The SpaceX IPO, valuing a motley collection of dubious business at over a trillion dollars, marks the abandonment of the Efficient (financial) Markets Hypothesis, one of the zombie ideas I criticised in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Not only do financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately, but the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying.
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Jerry Cayford at Three Quarks Daily has written a piece responding to the near-farcical “jungle primary” in California where it appeared possible at one point that both of the candidates making it through to the general election might be Republicans. The proposed response is to allow the top five candidates through to the general election, which would be run under Ranked Choice Voting.

Here’s the conclusion:

Final Five Voting emerges as the single most powerful way to address political dysfunction, “the root cause of the decades-long inability of our government to make progress on America’s most pressing economic and social problems” (18). (Better legislative rules take a strong but secondary position.) Harvard Business School’s large-scale, multi-year project has given us, then—along with valuable information, analysis, and insight—a thesis vitally relevant to our public conversation about electoral reform: the stakes of that conversation are immeasurably higher than we usually recognize. To make this point, HBS not only documented the magnitude of America’s decline and crisis, but also spotlighted electoral reform as the very top priority in reversing our long slide. Not just easing polarization, gridlock, and other narrowly “political” problems. Not just making California’s elections sensible. Breaking the politics industry’s self-serving duopoly is how we address everything else as well. 

Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.

Last week, because of a combination of bad planning (my bad) and endless delays (Deutsche Bahn’s bad), I arrive very late in a hotel in Berlin. I had to ring the doorbell. The guy at the reception started giggling the moment I came in, which irritated me at first (did my hair look so funny, after all these hours on the train?). But he quickly reassured me that it wasn’t about me. It was about the fact that he had pressed the button for the daily closing of the system about ten seconds before I rang the door bell (it was just after 3am). It meant that the computer was busy for a while and it would take a few minutes before he could check me in. He apologizes profusely – and we started chatting.

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Google maps said it would take 2.5 hours to drive from our place in the Blue Mountains to Hill End. Maybe we’re slow. And sure, we stopped to check out nearby gold mining village Sofala on the way. But we left home shortly after 8am and arrived at Hill End in time for us to claim early seats at the micro-pub for lunch. That was pretty good timing actually, though no thanks to the Google lady.

The purpose of this day trip was nerdy, for Hill End might have a reasonable claim to be Australia’s Deadwood.

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One my betes noires has been in the news lately. Jonathan Haidt has been annoying me since at least 2012, when I was critical of his bothsidesism on the culture wars.

At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals thought of Republicans as bigots and misogynists, concerned with preserving their own position in racial and gender hierarchies, Haidt explained that they actually had their own set of values, based on order, purity, honour and loyalty. The wheels started falling off that one when Donald Trump, the antithesis of all of these things, came along and received the unqualified support of the supposed believers in purity.

Haidt responded by reinventing himself a free speech advocate, concerned about cancel culture and the coddling of young minds. He hung out on the “Intellectual Dark Web” with Bari Weiss and Stephen Pinker. Now that Weiss is busy suppressing reporting of Trump’s crimes, the IDW appears to have shut up shop.

?Haidt’s next reinvention was an almost complete backflip. Despite having no relevant research background (as discussed his previous focus was on adult voters, followed by a shift to scolding college students) he suddenly became an authority on the effects of smartphone use on teenagers. His concerns about freedom of speech suddenly went out the window, replaced by a fear that the speech teens encountered on their phones was making them depressed as miserable.

Haidt’s work writings on this topic inspired the Australian government to pass legislation aimed at banning access to social media platforms for people under 16. It’s been mostly ineffective, but for the minority of kids who have left social media, a notable impact has been reduced access to news.

Possibly because recognition of this failure is spreading, Haidt has gone back to the “coddling” theme in a commencement address at NYU, for which he was roundly booed. Haidt appears not to have noticed that, far from protecting students from views that might upset them, NYU is busy suppressing speech by students that offends the administrators and of course the Trump Administration.

The kind of concerned punditry of which Haidt is an exponent never goes out of style, even if the topics of concern change from time to time. Given his ability to leap from one topic to the next with a fine disregard for consistency, I expect he will be around to annoy me for a long time to come.

Mostly I leave Sunday photography to our colleague, the estimable Chris Bertram. Still, this Sunday I was walking the dog in the hills above my town. (“My town” being a modest community of a couple of thousand people in the rolling countryside of northern Bavaria.)


[copyright me, yesterday]

And by the side of a grassy meadow, I stopped to photograph this pretty little yellow flower:

[they look so innocent]

A moment with the app revealed that this was Ranuncula bulbus, the Bulbous Buttercup.  There are a bunch of species in the genus Ranuncula, which is another way of saying there are a lot of different kinds of buttercup.  That’s because buttercups appear to be a recent evolutionary radiation, and a pretty successful one.

But when I did a quick search on these little guys?  I found they used to have another name.  The Bulbous Buttercup was once known as Saint Anthony’s Turnip.

Saint… what?
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Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprising in times in which productivity is a supreme social norm. Think of the relief – by students and faculty alike – when a text has been submitted before the deadline. Think of all the praise for writers and texts that goes around in our fields (“prolific,” “rigorous,” “accessible,” …). Think of the proud social media posts with a pile of books fresh off the press (I’ve been guilty of that myself).

Generative AI, for all its problems, has one virtue: it forces us to rethink that assumption. The ease with which AI can spit out seemingly coherent text, or help rewrite a few convoluted sentences into elegant prose, has been perceived by some academics as a threat to the very meaning of our professional existence. “I feel like one of those coal miners must have felt when it was already clear that the mines would be closed soon,” a colleague recently said to me.

I want to resist this idea – maybe out of a desperate desire to cling to my professional identity, but with what I have come to think of as an important distinction: texts as products, or texts as means to something very different.

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Last week Australia’s central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia, RBA) raised interest rates. Again.

Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom upwards. But now it seems most people understand that the latest interest rate rises requires ordinary people to hand over more of their cash to their bank, to get it out of circulation and bring down inflation.

Asking whether superannuation or taxes could also be used for the purpose of reducing interest rates, the ABC pointed out that interest rates were not always the way inflation was managed. They published an article asking ‘Would you rather hand over an extra $300 a month to your bank or the federal government?’ – suggesting that this might even be an option.

Rightly, the ABC points to the place of government in setting up this structure. But history shows that for all that government is nominally in charge. Well. You might have noticed that banks are fairly powerful. Government v bank doesn’t always mean the government wins…as we will see.

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