Back in the 1980s, I was (among other things) a writer and singer of satirical folk songs. Going to the National Folk Festival in Canberra at Easter, I caught up with old friends and was reminded that I had produced a book of my songs. Returning home, I dug out a copy, and decided to scan it. You can download the result here (big file)
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John Q
Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how many babies do we want. In particular, since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?
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The news from Hungary’s election is so good that I need to write about it, even if not all the implications are clear yet, and even in a disorganised and way, repeating lots of what others are saying.
Although the polls predicted Orban’s defeat, nothing I read foreshadowed the scale of the victory – a two-thirds majority which will allow the reversal of all of Orban’s constitutional changes. Some credit for this must go to JD Vance. The spectacle of a US vice-president appearing in Europe to complain about foreign influence must have been too absurd for voters to accept. Putin’s unsubtle interference allowed Peter Magyar to remind Hungarians of Russia’s previous crimes against Hungary.
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(A piece I wrote for the Guardian)
A couple of weeks ago, just before my 70th birthday, I completed the Mooloolaba standard distance triathlon (1,500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run). There was nothing exceptional about my performance, placing 1,509 out of 1,730 overall and 14th out of 18 in my 65-69 age category.
But not that long ago, it would have been exceptional. Until about 1980, competitive sport for those over 70 was restricted largely to golf and lawn bowls. Until the 1990s, there wasn’t even a category for 70-year-olds in most competitive triathlons. The small number of competitors over 65 were lumped into a single category. The first 70-year-olds recorded as completing the demanding Kona Ironman event in Hawaii (3.8km swim, 180km ride, 42.2km run), to which I still aspire, were Hiromu Inada (male) and Ethel Autorino (female) in the year 2000.
What’s true of triathlons is true of endurance sports in general. Older athletes seem to be becoming more numerous, and also quite a bit faster, across a wide range of sports.
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As I approach formal retirement from my academic job, I’m still thinking about ideas in my main theoretical field of decision theory. But I’ve largely lost interest in publishing journal articles, leaving the chore of dealing with Manuscript Central and other robotic systems to my younger co-authors in the case of joint work, and not submitting many of my own. I’ve also gone retro on reviewing. If I’m invited to review a paper, I write back to the editor and offer to do the job as long as they send me the manuscript directly.
That distance from the process provides me with a somewhat different perspective on how Large Language Models (LLMs) are changing things. The rise of LLMs combined with the growth of the global university sector and the dominance of a “publish or perish”[1] has inevitably produced a flood of AI-generated slop which threatens to overwhelm the whole journal process, especially when AI is also being used to generate referee reports.
But will it always be slop? I’ve been trying out various LLMs, including OpenAI Deep Research and, more recently, its French competitor Mistral. I recently used DR to write a piece in the format of a journal article, though I have no plans to submit it anywhere.
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It’s the 15th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and any lessons from that event seem to have been forgotten by most. Political leaders of all stripes, from centre-left to far right have been keen to promote nuclear power as at least a partial solution to the problem of replacing coal and gas. The peak of enthusiasm was reached at COP 28 when Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak signed a pledge to triple nuclear power generation by 2050.
It’s a truism that every child should be wanted. While there are plenty of exceptions, the birth of an unwanted child often turns out badly for both mother and child (and father, if they are present). Sometimes, once a child is born, the fact that they were initially unwanted fades into irrelevance, and the bond between parents and child is as strong as with a planned birth. But this isn’t true on average: children born after their mother was denied an abortion (due to time limits) experience, on average, more poverty and poorer maternal bonding The extreme case is that of Ceausescu’s Romania, where abortions were banned, and the resuling unwanted children received miserable upbringings in orphanages.
The birth of an unwanted child can be an economic as well as a personal catastrophe. This is crucial to understand when we are assessing claims that “the economy” would benefit if families had more children than they currently choose.
Raising a child from birth to adulthood requires huge inputs of labour, time and money. In the context of a loving family, these parental inputs are more than offset by the joy of having children. Because this context is assumed, most estimates of the costs of raising children typically focus on the financial costs incurred by their parents. That’s been estimated at 13 per cent of a family’s disposable income on the first child and a further ten percentage points for each child after that. For median couples, that amounts to about $300,000 over 18 years for the first child. Subsequent children would be about $230,000 each.
Not long after Trump took office, I observed that the status of the US as the “indispensable nation” could not be sustained. A year later, the US, considered strictly as a state actor, is already dispensable and has, in fact, been largely dispensed with, by Europe in particular. The standing ovation given to Rubio in Munich recently (made almost unavoidable when his retinue jumped to their feet in Stalinesque fashion) should not obscure the fact that almost no one interpreted it as anything more than a politer restatement of Vance’s tirade a year ago. At that time, Europe needed to keep Trump on-side to prevent a sudden collapse in support for Ukraine and to avoid an all-out trade war.
None of that is particularly relevant now. Europe (include Ukraine) has held Russia to a standstill for a year despite the complete cessation of US military aid. The US is still relevant as an arms exporter and as a patchy supporter of sanctions against Russia, but that’s about it. Trump has turned his attention to his desire to rule the Americas from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, as well as returning to the forever wars of the Middle East.
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… to reader and commenter Doctor Memory. We noticed recently that old posts weren’t displaying properly, apparently because we’d used a markup language (Textile) that our current setup doesn’t support. We put out an appeal on Bluesky, and Dr M was one of several people who volunteered to clean up the database for us. After backing everything up and doing the necessary editing, he’s just advise me the job is done.
There are still more problems to work on, including the display of curly quotes in comments. And, if you notice anything else, please mention it in comments.
But for the moment, we just want to thank Doctor Memory for helping to keep this blog (nearly 25 years old now) in working condition.
Ever since it became evident that Trump was likely to be re-elected, I’ve been among the most pessimistic of commentators on the likely course of US politics (most recently here for example). I’ve also been nowhere near pessimistic enough. I assumed that Trump would follow the course of dictators like Putin and Orban, gradually eroding freedom and making his own power permanent. Instead, he’s gone most of the way inside a year.
The Australian government’s legislation seeking to ban access to social media for people under 16 has received plenty of attention in International media, mostly leading with the government’s that 4.7 million accounts were banned or deactivated when the legislation came into effect. Rather less attention has been paid to discussion of the outcome within Australia, where the consensus is that there has been very little effect for most. With most kids still active, the minority who have been caught by the ban have suffered feelings of ostracism and exclusion When discussing the issue on my own social media (which had few if any teenage readers to begin with) I’ve only had one parent report their kids being thrown off.
As part of my critique of pro-natalism, I’m looking at the philosophical foundations of the idea. Most of the explicit discussion takes place within the framework of consequentialism (the idea that the best actions or policies are those with the best consequences) and particularly of utilitarianism, broadly defined to say that the best consequences are those which maximise some aggregate function of individual happiness or wellbeing. Other philosophical traditions either avoid the issue (for example Rawls’ theory of justice) or offer little that can illuminate debate over population numbers (for example, virtue ethics).
Looking at the utilitarian analysis immediately creates a puzzle. All the early utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill supported population limitation. They accepted Malthus’ claim that, in the absence of limitation, population growth would inevitably reduce the great majority of people to subsistence. But unlike Malthus, who used this argument to say that attempts to make the poor better off were futile (he rejected birth control as “vice”) the early utilitarians accepted the desirability of limiting family size.
Most notable among this group was Francis Place. Taking significant legal risks in the repressive climate of the time, Place sought to spread information about contraceptive methods in pamphlets such as Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (1822).
Importantly, and in contrast to many 20th century Malthusians, Place rejected coercive measures, placing his trust in families to make prudent decisions given access to information and the methods of family planning. Except for his failure (unsurprising at the time) to consider possible conflict within households, Place’s position stands up very well 200 years later.
The classical utilitarians argued for public policies which promoted the welfare of the community to which they applied, on the basis of “each to count for one, and none for more than one”. This applied both to the current population and to the children who would actually be born as a result of their choices, but not to hypothetical additional people who might raise the sum of total utility.
By contrast, contemporary utilitarian philosophy yields bizarre spectacles like “longtermism” which implies that our primary goal should be to produce as many descendants as possible provided that the result is an increase in aggregate utility. This is taking Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”, which I criticised here, to its logical limit.
My last post described my attempt to generate a report on housework using Deep Research, and the way it came to a crashing halt. Over the fold, I’ve given the summary from the last version before the crash. You can read the whole report here, bearing in mind that it’s only partly done.
As I said, I chose the questions to ask and the points on which to press further. DR extracted the data (I was planning to get detail on this process before the whole thing crashed), produced graphs to my specifications and generated the first draft of the text, with a style modelled on mine.
If I were doing this to produce a report for publication, I’d initially I was about halfway there, after only a few hours of work on my part. But as with LLMs in general, I suspect the final editing would take quite a bit longer.
Still, the alternative would have been either nothing (most likely) or a half-baked blog post using not-quite-right links to the results of Google searches. So, I’m going to keep on experimenting.
Early versions of LLMs were mostly substitutes for medium-level skill. It made it easy for someone barely literate to generate an adequate business email or (in the graphics version) for a complete klutz like me to produce an obviously-AI illustration for a post (Substack expects some kind of picture)
But with Deep Research, I think there’s an amplification of general research skills. It’s ideal for topics where I have some general idea of the underlying reasoning, but am not familiar with the literature and am unaware of some important arguments
I’ve long been interested in the topic of housework, as you can see from this CT post, which produced a long and unusually productive discussion thread [fn1]. The issue came up again in relation to the prospects for humanoid robots. It’s also at the edge of bunch of debates going on (mostly on Substack) about living standards and birth rates.
I’m also interested (like nearly everyone, one way or another) in “Artificial Intelligence” (scare quotes intentional). My current position is, broadly, that it’s what Google should have become instead of being steadily enshittified in the pursuit of advertising dollars. But I’m alert to other possibilities, including that more investment will deliver something that genuinely justifies the name AI. And I think a lot of the concerns about power and water use, the spread of AI slop and so on are either overstated or (as with deepfakes) are mostly new iterations of concerns that always arise with new IT and communications technology, and can be addressed with existing conceptual and legal tools.
With this background, I thought it would be interesting to try out ChatGPTs Deep Research (DR) on the question of what has happened to housework and why. As I may have mentioned before, I’ve trained DR on a big volume of my own writing. That produces a passable imitation of my style, and means I don’t worry about the ethical issues of plagiarising the writing style of others (of course, standard norms of citation and attribution still apply).
I decided to focus on single-person households, to abstract away from the issues of child-raising (which I want to look at separately) and the allocation of work between partners (about which there is a vast literature to which I can’t add anything new).
Everything went really well to start with. I prompted DR for time use data, then pushed further on with more detailed questions like the impact of air fryers on male cooking habits (I was given one recently and was impressed enough that I promptly bought a second). I asked for a literature search and got references to Judy Wajcman and Michael Bittman[2], both of whom I knew and a couple of people I didn’t. DR missed Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s classic More Work for Mother.
On the other hand, I wasn’t aware of Wajcman’s recent Pressed for Time and hadn’t thought about the broader issue of life administration, which DR pointed out. I gave it a more economistic take, trying to divide labour-saving innovation (electronic bill paying) from the labour costs of more digital consumption (retrieving passwords for streaming services etc).
I got DR to produce a LaTeX file, and was nearly ready to go to digital press when I noticed that the references were incomplete. At this stage, the whole process spiralled into disaster. Every draft seemed to lose more material, and to be worse written. Finally, I demanded an explanation
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I’ve been seeing more and more alarmism about the idea that, on current demographic trends, the world’s population might shrink to a billion in a century or two. That distant prospect is producing lots of advocacy for policies to increase birth rates right now.
One of the big claims is that a smaller population will reduce the rate of scientific progress I’ve criticised this in the past, pointing out that billions of young people today, particularly girls, don’t get the education they need to have any serious chance of realising their potential. But it seems as if I need to repeat myself, so I will do so, trying a slightly different tack
It’s surprisingly difficult to get an estimate of the number of researchers in the world, but Google scholar gives us a rough idea. Google Scholar indexes research across all academic disciplines, including social sciences and humanities. No exact count is available, but I’ve seen an estimate that 1.5 million people have Google scholar profiles. I’d guess that this would account for at least half of all active researchers, for a total of 3 million.