I'm a little bit envious. Reading such a great book for the first time.
I recommend re-reading it in a few years. Ecos books grow with you; the more you learn about the world and history, the more you'll find in nuance in that book. Maybe more true for me - as a teenager I've read it first as a mostly weird detective story. Later re-reads made me more interested in the weird parts.
There is, by the way, a separately published Postscript to the Name of the Rose with some notes on writing the book.
Hayek makes no statement about the ability of market forces to stabilize prices.
On the contrary, his point is that the equilibrium price in a decentralized market is a good sufficient statistic that aggregates the current demand and supply situation.
Building on his example on page 525, if more screws of a particular size are suddenly in higher demand, then the price will increase, as it should!
The goal is not to stabilize the price but to have the price reflect the marginal opportunity cost.
Right, but for functional markets it turns out the marginal opportunity cost is not good enough.
Most famously interest rates without some government (or other, in the case of Crypto) hand in distribution and projected distribution, the market can fail (everyone is encouraged to hoard).
In Stiglitz' case (not looking it up, but from memory), used car markets fail. While the marginal net opportunity cost is what the price yields, it creates a negative feedback loop where people that have a used car that's more valuable than is verifiable exit the market, and then you get .... all the more 'lemons' -- i.e. only bad cars). Dealerships are one way to correct for that information loss, but markets don't always value sufficiently the information that will solve it.
We can be a bit more smug/hopeful nowadays, because information is a lot more easily aggregated/hosted. But we have to recognize the .... value of those components.
I agree. From an outcome standpoint, the changes are for the worse. But some of them are understandable to the extent that in certain contexts USCIS is paying more attention to the letter of the law and not just accepting representations on face value but requiring evidence. From my standpoint, the biggest negative changes are the delays in the processing of green card applications (partly statutory and partly administrative) and the lack of access to USCIS officers.
Not much although the Biden Administration is prodding the agencies involved in immigration to facilitate (within the bounds of the law) the attraction and retention of tech/AI talent and companies.
My PERM was certified in August. Took a little over 16 months because it went to audit. Timelines on PERM shot up around the same time as I applied and have been steadily getting worse.
Filed I-485 in November, approved in 4 months and a week. So once your date comes up, they seem to be moving quickly.
> And I think it's safe to say that that would not be a good long-term strategy.
Why is this not a good long-term strategy? What is a better strategy? It seems like the alternative may well have been to go bankrupt and go out of business, and that definitely isn't a great long-term strategy.
If the strategy is just to recognize there are n subscribers who are dedicated readers of The Atlantic and are unlikely to drop their subscription if you increase the price 50%, then this is a bad long-term strategy because those people will eventually die or drop off due to attrition. The long term strategy should involve successfully bringing in new loyal subscribers.
I'm sure they know this, and want it to happen, but the bit about charging more and making it harder to read for free would seem to make it harder to get new subscribers on board. So, there's a reading that says their short term profitability is hurting their long term profitability.
> Is it right that I was filtered out by degree and not by capability? No, it’s not right, but it happened.
It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter.
In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being.
In reality, HR has limited resources and needs shortcuts to effectively screen applicants. Experience has shown that degrees and grades are useful summary statistics for filtering. It is not "right, and there are obviously Type I and Type II errors in this process.
But suppose we gave HR some other shortcut besides a college degree. Something that still attested to a similar level of work ethic and minimal qualification in a field.
If we just set the "college is important for well-rounded life experience blah blah" party to the side for a second and consider it strictly as a job-prep factory (because why else would an average schmuck spend that much on something if not for a good ROI), apprenticeships seem like an obvious better pattern for everyone.
1. They run for a similar length - multiple years
2. They attest to work ethic in the same way college degrees do
4. They train actual job skills and provide actual job experience, unlike (most) undergrad programs
5. And on top of it all, apprentices still get new life experiences, but probably more productive ones than Greek Life.
To me, it seems companies providing apprenticeship programs as a replacement for an undergrad program should lead to a better-equipped workforce and provide HR with better signal to filter by. Never mind that a successful apprenticeship could lead straight into a longer-term job offer in many cases, making things easier both for new worker bees and for HR.
I would think it would be more like the problem that colleges face in choosing who to accept. Companies offering apprenticeships obviously have limited resources for managing and running the program, but on the other hand perhaps apprentices can be "expelled" more easily than full-time employees.
Perhaps this is what that one financial firm was on to when everyone ridiculed them for their "Pay us to work for us" scheme (which does sound ridiculous, unless perhaps you can sell demonstrable educational and networking value from the program and can frame it as competing with what colleges offer).
> In an ideal world, there would be plenty of time and resources to learn the personality and skills of each applicant, as an individual human being.
I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted." Another part is signalling value not to your employer, but to the employer's clients. If you're in law or consulting, the value of an elite degree is more to show the client that your firm's high billing rates are justified. A third factor is that some firms are like clubs, where a de facto caste system exists and people from lesser schools are discriminated against. It's morally wrong, but it happens in many of the elite firms and startups.
It takes only a few seconds to legitimately scan through the non-college achievements in order to get a feel for a candidate's true potential. So it should not a real blocker to anyone who is serious about hiring the best people.
>I question this. There is signalling value in a degree, but it's more about providing HR and the hiring manager with reputation cover in case the candidate is a failure. "They were from $SCHOOL, it couldn't have been predicted."
I've been part of the hiring process at multiple companies over the course of a decade now, both at large companies and small ones, and not once has anything like this ever happened. A degree in the field has only ever been used as a filter at the start of the process, and in the small number of times there was a bad hire, no one ever used the candidates degree as an excuse because there was no need to: no one blamed anyone for the fact that a shitty employee was hired.
I was a programmer/am still sort of one. And I think a better filter is to be good at something and be able to look at the work of others and evaluate them quickly.
Or to have a work system that allows for lots of contributions to filter people’s work without requiring 40 hours of interviews.
The resume filter by education is used because it’s easy. Graduating from Harvard isn’t perfect. But it’s a fast way to filter out lots of candidates when you don’t have time.
> It is not obvious how to find a better way to filter.
An open exam process where anyone can take the test and receive a diploma for each individual class.
A bit like how professional certifications work.
That way, no matter the way you acquired your skills, you can try and get the same diploma.
Of course, you would also need to revise what skills and topics are tested to also provide exams for more practical topics usually ignored in colleges.
It probably varies per profession and industry, but in my experience the degree isn't often a good signal for screening, except possibly, in some cases, as a negative correlation.
Pilots need to be allowed in the cockpit during flight, for very obvious reasons. The fact that he was off-duty doesn't really change the security calculation. It might as well have been an on-duty pilot that had pulled this stunt.
I am just grateful that it didn't turn into a disaster.
It's not obvious that he needs to be in the cockpit, rather it's obvious that there is no security threat to allowing a pilot to occupy the jump seat. The trust they're given to fly the plane is a superset of the trust required to be in the cockpit at all.
I recommend watching the Blancolirio channel on YouTube, Juan is a 777 pilot and has I think hundreds of episodes on crashes and near crashes that have occurred. Third pilots have saved countless lives.
The insane thing about the Lion Air Flight 610 crash is in the same plane a day before it was avoided because the 3rd pilot who didn't have to follow any particular checklist realized there was a trim stabilizer issue and had the pilots turn it off.
Now, I have no idea why that plane flew again the next day at all. But it did with two pilots and all 189 aboard were killed.
In addition to training etc, yes there are positives to having a certificated third person for "crew resource management". They are expected to observe and speak up if the PIC and SIC miss something, and to help in an emergency. In UA232 for example, a third pilot was instrumental in saving lives; it took six hands to make the airport.
Makes life easier if one of the pilots needs to visit the loo or eat something, as long as the third pilot is type rated. And besides that, it can also be useful in the case of a serious incident to have a third capable person at hand to run checklists, communicate with engineering, navigation or whatever else.
To be fair, there were other things on the agenda as well. The time was the height of the cold war, and 1983 was the year of the Stanislav Petrov incident that could potentially have started nuclear war. (Not to mention dealing with the Iran-Iraq war and working to reduce emissions CFC gasses to protect the Ozone layer).
It is great that the world is now in a position to make serious progress on the green energy transition.
I know it is popular to assume that americans are crazy and ignorant, but part of the puzzle is that there were plenty of other ways to cross the highway. There are two other bridges just a few hundred feet away (a foot being about one-third of a meter):
"Why would you build a pedestrian bridge to an empty field?! That makes even less sense. Yes there is a neighborhood south of the field, but if you are in that neighborhood surely you could just use the sidewalk on one of those other two bridges a few hundred feet to the east or west."
... Have you ever walked over a freeway on the "sidewalk" that's provided? I actually found that part of the quote amusing/revealing. As a frequent pedestrian who didn't own a car for many years, but yet navigated many a suburban area, I would vastly prefer the independent footbridge over a narrow 5' wide strip while 4,000 lb boxes whipped past me at 50mph.
I've done it, and I can tell you besides being a hair-raising experience, one of the few thoughts that goes through your head in that moment is "I am meant to be less than those people in the cars in every way"
> "I know it is popular to assume that americans are crazy and ignorant"
On the contrary, I don't think this infrastructure is crazy or ignorant at all, but it is pretty emblematic of the way America defines class. Pedestrians/people who don't own cars are nearly subhuman, barely given any consideration at all in the best cases, and actively campaigned against at worst.
The way the road infrastructure is for pedestrians isn't crazy, it's entirely rational under a value system where they have no value.
