Codex: Resilience, occupational licensing, luxury beliefs, battle spears, open source software
Learn how to become more disciplined and resilient, why occupational licensing is bad for the world, the history and design of battle spears, and much more.
Dear learners,
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Now, let’s dive into the Codex.
March 8th, 2024 Learn Arena Codex
As you all know by now, I rarely share videos or podcasts unless I think they will truly benefit you because so many of them are absolute crap. This one is worth it: Andrew Huberman and Jocko Willink cover concrete, actionable mindset tips to become what you want to be in life.
We, as a culture, have been inundated for decades with anti-progress propaganda that claims energy use is bad and that society should use less energy and do more with less. As a result, we stopped believing we can or should build things that generate power while regulating them out of existence. Now, our country is out of power with no clear way to get more because we lack the will; we lack the belief; we lack the culture. https://archive.is/2024.03.07-193832/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-centers-power/
Another study proves what economists already knew: occupational licensing increases wages for licensed employees at the expense of overall economic growth and new entry into the market by other people. It enriches the specific licensed profession at the expense of literally everyone else. For example, think about the market for doctors. We have a huge shortage of doctors right now because the license is so very hard to get. Because supply is limited, doctors make millions. Now, imagine a counter-example where the AMA suddenly licenses 5x the number of doctors per year (without a reduction in training quality—this is feasible realistically for reasons I don’t have space to explain here). Doctor wages might decrease slightly, but now there are 5x more doctors! More people get life-saving and life-improving medical treatment instead of being treated by an NP pretending to be a doctor! Occupational licensing is almost always bad, folks. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730120
To add to the prior point, you may think, “But Trey, occupational licensing prevents bad or unskilled people from being doctors and lawyers and whatever else.” That isn’t the case—we know this empirically, as studies have looked at the quality of service in jurisdictions with licensing compared to those without, and there is zero difference (link to that here). Licensing exists to enrich producers at the expense of consumers with the help of the state. Occupational licensing promotes the interests of producers rather than the public, with the consumer suffering only a small wealth loss in higher prices due to licensing. https://consensus.app/papers/licensing-public-interest-maurizi/482187eeef9857608b17569339780195/?extracted-answer=Occupational+licensing+promotes+the+interests+of+the+producer+group+rather+than+those+of+the+public%2C+potentially+benefiting+the+occupations+receiving+licenses+at+the+expense+of+consumers.&q=Does+occupational+licensing+benefit+consumers%3F
Very important paper if you think it through as it relates to the US: employers in higher trust societies hire for foundational skills and potential, while employers in lower trust societies only hire people for specific advanced testable skills. Sound familiar to those of you on the job market right now? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00018392241233257
An interesting study looked at sets of genetically identical twins where one twin was abused as a child and the other twin was not. The abused twin has an enormously higher chance of having mental illness and depression in adulthood, despite having the same genes as their twin. A win for the nurture crowd in the nature/nurture debate! https://archive.is/0j0fJ
Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs thesis proven right once again: the people who are preaching the most that “marriage is an antiquated patriarchal system we should tear down so we can #girlboss” is, in fact, the exact group of people with the highest marriage rates in the US. https://archive.is/9vATG
Fantastic, must-read analysis of the concept of race itself.
In the communist Soviet Union, the government took all personal property and wealth from intellectuals and sent them to the backwaters of Russia, far away from core cities and industries, as a preemptive measure to keep intellectuals from writing and agitating against the communist government. A new study looked at what happened to these people, and it’s fascinating: wherever the intellectuals were sent is far more economically prosperous today as result! https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1765898289432449059
More than you ever wanted to know about spears as tools of medieval battle. https://twitter.com/rfhirst/status/1765866147977777377
Open source software has created around $8 trillion of economic value for humanity. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148
I want to add a quick comment about occupational licensing that I wonder is take into account by economists.
Many professions which require occupational licensing can be done virtually, meaning they are not limited by geography or proximity. That's certainly the case for many Professional Engineers (my own profession) but could apply to doctors, lawyers, mortgage brokers, etc.
With the current corporate culture of outsourcing, what prevents a firm from outsourcing their work to someone in India getting paid extremely low wages who has no cultural or ethnic connection to the people or community they are serving? This may lead to harms and poor outcomes. This appears to be the case with the recent debacle concerning Boeing and the 737 Max.
I'm inclined to think that some form of occupational licensing helps when it pushes people outside of the local or national culture and history from participating in that occupation.