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Re42: News -- Wealth, Wildcards, Computers

Retraice^1

We're all getting richer, but education is dividing us, and the machines are watching.

Air date: Sunday, 6th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.

The rich and richer

H10. Wealth: `The current trend toward concentration of wealth is making human life worse.'

So many definitions and concepts to decide: `human [quality of] life', `better/worse',^2 `wealth',^3 `concentration'.... And does the serious evidence even lean toward this hypothesis being true?

It's interesting to note that there are objective `better's (less death, disease) and subjective `better's (less unhappiness, suffering). These two could, conceivably, move in opposite directions! Imagine a population of suffering people having their lives extended by medicine. Didn't the Nazi doctors keep people alive in order to continue experiments on them? Probably.^4

One task is to distinguish between disposable income and asset wealth, i.e. `income inequality' (income or profit-and-loss statements) and `wealth inequality' (the balance sheet).^5

The Credit Suisse report on 2021 wealth growth:

"[W]ealth growth proved resilient in 2020 when COVID-19 caused major economic disruption, and the recovery during 2021 produced even more favorable conditions.... Setting aside exchange rate movements, aggregate global wealth grew by 12.7% in 2021, which is the fastest annual rate ever recorded."^6

On 2021 distribution:

"The wealth share of the global top 1% rose for a second year running to reach 45.6% in 2021, up from 43.9% in 2019. The rise in inequality is probably due to the surge in the value of financial assets^7 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the longer term, global wealth inequality has fallen this century due to the faster growth achieved in emerging markets."^8

An IMF journal on inequality:

"As the late Dutch economist (and first winner of the Nobel Prize in economics) Jan Tinbergen put it, inequality is the result of a race between technology and education."^9

Cancer, protein folding, black holes

H11. Wildcards: `New technologies, discoveries and deception regularly cause historic changes.'

Putin cancer: The New York Post is reporting on an article by The Sun, who claim to have reviewed the leaked emails. There's no way to be sure about this story right now.^10

From The Sun: "Game theory specialist Georgy Egorov warned a nuclear strike `makes sense' for Putin if he only has a few months to live."^11

Protein folding: Reading the various commentaries written since the AlphaFold breakthrough: this seems like a big deal in that chatter.^12 And what if it significantly affects lifespan? Congenital disease? Cognitive enhancement? Designer babies?

Black hole in our backyard: But it's "dormant".^13

Machines watching

H12. Computers: `Some humans now control others better, but machinery could take control.'

AI may help authorities track `ghost' fishing boats, Erik Stokstad, science.org, Nov. 2nd, 2022.

"Machine learning identifies suspicious activity when vessels turn off their identification beacons."

Billions of automatic ID system locations are in public databases. Cases that were "clearly" deliberate, and others that "seemed" technical, were used to train a machine learning system to detect suspicious activity.

So we have technical people building a system that classifies behavior automatically. The chain reaction starts when the beacon goes off, proceeds through classification of patterns of `behavior', and ends either with enforcement action or something else.

What used to go undetected, both nefarious and benign, could now be always watched by machinery. Boats with AIS beacons, whether or not they go off, are watched. What else is similarly watched? Everything. Consider:

The Panopticon is Already Here, Ross Andersen, theatlantic.com, Sep. 2020.

See also Strittmatter (2018), Schneier (2015), Zuboff (2019).

We're vacuuming up all the data from various sensors, including and especially cameras, and then computing machinery is detecting patterns in that data. The controllers^14 decide what patterns to seek out. The builders are not the controllers; the builders' power is only in building and publicizing.^15 The controllers end up with the power created by the builders.^16

_

References

Ferguson, N. (2017). The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0735222915. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0735222915 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0735222915 https://lccn.loc.gov/2018418429

Foroohar, R. (2021). The oldest asset class of all still dominates modern wealth. Financial Times. 15th Nov. 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/99a3cf9b-0ab8-45b9-bbc5-7e88c08f9ea5 Retrieved 7th Mar. 2022.

Jacobsen, A. (2011). Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Back Bay Books. ISBN: 978-0316202305. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780316202305 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780316202305 https://lccn.loc.gov/2011925205

Kiyosaki, R. T. (2017). Rich Dad Poor Dad. Plata Publishing, 20th anniv. ed. ISBN: 978-1612680170. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781612680170 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781612680170 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016941928

Retraice (2022/10/19). Re22: Computer Control. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re22 Retrieved 19th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/24). Re28: What's Good? RTFM. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re28 Retrieved 25th Oct. 2022.

Schneier, B. (2015). Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. W. W. Norton. ISBN: 9780393244816. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780393244816 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780393244816 https://lccn.loc.gov/2014048365

Shorrocks, A., Davies, J., & Lluberas, R. (2022). Global Wealth Report 2022. Credit Suisse Research Institute. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

Strittmatter, K. (2018). We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State. Custom House, revised, updated ed. ISBN: 978-0063027305. Published in Germany, 2018. This paperback edition 2021. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780063027305 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780063027305 https://lccn.loc.gov/2020288922

Tinbergen, J. (1974). Substitution of graduate by other labour. Kyklos, 27(2), 217-226. Jan. 1974. https://repub.eur.nl/pub/8084 Retrieved 8th Nov. 2022. Paywalled source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1974.tb01903.x

Woetzel, J., Mischke, J., Madgavkar, A., Windhagen, E., Smit, S., Birshan, M., Kemeny, S., & Anderson, R. J. (2021). The rise and rise of the global balance sheet. McKinsey Global Institute Report. Nov. 2021 https://mck.co/3ovj5eB Retrieved 6th Nov. 2022.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, Kindle ed. ISBN: 9781610395700. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781610395700 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781610395700 https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039998

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 We're not lost here. See Retraice (2022/10/24).

^3 The best definition we've found is: "Wealth is a person's ability to survive so many number of days forward--or, if I stopped working today, how long could I survive?" Kiyosaki (2017) p. 91, quoting R. Buckminster Fuller.

^4 FIXME TODO: Find citation to support this.

^5 Compare Wikipedia on Gini and Shorrocks et al. (2022), pp. 25, 31.

^6 Shorrocks et al. (2022) p. 7.

^7 Think stocks, bonds, cash deposits, i.e. generally liquid assets, as opposed to non-financial assets such as real estate, jewelry, soy beans, i.e. generally illiquid assets. See Nonfinancial Asset, James Chen, investopedia.com, Dec 31st, 2020.

^8 Shorrocks et al. (2022) p. 21. On the rise in non-financial asset values, see Foroohar (2021), "[F]or all the talk of blockchain, cryptocurrency and big data, it's rather amazing that most 21st-century wealth still lives in the oldest asset class of all: bricks and mortar"; and Woetzel et al. (2021), "Net worth has tripled since 2000, but the increase mainly reflects valuation gains in real assets, especially real estate, rather than investment in productive assets that drive our economies," (from the webpage summary), "Two-thirds of global net worth is stored in real estate and only about 20 percent in other fixed assets, raising questions about whether societies store their wealth productively," (p. vi).

^9 More or Less, Branko Milanovic, Finance & Development, September 2011, Vol. 48, No. 3. Tinbergen's paper is very technical, and his language is more reserved: "My approach suggests that [income inequality] depends on the `race' between demand for third-level manpower due to technological development and supply of it due to increased schooling.... [i.e. a] `race' between technical progress and extension of third-level education." Tinbergen (1974) p. 224.

^10 Putin battling cancer and Parkinsons disease, leaked emails claim: report, Yaron Steinbuch, nypost.com, Nov. 2nd, 2022; Bombshell leaked spy docs suggest Putin DOES have Parkinson's and cancer... and is `stuffed full of steroids', Imogen Braddick, thesun.co.uk, Nov. 1st, 2022.

^11 See also: Putin, Nuclear War, and Game Theory, Maxim Mironov, ie.edu, Oct. 31st, 2022.

^12 More Protein Folding Progress -- What's It Mean?, Derek Lowe, science.org, Jul. 23rd, 2021 ("Well, for one thing, it means that a lot of people in academia are going to have to rewrite their research grants. If you have been working on computational protein folding yourself, odds are that you have had your doors blown off by these recent developments and will need to rethink."); What are the implications of solving the `protein folding problem' for genomics?, Shannon Gunn, frontlinegenomics.com, Feb. 3rd, 2021.

^13 Astronomers Find a Black Hole in Our Cosmic Back Yard, Dennis Overbye, nytimes.com, Nov. 5th, 2022.

^14 They're humans and machines now, and possibly solely machines later. Retraice (2022/10/19).

^15 Of course, there is power to be had in building and not publicizing something. This is common in the intelligence agencies. See Jacobsen (2011) on the U2 and A-12 Oxcart planes, for example.

^16 Not like Niall Ferguson, who has no power, by his own estimate. (Ferguson (2017) pp. xx-xxiii.) He explains that, in a flat network, one's position determines one's power, as compared to one's rank or `altitude' (our word) in a hierarchy, p. xx.