Extinction Rebellion, a look inside

I have friends and friends of friends, loosely involved with Extinction Rebellion - it is a form of holocracy (self-organising).

I think a middle of the road type of person’s first instinct might dismiss this as somewhat crazy.

Borrowing from NIke’s successful ad campaign (and Cf. Thinking Bigly) it’s only crazy until you do it.

While I’m fairly uncommitted ideologically, I think supporting others in their strong views is valid.

This FT article looks at some of the prominent members of the Extinction Rebellion movement, and gives you an insight into their thinking. It’s pretty coherent, even if you disagree.

““I had this really rude awakening where I realised that my career was completely pointless — it was irrelevant, it was meaningless,” Green says. “Either I’m going to continue doing what I do and not sleeping well at night because of the crisis that we’re in, or I’m going to jump ship. How can we knowingly educate students for a future that doesn’t exist?”  A friend of hers coined a phrase — “ecophany” — to describe Green’s metamorphosis. She has since resigned from her job to support Extinction Rebellion, persuading hundreds of academics and scientists to endorse its principles. “

FT Long read on extinction rebellion

https://www.ft.com/content/9bcb1bf8-5b20-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a081a

Ray Dalio on reforming capitalism

This Ray Dalio piece on the problems and solutions for modern capitalism is an important piece of insight. It builds on his work on inequality and populism.

It is important as (1) he is a billionaire with considerable weight and clout

(2) it highlights the problems of both growing the (economic) pie and splitting the pie fairly

(Me: He omits natural/environmental capital in his primary analysis as a weakness)

(3) he observes social democratic/socialism ideas are better at (or at least focused on) pie splitting but free market type ideas have been better at (or at least focused on) pie growing

He pulls this together with a few other observations (amongst others) that

• the left and right have never been further apart since the 1930s - they are entrenched and polarised

• Technology (and other forces of capitalism) is continuing to disproportionately benefit the “haves”/rich ie owners of capital, automation will continue to displace workers

• The US and China are at loggerheads with unknown outcomes

He has strong focus on the education inequality in the US amongst other insightful data (particularly on the bottom 60% and other data on the poor) and some insightful data on food poverty

(The childhood poverty rate in the US is now 17.5% and has not meaningfully improved for decades. In the US in 2017, around 17% of children lived in food-insecure homes where at least one family member was unable to acquire adequate food due to insufficient money or other resources.Unicef reports that the US is worse than average in the percent of children living in a food-insecure household (with the US faring worse than Poland, Greece, and Chile).

He then draws the important insight that it is systems problem:

“Contrary to what populists of the left and populists of the right are saying, these unacceptable outcomes aren’t due to either a) evil rich people doing bad things to poor people or b) lazy poor people and bureaucratic inefficiencies, as much as they are due to how the capitalist system is now working.”

He sketches out some solutions to work on including:

-i  Leadership from the top

-ii  Bipartisan working groups (ie left and right together)

-iii Co-ordination of fiscal and monetary policy together

-iv Clear metrics for success and accountability

-v  Redistribution of resources that will improve both the well-beings and the productivities of the vast majority of people.

And within that a focus on good “double bottom line outcomes”

Ie outcomes that have good economic return and good social return

(for instance education fits that well)

(Again he misses out environment unfortunately, although many double bottom line ideas could be triple bottom line as well)

He proposes:

Create private-public partnerships (including governments, philanthropists, and companies) that would jointly vet and invest in double bottom line projects that would be judged on the basis of their social and economic performance results relative to clear metrics. That would both increase the funding for and the quality of projects because people who have to put their own money on the line would be responsible for them.

Raise money in ways that both improve conditions and improve the economy’s productivity by taking into consideration the all-in costs for the society (e.g., I’d tax pollution and various causes of bad health that have sizable economic costs for the society).

Raise more from the top via taxes that would be engineered to not have disruptive effects on productivity and that would be earmarked to help those in the middle and the bottom primarily in ways that also improve the economy’s overall level of productivity, so that the spending on these programs is largely paid for by the cost savings and income improvements that they create. Having said that, I also believe that the society has to establish minimum standards of healthcare and education that are provided to those who are unable to take care of themselves.

While you can argue about the diagnosis and cause of the problem, the data is insightful, and the solutions are food for thought.

Unfortunately, I am fairly pessimistic about most of those solutions given what I can see about the politics of the UK and US (and others) although some countries may fare better (eg New Zealand which I feel is working on i and iv)

But there are elements of v. I can see working although this may only come through if our leaders can take a longer view and whole-view lens (for instance, increasing educational and social resources in areas of poverty brings long term returns but is short term costly and painful; carbon taxes are hard to fall progressively on society)).

And in theory there’s no reason why i - iv couldn’t happen but it would take a moment or time of social cohesion and cultural change to get there. We don’t have that. But it could happen as I talk about in my performance-lecture Thinking Bigly.

Full Essay by Dalio here:

https://www.economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-To-Be-Reformed/

A blog on his populism work:

https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2019/1/5/ray-dalio-on-cycles-populism-trade-wars

https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2017/8/21/divides

Jobs, Stories of energy transition

They Grew Up Around Fossil Fuels.
Now, Their Jobs Are in Renewables. / NY times 

“Chris Riley comes from a coal town and a coal family, but he founded a company that could hasten coal’s decline. Lee Van Horn, whose father worked underground in the mines, spends some days more than 300 feet in the air atop a wind turbine. They, and the other people in this story, represent a shift, not just in power generation but in generations of workers as well.

They come from places where fossil fuels like coal provided lifelong employment for their parents, grandparents and neighbors. They found a different path, but not necessarily out of a deep environmental commitment. In America today there is more employment in wind and solar power than in mining and burning coal. And a job’s a job....”

Me: fascinating accounts of how the economics of wind and solar and the direction of energy markets is convincing a new generation to work in wind and solar over coal and oil  

link here: 

 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/26/climate/wind-solar-energy-workers.html

Recent Carbon Trends, IEA

“Driven by higher energy demand in 2018, global energy-related CO2 emissions rose 1.7% to a historic high of 33.1 Gt CO2. While emissions from all fossil fuels increased, the power sector accounted for nearly two-thirds of emissions growth. Coal use in power alone surpassed 10 Gt CO2, mostly in Asia. China, India, and the United States accounted for 85% of the net increase in emissions, while emissions declined for Germany, Japan, Mexico, France and the United Kingdom.” IEA

IEA

Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew 1.7% in 2018 to reach a historic high of 33.1 Gt CO2. It was the highest rate of growth since 2013, and 70% higher than the average increase since 2010. Last year's growth of 560 Mt was equivalent to the total emissions from international aviation.

The increase in emissions was driven by higher energy consumption resulting from a robust global economy, as well as from weather conditions in some parts of the world that led to increased energy demand for heating and cooling.

CO2 emissions stagnated between 2014 and 2016, even as the global economy continued to expand. This decoupling was primarily the result of strong energy efficiency improvements and low-carbon technology deployment, leading to a decline in coal demand. But the dynamics changed in 2017 and 2018. Higher economic growth was not met by higher energy productivity, lower-carbon options did not scale fast enough to meet the rise in demand.

The result was that CO2 emissions increased by nearly 0.5% for every 1% gain in global economic output compared with an increase of 0.3% on average since 2010. Renewables and nuclear energy have nonetheless made an impact, with emissions growing 25% slower than energy demand in 2018.

For the first time, the IEA assessed the impact of fossil fuel use on global temperature increases. It found that CO2 emitted from coal combustion was responsible for over 0.3°C of the 1°C increase in global average annual surface temperatures above pre-industrial levels. This makes coal the single largest source of global temperature increase.

The global average annual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere averaged 407.4 ppm in 2018, up 2.4 ppm since 2017. This is a major increase from pre-industrial levels, which ranged between 180 and 280 ppm.

IEA report (2018) here.

Start up advice: Do things that don’t scale.

thoughtful insights from one of the world’s leading VC investors, Paul Graham:

”One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. [1]

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going....”

read his whole piece here: 

 http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

UK life expectancy and healthcare spend vs OECD. NHS success story?

UK life expectancy expanded - in line with the OECD average (more or less, there was a little catch up) until recently where (like in a few countries) it seems to be flattening. This is a blunt but well understood measure of a population’s health.

A similar type of trend can be seen in childhood mortality. Although experts can gripe with the data, the overall trend is likely robust. There is also some catch up from OECD average from a poorer start.

This is a good achievement by the UK given what the UK has spent on healthcare since the 1970s.

My general observation here is that the UK has underspend / invested less in healthcare but has managed to obtain an average to above average results.

The under spend as % GDP has been 2 to 4 percent points lower than OECD peers on average. This has been going on since the 1970s. (The World bank data is from 2000, sourced from WHO)

There are many factors that combine to impact life expectnacy and health. Correlation is not causation.

However, I think there is enough data and evidence to suggest that given the amount the UK has invested in health (and social care and education) that if the UK wants to continue the positive trends in health, it will likely have to spend more or at current levels of spend the health out comes will - in my view - likely to continue to tail off.

In this sense, the UK’s NHS has been a unique system that has enabled outsized gains in health outcomes for the amount of spend over the last 50 years.

OECD data.

I can’t make a nice graph widget, but I can show how this % spend on GDP goes back to the 1970s. so this is arguably about 50 years of under spend, at even the lower end of 2% of GDP that’s somewhere in the region of £500bn to £1,000 bn (yes 1 £trillion) in culmulative under spend compared to what would have been spent on the OECD average %.

(Now whether it would have been well spent or what else the UK spent the money on is another debate - maybe the OECD over spent given its outcomes… but given the UK is uniquely low (though Italy is close in some years and has slightly worse outcomes broadly) .

You can see how Germany is approx matching the UK since 1970 on life expectancy and trend (OK it did slowly gain beofre mathcing), but was spending much more of GDP to achieve that.

IQ not useful for much...

Nassim Taleb criticises most IQ research.  

““IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent (with a lot of noise), a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects.

Designed for learning disabilities, and given that it is not too needed there [ ] it ends up selecting for exam-takers, paper shufflers … The concept is poorly thought out mathematically by the field (commits a severe flaw in correlation under fat tails; fails to properly deal with dimensionality; treats the mind as an instrument not a complex system), and seems to be promoted by

• racists/eugenists…

• psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers …

• It is at the bottom an immoral measure that, while not working, can put people (and, worse, groups) in boxes for the rest of their lives.

• There is no significant correlation (or any robust statistical association) between IQ and hard measures such as wealth. Most “achievements” linked to IQ are measured in circular stuff s.a. bureaucratic or academic success, things for test takers and salary earners in structured jobs that resemble the tests. 

• Some argue that IQ measures intellectual capacity — real world results come from, in addition, “wisdom” or patience, or “conscientiousness”, or decision-making or something of the sort. No. It does not even measure intellectual capacity/mental powers.

The whole discourse is worth reading if you are interested in the area.

In summary: IQ is useful to pick up learning disabilities - although there are many other ways to do that. It is not helpful for addressing many real world problems and challenges. On top of that, it is abused by racists making it problematic.

The full discourse by Taleb linked here.

On climate change risks: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2017/9/18/nassim-taleb-climate-change-risk

Taleb commencement address. And on the ethics of stuffing.

Small teams vs large teams and innovation effects

Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology |  Nature

Analyses of the output produced by large versus small teams of researchers and innovators demonstrate that their work differs systematically in the extent to which it disrupts or develops existing science and technology.

Me: Large teams do more incremental innovation. Small teams do more break-through innovations (which last further into the future, when it works…). Ties in anecdotally to what we know about large company innovation vs smaller tech and biotech innovation (and the high risk, high reward nature of smaller teams / companies). But you need both for a healthy innovation ecosystem.  It seems to be that small teams (less than 8, and say, solo or duo teams) look at older, promising ideas that weren’t developed and take those forward, but also that combining ideas from several fields is effective between 1 and 8 team members, but then falls.

Nature letter here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0941-9

Full paper accessible here:  https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1709/1709.02445.pdf