This is a topic I'm interested in, but the presentation and exposition on the website leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it does make you sound like a crank.
Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz.
The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model.
It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.
'classical economics doesn't know how technology affects the wage' - ridiculous, classical economists were addressing exactly how technology was changing society and economic relationships. they didn't have accurate/useful models but they described the relationships in great detail. Sentences like this make me question the author's ability to evaluate their own paper.
Thank you for being able to point out and articulate these issues. LLMs have a habit of laundering pre-existing concepts per the interests (or input) of any given user.
> And the intuitive idea for this is that the wage is set by technology and access to physically scarce things (land as an example, but tbh you can add other things you think are scarce), and then it’s scaled by how efficiently machines can make machines and how much labor you need to make machines. That’s it.
There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.
Human values ideally start deeper, in the creation of preferences, where economics simply takes as a primitive/preexisting part of the environment. Marketing theory is the one that focuses on manipulating human value.
I can't see how a price theory that takes human preferences as given and static can produce useful predictions in a world where they are innovative and dynamic.
> I never found a piece of text that pangram claims is 100% AI that to me seems like purely human written text.
Is that the level of sensitivity we're looking for? More than literally 0%? Do you know how crazy it'd be to achieve that, even if they were trying to?
Yes, quite a bit actually. It's directly analogous to e.g. "Red sky at night, sailors' delight", i.e. a pseudo-scientific approach that probably has a better-than-random success rate.
Land value tax / citizens dividend here is different to the UBIs sometimes proposed in contemporary US politics. The idea is that you tax and redistribute the profits on the scarce inputs to the economy, rather than the redistributing the outputs like manufactured grids and AI tokens.
This is a topic I'm interested in, but the presentation and exposition on the website leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it does make you sound like a crank.
Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz.
The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model.
It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.
'classical economics doesn't know how technology affects the wage' - ridiculous, classical economists were addressing exactly how technology was changing society and economic relationships. they didn't have accurate/useful models but they described the relationships in great detail. Sentences like this make me question the author's ability to evaluate their own paper.
Thank you for being able to point out and articulate these issues. LLMs have a habit of laundering pre-existing concepts per the interests (or input) of any given user.
> And the intuitive idea for this is that the wage is set by technology and access to physically scarce things (land as an example, but tbh you can add other things you think are scarce), and then it’s scaled by how efficiently machines can make machines and how much labor you need to make machines. That’s it.
There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.
Human values ideally start deeper, in the creation of preferences, where economics simply takes as a primitive/preexisting part of the environment. Marketing theory is the one that focuses on manipulating human value.
I can't see how a price theory that takes human preferences as given and static can produce useful predictions in a world where they are innovative and dynamic.
the paper abstract is generated by ai: https://www.pangram.com/history/c480c94f-2d19-4cc3-95e0-c4fa...
It may well be, but also Pangram is ridiculously transparent pseudoscience. Let's not play pretend that it's authoritative, please.
Edit: Just for fun I just defeated it with AI-generated text that it reported as 100% human-written. Great stuff. Truly genius scam.
I never found a piece of text that pangram claims is 100% AI that to me seems like purely human written text.
The only counter example is when a human composed a piece deliberately trying to mimic AI slop.
So call it an AI slop detector if you want, but either way it accurately identifies stuff I don't wan't to read.
> I never found a piece of text that pangram claims is 100% AI that to me seems like purely human written text.
Is that the level of sensitivity we're looking for? More than literally 0%? Do you know how crazy it'd be to achieve that, even if they were trying to?
It is not pseudoscience. Have you read about how it works?
Yes, quite a bit actually. It's directly analogous to e.g. "Red sky at night, sailors' delight", i.e. a pseudo-scientific approach that probably has a better-than-random success rate.
As a Georgist I'm naturally very sympathetic to anything in this vein, but as you say: dense!
What do you believe are the most important contributions here over standard Georgism or Ricardo's theory of rents?
Are there other alternatives to UBI in solving this problem?
Land value tax / citizens dividend here is different to the UBIs sometimes proposed in contemporary US politics. The idea is that you tax and redistribute the profits on the scarce inputs to the economy, rather than the redistributing the outputs like manufactured grids and AI tokens.
UBI is not a solution because it will drive up land rents and be eaten by landowners.
MMT job guarantee
I think the answer to the last question is obvious. That we are standing on the shoulders or something completely new.