Weekend Reading & Selected Links

Happy weekend! Here are some links to things I've been reading or watching that you might also enjoy:

1. My new podcast episode, with Andrew Leigh. At the bottom of this email, I've included three excerpts from the conversation.
2. If you'd like to attend any of my upcoming salons, there are only two left: one in Sydney and one in Melbourne.
3. 'Observations from India', a recent post by Tanner Greer.
4. 'Inference Scaling and the Log-x Chart', a new post by Toby Ord.
5. Three observations by Sam Altman.
6. Tyler Cowen's advice on how to prepare for advanced AI.
7. Josh Gans on alignment. Via Basil Halperin.
8. Nabeel Qureshi's principles.
9. A neat video for convincing housing supply skeptics.
10. 'Memorize First, Understand Later?', a new post by DJ Thornton.
11. 'We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It', a new essay by Charles Mann.
12. Terry Tao on 3Blue1Brown.
13. 'Narratives, immigration and immigration policy preferences', a new paper by Ayssa Leng, Ryan Edwards and Terence Wood.

Have a great weekend,‌
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Joe

Excerpts from my podcast with Andrew Leigh

1. Where does Australia's egalitarian tradition come from?

JOSEPH WALKER: So where do you think Australia's egalitarian culture comes from historically? 

I can tell at least two stories. The first story would be the kind of story we find in Manning Clark, which is that there was a limited supply of labour in the early days of the colony. So land is plentiful, labour's scarce, and accordingly, workers have a relatively more even balance of power with capitalists, certainly much more so than in Europe or North America. 

The second story is that when the colonists leave Europe to set up a new settlement, whether that's in Canada, America, Australia, they carry a shard of the European political culture with them that gets frozen at the time. And so when America is setting up their political institutions, the dominant political philosopher is probably John Locke. By the time Australia is doing the same, it's Jeremy Bentham. And so there's much less, you know, Gladstonian Liberalism, and much more kind of Benthamite utilitarianism in the air that's flowing through to our egalitarian ideology. 

Which of those two stories seems more important to you in explaining why we have this egalitarian culture? Or am I missing some kind of other story? 

ANDREW LEIGH: So I think your first one is the more important, and I'll add one more, a third theory.

In Australia in the 1800s, you have a country in which labour is scarce and land is plentiful. It's almost the opposite to what you see in Europe, where it's possible to drive down wages because there are many workers around to do the job. Whereas when you get to Australia, you simply can't mistreat your workers because there's not very many of them. And so as a result, you see a lot of the early trade unions forming here. The eight-hour day emerges. In the 1800s, workers in Sydney are earning significantly more than their counterparts in Chicago and London because workers are more scarce.

I'm kind of less attracted to the theory of political philosophers.

But I do think that one other factor is the role of the gold rushes. So the gold rushes are a moment where essentially luck determines your wealth. And so regardless of the skills that you have or the hierarchy that you've occupied, you're able to make it based on the chance of whether your particular plot has enough gold in it. That shakes things up, as, of course, does migration. You know, when countries are settled for very long periods, then hierarchies can emerge. You think about the way in which the hierarchies entrench themselves in Venice, the stories about long French aristocratic families. None of that exists in a settler society like Australia in the 1800s, where, apart from the first nations people, basically everyone's just gotten off a boat.

2. One surprising reason for Australia's declining PISA scores.

WALKER: I was shocked to learn that at least since mid-century, we've been doing poorly on math and literacy scores. And then, since the early 2000s, our PISA scores have been deteriorating as well. So what explains this? What is going on with Australian test scores?

LEIGH: So one of the challenges is that we had a way of getting very talented teachers in front of Australian kids throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 

The main way in which we did that was rampant gender pay discrimination across the professions. The consequence was that you had very few talented women going into law, into medicine, into dentistry, and you had lower quality service in all of those fields as a result. Just as you'd get if you kept half of the talented applicants out of any occupation, you got worse doctors, worse dentists, worse business people.

 Where did those talented women go? Well, overwhelmingly, they went into teaching and nursing. That meant that the calibre, the academic aptitude, of those going into teaching in the 1950s and 1960s was artificially increased.

Now, through the 1970s and 1980s, you had a reduction in gender pay gaps and in the rampant gender pay discrimination in those other sectors. Gender pay discrimination is legal before the equal pay cases of 1969 and 1972, and there's a change in norms as well that sees a lot of reduction in gender pay discrimination in those other fields. Talented women then flow into those fields, and the question is, what does teaching do as a response? Does it significantly increase the wages in order to continue attracting the same level of academic talent that it had beforehand? 

No, it doesn't. Indeed, teaching wages slip a little behind the wages of other professional occupations. 

So you see this in the academic aptitude of new teachers. Chris Ryan and I looked at trends from the early 80s to the early 2000s, and some other evidence (although not quite as good) in the decades since. 

That's not surprisingly correlated with Australian test scores going backwards to the tune of somewhere between half a year to a year of achievement over the course of the last couple of decades.

WALKER: That's huge, right?

LEIGH: Yeah, it's massive. The OECD's PISA test comes and tests year 9s, and the typical year 9 now is scoring about where the typical year 8 student would have scored back at the start of the century.

3. Global inequality has been falling—shouldn't egalitarians be celebrating?

WALKER: So, Andrew, as an egalitarian, it must be a pretty exciting time to be alive, right? Global inequality has been falling over the last few decades, driven largely by economic growth in China and India. So if we take a more global perspective, there's no better time to be an egalitarian.

LEIGH: So, Joe, you're of course being very naughty on this one, and it is worth unpacking the really important point you make, which is that inequality within countries has, on average, been growing, inequality between countries has, on average, been growing. Put those two together, and global inequality has been falling. 

Wait, what's going on? 

Well, the answer is that two extremely big countries, India and China, have been rampaging up the global income distribution. The result of the rapid growth in the world's two most populous countries is that global inequality—that is, the inequality you'd get if you lined up all the citizens in the world—is actually lower in the 2010s than it was in the 1980s. 

But the question is: how do you think about inequality? How many people think about inequality as compared to someone in Nigeria and Norway? 

My sense is that inequality most matters within countries. We're not benchmarking inequality against everyone else in Surry Hills. We're probably not benchmarking against everyone else in New South Wales. But I think we are benchmarking against everyone else in Australia. 

That's why national inequality has been the focus of most inequality researchers. It's the focus of Battlers and Billionaires. That's a story about inequality in Australia. 

But I don't think it's the wrong way to think about it. I do envisage that we view ourselves as citizens of a nation and therefore we compare ourselves to people within that country. We don't get up in the morning and think, well, you know, life is great, I'm earning many multiples of what somebody in Congo earns. Maybe people in Congo should be more front of mind for Australians. But my sense is we're benchmarking against our fellow citizens.