Category Archives: Economics

Why are there Multiple Theories of Economics?

Economics, Uncategorized

The Sciences are generally defined as ‘rigorous, systematic endeavor[s] that build and organize knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.’ As a Social Science, Economics focuses on ‘the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.’ As a Science, we would expect that Economics would be able to make testable predictions, and that over time, those theories would converge and those predictions would become more accurate.[0]

However much improvement there has been in economic theories over the past century or two, there is still no real consensus on the causes of and solutions for such basic economic issues as high inflation.[1]

So, why is this? A number of ideas come to mind, of varying levels of spiciness:

1) Economics lacks predictive power, and can only rationalize cause and effect after the fact

2) Human behaviour is too complicated to model (this Guardian article suggests that it might be a chaotic system)

3) Basic underlying assumptions are wrong (Humans are not rational actors, there is substantial information asymmetry, etc…)

4) Some combination of payola and regulatory capture (the current consensus on drivers of inflation does not take into account changes in corporate profit rates. Also note that the economics ‘Nobel Prize’ is not a true Nobel prize, and has been disowned by multiple members of the Nobel family[2].)

5) Different economic theories are required for different situations (read ‘Micro’ & ‘Macro’)

6) Economic theory is actually game theory, and as soon as something is figured out, humans compensate for that and change the rules (any large institution that you are trading with will adjust their prices (or other rules) if you figure out how to retain a larger percentage of the profit from a transaction, so as to maintain their margins)[3]

7) Much of human behaviour (and economic behaviour) is based on human sentiment, and measuring and reporting on it affects it (try watching how swings in price fluctuate vs. accepted measures of value for stocks as ‘market sentiment’ changes; cf. ‘Mr. Market‘)

8) Economic predictions are subject to ‘groupthink‘[4], as there are immediate consequences of being outside the mainstream, but few consequences for wrong predictions.

9) The returns from investing are directly at odds with the amount of profit made by investment advisors (see Warren Buffet’s successful bet with the Hedge funds for a good example)[5]

10) The inputs and ‘externalities’ are not things that most humans would choose (climate change is the current most pressing ‘externality’[6] that economic does not deal with well, but the original reason that economics was called a ‘dismal science‘ is another.)

So, which of the above are the main issues with Economics? Some of them? All of them? More importantly, what do we do about it?

Well, we can start by only believing theories that have been confirmed through the scientific method, i.e. Prediction, followed by successfully predicted result. Perhaps we can be more aware of sentiment or groupthink, and try to pay attention to the underlying.

(Just remember the famous quote attributed to Keynes: “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.”

Other ideas on what are the main causes? Other recommendations on how to deal with them? Let me know in the comments below!

[0] There is one Theory of Gravity (modulo quantum), and one Theory of Evolution, and each of them have massive predictive power. Why not Economics?

[1] Note the three main determinants of inflation mentioned do not include ‘too much growth in the money supply’, or ‘price gouging’, generally accepted to be a major cause of the 2021-2022 (and perhaps ongoing) inflation surge.

[2] “Nobel accuses the awarding institution of misusing his family’s name, and states that no member of the Nobel family has ever had the intention of establishing a prize in economics.[39] He explained that “Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being”, saying that “There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize”, and that the association with the Nobel prizes is “a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation”.[38] ”
Economics

[3] This is based on my experiences in Forex. I imagine other markets would be similar, but the less regulated the market, and the greater the power asymmetry, the worse this issue would be.

[3] “His analysis revealed that economists had failed to predict 148 of the past 150 recessions. Part of the problem, he said, was that there wasn’t much of a reputational gain to be had by predicting a recession others had missed. If you disagreed with the consensus, you would be met with skepticism. The downside of getting it wrong was more personally damaging than the upside of getting it right.”

[4] In case of link rot.

[5] Note that for example, the IMF focuses on the effects of Climate Change (and specifically says it is a ‘global externality’, rather than wielding its considerable power to propose policy changes that might reduce it.

” Climate and the Economy

Climate change has potential to do significant economic harm, and poses worrying tail risks. It is a global externality—one country’s emissions affect all countries by adding to the stock of heat-warming gases in the earth’s atmosphere from which warming arises.

The process of climate change is set to have a significant economic impact on many countries, with a large number of lower income countries being particularly at risk. Macroeconomic policies in these countries will need to be calibrated to accommodate more frequent weather shocks, including by building policy space to respond to shocks. Infrastructure will need to be upgraded to enhance economic resilience.

Elsewhere, climate change can entail significant risks to macrofinancial stability. Nonfinancial corporate sectors face risks from climate damages and stranded assets—such as coal reserves that become uneconomic with carbon pricing—and the disruption could affect corporate balance sheet quality.”

What is Management?

Economics, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems

So, I’ve been thinking about management training recently[0], and while I’m collecting my thoughts, I thought it would be good to talk about what ‘management’ is, at its most fundamental.

I’m going to make some assumptions here:
– Management is about the art of helping[1] people to work together towards a common goal
– We’re talking about ‘good’ management, which is trying to do the above in a positive and sustainable way
– The things we’re going to talk about will be relevant to all[2] organizations with some sort of hierarchy, and perhaps some without

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, manage.’
– A paraphrase of a quote from George Bernard Shaw

The quote above, while flip, has some interesting truth to it. I would argue that, beyond perverse financial incentives[3], those who decide to go into management from an individual contributor (IC) role do so because of some competitive advantage pushing that choice. Likely one of:
– They are better at managing then at being an individual contributor (leading to the quote above)
– They are better as an IC than as a manager, but they are better than anyone else at being a manager (competitive advantage)
– They are better as an IC than as a manager, but they are afraid that any one other than them chosen to be manager will be worse (and/or they want control over their work environment/process)

So, having some idea of why people ‘get into’ management, what is ‘management’?

Like we said above, ‘management’ is the art of helping people work together towards a common goal, in a positive and sustainable way.

To me, this includes the following components:
– Helping people work together towards the goals of one’s team
– Helping people work together towards the goals of the larger organization
– Helping people and the organization as a whole improve goals and process[4]
– Helping your team (and yourself[5]) achieve career goals
– Keeping your team (and yourself) happy

Now that we have some categories, we’ll continue next time going into a little more detail. Thanks for listening. 🙂

[0] And feeling super-pompous about it. Luckily, I have good friends who will tell me when I’m full of it. 🙂

[1] I use the word ‘helping’ here, a relatively positive word, and probably suitable for working with one’s direct reports, or in a truly psychologically safe environment. Sadly, most environments are not that, and people must often be convinced to do what is in the best interests of the organization (and often must be convinced to do what is in their own best interest, too). ‘Convincing’, or ‘getting’ might be used in other environments, but even in those environments, I think ‘helping’ is still a healthier and more productive choice.

[2] Public, private, etc…

[3] There are some organizations where the structure is such that one can only advance in one’s career (read payscale) by advancing in ‘management’. Some would say that most large organizations are like this to some extent. This discussion, while important, is out of scope.

[4] I have much to say (and many books have been written) about the ways in which organizations do non-optimal things, decide on non-optimal goals, or otherwise lose their way. (My favourite book which touches on this is ‘The Goal’, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.)

[5] It’s incredibly important to support your team, and do the best you can to ensure their success. In general, you become successful when your team is successful. There will be points where this diverges, though, and it’s important to know when those are, as you and your team members will be healthier with healthier boundaries.

On the Importance of ‘Technical Debt’

Agile, Economics, Engineering, Organizing Systems, Programming, Software Development

A couple of years ago, I was talking with a good friend of mine, we were talking about the difficulties of prioritizing the maintainability of software in a large organization development context.

And so, logically, the concept of ‘Technical Debt’ came up. Interestingly, he had never heard the term before[1], although as soon as he heard it, he grasped the importance.

(I remember it as being a really inspiring conversation, but sadly, my notes from that day don’t well capture what I found so inspiring about it. 🙁 )

Although the concepts of ‘clean up after yourself’ and ‘do it the right way’ are likely as old as human civilization, it was likely only after systems reached a certain level of complexity that the concept of ‘Technical Debt’ was really useful. There is a limit to how complex a mechanical system can get[2], and most other systems are amenable to human factors and psychological safety solutions.

It’s also interesting to think about what is different about software, that makes it: A) possible to make a working product with large (including conceptual) defects, B) Useful to ‘go into debt’ to get a product out the door faster (or more cheaply).

One wonders how much it is the sheer complexity of software systems, the number of interacting modules, or perhaps the number of layers involved, from OS to dev_tools, to language, to standard libraries, to 3rd party libraries, to user-made helper functions. Perhaps it is just that one can ‘go into debt’ in the uppermost layer, because there exists a good foundation.

It could also simply be that software is an automation of so many smaller tasks, that any human system as complex would have similar useful concepts of debt[3].

Doing a little bit of digging, it seems that the concept was first termed ‘debt’ sometime in 1992[4], but it was not until later that it was termed ‘Technical Debt’.

Articulating the concept of ‘Technical Debt’ has a number of important benefits:

1) It puts a name on the category of ‘things we want to clean up in our code’, adds an urgency, and calls out more precisely why this is important.

2) It links the concept of ‘do things the right way’ with ‘Business’ concepts of money. This enables much better CTO-CFO conversations, allows better and more informed project funding decision making, and (hopefully) enables better and more structured funding for Technical Debt reduction[5].

3) It enables conversations in the moment, during architecture conversations and code reviews (and everything in between), where the parties involved can directly weigh/balance the time/resource costs of proper implementation with the opportunity costs of delaying time to market (or MVI/MVP[6]).

It will be interesting to see how organizations (and organizational decision-making) change as this concept spreads from ‘pure’ software companies.

[1] We theorized that this was because he had grown up in Hardware companies.

[2] I am not a Mechanical Engineer, and I’m happy to hear counterexamples, as well the conceptual frameworks used to address this… 🙂

[3] Such as ‘Organizational Debt‘.

[4] https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html “As far as I can tell, Ward first introduced this concept in an experience report for OOPSLA 1992. It has also been discussed on the wiki http://wiki.c2.com/?ComplexityAsDebt.”

[5] My favourite label for this is the ‘FBI’ list[7], as in ‘Can you F****** Believe It?’, passed down to me by an executive from a famous Canadian software company.

[6] ‘Minimum Viable Increment/Minimum Viable Product‘, from various implementations of Agile theory.

[7] Things that might linger on a list like this include things filed ‘Too Dangerous to Fix’, which are often interesting memoir fodder.

Energy Efficiency and the ‘Rosenfeld Effect’

Economics, Engineering, Science!

Art Rosenfeld passed away two weeks ago. Most people would not remember him, but they have been affected by his simple observation in 1976 that a “proposed nuclear power plant would not be needed if refrigerators were required to be more efficient.”

Here you can see the effects on the energy efficiency in the state of California:

"The Rosenfeld Effect."
“The Rosenfeld Effect.”

Note how the energy expenditure per capita flatlines from the time he made the observation above. It was never one thing, but a lot of little things Turning off lights at night, higher efficiency furnaces and fridges and stoves. Higher efficiency lighting. Better windows.

These are the kinds of things which make a huge difference in aggregate (and he was a master at expressing how much of a difference each of them would make singularly, such as spending 20mins with light switches saves 100 gallons of gas over the weekend). These are the kinds of incremental changes which are slowly reducing the scourge of cancer[1]. These are the kinds of things which can reduce changes to the climate.

Thanks, Art. Let’s keep working and doing things a little more intelligently every day.

Art Rosenfeld, California’s Godfather of Energy Efficiency, Dies at 90

[1]This is a fascinating topic. Check out these graphs: https://www.google.ca/search?q=cancer+mortality+rate+historical

Global Warming is No Longer A Joke

Economics, Politics

“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.”

By now, many of you will have read the obituary for the 25-million-year-old Great Barrier Reef.

From the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, to soil erosion, to peak oil, to deforestation, human systems are good at squandering natural resources and bad at understanding how long it takes for them to replenish.

Today, it seems that we can add the Great Barrier Reef to that list. As the obituary poignantly puts it:

”
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.
…
The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habitat in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited.
…
No one knows if a serious effort could have saved the reef, but it is clear that no such effort was made. On the contrary, attempts to call attention to the reef’s plight were thwarted by the government of Australia itself, which in 2016, shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.
”

This last paragraph is perhaps the most damning. That we selected (and continue to select) leadership that actively works to put our collective heads in the sand, and that we fail to take them to task for it.

But maybe, like the cod stocks, we can stabilize the situation, (perhaps also at 1% of the original), and then start to reverse the damage. This article suggests that the Australian government is starting to pay attention, still far less than is actually required, but perhaps a start.

So, what are you doing to make a difference here? How are you influencing decisions that actually make a difference here? Who are you publicly calling out for making short-sighted long-term damaging decisions?

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Bumblebees are dying.

It is time for us to actually do something about it.

It is time for you to actually do something about it.

Why the Headphone Jack Must Stay

Economics, Engineering, Internet Culture, Music

Yesterday, we had a date night, and over dinner, we thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to watch Contact? Neither of us have seen it since it came out, almost 20 years ago.”

First, we opened up Netflix, and searched for ‘Contact’. It wasn’t available there, but Netflix said it could show us movies similar to it. (It also showed us ‘Star Trek: First Contact” as an option, more on that later.)

So, we try iTunes. We’re trying it on my computer, because S’s Mac has mysteriously stopped talking to our USB speakers. Fast-forwarding through the standard iTunes bad user experience[1], we eventually figure out how to rent ‘Contact’, the movie, in HD for $4.99. It starts downloading. We hook up the projector, start the movie, and we see the following screen:

This is what happens when you try to use iTunes with your projector. (Not shown: Our USB speakers stopped working just then, too.)
This is what happens when you try to use iTunes with your projector. (Not shown: Our USB speakers stopped working just then, too.)

The movie that we just paid money to rent will not play on a display that iTunes was more than happy to play on just a couple of years ago.

Think about what just happened here. We went to the extra effort of purchasing a movie rental, and it is treating us like we’re trying to pirate it.

Doing some quick googling, we determine that we might be able to get the SD version to work with our setup, but iTunes won’t let us change from HD to SD (and keeps trying to download the HD version, despite the fact that this will overfill the hard drive).

So, back to Netflix. We eventually settle on Firefly (a really interesting concept, more on this in a later post). Netflix just works.

Or at least Netflix tries to work. Somewhere during this process, my Mac has silently decided that it should no longer talk to the USB speakers. There being no useful way to debug this in the ‘System Preferences’ menu, we end up lugging my sound system from my computer, which has a headphone jack connector like so:

Headphone jack to RCA adapter. The best way to get sound from your computer to serious speakers.
Headphone jack to RCA adapter. The best way to get sound from your computer to serious speakers.

The headphone jack connect works. We finally start to relax, I start watching Firefly for the first time, then we watch the masterpiece which is Star Trek: First Contact, and go to sleep happy.

Apple has a lot of power, through its massive market share and avid user base. This power can be used for good, such as when it is used to push for selling DRM-free music, but it can also be used for evil, such as when Apple Music deletes music that you have composed.

With the iPhone 7, Apple is using this power to no longer include a standard headphone jack. Now all music, audio, Stripe payments, what have you, will be streamed digitally. It will probably work, it might even work perfectly and for a long time. But at some point, someone will decide to add DRM to that stream, and all of a sudden your music will stop working.

All because Apple decided to remove your headphone jack.

Cory Doctorow also has some thoughts about this.

[1]iTunes standard bad experience:
– You have to search twice in the search bar for it to actually search
– The search function has a pre-defined list of types of media, and it will always show them to you in that order. Compare with the Google search for ‘Contact’.
– If you start downloading a rented HD movie, you can’t switch to the SD version, even if you realize you don’t have enough hard drive space, or the HD movie won’t play because of the HDCP DRM.
– And don’t get me started on how slow it always is.

Trolley Problem Memes

Economics, Engineering, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Machine Learning, Organizing Systems, Thoughts on Thoughts

Trigger warning: Conversation and possibly dark humour about fictional (and possibly not-so-fictional) people dying in car and train accidents.

How do you design a self-driving car to appropriately value human life? Can you use a Facebook group to speed the development of philosophical discourse?

The ‘Trolley Problem‘ is a problem in ethics, first known to be described in its modern form in the early 1950s. Basically, it boils down to the question:

If you have a choice between action and inaction, where both will cause harm, but your action will harm fewer people, is it moral to perform that action?

Interestingly, people answer this question differently, based on how active the action of harm is, the ratio of people hurt between the choices of action and inaction, and other reasons.

The astute will notice that this type of decision problem is a very common one, the most obvious being in military applications, but also vaccines (and invasive health procedures in general), firebreaks, and perhaps the canonical example, automobile design and manufacturing.

This type of decision making has become even more important with the advent of self-driving cars:

Would you drive a car that would choose to drive you into a brick wall rather than run over five pedestrians?

Overall, you would think that this would reduce your risk of fatality, but few people would choose that car, likely because it is a classic prisoner’s dilemma[1][2].

What is your self-driving car's ethical system?
What is your self-driving car’s ethical system?

Personally, I think that much of this conversation is sophistry[3]. If one is truly interested in preserving life, the solution is not to convince self-driving cars to kill different people, but perhaps to have more stringent driving training requirements, to invest in fixing known problem intersections, to invest in better public transit.

So, if these conversations are not useful for anything else, they must be useful in and of themselves, and therefore must be Philosophy[4]!

One of the places that these conversations are occurring is the ‘Trolley Problems Memes Facebook page‘[5].

Now, you can argue that this page is purely for entertainment, but I think there’s a lot more hidden there. There is a fomenting and interchange of ideas, much faster and more fluidly than at any time in history. The person who writes the next book[6] on the ethics of decision making could well be influenced by or be an avid user of a site such as this one.

They may have started with Rick-rolling, but image macros are helping the advancement of human knowledge. Stew on that one for a while.

And while you’re thinking about that, something which ties it all together[7]:

"The creator might argue that his robot is an 'individual', capable of his own decisions, while the opposition would say that he (the creator) is responsible for the algorithm that led to the action. Imagine this happening - it would give birth to one of the greatest on-court debates ever." From Patrice Leiteritz via Trolley Problem Memes
“The creator might argue that his robot is an ‘individual’, capable of his own decisions, while the opposition would say that he (the creator) is responsible for the algorithm that led to the action. Imagine this happening – it would give birth to one of the greatest on-court debates ever.” From Patrice Leiteritz via Trolley Problem Memes

[1]If everyone cooperates, overall they will receive a better result, but if any one of them betrays the others, they get an even better result, but everyone else’s result is much worse. This theoretically leads everyone to betray everyone else, leading to everyone having a worse overall outcome.

[2]People also like the feeling of control.

[3]Check out the article. Apparently, the Sophists were the first (recorded) right-wing think tanks.

[4]My undergrad Philosophy 101 prof. made the argument that because philosophy was not useful for anything else, it must be inherently be useful (and that that was better).

[5]Dark humour. You have been warned.

[6]And it might not even be a book! A blog post, even! 😀

[7]Not a deliberate pun.

The Hollowed-Out Middle America

Economics, History, Politics

This presidential election has been described as a new realignment[1] of American politics, where social pressures mount so high that demagogues[2] appear, and politicians abruptly shift to actually mirror their constituents for a time.

First Bernie Sanders appeared[3], giving voice to the frustrations and the hope for change felt by Millenials and others who had been left behind by globalization and the regulatory capture by the banks.

Later emerged Donald Trump, who gave voice to the anger felt by blue collar white workers, who felt betrayed by decades of free trade and globalization/outsourcing/immigration[4] policies, exacerbated by trends towards more and more automation.

But they are really railing against the same issues (and these are very real issues), which is some of the reasons[5] why so many Bernie supporters are moving to Trump, even though Hilary and the Democrats[6] have basically adopted Bernie’s platform.

Much of why Trump has found such fertile ground is that *both* parties have been ignoring Middle America for decades, as Michael Brendan Dougherty says:

“To simplify Francis’ theory: There are a number of Americans who are losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a transnational global elite. These Middle Americans see jobs disappearing to Asia and increased competition from immigrants. Most of them feel threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees Middle Americans as loathsome white bigots. But they are also threatened by conservatives who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their unemployment too.”

To me, it seems that in general, anger comes from frustrated expectations, often expectations that are not conscious, where people are not encouraged to really look at the forces in play keeping their way of life the way it is. Then, when one or more of these forces change, life suddenly changes, and you get anger. (It could also be because people know exactly what is causing things, they’ve been electing politicians who say they will fix things, but never actually do, so eventually the people get angry.)

One thing I’d never really thought about (in such words) was that Middle America was really a class protected by political forces (Michael Brendan Dougherty quoting Francis):

”
Middle American forces, emerging from the ruins of the old independent middle and working classes, found conservative, libertarian, and pro-business Republican ideology and rhetoric irrelevant, distasteful, and even threatening to their own socio-economic interests. The post World War II middle class was in reality an affluent proletariat, economically dependent on the federal government through labor codes, housing loans, educational programs, defense contracts, and health and unemployment benefits. All variations of conservative doctrine rejected these…
”

and it was inevitable that this would wane, but it was in few politicians’ interest to actually confront and solve the problems.

So, here we are. Maybe, with Hillary adopting Bernie’s platform, things will get better, and we’ll work together to solve some of these problems. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the realignment works itself out.

(This other linked story talks about how the Democrats are becoming the party of globalization, as the Republicans become the party of isolationism, where):

“This difference in worldviews maps neatly into differences in policy. Nationalists support immigration and trade deals only if they improve the living standards of citizens of the nation. For the new, globally minded progressives, the mere well-being of American workers is not a good enough reason to oppose immigration or trade liberalization. It’s an argument that today’s progressive globalists have borrowed from libertarians: immigration or trade that depresses the wages of Americans is still justified if it makes immigrants or foreign workers better off.

[snip]

Likewise, the current opposition of many Democratic politicians to free-trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflects the residual influence of declining manufacturing unions within the party According to a March 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, by a margin of 56 percent to 38 percent, Democratic voters believe that free-trade agreements have been good for the U.S. Among Republicans, those numbers are almost reversed: by a 53 percent to 38 percent margin, a majority of Republicans believe free-trade has been a bad thing. Among younger Americans, who tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans, support for free trade is high: 67 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say trade agreements are good for the country. Even progressives who campaign against trade deals feel obliged by the logic of ethical cosmopolitanism to justify their opposition in the name of the labor rights of foreign workers or the good of the global environment.
”

[1]Or perhaps the end of a 50-year-long realignment.

[2]Trump for sure, but remember that Bernie Sanders appeared first, in his quiet(er) way, giving voice to the frustrations of many. In a way, both sides of the same coin, hope and fear.

[3]Yes, I know he’d been saying the same things for decades, but that was the first I’d ever heard of him.

[4]As Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in The Week:

“Chinese competition really did hammer the Rust Belt and parts of the great Appalachian ghetto. It made the life prospects for men — in marriage and in their careers — much dimmer than those of their fathers. Libertarian economists, standing giddily behind Republican politicians, celebrate this as creative destruction even as the collateral damage claims millions of formerly-secure livelihoods, and — almost as crucially — overall trust and respect in the nation’s governing class. Immigration really does change the calculus for native-born workers too. As David Frum points out last year:

[T]he Center for Immigration Studies released its latest jobs study. CIS, a research organization that tends to favor tight immigration policies, found that even now, almost seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans are working than in November 2007, the peak of the prior economic cycle. Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are two million more immigrants — legal and illegal — working in the United States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since November 2007 have gone to immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of native-born Americans, especially men, have abandoned the job market altogether. [The Atlantic]
”
”
For decades, people have been warning that a set of policies that really has enriched Americans on the top, and likely has improved the overall quality of life (through cheap consumables) on the bottom, has hollowed out the middle.
”

[5]The other reasons are generally sexism.

[6]This would either be a terrific or terrible band.

How do You Measure Inflation?

Economics, Nostalgia, Personal Finance, Politics

Inflation is supposed to be one, measurable number. There’s a number that’s quoted in all the newspapers, and is used all over the place, to help determine how well the economy is doing, to index pensions, to negotiate union contracts, etc, etc…

This is generally known as the ‘CPI’, or ‘Consumer Price Index’. I’ve reproduced the numbers for Canada from Statcan[1] below:

Consumer Price Index, historical summary
(1996 to 2015)   	All-items 	Change from previous year
  	2002=100 	%
1996 	88.9 	1.5
1997 	90.4 	1.7
1998 	91.3 	1.0
1999 	92.9 	1.8
2000 	95.4 	2.7
2001 	97.8 	2.5
2002 	100.0 	2.2
2003 	102.8 	2.8
2004 	104.7 	1.8
2005 	107.0 	2.2
2006 	109.1 	2.0
2007 	111.5 	2.2
2008 	114.1 	2.3
2009 	114.4 	0.3
2010 	116.5 	1.8
2011 	119.9 	2.9
2012 	121.7 	1.5
2013 	122.8 	0.9
2014 	125.2 	2.0
2015 	126.6 	1.1

These numbers should dovetail well with what you read in the news. They even nicely break the CPI down by type of item:

Consumer Price Index, by province (monthly)
(Canada)   May 2015 April 2016 	May 2016 April 2016 to May 2016 May 2015 to May 2016
  	2002=100 	% change
Canada 	  	 
All-items 		126.9 	128.3 	128.8 	0.4 	1.5
Food 			140.8 	143.8 	143.3 	-0.3 	1.8
Shelter 		133.2 	134.9 	135.1 	0.1 	1.4
Household op & furn. 	119.7 	121.6 	122.1 	0.4 	2.0
Clothing and footwear 	95.0 	96.0 	96.0 	0.0 	1.1
Transportation 		128.0 	127.8 	129.4 	1.3 	1.1
Health and pers. care 	120.7 	122.2 	122.3 	0.1 	1.3
Rec, ed, & reading 	109.9 	110.3 	111.7 	1.3 	1.6
Alc. & tobacco products 151.9 	156.5 	156.8 	0.2 	3.2
Special aggregates
All items excl. food 	124.2 	125.3 	126.1 	0.6 	1.5
All items excl. energy 	124.8 	126.9 	127.2 	0.2 	1.9
Energy 			152.4 	143.4 	146.9 	2.4 	-3.6
Source: Statistics Canada, CANSIM, table 326-0020 and Catalogue nos. 62-001-X and 62-010-X.
Last modified: 2016-06-17.

But many peoples’ experience of inflation can be very different.

I’ll use an example near and dear to my heart:

Today, I had the

Vegetable Chow Mein from my favourite food truck: Wokking On Wheels!
Vegetable Chow Mein from my favourite food truck: Wokking On Wheels!

I first visited the Wokking on Wheels food truck sometime during the fall of 1996, when I was working on Calculus with J (Thanks, J!). At that time, they had five daily specials which, if I recall correctly, they were selling for $3.75. These included the special Thursday special, ‘Singapore Fried noodles’, which you could persuade them to add red sweet sauce to. Delicious!

Anyway, the Vegetable Chow Mein was the least expensive thing on their menu today, at $7.

So, 20 years later, how has inflation fared? By the CPI deflator above, you would expect a $3.75 item in 1996 to cost $3.75*128.8/88.9 = $5.43, about $1.50 less than the actual.

Even if you use the ‘food’ number above, you get: $3.75*143.3/88.9 = $6.04, or about $1 less than the actual.

There are a number of reasons for this (which are beyond the scope), but it’s enough for now to note that there are reasons that people have a different feeling of inflation than what is ‘official’.

[1]The numbers for Ontario seem to be about the same to me.

Liveblogging the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting: II

Economics, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics

Yesterday, we watched the first half of the Q&A at the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting. We ‘live’ blogged the first quarter of yesterday. Today, here’s the second quarter:

Q10: Negative rates, and how they affect Berkshire:
Charlie:
1/4 to -1/4 is not very different. Both are ‘painful’ interest rates for investing $60 billion

Charlie Munger looks like a sea turtle.

Charlie seems to drink a lot of Coke, don’t know if Warren does, but that could just because Warren is the one talking most of the time.

Q11: BNSF Decline in commodity prices, and how that might change how much freight is shipped
“We don’t mark up and down our wholly-owned businesses based on motions in the stock market.”

Q12:Harry Potter(?!?) question? (The question asker compared the situation to Hogwarts, etc…)
How should children look at stocks when time horizons for ‘investing’ so short, and IPOs are making so much money?

(On IPOs)
‘If they want to do mathematically unsound things and one of them gets lucky and they put the one that’s lucky on television…’
Think of stocks as a business you own…
Charlie:
‘American business will do fine’
‘But not the average client of a stockbroker.’
‘The stockbroker will do fine’

Q13: NV lobbying against solar (rooftops) where the utility was forced to pay the increased rate to the homeowner instead of the government?
‘Who pays the subsidy’ is the issue… (‘A political question’)
‘If society is the one benefiting, then society should pick up the tab.’

Q14: Low oil prices influence BRK more now (because of various effects on various subsidiaries)?
Warren:
‘We don’t think we can predict the price of commodities.’
Charlie:
‘I’m even more ignorant than you are.’

Q15: Would philanthropic establishment of new universities help with the cost of tuition, possibly by supply/demand?
Charlie:
‘If you expect financial efficiency in american higher education, you’re howling at the wind’
‘Glory of civilization’ (universities)
‘Monopoly and bureaucracy’ (description of universities)

We (USA) spend a lot of money on higher education. Being cheap is not our issue.
Charlie:
‘I’ve made all the enemies I can afford.’

Q16: On effects of Donald Trump on Berkshire
‘That won’t be the main problem’
Charlie:
‘I’m afraid to get into this area.’
Warren:
‘Business in this country has done extremely well for 200 years.’
Returns on tangible equity have not suffered while those on fixed income have suffered.
GDP/capita has gone up in real terms
‘System works very well in terms of output per capita, as far as distribution (inequality), there are often more issues.’
‘Charlie, give something pessimistic to balance me out.’
Charlie:
‘I don’t think the future is necessarily going to be as good as the past, but it doesn’t need to be.’
‘You’re making free choices that you couldn’t 20 years ago.’

Q17: Norfolk Southern/CP failed merger fallout?
BNSF: Certain tests needed to be passed before a large railroad merger would happen (good for public interest, good for shareholders, etc…). That merger may have been good for the shareholders, but did not meet the overall criteria. Next round of mergers will occur when population makes transportation more scarce.

Q18: How do you feel about investment banks not being able to make as much money?
After 2008-9, regulations to increase capital requirements, particularly on larger banks….
‘You can change the math of banking and profitability of banking by changing capital requirements.’
100% capital requirement means not very profitable, 1% capital requirements causes huge problems
Investment banking not a thing we invest in.
Charlie:
‘Generally, we fear the genre more than we love it.’

Q19: Activist investor targeting if BRK trades at a discount to intrinsic value?
Defend by size, and by having money to buy shares at less than intrinsic value.
‘The numbers involved would be staggering.’
Mid-America does better by not being split up.
1973-1974 very good companies selling at a steep discount to what they’re worth… (When stocks at a discount, money is hard to come by)
Charlie:
We don’t worry about this and others do, they can get attacked by hostile takeovers/etc, and we can’t
‘…and you want a strong ally, how many people would you pick in preference to BRK?’

Q20: Leasing?
Train cars… Bank has lower cost of funds than we do
‘A trillion dollars, at 10 basis points’
Aircraft leasing not interesting…
‘We’re well located now, but I don’t think we have new opportunities.’

Q21: Which competitor would you take out and why
Charlie:
‘I don’t think we have to answer this one.’
‘Widening the moat’ is the goal.
‘Not trying to target competitors, just trying to do the best everywhere.’
Warren:
‘Spoken like an anti-trust lawyer’

Q22: Sequoia, and Valeant position
The guy we trusted and recommended passed away in 2005.
The manager involved is no longer in charge.
‘If you have a manager, and doesn’t have integrity, make sure they’re dumb and lazy.’
‘Pattern recognition is very important in evaluation of humans and business.’
‘Frequently come to a bad end, but frequently looks good in the short term.’
Charlie:
‘Valeant of course was a sewer.’ (And they deserved what they got.)

Just before lunch, they put up the interim results of a wager between Buffet and a money management firm.

Hedge Funds vs. S&P 500 Index Fund results
Hedge Funds vs. S&P 500 Index Fund results

Protege Partners Wager Results (longbets.org)
Hedge funds of funds vs. S&P500 index funds
‘That might sound like a terrible result for the hedge funds, but it’s not a terrible result for the hedge fund managers.’
‘180 million dollars a year, merely for breathing.’ (If Berkshire compensated 2&20.)
‘They can’t believe that they can’t hire someone to make them more money than average.’
‘Consultants can’t change too much year to year, because it looks like they don’t know what they’re doing.’
‘Charlie, do you have anything to add to my sermon?’
‘A tiny group of people.’ (Who can manage money consistently better)
‘Far far far more money made on Wall Street by sales abilities than investment abilities.’