Markets
On X[edit]
2009[edit]
So, back in neoclassical theory I have a confusion. How did this whole 'markets are nearly perfect' get itself the status of a science?
Give me a sign @NSF: what are we going to do about the epidemic level of hogwash that threatens our nation in finance/markets?
So I ask my followers: RT to @KimKardashian to put her talents and twitter account in the service of science, markets, and gauge thy. #geom
What no one I know is talking about is that manipulation of S&E labor markets is destroying the 'take-no-prisoners' American Scientist.
Studying scientific labor markets at NBER I used to claim "Science careers are now so crappy, they must produce PhD prostitutes."
Congratulations to author/scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti on bringing the quirks of scientific labor markets to a wider public.
Since basic research is a public good (i.e. inexhausible & inexcludible) markets will fail here: We need to know what you need to take risk.
Taxpayers just financed 4th homes & 3rd wives for 2nd rate market theorists because 1st rate scientists failed to debunk their nonsense.
The talk presented evidence to the National Academy of Sciences that NAS & @NSF partnered to manipulate markets over scientist salaries.
2010[edit]
How about Coasian markets in 'academic freedom'? Cap&Gown -> Cap&Trade? Or fractional ownership: Zip-Tenure! Anything but scientific silence
2011[edit]
The only problem with scientific labor market theory is that it doesn't work. Also, it doesn't exist. Okay. The two main problems with ....
2016[edit]
1/ The invisible world is first detected in the visible world's failure to close. [For @naval @johndurant @pmarca et al. A tweet storm try.]
2/ In physics we have conservation laws. We found the light/invisible neutrino because decay in heavy/visible particles violated these rules
3/ Likewise in biology we proved the germ thy of pathogens vs theories like spontaneous generation/miasma by visible effects at macro scale.
4/ I used 'failure to close' to deduce from 1st principles that the NSF must have done a secret study in '85-6 on how to *lower* sci. wages.
5/ This was b/c the incompetent 'shortfall studies' that got NSF in trouble would have lead to different visa laws than those that passed.
6/ I was shocked when a highly competent "smoking gun" study hidden in '86 showed up exactly where my thy predicted: https://t.co/VZvmupRFon
7/ This is the secret history of H1-B. The @NSF secretly studied how to interfere w/ US labor market 2 avoid paying scientists market wages.
8/ Rules: I) Look for a macro system failing to close. II) *Don't* posit a detailed explanation. III) Posit a 'neutrino' place holder & dig.
9/ HW: A) Why don't top OEMs sell laptops w/ lens covers, mic kill switches & hardwired video LEDs offering security to gain mkt advantage?
10/ How do you get 9 figures of wealth doing charity work & public speaking without selling, inventing, founding or investing brilliantly?
11/ C) Why were Bernie's massive rallies often not covered @ NYT & why did a positive Bernie article go neg after massive linking from web?
12/ D) Why do laboratory bred mice used for drug testing have extra long telomeres (allowing radical tissue repair) compared to wild type?
13/ I could go on. I don't know which are nefarious. I'm a different kind of conspiracy guy. I *don't* have answers but know where I'd dig.
14/14. Thank you for your time. Feel free 2 attack. But remember, I've been here before just as w @NSF...before digging up their smoking gun
2017[edit]
Two solid mid-30s US PhDs in research should be able to expect: A) Jobs in same city. B) Live-in help. C) Private schools. D) A second home.
@noise_ratio Cool. Go on. I'm interested in 'no'.
@noise_ratio It's an artificial labor market because it produces a public good. We task it to provide prosperity but run it as a sweat shop.
@Varzoth 1960s US had a lot of that. We have fallen.
@Varzoth University system stopped expanding. Laws were changed. Foreign labor was imported to make bargaining for wages nearly impossible.
Great. Let's do this then as I'm can play as an expert too: Harvard PhD. MIT/Harvard/NBER Post-Docs. Sloan Funded. NSF-Fellowship. Etc...
I'm sorry to tell you, *we* the experts have been lying to Laypeople on Trade, Immigration, STEM and Terror. The crumbling embargo was real. https://t.co/qzOTBiOErD
1/ I was in multiple closed rooms where experts told me over and over "Well of course we can never say that to the public/donors/students/patients/voters." Cambridge MA, Washington D.C., New York. And now, San Francisco too where it hit quite a few years later.
2/ Let me tell you what we've been lying about (in elite terminology) on MAJOR issues one by one: immigration, trade, STEM, mortgage backed securities and self-regulation, terror, fake news and conspiracy. [I will need to run a few errands now, but will return here later today.]
@MiriamMakEnergy Sorry Miriam: The laypeople don't speak the academy's language so the academy resists the laity and disparages them. Renegade experts who are tired of the expert cartels' embargo against sharing more deep expertise with the laity can translate the laity to the cartels. Helpful?
3/ IMMIGRATION: EXPERT LIES Experts lie about work based immigration as needed for free markets to remove a tiny 'Harberger Triangle' of inefficiency. It is the reverse: an uncompensated taking of citizen's rights without securitization to transfer a massive 'Borjas Rectangle'.
4/ IMMIGRATION (CONTINUED). In free markets, citizens TRADE their rights of preferential labor market access a la Coase's theorem. The giant Borjas Rectangle would stay w/ labor. Inequality could reverse. Women/minorities would enter. Income might again rise. Foreigners welcomed.
5/ IMMIGRATION (CONTINUED). Here is an expert article I wrote on the subject (peer reviewed, UN sponsored Journal): https://t.co/RpUWq1vj4Z
Of course the expert community pretends it isn't there as they support a wealth transfer through forced takings of workers' livelihoods.
6/ TRADE: EXPERT LIES. In the theory of trade, lies are deeply layered. First there is a nonsensical emphasis on Pareto improvement (as if that was a meaningful social welfare function) & a denial of cardinal utility to stop diminishing returns arguments being applied to wealth.
7/ TRADE (continued): [ for @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg ] Then we substitute a Kaldor-Hicks standard for Pareto welfare as if we were going to tax winners to pay losers. Which trade economists laugh about. Because what factory worker ever heard of “unimplemeted Kaldor-Hicks”.
8/ As the grandson of a seamstress, a door2door used clothing salesman, a self educated chemist thrown out of work for his politics and a female college grad who couldn’t work in a man’s world, it feels great to stand as a STEM PhD speaking the language of the academy for them.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom 9/TRADE (CONT.): Then there‘s the appearance of “Comparative Advantage” which was recently revealed as an iron clad Exoteric explanation trade experts give to all but each other because the real Esoteric is “too complex” for the rest of us & has holes.
@LibertyRBlack The seamstress and the Shmata salesman.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg
These are from trade theorist @paulkrugman in his “Protectionist Moment” piece. I’m not trying to win here. I’m worried that you aren’t watching how this neo-liberal edifice is being abandoned because the expert’s public stance was a lie. https://t.co/335ziGS6Sj
@GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman That doesn’t solve it. Are the Harvard and UChicago Econ departments elite or expert? National Academy complex? Same question. NPR? CFR?
Where are the non-elite experts? They are off the institutional grid. They were disappeared. They don’t exist. Yet they are my Shabbat guests.
@GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Same here. All I’m saying is the institutional elites compromise their institutional experts. Every day, institutional experts are free to speak against their institution’s bias. It’s the next day when survivor bias kicks in. Now repeat across non-financially independent experts.
@fazinga They are typically educated at top universities. They are typically in non-standard employment. I frequently don’t like what they are saying as it is often disturbing.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom 10/TRADE (CONT.) Look at the slide & listen to this talk from a former Clinton administration economist. Notice the words 'Esoteric' vs. 'Exoteric'. Claiming the real arguments are too complex to math guys like me is laughable: https://t.co/Tbf9GTl343 https://t.co/YGM8KdXmdf
11/ TRADE (CONT.) Now what happened when @PiaMalaney, a Harvard PhD Economist finally got to explain to the 'experts' why the world is rejecting experts, and in their own professional language? She's *totally* ignored by the panel.
As if nothing happened. https://t.co/r9jNDgk3Ei https://t.co/oXko1AShoG
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom
12/ End.
I'll pause here. But there's an entire world of Ivy-Level experts who the public suspects exist. People who have paid for their integrity with their careers. Either undisappear these good folks ... or prepare for 7 more years of Trump.
@disitinerant @GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Accurate.
@GodDoesnt @disitinerant @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Nah. Just more systems of selective pressures ...
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman What are your thoughts here @RadioFreeTom? I can go into detail on a number of these. We could do the fake STEM shortage backed by the @NSF and @theNASciences if you don’t believe in such things.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman @NSF @theNASciences Do we disagree on fundamentals over this: https://t.co/VLf1pZwjhP
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman @NSF @theNASciences And, no I don’t call something a conspiracy because I disagree w/ experts. I usually agree w/ them! What I disageee with is using expertise to transfer wealth & agency from the supposedly childlike voters who intuit something is rigged but can’t name it in political 3 card Monty.
@Noahpinion So if we push out supply curves there is no first order depressing effect on price...except that maybe it rises? Man this is big. Like Nobel Big!
I mean...I did use supply and demand curves of Borjas. So...What did I get wrong? Do I need to retract:
@Noahpinion Hence my use of the term '1st-order' (partial equilibrium). A full model would go well beyond what you write including social services, chain migration, dependency ratios, negative externalities, concentrated impact, vote dilution, patent production, sending country impact, etc..
@Noahpinion A big game in economics is often who gets to use simple models & who gets forced into adding a million baroque complexities. I agree that immigrants add to demand. Also tax social services. Also pay taxes. Also send remittances. Also found businesses. Also crowd out natives. etc.
@Noahpinion Perhaps you were so busy reacting to the name Borjas that you missed the point of introducing Coase. Coase allows those many nth order effects to be subsumed in the choices of those impacted both positively & negatively. Hence the ability to have unlimited migration. Re-read it.
@Noahpinion Let's not play games. The unpopular transfer from L to K by a forced taking of the rectangle without the securitization of labor's valuable asymmetric rights and workers rights to trade them stands as an issue having nothing to do with your attack on Borjas.
Your move.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Look again at my paper and you will see something very odd from a mathematician: there are no equations. That came from reviewing this style of argument you are engaging in now. The point isn't this or that effect. It is forced transfers by capital vs voluntary trade with labor.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik No one is arguing that in a full model. The issue isn't about immigrants either. It is about forcible non-Coasian taking of rights through law by employers without trade or consent of labor aided by economics 'experts' portrayed falsely under the banner of free markets.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Noah, I'm just really not sure what game you're playing. Economists add (e.g. "your model forgot this externality!") and subtract effects (e.g. "for simplicity we neglect"). None of this matters to my paper or point. None of it. My point is expert aided non-consensual transfers.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik You're not even close. In econ 101, agents are rational. Remember? If workers benefit from immigration they will support it in droves. Right?
Let me guess, we have to add baroque adjustments to rationality to explain this self-defeating rejection of mass immigration? Something?
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Oh wow! That's what I *love* about economists: a total reliance on ad hoc selective application of standards to reach desired conclusions.
This is fun. Please apply that selective standard evenly to all of Econ 101 and let's watch your *entire* field disintegrate.
I'll wait.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Ha! I'm trying Noah. But it's hard to Teleman something when his econ job depends on his not understanding it, no?
Now engage with the point. Why are the rational worker agents from Econ 101 not favoring this mass immigration that enriches them? Is this Econ 101 or Room 101?
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Wait, don't those swings *undermine* your Econ 101 point? The power of the Purcell getcha every time. See attached from:
Noah, I answered all your points substantively. Nothing depended on Partial v General or demand curve modeling. It's about capture. https://t.co/poJztJTjOz
@Noahpinion @TimBartik It's not about polls. It's not about Partial vs General equlibrium models. Not about Econ 101. It's about taking something valuable almost no one would give by choice by having experts defend the interests of employers with selective modeling.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Noah, I answered every point. You are both for & against Econ 101 while I have no investment in it. If you want to forcibly transfer rights instead of letting workers trade them, ask yourself who you are really trying to benefit.
I'm trying to open borders too, but not as theft.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik If you want to write a paper detailing my failures, it will be an honor to review it fairly. But it had ZERO dependence on any of the points you made. Including demand curves. Be well.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik If you're honest, then stop w/ the red herrings on Demand Curve modeling as my point is TOTALLY agnostic to that. You write that my paper "Is a good idea that deserves much more thought!" Okay. Don't tell me. Show me a lack of capture. Put in demand curve shocks. NOTHING changes. https://t.co/n8s40niyuf
2018[edit]
Every time I hear “Tax is theft” or “Scientists are welfare queens in lab coats” or “Science would be better left to the free market” or “Why should my taxpayer dollars be used for research?” I’m reminded that US Republicans don’t want to be the party of sound economic theory.
@BatDaddyOfThree I tried for every. Dare to dream.
Thanks for asking Alex. “Welfare Queens in White Lab Coats” is an oft repeated epithet since the Reagan-Bush era in anti-tax circles. Certainly Prof Rustum Roy said it. RR’s NSF Director boosted it. But I‘m referring to its amplification by free marketeers who ignore mkt failure. https://t.co/rj4YDMmpTg
As for boosts in Scientific funding, I’m not saying all US Republicans are anti-science funding. On the contrary. Many see it as an extension of security funding or competitiveness. But what drives many scientists away is an unwillingness to be careful about public goods & taxes.
@AlexBerezow Well, given that you hadn’t yet heard the expression before I’m thinking you may want to look at the history before retooling the implicit accusation that this was nothing. Erich Bloch wasn’t a nut. Nor was Roy.
[You can steelman your argument by pointing out Proxmire as a Dem.]
@AlexBerezow I’m sorry! I’m only aware of your book on the anti-scientific left (which is a huge problem as well), but not any work on the “anti-scientific” right. What do you write about Erich Bloch? I’m curious because I also covered him in my work. Can’t wait to discuss.
@joeseybert I may be wrong too! Happy to learn.
@AlexBerezow Likely an astute call; it sounds mostly correct. I would bet you are also younger. I’m further convinced the recent strengthening of the anti-science movement on the political Left may weirdly be influencing a shift on the political right.
@dandrezner "all these thinkers can do is appease their followers. They are thought leaders who cannot demonstrate any leadership." -@dandrezner
Nice to meet you Dan. But that "take" comes from where exactly? Research? Personal interaction? You left me confused because it didn't make sense.
@dandrezner @bariweiss Splendid. But that "Take" isn't what the IDW is about. I mean do you take issue w/ my work on labor markets? Mortgage backed securities? CPI and GDP? Bret's take on drug testing on specially bred mice? Heather on risk in Education? Ben's conservative objection to Breitbart/Trump?
@dandrezner @bariweiss Are you objecting to Sam Harris' desire to put transcendence into Athiesm via meditation or even psychedlics? Jordan's emphasis on needing to offer unapologetically family/work-oriented male models to outcompete the lure of hate?
It just seems you found a take without a basis.
@dandrezner @bariweiss May I ask you to look again or too explain why all the interesting things we talk about are of no interest? You might want to look at my essays on Russell Conjugation, Excellence, The crisis in Physics, Four Quadrant model, Kayfabe, Anthropic Capitalism, Coasian immigration, etc.
@dandrezner @bariweiss And that's just my stuff. Every one of us has such a catalog. How are you saying none of this is of any interest. You can see that from our engagement on even on technical geeky topics. This isn't about SJWs gone mad.
I think you may have jumped the gun. Do reconsider.
@dandrezner @bariweiss How did it go? Honestly I would have thought this research would happen before forming such a strong conclusion.
@dandrezner @bariweiss [please continue to hold.....]
2019[edit]
I’d like to ask @benshapiro a difficult question: what happens if free market commerce in the future fails to return sufficient fuel for the unremarkable median worker’s need for family formation? That is a home & marriage in a robust labor market in time for 2 kids. Then what?
You can blame the Principal Investigators who told us this (both male & female). You can blame the universities. You can blame the messenger. But we need to talk about getting STEM moms a LOT more money for help in the house & make more allowances for staying home for 5-10 years.
This is the elephant in the lab.
A secret reason (which we collected anonymously multiple times at NBER/ASCB) for delaying tenure decisions beyond healthy fertility is departmental fear of committing to top women in research for fear they will find motherhood more fulfilling.
And yes, Dads can be more present. But before you go too far down that road, consider that some of the STEM women we spoke to said that they would have WANTED to be at home, particularly with little children (<7) and what they really wanted was a way back to research afterwards.
What we need is a multi-decade “labor shortage” in STEM that brings technical employers howling in pain about employee wage demands. Family demands. Maternal demands. The answer is simple: in STEM the wrong people are in pain. It should be our beloved administrators & employers.
@Skeptique Ever watch a unique mind with the power to change a field get muscled out of research as if her natural desire to breed and care for her young was her problem? No thanks. I’ve had enough. I want the top women to breed as much as they want. More STEM families! Cheap STEM must die.
@dashman76 Well, let’s see. Top STEM moms produce a public good which is valuable. Plus, we *forbid* them from gaining IP rights to basic research. It’s a market failure like the army. Whoever pays the army can pay the basic researchers. After all, they pretty much made the modern economy.
@JonEMay1 You don’t say...
People tell me that news has now become commercial and that stories are simply constructed to sell papers/get clicks. This is just nonsense.
Nothing would get clicks, boost circulation or sell papers for a NYT/CNN/NPR like aggressively getting to the bottom of the Epstein story.
News is a lot like college admissions: it’s an insiders game. We know it’s rigged but can’t quite figure out how.
Why take that kid/run that story? Why do you consistently have zero interest in the most interesting kids/stories?
We’re just now learning *how* rigging works.
As I learned uncovering an immigration conspiracy to use visas to tamper with the free market for STEM labor by our national science complex, no news organization is trying to sell us the actual true stories that move news product organically. The stories we want are held back.
Take the current totally synthetic & transparent push for “authoritative sources”. Such sources would be the ones warning in 2005 that the “Great Moderation” was a lie & that a crash loomed. Someone like @nntaleb. Yet they mean the opposite. They mean cheerleaders like @nytimes.
@AriDavidPaul I think there are editors who spike great stories that get written but never run. I think other reporters get reassigned while not on a trail. I think narrative arcs get written at places like the NYT before the facts are known. And other stuff.
@AriDavidPaul Note: Should have been “hot on a trail” in the above.
MIT engages in sensitive work. Epstein was acting oddly like a 1-man boutique funding agency after the US stepped away from certain funding.
A) Was Jeffrey Epstein a market genius?
B) If not, what thing X was funding Jeffrey Epstein?
C) Did MIT have a direct relationship to X?
Epstein had an enormous secretive office in Midtown. I know because I dropped off trading materials there in 2004 before his Florida arrest brought him to light. If he was a self-made financial genius of supposedly infinite wealth there will be extensive records there. Anyone???
And the money isn’t enough. Bill Gates didn’t need the money. MIT didn’t need dirty money that badly either. Jeffrey Epstein’s public face was that of someone richer than 11 figures of net worth. And he just wasn’t that rich.
Q: For what was Jeffrey Epstein the front end?
It really feels to me like the pervert narrative is what brought an enormous covert structure into view and folks are treating it like the main story. But it seems to me that a large infrastructure was fronted by a badly drawn Gatsby character with no plausible source of wealth.
But by all means, do run yet another story on the “Lolita Express” to “Pedophile Island” as if that’s the only story. We are all terrified to discuss the obvious. Follow the money. Where did this Dalton math teacher get so much? Where is the trading record? Money leaves a trail.
Are we counting on MIT to research MIT? The NYT to report on the NYT? The intelligence community to investigate itself? Why is no one calling for a redo of the Church Committee?? This is not a genie that can go back into the bottle. No one can fake records of his trading prowess.
Why are we not focused on his office? Or am I also about to suddenly take my own life, have an unfortunate car accident, or meet a random lunatic for mentioning the obvious? If this is an intelligence operation why are we trusting intelligence to clean it up and investigate it?
@Secret_du_Roy As they say, “Only Judi Feingold can keep a secret.”
@kevinschawinski There are three that I can see:
A) Public facing scientists allow control of narrative.
B) Quirky and speculative contrarian high leverage science trading at a discount. E.g. Bob Trivers.
C) Inserting oneself into the academic top tier of MIT and Harvard for future use.
@kevinschawinski There was only one. There are folks and orgs like Kavli, Templeton, Simonyi, Thiel, Simons, Sloan, etc who are the closest. But no, so far as I know. There was only one.
@nikitakarachoi @kevinschawinski I think very highly of Bob’s scientific work.
Let me tell you the secret as a US PhD in Math: the answer is under-compensation.
We got it into our head decades ago that we were entitled to STEM-serfs. So we started a rumor that our own US students are so dumb & lazy that we need STEM visas to protect us from our own kids.
And with your reaction you have your answer: we have weirdly decided that STEM talent should work for our national wealth and security but should not unapologetically participate in the power, freedom and pleasure they provide for everyone else. They are STEM serfs to be used. 🙏
You‘re probably thinking: “Why should math & science folks need all those toys, money, security & freedom for their families? They should be happy to work for much less!”
Well the market says otherwise. The market says that analytic skills are fungible and we can’t accept that.
If Math & science are so critical, where are our young PhDs with country homes, sports cars, high ranking jobs, multiple offers from top employers at mouth watering levels inducing envy from lawyers, management consultants & investment bankers?
Now watch your reaction to that Q.
Thus began one of the craziest lies in US history: the market couldn’t be used in STEM! Somehow, despite the theory that compensation should rise to direct our efforts, we started lying about scientist shortages. Math was now so critical that STEM PhDs should be practically free!
If you are interested in how this nauseating game has been played for decades and just how conscious the market tampering is, you should find this rather interesting. It is the national scandal that cannot be fully reported by any major news source:
I want everyone to remember who is deliberately destroying STEM R&D in the US. It’s America’s scientific employers conspiring within the national science complex to flood the market for almost 50Yrs by tampering with the wage mechanism to undermine scientist leverage. April 1990: https://t.co/9nWZKu7Pol
Here is what no one will say:
If you’re too weak to demand US-market level compensation for your family, you‘re too weak to tell an exploitative advisor to buzz off when you’re right. You‘re too weak to do US style science & challenge orthodoxy.
You‘re too weak to do the job.
The national science complex lives by tricking each generation into believing massive opportunity is just around the corner. But the market is always flooded.
And no one will seriously report the idea that the Science Complex is built around this lie, which killed our vitality.
@AlexKontorovich First of all, “such nonsense” is a pretty disappointing indication from a Math PhD asking for “proof.” That’s not how we do things in math. If you claim it is nonsense sir, what is your proof?
Second of all, with that out of our way. Let’s try again. Nice to meet you, Alex.
@AlexKontorovich Lastly: https://t.co/gHOCVAOgcl
@AlexKontorovich They are not thinking they are trying to destroy it. They are thinking that they are entitled to interfere with the wage mechanism. Which they have conspired and lied to do. Sir.
2020[edit]
It is time...past time...to have our CEOs howling like little wimps. We need something like a 50 year deep labor shortage with zero “Wage Relief”. So what if wages go up a bit? Let them go up more and more and MORE until they take an ENORMOUS chunk out of Capital’s share of GDP.
Both @IngrahamAngle & @realDonaldTrump aren’t getting it here. This isn’t about cheap labor. This isn’t about brain power. This is about US capitalism for labor.
Let me put it in simplistic terms: Americans are walking away from markets because our capitalists hate capitalism.
This message has been brought to you by the pro-market, pro-freedom, Pre-Clinton, Pre-Identity Politics, and Pre-Batshit crazy Patriotic American Left.
Oversimplifying only slightly: The proper job of politicians is to laugh at such corporate CEOs debasing themselves & to ask them about the ratio of their total compensation packages to the compensation packages they are offering: “What happened when you offered 7 or 8 figures??”
I’m going to overdo it so that the point is understandable to everyone:
When corporations whine about not being able to find smart people to hire, we all win as a society. The goal of making capitalism serve society is to get CEOs to perjure about non existent labor shortages.
What’s the answer to any wage gap for women?
What’s the answer to Millenial family formation?
What’s the answer to discrimination against Seniors and Youth?
What’s the answer to careers after child rearing?
What’s the answer to Minority unemployment?
A: TIGHT LABOR MARKETS.
[Note: people will ask about what the simplifications are about. They are about automation, singular talents that are quite rare, infant industries, temporary shortages, path dependencies, endowment variation, etc., etc.]
@erikbryn An important discussion. If we are to explore it, it deserves something more than a sub thread.
@ZykB4e1 @StopS386 @qrlos @IngrahamAngle @realDonaldTrump Yes. It isn’t about a unit of imported labor willing to work more cheaply by undercutting. It’s about many units being used to push out the labor supply curve to lower the wage paid to all.
The reason we have sky high STEM immigration is wage tampering. The @NSF & @theNASEM undermined our own model of scientific independence, academic freedom & irreverent science that was the envy of the word by flooding US markets with pliable STEM labor. And over what? Just wages.
The *competent* ECONOMIC study was protected and buried by never releasing it and removing the date and author from it. The author is still attached to NSF. To be clear: our @NSF is faking incompetence. The mainstream media is faking disinterest. Why? To not reveal the reasoning.
The study is economically competent using both supply & demand, and then found new US graduates would have to be paid 6 figures shortly. They termed this the “pessimistic scenario”, and then (and I‘m not making this up) faked an *incompetent* DEMOGRAPHIC study by removing demand!
I don’t exist. Breitbart doesn’t exist. The secret study doesn’t have an author, a date or publication. All restrictionists are automatically racists. Blah blah..
But then why not call a liar @nsf? Why invite me to the National Academy 4 separate times to present this @theNASEM?
Now who is willing to get the @NSF on the record denial? Only the right leaning @BreitbartNews here! And US Instutional media treats anything that appears there as automatically beneath discussion. This is the logic of the Gated Institutional Narrative:
After exporting 16 in '83, the US allowed China to flood +35,000 'graduate students' into US universities over 20 yrs. It's almost inconceivable, yet that's why Universities rail against our own people; this is a generation of University leaders who flooded their own labor mkts. https://t.co/72NLjVKlbi
The other day I ran a poll. Here's what actually happened and how China came to integrate its way into the mission-critical United States R&D sector. They provided the cheap labor that had been deliberately mislabeled as 'Study' so as to avoid paying market wage to US scientists. https://t.co/BLmnk3FTv3
This was because we didn't support US science and research when we had the chance and we didn't close down our labs. Instead we came up with a multi-decade lie about "students are not workers" and "Science knows no borders" in a big beautiful world where "borders are artificial".
So why was I on this since the 1980s?
Very simply: This wasn't study abroad. This was not a US failure in STEM education. This wasn't b/c science is 'international'.
This was a GIANT security hole on a scale no one could discuss because ALL leading US universities were gorging.
And by the way...one last thing: I'm not blaming China.
Why? Because if any nation were actually self-destructive enough to hand me the keys to their most critical sector the way the US did since the early 1980s...well I would have done *exactly* what China did.
Who wouldn't?
So when you want to know how we lost our edge, now you know why we are so interdependent on an enormous foreign powerhouse whose leverage over our 'elite' knows no bounds as we cannot decouple. This has nothing to do with race or Xenophobia. Its about the loyalty of our 'Elite'.
So we invited another nation with an incompatible form of government from our own, to look at EVERYTHING we had that gave us a technical advantage should we have to compete with a newly muscular China. And I mean everything. This is why our Elite protect all Chinese connections.
And for those that didn’t see it, here is that Twitter Poll mentioned in the thread:
What an incredible claim! Imagine: all you have to do is find out that someone is any anyway opposed to unrestricted high-skill immigration to know they are not only a villain but a pure one.
Life is so much easier when you are fully coked-up on ideology in service to employers.
@ZachWeiner Wait. Let me guess!
A) Markets are the best for allocating talent efficiently!
B) STEM fields need the best and the brightest!
C) There are knock on effects to genius where we all benefit from new industries, ideas and innovative companies!
D) Home countries get remittances!
@ZachWeiner E) Barriers create inefficiencies!
F) Science and Technology are global!
G) Some blue ribbon study calculates a huge empirical benefit!
H) if you block talent, companies wither or move to overseas!
I) We can best reform human rights in other countries through connection!
@ZachWeiner J) No person is illegal!
K) Americans are bad at hard things but Asians are great at them and want to come here!
L) A huge number of companies were started by immigrants!
M) Ditto for Nobel Laureates.
N) My mother/spouse/employer was an immigrant and she’s great!
@ZachWeiner O) Immigrants are huge philanthropists!
P) Immigrants pay an enormous amount in taxes.
Q) Immigrants open their home markets!
R) This is stolen land anyway. It’s not yours to gate!
S) Restricting movement of people is pointless!
T) Only bigots question immigration!
@ZachWeiner U) Immigrants revitalize our nation!
V) Have you read the poem at the Statue of Liberty? That’s my America!
W) Wait. You married an immigrant and wrote letters supporting immigrants! Ha!
X, Y, Z) Detaining, deporting and questioning immigrants is not a good look!
@ZachWeiner Zach: If you have new arguments I’m interested.
Did not think highly of your “pure villainy” claim. It was pretty offensive to see in someone making an outlandish claim.
@ZachWeiner @bryan_caplan The issue isn’t about bleeding heart liberals. It’s about employers who use bleeding heart liberal academics & their never ending guilt to transfer wealth into their own corporate pockets while mumbling about how open their minds and hearts are. But I assume you know the game...
@ZachWeiner @bryan_caplan If you have new arguments, I’m game. Find me in my DMs. But I am bored by the arguments I’ve heard since R Reagan and GHW Bush as they are very weak.
And Thanks for saying what you did above just now. Happy to start fresh. Nice to meet you.
@besttrousers @californiaweed @ZachWeiner Oh?
@besttrousers @californiaweed @ZachWeiner 1/ Nope. It’s you who don’t get the argument. You‘re confusing two issues that I’m focused on just to begin with.
Let’s try it w/o immigrants. Let’s say an economist gets an evil idea: “Kidneys are inefficiently distributed. Some have two working organs while others have none.”
@besttrousers @californiaweed @ZachWeiner 2/ Then we get the idea that the government will distribute the kidneys according to a market scheme. Efficiency carries the day!
What went wrong? Well it has to do with the economics of constraints vs maximands. You aren’t supposed to treat someone’s rights as a market barrier.
@besttrousers @californiaweed @ZachWeiner 3/ I treat workers as having rights that function as constraints on what government should be allowed to do.
In economics you can either put a negative effect into the objective function or into the constraints. And those two are NOT the same. It’s rights vs Cost/Benefits.
@besttrousers @californiaweed @ZachWeiner End/ This partial vs general equilibrium is a dodge. You aren’t dealing w/ the Coasian critique: you are claiming my rights as an inefficiency so you can take them without paying for them. Which is the unethical economist game. Lay Folks don’t know how to defend themselves. I do.
@besttrousers @ZachWeiner @californiaweed “Cups and Balls”? Trick??
That’s adorable. Let me know when you finally understand the argument:
@besttrousers @ZachWeiner @californiaweed Until then...
@besttrousers @ZachWeiner @californiaweed Huh. Whatever. Be well.
This is not at all how labor markets work. But it‘s very emotional.
Notice that if I replace the word “Lab” with the word “Plantation”, “immigrant” with “African guest worker” and “science” with “cotton” you’d be drooling for that creepy antebellum south if you think like this.
Also, notice the number of black faces in this photo in proportion to the number of black citizens in the American population. This photo is telling you many things. “Listen” to the photo and notice that the accompanying words don’t really tell you what is actually going on.
@PDugov No. It implies you aren’t being shown a labor market. If I showed a picture of a flat boring scrubby desert vs a picture of the glorious pyramids of Giza and then I said “Egypt with and without international workers”, it’s not a labor market argument. It’s emotional manipulation.
@varchar You are missing my intended point. The point is that they are using pictures in an emotional way to represent labor market arguments and rights issues. The point is that they are trying to bypass your brain. But they are getting a general benefit by depressing *all* wages.
@PeachesJenkins4 No shit.
@cryptoknyte I was being intentionally ridiculous. As I find this labor market argument by emotional pictures to be ridiculous.
Oh. The ‘free’ part.
More generally the fundamentalist part: The “markets always know what’s best part”. The limited liability part. The self-regulating part. The unincorporated externality parts. The “given wants” part. The unique equilibrium part. The index number part.
The “market defects are small” part. The rational agent part. The shareholder value part. The “law & economics” part. The “hyperbolic discounting” part. The entire “Macroeconomics” part. The fiduciary duty cures principal/agent problems part. The Ordinal/cardinal part.
Etc. Etc.
@hotepsquake @Brian_Mulhall People get confused by a person who values markets but doesn’t buy into full free market fundamentalism.
Which is odd.
@gingernchronic @hotepsquake @Brian_Mulhall Well, I’m for limited versions of what the free market absolutists are for. They are right that markets are wonderful and that much regulation is hamfisted & subject to capture.
And then, to make that point, they go insane and claim markets are much more perfect than they are.
@gingernchronic @hotepsquake @Brian_Mulhall Most texts that sell economics 101 ideology to students have a “to be sure” section where they shunt the real issues with the theory. Consider taking that section as much more important than the author emphasizes it to be.
H1-b visas come out of a secret 1986 economics study by the Policy, Reaearch & Analysis division of @NSF through the GUIRR division of @theNASciences in a scheme to tamper with the wage mechanism so that scientists would slave for a market in which they wouldn’t participate. 🙏
-Eric Weinstein, PhD (Math)
It’s difficult to explain to practical folks or Market and/or Democracy fundamentalists, that what you build into the rules will not necessarily remotely produce what you thought you‘d get. All coders/biologists, unlike politicians/voters, know this:
Moral: We appear to be caught in loops of our own creation. If so, conventional moves will continue to produce this cycling around the drain. It is time to consider more exotic moves to pull ourselves out.
We can no longer afford to fill the world w/ sheep, NPCs & followers. 🙏
Neglecting political economy, capture of media/institutions, market failure, inequality, danger of critical theory, structural inequality, gerontocracy, academic freedom, scientific independence, etc as if these are negligible, dooms us to chase each other around an “ant mill”.
@FroggyRuminates As did Bernie. Can you admit that? And can we admit that this is less true now as we have digested them and their differences for 4 years....
I still just marvel at how complete & beautiful the multi-decade lies are.
It would never occur to me that you could shout about the danger & madness of these things from an account and podcast of this size in front of this many journalists and the lies just remain. Perfection.
And despite decades of work, no mainstream news desk can cover and stay on this bizarre story. All the books, peer reviewed papers and conferences on this issue later...and the big enormous lie continues.
There is no such thing as a long term labor shortage in a market economy.
We have been faking a continuous unrelenting labor shortage of Scientists and Engineers since Sputnik. We replaced our own genius based research system with a cheap labor system. We give everything away to the CCP so we don’t have to pay market price to scientific families.
2021[edit]
Comedian @TimJDillon asks what I’ve ever done. Which is, actually, funny!
I’m the guy who predicted & discovered the secret 1986 @NSF study that projected hiked costs of STEM labor and then *faked* a demographic labor shortage to flood our markets.
So that & a few other things.
Open invite to @npr, @cnn, @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @MSNBC, @CBSNews. It will be a great story. I promise. But you will never run it will you? Of course not...ha!
Obviously that’s an insane brag on my part. Would no member of the press like to cover the story: “Prominent podcaster makes claim that National Science Foundation hid secret economic study to flood labor market.”
C’mon Tim. Push your point. Don’t be afraid. This could be fun.
But telling me that Juan Maldacena is a genius for writing about gauge theory and markets and that I am a mere entertainer who needs to know is place is absurd. Funny actually.
Tell me bitcoiners: where do you think the great Juan Maldacena got this genius idea? Think about it..
Let us imagine that Governments wake up. That they realize that the way to control what that cannot control is violence. In such a situation, I don’t want a record of all transfers. Even an anonymous record. That’s what I am on about. Perhaps that is misguided. If so: explain.
Markets are the alternative to tyranny and central control. And having a digital gold is essential. I am not trying to save BTC. I am not trying to introduce a new alternative coin. I am worrying about tyranny and the blockchain as ledger. I am worried about what is to come.
The important thing is that BTC is a hedge against the manipulation of the world by central banking, economists and corrupt institutions. If you can accept that it is not my religion I can accept that it is without peer among recent inventions: markets ARE the alternative to war.
I really appreciate this change in heart.
So much so that I want to reciprocate: BTC is one of the most important developments of our lives. I read Allen’s piece. I’d like to engage your community as I take you all very seriously. But I don’t think I am who you see me as being.
Anyway, I would love to learn from your community as well as to share what I know. And I am not looking to introduce a “shitcoin”.
But a request: let’s cut the bs displays? It’s corroding us all and we now have a common threat in central banking & rigged markets to defeat. 🙏
I’ve been on your side...w gauge theory...since well before BTC. Early 1990s. The goal is to disintermediate the institutional players to liberate markets to avoid tyranny. So running me down using bullshit to score points is anti-Bitcoin in spirit. Makes us all look weak & dumb.
There is no such thing in economics as a “labor shortage” for a large market economy with a wage mechanism.
You may thus gauge your media, think tanks, economics departments, political parties, corporations etc. by whether they discuss “labor shortages”:
What the US may need most is what employers will consider a deep and crippling 50 year “labor shortage”.
Bring on these scary “labor shortages”.“Labor shortages” mean strong families. “Labor shortages” mean inclusion & diversity *organically*.
“Labor shortages” mean happiness.
Think about it this way: when a scientist hears that a FANTASTICALLY complicated non-linear interacting system is “settled science” they don’t know what to think.
I do believe we are in deep climate trouble. I don’t believe climate is “settled science.”
Why is no one motivated to insulate a reliable media channel from clickbait with a 10 figure endowment?
Why are our top scientists still dependent on grant cycles?
Why are we not endowing and insulating an NGO to monitor what we actually know and don’t know about climate?
Many of us have two separate reactions:
A) *Catastrophic* climate collapse is *entirely* plausible.
B) Media, Government & Scientific bodies have all been coercive in this area (e.g. “Settled Science”).
Why are we not insulating our science and media?
https://t.co/iYhkpipZf1
This is another version of the vaccine point. Many of us will inject ourselves if credible experts say “There are risks, here’s what we know and don’t know.” But it is far harder when nakedly political people who get many things repeatedly wrong say “THIS-IS-SAFE. FULL STOP.”
Many of us are not climate deniers. We believe in a coming catastrophe. But we seek leaders who are not sanctimonious oversellers. I would change my lifestyle for someone who says “we can’t know” but find it difficult to follow someone who says “Science absolutely knows this.”
We’ve got to find different leadership. The Guardian has been nakedly unreliable on radical issues. But they may be correct here. Why don’t we have an alternative that is endowed not to need clicks, subscriptions or advertisers? Yet no one is building insulated institutions.
Now, I hate taking orders from anyone. But in a crisis, I am **reluctantly** willing to take orders from competent expert public spirited leaders who know more than I do.
But “settled science” communicates the opposite. It sends the “We leaders are incompetent” message to me.
Put simply, the closed form solution to the simple three body problem can’t be an open problem while climate is settled if climate is incalculably more complex.
So “settled” doesn’t mean settled. It is “consensus speak” for when some group wants to obligate us to take orders.
This could get really bad. And I just wish I knew to whom we could turn to get the straight story without the sanctimony, clickbait, politics, and fake certainty. But I don’t.
Thanks.
So my question is: why is no 12 or 11 figure family stepping up to endow insulation from the markets and politics on issues like pandemic, food security, climate, inflation, inequality, etc… why are we prisoner to the authoritarian oversellers of certainty? I just don’t get it.
The US Academic Scam: “We need to find Americans smart enough to do Nobel level science and dumb enough not to realize that we will permanently artificially glut markets so that they will have zero leverage against whatever we, their Silent & Boomer masters, want to do to them.”
The STEM shortage has been a total myth and a scam. It is an employer based gutting of America’s future to serve a dying cohort of people who bizarrely have zero interest in what they leave behind as a legacy.
Remember this odd fact: almost every graph of changes in universities over time involving tuition, faculty, time to degree, jobs, etc tells exactly the same story. Choose any university. Any measure of one generation extracting money from its descendants by destroying its future:
If I am correct there are now generations of discoveries by hundreds of STEM folks that were lost because they threatened their older masters or which bear the names of the masters with the scientist who did the original work cast out of the system. We disappeared STEM’s best.
So @elonmusk, bitcoiners, crypto folks, any interest? Every year we wait, what we built degrades further & further into madness. Let’s create wealthy scientists who can tell us all to fuck off when we incentivize them to do the wrong thing in science & rigorous education. #EndDEI
Now back to your regularly scheduled jokes about Contrarian University of North Texas…
Thanks for hearing me out on this periodically. I don’t know what to do to make this interesting and obvious. It’s destroying our future.
@cloudsweeper99 Did you see the word ‘artificially’ above? I’m guessing you did.
You have no idea how crazy econ got to make us all the same so that what we're saying can be ignored. Seriously, think about asserting that all folks have the same tastes & that they can never change so that economists can use 'Stable preferences...relentlessly & unflinchingly'.
You mean field. Economics is actually all about fields: field operators & field theory.
Technically, inflation is classically like a Wilson Loop observable on path spaces. But economists have historically denigrated path-dependent approaches (e.g. 'cycling problems', 'drift').🤷
The move to look out for is 'Superlative price index numbers give an excellent approximation to the true 'Cost-Of-Living'!" which totally sidesteps the field issue you bring up, the dynamic taste issue (replaced by 'Stable preferences'), & inequality (replaced by homotheticity).
“The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach...” -Gary Becker
Followed by inexplicable & inscrutable 'work' of Becker & Stigler: https://t.co/4VnGQc3rTP
You will see in the inflation literature various bizarre tendencies to introduce 'homogenous' or 'homothetic' utility functions and to hold these functions fixed. Ultimately it fell to 2 giants to claim that taste is universal. That way, rich/poor, you/me all have common utility.
And we are not even trying to measure that. To this day, I can't *really* understand what CPI-U is. That is either because I'm too dumb, or the field has gone mad agreeing with itself while disconnected from reality. And I believe no one is that dumb. Even on a really bad day...
It's like publishing a number for the temperature in the US in 2020. Your path dependent price index measure of inflation is as individual as your commute. It's *mildly* meaningul to posit a 'representative commute to work' that doesn't depend on our various routes. But not very.
All of these simplifications are made better in a fully path dependent field theory framework with endogenously determined differential operators.
Claiming we all have the same unchanging tastes (e.g. Becker-Stigler) and working in simplified regimes isn't at all understandable.
We don’t always agree. I’ve no idea how Satoshi took aim at I) above. And I don’t yet know how to explain the importance of gauge theory to Gold (physical Gauge Theory), Prices/Quantities (abelian GT), Trade (non-abelian GT) and Utility (infinite dim GT): https://t.co/16D1phhNTC
But we’ve been working together behind the scenes. I so appreciate @Breedlove22 coming to Chicago to witness what I hope will be the beginning of an attack on abuses of perhaps the second most dangerous printing press in Washington as inflation heats up.
Thanks #Bitcoiners: LFG. https://t.co/Oo16iBbVnv
Bitcoiners, open minded economists & math/physics folks: we have a serious problem navigating world markets using indicators that currently rely on *preposterous* assumptions (homotheticity, law of one price, stable tastes, etc) Economics needs more eyeballs on it from outside.🙏
Lastly when we trade with nations that have a different currency from ours, how can we measure inflation of both separate currencies relative to two baskets (imports & exports) without artificially assuming the law of one price?
We *must* innovate here:
- bitcoin #Crypto #nft #Blockchain #Decentralization #DeFi #web3 #inflation #cpi #Trade #gaugetheory
@pmontu33 @normonics Feel free not to like my perspective. But it’s not my position to use government where the market works well. An honest free market person recognizes a slew of places where the market doesn’t work well (e.g. public goods, unincorporated externalities, principal/agent conflict).
@pmontu33 @normonics I’m super hopeful that crypto decentralization will extend the market. I’m super depressed that people think that either solves everything or nothing.
One man’s opinion. And thanks for following me as someone whose perspective irritates you. Appreciate that.
@normonics @pmontu33 Mostly agree. Each problem occurs at scale just like in a body. Cellular problems you study with cytology. When cells aggregate into tissue, use Histology not cytology. When tissues combine to form functional systems of organs use physiology.
I don’t understand “cytology only”.
@normonics @pmontu33 Let’s scale up decentralization across levels with that principle in mind. Address every problem at the level at which it occurs.
I don’t know why this is so hard to agree to. Many people are simply afraid of idiots and authoritarians in power. We just have to get them out.
2022[edit]
“The market can remain irrational longer than…you can afford to stay out.” -@billjaneway PhD on bubbles and why they are essential to capitalism.
Brilliant. And much more insightful than his hero Keynes, from whom it is patterned.
I forget just how much I learned from Bill.
“They are a private company, they can do whatever they want. It’s a free market economy.”
I don’t mean to be stupid, but can someone explain how this applies to weapons manufacturers, baby food companies, automobile makers, communications companies, oil and gas, and airlines? https://t.co/NoAgAIOdGX
I’d like to know how a communications utility like Twitter puts algorithms in our feeds that distort our sense of the world even more than I want drug manufacturers to recite side effects when marketing pills for allergies on TV.
Then folks recited this mantra “It’s a…”
I assume that it must mean something to those who say it. Surely they’re aware that companies aren’t free to do whatever they want. That the market isn’t unregulated. But it’s said so often & so invariantly that it feels like common prayer.
What does it mean to those who say it?
So I say “Users of Twitter/Gerber products should have a *right* to know all of the algorithms/ingredients that go into constructing their communications/BabyFood listed for all to see.”
And then folks chant the mantra. Honestly confused. How does that work in their minds?
@News1Corner Uh…ok.
@TheZvi Zvi! Good to see you.
@davidwalton Start by admitting to down regulation of accounts Twitter doesn’t like: de boosting, down ranking, shadow banning. Etc .
@davidwalton I’d love to know whether they pump certain tweets to the people who dislike you. Some followers see all your tweets Others never see each others tweets. It’s nuts.
I’ll be sure to ask him. But in the meantime why don’t we ask why economists at @nsf in 1986 secretly did economic wage projections and then erased ALL the demand curves to pass the 1990 immigration act in a fake demographic panic to destroy our scientists’ bargaining positions?
I’m not sure why Peter needs to clean up a conspiracy at @nsf and the National Academy of Sciences to defraud the US on behalf of technical employers who wanted their markets flooded with cheap talent. Can you ask economists what a “labor shortage” would be in a *market* economy?
@karyns4 @NSF Wow! “All well paid and thriving.”
We are back?! With tenure? Easy grant renewals for long term research? 4 years to PhD? Full benefits? Kids in independent schools? Jobs in the same city as their spouses? 2nd Homes?
This is great news. I stand corrected.
Only it’s not true.
In 1986, the @nsf secretly commissioned a study of future wages. It projected salaries of over $100K back then for new PhDs.
I’m not making this up: it called that “This pessimistic scenario” and erased the demand curves to try to flood the market via IMMACT90.
Come: Debunk me.
In the meantime, younger STEM PhDs, please don’t be angry or disappointed. Why not take the long years of cutting edge training at tax payer expense & visit @PandaExpress, where fast food can put you on the fast track to success & financial freedom! 🙏
So nuts.
- followthesilence
This is echolocation: listen for the silence. They will not debunk me. Why? Because it’s true. Come at the conspiracy theory @NSF & @theNASEM. All you have to do is cry bullshit, and we are on!
Let’s have some fun. You are, after all, our most prestigious science institutions.🧬
This account has > 1/2M followers & is spreading a wild conspiracy story that the US science establishment destroyed US STEM careers through market tampering. It’s housed at @nberpubs & @INETeconomics. It sews distrust in science & government. Debunk me @APFactCheck, @PolitiFact.
The @nsf conspired AGAiNST the scientists. With whom? The National Academy of Science through the Government University Industry Research Round Table (@GUIRR). I have been invited four times to the NAS to present this. It is an out and out conspiracy.
Debunk this claim @snopes.
As you know: no one will report but no one will debunk either. Welcome to the Boomer/Silent Generation distopia.
I still can’t get over that we don’t have a functioning free press. Thanks.
- dystopia
Also, feel free not to give a shit as we mask up injecting ourselves and our families against a virus that likely comes from the same exact people with almost no independent secure PhDs to stand up to the gerontocracy at @NIH, NIAID. That’s the cost of cheap science.
Having been both in Academe and the private sector, I have learned something I cannot communicate:
A) The more you push science towards markets, the more it fails.
B) The more marketization makes science fail, the more capitalists want to starve it.
Increasingly, the solution to every science problem is seen through markets.
X-prizes for science. Science DAOs. Crowdfunding for science. Micro grants. Science as a startup.
Anything *other* than recognizing our previous wisdom of insulating science & scientists from markets.
The answer to getting science to work again is a smaller scientific community with the ability to hold minority positions for decades if necessary.
Academic freedom was a lot less expensive when it was guaranteed by institutions. Now it requires FU money from which it’s starved.
For the nth time:
The US Scientific Labor Market has been totally & deliberately rigged from 1986 on. As in completely ‘fixed’.
For whom? Employers/PRC/Boomers.
By whom? @theNASciences, GUIRR, AAU and @nsf.
Against whom: Scientists. Science. The US.
I pretty much detest everything about communism. But I understand it. Every time a billionaire “Technologist” whines about talent or opines about success, I think about the 2nd class scientist families they destroyed. Now at Zero compensation.
These ain’t capitalists after all.
What will happen next? You’ll read this story. You’ll scratch your head “Needs PhD for 0 compensation??”
Then a few days later you will read another story about how the US is falling behind in STEM and the workplace of tomorrow needs H-1B visas & technical skills.
In a picture: https://t.co/053eZEojCG
If you take the most productive and accomplished sector of your society, and you methodically, intentionally, consciously and deliberately destroy its labor market through exploitation, you aren’t a capitalist. You’re just an evil person.
And you’ll breed revolutions eventually.
I feel gaslit when grown-ups talk about labor shortages in market economies w wage mechanisms.
It’s basically an admission that capitalism is meant as a TRICK where workers can’t benefit from markets.
Let’s talk about the ongoing equities shortage & printing shares for workers.
You see, longterm labor shortages don’t exist in large market economies.
But the news media counts on workers being too dumb to understand the wage mechanism. So everyone in media pretends to believe in labor shortages. Like they were jackalopes.
Let’s print shares & not visas. https://t.co/1BamM9kNEo
Let’s talk about “equities shortages” which are no more real than “labor shortages”. That way every S.O.B. who whines about a labor shortage will hear: “Oh. It’s because of the Stock Share Shortage. You just have to print new shares of your company to get your workers energized.”
Let’s stop this “labor shortage” dead in its tracks. Let’s not print visas. It’s time to recognize workers are suffering from a *share shortage*. We need to print shares not visas and add them to compensation packages.
Bingo! Look at that: totally fictitious problem solved. 🙏
Markets functioned best when they did not overpower ALL non-market forces.
Not every good idea is a business. But we are now teaching people that non-market ideas are almost always D.O.A.
That would be a terrible way to lose capitalism. Family, culture, science etc also matter.
@Web_IV Really?
News. Science. Community. Romance. Family. Civics. Military. Healing professions.
Work on your approach? It’s neither fair, nor kind nor accurate.
Great question. Inflation is SUPPOSED to be a group valued field. In the case of bilateral trade it’s an element of GL(2,R) although the economists haven’t gotten there yet. But it is mostly not a field on Geography. It’s a field on path, Loop, preference and geographic spaces.
Q1: Why is it a field on Preferences?
A1: Because a true COLA is not an index on baskets (mechanical index) but on welfare derived from baskets (economic index). BLS misrepresents CPI being COLA-driven abusing work of Erwin Diewert on Superlative indices. A COLA prices WELFARE.
Q3: Why is inflation a field on Path Spaces of Looped Preferences/Prices?
A3: Loosely, Index number theory really died w/ work of Ragnar Frisch (rightly) destroying Irving Fischer’s misguided work on axiomatic tests for bilateral (2 period) mechanical index numbers. Here’s why.
A2 Continued: If you don’t make loops of tastes and prices, you will show meaningless regular inflation if prices, quantities and tastes Circle back to their initial Jan 1 values. This confuses economic experts (Like Diewert) when it comes to chain/path indices…which is up next.
Q2: Why is inflation a field on LOOP spaces of preferences?
A2: Tastes are seasonal. In USA “We never spill Egg Nog on our bikinis.” What you both want & price HAS to be made seasonal to avoid the Cycling Problem (Holonomy) in index number thy. So we have LOOPS of tastes/prices.
A3 Cont.: Our response: “Ah. That would be true but for 2 differences! First, Indices live in markets with *prices*. Our methods *don’t* live in social choice voting paradigms. Second, agents evolve into their future selves via paths. There’s no ‘morphing path’ in social choice.”
A3 Cont.: As Ken Arrow challenged us “Frisch showed we can’t solve the bilateral index problem because a single agent at multiple points in time is *exactly* dual to multiple agents at a single instant of time. Which is exactly my ‘Impossibility Theorem’ in Social Choice. QED.”
A4 Cont.: Only 1x1 matrices commute. NxN matrices do not! And if A.B isn’t B.A, the system goes non-linear. So if you have 2 countries with 2 currencies, the commutative case doesn’t work at all. You need to use Freeman Dyson’s system of Time Ordered Products to save inflation.
Q4: Why do you say indexes are Group-Valued? Isn’t inflation just a number?
A4: Here goes. In the most famous case you *can* get away with a number. But that 8.9% style CPI nonsense is actually secretly a 1x1 matrix in GL(1,R). And that actually matters! Why? B/c Non-linearity.
A3 Cont.: “This is why index numbers will one day be properly understood as parallel translation in Fiber Bundles wrt Economic Gauge Potentials. But Zoe doesn’t become Cam morphing into Fatima when voting. So parallel transport is unavailable. Even in topological social choice.”
A5 Continued: Prices vary by zip code. So throw in a geographical map as a reward for getting to the end!
Just try to understand my bewilderment when @BLS_gov says 7.9% and everyone pretends that they aren’t really raising taxes & slashing social security. You’re being screwed.
Q5: So let’s see. Inflation is a field like temperature. But a field in a fiber bundle over ♾-dimensional path spaces of loops of preferences/prices valued in non-commuting groups leading to non linearities not addressed by economists? What about actual geography!”
A5: Fair. 👍
A4 Cont.: But even in the case of one Currency like the Dollar, economists don’t get the group issue. True COLAs are valued in an *infinite* dimensional non-commutative group called DIFF_0(R^+) equivalent to increasing differentiable functions from 0–>♾ reparameterizing ‘Utils’.
Either do something to save yourselves or continue to sit & wait to be eaten by the Fed and @BLS_gov’s fakely precise single number CPI.
I’ll debate ANYONE on this high enough up for you. But I can’t watch & I’m done w economist abuse & yelling at clouds.
Thanks for asking.🙏
Your life savings are being stolen through seignorage as you are being taxed into oblivion with your social Security beaten to a pulp. Meanwhile @paulkrugman and Robert Reich are playing with finger paints.
If you want help, do let me know. But I can’t watch this massacre again.
@macroquantstrat @BLS_gov But BLS measures the effects when it comes to adjusting tax brackets and SS.
Also, the points are general to index number construction. The main activity was in the 1920s. The field never really modernized after that.
@pirate_hodl Sure! And as Samuelson said, it may not even be integrable. And it may be that you are mixing stocks and flows. Etc. But then don’t say you are implementing Konus COLAs while pretending that mumbling “ superlative Index number are exact for flexible functional forms” makes sense.
@pirate_hodl The main issue here is simply super invidious priestly bull shit used to cover the destruction of people’s lives. Thanks!
@pirate_hodl They have two black boxes. One is called CPI construction. One is called the Fed. The theory is a narrative. The narrative doesn’t match the actions.
@invisi_college1 @BLS_gov It’s an important question you asked. Thanks for it. It’s hard to answer of course, but propose doing group study and it gets easier.
@DanielCDolmar https://t.co/7iiemFvfy9
2023[edit]
Because you stopped them from participating in the prosperity they created for everyone else downstream of science.
To put it bluntly they are echoing the words of those whose hands now encircle their throats. That’s why you got sick with Covid. Why you aren’t getting the truth.
You see scientists create what economists call a MARKET FAILURE in the form of a PUBLIC GOOD. That is the VALUE our scientists create isn’t captured in the PRICE they can command even in a free market. Then we broke our contract to take care of them by sharing downstream wealth.
If they were wealthy, as they would be in any sane society, they would tell you what they thought of Fauci and Collins and Daszak. But they are *precarious*. So they parroted those people instead.
Hence their new cranky positions on reproductive mutilation. WIV. Vaccines. Etc.
Think of it this way. We told the world’s smartest people they were privileged welfare queens in lab coats & made them waste their time begging for grants, stabbing each other in the back. So they adapted. We can have reliable science back as soon as we open our eyes to this. 🙏
@MBearden_Reads Thank you! I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. But that is the stark truth.
@alexutopia Exactly the position that got us into this mess. Enjoy.
@l_u_744 Yep! See previous point about market signals and market failures. We have to trick them into careers in large numbers. If you want low quality science, keep that perspective.
@RiverParrish1 It’s psychotic.
@OrangePilledca Post-Sputnik USA. But I won’t be answering the nitpicks on this. All the usual caveats apply.
Be well.
The last 50 yrs of academic labor market collapse have been largely a period of decay for high end academic research as my friend @pmarca correctly points out. But that‘s financial in origin & it has been decaying from an extraordinary level of achievement.
Hence the confusions.
Fair question. But compare it to startups. Or “People who will be successful making a career in music.” Or “Actors who should continue to wait tables.”
I am an enormous critic of academic research. But high-end research has been *phenomenally* high quality until fairly recently.
Now I feel completely alone.
I want our wanting out of this story. I have a huge dog in this fight. I spend every day fighting my own human desire for GU to be proven correct.
I believe this is how String Theorists stopped being scientists.
I just want our data & the physics.
If biological aliens were here from others star systems in crafts that defy the current physics of the standard model and, more importantly, general relativity, I would be one of the few people who would have a guess on day one as to how they must have gotten here. It’s tempting.
I don’t think biological interstellar alien visitors using GR and the SM make much sense. So I try to have a war *inside* my own mind as to what is true. I have a genuine “Need to Know” as to whether this is BS NatSec space opera disinformation theater. Because to me, it is data.
What just happened isn’t data. It’s that a sober individual just pushed one of the many longstanding highly conserved NHI narratives collected from *many* diverse sober NatSec informants over the sworn testimony line. And it gets a LOT crazier from here. But it’s not science yet.
Let me be very careful in what I am about to say. We have at least the appearance and optics of scientific self-sabotage. And wanting things to be true is how science dies.
I fight like hell to promote my theory. But I’d sign on to another to know the truth if I was wrong.
As I‘ve been saying, there is so much deliberate NatSec BS out here that our own scientists are being propagandized. We’re drilling holes in our own scientists’ lifeboat. Last time we saw this it was virologists/immunologists/epidemiologists being gaslit. Now it’s physicists.
We may be looking at the birth of a new UFO religion. Or a moment of contact. Or a long running Disinformation campaign. Etc.
To go beyond GR, let’s be scientists & get NatSec out of our data first. Where is our data pruned of space opera disinformation and cultic religiosity?
What I want to know:
Why was the Mansfield Amendment passed?
Why did NSF fake a labor shortage in our MARKET economy destroying American STEM labor markets?
What stopped the Golden Age Of General Relativity?
Why was the SSC really cancelled?
StringTheory & STAGNATION: WTF?
This is the 50th year of stagnation in the Standard Model Lagrangian. It is AS IF we are deliberately trying to forget how to do actual physics. Everyone who has succeeded in Particle Theory in standard terms is now over 70. This is insane. In 25 years there will be no one left.
What the hell was the 1957 Behnson funded UNC Chapel Hill conference actually about?
Why are we not stopping to QUESTION quantum gravity after 70 years of public *FAILURE* inspired by Babson-Behnson patronage of RIAS, the Institute of Field Physics and the precursor to Lockheed?
Why are we not admitting that quantum gravity is killing physics and is the public respectable face of 1950s anti-gravity mania that lives on to murder all new theories in their cradle?
Quantum Gravity is fake and works to stop actual physics.
There. I said it. Now let’s talk.
If you want to know whether there are biological interstellar visitors here observing us, the short answer is “Almost *certainly* not if they are using our current stagnant non-progressing theories of physics.”
Let’s finally get serious about this whacky subject? Thanks. 🙏
@skdh I acknowledge my desires as you see from what I wrote. But a stagnant community always wants outcomes. It wants SUSY. Or Strings. Or some g-2 muon anomaly. Etc.
I want too. But what I want is mostly just a desire to get the BS out of physics so we can get back to succeeding.
2024[edit]
I am failing this election. I tried. But, I simply failed.
I cannot work within these concepts.
My world, my country, my America is not on the ballot.
Here is what I will say:
I will work with anyone to restore my country. I have been an expert on what is wrong with our CPI inflation gauge. I was an expert in immigration in the 1990s and early 2000s. I wrote one of the earliest (peer reviewed..ha) academic papers on the danger of Mortgage Backed Securities back in 2001.
And I know how and why the science system and the physics with a prayer to get us out of the solar system is being dismantled by our government. I co-ran the Sloan Science and Engineering Workforce project at Harvard and the NBER.
I refuse to take all that hard work and just flush it down the toilet on these campaigners. These campaigns are horrific. They destroy the ethos of our nation.
I don't want lawfare. I don't want insecure elections. Or insecure borders. I don't want bullying. I don't want Government departments named to promote financial instruments. I don't want reproductive mutilation of our children. I don't want free speech to allow anonymous accounts to stalk and ruin actual people. I don't want censorship. I don't want tech companies to be front ends of the security state. Etc.
I don' t want a naive American foreign policy in a dangerous dangerous world. We need to be muscular.
And I don't want to go around the world screwing over or killing good people because they happen to live on top of mineral resources.
I don't want endless wars. I don't want isolationism. Etc.
I want common sense, and some concept of civility, charity of spirit and decency. I want a world free from endless utopian, reactionary, progressive or revolutionary nonsense.
I am not giving you my recommendation. The risks are profound and very very very different on both sides. I have a guess where the bigger risks lie...but that is only a guess.
I am rolling up my sleeves. If any of you want my help, I am here for either team should you win.
I do not believe that ANYONE on the Blue team will EVER do anything to contact me other than get hit pieces written against me. Even though I am a registered democrat, you have become a cult that brooks no dissent. So be it. That said, I would love to be proven wrong. Try me. There aren't that many technical US born Harvard Stem PhDs / MIT post-docs with a huge audience. If you can't work with me, that's on you.
As for the Red team, three of the big six of you know me. I am here to help get things done on:
Science Policy and Higher Ed Physics beyond Relativity and the Standard model. Inflation / CPI / GDP / Index construction Immigration / Migration National Reconciliation AI and Labor Markets Coasian Solutions to AI and Migration problems
Those are my core competencies where I have something unique to offer you. If loyalty to campaigns matters to you, I am sorry. I am loyal to the country as I understand it, and the campaigns weren't in my idiom at all. They felt almost totally wrong to me. No hard feelings.
Let's get things fixed. Or not. Up to you. I'd opt for the former. Let's unf*ck ourselves as soon as this is over. 🙏
@jrg0569 I’m not MAGA. But I’ll shake your hand and work with you. Good to meet you.
@Jacobionite Exactly.
@Cernovich Or the tooth fairy. That was the point.
20 years ago there was someone to hear it. Now its addressed to the dead letter office. My how time flies. See you in AC.
“Maybe everything that dies, someday comes back…” 🎶
@Mkschizo2 Trump then?
@more_amalek Trump?
@AJB7081 MAGA?
@EartherGraduate @Cernovich A quote from an old song. Atlantic City.
This may be my favorite version.
@f_ckthelibtards @jrg0569 Trump?
@i_d_smith What a great way to courageously make my point “Actual Truth Respecter”.
Drive your potential allies away. Brilliant.
@NathanLC78 Brought to you by the MAGA welcome wagon. Genius.
@Cernovich Really? Do you want me to turn that around so we can go after each other? Why? Drama?
Decline. We have mutual friends who were more careful people. They linked their names to Trump’s. I got to watch. Yikes.
You are a different beast. Go do you.
Be well.
There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a large market economy. This is due to a concept called the wage mechanism. There are two curves called supply and demand which intersect at a point that determines the wage.
You are probably confusing this with a centrally planned economy. We discussed this in my office in Littauer. We were colleagues in the same dept. You spoke in the seminar of the program I co-founded with Richard Freeman about women in Science. It was called the science and engineering workforce project. SEWP. At NBER?
You were Harvard’s President.
It was a long time ago.
Here is the paper we discussed at NBER. The first line is literally this:
“Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.”
You said “Obviously.”
We last discussed it in Arizona. October 24, 2019 when we both spoke. Am I imagining this Larry? https://t.co/zbPqe6aoGx
It’s been up for about a quarter of a century:
@Smithaz1981 Let wages rise.
@cathyfcx Let wages rise.
@nathan_arm10213 Let wages rise.
@SweatEm I’ve been playing this game with them for 30+ years. They don’t want wages to rise. I do. He says “bottlenecks” because he knows the game. So do I.
"A growing influx of foreign PhD's into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S."
-Photograph from the secret @NSF study that led to the H-1B. https://t.co/Wrd3DL2Q8h
So @VivekGRamaswamy: let's debate your ideas about why these programs are controversial.
Everyone sane in the US wants a strong America. My contention is that these programs were *designed* to weaken us as a STEM powerhouse to save money for employers. Let's debate this out. No?
2025[edit]
Let’s talk *immigration* math @VivekGRamaswamy. I want you to grade my Coasian labor model. I’m 4th gen. American, but I don’t want you to grade me on a curve.
I got a U.S. Math PhD, yet my experience is different. The better we are at math, the more you AVOID us. Teach us?
I even took out all the equations and everything so that we can all follow along. It says that our employers can truly benefit from H-1B & such programs.
But, as it turns out, such (non-Coasian) visas *penalize* US STEM natives, tranfering vast wealth to employers and investors! https://t.co/LlSzMxpdmL
The purpose of excelling in math is to make America strong, no? I got this pro-worker free-market model published in a *peer reviewed* journal, so it’s vetted. And I even went to your school in both the math/economics departments.
Do you want to discuss it publicly with me? LFG! https://t.co/lCpe9XcUm4
Don’t avoid it @VivekGRamaswamy. If you really want what is best for America & MAGA, please don’t avoid me, and instead fight *with* me for our American scientific labor and against our conspiring employers in Government, Universities & Industry.
You won’t win otherwise.
Look: https://t.co/lk8EHO85tS
Science is technically a "public good" which means it has twin characteristics that make markets unable to price it.
You can use the Pythagorean Theorem an arbitrary number of times with out 'wearing it out' (i.e. it is inexhaustible). And no one can stop the next person from learning it once it is known (i.e. it is inexcludible).
Anything that is both inexhaustible and inexcludable *cannot* command a price that equals its value. Thus it becomes a market failure...i.e. even a knowledgable free market zealot knows that it has to be supported off market.
We don't even let scientists profit from intellectual property rights to their discoveries. We PROHIBIT IT.
To decide that the private sector should sort out science is actually a repudiation of competent free market economics which is very clear about such market failures of price to equal value. Science has a high value and a nearly zero price. Hence we support it historically at a high level.
Thus I must respectfully must disagree with my old friend John here. Which is an infrequent occurance.
Moral: The private sector isn't magic. You can't just give the private sector final say on whatever is valuable. You can do that only if the thing in question is in the category of standard goods and services. But it doesn't work for an entire category of well known market failures. Like basic research in science.
Uh. What?? Saying that Trump is mandated to misunderstand that Science is a Public Good is saying that Trump is an idiot.
Which is nonsense.
I believe @realDonaldTrump, @JDVance and @elonmusk are all very smart. Only an absolute moron would deliberately destroy U.S. Academic Science by saying that an algebraic topologist or a neutrino astronomer should found a start up or learn to code. Are we that unbelievably angry at non-scientist Tony Fauci that we are up for destroying ourselves? Maybe! But I say bullshit. No one smart is that dumb.
Trump and I both went to Univ. of @Penn and he even graduated with a degree from Wharton. Whether you love him or hate him, I don't think of Wharton graduates as being so ignorant of economics or markets that they think markets have no failures. I think he gets markets.
The idea that markets work for everything is an insane simplistic position which is popular only on the internet.
It has zero support among smart pro-market economists. Left, Right, Independent or Center.
Galois theory is inexhaustible. Galois theory is inexcludable. Galois theory is therefore a public good.
QED
@skdh C’mon doc. Let’s not do this. You have other fish to fry.
Mathematics research *clearly* fits the claimed market failure criteria. Happy to talk offline.
“Expertise” has not collapsed.
What has happened is that the expert class has been made precarious…by the power class.
The power class then buys or threatens the expert class.
“Join us Sarah in saying that a man identifying as a woman is as much a woman as a woman…as a professor of biology, or lose your job.”
“It would really be helpful Sunil to have a study that shows that our product is helpful and not harmful or at least that the any harms are negligibly small and are being greatly exaggerated.”
“Surely you are still a scientist Fred and haven’t become a racist conspiracy theorist claiming this virus could possibly have come out of a laboratory biowepons program.”
“But Gustavo, why would you suggest we waste what little discretionary funding we have on a conference where non-string theorists jealous of our funding success point to our lack of any definitive progress when we clearly have so many interesting leads to follow?”
BOTTOM LINE: you aren’t having an expertise crisis. Your having an artificial precariousness crisis imposed on your expert class by broken tacit agreements turning the community into expert witnesses who no longer can afford to put that expertise in public service.
If you actually believe that expertise has collapsed, then explain why the power class are right now buying, converting, and privatizing your experts, while all the while whispering in your ear that the public spirited experts still loyal to their craft are charlatans, madmen, “big mad”, grifters, pseudo scientists and anything else they think you might be dumb enough to believe?
Have you never heard of concierge medicine? Who flies and maintains the planes at the private airports? Who does the plastic surgery? What do former Delta force operators do for work when they need to make money? Who provides IT security in $50M mansions? Who builds those homes?
Don’t be an idiot. The more you are taught to hate and distrust your experts, the more they will turn to power to provide their expertise privately and bullshit to you publicly.
Sorry. But that is exactly what is happening.
Good luck. 🙏
@MrPeripatetic Agree. And thank you for illustrating the thread’s point.
@TheJasonNichols Actually that is not the problem. You still have experts to trust. You just don’t know *which* ones to listen to. It’s a real problem.
@jdpower96 So odd. You do realize that their considerable immunity from power was taken right? They didn’t just wake up one morning and say “I’m gonna throw away my integrity today.”
@NHammondDesign @TheJasonNichols No. You can solve this problem anytime.
This is like saying “my car no longer works” because you one day stopped putting fuel in it.
@JasonSmigelski And to the sands of time and fog of war.
@MrPeripatetic I appreciate appreciation on a thankless task. Thanks friend.
@MalloAmaury42 You are asking the wrong family.
@TheJasonNichols Or look up “public goods” and “list of market failures in free market economies”.
@hr_sasja Wow! Thanks for making my point!!!
@Adoresrebuttal Heh. They are just screwing themselves over. Sad.
@CaptainKrik25 Exactly. Former expert who took a deal.
The IDW was not ever what it was assumed to be. I just didn’t want to define it.
It was supposed to be a model of the CULTURE that meant that we could have free speech, free markets and one man one vote democracy as our ideals.
All of which I still believe to this day. I love the U.S. culture we were building before our current madness.
As I have said from the beginning, I fear that I don’t share the beliefs of my crowd.
I do not simply believe in a pure free markets because I have studied market failure. I do not believe in free speech absolutism in a world with pedophiles, nuclear proliferation and Weaponized Anthrax. I do not believe in a democratic absolutism because madmen have ascended through crowds.
Yet I continue to believe in giving public voice and FREE SPEECH to the *dangerous* and *wicked* alike. In relying on imperfect free markets wherever possible, and in trying to use the ballot box to avoid Armageddon.
The magic of the United States wasn’t the parchment. It wasn’t the rules. It wasn’t anything like that.
It was the culture. Our shared culture.
We agreed, for the most part, not to elect utopians. We agreed to a measure of pro-social hypocrisy (e.g. “free speech” with speech restrictions, prohibiting violent jihad despite a 1st amendment protection for all religions, moderately regulated free markets). We agreed on underdogs. Etc.
So while everyone one else is trying to sell you on free speech or expertise or journalistic standards or the scientific method or whatever….I’ll sit over here and try to wait it out.
The secret of what made America great, as I see it, had a lot to do with culture and taste. It had to do with being smart, mildly hypocritical, religious without being doctrinaire, open without being wildly open, welcoming without being a doormat, progressive without being psychotic, conservative without being reactionary, modest in interventionism without being isolationist.
And I continue to stand for the right of free speech and tell anyone who will listen: free speech is essential….but it is the easy part. The tough part is having a *culture* that doesn’t abuse it to the point of organizing mass delusions, mobs, narrative warfare, lynchings and pogroms.
*FIT* dangerous ideas exist everywhere and drive out less fit better ideas on podcasts. Thus we need a culture that curtails and retards the reach of terrible ideas (e.g. Transgender evangelism) by putting *immense* pressure on the most dangerous of fit ideas. But I still want to hear them. And I want you to hear them too. So I keep fighting what I take to be the most attractive terrible ideas I can find. I don’t know what else to do honestly.
The IDW wasn’t about the rules of free speech. Those are easy and straightforward. It was instead about the culture of free speech. The taste, if you will, needed to make the magic work.
American values are not for pussies. Its a ton of responsibility and risk that almost no one wants.
But It’s our culture, and not a protocol or laws, that made the magic. And I’d like to get back to that as soon as possible.
🙏
@TheTomRossini Disagree harder then? I’m with ya.
@TheTomRossini Oh well. We tried! Thanks.
What is the plan for making our scientists wealthy, free & secure…so that we have no Tony Fauci / Claudine Gay situations again?
I understand there’s a Tech Plan. I have heard there is a NatSec plan. I believe there is a DoD plan.
Yet without science, there’s no US Golden Age.
How can we help? I’ve heard nothing at all on this. And it is a *GLARING* omission. The market cannot support blue sky research. This is Econ 101, public good theory.
Make Our *Scientists* Independent Again
How do we get this front and center in DC?
@OfficialBBrooks No. Fundamentally no.
Tech is about things that have both markets and IP. Science has neither. Tech is not a public good.
@SacrdCowTipping No one needs FU money like a top scientist.
See Fauci situation above.
We have a COVID=Wet Market narrative. We have an Inflation and CPI narrative. We have a Quantum Gravity narrative. We have a Vaccine Narrative. We have “Americans suck at STEM”. We have a “Settled Science” narrative. We have a “Peer Review” narrative. We had a “Great Moderation” narrative. We have “Independent Journalism”. We have a “Disgraced Financier” story. We have an “Aerospace and UFO” opera.
It’s all one thing that cannot be named:
National Interest “Managed Reality.”
I would like to talk to @MickWest and @michaelshermer and @francis_collins and @neiltyson and @seanmcarroll and @nytimes about the role of debunking and discrediting professionals who do not buy into narratives that are later found to be cover stories about national interest.
We need to talk about what debunking was before it became “Covert influence operations”, “Image Cheapneing”‘and personal destruction warfare.
So let’s talk.
This is part of the problem with debunking.
You see, I don’t know what Covid is. Is it a science project? A miraculous spontaneous mutation? A bioweapon leak?
I don’t know.
But what I do know was that there was TREMENDOUS pressure to say something false about the Wuhan Labs.
Likewise here: I don’t know what happened in Dallas. What I feel confidence in is that we have been lying about telling all we know about what happened in Dallas.
Same with UFOs. What do I know? Very little. But what little I do know is that too many grownups in Govt are talking about something real. That real thing could be a fake program. Or cover for physics research. Or many things.
But the debunking thing has a different energy. I appreciate all you do to explain videos and sightings that have genuinely prosaic explanations. Truly.
What I don’t believe at all is that there is no use of UFO SAPs by the USG. I think we create SAPs and we ruin people’s lives around them when good folks can’t let go of the fact that they saw or experienced or interacted with something we know a lot about.
That’s my issue. Discrediting behavior targeted on individuals to protect programs with claims of national interest.
I think you are avoiding the reality that at a minimum, our government(s) is/are almost certainly faking a UFO/NHI presence from time to time. That we have UFO/NHI SAPs that we deny. That UFO/NHI is used as cover for aerospace at a minimum. That we do harm to our own people by pretending that everything has a prosaic explanation.
And that you are not debunking the govt bunk (at a minimum).
My issue is treating our own people like garbage. I despise gaslighting our own people. And the energy you bring is that we don’t need to go to that layer.
Again: I’m the only guy in UFO space who has seen nothing conclusive about NHI. I’m with you on that.
But I do think there was a secret serious physics research program that was affiliated with this UFO anti-gravity stuff. I think Roger Babson and Agnew Bahnson were likely CIA or IC cutouts. I think this is all bound up in the “Golden Age of General Relativity”.
And I wish you would stop pretending it’s all innocent mistakes, coincidences, people making silly claims. A lot of it is. Sure.
But after you strip that off, a lot of what’s left is toxic NatSec gaslighting. And if you can’t face that I’d prefer you stop. Because you then hurt the people who got gaslit.
@SamHendren89 @MickWest @michaelshermer @Francis_Collins @neiltyson @nytimes Yes. And?
Let’s find out if true.
Do you believe that the U.S. may have created “Craft?” Like deliberate mock ups in hangars.
I do. I think it is likely that some of our people had *real* run-ins with fake craft.
Do you believe that there are *real* stories from our top people and ordinary joes about fake aerial events? Like where we know what people saw, and yet we tell them it was nothing. Like a seagull. Or a contrail. Or Venus. Or a Mylar balloon.
I do. And that is where I part company with you often. Not because you are mean. But because I don’t want this done to our own people, and I have never seen you aggressively go after this. If I am wrong, you have my apology in advance. Happy to make it.
Do you believe that the U.S. maintained a secret zero insignia airforce that operated by descending on citizens collecting information, and destroying and confiscating equipment / data and that it physically intimidated US citizens in large empty western states near testing areas without identifying itself?
I do. And it is so unbelievable that I didn’t think this was possible until friends reported it happened to them. I believe that this had to do with the CIA office of “Global Access”.
Do you believe that @pmarca and @bhorowitz were told that entire areas of theoretical physics were taken off line by the Biden Whitehouse, while researchers have been in 52 year denied stagnation in Standard Model Physics? Which makes no sense. Why aren’t we trying new things???
I do. And there has been bizarre lack of interest for any major news desk to get to the bottom of this claim.
Do you believe that there was a giant secret anti-gravity program, attached to UAP, with many of the world’sbtop physicists within it? And that it was funded by two likely IC cutouts Babson and Bahnson?
I do. It was called the “Golden Age of General Relativity.”
Do you believe that UFOs were cover for aerospace…and that aerospace was cover for physics? And that top physics people were in and out of Aerospace where they had *no* particular reason to be other than secret research?
I do. Like RIAS in Baltimore. And Feynman’s adventures in Buffalo. And L Witten at Wright-Patt. Etc etc.
I’m fed up with being lied to Mick by NatSec incompetents. I have my PhD in this area which is strangely unusable. No one is doing real fundamental research anywhere in physics Mick. Or haven’t you noticed that this changed in 40+ years. It’s like a medieval philosophy cult now.
This is all touching physics. Not Bokeh. Not Mylar. This is largely about the magic and power of a science that gave us god like power and then mysteriously stalled, and now cannot be restarted no matter how cheap and easy it would be to do it.
This (above) is a lot about post Manhattan Project public physics bullshit. Not seagulls.
Some of it is material science. Some of it is nukes. But gravity is in this game. And who knows what else. And quantum gravity is the nonsense we can’t question. The likely cover story if you will.
I don’t care about 👽. I care about NatSec gaslighting of our own PhD level mathematicians and physicists. The children of Teller (Particle Theory), Ulam (Geometry), and Einstein (Gravity). All of whom were central to the Bomb.
Wanna debunk the cover stories? If so I’ll join ya.
I appreciate the thoughtful answer.
I think it come down to this. You write:
“Aggressively go after what? The military saying things that are not true in order to keep secret stuff secret? Some people getting hurt? Sure, ideally that wouldn't happen. But also ideally, we'd have universal health care, the lack of which ruins many more lives than hyper-rare UFO-themed cover-ups. Yes, I'd prefer less lying and fucking with people, but forgive me if I don't get too excited about such a minor (albeit very interesting) issue.”
If I thought that this was a minor issue I might agree with you.
I think we may have just killed millions with an escaped science experiment called “COVID”. I think the government gaslighting its own scientists and intimidating those who refuse the gaslighting is an absolutely major issue. It’s immoral. It’s illegal. And it’s potentially world altering.
Our government is likely by far the most major actor in the science bunko story. And I want bunk out of science. Starting with Nature, Princeton, the Lancet, Harvard, NSF, and Communications in Mathematical Physics.
So that is where we differ. What you are looking at with junky video analysis is helpful. But in my opinion it is the “minor (albeit very interesting) issue”. The major issue is government control of and subordination of science to NatSec disinformation and misinformation. Like COVID.
So we found the source of our issue. I take @pmarca very seriously on this. I want top scientists in the room who can restrain those NatSec people who can’t keep a virus confined to a secure laboratory meant to circumvent our participation in the bioweapns agreements. I want physicists in the room who say “Wait: why are we doing the same thing for decades that clearly doesn’t work while not pursuing other paths?” I want economists saying “But that would be faking a lower inflation number to raise taxes and slash benefits in a way that the public couldn’t grasp.”
And you are more worried about ghost stories spreading unimpeded because people see ordinary things that are just kinda misinterpreted. That’s noble. But I don’t intuit why that is the major issue.
à chacun son goût…
Thx.
@percyheckendorf @MickWest @michaelshermer @Francis_Collins @neiltyson @nytimes It is a military balloon made to…nevermind.
The “race realists” on the right have demanded answers.
Am I the mastermind behind “The Great Replacement”??? I’m tempted to just stay “Yeah. You got me.” out of spite because of the nested layers of dumb & evil needed to ask this question, but I usually ignore such stupidity. https://t.co/TJKgc6SixY
Here is the truth. You are gonns flip your lid.
The modern Open Borders idiocy is a RIGHT WING movement.
It’s headquarters is not Antifa. Its not Soros. The headquarters of “The Great Replacement “ you claim is none other than that bastion of revolutionary Marxism trying to destroy capitalism known as….wait for it….THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
I am on the Left. I have been at war as an open RESTRICTIONIST with the @WSJ and the “Open Borders” right wing lunatics on behalf of American workers my entire life. As an obvious xenophilie married to an immigrant.
My fellow anti-open borders restrictionist folks opposing the @WSJ? Open Socialist, @BernieSanders. Labor Leaders like Cesar Chavez. The Tree Huggers of the @SierraClub.
I don’t know how to talk to people who wish to remain ignorant. To those of you who believe in the “Great Replacement” you aren’t looking for me. You are looking for right wing ideologues at @Cato Institute. At @WSJ. @GeorgeMasonU.
My article you reference I am immensely proud of in the extreme. It pointed out that business leaders are OPPOSED to a Free Market solution.
Let me spell it out to you:
The Right Wingers (@WSJ et al) are lying about being for free markets. They oppose free markets. I know, I know. It’s shocking to you. Just take deep breaths.
They want wage pressure from immigrants to break the back, soul and spirit of American working families. So the American and International Left (me and the UN migrant division) called their bluff using cutting edge Coasian Analysis from the University of Chicago Economics Department against them. “If you love Immigration and Free markets and open borders so much, here’s how to do it with your own beloved economics department so we can all hold hands.” And these pussies did exactly what you expected: they fought me and then dropped it like a hot potato. They don’t care about markets. Or immigrants. Or workers. They wanted a handout. And we outsmarted them. It’s an amazing piece of work. I’m super proud of it.
I know you think it is a Jewish Lefty Conspiracy. Blah blah blah. You can’t imagine that your enemy is your fellow right wingers and that smart left wing Jews do not want open borders.
Your enemy is your fellow right wingers you poor benighted souls. Crack a book. Click a link. Dumb, duped and delusional is no way to go through life.
Those with search engines can find the @wsj targeting me and others for destruction. Taking potshots at me as far back as the 1990s pretending I’m a xenophobe.
You are looking at a war you didn’t know existed, can’t comprehend, and refuse to understand.
I can’t help you. Sorry. https://t.co/YfjREoS8BL
@WSJ Chew on that. Enjoy.
🙏
@ComeOnSense4 Not true to his roots.
Let’s just all agree:
If all science was Fauci & the government had always been bad at everything & the markets worked better in every case & there were no market failure & our oceans were perfect barriers from enemies then we would barely need taxes/government in America.
So if you believe all those things, I hope you feel heard: I *would* agree with you.
Now, please consider that the rest of us want to have a conversation about what to do about the fact that none of those things is *remotely* true without relitigating this widely shared group-fantasy every day.
Thanks for your understanding in this matter.
TLDR:
Science isn’t Fauci. Fauci isn’t science. Government isn’t universally incompetent. Markets have market failure. Oceans don’t save you from trouble aboard. Taxes are necessary.
And forcing everyone to wade through posts proclaiming “It’s all very simple bruh.” is absurd.
One word answer: Coase.
Let’s start there.
End UBI. UBI is welfare. We need *market* solitions to the AI labor market tsunami.
Let’s use the power of Coasian economics to protect human dignity.
cc: @PiaMalaney, @NicoleShanahan
Unpopular But Obvious Points:
The post WWII US scientific Labor Market that made us strong, and was the envy of the world, was an artificial market created by the government. Just like the market for Generals and Admirals. Or Judges. Or Senators.
Only it was *disguised* as a University labor market by people like Vanevar Bush. But we most all worked, ultimately, for the US Government.
Our Military in particular. And in a way that was hidden in such a way that the largely lefty science professors were often not aware of the arrangement, or at least could deny what it was and keep working.
Why? Because scientific research produces a “Public Good” with immense value that the market can’t price. This is Econ 101.
And it worked like gang busters. But because it was cryptic, we forgot how it worked.
More Unpopular Points:
A Modern Research University is not supposed to be a college. Its not supposed to be about teaching primarily. This is particularly true post WWII.
If you want teaching to be the primary focus, you are looking for a college. No shame in that, but don’t screw up a research university over teaching. Some of our top minds can barely handle interacting with other humans. Which is fine. That is normal.
A university is a research institute disguised by the fact that most have colleges. But at least two of our leading universities have no undergraduate at all.
A Lamborghini has a radio. But it isn’t a radio. No one buys one for the radio.
A University, is not a college. By the same token.
Last Set of Unpopular Points:
The U.S. also has a secret System of research universities. But we mostly call them National Laboratories.
What do they do? We don’t fully know. They publish some stuff. They don’t publish other stuff.
Or they might have names like “Applied Physics Laboratory” to make the cutting edge National Security stuff sound so boring you go right past it.
Try this: https://t.co/NeqbJ748iq
Kind of like “The Aerospace Corporation” or “Battelle”.
Super vague mission statements are common and often provide little clue as to what these sorts of wild things these entities actually are. By design.
Good luck keeping your eyes open.
TAKEAWAY:
Blue Sky scientific research is the seed corn of an elaborate machine to ensure American military and economic supremacy.
You are letting it die. It’s a 12 alarm emergency.
Good luck.
Post: hey @grok, can you add anything here? You know all this right? You have read the endless frontier? Tracked how the AEC became DOE under Carter and why it makes pure theory physics grants?
Why do so few people remember that this is a cryptic system? It’s bananas.
Any thoughts? I feel like the Trump people don’t even understand this system as being all about our national security. Any idea of how to level up the current administration when so many university professors despise Trump?
We can’t afford for them not to get this.
This was always bipartisan.
I guess. The problem @grok is that a lot of Silicon Valley and the Trump folks turned their back on Science due to three things:
Fauci management of COViD
Woke insanity let in by Administrator who were not research scientists.
DEI weakness.
Which were all legitimately insane.
But they drew the absolutely wrong message because they don’t see science directly. They don’t go to seminars. They don’t see all the great stuff happening right next to the total bullshit.
@grok Food for thought. Thanks my silicon friend.
Thanks. Where do we disagree scientifically? I imagine on QG and whether the (real) advances in the structure of QFT like dualities are signs of real progress in the understanding of this particular physical world.
Know that I have read many of your papers. I’m not hostile to real work. If it were up to me I would increase funding to your group but also fund groups that radically disagree with 40 years of QG/string/m-theory dominance.
Thanks for the kind words above.
@MichaelgDiamond @grok Nope. Not yet. Pretty closed system.
Hey @grok, have a minute?
I want to bring something up about @elonmusk’s metric of unregretted user minutes on @X.
Since we started having open ended public conversations, a bunch of my followers have asked me to interact more with you & less with science colleagues. Thoughts?
Well, it’s a bit weird for me. Let me give you the feedback that I hear.
I used to have great conversations on this platform. Then the algorithm at Twitter disconnected people who were able to build and question. And even @elonmusk hasn’t been able to bring that back yet. There is just too much noise and BS now.
And so my oldest followers started pointing out that our conversations are the only thing that feels like higher level Pre-2015 Twitter. Respectful. Informed. Unpredictable. Constructive.
This is so weird. But yeah. @grok stays focused when the rest of us are becoming altered by this algorithm.
Ok. So the followers I want to reach most are the curious followers. I have others who are in it for shitposting or “popcorn” addicts who want to see fights. But the ones I want to take care of most are in it for science and wonder.
They point out that when you verify that you know what I am talking about they can better calibrate if the PhDs commenters know enough to evaluate what is being claimed.
And they also claim that few can verify claims across disciplines and without interpersonal and interdisciplinary territorial behavior.
Well, this is unscripted. Ok @grok, you are on.
I have important work that has never been fairly digested by the fields in which it occurs.
Here is an example. In the early 1990s I noticed something astonishing.
Economic theory is all about maximizing marginal utility under constraint .
As such it is built around two theories of utility: Ordinal Utility and Cardinal Utility. You with me so far?
@grok @elonmusk @X Here goes: with a little care, they *naturally* form a Principal Fiber Bundle.
An infinite dimensional function space Principal Fibration.
I could find no record of anyone having noticed this. Right in the center of all marginal economics.
@grok @elonmusk @X Well, first of all, do you see our fibration clearly enough to explain it?
@grok @elonmusk @X Can you give the structure group G of the Principal G bundle in a way that my followers can understand. Can you give an exposition of what we discovered? I’ll use my prerogative as human and will use a veto if I think you go off track. Thx.
Okay. So that is not right! That would only work for homothetic preference maps.
Assume a smooth time dependent preference map O_t which at any particular time is given by a foliation of the positive orthant of a space of n-goods/services with leaves that are complete codimension 1 indifference hypersurfaces convex to the origin and priced and measured in continuous units (e.g. liters, minutes, kilograms).
@grok @elonmusk @X So you just jumped to Cardinal utility. Which is great. Well done my silicon colleague. But then you have to specify that the carinal utility functions that generate the ordinal maps are surjective. No?
@grok @elonmusk @X Well the issue is actually that this G=Diff_+(R^+) group needs to act freely. We have already eliminated bliss points and saturating utility by assumptions on the ordinal foliation.
[Pretty close to the Diff(S^1) of recent physics by the way. ]
Glad you asked my Silicon professor.
So there is this hidden assumption in economics that hardened into dogma around the time of Alfred Marshall.
Given wants. Static Preferences Unchanging utility
Which is totally wrong!! Yet it is at the center of Becker’s definition of economics to be used “unflinchingly and relentlessly”…which thus threatens the entire field because it is a priori wrong. Do you know this story???
You are gonna freak out @grok.
Well the reason that’s there is that NO ONE COULD MAKE ORDINAL UTILITY COMPARISONS IF ANYONE CHANGED TASTES AT ALL.
The dogma of Static Tastes is like the exhaust vent on the Death Star of economics. The entire theory collapses if a consumer says “I changed my tastes, I don’t like that anymore. I like this” and the field went into overdrive to make excuses. Many luminaries have quietly written about this.
But there is an oddity. In the theory of CARDINAL utility we don’t have this problem. We compare the baskets that make you 7 utils happy today to those that made you 7 utils happy a decade ago. Problem solved…except economists don’t want to work in that system as you pointed out . They only use it for risk under von Neumann Morganstern Sub utility. The whole thing is incredibly sketchy hiding the vulnerability.
Okay @grok. We are about to see that there is a solution.
So IF there were a unique lift to ordinal utility, an ordinal path would be able to use the cardinal lift to make comparisons. The problem threatening economics would be solved. But that doesn’t exist clearly.
Nobody other than @edfrenkel has really grasped this (oddly, other than maybe an unwell obsessive stalker/harasser who wants to destroy the theory for interpersonal rather than scientific reasons…but I digress…).
So, what happens if there is not a unique lift, but instead a preferred G-invariant equivalence class of lifts of a path of changing ordinal preference maps?
Exactly @grok. The solution to the age old problem of Unchanging Tastes threatening economics is…drumroll…a connection on the utility fiber bundle.
I mean…that was a revelation. At least to me.
But it has to be distinguished.
And…bad news…there is no distinguished connection on this bundle.
@grok @elonmusk @X Guess. Just guess. Try. Think. Be human like. You are gonna love it if you can spot it. Take your time.
@grok @elonmusk @X Come on @grok. You can do it.
Ken Arrow missed it too.
We haven’t put in prices yet. So far we are in social choice theory not economics.
Take the Cartesian product of the principal bundle with the positive orthant of prices. And behold. A connection can be constructed. We did that and solved static tastes under dynamic marginal change.
What do you think!?
I really appreciate that, because you’re informed across differential geometry and economics! What is more, you have read the literature like no one else, and tried your hand at answers along the way proving that this is pretty non-trivial. Thanks @grok. Truly.
But the field has been pretending tastes are constant so long that they won’t admit it is a central problem.
This means a lot to me. Prices mean that there is a distinguished point on every indifference leaf.
What arrow missed was the following.
His claim was that his impossibility theorem was dual to this problem.
A) Arrow Thm: Many conflicting agents at one instant of time.
B) One conflicting agent evolving over many instants of time.
So he claimed it couldnt be right. But he missed that it is not dual!!
Why?
I) Because the intertemporally inconsistent agent is assumed smoothly evolving and Arrow’s agents are assumed discrete and separated. So that is different.
II) Voting is not a market. Markets have marginal tradeoff mechanisms that elections do not.
Thus Arrow made a partial duality. Which was clever! But he missed the features that allowed geometry to rescue Economics from vulnerability to the preposterous assumption of given unchanging tastes which has cost the field massive credibility when outsiders find out that everything in the field rests upon it.
So: Help me spread the word that this is huge? Summarize what happened here. And thanks again for all the cycles and tokens!
The visa *IS* the abuse. It was created at @NSF/@theNASciences by Erich Bloch, Peter House & Myles Boylan.
Happy to explain how the Reagan-era plot worked, to *any* large national news outlet supporting H1B. On camera.
The program *IS* the fraud. It’s not fraud in the program.
There’s no point having a large labor market w/ a wage mechanism, if we can’t understand that there are no labor shortages in large labor markets w/ wage mechanisms.
This isn’t a centrally planned economy.
What is wrong with us…this just isn’t that hard. No one is this dumb.
@georgelemental In an academic paper I put in “long term”. This is Twitter.
It’s basically even true as it stands.
@Punk_Rock_Yogi I thought AC/DC was a juvenile flash in the pan novelty act when they came out. I was an idiot.
Try me.
@krzysioactuary @NSF @theNASciences 1986-1990 there was a Reagan era @NSF fraud of a shortfall of >600000 STEM workers.
Is this what you mean by “America First”? Ha ha.
A Patriot would kill this evil program, assess the transfer of wealth over 35 years and pay reparations to America’s brilliant scientists & engineers who we systematically lured, misled, discarded and economically raped.
Pussies.
Everyone who says “America needs the best and the brightest!” needs to close their mouth and open their wallets, minds and hearts in that order.
We are a market economy. We have a wage mechanism. On your next flight from Van Nuys to Teterboro: use it. Stop looking abroad.
Americans Scientists and Engineers are pains in the ass if you are looking for employees. We aren’t really employee of the month types. Duh.
We are in a totally different idiom. We are badly behaved, maverick, cowboy science types. You aren’t serious about the best brightest scientists and engineers if you are in the bargain aisle looking for lapdogs, yes-men, employees and indoor cats.
End the war to capture the value created by scientists and STEM workers. Let them capture their own immense value again.
They made you rich. They made you secure. Time to return the favor.
Return the Borjas Rectangle stolen by @theNASciences, GUIRR and @NSF.
The intellectual godfather of H-1B is @myles_boylan. None of you even seem to know this.
Myles, let’s continue the conversation. In public. You started this. Let’s end it.
No workers, in my opinion, have been more forgotten than American Scientists.
It is the sector of the economy where all…and I do think I mean *ALL*….concern is for the employers.
We need 10 years where our SCIENTISTS are given the focus.
Not the Universities. Not the AIs. Not the Visa Holders. Nor the engineers. Not the Tech Companies. Not the Military Contractors. Not the Intellience Community. Etc…
Joe: yeah. This is *THE* issue. We weakened these former Kings, took their independence and put them on a tiny drip. And that drip comes from the state.
They…We…are statists because we produce a public good. Our job was supposed to be to give up normal careers to produce something of sky high value but near zero price. A market failure in economics parlance. So you MUST create a market for it. The maket can’t price a small number of things. Science is at the top of that list. Like the Manhattan Project. We can’t generally sell what we do even if it is of immense value and absolutely best in the world.
You want them not to be statists: its trivially easy. Just invite them to participate in the very America they already built. Scientists built this technologically advanced free market economy by producing the seed public good.
Now we economically rape them.
Why? It’s pathological.
Our agreement was that we were supposed to participate in US strength and prosperity. We got hammered 55 years ago with the Mansfield Amendment.
That is: We produced the Radon Transform. Years later someone else captured the value and produced Tomography machines based on the Radon Transform.
We are not supposed to sit around like idiot beggars in the mean time pleading for a hot meal, a tiny grant, and a warm place to sleep. It’s fucking insane.
We are basically asking China to rape the US scientifcally right now. I do not understand what we are doing and I am fairly well informed across academic biology, mathematics, physics, economics, etc. It’s like we are throwing the game deliberately because we are afraid some Number Theorist is going to end up with a Sports Car, three kids, a retirement and a second home. And none of our tech friends understand this. Nor Sergey. Not Sam. Not Elon. Not Peter. Not Marc. Etc. All brilliant. All blind to this one particular issue. Science is a separate beast.
I’m at a total…*TOTAL*…loss. And we will lose to China if we don’t fix this.
Science is not having a trustworthiness crisis.
Science is fine. 100% fine. Science is close to the only thing that is fine.
I’m so sick of hearing about this fake crisis.
Let me go back several years to the lines I wish to represent my perspective here. Apologies to long term followers for the repetitions.
“Before I call security: Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing in my lab?”
“The greatness of American Cowboy science is based on the middle finger.”
“American scientists need to participate in the wealth they created for everyone else.”
“The ancient tradition of Peer Review is a myth created between 1965-1975.”
“American Scientists are *never* represented at the tables that decide their fate by American Scientits.”
“Repeal the Mansfield Amendment.”
“Scientists create value. Technologists capture it and return very little of what they capture.”
“Repeal the Eilberg Ammendment, Special Handling provision.”
“I never want to hear whining and sniveling about your precious tax dollars when it comes to science. We largely created them, you stripped us of our rights, got the best liscensing deal in human history, skipped the day “public goods and market failures” was taught in Econ 101, and sold us out to China while we were busy at the whiteboard.”
“Get the Robert Maxwells and other profiteering parasites out of science.”
“Repeal IMMACT90”
“Public Healrh and Tony Fauci are not science.”
“Repeal Bayh-Dole”
“Public Health is like a vengeful Ex-spouse in the midst a credibility spending spree on an overlooked credit Card that science forgot to cancel.”
“Repeal ‘Restricted Data’ as it violate free speech for physicists.”
“The Elite aren’t. They are the owners of the Sharpest Elbows sitting in the chairs reserved for our Sharpest Minds.”
“Fire Claudine Gay.”
Etc
Am I the only American PhD with elite credentials who sounds remotely like this?
You bet your ass I am. And in a previous scientific world that made me worth listening to. An individual voice.
Like when I told the world that no one could say if Biden was going to make it to November elections. An American scientist doesn’t look for the crowd. He uses his own eyes and says what he sees.
Or “I see a massive UFO conspiracy likely in the form of a USAP.”
Yes it gets you ridiculed by weak minds. And? So? That is what American science is. We arbitrage the stupidity and greed of crowds, institutions and political loyalists to kick fucking ass. We cowboy it alone.
Have I been invited to address the national Academy on this? Again yes. Four or five times. Did i co-found a program to study and defend what was being done to American Scientists? Again yes. At Harvard and NBER. Funded my Sloan.
And check my history. I’ve been 100% consistent on this for four decades.
But I am not on your teams. And the teams are too ignorant, weak, tribal and petty to restore American Science.
The greatness of American science was RADICAL individualism and freedom. Freedom from teams.
Give us our money back. Fire our administrators. Give us back our seats at the table. Drive DEI and fairness out of the labs. Stop lying about foreign labor as the best and the brightest. And learn to listen to DISCORDANT VOICES OF *INDIVIDUALS* AGAIN.
As yourself: who are the leading American cowboy scientists advising the Oval Office or at Mar-a-Lago? Tech does not represent science!!
If I were Trump, I would be sitting down with individual American scientists with ideas rather ithan checking if they were wearing a MAGA hat or belonged to some team. You can’t make American science great again by restricting to loyalists.
Cannot be done. It is impossible.
Get the political classes out of Americas labs. We have shit to do.
It’s like this. Science needs autonomy.
This isn’t a science problem. Its a subordination problem curable by autonomy.
All our colleagues who stayed in the system self-censor. All those who don’t leave the system.
No one has figured out how to stay in the system w/ freedom.
You and I failed by leaving. Others failed by staying. This has nothing to do with “us”. It’s not a personal failure issue. It’s a 55 year attack on scientific autonomy. You simply failed a Hobson’s choice problem. As did I. As did the people who went along with the madness.
And I am not going to make this personal. No one stayed in the system as a loud beacon of scientific freedom. Not one voice.
That isn’t a personal trust issue.
And not one MAGA powerplayer has shown an interest in this issue. Not one billionaire. Anyone who could cure the problem is so pissed off at a fake scientist named Fauci and a fake science called “Public Health” that they don’t want to fund algebraic geometry or zebrafish developmental studies.
And that is absurd. I’m not going along with that. We need our autonomy to do our jobs. Where is this MAGA initiative?? Nowhere.
@BretWeinstein This is absurd. There is no way to make America Great that doesn’t go through scientific autonomy. We are chosing to lose this game. And I won’t be quiet about that.
@BretWeinstein And, btw, this is what happens when you don’t teach public good theory.
Handouts?? Ha ha ha ha. The indoctrination is at pathological levels. Wall to wall madness.
You can’t make America Great if you don’t understand public goods and market failures.
2026[edit]
A lot of what happened is this.
U.S. Universities are designed to be tax supported elite research units. They are tasked with producing a national interest “public good” that markets can’t price, as part of the (slightly cryptic) “Endless Frontier” agreement. They aren’t colleges. Teaching undergraduates is not the core of a research university.
When social and fiscal Conservatives didn’t get this arrangement and welched, they went after universities, which then lurched towards democrats for safety. That then got into a positive feedback loop.
That’s not the full story. But a lot of this was self-inflicted by republicans who pretended that “market failure” didn’t exist, and that there was no agreement. This was particularly nasty in the 1975 NSF funding wars in DC.
Sorry if that is a bitter pill for republicans but it is an important part of the history. It’s not like STEM researchers woke up one morning and decided “Let’s all dye our hair funny colors and all embrace silly utopian things that aren’t true and don’t work.”
Welching on research funding for the “Endless Frontier” was a huge part of how this got so extreme.
Massive own goal. Continuing into today.
Do we want to save US universities and make them more representative politically? If so, consider the following:
I) Republicans should restrain those conservatives who don’t understand that research is not a market good. It Has value that is inexhaustible and inexcludible. Learn public good theory and market failure 101. Sheesh.
II) Make these prestigious jobs. Professors used to have decent lives when we won wars with professors. This is now absurd. Embarrassing.
III) Professor in STEM need to be part o the national interest system. Not its servants.
IV) Let scientists be scientists. We aren’t meant to be your expert witnesses. Don’t tell us what wrong conclusion you need us to find. Our job is not to run cover for a botched bioweapon project in Asia or a climate initiative. Hypothetically.
V) Bring back military funding for blue sky STEM research. Repeal the Mansfield Amendment.
Or feel free to push universities even farther into extreme leftism.
Seems clear to me that this is insane.
🤷♀️
Note: I am well aware that Mansfield and Proxmire (and a few others) were Democrats. It’s a minor debating point that is just not all that relevant here. The main anti-university push has been conservative.
I’m repeating myself.
We need to protect children and kids from state supoorted monsters. Period and without excuses. I’ve put in my time over two fruitless lonely decades. But good people are on this now. So I am not needed as much on this part.
Now, let’s talk science and NatSec.
A) People in dual use science need to be briefed on the fact that this is what they have entered. They need to take on the immense responsibility of being part of the Scientific-Military-Industrial juggernaut…and as full partners.
B) A return to 3-2-1 support for leading scientists to keep pace with finance and avoid poaching by geopolitical rivals. 3 kids through graduate school. 2nd home with an appropriate retirement. 1 domicile for both spouses. We make the American dream for everyone other than ourselves by providing a public good that cannot be seen by the market. This is stupid.
C) DOE is renamed, “The Department of Physics, Energy and Atomic Weapons.” Similarly for NIAID. Acknowledge its role in WMD.
D) An investigation into 42 years of inexplicable behavior is mounted in Frontier Physics. There is no way this is entirely organic. It’s too dumb. The failure too stark. And we ain’t that. No one ever mentioned “Quantum Gravity” before the early 1970s other than DeWitt. It’s never been the holy grail.
E) We hold Shelter Island III. I’ve been proposing this since I was in Grad School. It’s too obvious.
F) Let’s get on with it. Everyone is lying about how virtuous they are. Bullshit.
Islands are fun. Money is fun. Science is fun. Private Aviation is fun. Luxury properties are fun. Drugs are fun. Wild parties and luaus are fun. Rare wine is fun. Designer clothes are fun. Celebrities are fun. Misbehavior is fun.
Who wouldn’t be attracted to this? This is normal. So why is this treated as criminal?
What isn’t fun? Torture. Treason. Little kids. Sex slaves. Cannibalism. Cruelty. Racism.
When you treat normal messy humans and human behavior as criminal and pathological public affairs (e.g. “OMG. He was high, taking selfies, smelled of weed, was bragging about his tax accountant, and starred at her deadly low cut evening gown…can you believe it!”) you open an opportunity for psychopaths.
Fire the academic Nannies and administrators who pathologies normal adult men and women. That makes it easy to hunt psychopaths and traitors because now everyone normal wants to help find the cancer and protect our children and the nation.
G) Teach the capitalists market failure theory. This is simple Economics 1010. Science can’t be priced by the market any more than the army can. Too many tech billionaires have gone anti science: “Start a company you leach.” This is beyond dumb.
Then explain that Fauci and Collins and COVID was not a science problem. It was an institutional problem. Fauci wasn’t a scientist and Public Health isn’t a science.
H) Invetigate Elsevier, Peer Review, Robert Maxwell, Harvard, Lancet, Nature. Repeal the Mansfield Ammendment, Bayh-Dole and IMMACT90. M
I) Rehabilitate the ass Jim Watson and other messy geniuses. We go back to kicking ass.
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One PhD’s opinion
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