Why there is no progress? Inelastically Supplied Jews

An academic paper confirms what I had long suspected: the factor impeding progress is the scarcity of what they call "genius" and "inelastically supplied superstar labor" and I call, with due modesty, "Jews". I mean real flesh-and-bone Jews, and also a close group of non-Jewish smart people. 

Digital versions of labor and capital can be reproduced much more cheaply than their traditional forms. This increases the supply and reduces the marginal cost of both labor and capital. What then, if anything, is becoming scarcer? We posit a third factor, ‘genius’, that cannot be duplicated by digital technologies. Our approach resolves several macroeconomic puzzles. Over the last several decades, both real median wages and the real interest rate have been stagnant or falling in the United States and the World. Furthermore, shares of income paid to labor and capital (properly measured) have also decreased. And despite dramatic advances in digital technologies, the growth rate of measured output has not increased. No competitive neoclassical two-factor model can reconcile these trends. We show that when increasingly digitized capital and labor are sufficiently complementary to inelastically supplied genius, innovation augmenting either of the first two factors can decrease wages and interest rates in the short and long run. Growth is increasingly constrained by the scarce input, not labor or capital. We discuss microfoundations for genius, with a focus on the increasing importance of superstar labor.

Imagining my fate in Venezuela

It was 1976 or so when they knocked on the door of the apartment my parents were renting out to a young couple. The neighbors said people without uniforms came and kidnapped the terrorists. That was a time when it was enough that one's phone number was in the phonebook of a suspected person to be sentenced to death. May be they were in fact looking for me? The same day I burned all my books and went to the Venezuelan consulate in Buenos Aires to get a visa. Venezuela was then a most prosperous democratic country, with fantastic oil income, many young professionals were leaving Argentina and moving to Caracas. Others went to Spain, Mexico, Italy, Brazil. The consulate was crowded and I could not even get inside. I talked to the people in the corridor and got the impression that the situation was much more urgent than I had thought. People were crying of fear and desperate to escape. I had a valid visa to the USA and an open Lufthansa ticket, so next day I was in New York.

The point is that Venezuela has self destroyed and seven or ten million have escaped and found refuge in Colombia and other hellholes. Almost all the Jews have left for Miami, certainly those who arrived from Argentina to share Venezuela's (temporary) oil bonanza and safety. Venezuela has been thoroughly ruined by Chavez and Maduro, the currency is worth nothing (pic) and its prospects are infernal as its oil production is falling and the price of the oil - collapsing. I did not like New York, and spent time drinking in the YMCA, then took the drunk decision to move on to Israel. Israel just had emerged from a big war and I was not sure it could survive. I was always Zionist, but my Aliyah - like everybody's - was not a clear-cut rational decision. In my drunken way, I had taken the best decision. I am at home. 

Vaca Muerta: The Cow is Dead

Vaca Muerta (Neuquén, Argentina) fracking project went in three years from discovery to full development (13,000 workers) and now to decay. With the current price of Brent at 56 dollar a barrel, Vaca Muerta cannot compete and is  sacking 1000 workers. Just as in the times of Rockefeller, the oil industry is suffering from cyclical chaos.  

Geffen

Corchito in Monte Hermoso beach

The short man is Corchito, a. Jorge Sogden, a local celebrity, with us the lifeguards. Corchito had crossed swimming the Laguna Sauce Grande, and before that, swam from Spain to Morocco. The pic was taken by the beach photographer fifty plus years ago, to his right (in the pic) it is me and then Socchi, my assistant lifeguard. I would not recognize myself today. The pic is in the local history museum, I am so old that have turned into a museum exhibit. 

Shakedi

The marrying kind

The grandson of the Chief of the Toldot Abraham Itzhak congregation  married the granddaughter of the Head of the Lelow Hassidic group. Toldot Abraham Itzhak is based on Jerusalem and grew out of the old Hungarian Yishuv of Jerusalem, while the Lelow Hassidim follow the old Rebbe from that Silesian (Polish/Prussian) village.

The old Hungarian Yishuv in Jerusalem was no more than a small extremely poor synagogue of old people who moved in the 17 and 18th centuries from Hungary to pray, die and be buried in the holy land of Jerusalem. Apparently, some married here and had issue. They subsisted from alms that were divided among themselves. The division of the alms was a permanent focus of strife, and there is a vast literature of letter in Hebrew and Yiddish accusing each other of laxness and sinfulness, and don't give to him but sent money to me. It is astonishing that from that community of poison-pen letters-writing pious beggars grew out the current dynamic (pic) group.

Lelow is a small village (population 2100) on the Bialka river. The Nazis killed almost all the Jews of the place, but the few that survived the Holocaust are rebuilding the community. I presume they are now more numerous than ever. Once a year they visit the tomb of the founding rebbe, to the astonishment of the native Poles of the village. They had not seen a Jew in ages. Once a Gur Hassid told me about his visit to the Polish village of Gur, where his sect was founded. He could not believe that such remote, muddy, small village out in nowhere could have been the cradle of their current community. But that is the power of the compound interest equation.