Maxwell Tabarrok

In a previous post, I argued that AGI would not make human labor worthless.

One of the most common responses was to ask about the horses. Technology resulted in mass unemployment and population collapse for horses even though they must have had some comparative advantage with more advanced engines. Why couldn’t the same happen to humans? For example, here’s Grant Slatton on X or Gwern in the comments.

There are also responses from Zvi Mowshowitz and a differing perspective from Matthew Barnett that basically agree with the literal claim of my post (AGI will not make human labor worthless) but contend that AGI may well make human labor worth less than the cost of... (read 1909 more words →)

AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless

Maxwell Tabarrok

The discovery and use of machinery may be … injurious to the labouring class, as some of their number will be thrown out of employment, and population will become redundant.

- David Ricardo

Fears about human labor getting replaced by machines go back hundreds if not thousands of years. These fears continue today in response to the rapid progress of AI in several previously secure human domains.

Rudolf L on the Lesswrong forum, for example, claims that a world with labor-replacing AI would mean:

People's labour gives them less leverage than ever before.
Achieving outlier success through your labour in most or all areas is now impossible.

Scott Alexander responded to this post with some reasons to doubt... (read 1468 more words →)

-8

Literacy Rates Haven't Fallen By 20% Since the Department of Education Was Created

Maxwell Tabarrok

On the heels of Donald Trump’s election and his promises to end the Department of Education, you may have seen claims like these spreading around X.

Source

This claim is based on two datapoints. First, is the literacy rate of around 99% in 1979 which was measured by the US Census. After the Department of Education was created in the same year, the census stopped measuring literacy in their surveys and it’s since been tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The tweet’s second number comes from a recent NCES result that shows that around 16% of sampled Americans are at or below level 1 English literacy.

The problem is that these claims... (read 684 more words →)

Replying toA Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance

Maxwell Tabarrok1y

A Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance

Yeah, there can definitely still be imbalances/extra costs imposed on defenders but the point I'm making is that the projections people make are very often large over-estimates of what those costs will be.

A Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance

Maxwell Tabarrok

The offense-defense balance is a concept that compares how easy it is to protect vs conquer or destroy resources. For example, autonomous weapons and AI systems might make attacks easier and more scalable compared to defensive measures. The balance matters because when offense has the advantage, it can create instability and increase the likelihood of conflict.

I claim that worries over a massively upset offense-defense balance make the same mistake as peak oil apocalypse prophecies.

Peak Oil

Peak oil hysteria was seeded in the environmentalism and energy crisis of the 1970s and reached its apogee in the early 2000s with a flood of books, documentaries, and movements predicting civilizational collapse.

In some ways, the predictions of... (read 594 more words →)

Prices are Bounties

Maxwell Tabarrok

A man has just robbed a train. A Rock Island Rail car was held up in the desert of North Texas on route from Chicago carrying dozens of passengers and tens of thousands of dollars in a Wells Fargo express compartment. The men were slain and the women and children are kidnapped.

You’re the sheriff in charge of the investigation. In a case like this, tried and true procedure is to put a bounty on the man’s head. That gets everyone interested in looking and bringing this man to justice. An everyday 2-bit robber might get a bounty of a thousand or ten, but this is an emergency. You set the bounty at... (read 419 more words →)

The Offense-Defense Balance of Gene Drives

Maxwell Tabarrok

I recently wrote a twitter thread for Works In Progress summarizing their article on gene drives as a tool to end malaria. There’s a section in that piece that I didn’t get to highlight in the thread which I want to talk about here: the offense-defense balance of gene drives.

What Are Gene Drives and How do They Work?

Gene drives are a form of biotechnology that allows DNA mutations to guarantee inheritance in offspring and rapidly spread through a population, regardless of their evolutionary fitness. Nature discovered this technology long before humans did, and around half of our DNA is currently made up of these gene-drive mutations.

Humans have recently discovered how to engineer... (read 1149 more words →)

Should Sports Betting Be Banned?

Maxwell Tabarrok

You may have seen this recent paper on the financial effects of legal online sports betting floating around econ twitter a few weeks ago:

Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting's Impact on Vulnerable Households by Baker, Balthrop, Johnson, Kotter, and Pisciotta (2024).

The headline result: legalizing online betting increases betting by about $25 and decreases investments in stocks by about $50 per household per quarter.

These are averages across all households in a state, including the ones that never bet. For households that actually begin betting after legalization, betting expenses rise to about $179 per quarter, on average.

The negative effects on investment are large relative to the sample mean. The average household invests about $380 a... (read 1161 more words →)

Congressional Insider Trading

Maxwell Tabarrok

You’ve probably seen the Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker on X or else a collection of articles and books exposing the secret and lucrative world of congressional insider trading.

The underlying claim behind these stories is intuitive and compelling. Regulations, taxes, and subsidies can make or break entire industries and congresspeople can get information on these rules before anyone else, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they used this information to make profitable stock trades.

But do congresspeople really have a consistent advantage over the market? Or is this narrative built on a cherrypicked selection of a few good years for a few lucky traders?

Is Congressional Insider Trading Real

There are several papers in economics and... (read 1855 more words →)

•••

Investigating the Chart of the Century: Why is food so expensive?

Maxwell Tabarrok

You’ve probably seen this chart from Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute.

I’ve seen this chart dozens of times and have always enjoyed how many different and important stories it can tell.

There is a story of the incredible abundance offered by technological growth and globalization. Compared to average hourly wages, cars, furniture, clothing, internet access, software, toys, and TVs have become far more accessible than they were 20 years ago. Flatscreens and Fiats that were once luxuries are now commodities.

There is also a story of sclerosis and stagnation. Sure, lots of frivolous consumer goods have gotten cheaper but healthcare, housing, childcare, and education, all the important stuff, has exploded in price. Part... (read 643 more words →)

126

Four Randomized Control Trials In Economics

Maxwell Tabarrok

Randomized Control Trials have some drawbacks. For many important questions, like causes of the industrial revolution, a randomized trial is impossible. For many others, RCTs are expensive and cumbersome, leading to low sample sizes or experimental designs that precisely answer irrelevant questions. Still, when RCTs with large sample size and generalizable designs are possible, their advantages justify deference to their results even when observational evidence disagrees. This is the case with the four trials in this post. They each have hundreds to tens of thousands of participants and budgets big enough to test treatments that are relevant to the real world.

The largest RCT in this group, run by Harvard economists and the... (read 1195 more words →)

Replying toFour Futures For Cognitive Labor

Maxwell Tabarrok2y

Four Futures For Cognitive Labor

A couple of reasons why authors might be worried about the press:

It's a massive change to the technology of what they produce. This comes with lots of uncertainty and fear.

It commodifies books and massively decreases the unit price. Depending on how much you think quantity demanded will change, it could easily decrease your income. E.g, if the press came around and no one read any more books, it would be scary for authors and many would be out of work since now a single author can produce 100x more books.

-1

Replying toFour Futures For Cognitive Labor

Maxwell Tabarrok2y

Four Futures For Cognitive Labor

Hmm fair enough, I didn't consider that there would already be a lot of specialization between authors and copyists pre-press. Still, I think I can rewrite the paragraph to remove this error and preserve the parts relevant to the overall post:

>First: the printing press. In 1400, the labor and skill that went into copying a book made up the majority of its value. Authors confronted with a future where the most valuable part of each of their books is automated for a tiny fraction of the cost might understandably be terrified. Each book would be worth a tiny fraction of what they were worth before, surely not enough to support a career.

Replying toAgainst Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political Compass

Maxwell Tabarrok2y

Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political Compass

That's not a part of any of the plans to cancel student debt that have been implemented or are being considered. That would definitely change a lot of the arguments but I don't think it would make debt cancellation look like a much better policy, though the reasons it was bad would be different.

Replying toAI Regulation is Unsafe

Maxwell Tabarrok2y

AI Regulation is Unsafe

Firms are actually better than governments at internalizing costs across time. Asset values incorporate the potential future flows. For example, consider a retiring farmer. You might think that they have an incentive to run the soil dry in their last season since they won't be using it in the future, but this would hurt the sale value of the farm. An elected representative who's term limit is coming up wouldn't have the same incentives.

Of course, firms incentives are very misaligned in important ways. The question is: Can we rely on government to improve these incentives.

-6

Replying toAI Regulation is Unsafe

Maxwell Tabarrok2y

AI Regulation is Unsafe

Daniel and I continue the comment thread here
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/ai-regulation-is-unsafe?r=awlwu&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=54561569

Replying toContra Scott on Abolishing the FDA

Maxwell Tabarrok2y

Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA

It's not a Motte and Bailey because I don't switch between positions. My definition of the hardline position is to "restrict the FDA’s mandatory authority to labeling and make their efficacy testing completely non-binding."

I could have made an argument for removing FDA safety testing as well but I didn't. I am arguing only for the Motte against Scott's plan to expand supplements and experimental drugs.

Replying toA Double-Feature on The Extropians

Maxwell Tabarrok3y

A Double-Feature on The Extropians

That's awesome to hear! Hope you enjoy

Replying toEnlightenment Values in a Vulnerable World

Maxwell Tabarrok4y

Enlightenment Values in a Vulnerable World

Thank you for reading!
There's a great chapter in Deustch's Beginning of Infinity on counterintuitive properties of infinite sets. One of them is relevant to anthropic reasoning type arguments sometimes made by longtermists.

For example, the grabby aliens paper deducing a lot of information based on the fact that human's appearance seems astoundingly early relative to the lifetime of the universe. Or the Doomsday argument which says we should expect the world to end soon as that's the only outcome which would make our presence average rather than being an outlier right at the beginning of human history.

However, as Deustch points out that if you pick any number in an infinite set, it will... (read more)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Investigating the Chart of the Century: Why is food so expensive?

The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes

The 2nd Demographic Transition

A Double-Feature on The Extropians

Maxwell Tabarrok

Maxwell Tabarrok

What About The Horses?

AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless

Literacy Rates Haven't Fallen By 20% Since the Department of Education Was Created

A Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance

Prices are Bounties

The Offense-Defense Balance of Gene Drives

Should Sports Betting Be Banned?

Maxwell Tabarrok

Investigating the Chart of the Century: Why is food so expensive?

The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes

The 2nd Demographic Transition

A Double-Feature on The Extropians

Maxwell Tabarrok

Maxwell Tabarrok

What About The Horses?

AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless

Literacy Rates Haven't Fallen By 20% Since the Department of Education Was Created

A Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance

Prices are Bounties

The Offense-Defense Balance of Gene Drives

Should Sports Betting Be Banned?

Peak Oil

What Are Gene Drives and How do They Work?

Is Congressional Insider Trading Real