?]
no - because Switzerland's population is 70% Swiss, with the remaining mostly from nearby countries that have similar values and complexions. Just because you grow up learning various languages does not mean your society is heterogeneous.
A society where every learns 4 languages and looks the same is homogenous.
You aren't: you are trying to defend the silly notion that a group of white people are homogenous even if they have different languages.
You state such a thing (diversity) cannot EVER possibly be true. The OP and I testify otherwise. From lived experience - mine with nothing to do with Switerland (or Canada in case you are guessing).
Consider today then whether the Serbo-Croation war could ever be possible under your model of reality (who would fight who?). Except it was.
I think it's a little disingenuous to call America a heterogenous society. While the share of population for different ancestries[1] makes it look heterogenous, a large part of the equation is cultural homogeneity. American culture is derived from its anglo history and I'd argue economic and political pressures have forced "model minorities" to forgo their heritage.
There is a culture of doing things very well up to perfection, at least in certain domains. I don't think it has anything to do with tourism. One folk story is that this is linked with the perpetual destruction of things in Japan, because of natural elements, etc. so there is an emphasis on controlling the process as most things tend to be short lived.
You also need to be careful about cleanliness. If you go into more traditional areas, things tend to be quite messy. Japan's record in terms of pollution is not that great either.
You need to live there for a while to start seeing the other side of the story on the social side. Social pressure is huge, starting from early age. Huge gender gap in almost every metric you can think of. People who do not conform are push out of the society very violently. For example, have you noticed how little you see intellectually disabled children ? Hint: it is not because Japanese are particularly immune to it. Also, why do young Japanese women all have black hair ? Hint, it is not because all Japanese woman have black hair. Etc.
I love the country, the culture and the people, have lived there most of my adult life, but as in every culture, once you go beneath the surface, you see that it is a bit less bright than it appears. There is also a tendency from a certain faction of the Japanese society to believe in the uniqueness of Japan, called nihonjiron, a set of essentialist nonsense particularly popular on the extreme right for obvious reasons.
> Also, why do young Japanese women all have black hair ? Hint, it is not because all Japanese woman have black hair. Etc.
Curious what you mean by this? Most Asian people have naturally black hair.
If anything, there was a period in the late 90s-2000s when most young Japanese people dyed their hair brown (it was a fashion fad), so if you saw an Asian person with brown hair, it was likely they were Japanese.
As a Japan resident and expat from a small south pacific nation you may of heard of recently, I don't find Japanese "baseline execution quality" to be categorically better. There are a lot of places where it is worse.
> Buses and trains are better (and more punctual);
Japan's public transport is great.(where there is money)
> low-end food is tastier;
50/50 on this. Maybe gyudon or kaiten-zushi are tasty, but a lot of the low end food is over processed, over packaged, over sweetened, uninspired imitations of food, factory made, prepared by low wage workers, with all the challenging and exciting bits take out.
> cheap hotels are more comfortable;
you even get complimentary right wing nationalist literature in the bedside table.. but This is probably true.
> streets are cleaner;
People just throw things where no one can see, when no one is looking. They neatly tie up their convenience store rubbish in its plastic bag, and throw it into a stream. dump their fireworks and BBQS on the beach, fluorescent lightbulbs in the forest,
> grocery stores and corner stores are nicer;
Every thing comes in sooo much plastic, and the selection is very limited. Corner stores are all franchises of a few big players, who don't share much profit with local owners or suppliers. sure Fami-chikin is tasty, if you don't think about where it came from.
> ostensibly unremarkable villages have more beautiful buildings and are more pleasant places to spend a few days.;
Sure they are nice to "spend a few days". But a village is supposed to be the centre peoples lives. These nice villages with cool old buildings are emptying out fast and becoming abandoned along with the rural way of life because of the lack of immigrations and the economy being so centralised on Tokyo.
It strikes me that all the writer's points are very much about what appeals to a middle class visitor. Is this a good metric to judge a society by?
You can, but it looks like everyone else in this thread is lazer focused on Japan (likely due to the prestige of Japanese culture).
But that doesn't explain Switzerland. Is Switzerland closer to Japanese in culture than they are to Dutch? I think obviously not, but from the thread you would assume otherwsie.
Both countries (Switzerland and Japan) have a culture of a focus on quality, so they are very close in this trait.
The Dutch are IMO very pragmatic people that, while quality is important to them, are more willing to sacrifice it for other things that are of higher priority.
So it's not about a general sharing of culture but only about sharing the quality-focus aspect.
I had a colleague who insisted on quality in every bit of our software and the results were similar perhaps: locally, each thing might take more time and more care, but the global result was everything working better and being done more easily. So perhaps focusing in quality and assuming efficiency will come from global effects is a good strategy?
(Reminds me also of The score takes care of itself business book)
It's almost 100% cultural I feel. At least Japanese people always attribute it to their culture and self concept of what Japanese do / how Japanese (and therefore themselves) behave.
If there are non-cultural factors I would think they contribute a fairly small amount.
But there's a light side and a dark side to the cultural factors. It has some seemingly unavoidable side effects.
I am sometimes baffled at how the leaders at NK can't have a look at just down the DMZ and see what they could have. The difference in social indicators is magnitudes better. Their ideology has been proven so wrong. I wonder what will take them to just give up.
If they are worried about punishments for what they have done, they could just cut a deal to let them have a lot of assets and be immune from judgement against past crimes.
I'm sure the leaders enjoy their position in north korea quite a lot. Better to be a king in somewhere like North Korea than to be an ordinary person somewhere else.
Really? I mean, think of the story of Boris Yeltsin visiting a grocery store.
Is the life of the average North Korean government official actually better than my life as an SRE in Brooklyn? I think I have way more access to luxuries than they do.
When was the last time North Korea had a race riot?
Also North Korea has a lot more geopolitical disadvantages at hand, namely sanctions.
An ethno state helps you avoid several classes of problems, like strict typing prevents runtime type errors. It doesn’t solve all administration problems.
But patronage of two big states which would be more than happy to keep a developed buffer state between US military bases. NK at least was rich in resources unlike SK.
When was the last time most countries had a race riot? Some countries have racial tension but not all ethnically diverse countries have serious racial tension.
Even if its not race, all countries have divisions. Some countries function well enough that divisions dont devolve into riots. Other's don't.
> It doesn’t solve all administration problems.
The parent post basically was claiming that it helped with all administrative problems (a claim that i certainly agree is absurd)
if you care to look you'll find it's often at the expense of those who aren't part of the homogenous culture. It can be hidden or minimized, but it doesn't make it go away.
Pretty sure China's not an ethnostate, as much as the CPC would want it to be, and pretty sure the lack of internal division is from their atrocious suppression of minority groups.
Less than 5% of the Chinese population is non-Han. I think the Manchu are the single largest minority and their language is for all practical purposes dead, along with any living distinct culture.
Doesn't make what he said false though. If your state caters to mostly the wishes of the 93% majority suppressing others, you can effectively consider it to be an ethnostate for arguments.
“ Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. "
Does anyone know if this also true of learning & development in companies? For example sales training or training
I don't have full answers for all of your questions, but my colleagues doing Learning Science often mention this two-sigma improvement, and are working on computer-based cognitive tutors that can adapt and model what a student is learning. I vaguely recall that these cognitive tutors are at the 1-sigma level for certain subjects (primarily STEM subjects), but that was many years ago and I'm not sure of the details.
Cognitive Computer Tutors: Solving the Two-Sigma Problem
Individual human tutoring is the most effective and most expensive form of instruction. Students working with individual human tutors reach achievement levels as much as two standard deviations higher than students in conventional instruction (that is, 50% of tutored students score higher than 98% of the comparison group). Two early 20th-century innovations attempted to offer benefits of individualized instruction on a broader basis: (1) mechanized individualized feedback (via teaching machines and computers) and (2) mastery learning (individualized pacing of instruction). On average each of these innovations yields about a half standard deviation achievement effect. More recently, cognitive computer tutors have implemented these innovations in the context of a cognitive model of problem solving. This paper examines the achievement effect size of these two types of student-adapted instruction in a cognitive programming tutor. Results suggest that cognitive tutors have closed the gap with and arguably surpass human tutors.
Feels like the Khan Academy apps do something like this. You progress through a tree of knowledge and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on, demonstrated by solving problems. It also gives you all the help you need to achieve that mastery.
> and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on
Oh that's the absolute worse way of teaching people (or, ok, that's my pet peeve in education)
"but how do you expect to learn stuff without knowing the basics blah blah blah" well, because maybe actually knowing how it is used in the end helps with learning. Instead education seems to focus on wasting a lot of time with "basics" disconnected from reality then finally teaching things how it is.
Calculus was the worst for this: in my first class we spent literally two months dissecting the minutiae of limits and Lipschitz conditions and infinitesimals and blah blah etc, only to get the the punchline, "and you find the slope of a function by doing the obvious thing, which works in the obvious way every time you'll actually be using it in practice". I get it in a college level analysis class or something, but as an intro in high school that's just a great way to make students hate what is at its core a very simple and useful subject.
Not sure if I'd agree. Khan Academy is firmly rooted in the American tradition, it teaches facts, but it's like Feynman in Brazil, it does not integrate the concepts. For that you need problems tailored to your level. A good tutor can do that.
Feynman's complaints will be familiar to anyone teaching university in the United States. Obviously Feynman makes a distinction between the science education that he knew and the travesty that he saw in Brazil, but today's education in the US is exactly like what he complained about. What happened, and when?
The Russian tradition of "math circles" (https://www.msri.org/people/staff/levy/files/MCL/Zvonkin.pdf) is altogether more productive than US-style kindergarden (no resemblance to the German original) where the 3-year olds sit in rows and have the ABC beaten into them. Of course the Russian approach relies on individual attention and problems, and class sizes are smaller.
That, and/or mastery learning. I haven’t read the research, but I hypothesize the focus on ‘mastery in each subtopic before moving to the next’ is what drives results, while 1-1 tutoring is what drives the speed of attaining them.
Why do you think that takes a lot of effort? I suspect it would not be hard to find a tutor at readonable rates. (Speaking as a former home-schooling dad. We used math toturs for 1:1 instruction at various times. )
I'd be looking for a tutor in graduate mathematics, and particularly the subjects that I can most readily apply to my work.
In Sydney I don't think there'd be that many available, and it would take time to find the right 'fit'. I don't think you can assume that once a reasonable rate is settled that the partnership would be a success.
A private tutor in graduate-level mathematics, with emphasis on subjects that can be applied to your work - what a great idea!
Like the sibling comment suggested, I imagine there must be an over-qualified and under-paid talent pool around universities, with enough candidates for you to select a suitable tutor.
I'm personally pretty confident that with the level of resources now available for learning almost anything online, you can replicate a lot of the benefits of tutoring by (1) getting students excited about a topic and then (2) teaching them the basic keywords and research skills for that topic.
(We've seen a lot of success with this model at CodeDay, n~50,000. It was very exciting when we first tried this as a legitimate educational strategy and saw it work, one of the reasons I decided to work for this nonprofit instead of another startup.)
I assume the answer is... it depends. I've taken training/workshops that clearly depend on group dynamics. I've also had training presenting, skiing, individual projects in grad school, etc. that pretty much depend on 1:1 time and, to the degree you're in a group, it mostly means you just don't get as much attention (but it's cheaper).
Bloom's paper largely focuses on when/how students get feedback and less on the particulars of the assessments.
For example, maybe mastery learning works (in part) because it helps teachers pay attention in a group setting more like they would in a 1:1 setting. From Bloom's paper: https://share.getcloudapp.com/rRu7WJRz
I wonder if it's reasonable to talk about some of these things separately from the rest of the economy. San Francisco can't build a bus lane, but it can build the hell out of some software. (You might argue that our productivity has gone down there too, but I'd say the social impact has never been higher.)
Maybe with "hard" infrastructure being a bit old-fashioned, or bogged down in red tape, maybe the entrepreneurial or organising or effective talent moved into other industries?
It sounds a little self-congratulatory, so I don't like the idea, but it's hard (for me) to see something like SpaceX as something other than a competent "can do" entrant into a stale old industry.
I don't know what lessons we might learn from that, though. Room for small upstart players in industries (especially around government spending) might be one.
you are right, the demand is artificially propped up by the govt. as you stated.
However, it is tied to the job market, which is more realistic, and we are starting to see the fallout where many of the colleges will be going out of business.
I don’t necessarily buy the idea that student loans are driving price increases, but there’s a tangible difference between subsidizing producers versus consumers (corn subsidies are generally the former, student loans are the latter).
Government money increases the supply of corn, and drives the price down. Hence, corn, and products derived from it -- high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn-fed beef, Nu Metal bands, etc -- are cheaper.
College is an example of subsidized demand.
Government money increases the number of prospective students, by lowering the financial barrier to attend university. The result being that the cost of a university education has risen, drastically, while the quality of that education has plummeted.
education is not a commodity in the same sense as corn
and it’s much more of an inelastic good than corn
the difference between 50k in tuition and expenses and 55k will not change demand a meaningful amount, and universities exploit the fact that education is inelastic and the money is coming from a guaranteed source regardless of the student’s ability to pay upfront.
Cars and Cellphone service sectors are heavily regulated. Textbooks are not regulated.
There is more to it than just "more regulations". Also regulation doesn't necessarily have to come from the government, for example, the Apple App Store is heavily regulated, and yet they have some of the lowest software prices compared to other platforms.
In my opinion, competition through trade may have a stronger effect on prices; you can easily buy a TV or a car made in China, but you can't easily attend the University of Shanghai, or be treated in a Hospital in Hong Kong.
Textbooks aren't regulated in the governmental sense (though they are somewhat at the middle/high school level), but there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment.
> there's certainly been more "regulation" in the sense of schools trying to enforce what books are used for what class for their own enrichment.
That has little bearing on the prices of textbooks. Also a school can't function without textbook standardization. That's hardly the same thing as regulation.
Are you saying that in any given UK primary school (I mean the actual physical school, not the school district, municipality, county, etc) they don't use the same textbook/curriculum across multiple classrooms in the same grade/standard?
Does each teacher or student/family chooses the textbook to use, without any standardization even at the same school?
I don't think UK primary schools use textbooks. There is a curriculum for state schools which is reasonably proscriptive (and set by the state directly), but in terms of planning, creating, and delivering lessons, each teacher seems to do it themselves. Sometimes if there is more than one class of the same year group (grade) the teachers will work together on resources, but not necessarily. (This has always struck me as inefficient; in reality, teachers share a great deal of lesson plans and resources, but there is no compulsion other than the curriculum.)
My understanding was that US school districts or even whole states selected textbooks for K-12 students that all teachers were expected to use in public schools, but I may have missed something.
And US university accreditation seems to be tied to exam boards who also publish textbooks which students are expected to buy; again, in the UK, there is nothing so organised (in the sense of "organized crime") and University accreditation is done by a separate non-profit, the QAA.
I don't agree that textbooks aren't affected by regulations. Regulations permit easily available student loans which leads to the glut of college students who need to buy books. The books aren't exactly a free market as you are told by the school which books and which version to buy. Also, government programs subsidize textbooks.
That is a correct definition of regulation - it captures a feedback cycle; but the parent, was clearly meaning government regulation. If customers don't like a product that helps regulate quality, etc...
1. Is steelmanned buddhism wrong in important ways? Can some sort of minimal set of claims version of buddhism even be steelmanned consistently?
2. The joint-stock corporation appears to be the most scalable coordination tech ever invented. What is the embedding space of the things that make it possible and what else is in the space?
3. Does most progress come from pairs of people in high bandwidth collaboration? How could we test this and how could we scale the matching problem implied? If this is true why aren't there more famously successful twins? (also mentioned by Gwern)
4. Are dramatically better matching algorithms possible (lemon markets, costly signal bandwidth saturation)? Ones good enough that they would encourage more geographic mobility?
5. What's the natural embedding space of 'values'? If discovered and rendered tractable would this solve problems with our current attempts at formalization (VNM, Arrow's impossibility, various decision theory gotchas etc)?
6. Why are all the general purpose 'how to navigate life' resources so poor in quality? (also mentioned by Patrick)
7. Does DNA (and RNA?) transcription error rate emerge as a natural kind in large scale biological prediction? Does this create natural limits on malleability of biological systems?
8. Is there low hanging fruit in CNS imaging? Would this directly lead to dramatically better mental health interventions?
9. Can research stagnation be undermined by funding more research review enabling more cross collaborative legibility of researchers into each other's work?
Can you say more about the steelmanned buddhism questions? I'm interested but not clear on what you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism" or what important ways you think it might be wrong about.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm familiar with the idea of steelmanning, but not what set of buddhist ideas you're pointing to with the term "steelmanned buddhism".
On the Chinese research question: Just wait a decade.
In all likelihood, I am permanently departing academia in about a month. The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave. I am about to join them. There is literally no path forward.
In the decade that I have watched my world-leading research group wither, our Chinese colleagues have expanded their laboratories by 4-5x, appear to be well-resourced, and are poised to lead the world on all fronts within the decade.
An excellent colleague of mine, who had done excellent work for US particle-physics experiments, went to China for a high-energy physics faculty interview. On arrival, he was surprised to find that there appeared to be another candidate competing for the position. He did his best, as did the other candidate. As he prepared to depart, he asked whether or not it had been a competition for the open position. The reply? "We had one position, but we liked both of your talks so much, we are extending offers to both of you." There was no matching US offer of which I am aware: he accepted.
That essentially never happens these days in the United States. It is a story the likes of which one might have heard from 1950-1970.
Chinese physics results are continuing to gain in reliability. Where once we saw quite a bit of copy-catting, Chinese fundamental science research is beginning to transition into regularly breaking new ground.
Wait a decade.
We should welcome this development with open arms. A billion smart people, with equal potential, should be able to turn out roughly three times as much research as the 0.34 billion smart people in the US. We can encourage that research at the same time that we must stand against the regime's attacks on democracy in Hong Kong, the atrocities occurring in Xinjiang, their surveillance state, threatening the independence of Taiwan, enabling North Korea, and more. ( The US has dirty laundry, too: Our President is incompetent. Vote! )
Something else to mention - the pipeline of attracting smart students from all over the world (especially China and India), educating them, giving them green cards and having them continue researching at US universities or working for US companies is basically done. It might not be immediately apparent, but we are going to see a significant change in high-skilled labor availability and output in America over the next decade.
A good chunk of the young top talent in the last 2-3 years in my area have returned home (India, China, Europe, Canada). I expect them to produce top notch work wherever they are.
If we just think of something that is part of the fabric of a prominent university like a university press - MIT Press was formed in 1932. Oxford University press was founded in 1586.
Tsinghua University Press was founded in 1980. The university probably wasn't even open during the cultural revolution. This is where Xi Jinping graduated, it is considered by many to be the best university in Asia, and its press didn't open until 1980. I know a CS professor who published a book via TUP about 15 years ago, and there were all kinds of problems, they just didn't know how to publish a textbook in the manner that MIT Press or some equivalent university press could, the publication process was much more amateurish. But - at the end of the day - the textbook was published, the content was good, and the printing was adequate. I have a feeling that they will get there.
I think about this a lot as well.
To a scientist, funding more science and scientists seems like a no brainer. It's not like everything's worked out, we are inured against all the reasonable existential threats, and we all live to 150 in perfect health. There seems like a clear line between scientific discoveries and almost everything that is good about the world. If everyone in the world took military spending for one year, and made a huge fund to give money to scientists, it at least has a chance to be one of the most beneficial actions in human history. It would also be an eye-watering waste of money, as in literally money disappearing into the void.
This is the thing. Science is a massive waste of money. It is the most important waste of money there is, but it is still a waste of money. If you try to make it less of a waste of money, it stops being worthwhile. To any sort of accountant, it looks like setting money on fire. Academia has shown the ability to proliferate and essentially soak up as much money as they can. Now at the moment, China can see that line between funding and future good. They can tolerate the huge wastage it entails. They are also a functionally permanent regime.
In western countries, my opinion is that science funding will contract over time. I think one of the reasons is that society is ageing. This is partly an economic effect, where the cost of caring for the elderly goes up, the number of people working and paying taxes goes down, and there is less money to fund science. In my country, the biggest government spending ticket is aged care, not including healthcare. But I think the main effect is psychological - more elderly leaders and a more elderly society have a harder time seeing the point of funding science. I'm not saying this is good or bad, only that it is there. In the end, a society decides on the appetite it has for funding science.
If academia is structured the same way in China as it is in the US, that situation won't be sustainable for long there, either. If each professor produces ten new PhDs, the only way for them to all find academic jobs is through very rapid growth in faculty size, which can't be sustained for that long.
Agreed -- one can only hire like crazy in a growth phase. The frequently promulgated expectation that every new PhD can become an R1 professor is incorrect, unwise, and unhealthy. If that expectation alone were altered in the undergraduate consciousness, a lot of sadness could be averted.
The contrast here is that the US (in particular -- the EU seems to be more thoughtful) doesn't seem to be maintaining its robust research program, while China seems to understand that leadership in basic research has compounding benefits on decadal timescales.
I got my physics PhD in 1993. By this time, this expectation was already held in disregard. Most students were aware of what we called the "birth control problem." My dad got his PhD in the 1950s, and told me that it was common knowledge back then too.
But while students vaguely knew that most of us would not end up on this path, we got little or no guidance on what else we could do. A common aspiration was to teach at a lower tier school, but the academic job market was saturated from top to bottom. I was ready to go into some kind of engineering. A lot of us became programmers.
I got lucky -- a friend of a friend owned a company, and hired me.
My experience is that the understanding of the problem is apparent to post-graduates and older, as well as a number of people outside of academia. Among my undergraduate class and my entering first-year graduate class, understanding of that reality -- that many of them (which, probabilistically meant you) would not become professors -- was limited at best.
That's fair. It may be something that students have been told but don't really internalize. Everybody at the tournament wants to believe that they stand a chance. I know this is true of students in the humanities too. Everybody is actively putting off facing the reality.
One thing I do remember is that as undergrads, we were advised to maintain a pretense of wanting to pursue an academic career, even if we had other plans. If you told them that you intended to finish with a masters and go into industry, you would probably not get accepted, would not get funding, and would be treated as a second class citizen. So students were pretty much told to inflate their expectations. That was a long time ago, and I don't know how it is now.
I didn't become a good enough research scientist to compete for a trophy gig in academia. What I saw is that my own university was hiring up, i.e., only considering applicants from higher ranked schools. That meant my chances were somewhere close to zero. I got to know the post-docs and understood their grind. But also, I became more interested in gadgets and making things work, than in directing fundamental research.
I recall reading here, within the past month, that China had blown up its' academic institutions, and they were considerably behind the rest of the world as late as 1990, and perhaps even later. They may in fact have lots of room to grow. They can't grow exponentially forever, but maybe they can for a while.
Your answer resonated with me a lot. Can you elaborate on this? What is that structural reason?
> The underlying reason is structural -- neither our funding agency nor our institution is willing to yield on a fundamental sticking point that is causing all of our young researchers to leave.
The National Science Foundation (for good reasons) will not fund more than a month or two of a Principal Investigator's annual salary. They'll fund many other types of position, but not that one.
Our University (for good reasons) is reticent to hire into faculty positions, where the state/university would fund a PI's salary. Furthermore, any research professors must fund themselves through grants.
NSF is the only serious game in town for our grant funding.
Even though we have the country's best infrastructure for these experiments, are leaders in our field, can attract grants, and have done so since 1987, we haven't been institutionally capable of retaining promising early/mid-career researchers since ~1999.
The big losers in this situation are the country's experimental capability and science in general. We easily have at least another decade's advances ahead of us. The issue isn't really one of total amounts of funding, but rather whether we are allowed to invest in retaining skilled and knowledgeable leadership.
1999 was roughly the last time we made a faculty hire into our group.
My understanding is that NSF doesn't want PI salaries to be dependent upon grants -- that way, your job isn't (directly) on the line for a specific line of research. It removes at least a little bit of bias toward proposing research just to stay funded.
Moreover, the policy is an incentive for universities to hire faculty, which is generally good for research/teaching.
The hard thing, from the university's perspective, is that a faculty hire is, assuming tenure, very expensive. There is generally a ~$0.5-1M laboratory-startup package, plus a commitment of a professor's salary until ~2055. For this reason, our Department is generally allotted ~1 faculty hire/year. Only exceptional events, like the appearance of a huge and sustained source of money or winning the Nobel Prize (UW Physics: 1989 and 2016) will permit extra hires in targeted fields.
Furthermore, because faculty hires are so rare and each professor gets a vote, each hire has an impact on internal politics. Our department is comparatively friendly, but faculty-hire slots are the most precious commodity in any department.
All of this is to say that it is difficult to find a path that, in this case, would help to retain knowledge and talent in our group. The meeting of the minds that needs to happen is between national funding policy and the status quo among most universities. It is so far above my pay-grade that I've not yet found a reasonable angle from which to attempt to solve the problem.
The obvious issue is whether you can think openly when you can get in trouble for it.
Einstein was not a conformist. Could he have survived such an environment? Or would they beat him down, or would he leave?
Consider Li Wenliang, who first noticed covid19, and was interviewed by the police, and investigated after his death for disrupting public order.
OTOH the PRC have been very astute in adopting capitalism. If they can, they will find a way for research. I'm just not sure if it's possible to reconcile thought-control in one sphere, and not in another.
> Why is there no canon for life's most important questions?
There is!
Well, sorta, but a very good attempt at least: Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World, 1965 (a bit dated by now).
It's the supra-compilation of 'western' thought, and the works in there do come close to a canon for the most important questions in life. That list of questions does need to be formalized first, unlike, say Electromagnetism; you're dealing with more than just charged particles after all.
Still, the best thing about Adler's work was the Syntopicon: a 'quick' reference of the great works based on ~100 topics (Astronomy, God, Justice, Family, Dialectic, etc.). Each of those topics was further subdivided into specific areas (The nature of Jesus' human form, Ellipses, Jurisprudence of Judges, etc.). It's a huge work.
Most critically, these specific areas listed a where you could find the relating pages in the great works.
For example: Under the topic of 'Mind' and the subtopic of 'The condition of the human mind when the soul is separate from the body', you have a listing for 'GIBBON: Decline and Fall, 233d' and a lot of other listings too.
It's not exactly what the question asks, but it is as good a starting point as I think you can get shipped to your door.
We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of "vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by their city or municipality.
i wonder what pc thinks of https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - is this a cherrypicked statistical fluke or is this an actually important long term economic trend worth exploring?
One thing I have found about HN in general is a refusal to ponder the meaning of money itself.
1 Why is a small amount of inflation considered a "good thing"? In just one generation, inflation targets reduce the purchasing power by nearly 50%. What if you knew that assumption lead to all kinds of terrible outcomes, but they only surfaced after 7-8 election cycles?
2 Why is a gold standard considered impractical? After all, today, the technology actually exists to at least make this a worthwhile pursuit (that is, a digital gold standard which doesn't involve the actual movement of physical gold)
3 Why is there so little discussion on the "amount of currency units your central government printed this year"? I find it remarkable, and somewhat amusing frankly, that there could be so many intelligent people on a forum (compared to the average online forum) and how few of these folks have asked themselves this question.
4 Why is there so little discussion on the possibility of currency deflation being a very good thing for the people on the margins of society?
It certainly doesn't help that 99% of the folks who ask these questions happen to be both male and white, which just makes people auto-associate these ideas with racism, privilege etc. I don't think the core ideas themselves have been given sufficient thought for a few decades.
And as for Patrick Collison, I am willing to bet he hasn't read a single book written by Thomas Sowell (whose books will at the very least force you to ask these questions, even if you might come to different conclusions to others who read his books).
It’s very challenging to ponder these questions in a public forum, because so many people hold uninformed or nonsensical views on them. Whenever I’ve tried to discuss them, I’ve had to fight off very basic misunderstandings like:
* The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500 billion means banks are $500 billion richer.
* The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar.
* Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money.
I’m sure you understand the problems here, and I certainly don’t hate educating people about them. But it’s hard to have a deep discussion punctuated by constant breaks into monetary theory 101.
> The Fed prints money by giving free gifts to banks. That is, QE for $500 billion means banks are $500 billion richer.
This is a straw man, $500 billion in loans (normally above market value for collateral) means banks could be anywhere from 0-500 billion dollars richer but they are certainly not poorer.
>The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar.
Have you seen the stock market lately? Investors have done well in this new easy money economy and until that money trickles down they certainly have it much easier than they otherwise would.
>Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money.
In the long run this is true. Especially the second statement, it's almost trivial to prove: Imagine an island with 10 dollars in circulation. The amount of goods produced doubles, and everyone is able to trade and consume all the goods. The price of the goods must necessarily be cut in half on average, so that the 10 dollars are able to pay for all the goods.
> This is a straw man, $500 billion in loans (normally above market value for collateral) means banks could be anywhere from 0-500 billion dollars richer but they are certainly not poorer.
It's not universally a strawman. I've had people propose to me, in all apparent seriousness, that we should just take the QE funding and give it to individuals instead.
> Have you seen the stock market lately? Investors have done well in this new easy money economy and until that money trickles down they certainly have it much easier than they otherwise would.
I've seen this theory, but it fundamentally doesn't make sense. Money is fungible; there's no trickling barrier dividing the money supply into "investment dollars" and "consumption dollars". (It is of course true that monetary policy can affect asset prices in other ways.)
> In the long run this is true. Especially the second statement, it's almost trivial to prove: Imagine an island with 10 dollars in circulation. The amount of goods produced doubles, and everyone is able to trade and consume all the goods. The price of the goods must necessarily be cut in half on average, so that the 10 dollars are able to pay for all the goods.
This isn't so, because you're missing the critically important concept of the velocity of money. If everyone buys and sells things twice as often to match the doubling in total production, prices won't need to be cut. It may help with the intuition here to imagine playing a video of the island at 2x speed; the number of goods they produce in any given time interval will double, yet the total number of dollars in circulation won't change.
The question about healthcare, infrastructure, college, housing is a major one.
The explanation I’ve come up with is that they aren’t machine scalable problems and that the barrier to entry is so high that existing incumbents have little incentive to do “more with less $” when due to increased demand they are racking in billions.
Matt Stroller’s BIG newsletter goes deep into the little monopolies and consolidation of markets by private equity.
There’s also insurance and loans that comes into play. You can charge obscene amounts of money when it’s other people’s money. In a complex system, accountability is hard, so it’s ripe for rent seeking and corruption by the few people who are the bottleneck.
> It is interesting that the real cost of medical care and hospital services didn't see any sort of inflection change with the introduction of the ACA.
No one expected it would.
> One the key reasons for implementing the ACA -- which I supported, mind you -- was to control rising healthcare costs.
The immediate reason was to address broad consumer affordability, especially for the people that could least afford it and needed it most.
Long-term, overall cost containment was a long-term goal, but it wasn't expected to have that effect in the short-term, and the pieces that contribute to that either weren't implemented at all, weren't implemented fully, or weren't maintained. (And, heck, a lot of the other pieces weren't in place long before they too started being chipped away at.)
For example, the pieces building on the HIPAA Administrative Simplification provisions designed to by increasing the coverage of transaction standards and doing regular modernization so that incompatible ad hoc approaches wouldn't be needed as extensively were largely unimplemented, with the most important mandated standard operating rules never adopted and the mandated regular (3-year, IIRC) update cycle for the standards and standard operating rules never begun. There are mandated dates in law, but HHS never adopted the required regulations. (That's actually one of the more minor unimplemented cost containment measures, but the one I'm most intimately familiar with because I spent a lot of time those rules were in limbo being involved in planning compliance catch-up and forward looking planning for a component of a state Medicaid system.)
You need 2 things to bring down health care costs (without resorting to rationing): first, introduce price transparency so that consumers can find the low cost providers, and second, provide an incentive for consumers to balance cost vs quality of care and seek out the lowest cost provider for the care needed. This doesn't work for all procedures needed but for huge segments of health care like imaging, this seems to be the best bet.
The key reason for ACA was to get more people insured. In fact the biggest criticism against it was that it would cost too much. No one expected overall healthcare spending to decrease.
It's a racket. Universities must use the latest textbooks to remain accredited. This is why syllabi will always list the latest edition of a textbook as the required text (and mentioning that the last edition is sufficient is always done parenthetically). Publishers can fix a few typos, change some example problems, and call it a new edition. Every university will have to recommend the new edition to their students. The students who bought the last edition last year will have to sell their now obsolete textbook for a fraction of the purchasing price.
Markets in everything: University textbooks are always priced to be marginally outrageous. If they were to cost something ridiculous like $1,000 a piece, there would be protests and riots on campus. Instead they merely fleece the students for $100 or $200. Enough people pay up that the system is deemed imperfect rather than inherently flawed.
I think it was Freakanomics that had an episode about textbook cost. Their idea was it was a disparity between those choosing the textbooks (professors) to those bearing the costs (students). In other words, it is much easier to increase the cost of a product if those bearing the cost don’t have a say.
Oddly enough, one of my professors wrote textbooks for his classes that he gave to us for the cost of copying them. He was outraged by the price of textbooks.
I like the way "Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?" is loaded. Touches on several "questions" in the vein of this article.
One load is "why don't we know this with more certainty?" It's a useful thing to know. What is achievable? What's the bar? How good could education be, regardless of resources and other limitations. If true, that can be our 100% marker for instructional effectiveness.
From there, we cold say that average school instruction is 10% effective or 60% effective.
Realistically, this needs to be tackled with a lot of force to make progress. Change is likely inconvenient, in a real world environment with limited resources. Maybe school should be 3 hrs per day, not 8.
In any case, I think it's notable that high-end private education, which has more resources available, have not pursued these kind of goals any more than public education.
There's an assumption in this line of thinking which I think is unlikely to be true: that this stuff is measurable, at least in principle.
I think 'instructional effectiveness' can't ever be clearly and unambiguously defined, much less measured. As with anything that involves people. In my experience, most attempts to do so only cause more harm than good.
There are different kinds of measurable, and the purpose of the measure is important. Measuring for the purpose of management (eg creating incentives for teachers and schools), measuring for the purpose of most academic publishing, etc. Each have their own pitfalls, and I agree with you on these.
That said... there is clearly such a thing as better and worse instruction.
Where the 2-sigma claim gets interesting is scale. We're not concerned with marginal differences (management measures) and we're not concerned with legibly identifiable causal relationships (academic publishing). We're just concerned with establishing a high watermark.
The simple measures (eg testing) we have, work fine for that... in the context of math, reading/writing, foreign language, etc. Stuff that's easy to test for, and assuming we're only interested in big differences.
Two sigma implies that within 1 year of instruction, the two sigma group will have progressed by several years. 12th grade math level by grade 10. This doesn't have to be achievable by every teacher, it just has to be achievable at the high end.. assuming a random sample of students.
Agreed though.. we have a history of insisting that the unmeasurable be measured... and its a very common, long term failure mode. more harm than good. I'm not suggesting implementing anything, let alone implementing anything using measures. Just setting that watermark, so we know what awesome looks like.
If one is trying to improve education given class sizes of 1 or 2 dozen students, it may not be helpful to pursue better quantitative studies for class sizes of 1 or 2 students.
The goal, in my view, of such research is to make discoveries. I'm dubious of academic research that targets scalable educational methods too closely.
In essence, I agree with Patrick. I want to know if "2-sigma" is true, replicable. Establish that watermark. At that point we'll have a high watermark for education, what a median student can achieve in a near ideal environment. Is there really a 2 sigma difference between normal school results and ideal?
If so, this difference represents potential.
Figuring out how to apply that IRL with resource constraints, scaling issues, etc... That may not be a job for academics. Either way, it comes later.
Quick answers just for fun:
1. Technological abundance vs regulated scarcity
2. Complexity outpacing human understanding. Plus regulation/approvals.
3. Because the FOMC controls it.
4. Reduce legal barriers to entry.
5. Reduce central control.
6. Risk minimization.
7. Trust by common identity.
8. Maybe. Pace tracking classes.
9. Money is cheap enough now for investors to fund most science for profit.
10. No programming. AI queries (e.g. “Her”)
11. Audiobooks
12. Arxiv / citation ranking
13. No. Too easy to ignore ads on text.
14. Nobody’s paying for IDEs anymore.
15. See #7.
16. See #15.
17. See #7.
18. Political vs scientific incentives.
19. contra to #7.
20. See #7.
21. It’s more lucrative to fail than to succeed.
22. I’ve heard it was due to mass burning by humans. Fire/regrowth fixes more carbon than it releases.
"How do we help more experimental cities get started?
It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, "
???
HK and to a lesser extent Singapore are some of the most inegalitarian places in the world, that thrive because they have established Western commercial practices in a sea of otherwise more obvious corruption. There is a very dark underbelly to HK.
Dubai is an Oil Rich state, with a fairly ruthless totalitarian leadership wherein the pay Indian workers 10's of cents an hour in a form of indentured servitude. An Arab Dubai resident could kill one of these workers and probably get away with it.
They also are nice places for rich people to hide their money.
There are no mysteries here.
Dubai is the 'anti civilisation' - maybe one of he worst examples of 'what to build'.
As for 'why some things are more expensive'?
Some things are commodities, some are not, some things have price inelasticity, some do not.
Why was the P43 made in a few months?
Because WW2 planes are very simple, and it was during war, and we didn't care about safety back in the day. 'Crash tests' for cars? We didn't even wear seat belts. No emissions standards. etc.. Most of today's projects are much more complex. It takes government 10 years to do anything because those systems are complicated, we have strong government unions, and a kind of civic dysfunction in many places.
The GDP is not consistent - it just looks like that in the chart.
The GDP naturally, is not going to change that much year over year - because we are largely engaged in the same patters of activity. But the rate of growth swings a lot. There is no mystery to solve here.
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?
Different risk postures. If you're willing to sacrifice a few lives and limbs and not worry about the disposition of toxic waste, you can get things done just as fast today as yesterday.
In relation to the Golden Gate Bridge construction, it was mostly financed by the son of Italian immigrants turner banker, Giannini; his bank also lent to people devastated by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The "Bank of Italy" changed its name to "Bank of America" [0].
From the article linked at the bottom of my comment [0]:
> A. P. Giannini, President of Bank of America, was legendary for his dedication to the development of the San Francisco region. A native of San Jose with a blue-collar background, Giannini believed that banks should lend more freely to working-class people, whom he believed to be fiscally responsible. Following the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of San Francisco, most banks closed up shop, but Giannini set up a makeshift desk and issued credit "on a handshake and a signature" to families and small businesses in immediate, desperate need. His investments built a foundation for San Francisco's economic recovery.
Also, it's ironic that A.P. Giannini was what we would call today a "college dropout", which is particularly "cool" and "popular" in the San Francisco Bay Area. From [1]:
> Giannini attended Heald College but realized he could do better in business than at school. In 1885, he dropped out and took a full-time position as a produce broker for L. Scatena & Co.
"Where will the money come from to get the car fixed?" is a very personal question; answering it well would require knowing a lot about the person asking, and what their life circumstances, talents, resources, and obstacles were. This makes it harder to discuss on HN (or most other Internet sites), since these are very large groups who are mostly strangers, and don't know that much about each other. Questions about economic equality, the cost of housing, career advice, and so on in general are reasonably well represented here, I think.
There are different questions that we have at each level in Maslow’s pyramid, and HN tends to focus on the last two levels - but that doesn’t mean the questions at the other levels are any less important. There are other site, communities and blogs that cater to people at these levels.
A one size fits all solution wouldn’t be good for any of the levels, and it doesn’t mean people are one level are any better or worse than people at others.
For the first chart/question it’s important to distinguish cost from spending. For example, “food and beverage”: Americans are (at least pre-Covid) eating out a lot more than they were 20 or 30 years ago, so that category presumably now covers a very different basket of goods than in the past, even if they add up to roughly the same number of calories.
I find the replacement rate question really interesting. Is there an aligned way we can allow companies to decay once they have stalled in innovation? What do we do about companies that have reached a point of monopolistic advantage but provide no real new innovation (PG&E comes to mind)? In some cases like Internet access, is competition the only driver of affordability or do we eventually have to find a way to regulate pricing on things that evolve to become general public needs. This question likely comes up a lot in healthcare and pharma, but I'm not sure there's a good answer. It's sort of muddled in between providing enough incentive to creators to start things and ensuring that once things do get created, that privatized commercial interest doesn't work to remove the very value it helped create (which happens when the company stops innovating).
I believe regulation is often the cause rather than the solution to stalled innovation. If you look at areas where innovation has stalled, high barriers to entry for new companies is typically a primary cause and in many cases regulations contribute to that barrier.
We should make it a goal to lower those barriers and encourage competition wherever possible. NASA's commercial crew program is one example of this. Another is how Illinois forced their electric companies to open access to the power lines, fostering healthy competition.
If you taboo the word 'personality', the underlying question here is still interesting. Do different people in the "exact same" situation always behave /identically/? (Obviously not.) What are the most informative features of the person explaining the divergence in response?
Christian Miller is arguing that while we do have phycological character traits and motivations, that persist between situations, how we actually behave is a complex interaction between these and our contexts. Divergence can maybe be explained as much by contexts as by characteristics. If I were to meet someone who works a similar job, has a similar social and familia situation, but divergent motivations, I might have more in common with them than I would have if I met the university student version of myself.
Lovely list. As for real estate and housing prices: interest rates are ridiculously low, once you account for that the price increase from the 1970's to today makes really good sense. Corrected for inflation it is now much cheaper to own rather than to rent real estate even though the sticker price of the houses went up.
Rents then predictably increased because houses/apartments that got bought reduced the supply available for renting out. Especially in the bigger cities where the economy is a bit better rents have skyrocketed.
But the cost of owning a house as a function of take home pay has dropped. The same house that cost my parents a ridiculously high mortgage (10% was pretty normal in the 70's here) can now be had for a fraction of the inflation adjusted wages today. Even though the on-paper value of the house is roughly 10x what it cost back then.
To fix the rental market a lot of new housing would have to be built, but then you run into zoning issues, transportation issues, the price of land and other limitations that make it hard to expand affordable housing for cities. Historically institutional investors (for instance: pension funds) would fund these developments but since they now have shorter time horizons for their ROI and want higher returns they are not as interested as they used to be to pick this up.
This problem will not resolve easily or even at all as long as people are willing to pay high rents and the market is as restricted as it is I would expect rents to continue to go up. Even an increase in interest will likely not return all that many houses to the rental market because that would require the sticker price of houses to come down, which hardly even happens. Even in the 2009 financial crises housing prices reacted only in a limited way: people had bought in at a certain price level and could not let go of their properties without ending up with a debt to the bank, a situation best avoided.
P Collison comes across pretty well in his 'thinking in public' type stuff. The questions are all pretty interesting and important, or at least important to the class of society that he occupies.
> How do people decide to make major life changes? Most days, people don't decide to change their lives in big ways. On a few days, they do. What's special about those days? How much is it about the stimulus versus their own inner state?
A recognition of self was what it took for me. Changed my life situation pretty recently for the better after a realization following a personal conversation with a close friend. The realization undermined a lot of my assumptions about how I was living my life, but it took substantial input and questioning from them for me to understand it; it was akin to pulling a thread and unraveling a tapestry, so to speak.
Can't say this is true for everyone, but it was for me.
I'm being deliberately obtuse, but in essence I recognized that I was mentally working around growing in a certain area rather than tackling it head on.
There has been considerable philosophical work on this topic. Contemporary scientific studies (such as the ones in the link) are not particularly useful here, as they are too trapped in the current societal context to understand deeper cultural trends. Religion as a word is so broad as to basically be meaningless. Separating religion from culture or history is a modern legacy of academic and industrial specialization.
In any case, some reading suggestions, if you're interested in this topic.
- Max Weber. Pretty much the founder of modern social science, particularly with regards to religion. He originated the idea of “The Protestant Work Ethic” and argues that specific features of Protestantism lead to market capitalism arising in Northern Europe, rather than in India or China.
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. This book really changed the way I think about the modern world and what I'll call "the preference for scientistic, humanistic atheism". Taylor essentially argues that modern secularity is not merely the subtraction of religious belief, but a new historical situation where religious beliefs are co-existent both with each other and with immanent beliefs (entirely focused in the world.) This book is huge, so I recommend starting with How Not to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith, as it's a condensed summary of Taylor's book.
- Friedrich Nietzsche. A philosopher quite interested in this problem. His main goal was to trace the development of moral ideas and subsequently create new, healthier (to him) ones. Too many books to list, but I recommend The Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil.
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?
Because we have been shifting responsibility away from individuals who have the best knowledge to complete a task (I.e. engineers) towards managers. In software development, this can be seen by an increased focus on frameworks, statically typed languages, 100% test coverage, CI pipelines, code analysis tools; all designed to relieve developers from a sense of responsibility and ownership over the code and to give managers extra visibility.
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?
Because there is no growth. What looks like growth is just inflation of the dollar relative to the value of goods and services which underlie the GDP calculation.
> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?
Abolish the Federal Reserve, introduce UBI. Trickle-up economics will bring back the free market because companies will compete to actually satisfy people instead of competing to manipulate them at the behest of their institutional paymasters.
> How do we help more experimental cities get started?
This is an artificial concept which does not align with free market dynamics. Does the market need experimental cities to begin with?
> How do people decide to make major life changes?
When they become deeply unhappy with their current situation.
> Could there be more good blogs?
Only in a free market. If visitor numbers are being shaped and suppressed by algorithms, there will not be any good blogs. It will devolve to mindless hedonistic garbage.
> Why are programming environments still so primitive?
Because simple tooling is essential. Complex programming environments will create more reliance on tools which will pull back the sense of responsibility from developers which will make them produce inferior work.
No amount of tooling can make a developer care more about the work; the more you automate a developer's work, the less they will feel as if it is their own work and the less they will care.
No tool cannot ever compensate for lack of care.
> What does religion cause?
It's a very positive force. People need to share ideals related to altruism and fairness in order to allow social contracts to remain coherent. People need to believe that if they do nice things for others, they will be rewarded with eternal life. Without this, most people will work only in their own self-interest and the whole capitalist system, which is rooted in the exploitation of the altruism of others, won't work.
Pervasive, single-minded self-interest is not compatible with capitalism. Capitalism needs somebody altruistic to exploit; religious people, young people, etc...
When capitalism runs out of altruists, it runs out of fuel.
> What influences when people act in accordance with their self-interest and when they don't?
People always act in accordance with their self interest or in the interest of their kin. If they think otherwise, they're lying to themselves.
What great questions. I've had pub debates about 3/5 of these over the last year. Reminds me a lot of pg during his prolific periods.
What makes a lot of these interesting is that most have bad answers. Some (eg the inflation question) have answers were sustainable 10-20 years ago, but grew out of them. Some have cliched or even ideological answers. Again, time has changed the strength of these answers. Time to re-ask and re-answer.
Some (eg progress in science) have no obvious or common answer, but are commonly discussed at a smaller scale. Academic incentives, publishing & such are commonly discussed, but no ways forward seem to emerge.. even rhetorically.
In any case, I think the first one (inflation by sector) hits squarely at a major blindspot in most economic thinking. I think it's responsible for a lot of the divergent views of economists (relying on measurements) and non economists relying on intuition.
Your answer to this question may relate to GDP growth consistency. Again, I feel this is a blindspot in most theoretical economics. One of Thomas Picketty's controversy bombshells was treating GDP growth and rate-of-return (r>g) as basically constant. Almost all other theories (even Marx) treat these as determined by everything else in the theory. All that doesn't seem consistent with consistency, as patrick points out.
I would have also asked, "what is the successor to the university" since several of these questions could be answered if you had an answer to that. It's a loaded form of a question, but other questions take that form.
How you load questions can be the most important thing. "What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?" is loaded in an opposite way to "* How do we help more experimental cities get started?*" I'm not saying questions shouldn't be loaded, just that they should be loaded carefully.
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?
Alex Tabarrok argues that this is largely do to Baumol cost disease [0]: "rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth". He has a book about it [1]
This aligns well with Patrick's graph: healthcare, college, childcare are all labor intensive and have seen little to no productivity increase in the last 23 years.
The story for housing is different, though. We are consistently concentrating economic opportunity in the urban centers. However, through NIMBYism, we have made it very difficult to build new housing. The "surprising" result: very expensive housing. Relatedly, Matt Rognlie found out [2] that the increase in the capital share of income since 1970, as noticed by Piketty, can be mostly explained by the housing sector.
The solution to both, in my view, are related. We need to reduce barriers for labor movement. We can reduce labor cost by liberalizing immigration to the USA and by liberalizing (re-zoning) and incentivizing (via Land Value Taxation) housing production within the main US urban areas.
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?
My suspicion is institutional ossification in the USA. With time we accumulate rules / regulations / procedures that increase the complexity of the task at hand. Eventually, the marginal procedure increases complexity such that our competence is exceeded, making the task impossible.
I think the solution is related to his other question "How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?". We should have a way to replace these institutions. Market forces are a great way to do so for private endeavors, startups being the prime example. But for public institutions, it is less clear what could be the proper approach. If there was a way to have states compete for citizens in a non-violent way, that may help.
> Why don't we build nice neighborhoods any more?
I think it is a mixture of i) survivorship bias (as he suggests), ii) car-oriented development (as he suggests), and iii) the fact that attractive neighborhoods have an organic feel to them that only time can give. Thus, in the car-era we built new neighborhoods but they were car-oriented so they never aged into nice, walking neighborhoods. We are trying to rectify that with new walking-oriented developments, but they have a synthetic feel to them that will only go away with time.
> What's going on with infrastructure?
I would say this is a combination of the Baumol cost disease and the ossification of our institutions (both mentioned above).
As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?
As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.
Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ?
OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill.
The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.
What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.
PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem