#average is over

Part of why the 'creative slum' rhetoric is so menacing is that the bugman still defines poverty purely through the consumer-experience phenomenon. A quick thread...

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The bugman believes his life is superior bc he has access to the fruits of the internet. Yet the slums are connected, not only from growing wifi connectivity, but the boom of cheap smartphones across the world.

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In fact, so many people in the slums have 4g enabled smartphones, academics and engineers are looking to use them for early warning fire signalling.

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Yes, they may not have the instant streaming power of Netflix at their fingertips, but is this really such powerful distinction?

The bugman likes his conveniences and ethnic foods, fortunately for him the slum provides. Every kind of street food, much made and caught locally, just don't mind the raw sewage in the  fisheries.

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The consumer Etsy life can also be had here - all women cooperatives recycling garbage into carpets, local handmade jewelry, unique pottery and repurposed metal for artisan knives.

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The reality is, the bugman, and the rest of us with him, could easily sink into a slum like existence. Working online, creating start ups, buying novel local foods, saying hi to your neighbour, being minimalist with your possessions and space.

Random notes from a discussion of Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over:

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and a number of thoughts came to mind.

The first thing I noticed, of course, is that the only household income intervals with estimated TFR above replacement are those under $25k/year or over $1 million/year. I can't be the only one to find that concerning.

Then, I noticed that the horizontal axis is in income intervals, and that I had no real idea what fraction of the population each of these intervals represents. A quick online search, and I found that the Census Bureau reported that the median household income in 2016 was $59,039. Similarly, the interval with the lowest TFR, $150k-199k, is roughly the 90-95 percentile range. Though note, these are quantiles for households, not for population; converting from the former to the latter would require details of how the distribution of household sizes varies with income. A quick search online didn't give any good, hard data, but indicated that the effect would likely not be too large, and that the outcome would be roughly the same: with the horizontal axis changed to population quantiles, the points in the middle of the chart would be shifted massively rightward.

After World War II, computer science pioneers Alan Turing and Claude Shannon both saw that computers would one day play chess, and wrote seminal articles on how it might happen; Turing was brilliant enough to figure out how computers would play chess even before other scientists had figured out computers. Later, chess was picked out as a test case for the development of computer intelligence and given a big financial boost by the computing giant IBM for publicity reasons. Their Deep Blue machine went on to beat the grandmaster, and perhaps the greatest chess player ever, Garry Kasparov. At that time, in 1997, Kasparov still was probably the better player, and he lost to Deep Blue in large part because he lost his cool, but my how things have changed. The last time a serious public contest was tried, in 2005, Hydra crushed Michael Adams 5.5 to 0.5. A half point indicates a draw, and Adams was lucky to come away with that one draw. In the other games he didn't put up much of a fight, even though he was ranked number seven in the world at the time -- among humans.