(^38) Best columns: Business
We’ve “living in a time of intense backlash against
the technology industry,” said Nicholas Thompson.
No question, Big Tech had it coming. Silicon Valley’s
colossal failure of imagination made it blind to how
its inventions could be misused. When Facebook was
weaponized to manipulate the 2016 elections, all the
worries about technology—from online privacy to
artificial intelligence—we’d pushed to the background
came roaring into view. Ad targeting was “redefined
as surveillance capitalism.” #Delete Uber became
a meme. The tech industry failed to anticipate this
because “the nerds had ascended, culturally and so-
cially, and had become enchanted with their own vir-
tuous self-image.” They spoke like St. Francis while
worshipping Mammon. But “much of the magic in
our lives comes from software: the music we hear,
the movies we watch, the stories we tell.” We live
longer, eat better, and keep in our pockets computers
more powerful than those that guided the first men
into space. Rather than abandon the tech industry,
we should “build it anew with forethought.” Some-
times systems crack and shatter, but other times those
cracks lead to a repair. What’s required now is action
from government, builders, and users— “a coming
together of many tribes to fix the mess we’re in, and
to learn from the mistakes the industry has made.”
This year’s Nobel Prize in economics shows how the
discipline is finally getting humbler, more pragmatic,
and less afraid to get its hands dirty, said Noah
Smith. A common idea about economists is that they
are “the high priests of the free market,” who “give
short shrift to the needs of society’s poorest.” But the
2019 winners— Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mi-
chael Kremer of Harvard University—have devoted
their careers to alleviating global poverty. They’ve
examined programs that “nudge developing-world
farmers to use more fertilizer, provide microcredit
to slum residents, create quotas for women in local
government, provide deworming treatments for the
poor, and eradicate malaria,” among other targeted
government interventions. In a field given to airy
theorizing, these economists go out and do random-
ized control trials to test the effects of such policies in
the field. “Instead of studying the impact that govern-
ment programs have on their own, they actually go
into poor countries and create the programs.” Duflo,
at 46 the youngest economist to ever win the Nobel,
likens development economists to plumbers, solving
real-world problems “instead of seeking sweeping
universal insights.” That’s a “breathtaking shift for an
often hidebound and cloistered academic field.” Re
ute
rs
Rebuilding
Big Tech
the right way
Nicholas Thompson
Wired
A Nobel for
real-world
economics
Noah Smith
Bloomberg.com
As the Trump administration and Bei-
jing appear to edge closer to a trade
agreement, “China is emerging with
wins,” said Chao Deng and Lingling
Wei in The Wall Street Journal. The
U.S. agreed last week to suspend an
imminent tariff hike on $250 bil lion
worth of Chinese imports; in return,
President Trump said, China will buy up
to $50 bil lion in U.S. agricultural prod-
ucts. Beijing has pursued a “tit-for-tat
strategy” on tariffs in the year-old trade
war but has grown more open to a deal
as it “runs out of ammunition on more
U.S. imports to hit.” Yet it’s not clear what China is really will-
ing to concede to secure a trade pact; even the billions supposed
to go to U.S. agriculture may be more of an “aspiration” than a
firm target. Despite that lack of firm commitments, Trump has
played down the protests in Hong Kong to keep the trade talks
on track—a success for Beijing. The two sides emerged from
talks last week with different takes on what will be included in
any eventual accord “and how close they are to signing a docu-
ment,” said Bloomberg.com. President Trump claimed to be
very close to a “phase one” agreement, calling the latest talks a
“lovefest” and saying that “we’ve come to a deal, pretty much,
subject to getting it written.” But China has been much more
measured, saying only that progress has been made.
For the U.S. and China, this is already the 13th round of trade
talks, said Weizhen Tan in CNBC.com. Trump’s phase-one deal
is really more of a truce, with China still “hunkering down.”
The very limited agreement leaves the hard issues such as cyber-
security and the fate of blacklisted
Chinese tech companies, including the
giant Huawei, still on the table. “The
agreement, such as it is, seems more
like a demonstration of goodwill than
a resolution of the trade dispute,” said
TheEconomist.com. We’ve been here
before, and prior cease-fires have col-
lapsed “under a barrage of tweets.”
And what advances have been made
aren’t all in the right direction. Yes,
having China buy some $50 billion
worth of agricultural produce would
help American farmers. “But trade is
supposed to be about markets, not state intervention,” and in
the long run this movement toward managed trade could “fur-
ther undermine the global trading system.”
“Don’t get too excited” about hopes of relief from the trade war,
said David Fickling in Bloomberg.com. More than $460 billion
worth of tariffs remain in place between the world’s two biggest
economies, and there are few reasons to think the bilateral rela-
tionship will improve anytime soon. Trump’s impulsive, unpre-
dictable behavior discourages China from striking a more com-
prehensive deal. “There’s little point in offering concessions on
intellectual property protection or opening more sectors of the
economy to foreign investment if the other side is prepared to
throw over the chessboard because of a separate issue.” Mean-
while, an increasingly authoritarian China is “busy making itself
a markedly less attractive place for U.S. businesses to invest.”
There could well be no resolution at all to the trade battle, and
the current “grim equilibrium” may be all we can get.
China trade: Deal or no deal?
Tariffs on Chinese goods may be here to stay.
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