The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A Bitcoin bet — Cameron Murray in MacroBusiness: It is not clear what the advantage of a blockchain tracking all transactions is. My view is that this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of money. Money is a not an object, or token. It is not a gold coin. It is a common accounting system. This is why we price in the national currency. There is nothing stopping any company setting their prices in all manner of things — gold, iron, US dollars, or other units. But we don’t. Because we want to integrate into the common system of accounting that our suppliers and customers use, and one where it makes financial sense to can keep relatively stable and predictable pricing, in addition to easy payment. Every online store that I have found that accepts Bitcoins does not price in Bitcoins. It prices in the national currency, and allows you to pay using Bitcoin. An Australian service that allows you to ‘get paid in Bitcoin’ prefers to be paid themselves in Aussie Dollars for that service.
• Google Thought I Was a Man: How Facebook and Google build a picture of who you really are — Sara Wachter-Boettcher in Nautilus: A proxy is a stand-in for real knowledge—similar to the personas that designers use as a stand-in for their real audience. But in this case, we’re talking about proxy data: When you don’t have a piece of information about a user that you want, you use data you do have to infer that information. Here, Google wanted to track my age and gender, because advertisers place a high value on this information. But since Google didn’t have demographic data at the time, it tried to infer those facts from something it had lots of: my behavioral data. The problem with this kind of proxy, though, is that it relies on assumptions—and those assumptions get embedded more deeply over time. So if your model assumes, from what it has seen and heard in the past, that most people interested in technology are men, it will learn to code users who visit tech websites as more likely to be male. Once that assumption is baked in, it skews the results: The more often women are incorrectly labeled as men, the more it looks like men dominate tech websites—and the more strongly the system starts to correlate tech website usage with men. In short, proxy data can actually make a system less accurate over time, not more, without you even realizing it. Yet much of the data stored about us is proxy data, from ZIP codes being used to predict creditworthiness, to SAT scores being used to predict teens’ driving habits.
• Walking While Black — Garnette Cadogan, Literary Hub: On my first day in the city, I went walking for a few hours to get a feel for the place and to buy supplies to transform my dormitory room from a prison bunker into a welcoming space. When some university staff members found out what I’d been up to, they warned me to restrict my walking to the places recommended as safe to tourists and the parents of freshmen. They trotted out statistics about New Orleans’s crime rate. But Kingston’s crime rate dwarfed those numbers, and I decided to ignore these well-meant cautions. A city was waiting to be discovered, and I wouldn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way. These American criminals are nothing on Kingston’s, I thought. They’re no real threat to me. What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.
• The New York Subway Conductor’s Guide to Vocal Warm Ups — Bob Vulfov, Paste Magazine: Aside from their train’s emergency brake, a New York subway conductor’s most vital tool is their impossible-to-decipher voice. Although some subway conductors have a naturally confusing timbre to their voice, it always helps to prepare your vocal tools prior to a work shift. A few simple warm up techniques can help any conductor make even the most basic of subway announcements sound like they’re being said by an adult in Peanuts. This guide will help you conceal the words coming out of your mouth under an opaque cloud of gibberish words, trombone-like grunts, and whole sentences that sound like extended yawns.
• Self Driving — Randall Munroe, xkcd:
  

This week… Oy! Reading schmeading:

• The death of Christianity in the U.S. — Miguel De La Torre in Baptist News Global: The Evangelicals’ Jesus is satanic, and those who hustle this demon are “false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve” (2 Cor. 11:13-15, NIV). You might wonder if my condemnation is too harsh. It is not, for the Spirit of the Lord has convicted me to shout from the mountaintop how God’s precious children are being devoured by the hatred and bigotry of those who have positioned themselves as the voice of God in America.
• Austerity is an Algorithm — Gillian Terzis in Logic: Things changed in December 2016, when the government announced that the system had undergone full automation. Humans would no longer investigate anomalies in earnings. Instead, debt notices would be automatically generated when inconsistencies were detected. The government’s rationale for automating the process was telling. “Our aim is to ensure that people get what they are entitled to—no more and no less,” read the press release. “And to crack down hard when people deliberately defraud the system.” The result was a disaster. I’ve had friends who’ve received an innocuous email urging them to check their MyGov account—an online portal available to Australian citizens with an internet connection to access a variety of government services—only to log in and find they’re hundreds or thousands of dollars in arrears, supposedly because they didn’t accurately report their income. Some received threats from private debt collectors, who told them their wages would be seized if they didn’t submit to a payment plan. Those who wanted to contest their debts had to lodge a formal complaint, and were subjected to hours of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major before they could talk to a case worker. Others tried taking their concerns directly to the Centrelink agency on Twitter, where they were directed to calling Lifeline, a 24-hour hotline for crisis support and suicide prevention.
• A Eulogy for the Headphone Jack — Charlie Hoey in Medium: Sound cards happen to carry sound most of the time, but they are perfectly happy measuring any AC voltage from -2 to +2 volts at 48,000 times per second with 16 bits of accuracy. […] To any headphone jack, all audio is raw in the sense that it exists as a series of voltages that ultimately began as measurements by some tool, like a microphone or an electric guitar pickup or an EKG. There is no encryption or rights management, no special encoding or secret keys. […] Smartphone manufacturers are broadly eliminating headphone jacks going forward, replacing them with wireless headphones or BlueTooth. We’re going to all lose touch with something, and to me it feels like something important.
• Australians pay more for education than the OECD average – but is it worth it? — Megan O'Connell in the Conversation, with obligatory Goodhart's Law warning. It would be interesting to see how the ratio of public to private spending correlates with the range of courses on offer: Australians value education, so when looking at the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2017 report, it’s not surprising to see we spend more on education than average among comparable nations. However, it’s worth noting where the money comes from. A closer look at the data shows public funding for education in Australia is much less than the OECD average, with private funders (including families and students) footing the rest of the bill. When combining both public and private funding sources, our overall spending on education is 5.8% of GDP from primary to tertiary levels. As our Federal Education Minister has been quick to note, this is more than the OECD average of 5.2%. However, when looking at public expenditure, Australia, at 3.9% of GDP, is well below most OECD countries.

This fortnight, I have been mostly working for money rather than knowledge:

• The historical context to Trump's 's***hole' remarks only makes them more outrageously shameful — Andrew Buncombe, the Independent: Between 1956 and 1986, the country was dominated by the murderous dictators Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Four years after Baby Doc fled to France, it seemed that Aristide, who swept to power with 70 per cent of the vote, was poised to bring change. So he might, had he not antagonised the country’s small elite or their supporters in Washington. If Donald Trump was interested in history he would know this. He would know the challenges Haiti has faced, and the way his own country has hampered its development. He would know how, even now, the US Embassy and State Department are major player in the country’s politics, throwing their support behind those candidates it approves of, and blocking the path of those it does not like.
• Why are doctors in the Middle East cosying up to foreign armies? — Robert Fisk, the Independent: Jonathan Whittall of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) first raised the alarm during and after the siege of Mosul when doctors and medical personnel sometimes allowed local security forces to check the identity of patients entering their hospitals or aid centres. “Sometimes they gave the names of patients to the local secret services,” Whittall told The Independent. “Horrific compromises were made to work hand-in-hand with the international military coalition. The wounded were often not treated as patients but as suspects. This fundamentally compromises the trust patients have in medics. And this makes our work less effective”.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• How I Got Fired From a D.C. Think Tank for Fighting Against the Power of Google — Zephyr Teachout in the Intercept: In June, when the European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for abusing its dominant position to serve itself and quash competition, the Open Markets team put out a press statement that was entirely consistent with its longstanding position. It praised the EU’s action, and argued that American antitrust authorities should also look at Google’s use of its search power to leverage its influence in other markets. New America’s leadership must have gotten an earful. Within 72 hours, New America’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, told Lynn that he — and all of us on the Open Markets team — had to leave. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Slaughter emailed Lynn to say that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” and the email accused Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.” (After the Times story was published, Slaughter tweeted that the article was “false,” though she later added, “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.”) [Some additional context provided by the Intercept]
• Racism is real, race is not: a philosopher’s perspective — Adam Hochman in the Conversation: From a scientific perspective, the best candidate for a synonym for “race” is “subspecies” (the classification level below “species” in biology). When scientists apply the standard criteria to determine whether there are subspecies/races in humans, none are found. In chimpanzees yes, but in humans no. Racial classification is unscientific. However, humanities scholars have their own justifications for race-talk. Many argue that while there are no biological races, there are social races. Race, as philosophers put it, is a social kind. In my view, the redefinition of race as a social kind has been a major mistake. Most people still think of race as a biological category. By redefining it socially, we risk miscommunicating with each other on this fraught topic.
• Stylised Facts — Robert Skidelsky Wow. This is great. Lots in here, but this jumped out at me, given my current interests: Though Kaldor was concerned with long-run growth and Keynes with the short- run management of demand, there was no contradiction between the two, since post-war Keynesians like Kaldor assumed that Say’s Law was now guaranteed by Keynesian full employment policy. This re-established the long-run growth agenda of the classical economists. So the Keynesian economists of that day produced growth models – Harrod-Domar, Solow, Rostow, etc. – geared chiefly to the problems of the developing world. This growth orientation did mean though that Kaldor was as much concerned with the conditions of supply as demand, something evident in his 1966 inaugural lecture. Kaldor was heir to the German economist Friedrich List, in that he regarded premature free trade as an obstacle to growth for those countries in the business of catching up with the leaders. Countries should seek to develop their dynamic rather than simply exploit their static comparative advantages. This required policies of protection and import substitution. Kaldor was passionately opposed to static equilibrium analysis.
• After such unexpected success in 2017, what does Jeremy Corbyn have planned for 2018? — Richard Seymour in the Independent: The result didn’t come from nowhere. It was a vindication of the strategy outlined by Corbyn when he won the leadership in 2015. To rebuild its electoral base, Labour had to rebuild itself as a membership party. It had to recruit previous non-voters, above all the young and the poor, shamelessly written off by pollsters and most politicians. It had to move sharply to the left, and stop trying to appease the media and the Conservatives. Corbyn’s point has been proven, far more quickly than even his supporters expected. More importantly, the form of organised distrust of the members evinced by the old managerial guard, has been discredited. Labour’s members have shown more insight into contemporary Britain than the majority of MPs. And finally, after many years in which activists themselves distrusted the party form, it proved its worth: for all its limits, this scale of organisation can change the country.
• Australian national accounts – government spending drives growth — Bill Mitchell: The ABS released the – June-quarter 2017 National Accounts data – today (September 6, 2017), which showed that real GDP had risen by 0.8 per cent in the June-quarter 2017. Annual growth (last four quarters) was just 1.8 per cent around half the trend rate before the GFC. The striking result was that public spending (consumption and investment) contributed 0.8 percentage points to the growth rate – which means that without that contribution, real GDP growth would have been zero in the June-quarter 2017. Private consumption expenditure contributed 0.4 points, although the household saving ratio fell again indicating the tenuous nature of relying on this growth with flat wages. Private investment spending was negative. Net exports were stronger with export volumes strong in the face of the falling terms of trade. Overall, the growth is unbalanced – relying on lumpy public investment spending and credit-driven private consumption growth. The outlook is thus uncertain.