Podcast

Podcast on the Major Macro Events Since Y2K

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

The latest Macro Musings is an episode I could recommend to students in a macroeconomics class.

Jim Clouse on the Last 4 Decades at the Most Powerful Central Bank in the World

Since the great depression is over, what are the big events of the 21st century for macroeconomics?

9/11 and shoring up bank confidence subsequently

The Great Recession and preceding mortgage crisis

Covid and subsequent stimulus

This conversation is a tour of the trade offs under consideration at the Central Bank at these pivotal moments in the 21st century.

Beckworth: I think this is where it’s important to do the right counterfactual. What could have been could have been far worse, right? If there hadn’t been these interventions, so it’s easy to criticize from the outside, and there’s a lot of criticisms the Fed received at this time. Not to say we would have gone all the way to the Great Depression, but the fact that it was possible, right, this financial system was crashing. 

Podcast Recommendation: Acquired

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

For your upcoming summer road trips, even with a family, I recommend you check out the Acquired podcast. Each episode is the history (or partial history) of one business, told in a way that is entertaining and informative on many levels.

I was first introduced to the podcast when someone recommended the episode on Costco. It’s 3 hours long. I thought to myself “Really? I’m interested in Costco, but isn’t 3 hours a bit much?” But I had a long road trip, so I gave it a try. I was floored by how much I learned about Costco, the history of retail in the US, and the connections to other businesses. For example, Sam’s Club, which I thought was just kinda doing the same thing as Costco in different geographic areas, but no — Sam Walton copied Costco, as well as many other ideas from Sol Price (what a great name for a retailer!), the man behind the companies that would eventually become Costco today.

If you are at all interested in the history of business (especially mid-to-late Twentieth century businesses, though they do have one on Standard Oil), you will love this podcast. But I have found that the podcast is also great for children — well, at least if you have a roughly eleven-year-old boy. They will have many questions, so you may stop the podcast often, but that’s OK with me.

I think the reason some of the episodes appeal to children is because many of the stories focus on a single entrepreneur that started a business, and the hosts always spend a little bit of time on the childhood of those entrepreneurs. Often, they were entrepreneurial or innovative in some way as a child. For example, Warren Buffett in the first Berkshire Hathaway episode (there are 3 episodes on BH, totaling over 9 hours!), selling sticks of gum and cans of Coke door-to-door. Or Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA, told in a 3-hour episode) selling matchboxes and fountain pens. Or the young Bill Gates being privileged enough in middle school to have access to computers, but also turning this into a business in high school (told in the first of two episodes on Microsoft, totaling once again over 9 hours).

As I mentioned in the above paragraph, if you thought that 3 hours on Costco was a lot, just wait until you listen to some of the others. You probably can’t imagine yourself listening to 9 hours on the history of a single company, much less your kids following along too. But I highly recommend that you give it a shot.

Notes from Greg Mankiw podcast

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Good job to Jon Hartley to get the conversation going. All indented quotes are from Mankiw in the podcast.

Some history for those of us who write about sticky wages and prices.

But it was that idea that real wages weren’t countercyclical, that said, you have to start thinking about not only sticky wages, I have to start thinking about sticky prices.

And if I’m gonna start thinking about sticky prices, you have to have firms that are not competitive, that are price setters, not price takers. Because if you’re going to think about the incentives that firms have to adjust prices, you can’t have them being price takers. And it was that that got me to write my small menu cost paper…

There is a lot more on that topic in the transcript, for those who are interested.

How do we feel about big models?

I think people were getting a little tired of these big models because they were large, non intuitive. They seemed very black boxy, so you didn’t really know what was happening in them.

Haha. Here comes ChatGPT. ‘Leeroy Jenkins’ and all that.

One thing I’ll say about being Chair of the Council, which I did from 2003 to 2005. And I worked harder those two years than any two years of my life, by far, because the days are long. In the Bush administration, every day started with the 7:30 AM staff meeting in the Roosevelt room, which is the conference room right next to the Oval office.

In all my years at Harvard, I’ve been in Harvard almost 40 years, nobody’s ever called a 07:30 AM meeting. While I was at the White House, every day it was at 7:30 AM meeting. It’s not like you take off early at the end of the day, you work long hours at the end of the day too.

So they’re are very, very long days. I left my family behind in Boston, my wife was a saint and took care of my three small kids. And I basically moved into a hotel just a few blocks from the White House…

Note the saints lurking behind the intellectual contributions. With falling fertility all over the world, it raises the question of who watches the three small kids? Something I am pondering this week is that I’m glad I didn’t try to homeschool my kids this semester. I support others who make that choice, but it wouldn’t have been good for us.

Zuckerberg wants to solve general intelligence

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

Why does Mark Zuckerberg want to solve general intelligence? Well, for one thing, if he doesn’t, one of his competitors will have a better chatbot. Zuckerberg wants to be the best (and good for him). At his core, he wants to build the best stuff (even the world’s best cattle on his ranch).

If AGI is possible, it will get built. I’m not the first person to point out that this is a new space race. If America takes a pause, then someone else will get there first. However, I thought the Zuck interview was an interesting microcosm for why AGI, if possible, will get made.

… We started FAIR about 10 years ago. The idea was that, along the way to general intelligence or whatever you wanna call it, there are going to be all these different innovations and that’s going to just improve everything that we do. So we didn’t conceive of it as a product. It was more of a research group. Over the last 10 years it has created a lot of different things that have improved all of our products. …
There’s obviously a big change in the last few years with ChatGPT and the diffusion models around image creation coming out. This is some pretty wild stuff that is pretty clearly going to affect how people interact with every app that’s out there. At that point we started a second group, the gen AI group, with the goal of bringing that stuff into our products and building leading foundation models that would power all these different products.
… There’s also basic assistant functionality, whether it’s for our apps or the smart glasses or VR. So it wasn’t completely clear at first that you were going to need full AGI to be able to support those use cases. But in all these subtle ways, through working on them, I think it’s actually become clear that you do. …
Reasoning is another example. Maybe you want to chat with a creator or you’re a business and you’re trying to interact with a customer. That interaction is not just like “okay, the person sends you a message and you just reply.” It’s a multi-step interaction where you’re trying to think through “how do I accomplish the person’s goals?” A lot of times when a customer comes, they don’t necessarily know exactly what they’re looking for or how to ask their questions. So it’s not really the job of the AI to just respond to the question.
You need to kind of think about it more holistically. It really becomes a reasoning problem. So if someone else solves reasoning, or makes good advances on reasoning, and we’re sitting here with a basic chat bot, then our product is lame compared to what other people are building. At the end of the day, we basically realized we’ve got to solve general intelligence… (emphasis mine)

Credit to Dwarkesh Patel for this excellent interview. Credit to M.Z. for sharing his thoughts on topics that affect the world.

“we’ve got to solve general intelligence” If a competitor solves AGI first, then you are left behind. No one would not want general intelligence on their team, on the assumption that it can be controlled.

I would like the AGI to do my chores for me, please. Unfortunately, it’s more likely to be able to write my blog posts first.