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skew-aberration 1 days ago [-]
This is a topic I'm interested in, but the presentation and exposition on the website leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, it does make you sound like a crank.
Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz.
The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model.
It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.
jerf 1 days ago [-]
So, like, legit pro AI tip, at least for 3rd-quarter 2026... whenever you're working on something interesting, ask the AI about prior art, or to do a scan of the scientific literature. Whether it's economics, health, or something algorithmic at work, at least the AIs I've used (as we've not all spent all the time with all the models) are still generally inclined to give you exactly what you ask for. They may do a good job at giving you what you asked for, but they won't generally do a whole lot more. Ask them to go looking around and it's like giving them a 30 point IQ boost sometimes. They all operate way better when you fill the context window with relevant information then when you're operating just in the latent space of their training, but they only rarely seek it out without being prompted on their own.
On my near-term todo list is to explore a particular crank physics theory of my own with AI... but not as a way to validate it, I know it's a crank theory that is far too simple to have been missed by pros in the relevant fields, but as a window into the literature and figure out what's wrong with it and thereby learn something. I will be framing it to the AI in pretty much precisely that way: Go get literature and reputable sources and talk through why this is already well known, probably well known to be a bad and wrong idea.
I still feel like not enough people are talking about this here on HN... AI has opened the scientific literature like never before. It's like being able to interrogate it and interview it as if it was a person, rather than just searching papers, for keywords you don't know, for lines of thought you've never heard of, in a sub-sub-sub-field you didn't even know existed, and failing before you even knew what it is you wanted. I've read more papers in the past 6 months than the past 10 years. Whatever opportunity you have to try this out, be it some question bothering you for the last 10 years, or a crank theory of your own to prove out against the literature, the foundation of some vibe-coded program informed by the literature rather than just vibing on the neural weights directly, or just asking something random about the studied effects of beavers on local ecosystems, you gotta try this. Prompt it specifically for "reputable sources and scientific papers", that helps a lot. It does not make you suddenly an expert in the field, but it does let you poke through the pile of literature far, far more effectively than you could hope to before.
And then don't forget to ask it why your summary is wrong or incomplete. Even if it doesn't convince you, you'll learn yet more.
mattwiese 1 days ago [-]
Yup, I too am surprised this hasn't (at least by my awareness) entered the zeitgeist.
At work I'm putting together an MCP server that more easily exposes our legume data for model consumption, and part of the insane value-add has been the curatorial work that our collaborators at USDA put into the data over years. For example, genome data (i.e. nucleic acid fastas) include relevant metadata such as their DOIs, so models can fetch and read the original papers (if they're open access, of course).
This goes a long way to boosting the intelligence/usefulness of these systems for research.
copperx 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, you have to do the lateral thinking yourself. But the LLMs can do the work of going into a single-focus rabbit hole quite quickly.
edot 1 days ago [-]
Yes, exactly. Researchers will not like the fact that I refer to the literature as merely a manual, but “RTFM” applies here. Someone has likely already investigated what you’re looking at, or at least found a way to not do it. And sure it’s in the weights, but if you put papers directly in front of the LLM it’s much more impactful.
datsci_est_2015 19 hours ago [-]
As someone with a scientific background, and the word scientist in my title I guess this comes as a “no duh” to me. Prior art is table stakes. There should be nothing more embarrassing to a researcher than learning that they’ve failed to read and consider other work on a topic that’s easily accessible.
hanspagel 1 days ago [-]
> why this is already well known, probably well known to be a bad and wrong idea.
This is still pointing the LLM in a specific direction . You might want to prompt something like “give me a summary of relevant literature” and avoid sharing your point of view. Wdyt?
jerf 18 hours ago [-]
It's to compensate for the effect where they are still a bit of a yes man. Way, way better than they were several models ago where they were pathological about it, but still a bit biased in the direction of explaining why you're right. I know I'm not right. I don't want a neutral summary, I want an interesting discussion of what's wrong with my idea and why.
If I were operating in a field in which I was already an expert, or in a field that is more strongly opinion-based anyhow (e.g., philosophy... it isn't particularly clear that being an "expert" in philosophy has any strong impact on your chances of being "right", for whatever that even means in that field), I might ask for something more neutral, but I know I'm not.
tomveber 1 days ago [-]
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skew-aberration 1 days ago [-]
'classical economics doesn't know how technology affects the wage' - ridiculous, classical economists were addressing exactly how technology was changing society and economic relationships. they didn't have accurate/useful models but they described the relationships in great detail. Sentences like this make me question the author's ability to evaluate their own paper.
oefrha 1 days ago [-]
Yes, crack open an intro to macroeconomics textbook and it has to discuss total factor productivity (technological progress) in the Cobb-Douglas production function, and its short run and long run effects on wages, or it's quite easy to connect the dots if it doesn't discuss that relationship directly. You'll get medium run too if you go a little beyond classical. It's funny someone claims to be writing economics papers but refuses to spend 100 hours, maybe less, to learn the fundamentals of macroeconomics as understood by everyone working in a related field.
> I simply could not have written this piece. I myself have no formal economics background
No shit, me neither, I read a couple macroeconomics textbooks at the age of 30 and now I wouldn't make arrogant and obviously wrong claims like the above. And I don't have the hubris to publish a paper.
tolerance 1 days ago [-]
Thank you for being able to point out and articulate these issues. LLMs have a habit of laundering pre-existing concepts per the interests (or input) of any given user.
howunfortunate 1 days ago [-]
To be fair, human scientists also frequently launder small modifications to pre-existing work as if it's completely novel.
tolerance 1 days ago [-]
That's why I don't trust 'em neither!
boringg 1 days ago [-]
I feel bad for the humans who rediscover what we have already discovered and position it as something new. If this keeps happening soon we will be in an endless loop without gain.
Ah well.
bix6 1 days ago [-]
I also tried to understand what they were saying. I read the website and skimmed the paper. It left me confused and unclear on what the takeaways really are.
crooked-v 1 days ago [-]
It reminds me of the people who reinvent some basic concept of physics with an LLM (usually, but not always, incorrectly) and think it's 'revolutionary'.
layla5alive 1 days ago [-]
Your discomfort may be understated - this phenomena seems to be a slippery slope towards a kind of Dunning-Kruger accidental plagiarism via LLM?
oliviayii 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dash2 1 days ago [-]
Guys you realise you can just read the Journal of Economic Perspectives for free? Its articles are written for the ordinary reader, by experts who have spent big chunks of their lives studying their specialty. They don't try to sound like a teenage girl, they don't boast about being able to do High School algebra, and they contain ideas that are less than one hundred and fifty years old. Some of them might even be new!
Sheesh.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
As a Georgist I'm naturally very sympathetic to anything in this vein, but as you say: dense!
What do you believe are the most important contributions here over standard Georgism or Ricardo's theory of rents?
larsiusprime 1 days ago [-]
RE sovereign wealth funds, You might find it interesting that the Norwegian approach to natural resource management is also based on the classical principles of Ricardo and George:
> And the intuitive idea for this is that the wage is set by technology and access to physically scarce things (land as an example, but tbh you can add other things you think are scarce), and then it’s scaled by how efficiently machines can make machines and how much labor you need to make machines. That’s it.
There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.
tomrod 1 days ago [-]
Human values ideally start deeper, in the creation of preferences, where economics simply takes as a primitive/preexisting part of the environment. Marketing theory is the one that focuses on manipulating human value.
impossiblefork 1 days ago [-]
Preferences come from selection pressures and needs. Taking them as a foundation leads to excessive focus on trade and obscures the fact that humans in almost all cases need essentially the same things.
1 days ago [-]
Stevvo 1 days ago [-]
My high-school economics teacher taught us Georgism is the optimal form of taxation. He gave us a bunch of dense math to back up that claim, but I can remember none of it.
s1artibartfast 1 days ago [-]
There is no optimal form of taxation, only trade-offs.
There is shifting burdens from good to good or person to person.
I find it no surprise that so many of the loudest proponents for georgism are highly compensated tech workers with low physical consumption - exactly the demographic that would be favored most under that system.
imtringued 1 days ago [-]
Georgism makes it possible for the government to profit off the infrastructure it builds, which makes it possible to fund public transportation projects without the tax payer having to pay income tax.
Instead the people who benefit from the infrastructure have the bill for the public transportation system rolled into their land value tax.
Right now in the current system you pay both income taxes and then you pay the landlord again because to him as the monopoly owner of land, the public infrastructure is pure producer surplus.
The demographic that would be favoured under that system is people who work for a living and the people being disadvantaged are the ones sitting on land or extracting the producer surplus.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
We tend to own property in places where land is expensive, we'd be paying hefty taxes in a Georgist system.
reverius42 1 days ago [-]
It would also help incentivize real improved use of expensive property, and less speculative investment without improvement, perhaps leading to lower prices (thus lower land value, and lower taxes), perhaps reaching some kind of equilibrium with better improved land use in expensive areas, less speculation resulting in the expensive areas being less expensive, and more equitable taxation than our current system.
estearum 18 hours ago [-]
Yes basically you should expect to see significant densification with significant competition in how appealing to the market you can make that level of density (since you as the developer keep all the upside).
s1artibartfast 7 hours ago [-]
I would actually expect to see a reduction in densification if a LVT is more expensive than current property taxes.
While it obviously encourages putting high value land to greater use, it also encourages avoiding high value land itself.
If the tax burden of your San Francisco house or office doubles, you may look into relocating to where land is cheaper.
It obviously depends on the rates.
s1artibartfast 1 days ago [-]
I would expect that land usage favors the very rich, but not nearly as much as income.
Georgism does a excellent job of incentivising better land use, but is trivial to shelter income from.
A teacher renting a run down aprtment might have a similar land tax footprint to a tech ceo in a taller building, or maybe the ceo just teleworks from home in Wyoming.
xAI or whomever puts their next Mega server farm on undesirable land, and then operates basically tax-free.
The end of day problem with the Georgist theory is that we now live in a knowledge and information economy, not an industrial one governed by material inputs. Changing a 1 to a 0 on a string of bits might yeild a billion dollar profit, but requires no material overhead.
estearum 18 hours ago [-]
You seem to think the point of a taxation scheme is to tax everything. It's not.
It's to 1) fund services while 2) minimizing distortions.
If someone can consume land of no value and produce huge amounts of value from it, that's a good thing. They should be entitled to as much upside as they can produce.
s1artibartfast 17 hours ago [-]
Im more a small goverment type.
That said, the point of a taxation scheme is not to "minimize distortions". If you think that is important, thats fine, but it isn't a commonly held position.
Funnily, It is mostly Georgists that think it is a very important property of a tax.
estearum 17 hours ago [-]
Which political ideology wants taxation generally to create market distortions?
Virtually every political persuasion favors some types of Pigouvian taxes, which are deliberately designed to do this, but which believe that it's generally good for a tax to be distortive by its own merits?
s1artibartfast 15 hours ago [-]
I said minimizing distortion isnt a purpose , not that I find i find it desirable on its own merits.
So as you point out, one large segment of voters are interested in pigovian taxes. I think there is also a large overlapping segment that want taxes to optimize or reform behavior absent externalities for things they don't like.
However, I think the biggest moral consensus amongst voters is for taxes levied on the beneficiaries from the public work or institutions funded.
The public cares not if a tax has absolutely zero distortion when it is levied on the masses to benefit the few.
This more resembles income, profit, or use taxes.
wat10000 17 hours ago [-]
I'm curious as to how a small government type would be so derisive toward the idea of a goal of minimizing distortions in taxation. "Minimize distortions" is another way of saying that the tax minimizes government interference in the economy. Seems like exactly the sort of thing a small government type would want.
s1artibartfast 15 hours ago [-]
I see the two as completely independent, and I think proportionality overrides non-distortion.
I dont care if a tax has zero distortion when it is levied predominantly on one person to benefit another, or levied on the masses to benefit the few. Those who get the lion's share of the benefit should carry the lion's share of the cost.
Distortion has a very specific economic meaning which has nothing to do with who benefits and how much.
For example, a fuel tax to fund highway maintenance is distortionary but appropriate in my view.
Paying for the cost of wear and tear is a "distortion", because it changes the amount consumed. I argue that the cost of maintaining and building roads should factor into road consumption decisions!
Another example, If people want to live in remote fire-prone areas, they should pay more taxes to account for the higher state costs of infrastructure and safety, not fewer taxes because the land is cheaper than urban zones. The people driving the cost would be disconnected from the burden, and incentivized to drive them higher!
Distortion is a feature, not a bug.
estearum 14 hours ago [-]
I'd argue this is a baseline error. The efficient baseline policy for roads is to have a consumption tax attached. It is therefore deviations from this efficient baseline that are distortionary, which is actually the absence of a consumption tax.
Distortion isn't just "produces different behavior," because if it were, then any tax change in any direction to anything would be distortionary. Distortion is when a tax produces less-efficient behavior. For goods like roads, the inefficient-behavior state is the one created by not having consumption taxes.
s1artibartfast 13 hours ago [-]
If you are arguing the efficient baseline for roads is a use tax, then we agree!
The un-priced state of government infrastructure and service use is a market failure, but this is exactly what modern georgism and LVT calls for in its myopic focus on land and natural resources!
estearum 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, we do agree on that.
Georgism actually does not argue against Pigouvian taxes or use taxes per se. His view is more that you should expect to get less of whatever you tax. In this case, our shared view is that you actually want to tax road usage because you want less of it. I doubt George thought that people should use roads less, so I presume he wouldn't have been fond of the idea of taxing their use.
And it's worth noting the vast majority of LVTers or Georgists are not "single-taxers." They typically would believe that no tax scheme in lieu of a high LVT will produce desirable results, but not necessarily that any additional taxes on top of an LVT are necessarily bad.
s1artibartfast 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, perhaps I am arguing too much with with vocal online LVT proponents, and my criticisms should be directed at them rather than Henry George.
I think single taxers or mostly single taxers have bad policy, and also overestimate the difference in revenue from current property taxation of land and improvements. I most often hear it as an alternative to income taxes and paired as a funding source for universal healthcare and UBI.
I haven't read Progress and Poverty but my understanding is George wanted to abolish state-sponsored charity/welfare.
I think LVT as a social solution to poverty is largely out of date, and more of a niche policy fix for some urban NIMBY problems. Particularly because modern modes of consumption, value production, and (dare I say it) rent seeking have grown beyond material inputs.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
You should read P&P! It's a really incredible book, and I think you may be surprised the elegance with which it still "handles" a modern economy.
I think George's view on state-sponsored charity/welfare is more nuanced than that. It's a bit analogous to the prior argument. It's not that charity is bad, it's that in the absence of LVT, it will never be sufficient to solve the problem because a large portion of the intervention will get eaten by land rents. Basically that land rents rise to an equilibrium of "there's some poverty", no matter how much money you dump into the demand side.
Temporary reduction in evictions, then rents rise to equilibriate back at "there are some evictions." There is some set point of eviction rate that landlords as a whole are comfortable with, and they will set their prices to whatever is needed to achieve that rate.
He also seemed to believe that LVT itself would achieve the most aspirational visions of charity/welfare, so maybe (hopefully!) it would be unnecessary, but I don't remember him taking aim at charity/welfare as a concept.
IMO the right way to think about LVT is this:
Without LVT, virtually no other interventions can achieve shared prosperity. Minimum wage, UBI, public housing, rent controls, even just the advancement of technology itself... they all either equilibriate into higher land rents, OR they require controls on land rents that create catastrophically inefficient use of resources anyway.
slopinthebag 1 days ago [-]
The optimal form of taxation is none
antisthenes 1 days ago [-]
Coincidentally, that's also the optimal number of libertarians.
slopinthebag 1 days ago [-]
Coincidentally, that’s how much you contribute to the discussion
s1artibartfast 1 days ago [-]
Most libertarians think government institutions and their services are essential for society to function. They aren't anarchists after all.
antisthenes 19 hours ago [-]
They should really hold a group discussion then and talk about how they present themselves to the outgroup.
Because in my experience talking with them, most don't, and the vast majority are anti-federal organizations of any kind. And these have been multiple discussions over the course of 20+ years.
slopinthebag 19 hours ago [-]
That’s because unlike other political factions that treat politics as a team sport and prioritize group identity, libertarians tend to be free thinkers and have their own opinions and views.
estearum 18 hours ago [-]
I can predict virtually every single opinion a self-labeled "libertarian" has about the world.
Now granted, among the people who are actually free-thinkers and have their own opinions, you will find many libertarian-adjacent views, but I've found that those people do not refer to themselves as libertarians.
slopinthebag 17 hours ago [-]
lmao funny you say that because i dont call myself a libertarian despite holding many adjacent views....
there's also a difference between Libertarians and libertarians. im not american so i refer to the latter but i know what u mean
Yes? The author is very clear in the blog post about having used AI very heavily:
Up until now you have been reading the words of Anthropic’s Claude, in particular Fable 5. In part, this is because I simply could not have written this piece. ... Although it might seem strange I thought it wrong to impose too much upon the machine, changing its voice to emulate mine. Richard Sutton’s bitter lesson would likely advise as much. Instead it has its unique voice, grating to some perhaps but altogether fitting that it should be able to keep it, and I only gave it advice on what considerations during writing would bridge the gap between its understanding and that of a reader.
ekelsen 1 days ago [-]
I don't know if putting a disclaimer at the very end of the blog, that you also disclaim, should be considered "very clear".
"Here is, for those that have read this far, the acknowledgements that used to be in the formal paper but we decided to remove it, mostly because the paper has been reworked and rewritten so many times by us."
estearum 1 days ago [-]
It may well be, but also Pangram is ridiculously transparent pseudoscience. Let's not play pretend that it's authoritative, please.
Edit: Just for fun I just defeated it with AI-generated text that it reported as 100% human-written. Great stuff. Truly genius scam.
ekelsen 1 days ago [-]
I never found a piece of text that pangram claims is 100% AI that to me seems like purely human written text.
The only counter example is when a human composed a piece deliberately trying to mimic AI slop.
So call it an AI slop detector if you want, but either way it accurately identifies stuff I don't wan't to read.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
> I never found a piece of text that pangram claims is 100% AI that to me seems like purely human written text.
Is that the level of sensitivity we're looking for? More than literally 0%? Do you know how crazy it'd be to achieve that, even if they were trying to?
snitty 1 days ago [-]
What were the text, your prompt, and model?
estearum 1 days ago [-]
It was actual work output I generated a few weeks back with Sonnet 5. Not posting here for obvious reasons, but it was nothing special or engineered for Pangram deception.
ekelsen 1 days ago [-]
The real reason being that it doesn't exist?
estearum 19 hours ago [-]
Ya bro it's totally not possible to defeat a detection system that, in its own marketing on contrived, game-able benchmarks that they created, claims only a 99.6% true negative rate.
It has literally never been done.
What a hilarious inversion of credulity.
ekelsen 17 hours ago [-]
So show us the prompt
estearum 16 hours ago [-]
As stated, it's work product. Not a toy "adversarial prompt," so I won't be posting it here.
And as stated, even Pangram's own marketing material claims at least a 0.4% false negative rate on their own contrived corpus. A one in 250 event is hardly even rare.
You seem quite defensive about Pangram, and it shows up in a few of your comments. Is there a reason for that? If it's extending to outright denial of Pangram's own stated error rates... sheesh... very weird indeed (unless they're paying you, obviously).
ekelsen 14 hours ago [-]
What I said is that every time Pangram has said 100% AI, it is 100% something I don't want to read. I don't particularly care if it was written by humans or LLMs.
Every time I've asked for evidence from someone who claims something like you do there always seems to be a reason it can't be posted. So it makes one suspicious.
Is there no way you can modify your prompt to be shareable?
estearum 14 hours ago [-]
> I never found a piece of text that pangram claims is 100% AI that to me seems like purely human written text.
That's another claim you made, which is quite silly. You've never found something that Pangram marks as 0% human and which you deem to be 100% human? Huge gulf.
And no, not really. It's copy from fundraising materials. Removing the identifiable portions of it would remove virtually everything, which is perhaps why Pangram didn't flag it?
ekelsen 11 hours ago [-]
I said it wasn't something I wanted to read. Humans are capable of writing things I don't want to read. Which at this point is starting to include your comments.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
Did you not write the quoted text?
ekelsen 5 hours ago [-]
I did and it's true, but I amended my statement at the top of this thread, which you've ignored.
What I wrote is true (it is a claim about my experience), so I'm not sure what you're attacking.
I amended my statement to avoid a discussion about the provenance which is not what I actually care about. What I care about is if I want to read it. Humans could theoretically write something in AI voice and if they did, I wouldn't want to read it.
I have not seen any examples of human text in LLM style that clearly predate 2023. If you can supply one, that would be incredible evidence.
If you're able to supply a prompt which generates text that fools pangram and is not like one sentence long or a list of names or something, but actual prose I want to read, then I will concede.
dwaltrip 1 days ago [-]
Pangram 4?
estearum 19 hours ago [-]
Whatever is deployed on their website 13 hours ago
porridgeraisin 1 days ago [-]
It is not pseudoscience. Have you read about how it works?
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Yes, quite a bit actually. It's directly analogous to e.g. "Red sky at night, sailors' delight", i.e. a pseudo-scientific approach that probably has a better-than-random success rate.
robotresearcher 1 days ago [-]
So it’s a heuristic. Lots of very valuable heuristics exist.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
None of which is authoritative, per my initial comment.
Tostino 1 days ago [-]
And I'd agree if that's what GP said.
1 days ago [-]
robotresearcher 1 days ago [-]
What name do you use for an approach that probably gets a better than random success rate (without guaranteeing that)?
I’m leaving out the ‘pseudo-scientific’ part of GP’s description, since it doesn’t entail anything technically.
Tostino 22 hours ago [-]
I was talking about the root comment that just said "it's AI because this website said so", not the one about treating it like a heuristic. I agree with that.
Are there other alternatives to UBI in solving this problem?
skew-aberration 1 days ago [-]
Land value tax / citizens dividend here is different to the UBIs sometimes proposed in contemporary US politics. The idea is that you tax and redistribute the profits on the scarce inputs to the economy, rather than the redistributing the outputs like manufactured grids and AI tokens.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
UBI is not a solution because it will drive up land rents and be eaten by landowners.
bubbleRefuge 1 days ago [-]
MMT job guarantee
throwatdem12311 1 days ago [-]
Boy I sure love my ditch digging job for the government! My friend also loves his ditch filling job too!
mcmcmc 1 days ago [-]
You say this, but if the US actually expanded nationwide fiber like we were supposed to there would have been a whole lot of ditches to dig up and refill. Public works projects don’t have to be wasteful.
Tostino 1 days ago [-]
You may know this already, but we did lay the fiber already like we were supposed to have. Most of it just never got used until ~20 years later. Because corporations need to milk their profits.
schmidtleonard 1 days ago [-]
About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it.
It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.
bethekidyouwant 1 days ago [-]
I think the answer to the last question is obvious. That we are standing on the shoulders or something completely new.
Almost all of the theory and predictions presented seems to be those of regular classical economics, per Smith, Riccardo, and particularly George. You can find them in Wealth of Nations, Progress and Poverty. This surprises people who have been failed by our education systems. There are still many people writing about this exact topic now - the author does mention e.g Stiglitz.
The author seems to be overcome by the explanatory power of a 150-250 year-old well-established economic theory, of which fable has built a fairly general (novel? improved?) macro model for him, including the effects of certain tax policies. They present this as a new theory of economics rather than a new macro model.
It's very off-putting as a reader - you can't distinguish at a glance between what the author claims to have contributed vs merely discovered by reading about Georgism. Established concepts are not referred to be their usual names, etc.
On my near-term todo list is to explore a particular crank physics theory of my own with AI... but not as a way to validate it, I know it's a crank theory that is far too simple to have been missed by pros in the relevant fields, but as a window into the literature and figure out what's wrong with it and thereby learn something. I will be framing it to the AI in pretty much precisely that way: Go get literature and reputable sources and talk through why this is already well known, probably well known to be a bad and wrong idea.
I still feel like not enough people are talking about this here on HN... AI has opened the scientific literature like never before. It's like being able to interrogate it and interview it as if it was a person, rather than just searching papers, for keywords you don't know, for lines of thought you've never heard of, in a sub-sub-sub-field you didn't even know existed, and failing before you even knew what it is you wanted. I've read more papers in the past 6 months than the past 10 years. Whatever opportunity you have to try this out, be it some question bothering you for the last 10 years, or a crank theory of your own to prove out against the literature, the foundation of some vibe-coded program informed by the literature rather than just vibing on the neural weights directly, or just asking something random about the studied effects of beavers on local ecosystems, you gotta try this. Prompt it specifically for "reputable sources and scientific papers", that helps a lot. It does not make you suddenly an expert in the field, but it does let you poke through the pile of literature far, far more effectively than you could hope to before.
And then don't forget to ask it why your summary is wrong or incomplete. Even if it doesn't convince you, you'll learn yet more.
At work I'm putting together an MCP server that more easily exposes our legume data for model consumption, and part of the insane value-add has been the curatorial work that our collaborators at USDA put into the data over years. For example, genome data (i.e. nucleic acid fastas) include relevant metadata such as their DOIs, so models can fetch and read the original papers (if they're open access, of course).
This goes a long way to boosting the intelligence/usefulness of these systems for research.
This is still pointing the LLM in a specific direction . You might want to prompt something like “give me a summary of relevant literature” and avoid sharing your point of view. Wdyt?
If I were operating in a field in which I was already an expert, or in a field that is more strongly opinion-based anyhow (e.g., philosophy... it isn't particularly clear that being an "expert" in philosophy has any strong impact on your chances of being "right", for whatever that even means in that field), I might ask for something more neutral, but I know I'm not.
> I simply could not have written this piece. I myself have no formal economics background
No shit, me neither, I read a couple macroeconomics textbooks at the age of 30 and now I wouldn't make arrogant and obviously wrong claims like the above. And I don't have the hubris to publish a paper.
Ah well.
Sheesh.
What do you believe are the most important contributions here over standard Georgism or Ricardo's theory of rents?
https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...
There is no term for human value here, and it is values that set prices. Scarcity is not itself a value. A particular snowflake or UUID being unique adds no demand. Wages are set in the context of every possible opportunity that the employer can imagine, as ordered by values. So a wage-predicting equation needs arguments that measure all of those value-weighted opportunities against paying a given wage, but this one doesn't. And "That's it" seems to declare them not relevant.
There is shifting burdens from good to good or person to person.
I find it no surprise that so many of the loudest proponents for georgism are highly compensated tech workers with low physical consumption - exactly the demographic that would be favored most under that system.
Instead the people who benefit from the infrastructure have the bill for the public transportation system rolled into their land value tax.
Right now in the current system you pay both income taxes and then you pay the landlord again because to him as the monopoly owner of land, the public infrastructure is pure producer surplus.
The demographic that would be favoured under that system is people who work for a living and the people being disadvantaged are the ones sitting on land or extracting the producer surplus.
While it obviously encourages putting high value land to greater use, it also encourages avoiding high value land itself.
If the tax burden of your San Francisco house or office doubles, you may look into relocating to where land is cheaper.
It obviously depends on the rates.
Georgism does a excellent job of incentivising better land use, but is trivial to shelter income from.
A teacher renting a run down aprtment might have a similar land tax footprint to a tech ceo in a taller building, or maybe the ceo just teleworks from home in Wyoming.
xAI or whomever puts their next Mega server farm on undesirable land, and then operates basically tax-free.
The end of day problem with the Georgist theory is that we now live in a knowledge and information economy, not an industrial one governed by material inputs. Changing a 1 to a 0 on a string of bits might yeild a billion dollar profit, but requires no material overhead.
It's to 1) fund services while 2) minimizing distortions.
If someone can consume land of no value and produce huge amounts of value from it, that's a good thing. They should be entitled to as much upside as they can produce.
That said, the point of a taxation scheme is not to "minimize distortions". If you think that is important, thats fine, but it isn't a commonly held position.
Funnily, It is mostly Georgists that think it is a very important property of a tax.
Virtually every political persuasion favors some types of Pigouvian taxes, which are deliberately designed to do this, but which believe that it's generally good for a tax to be distortive by its own merits?
So as you point out, one large segment of voters are interested in pigovian taxes. I think there is also a large overlapping segment that want taxes to optimize or reform behavior absent externalities for things they don't like.
However, I think the biggest moral consensus amongst voters is for taxes levied on the beneficiaries from the public work or institutions funded.
The public cares not if a tax has absolutely zero distortion when it is levied on the masses to benefit the few.
This more resembles income, profit, or use taxes.
I dont care if a tax has zero distortion when it is levied predominantly on one person to benefit another, or levied on the masses to benefit the few. Those who get the lion's share of the benefit should carry the lion's share of the cost.
Distortion has a very specific economic meaning which has nothing to do with who benefits and how much.
For example, a fuel tax to fund highway maintenance is distortionary but appropriate in my view.
Paying for the cost of wear and tear is a "distortion", because it changes the amount consumed. I argue that the cost of maintaining and building roads should factor into road consumption decisions!
Another example, If people want to live in remote fire-prone areas, they should pay more taxes to account for the higher state costs of infrastructure and safety, not fewer taxes because the land is cheaper than urban zones. The people driving the cost would be disconnected from the burden, and incentivized to drive them higher!
Distortion is a feature, not a bug.
Distortion isn't just "produces different behavior," because if it were, then any tax change in any direction to anything would be distortionary. Distortion is when a tax produces less-efficient behavior. For goods like roads, the inefficient-behavior state is the one created by not having consumption taxes.
The un-priced state of government infrastructure and service use is a market failure, but this is exactly what modern georgism and LVT calls for in its myopic focus on land and natural resources!
Georgism actually does not argue against Pigouvian taxes or use taxes per se. His view is more that you should expect to get less of whatever you tax. In this case, our shared view is that you actually want to tax road usage because you want less of it. I doubt George thought that people should use roads less, so I presume he wouldn't have been fond of the idea of taxing their use.
And it's worth noting the vast majority of LVTers or Georgists are not "single-taxers." They typically would believe that no tax scheme in lieu of a high LVT will produce desirable results, but not necessarily that any additional taxes on top of an LVT are necessarily bad.
I think single taxers or mostly single taxers have bad policy, and also overestimate the difference in revenue from current property taxation of land and improvements. I most often hear it as an alternative to income taxes and paired as a funding source for universal healthcare and UBI.
I haven't read Progress and Poverty but my understanding is George wanted to abolish state-sponsored charity/welfare.
I think LVT as a social solution to poverty is largely out of date, and more of a niche policy fix for some urban NIMBY problems. Particularly because modern modes of consumption, value production, and (dare I say it) rent seeking have grown beyond material inputs.
I think George's view on state-sponsored charity/welfare is more nuanced than that. It's a bit analogous to the prior argument. It's not that charity is bad, it's that in the absence of LVT, it will never be sufficient to solve the problem because a large portion of the intervention will get eaten by land rents. Basically that land rents rise to an equilibrium of "there's some poverty", no matter how much money you dump into the demand side.
Here's evidence of exactly that dynamic with a similar intervention of minimum wage increases: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
Temporary reduction in evictions, then rents rise to equilibriate back at "there are some evictions." There is some set point of eviction rate that landlords as a whole are comfortable with, and they will set their prices to whatever is needed to achieve that rate.
He also seemed to believe that LVT itself would achieve the most aspirational visions of charity/welfare, so maybe (hopefully!) it would be unnecessary, but I don't remember him taking aim at charity/welfare as a concept.
IMO the right way to think about LVT is this:
Without LVT, virtually no other interventions can achieve shared prosperity. Minimum wage, UBI, public housing, rent controls, even just the advancement of technology itself... they all either equilibriate into higher land rents, OR they require controls on land rents that create catastrophically inefficient use of resources anyway.
Because in my experience talking with them, most don't, and the vast majority are anti-federal organizations of any kind. And these have been multiple discussions over the course of 20+ years.
Now granted, among the people who are actually free-thinkers and have their own opinions, you will find many libertarian-adjacent views, but I've found that those people do not refer to themselves as libertarians.
there's also a difference between Libertarians and libertarians. im not american so i refer to the latter but i know what u mean
Up until now you have been reading the words of Anthropic’s Claude, in particular Fable 5. In part, this is because I simply could not have written this piece. ... Although it might seem strange I thought it wrong to impose too much upon the machine, changing its voice to emulate mine. Richard Sutton’s bitter lesson would likely advise as much. Instead it has its unique voice, grating to some perhaps but altogether fitting that it should be able to keep it, and I only gave it advice on what considerations during writing would bridge the gap between its understanding and that of a reader.
"Here is, for those that have read this far, the acknowledgements that used to be in the formal paper but we decided to remove it, mostly because the paper has been reworked and rewritten so many times by us."
Edit: Just for fun I just defeated it with AI-generated text that it reported as 100% human-written. Great stuff. Truly genius scam.
The only counter example is when a human composed a piece deliberately trying to mimic AI slop.
So call it an AI slop detector if you want, but either way it accurately identifies stuff I don't wan't to read.
Is that the level of sensitivity we're looking for? More than literally 0%? Do you know how crazy it'd be to achieve that, even if they were trying to?
It has literally never been done.
What a hilarious inversion of credulity.
And as stated, even Pangram's own marketing material claims at least a 0.4% false negative rate on their own contrived corpus. A one in 250 event is hardly even rare.
You seem quite defensive about Pangram, and it shows up in a few of your comments. Is there a reason for that? If it's extending to outright denial of Pangram's own stated error rates... sheesh... very weird indeed (unless they're paying you, obviously).
Every time I've asked for evidence from someone who claims something like you do there always seems to be a reason it can't be posted. So it makes one suspicious.
Is there no way you can modify your prompt to be shareable?
That's another claim you made, which is quite silly. You've never found something that Pangram marks as 0% human and which you deem to be 100% human? Huge gulf.
And no, not really. It's copy from fundraising materials. Removing the identifiable portions of it would remove virtually everything, which is perhaps why Pangram didn't flag it?
What I wrote is true (it is a claim about my experience), so I'm not sure what you're attacking.
I amended my statement to avoid a discussion about the provenance which is not what I actually care about. What I care about is if I want to read it. Humans could theoretically write something in AI voice and if they did, I wouldn't want to read it.
I have not seen any examples of human text in LLM style that clearly predate 2023. If you can supply one, that would be incredible evidence.
If you're able to supply a prompt which generates text that fools pangram and is not like one sentence long or a list of names or something, but actual prose I want to read, then I will concede.
I’m leaving out the ‘pseudo-scientific’ part of GP’s description, since it doesn’t entail anything technically.
It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.