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f the replacement of human labor the big difference is whether you think this is a present or a future problem it is becoming hard to see what is optimistic about the robo optimist viewpoint i think it is helpful to get beyond the binary viewpoints let s divide things up as follows strong robo pessimism robots and ai will come no matter what we do they will reduce demand for labor so much that the majority of humans will have no work to do and we will be at the whim of the minority of robot ai owners the horse argument is a form of strong robo pessimism weak robo pessimism i d classify richard serlin here weak robo pessimism thinks that labor is already being replaced but there are things we can do to ameliorate this education redistribution weak robo optimism brynjolfsson and mcafee are a good example of this viewpoint possibility that labor will be replaced but this hasn t occurred yet we have time to adapt to the distributional issues strong robo optimism robots and ai will come no matter what we do they will create a scenario of material wealth such that humans will no longer need to work but if they want to they will always be able to invent something new to do one of the issues in discussing these topics is that we often are not arguing with the right group weak robo optimists use strong robo pessimists as their straw man weak robo pessimists use strong robo optimists as their straw man i am as guilty of this as anyone i think the argument that humans are doomed because look what happened to horses is stupid people are not horses they are apes and apes are intelligent creative and social the last one is very important because it means we have a built in demand for being around other people a demand that we routinely pay to have supplied we will always find ways to pay other people to interact with us the horse agument though is a form of strong robo pessimism when i go after it it makes it seem as if i have a real distinct difference from someone like richard a weak robo pessimist i don t i think i am a weak robo optimist and if you really get down to it the implications of the weak forms are not really different read through richard s post or the brynjolfsson and mcafee post or this article in the guardian or this one in the ft you get the same advice from weak robo pessimists and weak robo optimists training we need to equip people with skills that allow them to move into jobs that are harder to replace or at least to keep leapfrogging into jobs before robots replace them different people mean different things by training but it runs the gamut from pre school to vocational school redistribution whether this is simply taxes on wealthy robot owners state ownership of robots or some kind of robot share ownership plan the idea is the same spread the returns from owning robots around to everyone one interesting thing i see is that the robo pessimists tend to be more worried about training you have to keep providing people with skills to compete with robots but it is important that people work or can work or should work robo optimists tend to be more worried about redistribution how do we reallocate ownership or the proceeds of ownership so that everyone can maintain living standards the more i thought about it this week the more i think the important distinction between the optimists and pessimists is in their attitudes towards work the optimists ultimately see the decline in working hours for humans as a good thing yes there are issues with distribution but those details can be attended to how great will the world be when we all only have to work 5 hours a week the pessimists see the decline in work hours as a distinct problem this need not be because they have some puritanical need to see people act busy but rather because they don t see how we could solve the distributional issues necessary to ensure people can afford a basic living standard the best we can do is to ensure that people can continue to work full time in order to meet their needs how awful will the world be when we can all only work 5 hours a week as i said above i tend to be a weak robo optimist i like brynjolfsson and mcafee completely agree that robots ai will create a drag on the demand for human labor and in particular unskilled labor my robo optimism isn t a belief about technology it is a belief that we can figure out how to manage the glide path towards shorter work hours while maintaining living standards for everyone it s a good thing that we ll have to work less and there remains a little piece of strong robo optimism lurking inside of me i don t think work less is really well defined we will likely have to spend less time working for wages to afford the basic material goods in our lives but that doesn t mean we won t spend lots of our time working for each other doing other things whether that work is paid in wages or not is immaterial share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on reddit opens in new window reddit email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading posted in uncategorized 17 replies roman history reading posted on december 10 2015 by dvollrath 15 note the growth economics blog has moved sites click here to find this post at the new site this really has nothing to do with economic growth so feel free to dismiss it my most recent hobby reading has been on the fall of the roman republic and the emergence of the empire under augustus i ve got a nice little reading list if you are interested in the topic or time period or looking for gifts for that special nerd in your life tom holland s rubicon the last years of the roman republic is a great introduction to the era he writes in an engaging style but provides enough information and analysis to make you think it s not just a then this battle happened kind of history book richard allston s romes revolution death of the republic and birth of the empire argues that you have to understand the nature of roman social networks to understand what happened to allow the republic to die the republic survived because the networks of major families were in something like a balance of power caesar and then augustus broke that balance of power by creating a network outside of the major families the legions whether this was inevitable the balance could not hold necessary to limit civil war or desirable was the old balance so great is not something allston takes a firm stand on but he describes nicely how the senate got coopted into the new augustan network ronald syme s the roman revolution is a classic in this area written in 1939 it is one of those books that presumes the reader is already educated in classical history so i d suggest trying some of the others first before you tackle this one unless of course you graduated from oxford in 1917 for all that it is an excellent book albeit quite grim syme see s caesar and augustus as somewhat inevitable given the inherent problems that the roman republic had with administrating an empire like allston it was about the persona network of power that augustus built not any grand political theories that created the empire h h scullard s from the gracchi to nero a history of rome 133 bc to ad 68 is another classic in this arena a little more accessible than syme s work and not a bad intro the nice aspect is that it covers the early part of this period with more depth than most there are two reasons the gracchi brothers are often used as the start of this story first because they were the first to take full advantage of the position of tribune to veto senate legislation asserting the power of the plebs second because the senate oligarchy got so spooked by this that they had the gracchi killed which opened the door to violence as a legitimate political action gareth sampson s the collapse of rome marius sulla and the first civil war is not a great book it s very much and then this battle happened kind of history but the actors and time period are where i think much of the interest is at the republic starts to wobble as marius and then sulla use break the ice and use violence to assert their political power all in the name of the people caesar learned his lessons from these men tom holland s dynasty the rise and fall of the house of caesar is really about a different time he provides some background but the first part of this book is about how augustus built his dictatorship into a hereditary dynasty the second part is about how augustus various relatives tried desperately to screw this up i didn t find this book nearly as engaging as rubicon perhaps because the story of the early emperors is something i was more familiar with and the minutiae of palace intrigue gets a little old after a while plutarch s lives one of the classic original sources despite the fact that plutarch was writing himself from other sources regardless much of the story of this era is based on guys like plutarch so it is worth reading i think it s one of those things to read after you ve exposed yourself to the general story because plutarch is a little sloppy about name usage places and dates appian s the civil wars again an original source that forms a lot of the basis of later history as you can glean from the title the period leading up to the establishment of the empire is a series of civil conflicts not a single one you have generally speaking a running series of conflicts between populares those claiming to represent the people and optimates those claiming to represent the traditional republic over who will actually be in charge the gracchi s versus the senate is one brief skirmish marius versus sulla turns into full scale war caesar versus pompey is a really just an extension of that war augustus versus antony loses a little of this thread as by then it is simply a slugfest over who gets to be the dictator but another book to read after you ve got the essential history in your head i won t claim that everything i read here is fraught with deep contemporary relevance but there are some interesting elements of the roman world around the time of the end of the republic that have parallels worth thinking about technological disruption an influx of slaves from the east eliminates jobs for roman citizens creating a class of people with a lot of uncertainty and little to lose increasing wealth disparities the landowners who owned the slaves consolidated land becoming even richer and displaced even more common romans citizenship questions italian allies of the romans had helped defeat carthage and win the east but were not citizens this bothered them but the idea of making them citizens bothered the existing romans who had little more than their political rights as assets external threats in the middle of this period a new wave of gauls descends on italy scaring the out of rome and people quickly abandoned traditional limits on the power of the consul in order to ensure safety once granted the legions would never really relinquish this power even as the effective dictator changed marius sulla pompey caesar antony augustus it s a fascinating period of time enjoy share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on reddit opens in new window reddit email a link to a friend opens in new window email like loading posted in uncategorized 15 replies women and the wealth of nations posted on december 8 2015 by dvollrath 2 note the growth economics blog has moved sites click here to find this post at the new site i discussed a paper by david cuberes and marc teigner at the sea meetings in new orleans a few weeks ago it provides some interesting calculations on the economic cost of discrimination against women in developing countries ct set up a simple model of occupational choice a la banerjee and newman where people can be a workers b self employed entrepreneurs or c firm owners with multiple employees as in that standard model there is some distribution of managerial talent and so the most capable managers become firm owners and hire lots of employees those with medium management skills run firms but it only makes sense for them to hire themselves self employed finally those with low management skills find it more lucrative to work for the firm owners than start their own firms what ct add to this is frictions that prevent women from entering those different categories even though their distribution of managerial talent is similar to that of men they set this up so that if affects the number of women in each category but not the distribution of their skills for example if 100 men have sufficient management skills to become firm owners then 100 women presumably also have sufficient management skills but the friction means that only 20 of them get to be firm owners the average skill of those 20 is the same as the average skill of the 100 men the friction discriminates purely on gender not on talent this takes place all down the line so you have fewer female firm owners fewer female self employed entrepreneurs and fewer female workers now because we have gotten rid of some possible firm owners and entrepreneurs we are worse off fewer firm owners means lower demand for labor so the wage of workers is lower thus more people men and women want to become self employed so the firms that do exist are smaller fewer workers are available and more of the population works as self employed entrepreneurs on the other hand if few enough women are in the labor force then the wage of the men and remaining women may actually be higher which also limits the incentive to start a firm regardless we get distortions to the number of firms distortions to the wage of workers and distortions to the number of self employed entrepreneurs in the end this results in lower output per capita how much lower that is the real contribution of ct they take survey data from a set of developing countries that contains information by gender on whether people are workers self employed entrepreneurs or firm owners they then ask what kind of frictions are necessary in their model to generate the observed numbers once they know that they can ask the counter factual question of what output per capita would be if they removed any or all of the frictions to women their table 5 shows the percent loss of income per capita due to various frictions focus on the long run loss columns which have allowed for capital to adjust to the lower supply of labor the first column with a 7 06 loss for central asia shows the impact of the frictions that limit women from becoming firm owners and or self employed entrepreneurs as you can see there is a sizable loss across regions ranging from about 5 ish to not quite 10 the second column adds in the loss from limiting women from becoming workers in other words limiting their labor force participation rate this increases the loss in all regions of the world but there is really wide vari...