Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• How We Broke the Supply Chain

  Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits.

  Almost none of these stories will explain how these shortages and price hikes were also brought to life through bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed. We spent a half-century allowing business executives and financiers to take control of our supply chains, enabled by leaders in both parties. They all hailed the transformation, cheering the advances of globalization, the efficient network that would free us from want. Motivated by greed and dismissive of the public interest, they didn't mention that their invention was supremely ill-equipped to handle inevitable supply bottlenecks. And the pandemic exposed this hidden risk, like a domino bringing down a system primed to topple.
  ...
  THE ROOTS OF THE SUPPLY SHOCK lie in a basic bargain made between government and big business, on behalf of the American people but without their consent. In 1970, Milton Friedman argued in The New York Times that "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." Manufacturers used that to rationalize a financial imperative to benefit shareholders by seeking the lowest-cost labor possible. As legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch put it, "Ideally, you'd have every plant you own on a barge," able to escape any nation's wage, safety, or environmental laws.

• Alcohol, violence and injury-induced mortality

  Evidence from a modern-day prohibition.

  This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on the true impact of alcohol on injury-induced mortality. We also document a sharp drop in violent crimes, indicating a tight link between alcohol and aggressive behavior in society. Our results underscore the severe harm that alcohol can cause and point towards a role for policy measures that target the heaviest drinkers in society.

• New Study Disavows Marshmallow Test's Predictive Powers

  But the latest Bing follow-up study, by a team of researchers that included Mischel, casts doubt that a preschooler's response to a marshmallow test can predict anything at all about her future.

  Following the Bing children into their 40s, the new study finds that kids who quickly gave in to the marshmallow temptation are generally no more or less financially secure, educated or physically healthy than their more patient peers. The amount of time the child waited to eat the treat failed to forecast roughly a dozen adult outcomes the researchers tested, including net worth, social standing, high interest-rate debt, diet and exercise habits, smoking, procrastination tendencies and preventative dental care, according to the study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

• What Was the TED Talk?

  Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting"

  In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn't to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED's longtime curator, puts it, "We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something." And yet, TED's archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future - the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human - that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.

• What Spotify data show about the decline of English

  To investigate the evolution of music tastes across the world, The Economist trawled through the top 100 tracks in 70 countries according to Spotify. Examining 13,000 hits in 70 languages along with other data like genre, lyrical language and nationality of artist, we sought to group countries according to musical similarity.

  On these 320,000 records, we employed a principal-components analysis to assess the degree of musical kinship between countries, and then a clustering algorithm (known as k-means) to group them. Three broad clusters emerged: a contingent in which English is dominant; a Spanish-language ecosystem; and a third group that mostly enjoys local songs in various tongues. Across all, one trend emerged: the hegemony of English is in decline.
  ...
  There is no doubt that, despite its decline, English is still king. Of the 50 most-streamed tracks on Spotify over the past five years, 47 were in English. And the genres it incubated are being widely adopted elsewhere. There is now excellent rap available in Arabic, Russian and, of course, Spanish.

• Beatlemania

  Why did the Beatles become a worldwide sensation? Why do some cultural products succeed and others fail? Why are some musicians, poets, and novels,, unsuccessful or unknown in their lifetimes, iconic figures decades or generation after their deaths? Why are success and failure so unpredictable? On one view, the simplest and most general explanation is best, and it points to quality, appropriately measured: success is a result of quality, and the Beatles succeeded because of the sheer quality of their music. On another view, social influences are critical: timely enthusiasm or timely indifference can make the difference for all, including the Beatles, leading extraordinary books, movies, and songs to fail even if they are indistinguishable in quality from those that succeed. Informational cascades are often necessary for spectacular success; in some cases, they are both necessary and sufficient. For those who emphasize social influences and informational cascades, success and failure are not inevitable; they depend on seemingly small or serendipitous factors. History is only run once, so this proposition is difficult to prove. ...

• Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero

  We use AlphaZero, a system that learns to play chess from scratch, to explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level.

  Atomic changes to the rules of classical chess alter game balance with the material value of the pieces being altered accordingly, resulting in either more draws or more decisive outcomes. The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess.

• Pizza Isn't Italian

  It's as American as Dixieland Jazz

Some recent items related to U.S. foreign policy matters.

• Why Biden didn't negotiate seriously with Putin

  Robert Wright Nonzero Newsletter

  Wait, let me get this straight. So the leaders of the big NATO countries didn't especially want Ukraine to join NATO? And agreeing to not let Ukraine join NATO-agreeing to not do what they didn't want to do anyway-might have kept Russia from invading Ukraine? But they didn't do that? And doing that wasn't even seriously discussed? Like, virtually no influential American commentators argued that doing this would make sense? How could that be?

  Good question! Regular readers of this newsletter may expect me to answer it by launching immediately into an indictment of "the Blob" (the foreign policy establishment) and lamenting the Blob's lack of "cognitive empathy" (understanding how your adversary, or anyone else, views the world).

• This is Putin''s war, but America and NATO aren't innocent bystanders

  Thomas L. Friedman

  In my view, there are two huge logs fueling this fire. The first log was the ill-considered decision by the U.S. in the 1990s to expand NATO after - indeed, despite - the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  And the second and far bigger log is how Mr. Putin cynically exploited NATO's expansion closer to Russia's borders to rally Russians to his side to cover for his huge failure of leadership. Mr. Putin has utterly failed to build Russia into an economic model that would actually attract its neighbors, not repel them, and inspire its most talented people to want to stay, not get in line for visas to the West.
  ...
  The mystery was why the U.S. - which throughout the Cold War dreamed that Russia might one day have a democratic revolution and a leader who, however haltingly, would try to make Russia into a democracy and join the West - would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia's face when it was weak.

• Against Intervention and Regime Change

  Scott Horton and Bill Kristol Debate

  3,000 people were killed on September 11th, 2001. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted, the main reason Osama bin Laden cited for attacking America was the U.S. military bases left in Saudi Arabia for the so-called "dual containment" policy against Iraq and Iran in the 1990s after Iraq War I, the Persian Gulf War.

  Bin Laden's plan was to provoke the United States into invading Afghanistan so he could replicate the mujahideen's earlier success against the USSR, with U.S. support, in the 1980s, this time against us; to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy and to create a "choking life" for the American people under the tyranny of our security state.