Climate Invite, Thoughts on Lehman play
Climate: Invite to Chris Stark event. Theatre: Thoughts on Lehman play. Podcast: Jennifer Doleac on crime. AI: Sam Altman and Patrick Collison. Management: Maker time vs manager time.
Climate: Invite to Chris Stark event
AI: Sam Altman and Patrick Collison in conversation
Management: Maker time vs manager time
I am co-hosting this climate policy event on June 7th. If you want to come, let me know.
Join Chris Stark, chief executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, in conversation with Ben Yeoh, as they cover the opportunities and challenges facing climate policy. The panel discussion will start at 18:00, followed by a drink’s reception.
In particular, this session will seek to explore such questions as:
What corporates and investors should be doing (and not doing) on their net-zero transitions?
What policies can help support this?
How should we think about adaptation as well as mitigation within the transition?
How should society think about how the decarbonization process supports jobs within a net-zero economy, fairness and energy security?
Details here. June 7th at Chatham House.
My excellent chat with Jennifer Doleac. She studies the economics of crime and discrimination. In July 2023, Jenn will join Arnold Ventures as the Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice.
We chat about trends and causes of crime. How guns, drugs and policing interact with crime trends.
…there was this huge increase in violent crime in particular in the late early eighties, early nineties. And suddenly violent crime started falling dramatically in the mid-1990s. We still aren't entirely sure why that is the case, this big mystery in the economics of crime world. But we do know that basically crime has been falling since then until very recently. So during the pandemic and since the pandemic, we've seen this big uptick in homicide and shootings, at least in the US. Again, we're not entirely sure why that change. It's kind of like trying to describe what's going on in the stock market. There are lots of sort of little blips and everything, and you can have big picture understanding of the economy and what drives growth, but not be able to predict fluctuations in the stock market. So it's similar with crime rates
But overall, we're still in a place where homicide rates and violent crime rates are much lower than they were in the early to mid-nineties. So overall things have gotten much safer, especially in our big cities; we're much safer. But of course, as you said, there's a lot of variation place to place; particular neighborhoods, particular communities, they're the brunt of a lot of violent crime that is still going on. So it's a major public safety or major public problem and concern for policymakers in particular places and that has become more of a focus in recent years as homicides and shootings have gone up, which of course we're not used to after this big decline for decades
What we know of policies that work on reducing crime, and how challenging the recent uptick in crime statistics is to ideas on reforming criminal justice.
We discuss alternatives to jail, and what type of interventions can work on crime, such as sentencing for misdemeanors, and access to healthcare.
Jenn explains why the “broken window” theory of crime has not really held up. The mixed studies on body cameras and how deterrents (like DNA databases and CCTV) seem to work.
Jenn discusses her work suggesting some policies have had unintended consequences related to “ban the box” (where employers are not allowed to know of former convictions on initial job application), and related to her paper on the Moral Hazard of Lifesaving Innovations: Naloxone Access and Opioid Abuse (which has proved controversial in some quarters).
We play overrated/underrated on: Texas, diversity and universal basic income.
We end on Jenn’s current projects and life advice. Transcript here or on video on YouTube. Listen below (or wherever you listen to pods).
“The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrive in America and found an investment firm/brokerage through to the collapse of the company in 2008.”
As a playwright and equities market participant I should have made time to see Lehman Brothers earlier. I think logistics and its length had put me off.
I’m glad I went. In part because I certainly feel there is room for more plays about financial markets.
My arguments would be that financial markets as a human construct reflect much and enable much of what human society does… the good, the bad, the ugly; the sublime, the silly, the pointless and that markets are powered by people and people are all of that.
Dramaturgically, it was insightful to observe that the vast amounts of expositional story telling - performed sharply and well written - were often gripping to many.
(Not all, as some were switched off; and not at all moments - perhaps the difficulty of the story).
In many ways, the direct-to-audience story telling is a technique I use in both my latest shows. Stand-up comedy uses it - but I’ve sometimes been cautious as to how well it will hold within a more conventional dramatic piece.
I’m now convinced that good writing and performance can hold it well.
The live music provided emotional and dramatic counter points. I found those aspects of the theatre instructive. (Although I have minor quibbles with some aspects of the performative story telling; a little too much one note shouting in places; not enough use of the quiet).
In terms of finance and economic history, or even the cultural history of persons then I learned new things in the first act about immigration, Jewish culture, slavery, cotton and the civil war. I could even draw some links even when there were not overt references.
You’d still learn more from a history book of the time or on economic history by listening to my podcast with, for instance, Mark Koyama (!).
These ideas weakened in act two and were very slim in the last act.
The play tackles the financialization (money!) of real goods (eg cotton!) with a passage about words which hints of the truth.
The Lehman brothers trading in the words of cotton. There is no cotton but the word cotton. There is no coffee but the word coffee.
This abstraction is true and not true on many levels and I liked it. Mathematics is a language that seems to describe properties of how we perceive the real world. Mathematics is not the real world. A contract on coffee is not coffee, but it represents how coffee will trade.
Financial market contracts or the words between men - are a human language construct that allows the movement, trade and manufacture of real goods like cotton to be turned into shirts - which people can buy for a promise (a money note) - to wear to keep them warm or to signal their desirability.
They are a language of trust. They are not - mostly - a description of the “real world”.
But I bring my views to that. The play touched only lightly on what financialisation of goods might mean and how it comes about. …
Two of the most thoughtful, smart and connected people (Patrick Collison and Sam Altman) in tech talk about AI. Takeaways: if you are truly worried about AI safety then leave social media and go and work in alignment. Areas to work on: 1. (high effort, high reward) attempt to build an (international) agency like the Internal Energy Agency or World Health Organisation. This AI org could audit and assess any large AI model. Large organisations should be/could be persuaded to submit. Or 2. As a technical AI alignment researcher. Altman argues a strong science researcher can re-train in 6 months.
Altman suggests world will be weirder but expects a world more like Star Wars with C3POs and R2D2s. Humans will know they are AI, but will be attached. Perhaps we will have as many AI friends as human friends.
Opensource is already here and creating amazing things. Large private corps may stay ahead and have use cases but many smaller but significant economic wins will be from opensource.
Altman argues current human captial allocation of humans is terrible.
Youtube here:
Continuing to be incredibly busy, I have been dwelling on what Paul Graham has described as “Maker Time” and “Manager Time”. To perform well, makers - and most of us are makers - need to be able to arrange enough “maker time” and that tends to be in longer blocks of time. Those of us who are managers need to be mindful that short chunks of time, disturb makers. Graham writes:
“One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.” …Paul Graham essay here.
Links:
Bloomberg learnings on Bloomberg-GPT (Twitter)
New Zealand planning reform (more building houses)
Dolphins protect US nuclear weapons
Grass is greener, young Chinese immigrants find Sweden a bit tough