LRS
Nothing like the real thing
A company’s success is largely dictated by its suppliers’ and buyers’ negotiating power, and the strength of its competition, argues the technologist Cal Paterson. Airlines have it rough — there are only two main airplane manufacturers, customers are fickle, and it’s easy to enter the market. So their margins are slim. Meanwhile, being Coca-Cola is great. You can source ingredients from anywhere, and customers will reject even near-identical products like Pepsi, so competitors struggle.
Large language models like ChatGPT are the big buzzy thing at the moment, and investors are pouring money into them. But they are probably more like airlines than they are Coca-Cola, argues Paterson. Customers don’t seem to have any loyalty, developers only have one real supplier of chips in Nvidia, and the market has loads of competitors. That doesn’t mean LLMs won’t transform the world — “Whether the technology ends up being good or not is mostly unrelated to whether Open AI/Anthropic/Mistral/whoever makes any money off it.” But like web browsers, he writes, they probably won’t end up being a moneyspinner.
A woman’s work
Britain has a big South Asian population, largely Hindu and Muslim. Most Hindu women — 58% — work, compared to 37% of Muslim women. But in South Asia itself, female labor force participation is much lower: Hindu women work about as much as Muslim ones. Why the difference? “Understanding this paradox,” says the social scientist Alice Evans, “offers crucial insights into the drivers of patriarchy, and the pathways to gender equality!”
The difference appears to be driven by caste: In India, it is a mark of high caste for women not to work, and as families of lower caste gained money, they adopted the customs of higher ones. In Britain, the caste system is far weaker, and high-status women usually work. “This has crucial implications for policy” in South Asia, Evans writes in her newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence: Reducing the salience of caste and showcasing “high-status groups embracing female employment” should boost female employment.
Crime and punishment
The US Democratic Party is having a postmortem on its defeat in the presidential election. The Democrat-supporting political writer Matthew Yglesias is among the thinkers putting forward ideas for how to recover. One part of his manifesto is that the party should remember that crime is bad, something it has apparently forgotten: Since about 2008, the Democrats have “become ambivalent about the idea of punishing people who break the rules, to the point that the party says we need to accept disorderly and dysfunctional public spaces.”
This comes from a well-meaning place, says Yglesias. Democrats wanted to make the criminal justice system less cruel. But it has ended up, in many cases, as simply not enforcing laws. This is politically unviable, but it’s also a false humanitarianism. “Most low-income people are not criminals, and it’s precisely the poorest and most vulnerable people who most need [public spaces] to be actually good.” Accepting disorder disproportionately hurts the least privileged. “Building a more humane system has to mean actually finding better ideas for maintaining public order,” says Yglesias, “not giving up on the goal.”