Great to see you launch this! I know you've put a lot of work into it and I've found it fine going through the samples. (Disclaimer: family member of the OP)
Bit of feedback: It would be a little easier to jump into the Learning mode if it defaulted with more UI space.
Speciation of archaic humans is an attempt at applying discrete categorization to continuous phenomena. It's like looking at a rainbow and trying to figure out where red ends and orange begins. Also interesting is Homo Longi, which can be argued to be Denisovan, or maybe not, depending on where you want to draw the lines on the raindow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_longi
The lines are arbitrary, but it may still be useful to draw them for some applications.
It’s a rainbow all the way back to the first tetrapod (and beyond). But clearly we are not fish, so somewhere in that spectrum there is a useful distinction to be made, a line to be drawn. Of course, the closer you get to finding that line, the faster it vanishes. It’s equally futile to say that we are indistinct from fish because there is no clear and decisive separator.
The concept (and definition) of red, orange, etc. is important and useful. A great many things would be impossible without it frankly. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy]
Applying it in real life in some situations sometimes has a fractal like quality. Like measuring a shoreline.
I’ve gotten the impression from several practicing archaeologists that the biggest reason they haven’t unified a bunch of the Homo species is that no one can quite agree on how to do it and there’s so much inertia in the field. Between ample evidence of interbreeding, the growing evidence that our genetic differences weren’t that significant compared to modern variability in the human gene pool, and a reevaluation of morphological differences it’s getting harder and harder to justify keeping them separate.
As a sibling comment mentions, this is true for pretty much all animals. It's a well-known, old problem. Darwin even mentions it in the Origin of Species and says that "species" is really just a term of convenience applied somewhat arbitrarily according to the different tastes of different naturalists.
Now we understand even better that, like GP said, there are no discrete groupings we can label as a species. It's a useful abstraction at a 5000ft level but it breaks down when you zoom in.
If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated.
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
Ah, I perhaps should have read all the comments before posting here, because it seems that you're answering my question, and confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.
This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research.
If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English.
But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
>confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.
As I understand it, this is a recent development as in the science of language is a recent development. We might not have known about it but it was always there.
I think the comparaison with Greek or Latin is a good one. I can read modern French and Chinese, and my understanding of Latin and Classical Chinese is about the same: virtually nonexistent, at most a word here and there. The reason why Chinese understand it is because they learn it at school.
There's no great analogy where the modern language is English, because English does not position itself as a successor of a long, linguistically-continuous literary tradition. That said, there is certainly an Anglo tradition of education in which well-educated schoolboys were expected to be able to puzzle through a smattering of horribly butchered Greek and Latin.
Vacheron Constantin was founded in 1755 by Jean-Marc Vacheron, a watchmaker, who later took on a partner François Constantin who traveled the world managing sales of their highly complicated watches. In fact, the two (Vacheron and Constantin) barely ever met and communicated solely through letters. The "Overseas" model of watches, which is their most popular sports model, celebrates this fact in the name (that the company was literally built through communication over oceans) and VC is arguably one of the top 3 swiss watch brands that still thrives today.
I'm not saying that the business didn't have a physical location (it clearly did for manufacturing) but if two co-founders could build a remote-first startup using 1755 technology, there's no reason why early stage startups today with the power of Slack, Zoom, Email, Git, etc can't build the next generation of business in a fully remote fashion. Startups like this will naturally have a competitive advantage when hiring as well, as they'd be able to tap into a world-market, rather than a local-market.
Remote work is here to stay and companies that can find a good hybrid of remote and in-person will thrive going forward, as has always been the case, whether it's 1755 or 2055.
I don't think meta is going to lead the charge, but soon we'll have quality vr worlds where we can commute to virtually and meet in person in our own home office.
if we're building to that, why not rip the band-aid off since there's enough tools to make it feasible?
The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard. We as a whole are much more educated now and the idea that legacy institutions should serve as gatekeepers of education or validation thereof based on reputation alone seems outdated. These schools should be judged by the rigor and quality of their curriculum rather than the reputations of their past. And I say this as someone who graduated from one of these top schools.
Funny, I constantly think how much more educated the educated people were in the past than today. The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s. I would argue that the vast majority of graduating college students are almost entirely unable to write a half decent essay. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that more people get to go to college, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the average person is so highly educated!
I’m not sure why this is getting downvoted. Every time I read through a scientific journal from the 60’s or 70’s I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that the qualitative and quantitative reasoning is clearer and more sophisticated than what I see in many contemporary publications. The OP is perhaps justified that we should fixate less in the US news rankings, but the sense of decay seems justified.
Imposter syndrome is frequently brought up to reassure people but in a lot of cases I see that people are actually frauds and we mask this over with endless positive affirmations. It is genuinely upsetting to see mediocre researchers get tenure when there is such a glut of talent that is simply passed over.
That would make sense. There are probably a lot of reasons for this trend. The OP's point about fixating on US News ranking seems related to your suggestion. Whatever the cause may be it seems clear to me that a lot of our best scientific minds are increasingly excluded and marginalized by the modern academy.
> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.
Sounds like you're just making this up. Have any studies on this or something not anecdotal?
IQ talk is funny like that. It’s intended to give a science-y sounding veneer to whatever argument is being made but because actual studies are a lot of work, people just throw around numbers with nothing more than “common sense.”
Given that it’s all “common sense” people ought to skip the veneer and just say “more intelligent”, “less intelligent”, “much more intelligent”, and so on. That’s more honest rhetoric.
I don’t claim it isn’t real. What I claim is that people like to throw around random made up facts involving IQ to make their arguments seem science-y and that they ought not to.
I'll go on the record to say that IQ is as real as any other social construct like money, God, or nationality. Depending on your predilection that can range from worthless to "party of the fabric of reality itself."
IQ isn't a social construct. It is a actual quantitative measure of how well the brain can process information. This is why lead blood concentration causes a predictable decrease in IQ.
You can measure how much money you have in your bank account and money is a social construct. Spending money leads to having measurably less money. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
You might be confusing "social construct" with fake. That's not at all what I'm saying.
IQ isn't a social construct because intelligence is not a social construct. A social construct is something that is created by everyone agreeing that it is real, like money. Human intelligence is a function of how the human brain works and is NOT a social construct.
It's funny arguing with someone who has reified the concept so thoroughly that dereification is unthinkable.
First off I'm setting aside the argument that intelligence is constructed or not. Ssecondly, social ontologists would say that you're arguing from grounding.
You're arguing that because one thing is grounded in the other and the latter is real that the former is real as well. It also sounds like this is taken as axiomatic, to which I simply say, prove that's how grounding works.
Everything is a social construct. It is just a vapid meaningless statement sociologists use to legitimize their expertise and colonize other fields of inquiry that were traditionally the domains of philosophers and scientists. The whole thing is just repackaged Marxist analysis of everything as a social relation.
Things that only work if everyone thinks they are real ARE social constructs. Money is the best example of these. But some pretentious people just LOVE to feel smart by saying everything is a social construct like it is some profound insight that we would all be in awe of.
"sociologists use to legitimize their expertise and colonize other fields of inquiry that were traditionally the domains of philosophers and scientists. The whole thing is just repackaged Marxist analysis of everything as a social relation."
It’s a very heterogenous academic field. Some parts of it are scientific; some parts are pseudo-scientific; some parts are simply non-scientific, which, of course, doesn’t mean that those parts are less worthy or worse than scientific parts.
Right, and even withing social ontology/constructivism there are multitudes. Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature. If you have specific critiques feel free to share them but, "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get.
> Right, and even withing social ontology/constructivism there are multitudes.
There are multitudes; and that’s exactly why such statements are vapid and contain no information. You failed to clarify what you meant and only managed to make a vague reference to Berger.
There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.
> Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature.
Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.
> "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get
It sounds like you've read a critique of social construction without actually reading much about social construction itself.
Social construction is an lens of interpretation in the toolkit of critical thinking. I like to frame it as an epistemological question that simply asks, "How do you know that?" It's extremely powerful when used against topics where people make claims that are "obvious", "reality", "truth", or even "science".
Science itself is an epistomological framework and subject to interpretation from other (meta-)epistomological frameworks eg: scientific examination of social construction is just as valid a pursuit as the social construction of science. In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.
>There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.
You're describing science. Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on." This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.
> Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.
We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.
> It's extremely powerful when used against topics where people make claims that are "obvious", "reality", "truth", or even "science".
It is an extremely powerful rhetorical device, yes. You can equivocate IQ with “the social construct of IQ” and make seemingly profound statements.
> In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.
Scientists that study IQ can study how useful it is as a metric, whether it has predictive power, whether it is biased, how it relates to common notions of intelligence, how it correlates to other traits, whether it should be used for welfare means testing, etc. The framework of social constructivism cannot help much with that: the flow of knowledge mostly runs in the opposite direction.
> You're describing science.
No, I am describing why sociologists like to use that concept.
> Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on."
Lots of things allow people to claim authority on something. That’s not what makes science science.
> This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.
> We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.
I totally agree. That’s why “IQ is a social construct” is a vapid meaningless statement. You can put anything instead of IQ and it will make as much sense.
You seem to be confused about the difference between labeling something as a social construct and analyzing it as a social construct. Can I ask how you were introduced to the concept?
I am not familiar enough to understand what information you are trying to convey using that term. Can you confirm that IQ is a social construct in exactly the same way all other things I listed are social constructs?
Then it seems extremely disingenuous that you only mention money, God and nationality as if you have an axe to grind. Why not say that it is a social construct like the Global Warming, the Holocaust and gender dysphoria?
HN members on average hold views on these topics that are more apt to view as socially constructed than other topics. By focusing on these topics, we can explore why they might be socially constructed and why those reasons are necessary and sufficient. Once establishing that, we can examine IQ to see if they apply as well.
Don't mistake me bringing them up as an endorsement or critique of them in and of themselves. Besides, bringing up global warning, the holocaust, and gender dysphoria will inevitably attract follow-ons who want to debate the validity of those topics.
I'm not here to do that. What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example. If you want to switch to a different set, by all means, go ahead and choose them instead. I personally think it will be a less productive discussion, but I'm willing to play along.
I don't know what you mean by that, but to me it gives an impression of run-off-the-mill bashing of "fake" and "bad" things like gender, race, religion, capitalism, nationality that we should re-think and re-make where "social construct" is used as an ambiguous slur by someone who learned about it on Reddit or BuzzFeed. I guess I wasn't the intended audience of that comparison.
> What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example.
I usually interpret "a social construct" in a way that ranges from being a synonym for "a social contract" to a synonym for something like Kantian appearance (insofar as conception of any object in mind is partly influenced by social institutions) depending on context. But many people seem to make it extremely hard to understand what they mean exactly. So providing examples helps understand what is being asserted. If someone starts talking that X is a social construct just like all that other bad stuff, asking them whether good stuff is a social construct helps ensure that they aren't engaged in agenda-posting or, at least, have far less wiggle room for pushing their rhetoric.
> finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.
Lead toxicity was identified more than 2000 years before the first IQ test, and was rather extensively studied during the Renaissance. The combination of blood lead and IQ tests was important in quantifying the existence and impacts of particular kinds and levels of environmental exposure that had been assumed to be forms of levels that would not be hazardous, but it was not important to identifying lead as a toxin.
If you live in a society where most people go to university, and average IQ is 100 (by definition it was when it was normed) then you're going to get people with <100 IQs going to university, and some of them will graduate.
We're not in such a society though. Ignoring master's, bachelor's, and decent grades to just focus on a lower bar of "people with associate's degrees regardless of grades" we're still shy of 50%, even if we restrict to younger age groups like 25-30 years old.
That image lacks an obvious source or any explanation for methods of how the data was gathered and I can find no record of a study or context that corresponds to this image.
What I can find is a wikimedia entry with the image but no attribution except the "US Census" and no actual link to any publication put out by the Census Bureau. The archive link goes to a page that does not actually contain this graphic, or the data necessary to generate it, making it a bit suspect to begin with.
The census also don't systematically collect IQ scores or themselves administer IQ tests, making the details, data, and methodology of any study they produce paramount to interpreting this barebones graph. The title of the graph itself is borderline ridiculous, awkwardly stated at best and downright deceptive:
IQ tests are not a requirement for graduating college, and taking them at all is relatively uncommon these days.
As it stands, this image is worthless without context, and that context is oddly elusive except for an anonymous wikimedia post that did not cite the source with any specificity required to authenticate it.
This image is even more worthless than it seems. The post on Wikimedia is an original work. Its description states: "As the percentage of graduates increases the minimum IQ to include at least that percentage of graduates inherently decreases. Since 2000 the intelligence required to be a college graduate has been less than the intelligence required to graduate from high school in 1940, based on a standard distribution."
It seems the author took the the percentage of the population that graduated high school/college each year and then found the corresponding percentile on an IQ bell curve and used those as the y-values. This methodology only makes sense if you assume that high school/college graduates are exactly the highest IQ population and that everyone who does not graduate isn't intelligent enough to do so. This chart also almost certainly doesn't normalize IQ over time, even though IQ is constantly redefined so that 100 is average while raw intelligence scores have increased over time [1].
What this chart actually shows is the highest possible IQ of the graduate with the lowest IQ in a given year, a statistic that seems to have dubious value.
You’re right it is worse. It looks like they assumed college-going students would approximate the standard distribution of scores for the population as a whole, which… no. An awful assumption for an activity where academic ability is a primary gatekeeper at the same time that they’re attempting to apply a metric of IQ essentially as a proxy for academic ability/knowledge/whatever. (“Whatever” because the entire concept of intelligence is filled with varying definitions)
Most of the Ivies were much more academically rigorous in the past. There were no ideological, unrigorous majors like Sociology or Gender Studies. Graduates were expected to read both Greek and Latin.
Those divinity students at a good school in the 1800s were incredibly smart and erudite. Even if you think theology is wrong or silly, it doesn’t mean the people were silly.
Weirdly, I don’t think society and the role of gender in it are worthless topics of study, and I don’t think intellectual rigor should be measured primarily by knowledge of the languages that form the roots of the non-Germanic portion of English.
While I'm equally skeptical of certain modern majors, I'm not convinced that just because the "educated Western man" (and, yes, we're mostly talking men) of the 19th century were expected to be well-versed in certain subjects doesn't mean there aren't better options for many today.
Almost all of those men went on to marry women who were also very well-educated on the classics. Education was about social class much more than gender.
The fact that we only hear about "great educated men" in the history books has more to do with a bias in society than with who actually got educated.
From what I see, that was mostly a Victorian era thing. Not sure about earlier--though there were certainly tutors for the upper class. Certainly, in general, women weren't learning classical languages in universities until female colleges became fairly common in the US and Britain.
Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented, so you can't exactly infer an absence of education from the absence of evidence.
What we know is that the very wealthy often had private tutors for their daughters, and that some women also learned a lot from their parents. Records exist that describe the tutelage of aristocratic and royal women, and it's not hard to extrapolate that those professional tutors probably needed other clients (from the less-well-off aristocracy and merchants) to both "climb the ladder" and fill the gaps between aristocrats' daughters.
An interesting tidbit in this regard is that we actually do know that the women in the (middle class) Bach family were as musically-educated as the men, since they ended up as leading sopranos in opera houses. Some people theorize that the Bach women were the ones teaching their sons music, not the men.
Universities definitely aren't the only places to get educated, and they were a men's club for a shockingly long time. Women were getting higher education in more private settings.
> Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented
There are plenty of female diarists. Court cases often delved into women’s lives. Women belonged to institutions like convents that kept records.
The real gaps in documentation aren’t based on gender but class. Not entirely clear what medieval peasants did with their time.
But even then, inquisitions kept meticulous records and regularly investigated small towns. Women were questioned as often as men.
Modern historians (pre-1970s) may have been less interested in women’s lives, but they weren’t necessarily less documented.
Edit: another big gap in records is from the wars of the 20th century. WWII and the wars of the 1990s destroyed “the record” in large parts of eastern europe.
Musical education absolutely, which in the days before recorded music was a relatively widespread and practical undertaking. I assume that private tutoring in classical subjects for upper class women was, if not the norm, probably not rare. And we do know of some examples like Ada Lovelace.
>they were a men's club for a shockingly long time
But, yeah. A lot of elite universities had a rather small percentage of women well into the latter half of the 20th century. Those that have larger numbers was often because there were sister female schools like Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. Dartmouth College didn't start admitting women until the 1970s.
I forgot to add this, and it still seems relevant: before the industrial revolution (the Victorian era), education in the West was pretty rare in general for members of both genders, and very much the privilege of the upper classes.
Or perhaps, since IQ is relative to general population, the average person is a lot smarter due to better nutrition, less lead exposure, and access to information?
>The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.
IQ is in practice affected by education (to a small extent and mostly in early childhood), but the whole point of it as a concept was to avoid measuring education. So I don't think it follows that higher IQ = more educated.
That's not what he's saying, he's saying collage is too hard to graduate and get good grades with an IQ less that a bit over 100 now, and that number was more like 115 in the past.
Plenty of dumb people graduated collage in the 1950’s. The difference is we still value most of their skills while giving them a free pass for all the modern skills they don’t have. Take all that time you spent learning computers and apply it to other stuff and you would be more capable of that stuff.
So yes people on average where better at say mental math back then, but plenty of people still sucked at math etc.
Of course, people did study engineering in 50s even though it mostly wasn't related to computers. (For that matter, I have an engineering degree from the late 70s and I barely touched--or mostly had access to--computers.)
Definitely, and many programs were highly selective, extremely rigorous, and had very high dropout rates. Some colleges just had vastly less demanding degrees and a reputation for wild parties, excessive drinking, etc.
I am mostly referring to the idea people have become less capable because fewer people know how to say repair their cars. Ignoring the fact cars just don’t break down as much and are also vastly more complicated today. So, basic car repair is both more difficult and less necessary.
Car repair is just pretty far down the list of things it's important for most people to be able to do. I have a general notion of how cars work but there's relatively little I could do on my own. (And, of course, it's increasingly difficult for even indie garages to do a lot of things.)
I do wonder if selective schools have over-rotated in the theoretical direction though that's a debate with a very long history. I'm reading a bio of "Doc" Draper, for whom Draper Labs--which designed the Apollo Guidance Computer--is named. And I was just commenting to a friend literally last night that I bet a lot of the very hands-on engineers who tinkered as much as they did theory like Draper and Doc Edgerton (inventor the strobe) and others would probably never have gotten faculty appointments as prestigious universities today.
Personally, the courses where I did hands-on work are some of the ones I remember best.
> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s
Harvard is private social club, a glorified country club posing as a school. The entire purpose of the institution is to perpetuate the disparity of wealth and power in society. The selectivity and exclusiveness is essential, the raison d'être of Harvard. This is the only thing we need to understand about it.
More importantly while there’s nothing wrong with operating a private social club, doing it with public tax dollars and claiming it’s anything but a private social club is ridiculous.
This made the scandal where celebrities were photoshopping photos of their kids doing prep school sports a little awkward. The rarely reported detail was that they were paying $200k bribes because they weren't actually rich enough to make $2M bribes directly to the schools.
>In the 16 years since, although the number of applicants to the College has more than doubled, the size of Harvard’s undergraduate population has remained relatively constant. This year, the College admitted 2,037 students to the Class of 2020; in comparison, 2,035 students were admitted to the Class of 2004.
IMO when your non taxable endowment gets large but your undergrad population stays the same maybe part of the endowment should become taxable.
You realize they're in the middle of Cambridge, MA, right? It's not like there's a bunch of empty land around the campus to just make the school bigger.
Acquiring non-Harvard land in Allston met with some backlash owing to how they went about it (sneakily, to avoid getting put over a barrel on price).
Building up rather than out would require knocking down buildings that range from historic to merely very old.
Suggesting that Harvard should just take more students as the number of applicants grows sort of ignores the constraints they operate under.
Don't many universities have branches elsewhere? Would students choose not to go to Harvard if the campus was in say New Jersey? Would the quality of education be inferior outside of Cambridge?
I've heard some schools even have online offerings, crazy.
They could very easily set up a new campus a few miles away.
Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.
Like Harvard? Which was founded in 1636. It's no Oxford, but the buildings are historic in the context of the USA, which is the context that matters for purposes of this discussion.
And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare. Traffic sucks, and public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0].
Getting between the new science center in Allston and Harvard Square is about a 20 minute walk (hustling). Driving might shave 10 minutes off of that. Or it could add that much and more, depending on the time of day.
Harvard's med school is in Longwood, which presumably only works because the med students live off campus anyway and don't have to get to the main campus on a regular basis.
[0] See https://universalhub.com for examples. You're unlikely to have to look back more than a week.
> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.
Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.
"public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0]."
In a world where NIMBYs weren't the most important people on the scene, building a tram (streetcar) line between those two campuses would be a working solution. High capacity, intervals can be adjusted to the needs of the school, no traffic jams on the track.
And Harvard sits on an enormous warchest, it could cover the costs handily.
But pushing such a construction project in contemporary atmosphere would take longer than landing on the Moon.
Those schools are also where most of cutting edge research happens. And that’s why the folks who go there have such strong networks and an in-crowd mentality.
I am trying my hand at networking and I find that I get ghosted like 80% of the time when people I talk to from these backgrounds find out I’m not as qualified on paper.
To discriminate, whether by race or by alma mater, is innate; even if it is illegal it will still happen. Meritocracy is hard, and wounded when we characterize a flaw in a meritocracy as if that were judgment day.
Should we all abandon Harvard now? Nah, this battle is everywhere.
I generally agree :-) Though many of the same dynamics apply to MIT even if some of the specifics differ. MIT isn't admitting students purely on the basis of test scores.
I knew a long ago admissions director at MIT. At least at the time, they basically had an x-y chart with quantitative on one axis and qualitative on the other. There was a quantitative lower-bound cutoff but, beyond that, the two factors could balance each other out. (e.g. decent but not not fantastic SATs could be balanced out by really eye-catching qualitative factors and vice versa.)
I thought the theory was people are dumber than ever thanks to smartphones, social media, decreased attention spans, etc. I would take a bet that the average person is not even close to as smart as the average Harvard grad.
Something like 35% of the US has graduated university[1]. I suppose the average university graduate is smarter than the average person regardless of the school they attended.
It's not going away, because school choice continues to be a valuable signal of how capable someone is, and graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society.
At some point it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The smartest people in the world want the Harvard brand. They graduate and do great things. Their success gets attributed back to Harvard. So how does one measure what specifically the university is bringing to the table?
> graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society.
you offer no data to differentiate between this being caused by their abilities, or their greater access to the networks that place people in high impact positions.
"and graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society."
Source? There are many individuals who went to state schools or didn't go to college at all that have turned into billionaires, Nobel prize winners, etc.
Not to mention there's no evidence that the people who went to an elite school would have less of an impact if elite schools didn't exist.
A higher number of those billionaires, Nobel prize winners, and political leaders in the US went to elite schools like Harvard and Yale.
They undoubtedly have higher impacts on society, not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities that are not available to average person…for all our talks about meritocracy, humans still pay more attention to signaling, branding, and marketing…and the elite schools know how to milk that for money and power.
That's 9 people in one profession. A profession that specifically has restrictions on who can be a lawyer and judge. I can name people who didn't graduate from college, or graduated from non-ivy schools too. Considering technology is extremely influential in shaping out lives, you'll probably find it interesting how many of these people never even graduated from college.
It's common sense, it's just a numbers game. Harvard has like 8000 undergrads or whatever, while your typical state school has ~60000. All I'm saying is that if you take a random student from both these populations, the Harvard student is statistically more likely to be some uber-successful wunderkind. In no way am I trying to say that people from non-elite schools are inherently less capable.
Just offering up a food for thought, as I recently did some research in the cost of construction (for the Bay Area, California): I see a lot of comments denouncing NIMBY-ism for the lack of construction or other reasons to answer the question of "Why not just build more housing?" but I suspect this, as true as it is, is the most popular talking point because it's politically a juicy topic to talk about. However, at least in HCOL places like the Bay Area, there is also another very basic economic reason: Construction is simply too expensive.
The cost per square foot of standard construction (wood frame, slab foundation, nothing fancy in terms of doors and windows) is about $450-$550 per square foot. This sets a real hard lower bound on the price of net-new housing. If you're talking larger buildings (more concrete, steel frame, drilled pier foundations in consideration of soil conditions and structural weight) the costs start sky rocketing to unbelievable numbers. Sure we can point at bureaucracy and the permitting process, but when we're talking about large scale construction of SFH and multi-unit residential buildings, the permitting and legal barriers are a small slice of the overall cost pie.
In the Bay Area, and I suspect soon in various geo areas, labor is simply too expensive. (And labor is an input to a lot of costs along the supply chain as well, like wood, concrete, steel, and glass.) In a culture where we all strive to be white collar workers abstracted away from the real physical reality that our world still runs on physical objects, most importantly housing, perhaps "learn to code" is not the universal answer and there needs to be just as much "learn to plumb" or "learn to concrete". And I know this last point is politically touchy, but big buildings housing hundreds and thousands of residents simply don't get built by an all-middle-class society. You need cheap labor (or better yet cheap automation?) so that this housing problem is tractable at an economic level.
From 2014-2018, Santa Monica issued permits allowing 12 multifamily units[0]. Since the builder's remedy is forcing the city's hand, applications for over 4000 new units have been submitted.
Construction costs are a thing, but the blocking of new construction is absolutely real.
I think everyone understands this barrier already, it's well discussed and my point was not to diminish the well-known challenges to the problem. The economic reasons I mentioned are another (much less discussed) angle that most people just aren't even aware of and is absolutely a barrier to large scale housing development.
Construction costs are a much bigger deal than NIMBYism or anything else anyone has mentioned so far.
We had easily affordable housing in California, including in Silicon Valley, until probably the 1990s. NIMBYism and property taxes (including Prop 13) have existed since the 1970s at least, zoning hasn't changed much since then, and geographical constraints are eternal. We also didn't have a Georgist land-value tax or any other nonsense; housing was affordable without all that stuff.
So why was housing cheaper then?
Well, consider the case of a friend of mine who recently built an ADU and was told it had to have solar panels because of a new state law. At least $25-30k is added to the cost of any residential construction just because of that one thing. That is only one of the many things that new buildings need that were not required in the past.
When you try to provide housing to other people the government makes you suffer for it.
We are regulating ourselves into this corner. Quite a lot of the building codes have nothing to do with safety or habitability.
There are a ton of other silly requirements that get piled on top of each other and burden all new construction.
For example, if your house in California needs a new electrical panel to charge an electric car? $700+ permit for the panel, plus parts and labor. Adds up to several thousand.
There are definitely building codes that should exist -- earthquake safety, fire safety, etc. But quite a lot of them are just the state interfering in things it has no business dealing with, like the solar panel requirement that lets politicians feel better about themselves while making homes more expensive.
Building cost of 5000€ for a square meter just blows my mind. Especially for wood frame building. What’s so special about it? Maybe you have a source how these costs divide into materials/salaries/permits/etc? I would say prefab panels is a solution. That’s how houses are built in cheap labor countries in Europe and then moved on the trucks to expensive Scandinavian countries. Assembly takes couple weeks.
Nothing. That's exactly what I mean when I say the cost is labor. The quoted price $450-$550 per square foot does not include land, permitting, soft costs, etc. That's just labor and materials.
$450 to $550 seems like the price for detached homes.
For a 2BR apartment at 850 sqft, that's $425,000. In the Bay Area I presume,
Anecdotally, from memory, the price of high quality apartment, globally, varies around the $125,000 to $200,000 USD mark. Depending as you say, on materials. The interesting fact I was told is this price scales linearly with high rise, for quite a long time.
85 stories can and will average out to the magic $200,000.
Even presumably adding a Bay Area markup, a $300,000 cost of construction is eminently affordable.
For 2BR apartments for childless couples, $300,000 is a excellent.
To me, the obstacle is purely zoning and supply side constraints for large high rises. Singapore style high rises given proper zoning would provide umpteenth $250,000 two bedroom apartments, on Singapore sized parcels of land.
Providing sufficient land, construction of high rise units would grossly improve the housing affordability situation.
It's purely a zoning/public services provisioning issue.
True. Ultimately we can't know until we quantify the costs for high-rise apartments.
All I'll say is that, yes labor's an input. You have to quantify that cost per square foot.
But, given the number of property developments that have been attempted in the Bay Area and blocked, my (guess) is the economics stack up. Otherwise, developers wouldn't have attempted it.
You might be mixing cause and effect. Expensive housing drives out blue collar labor. The remaining workers are expensive and push up construction cost.
I was not able to convince a plumber to visit my house in the bay area last year, even after offering several hundred dollars.
It bears repeating because this is a common mistake in inflation discussions: a decrease in inflation metrics means price increases are slowing down, it doesn’t mean that prices are going down （that would require a negative CPI print).
Also, this number is year over year, so the decrease just means the price increases between Oct 21 and Oct 22 are not as steep as between Sept 21 to Sept 22, which is not hard to achieve because Sept 21 to Oct 21 had a bigger month over month jump.
The right way to interpret this number is that high prices have plateaued a bit. Yes that means your groceries are going to be x% higher than in 2020. Short of deflation, they always will be.
And to add to your explanation, because inflation jumped so quickly and then slowed we'll eventually hit a YoY number that plummets. If milk is $4/gallon today and still $4/gallon 12 mos. from now, that's 0% YoY inflation.
This will inevitably lead to people saying the numbers are fake because milk used to be $2/gallon.
> If milk is $4/gallon today and still $4/gallon 12 mos. from now, that's 0% YoY inflation.
Conversely, if there was a one-time jump in a particular item, it will take a year before it gets 'removed' from the inflation numbers.
Extremely contrived example: if gas/petrol was $1/L in December 2021 (and generally in all of 2021), but $1.20/L in January 2022, then there will be a 20% YoY jump in inflation for the January number comparing Jan 2021 to Jan 2022.
Now if gas stays at $1.20/L in February 2022, it will still register as 20% YoY even though the price has not changed month-to-month. That 20% (YoY) is "stuck" in the system until January 2023 when we're comparing $1.20/L to $1.20/L.
A one-time jump can 'skew' the numbers if all you look at is YoY metrics.
I agree it's confusing. I think they do it to remove seasonality and the experts on the topic probably don't understand anymore why the rest of us think their way of reporting is confusing to lay people.
Seasonally adjusted != multiply by 12. Prices naturally fluctuate throughout the year due to weather, consumer patterns, and business cycles. Seasonal adjustment is an attempt to account for those changes.
I agree the annualizing the monthly figure would be handy, as an additional figure. Looking at annualized monthly figures, it was also apparent (say) six months ago, that the monthly annual figures would almost certainly continue to get worse.
It is skewing if you are looking for an up to date change. It's like, is it better to get two points on a curved line and draw a straight line through them, or is it better to calculate the derivative and the the slope at a specific point?
It may be - but to the above poster's point - if gas went up 20% in Jan of this year and then stays flat... is it helpful to think of prices as "going up" ? It seems misleading.
"is it helpful to think of prices as "going up" ? It seems misleading."
Here you are encountering a common human cognitive failing, which is the belief that there is some sort of objective answer to the question "are prices going up?" that we should all be able to totally agree on, somehow floating in Platonic space without reference to any particular measure of "prices increasing".
The problem is that if you drill down to the question of "what does it mean for prices to be 'going up'?", you must admit to the fact that there are multiple valid definitions of that. It just isn't possible or plausible to create one true definition.
In the presence of that fact, it becomes inevitable that there will be senses in which the price is going up, and senses in which they are not, and senses in which prices are going up more than other senses. That is the reality, which is complicated.
(One propaganda technique is to take one of these numbers, which really exists and is perfectly defensible on its own terms, and then use it in a context in which you know people are generally going to interpret it as one of the other senses of the term. Excitingly, by controlling which "sense" you anchor your listeners to, both "sides" of a debate can push the numbers in whatever direction favors them at the same time.)
According to our nationally-used, generally-accepted metric, if gas is the same price today as it was 365 days ago, inflation is zero. But does that mean the metaphorical person on the street is "lying" if they say prices are generally going up because gas is 20% more expensive than it was three hundred and sixty six days ago? There is a fundamental arbitrariness both to our metrics, and how we all feel about things. I've seen plenty of "How can annual inflation be %8 if my eggs are 2.5x more expensive than this time last year?" posts around lately. The literal answer to that question is obvious, but if someone's expenses involve more eggs than mine, either because their food is a bigger percentage of their home budget or they are a business for whom eggs is a major input cost, they may feel a higher level of inflation than I do, and they're not wrong. They've just got their own inflation metric that disagrees with the national one, but their own metric may well be more relevant to their life than the national one is.
Most people in this thread are using prices and CPI interchangeably, for better or worse. My read of the thread is that most people in the thread know they aren't actually the same thing.
The misleading bit would be reporting yoy price increases every month. Still not necessarily misleading to someone trained in reading this data, but the average lay person would probably interpret yoy statistics reported monthly incorrectly when comparing adjacent months
People aren't checking their statements for milk prices from Nov 2021 right now. They just know "man it jumped up".
The point is that the everyday person cares about jumps and trends, and hearing "20% YoY increase" for 12 months is misleading to someone not thinking about it in economists' terms.
The fact a bunch of people here are debating what it means and how to interpret it proves my point.
And yet that's the same kind of distinction that you need to understand to be able to make decisions about household debt. If we're honestly at the point where this is considered too confusing for the masses, I think I've stopped thinking democracy is a good idea.
* You have to have a lot of context about surrounding numbers to try and distinguish between these scenarios.
* The drop from +10% to 0% is not related proximally at all to the real change.
* Even if you are careful in interpretation, information and context are removed.
It's not very user friendly or useful as a single number to get an idea about what's happening with prices now.
> If we're honestly at the point where this is considered too confusing for the masses, I think I've stopped thinking democracy is a good idea.
I have a lot of knowledge about economics and mathematics, and it's frequently confusing for me and difficult to tease out what's really happening with prices from a couple of macroeconomic aggregates. If that makes you give up on democracy, uh, so be it.
And it's not even a theoretical issue. Look at the energy component of CPI. And then consider how that flows through to food and transportation. It is very possible that the vast majority of what we are seeing is the result of a big jump in energy prices over a few months, 8-10 months ago.
> Look at the energy component of CPI. And then consider how that flows through to food and transportation. It is very possible that the vast majority of what we are seeing is the result of a big jump in energy prices over a few months, 8-10 months ago.
Well, that makes it even worse, the "flow through" you're describing from prices increasing because an input price increased. That spreads the initial shock over a longer term.
But the effect I'm describing shows up even if it's just a single good that steps once. What's measured in the YoY inflation number is a convolution/FIR filter of 12 months of changes.
Maybe that is why we have a republic with representatives? Of course we can just shift the discussion to point out that US Congress critters don't seem to have a strong grasp on these topics either. :-(
I think that's exactly why we have a republic with representatives, but I don't even think people are qualified to pick good representatives. A campaign can easily pander to people who are acting selfishly or stupidly. At the end of the day, if you have people who can't even understand compound interest by the time they're entering university and who can't do a cost-benefit analysis on loans, why are those people supposed to catch nuances in monetary and fiscal policy and select from a panel of alleged experts?
Imagine a more extreme case where we reported inflation over the past 50 years each month. Every month we compute the price of the basket 50 years ago and the price of the basket today and compare. This number would go up when the most recent month had more price increases than the month 601 months ago. It would go down when the situation was reversed. It would be a number, but it would tell you very little useful information.
It is also the case that going extreme in the other direction is ridiculous. Imagine a daily inflation measure. Also nearly useless. "Oh, prices were flat today so everything is fine."
Published inflation numbers in media are usually used to make either the claim "everything is fucked, you should be mad about public policy" or "everything is fine, you should be happy about public policy." To me, this means that the reported should ideally be tied to some cadence that matches public policy. I'm not sure what that cadence is.
Misleading implies the data has some agency. Data cannot be misleading. People can make whatever conclusions they want based on data at hand and it’s just bad analysis if it’s wrong. The data didn't mislead them.
Sort of. BLS also publishes other numbers. Media outlets choose which one to report.
Consider how last month everybody was reporting Core-CPI because it was higher than overall CPI and therefore produced more urgent sounding headlines whereas earlier in the year when overall CPI was higher that was the reported number. Yes, headlines said "Core-CPI" last month but if you aren't careful you get a very incomplete picture of things.
The conclusion that “prices rose” is the correct one. What you should not conclude, even though the inflation has been at 20% all year is that “prices are (still) rising”.
You can't use "rising" to strictly talk about the past. You need to expect it in the future too. If you don't expect the price to be higher a year from now, then it's not "rising YoY", it merely "rose YoY".
The price is still 20% you, and still 0% mom. If reported as inflation still at 20%, does that affect perceptions of inflation, and if so, expectations of inflation? Because expectations of inflation often turn out to be self fulfilling drivers of inflation.
Reported as inflation stable even if it is 20%? Better? Not that 0% is a great target, but that's a separate issue.
Even in the early 80s after huge interest rate hikes, YoY CPI inflation stayed above 2% (until the mid 80s).
Rather than modeling it as "the price increases happened in a short period of time and then went back to normal," I think it's more likely that it happened more spread out and persistently, and perhaps still is going on. It's not going to jump to zero after some given month
Your explanation is fully technically correct, but the subsequent messaging that inflation is zero is a matter of not reading the room.
When an important item dramatically rises in price, this can have a massive impact on people. A dramatic drop in purchasing power or even businesses needing to close. It is impactful.
When the price continues to be high, the impact remains. The pain continues, the problem is not solved. The politically smart messaging is to say "we feel and acknowledge your continued pain, this is what we're going to do about it", not "Good news! Inflation is 0%."
Same with the opportunistic messaging of sometimes using MoM or YoY, whichever number looks better. When MoM inflation in October is 15% and 5% in November, you really shouldn't bring this as good news. The situation still got worse in the real world.
That's a different issue. "High prices" are a problem, but that's not what "inflation" measures. There is no way to report inflation (derivative of prices) that correctly reports "price/wage ratio", which is what people really care about.
It's bullshit because it's an average of everything that no one buys. My grocery bills have doubled since 2020, meaning my CPI was 100% over 3 years. I will not shut up as you and many others are trying to force me into accept it's 10% inflation.
You're making the same mistake. If inflation is transient, the price _increase_ is transient, but the high prices remain. It would only go back to 2/gal if the high prices themselves were transient. Which I really hope is the case, but IDK.
“Inflation” means “increase in price levels”. That’s it.
“Inflation is transient” fits prices increasing and then leveling out, and does not imply that every bit of price increase is balanced out one-for-one by immediate deflation afterwards.
As for gas prices, it’s going to depend on supply (including refinery capacity) and demand. The $2/gallon of April 2020 was an artifact of covid nuking demand.
>When campaigning for a second term in office, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing, which has been noted as "the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection."[2] Since inflation is itself a derivative—the rate at which the purchasing power of money decreases—then the rate of increase of inflation is the derivative of inflation, opposite in sign to the second time derivative of the purchasing power of money. Stating that a function is decreasing is equivalent to stating that its derivative is negative, so Nixon's statement is that the second derivative of inflation is negative, and so the third derivative of purchasing power is positive.
p = price
t = time
dp = change in price
dp/dt = change in price over time = inflation
d^2p/dt^2 = change in change in price over time over time = change in inflation over time = what we are talking about
Second derivative I think. Inflation is change in prices. Change in inflation is a second order derivative? I wish more Americans knew at least a little conceptually about derivatives. Personally, I need to review them. Anecdotally, the number of accountants that I've met that haven't progressed beyond middle school level math is depressing as well.
No, acceleration is going down. Not a lower rate of acceleration. The second implies acceleration is still increasing, but at a slower rate. What is actually happening is we're decelerating (so we're still going fast, meaning inflation is high, but inflation is going down...)
Without trying to be mean, I would also argue your framing is also poor as some inflation is not bad.
To put it in context, if current trends hold we'll expect 3-5% inflation yoy. That is not awful. Higher than last decade or so but we have had super low inflation for a long time. Averaging out, inflation over the last decades, even including the recent high inflation, will still be pretty low, around 3%.
There's no cliff (at least for this to be the third, or even second, derivative with regard to.) Its not like there is a magic bad nominal price level.
Right, the cliff is when people lose confidence in the dollar, which probably has a lot to do with the inflation rate, changes in the inflation rate, and the duration over which we've seen what sort of behavior (... and probably a lot of other things) but not much to do with the actual price level itself.
If we average 2%yoy every single decade for the next 300 years, people will probably have a lot of trust in the dollar in the decade following. If we hit that same price level tomorrow, people will rightly flip. $1700 milk either way, but in one case we'd expect $1700 milk the following day and in the other we'd expect the dollar to plummet further from the shock of it.
Since inflation is a 1st derivative of price, 4th derivative of inflation would actually be a 5th derivative of price. It'd be like: "The increase of the acceleration of the rate of price increase is slowing."
Definitely not a statement that I would be able to visualize :)
Many Americans are illiterate on numbers and the economy too. I still remember the classic example that a burger chain released a 1/3 pound burger to compete with another chain's 1/4 pound burger, and many people thought the 1/4 pound was bigger...
Edit: there are some people saying it's a myth, or not a complete picture. Looks like we don't have the data. But my point is that we aren't very good with numbers or economics.
>Many Americans are illiterate on numbers and the economy too
Many more pretend to be less literate than they are for ideological reasons.
>still remember the classic example that a burger chain released a 1/3 pound burger to compete with another chain's 1/4 pound burger, and many people thought the 1/4 pound was bigger.
This trope needs to be taken out back and shot. It wasn't that people didn't get it. It's that it was poorly marketed and the difference between 1/3 and 1/4 isn't enough to make people go to a burger chain that was dying due to low and variable quality when they could just go to McDicks and get a reliable 1/4lb.
There's certainly more than just the number confusion, but I specifically remember the case study we were looking at included a survey where a sizeable number of respondents said 1/4 was bigger than 1/3.
I don't know anything about this particular one, but just because it's a case study in a textbook doesn't mean it's true. There are lots of untruths that get propagated long after they've been debunked.
But they’re citing a survey where people literally didn’t get it. That, if not made up, factually supports the claim that some people really do think 1/3 is less than 1/4.
I really liked the 1/3 pound “thickburgers”. I don’t think it was just some dying chain trying to spread rumors about how stupid people didn't understand their marketing and that’s why they “died” (they’re still very much alive last I checked).
It's hard to find contemporaneous evidence, because it was apparently revealed by an internal company focus group, but here's [0] the page from the company themselves with the claim.
It wasn't revealed at all until the founder's memoirs in 2007, and it wasn't reported widely until this [1] 2014 article.
this is a 'haha Americans so dumb' myth that's been blown up - it's the result of a NY Times article that outline a private restaurant chain focus group result.
So tldr; some people in a private focus group questioned the value of a 1/3 pound burger over the same priced 1/4 pound burger. It's not indicative of any system numerical illiteracy.
I will add there were no actual data released - it's solely based on an anecdote from a A&W restaurant executive.
I was exposed to this myth in my youth as various European nations described their misadventures in the US of A or encounters with Americans and as a result came to US with wrong expectations. Now that I live here, things a little more clear to me. It is a nation of more than 350 million people ( depending on how and who you count ). Even a small percentage of certifiable idiots will be very well represented in terms of absolute numbers.
I would not say Americans in general are dumb though. I would say that:
1) they are under-educated ( and then we can also get about the quality of education for those that were educated )
2) they are very heavily propagandized
Even more than that, the accounts we get claim that some of the people in the focus group said the 1/3 pound burger was smaller than the quarter pounder. Even if those claims are accurate, it's possible they were looking at the diameter, since the 1/3 pounder has two smaller patties stacked on top of each other, while the quarter pounder is one large patty.
Most places that report on this say that the third pounder was cheaper and that Americans preferred the taste, but they didn't buy it because of the name and their poor math skills. But its name was changed to "Papa Burger," and it still didn't become the quarter pounder killer it's portrayed as.
And since we don't know the context they could have shown a closer up burger, or heck, taller burger that is 1/4 and a 1/3 next to each other but further away or stepped on at which point they were asked, what's bigger?
Also, the 1/4 or 1/3 is referring to the raw, uncooked meat only. So in theory you can add 1400 lbs of lettuce to make something larger than my car. (Which is terrible, since lettuce is where you pick up all the disease these days - everyone here should order all their food without any lettuce)
I have a degree in it and I often don't feel that I know anything. For a guy who did a lot of STEM economics is a pretty odd subject in many ways. A mixture of interesting insights, strange models, and a lot of soft talk.
Also it is worth mentioning that part of the major reason accounting for inflation is car price. It’s going down now as chip makers produce more and prices go down further.
It's also going down because it's a debt market and financing is more expensive w/ used car interest rates at 9% instead of 4% and new cars at 5% instead of 0%...
I expect the number of car sales in the US to go down significantly like it has in Europe. Interest rates are one major factor, but another is the electric transition. Anecdotally I know quite a few people that aren't buying new vehicles right now. They're the kind of people that buy a new car every 10 years or so, and are delaying their purchase or buying used. They realize it's a bad idea to buy a new gas car but aren't yet ready to buy an electric car because they don't understand them yet, they're too expensive, have a massive backlog, or don't come in the style/variant they want.
My reasons: in 10 years time most local gas stations will be closed, 95% of the demand for used cars will be for electrics and 97% of the supply will be gasoline so the car will only have its scrap metal value.
But most people aren't thinking that far ahead. They just know I can recharge my car for $10 but it costs them $100 to refill theirs. They know that electricity prices are a lot more stable than gas prices.
I agree with your general sentiment, but I think this timeline doesn't necessarily extrapolate well for the United States. The average age of a vehicle on the road in the US is about 12 years - aftermarket suppliers as well as oil/gas companies have a very strong incentive to plan that far ahead in order to keep up with the demand. Especially given that the quantity of gas vehicles on the road will be, as you say, such a large percentage of the market.
Miles/year of old cars is a lot less than new cars. So demand for gas in 10 years might be about half of what it is now. Some stations will still do well, but a lot of marginal stations will disappear.
Gas exploration is way down. No gas production won't stop, but supply growth seems to be completely stalled while demand is not due to developing countries continuing to get richer. Gas will likely continue to be expensive as we transition away from fossil fuels.
Car lots need to be knocked down a peg or ten. Car sales folks are the scummiest folks on earth and they have been empowered by this disaster of a market for too long.
The overwhelming majority of car sales people know almost nothing about cars. That's already how you know that their industry is basically useless.
It's also extremely predatory. Anyone trying to pay a 30K mark up on a rav4 prime is being swindled (even if they think they're not). You (the sales person) should prevent obviously stupid car sales (or shit like 25% apr hellcats to US soldiers), but of course not, they're greedy!
I don't buy cars often but it seems like the last decade or so, the major dealers anyways, don't play a lot of games like they used to. They put a decently fair price out there and can maybe knock a bit off but with some much information about cars today (CarFAX, BlueBook, searching online) it's really difficult to swindle people. So they just list a fair price and go from there.
They make a lot of their money today selling warranties, service packages, and financing.
I was looking a few weeks ago and the sales associate mentioned that it's starting to come down but they've just struggled so much at getting enough inventory that people were willing to bid up from MSRP. He advised me it's still a bad time to buy a car and that next year will probably be better.
Well, yeah. There was an imbalance in the market between the supply of cars and the demand from consumers for cars. People were willing to spend more than ever, especially with super low interest rates making it nearly free to borrow money.
Anyone else feel like this is such a dumb way for the general public to track inflation. Like, a simple line chart with the X axis being time and the Y axis being the price of a basket of goods would be so much clearer
Is inflation (meaning CPI figures) meant for the general public? It's a useful economic tool, but not very relevant to the average Joe. I would think expansion of cost of living is what the general public is interested in, and for that they have to track their spending, and can do so in any way they see fit.
I'm in the general public. Basically anyone not in finance or economics I'd consider to be the general public. It's still important to know the trend to know how and where to invest your resource.
If you're utilizing the inflation figure, are you really the average Joe, and if you are utilizing that information are you really going to stop with the headline figure? Inflation is more nuanced than is captured in a single variable.
It's prob the reason the average Joe doesn't look at inflation - because its presented in the worst way possible.
I'm not trying to be the best investor or anything like that - but knowing the basic inflation trend I think would be useful to a large % of the population.
This isn't right. It could in fact mean prices are going down.
Had we just reported a month on month -0.4% instead of 0.4%, the yoy rate would have been reported as 6.9%. A headline of 6.9% would mean prices are actually going down.
Anything positive YoY means prices have gone up overall over the last year. For prices to have gone down in general over the last year, the YoY would have to be negative. A headline of 6.9% would mean prices have gone up.
You're just talking about different time frames. Yearly inflation can be positive and prices can also be lower than they were last month. Ergo prices are going down but inflation still positive.
Nope. You are continually overlaying data with different X axis and trying to draw conclusions and sound authoritative and it’s just sloppy and irresponsible.
The instantaneous slope would be negative if the last month happened to observe a slight decrease, true. But the slope of the line between last year and this year would be positive.
Both statements can be true:
1. prices just fell slightly since last month
2. prices have risen overall since last year
EDIT: you edited your comment I’m not going to update mine.
Sigh. Obviously we’re talking time here. The scale on the X axis, the interval that appears on the graph between two points, is different if every unit is a month vs a year. Months and years are different units of time.
IDK… nobody is really trying to figure out how to interpret the data. People were just commenting that “declines to X%” actually still means that it’s gone up YoY and not that it’s declining YoY and here you are yelling that actually it is declining because recently it went down. Which is false, YoY.
Scale is the same. The CPI reports every month. It's one chart, a single index, one point per month.
They just take the recent point and the point from a year ago and do the math and report the change. For mom they do the recent point and the one before that, do the math and report.
Some people actually know what the CPI is, how it gets reported, and understand the shortcomings of said reporting. If you aren't one of those people, it's silly to go around correcting others.
I… do… know that. That’s why I’m trying to clear up the shitstorm you’re causing by deliberately being provocative. You sound like a manager trying to deceive reports into thinking they don’t need an inflation bump this year because “look inflation is lessening” or something.
No historical data is going to tell us the future. But it can give us an idea of the trend, which is useful since in a large system like the economy the trend tends to change relatively slowly as compared to individual compentents.
A statistic is only useful if you know how to interpret it. Case in point: you can have double digit year-over-year inflation, while simultaneously falling prices for the last 11 months.
This doesn't make sense. Falling prices for what? CPI is a measure of cost of a basket of goods. You can't have net aggregate falling prices and a rising CPI unless you are measuring different prices.
It's just about how are you measuring the slope? Like, when you first learn derivatives and the math teacher draws a line between two points on a curve, then draws another from points closer together, then draws the tangent, then goes through how you get to a derivative function etc.
The yoy is just using two points very far apart. The mom is using two points closer together. It would be nice but practically impossible to measure it instantaneously, mom is about as good as we get.
I can get the prices for goods online, and then get them delivered to my house. Getting the CPI more often seems entirely feasible to me if we really wanted to.
Maybe. But online isn't the only place to buy, and to arrive at a single number they do all kinds of adjustments to account for seasons, locations etc.
If you are right, I'd guess the cost benefit probably isn't there regardless.
Which is still stupid to even be arguing about. It’s like people are trying to find a problem with data that is objectively reported by arguing that if you change the x axis you get an entirely different conclusion. No shit… that’s how data works.
No one is suggesting there is a problem with the data. They are discussing how best to interpret it.
And nobody is suggesting changing the x-axis. It's still time. The distinction people are making is which points does one use to calculate the slope? The most recent two? The most recent one and the one from a year ago? What are the implications of each?
From what I can gather you’re trying to suggest that prices are going down because “recently” they have been (which isn't even true MoM they’ve still increased). That’s a pretty sloppy and inaccurate statement without a very precise definition of recently, which has been omitted. And YoY it’s not true.
I didn't see any thread of discussion that you’re alluding to where people were trying to interpret what the data actually means. There was simply a word of caution about making sure not to let the headline confuse you. Then some incorrect and sloppy comments appeared like “actually this is incorrect data because the price is trending down MoM don’t be fooled”. That’s an entirely different thing. Hence why you see all the people trying to explain how it’s silly. I didn't introduce confusion by changing the slope calculation… I’m just responding to it trying to clean up the mess it’s made.
I’m seriously confused: what is your actual point?
Which businessman in their right mind will decrease the price of their products because of cost decrease? Not unless there is intense competition. Because of that for large scale monopoly business like commodities once the prices go up it may not come down again.
I may be missing something, but if there is no competitive pressure/monopolistic market, why would these businesses need the excuse of inflation/cost increases to increase their prices? Wouldn't we expect prices to have gone up before inflation?
Or is this a specific criticism of a regulatory blind spot for reigning in market power? Monopolies can get away with price increases now, but they wouldn't normally?
The argument is that they had market power before, but were afraid to exercise it for political reasons or because they feared enforcement action. Now, with inflation, the company has an excuse to raise prices, but now they're raising them only partly due to increased costs, and partly as an exercise of their market power.
Yes the YoY number is useful for getting rid of seasonal variations. The monthly CPI is also noisy. But when there’s a big spike over a few months (like we had 8-16 months ago) YoY won’t go down meaningfully for at least a year.
This is actually great (if noisy) news. 2 months of 0.4% CPI increase is equivalent to 5% yearly inflation. But the YoY is still high because it was much worse 8-12 months ago.
I hadn’t even considered that people will think low numbers are a lie because prices don’t go down. But of course (sadly) you’re right.
> The right way to interpret this number is that high prices have plateaued a bit.
This part is true.
> that means your groceries are going to be x% higher than in 2020
But this part jumps right back into the much bigger fallacy that inflation represents a change in value and not price! Sure, groceries are higher in price, just like your assets are higher in value (on average) and your wages are higher (on average).
But in any case, your notion that inflation isn't instantaneously halted is a little spun. In fact month-to-month CPI change for October is 0.4%, which corresponds to about 4.9% per year. That's higher than we've seen for most of the last decade, but not a number most people would consider "high" in the sense of "disruptive to economic activity".
I think of it like the accelerator pedal on a car. A decline in inflation means the foot has eased up on the accelerator some, but the car is definitely still moving forward.
Sure, but this is still exactly what we want to see. If the target is 2%, YoY metrics moving in that direction is a positive step.
The only thing we can hope for is that, as inflation numbers continue dropping back toward "normal", wage increases will eventually catch up and make those already-higher prices less difficult to swallow. Of course, it never works out that neatly.
Couldn't some goods in the basket be slightly negative while others are positive? For example if rent went down relative to last year's baseline but groceries, gas, etc were all very much up.
The number is largely manipulated anyway. It's more complex than even this because you have to account for price elasticity. They are giving oil a very wide fluctuation, for instance.
I've been tracking my expenses since 2015 and they're up around ~50% since then, for effectively the same food (eggs, bread, meat, etc). I eat ~2800-3000 calories per day (which I also track) and that's been consistent.
According to BLS it should be up only 27%, but everyone knows that's just not true. Remember ~1 year ago when the administration was calling prices "transitory", that means they're claiming a larger elasticity in prices so inflation doesn't look bad because they believe they'll come back down (soon).
Though the mathematically inclined should also know that we're not looking at dp/dt, we're looking at p(t) - p(t-T).
The difference is important, especially because we're looking at a yearly increase every month. The derivative of the annual inflation is not d^2p/dt^2 but (dp(t)/dt - dp(t-T)/dt).
If "p" is the relative price level index (CPI-U in this case), then "1/p" represents the relative purchasing power of a single dollar over time -- explained on homepage in more detail.
And I find it hysterical that the 10 year Bond dropped 4% because of this. They think this is the peak, as in the Fed will stop raising interest rates and inflation will only get lower from here.
A rare watch is an IYKYK item and the iconic pieces are immediately noticeable from across the room. I do wonder if the deflation in asset prices (driven by increase in interest rates) will put downward pressure on some of the craziness right now.
But for someone who is outside looking in, and wondering what the fuss is all about: A watch, especially Patek Philippe is much better for signaling status to those you want to send that signal to, while completely being unnoticeable by an audience from whom you don't want negative attention. At the same time, it appreciates like fine art that you can take with you on your wrist. It has a lot of the characteristics of investment assets that are desirable.
See also the booming Rep (replica) Watch scene, where $100-300 gets you a very passable knockoff PP that signals the same, especially from across the room.
In California, IYKYK, but so do the streeet thugs. $200k is a nice payoff for 30 seconds worth of risk.¹
We need to start expanding the scope of our anti-trust laws so that internet communication channels go back to what they were meant to be: de-centralized.
The fact that the internet and web was designed to be decentralized and then somehow ended up being concentrated on 5 or 6 websites is a bug, not a feature.
I'm not proposing we just do this overnight though -- too much of the US economy and software sector is propped up by these companies to just yank it all out, but we need to head back to decentralization by revisiting our definition of monopolies as it applies to communication channels.
I don't believe the dominance of a small number of social media empires is due to anti-trust violations, specifically anit-competitive behavior. Instead, I believe these industries have incredibly strong network effects with the value of the platform growing faster than linear with the number of members.
If there were thousands of social media networks, each of roughly the same size, then content would be highly fragmented. If say your closest ten friends and family members in aggregate use seven different networks, then you'd have to belong to all seven and regularly interact with all seven to stay up to date with your community. A similar situation exists for following famous and influential people.
Further, as any single social network grows, it naturally acquires a moat in that with more members there is a larger reason for new members to join that network since there is a higher percentage of people of interest already on the social network in question. Over time we've seen this lead to dominant social networks over several generations of social media. E.g., Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook.
Bit of feedback: It would be a little easier to jump into the Learning mode if it defaulted with more UI space.