Month: January 2026

Productivity by itself does not eliminate poverty

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure , , , , , , ,

Jan 25 JDN 2461066

Scott Alexander has a techno-utopian vision:

Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you’ll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things.

I agree that total annihilation is a very serious risk, though fortunately I believe it is not the most likely outcome. But it seems pretty weird to me to posit that the most likely outcome is “infinite post-scarcity” when oligarch capture is what we already have.

(Regarding Alexander’s specific example: Dario Amidei has $3.7 billion. If he were to give away 10% of that, it would be $370 million, which would be good, but hardly usher in a radical utopia. The assumption seems to be that he would be one of the prevailing trillionaire oligarchs, and I don’t see how we can know that would be the case. Even if AI succeeds in general, that doesn’t mean that every company that makes AI succeeds. (Video games succeeded, but who buys Atari anymore?) Also, it seems especially wide-eyed to imagine that one man would ever own entire galaxies. We probably won’t even ever be able to reach other galaxies!)

People with this sort of utopian vision seem to imagine that all we need to do is make more stuff, and then magically it will all be distributed in such a way that everyone gets to have enough.

If Alexander were writing 200 years ago, I could even understand why he’d think that; there genuinely wasn’t enough stuff to go around, and it would have made sense to think that all we needed to do was solve that problem, and then the other problems would be easy.

But we no longer live in that world.

There is enough stuff to go around—at the very least this is true of all highly-developed countries, and it’s honestly pretty much true of the world as a whole. The problem is very much that it isn’t going around.

Elon Musk’s net wealth is now estimated at over $780 billion. Seven hundred and eighty billion dollars. He could give $90 to every person in the world (all 8.3 billion of us). He could buy a home (median price $400,000—way higher than it was just a few years ago) for every homeless person in America (about 750,000 people) and still have half his wealth left over. He could give $900 to every single person of the 831 million people who live below the world extreme poverty threshold—thus eliminating extreme poverty in the world for a year. (And quite possibly longer, as all those people are likely to be more productive now that they are well-fed.) He has chosen to do none of these things, because he wants to see number go up.

That’s just one man. If you add up all the wealth of all the world’s billionaires—just billionaires, so we’re not even counting people with $50 million or $100 million or $500 million—it totals over $16 trillion. This is enough to not simply end extreme poverty for a year, but to establish a fund that would end it forever.

And don’t tell me that they can’t really do this because it’s all tied up in stocks and not liquid. UNICEF happily accepts donations in stock. Giving UNICEF $10 trillion in stocks absolutely would permanently end extreme poverty worldwide. And they could donate those stocks today. They are choosing not to.

I still think that AI is a bubble that’s going to burst and trigger a financial crisis. But there is some chance that AI actually does become a revolutionary new technology that radically increases productivity. (In fact, I think this will happen, eventually. I just think we’re a paradigm or two away from that, and LLMs are largely a dead end.)

But even if that happens, unless we have had radical changes in our economy and society, it will not usher in a new utopian era of plenty for all.

How do I know this? Because if that were what the powers that be wanted to happen, they would have already started doing it. The super-rich are now so absurdly wealthy that they could easily effect great reductions in poverty at home and abroad while costing themselves basically nothing in terms of real standard of living, but they are choosing not to do that. And our governments could be taxing them more and using those funds to help people, and they are by and large choosing not to do that either.

The notion seems to be similar to “trickle-down economics”: Once the rich get rich enough, they’ll finally realize that money can’t buy happiness and start giving away their vast wealth to help people. But if that didn’t happen at $100 million, or $1 billion, or $10 billion, or $100 billion, I see no reason to think that it will happen at $1 trillion or $10 trillion or even $100 trillion.

Another year older

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 18 JDN 2461059

This post goes live one day before my 38th birthday. I think at this point I have to officially classify myself as middle-aged; I have nearly lived half the life I can expect to live. (Actually if you look at actuarial tables, the point at which, for a male, your expected remaining lifespan is equal to your age is 39 years old, so I’m not quite there yet.)

The odd part is I still don’t really feel like an adult. I don’t own my own home; I’m not making enough money to save; I don’t have any children. I am at least married, and I have a PhD; so I have at least achieved some of the milestones of adulthood—but not nearly as many as I’d expected to have achieved by the age of 38.

Then again, maybe growing older always feels like this. SMBC had a comic about this, where a woman grows older but always feels like she’s a child pretending to be older. But I don’t really feel like a child pretending to be an adult; I feel like a teenager pretending to be an adult. It’s as if my core identity was set at about the age of 16 and ever since then, time passes and my body keeps getting older, but I still feel like I’m that same person pretending to be someone else.

I think I felt more like an adult when I was teaching at Edinburgh; then at least I was working as a professional and paying my own rent. I wish I’d been able to find a way to be happy in academia, because I certainly haven’t found a way to be happy outside of it—and at least on the inside I was making money.

This last year in particular has been one of the worst in my lifetime—not just for me, but for the whole world.

For me personally: I lost one of my greatest mentors, I still remain unemployed, and my mother’s memory problems have not improved (though they also haven’t gotten worse).

For the world at large: Thanks to his enablers in the Republican Party, Donald Trump has been able to do tremendous damage to the United States, the global trade system, NATO, and global poverty relief efforts, with virtually no apparent gain to anyone but himself and perhaps a few of his closest cronies (though even them he would happily throw under the bus for an extra dollar).

I guess it remains to be seen what will happen to Venezuela; while Maduro was terrible, it’s quite clear that Trump does not have the best interests of the Venezuelan people at heart. He seems unwilling to even pretend that this is about anything but oil. (The weirdest part is that even the oil companies don’t actually seem all that interested in the oil!)

We have all watched helplessly as the carnage has ensued, getting news almost every single day about some new horrible thing that he has done. All the institutions that were supposed to stop this kind of madness have utterly failed in their task, most of all the Electoral College, which actually did the exact opposite of its intended purpose by electing him in the first place.

It’s not all Trump’s fault, either: The increase in US carbon emissions had less to do with Trump’s policies than with the war in Ukraine raising natural gas prices and data centers hogging our electricity.

It could be worse, I suppose. We still aren’t in World War 3. Congress is actually doing something to try to stop Trump from—I can’t believe I’m saying this—invading Greenland. And the recent increase in extreme poverty measures was a change in how poverty is measured, not a real reduction in standard of living; global extreme poverty is still decreasing (though also still horrifically high).

I still feel like I’m in survival mode: Just trying to get through each day, hoping that things eventually get better. But at least I get to have some cake with friends.

In memory of Jens Zorn

PNRJ current events, personal , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 11 JDN 2461052

I received the news when I woke up on January 5 that Jens Zorn had passed away the previous night.

He was born in 1931, so he died at the age of 94; we can all only hope for a run like that. (If I make it as long, I’ll live until 2082. At this point I’m not sure humanity is going to make it that long.) So I can’t exactly be shocked that his life ended, but I still feel like a part of me has been torn away.

Jens was a great mentor to me. I met him through the Saturday Morning Physics program at the University of Michigan, which I attended all through high school. (Oddly enough, my biology teacher in 9th grade gave extra credit for it, but my physics teacher in 10th grade did not.) I then arranged to take his course in intro quantum mechanics as a dual-enrolled high school and college student.

He was of course brilliant—he was a quantum physics professor—but he was also kind, understanding, and down-to-earth in a way that defied the usual stereotypes about physicists. He was also an artist; he created a number of metal sculptures around campus, most of which commemorate major discoveries in physics that were made at Michigan. I think my favorite is the elegant Positronium. As someone who also combines both scientific and artistic interests, I felt like we were (so to speak) on the same wavelength. Maybe that’s why he took me under his wing.

Jens saw tremendous potential in me. He believed I could be a great physicist. He helped arrange numerous opportunities for me to participate in theoretical physics research in high school and college.

Jens also helped my career in other ways. He helped me get summer jobs at the University of Michigan interviewing physicists to compile an oral history for the University’s bicentennial and doing some web development for the physics department. I still look back on those as the best jobs I ever had; they didn’t pay as well as Edinburgh (though by the hour they weren’t actually much worse), but I was actually happy at them in a way I’m not sure I’ve been happy at any job before or since. The work came easily, I got everything done well and ahead of schedule, and I felt like I was making a real contribution.

In some ways, I feel like I let Jens down. For one thing, I didn’t become a physicist at all. I dabbled in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science before finally settling on economics for graduate school. But I think he would still have been happy for me if I had been successful as an economist, or even as a science fiction author. The way I really feel like I let him down was by not being particularly successful at anything at all.

He believed in me when I didn’t; and I think he died still believing in me even though I’m still not sure I do. He saw something in me that I don’t see—and he isn’t the only one who saw it, so I can’t say it was just a mistake. But it also seems like “the world”, or “the market”, or whatever we want to call those inscrutable impersonal forces that actually decide where people end up in life, doesn’t really see it in me either. So I’m left to wonder why so many people have told me they believe I am destined for excellence when actually achieving even mediocrity has been so elusive. Can “the world” be wrong? Could I still have a chance, after all these years of failure?

One thing I know for sure: If I do, Jens Zorn won’t be around to congratulate me—just like my father won’t.

Hope for the new year

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , ,

Jan 4 JDN 2461045

We have just entered 2026. I remember that around this time last year I felt a deep, visceral despair: Trump had just been elected and was about to be inaugurated, and I could only dread what the next year would bring. For the next several weeks I posted sections of my book The Logic of Kindness (at this point, it is probably never actually going to be published?), partly because I felt—and still feel—that these ideas do deserve to be out in the world, but also partly because I had no creative energy to write anything else.

Well, the first year of Trump’s second term was just about as bad as we thought it would be. He has torn apart global institutions that took decades to forge; he has caused thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths; he has alienated our closest allies—seriously, CANADA!?—and cozied up to corrupt, authoritarian dictators around the world, because that is exactly what he aspires to be.

It’s true, he hasn’t collapsed the economy (yet). Inflation has been about as bad as it was before, despite the ludicrous tariffs. (He promised to bring prices down, but we all knew he wouldn’t. I honestly expected them to go up more than this.) He also hasn’t started any wars, though he looks damn close to it in Venezuela. And as he continues to make a mockery of our whole government, the checks and balances that are supposed to be reining him have languished unused, because the Republicans control all three branches.

Trump is still in office, and poised to be for three more years.

Yet, at last, there is some glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Other Republicans are starting to turn against him, in part because of his obvious and undeniable connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of serial rapists. (Let’s be clear about that, by the way: They’re not just pedophiles. “Pedophile” merely means you are sexually attracted to children. Some pedophiles seek treatment. These men were rapists who sexually assaulted actual teenagers. And at this point it strains credulity to imagine that Donald Trump himself wasn’t an active participant on multiple occasions—no amount of incompetent redactions will change that.)

Trump’s net approval is now negative on almost every major issue, especially on inflation. It is now a statistical certainty that more Americans disapprove of him than approve of him.

Both of these things should have happened more than a year ago, if not a decade ago; but hey, better late than never.

Democrats—even very left-wing democrats, like Mamdani—have done very well in elections lately, and seem poised to continue doing well in the 2026 midterm election. If we can actually secure a majority in both houses of Congress, we might finally be able to start undoing some of the damage Trump has done—or at least stop him from doing even more.

I’m sure there will be plenty of bad things that continue to happen this year, and that many of them will be Donald Trump’s fault. But I no longer feel the deep despair I felt last year; it seems like things might finally be turning around for America—and thus for the world.