Also people working on thermodynamics get to test their models a lot, and it’s noticed when their models fail. I’m not even sure supply demand curve is good for a specific product, having spent some time around consumer packaged goods analytics. Consumer behavior around frozen pizza alone is massively complicated, never mind cleaning supplies, candy, beer, or cosmetics.
Except if the increase in car prices is known to be temporary than it doesn’t really drive overall inflation. I for one just fixed a car I would otherwise have replaced, due to the used cars I would replace it with being in short supply.
I make planning software at a quantitatively sophisticated tech company, and it’s quite ironic to me that we don’t have a precise understanding of the expected impact of our software on the company. But that’s normal. We don’t build software that will barely break even. We build software that we expect can be massively successful, and the resource allocation is more about opportunity cost and uncorrelated bets than predicted outcomes.
Companies that make low margin highly competitive products, like paper mills, are the ones with a rigorous understanding of the costs and benefits of every activity.
I’m sure Markey would be happy to legislate against it. But thanks to the filibuster he would need to get 49 Democrats and another 10 Republicans on board before that would accomplish anything.
The idea that personal choices about straws or motorsports are an important or effective response to climate change is a fallacy encouraged by organizations who benefit from climate change. If it’s all about consumer choice, then real reform will never happen.
Only some people fall into the “both sides” trap and start thinking that cynicism is a virtue. It’s unfortunate, as this behavior encourages the very outcome to which you object. It’s much easier to take advantage of people who have given up.
If you have only wage income in Germany, as I understand it, there is no need to file a tax return. So you are correct there is no “pre-filled form.” But the system is simple and automated enough that a great many people don’t have to do anything.
Talking about pay is pretty much always a win for workers. If people have an emotional reaction, maybe they need to do it more or maybe they have some unique need to opt out. Otherwise, it’s the lowest effort way for workers to improve their outcomes.
Only if management and the shareholders are ignorant and short-sighted. Discouraging union activity with a stick is not a long term win. Maybe with a carrot, or maybe embrace it.
Not being allowed to mutiny in the navy is related to the whole violence thing. It’s also the case that people in the navy can’t just quit when they want to. I don’t think you want those kind of rules applying to most workplaces. Talking about pay equity is a good thing to be encouraged.
Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.
Once upon a time US regulators recognized that limited competition and market dominance can be a problem all by themselves, for their chilling effect on innovation. Unfortunately under Reagan the DOJ changed their policy and started arguing that concrete consumer harm has to be demonstrated for a business to be subject to antitrust. That’s a much higher bar. Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco monopoly, and trying to argue that consumers were being harmed because internet access was limited. Who would even want internet access under those circumstances?
The same is true of Google. It’s hard to show concrete harm (though wrecking flight search counts for me) when we have no counterfactual to consider. For example, in a truly competitive display ad market (instead of a duopoly), maybe our civilization would have figured out that display ads are a waste of money and consumer product manufacturers and retailers would stop buying them. But it’s hard to know. This is why we should go after any company that is dominant in any market.
It bothers me that this article from the economist fails to recognize the deleterious impact that lack of antitrust enforcement has had on life outcomes and thus on the educational arms race. The article mentions that competitive goods like housing and social status drive the push for education. Before the last 50 years of industrial consolidation there were more opportunities to succeed in more cities, creating a greater range of available competitor goods in those places. Now everyone has to be competing globally for status and to a great extent for housing (as people consolidate into a few cities) and career opportunities (as fewer companies mean fewer paths to high achievement). It’s a nice idea to discourage unpleasant competition among Hugh school students. But fixing other parts of the economy could help address demand for this activity, and improve aggregate outcomes in many other ways.
It can be difficult to overcome initial conditions and shine if you are locked out of the best opportunities. The bimodal outcomes for law school graduates are a good example. That’s not how the whole economy works, but it is a potential failure mode.
Friends of mine work at these private schools for lower salaries than public schools. The reality is the job sucks a lot less. You get ~100% engaged students, supportive parents, and a school administration with minimal perverse incentives. Struggling students and discipline problems get filtered out and sent somewhere else. There a loads of qualified teachers, and really plenty of very capable teachers. There is no need for the schools to pay a premium to get the best teachers.
Imagine if 99% of programming jobs were on Win32 native apps using tools from 1998, and 1% of them were using modern tools on a modern Unix-derived stack? Would the 1% really have to pay a premium to get top 10% developers?
Opportunity cost is totally the analysis. Not just the developers, but the tech writing and support and product marketing and management oversight and continuity planning and support commitment. Building production software in a large organization is 10-50 times more expensive than a random open source hobby project. If you have a team to do that, is yet another graphics API really the best use of their time?
If software causes soft cost savings (reducing the number of required people) the savings may not actually be realized. The internal feudalism of large enterprises protected by monopolistic moats means people resist headcount reductions. And since these large enterprises still employ the majority of people, they are over represented in the statistics.
“We can’t know what would have happened if $historicalfigure hadn’t done $badthing,” is a very weak line of argument. One could similarly suggest that the Nazi Holocaust was better than what might have happened under other circumstances.
I wish there were more established patterns around progressive disclosure of personal information. I want to use an app for a while before I start inviting them into my inbox and text messages.
Understand who you are negotiating with. It’s not usually the hiring manager or recruiter who has final say over pay. Figure out who does if you can, and figure out what they care about and need to see or hear. Then equip your contact with the information they need to advocate for paying you what you want. Like if they need a clearer statement about your years of experience, or your other offers, or your alignment with the role.
Great post. I found it entertainingly ironic that a post about a tool which reuses text blocks the half paragraph about Excel being the most popular backend database is repeated twice. I guess it was really important.
If you own stock that goes up 10% per year, and you take out a 5% loan against it, the appreciation in the stock more than covers the interest on the loan, so why would you ever pay it off?
If you’re doing transaction processing on the mainframe I could imagine wanting to score something (eg fraud) mid transaction, which might call for some additional platform capabilities. But it’s also plausible someone in marketing demanded more AI.