Labor Economics – artdiamondblog.com

“Effort Means That You Care About Something”

In my Openness book, I argue that we should allow each other the freedom to choose intensity over work-life balance. David Brooks is sometimes thought-provoking and eloquent, for instance in the passages quoted below where he defends intensity.

One question that Brooks discusses elsewhere in his essay is: how do you find your “passion,” your “misery,” your “vocation”? He tries but after reading his answers, I think the mystery mostly remains. The best answer to this question that I have found is in a book by John Chisholm called Unleash Your Inner Company. Chishom suggests that you should apply yourself to something worth doing, and work to do it better. If you do that, he suggests, you are likely to eventually find you increasingly care about what you are doing.

(p. 9) My own chosen form of misery is writing. Of course, this is now how I make a living, so I’m earning extrinsic rewards by writing. But I wrote before money was involved, and I’m sure I’ll write after, and the money itself isn’t sufficient motivation.

Every morning, seven days a week, I wake up and trudge immediately to my office and churn out my 1,200 words — the same daily routine for over 40 years. I don’t enjoy writing. It’s hard and anxiety-filled most of the time. Just figuring out the right structure for a piece is incredibly difficult and gets no easier with experience.

I don’t like to write but I want to write. Getting up and trudging into that office is just what I do. It’s the daily activity that gives structure and meaning to life. I don’t enjoy it, but I care about it.

We sometimes think humans operate by a hedonic or utilitarian logic. We seek out pleasure and avoid pain. We seek activities with low costs and high rewards. Effort is hard, so we try to reduce the amount of effort we have to put into things — including, often enough, the effort of thinking things through.

And I think we do operate by that kind of logic a lot of the time — just not when it comes to the most important things in our lives. When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic, which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.

. . .

. . . I have found that paradoxically life goes more smoothly when you take on difficulties rather than try to avoid them. People are more tranquil when they are heading somewhere, when they have brought their lives to a point, going in one direction toward an important goal. Humans were made to go on quests, and amid quests more stress often leads to more satisfaction, at least until you get to the highest levels. The psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote: “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”

All this toil is not really about a marathon or a newspaper article or a well-stocked shelf at the grocery store. It’s about slowly molding yourself into the strong person you want to be. It’s to expand yourself through challenge, steel yourself through discipline and grow in understanding, capacity and grace. The greatest achievement is the person you become via the ardor of the journey.

. . .

So, sure, on a shallow level we lead our lives on the axis of pleasure and pain. But at the deeper level, we live on the axis between intensity and drift. Evolution or God or both have instilled in us a primal urge to explore, build and improve. But life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond what evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.

For the full commentary see:

David Brooks. “A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sun., March 30, 2025): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 27, 2025, and has the same title as the print version. The first couple of paragraphs quoted above appear in the longer online version, but not in the shorter print version, of the commentary. In the third quoted paragraph, the words “like” and “want” are italicized.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The book by Chisholm that I praise in my initial comments is:

Chisholm, John. Unleash Your Inner Company: Use Passion and Perseverance to Build Your Ideal Business. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2015.

Doctors Burnout from Spending Less Time with Patients and More Time Arguing with Insurance Firms

Government policies have increased the paperwork that physicians must process and the time they must spend arguing with insurance companies on behalf of their patients. The policies have increased the need for back-office staff to handle the regulations, and so increased the overhead of private practice. So more and more physicians have given up private practice and become employees. They find their work less fulfilling and face burnout. Patients suffer when more of their physicians are bitter and burned-out.

(p. A1) There’s a question dividing the medical practice right now: Is being a doctor a job, or a calling?

. . .

(p. A2) Physicians work an average of 59 hours a week, according to the American Medical Association, and while the profession is well-compensated—the average physician makes $350,000, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis found—it comes with high pressure and emotional strain.

. . .

Among physicians under age 45, only 32% own practices, down from 44% in 2012. By comparison, 51% of those ages 45 to 55 are owners.

Owners have more autonomy, but also increasing overhead costs. Vaughan, who sold his private practice in 2011, saw his malpractice insurance premiums increase to $65,000 a year.

Dr. Joseph Comfort, 80, sold his anesthesiology practice in 2003, frustrated by rising billing tussles with insurance companies. He now works part time as an internal medicine doctor at a small concierge clinic in Sanford, Fla.

“We’ve been ripped down off our pedestals,” he says.

For generations, Comfort says, doctors accepted being at the mercy of their pager and working long hours as the cost of doing business. “We took it because we considered ourselves to be masters of our own fate,” he says. “Now, everything’s changed. Doctors are like any other employee, and that’s how the new generation is behaving.”

They also spend far more time doing administrative tasks. One 2022 study found residents spent just 13% of their time in patient rooms, a factor many correlate with burnout.

. . .

In San Francisco, Dr. Christopher Domanski—a first-year resident who had his first child earlier this year—says he’s interested in pursuing a four-day workweek once he’s completed his training.

“I’m very happy to provide exceptional care for my patients and be there for them, but medicine has become more corporatized,” says Domanski, 29. Though he’s early in his medical career, he’s heard plenty of physicians complain about needing to argue with insurance companies to get their patients the treatments they need.

“It’s disheartening,” he says.

For the full story see:

Te-Ping Chen. “Younger Doctors Balk at Medicine’s Workaholic Culture.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Nov 04, 2024 [sic]): A1-A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 3, 2024 [sic], and has the title “Young Doctors Want Work-Life Balance. Older Doctors Say That’s Not the Job.”)

Nvidia Entrepreneur’s Work-Life Imbalance: Ferocious Hard Work

(p. A15) Mr. Kim’s book is nothing like Walter Isaacson’s portraits of tech geniuses Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. It is more prosaic, focusing on the technical and human ground war of building a company. Even so, there is drama in Nvidia’s remarkable rise, and Mr. Kim’s reporting offers plenty of incident and portraiture.

. . .

As a teenager, we are told, Mr. Huang was a formidable table-tennis player and earned money by cleaning tables and bathrooms at a local Denny’s, a toughening experience that prepared him for life as a tech CEO. As a business sage, Mr. Huang says that work is simply perseverance in the face of difficult odds and that character is the source of greatness. Asked how to be successful, he will respond: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

. . .

By . . . -the late 1990s—Mr. Huang had figured out a particular way of building and managing his company. The bedrock precept was ferociously hard work. New employees were told that the culture was “ultra-aggressive.” Mr. Huang demanded that they work at the “speed of light,” constrained (as Mr. Kim puts it) “only by the laws of physics—not by internal politics or financial concerns.”

. . .

Does all of this success make Mr. Huang happy? Apparently not. After one especially successful quarter, he began a review meeting by saying: “I look in the mirror every morning and say, ‘you suck.’ ” He still enjoys publicly dressing down employees, saying that humiliation is a small price to pay for group learning. He believes that he can “torture” his people “into greatness.” When employees begin to ramble in his presence, he will start to murmur “LUA,” a warning to the speaker. The abbreviation means: “Listen to the question. Understand the question. Answer the Question.”

For the full review see:

Philip Delves Broughton. “Bookshelf; The Hard Work Of Tech Mastery.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 16, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 15, 2024, and has the title “Bookshelf; The Nvidia Way’: The Hard Work of Tech Mastery.”)

The book under review is:

Kim, Tae. The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

Medical Oversight Boards Jeopardize Patient Safety by Ignoring or Forgiving the “Egregious Misconduct” of Healthcare Providers

(p. C7) In her excellent book, “The Licensing Racket,” the Vanderbilt law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth presents plenty of cases of hair braiders, barbers and interior decorators who have been prevented from working by license restrictions that inflate prices without improving safety or quality. But Ms. Allensworth has bigger targets in mind.

Most people will concede that licensing for hair braiders and interior decorators is excessive while licensing for doctors, nurses and lawyers is essential. Hair braiders pose little to no threat to public safety, but subpar doctors, nurses and lawyers can ruin lives. To Ms. Allensworth’s credit, she asks for evidence. Does occupational licensing protect consumers? The author focuses on the professional board, the forgotten institution of occupational licensing.

. . .

(p. C8) You might hope that boards that oversee nurses and doctors would prioritize patient safety, but Ms. Allensworth’s findings show otherwise. She documents a disturbing pattern of boards that have ignored or forgiven egregious misconduct, including nurses and physicians extorting sex for prescriptions, running pill mills, assaulting patients under anesthesia and operating while intoxicated.

In one horrifying case, a surgeon breaks the white-coat code and reports a fellow doctor for performing a surgery so catastrophically botched that he assumes the practitioner must be an imposter. Others also report “Dr. Death” to the board. But Ms. Allensworth notes, “at the time of the complaints to the medical board, [Dr. Death] was only one third of the way through the thirty-seven spinal surgeries he would perform, thirty-three of which left the patients maimed or dead.” The board system seems incapable of acting decisively and Dr. Death’s rampage is only ended definitively when he is indicted—the initial charges include “assault with a deadly weapon,” the scalpel—and eventually imprisoned.

No system is perfect, but Ms. Allensworth’s point is that the board system is not designed to protect patients or consumers. She has a lot of circumstantial evidence that signals the same conclusion. The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), for example, collects data on physician misconduct and potential misconduct as evidenced by medical-malpractice lawsuits. But “when Congress tried to open the database to the public, the [American Medical Association] ‘crushed it like a bug.’”

One of the most infuriating aspects of the system is that the AMA and the boards limit the number of physicians with occupational licensing, artificially scarce residency slots and barriers preventing foreign physicians from practicing in the U.S. Yet when a physician is brought before a board for egregious misconduct, the AMA cites physician shortage as a reason for leniency. When it comes to disciplining bad actors, the mantra seems to be that “any physician is better than no physician,” but when it comes to allowing foreign-trained doctors to practice in the U.S., the claim suddenly becomes something like “patient safety requires American training.”

. . .

I agree that licensing boards have failed to effectively discipline their members, but I think we should eliminate restrictions on supply. The adage “any physician is better than no physician” should not be a shield for negligent doctors, but it underscores an essential truth. The real harm lies in the scarcity created by licensing.

. . .

Voluntary certification can effectively replace many occupational licenses. Consider computer security, one of the most critical fields for consumer safety. Instead of requiring occupational licenses, professionals in this field rely on certifications such as the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) to demonstrate expertise and competence.

. . .

The medical profession is unlikely to be delicensed, but as Ms. Allensworth’s book shows, we shouldn’t let the AMA dictate the terms of medical education. Many European countries offer combined undergraduate and medical degree programs that take only six years, compared to the eight or more years required in the U.S.

Advances in artificial intelligence, which Ms. Allensworth doesn’t explore, may also catalyze reform. AI is already transforming fields such as legal research and medical diagnostics, automating tasks once reserved for licensed professionals. As these technologies advance, they can reduce reliance on rigid licensing systems by ensuring quality and safety through innovative tools.

For the full review see:

Alex Tabarrok. “Permission To Join The Field.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 7, 2025, and has the title “‘The Licensing Racket’: There’s a Board for That.”)

The book under review is:

Allensworth, Rebecca Haw. The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025.

F.D.R.’s Wage Controls Created a Wedge Between Patients and Doctors, With Awful Unintended Consequences

Under F.D.R.’s wage controls, firms competed for workers through perks, like healthcare benefits, since they could not legally compete by offering higher wages. That resulted in the first middlemen (in this case firms) between the customers (patients) and the suppliers (doctors). The result of adding the middlemen, and also adding a variety of regulations, is a “market” that is opaque, inefficient, and slow to innovate. Rather than drain the swamp, the response has been to add more middlemen (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and Pharmacy Benefit Managers, aka PBMs), that have only thickened the mire.

(p. B11) The roots of today’s fragmented system can be traced back to a quirk in U.S. history. Unlike most high-income countries, which created centralized government systems to ration care in the 20th century, the U.S. followed a different path shaped by historical circumstances. During World War II, wage controls prompted employers to offer health insurance as a tax-free benefit to attract workers.

Medicare and Medicaid, followed decades later by Affordable Care Act exchanges, were added over time to cover those who couldn’t get insurance through their job, creating a highly decentralized and convoluted system. . . .

. . . the pressure to increase their earnings means insurers have looked for ways to overbill the government and skimp on patient care, always staying a step ahead of regulators. In recent years, they have become vertically integrated conglomerates, controlling doctors, pharmacies and payment-processing systems.

. . .

One of the most frustrating aspects of the system is a tactic called prior authorization, a process requiring providers to obtain insurer approval before delivering certain services. While that might be disagreeable, there is little public data on how often insurers deny care. This lack of transparency allows insurers to wield prior authorization aggressively, particularly when expensive treatments are recommended.

For the full commentary see:

David Wainer. “How to Fix Health Insurance.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 20, 2024, and has the title “How American Health Insurance Got So Infuriating.”)

Welcome Immigrant Innovators

Empirical research by reputable economists at some top schools concludes that although “immigrants represent 16 percent of all US inventors . . . immigrants are responsible for 36% of aggregate innovation, two-thirds of which is due to their innovation externalities on their native-born collaborators” (Bernstein et al. 2022, p. 1). (I have not yet looked carefully at this research, but have looked at other papers by Rebecca Diamond (no relation), finding them important and well-done.)

We should make it easier for innovators to enter the United States and harder for murderers and thieves to enter. And whatever immigration rules we adopt, we should enforce. We are unfair to those who follow our immigration rules if we allow others to enter the United States without following our rules.

Beyond that, I think our rules can be fairly generous, even letting in many non-innovative immigrants, if at the same time we adopt policies that give a probable path forward to current Americans who are among the least well-off. In a working paper that I hope to return to soon, I argue that we can create this path forward by unbinding entrepreneurs so that they can create more and better jobs for the least well-off.

(I thank my former student and current friend Aaron Brown for alerting me to the article on immigration.)

The empirical research on immigrant innovators mentioned above is:

Bernstein, Shai, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade, and Beatriz Pousada. “The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #30797, December 2022.

My working paper mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Robustly Redundant Labor Markets.” Working Paper. 2021.

A.I. May Create More and Better Jobs

In my Openness book, I made good use of The New Division of Labor book by Levy and Murnane that gave plentiful evidence that the innovative dynamism exemplified by the computer revolution on balance resulted in more and better jobs. The Levy/Murnane book is now over 20 years old, so the skeptical might question whether what was true about computers is also still true about artificial intelligence (A.I.). Now one of the book co-authors, Frank Levy, has co-authored a new working paper in which he answers “yes.” The working paper has recently been summarized by Steve Lohr.

Steve Lohr’s article is:

Steve Lohr. “A.I. Is Poised to Put Midsize Cities on the Map.” The New York Times (Mon., December 30, 2024): B1-B2.

(Note: the online version of the Steve Lohr article has the date Dec. 26, 2024, and has the title “How A.I. Could Reshape the Economic Geography of America.”)

The academic working paper co-authored by Frank Levy, that Lohr summarized in The New York Times article mentioned and cited above is:

Abrahams, Scott, and Frank S. Levy. “Could Savannah Be the Next San Jose? The Downstream Effects of Large Language Models.” In SSRN, June 23, 2024.

The book co-authored by Frank Levy and mentioned in my initial comments is:

Levy, Frank, and Richard J. Murnane. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Time Constraints for Tenure, Promotion, and Funding Decisions Lead Academic Biologists to Over-Study Already-Studied Genes

George Stigler argued that when most economists were self-funded business practitioners economics was more applied and empirical, while after most economists were academics funded by endowments or the government economics became less applied and more formal. [In a quick search I failed to identify the article where Stigler says this–sorry.] A similar point was made to science more broadly by Terence Kealey in his thought-provoking The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. The article quoted below argues persuasively that research on human genes is aligned with the career survival goals of academics, rather than with either the faster advance of science or the quicker cure of diseases like cancer. The alignment could be improved if more of research funding came from a variety of private sources.

(p. D3) In a study published Tuesday [Sept. 18, 2018] in PLOS Biology, researchers at Northwestern University reported that of our 20,000 protein-coding genes, about 5,400 have never been the subject of a single dedicated paper.

Most of our other genes have been almost as badly neglected, the subjects of minor investigation at best. A tiny fraction — 2,000 of them — have hogged most of the attention, the focus of 90 percent of the scientific studies published in recent years.

A number of factors are largely responsible for this wild imbalance, and they say a lot about how scientists approach science.

. . .

It was possible, . . ., that scientists were rationally focusing attention only on the genes that matter most. Perhaps they only studied the genes involved in cancer and other diseases.

That was not the case, it turned out. “There are lots of genes that are important for cancer, but only a small subset of them are being studied,” said Dr. Amaral.

. . .

A long history helps, . . . . The genes that are intensively studied now tend to be the ones that were discovered long ago.

Some 16 percent of all human genes were identified by 1991. Those genes were the subjects of about half of all genetic research published in 2015.

One reason is that the longer scientists study a gene, the easier it gets, noted Thomas Stoeger, a post-doctoral researcher at Northwestern and a co-author of the new report.

“People who study these genes have a head start over scientists who have to make tools to study other genes,” he said.

That head start may make all the difference in the scramble to publish research and land a job. Graduate students who investigated the least studied genes were much less likely to become a principal investigators later in their careers, the new study found.

“All the rewards are set up for you to study what has been well-studied,” Dr. Amaral said.

“With the Human Genome Project, we thought everything was going to change,” he added. “And what our analysis shows is pretty much nothing changed.”

If these trends continue as they have for decades, the human genome will remain a terra incognito for a long time. At this rate, it would take a century or longer for scientists to publish at least one paper on every one of our 20,000 genes.

That slow pace of discovery may well stymie advances in medicine, Dr. Amaral said. “We keep looking at the same genes as targets for our drugs. We are ignoring the vast majority of the genome,” he said.

Scientists won’t change their ways without a major shift in how science gets done, he added. “I can’t believe the system can move in that direction by itself,” he said.

Dr. Stoeger argued that the scientific community should recognize that a researcher who studies the least known genes may need extra time to get results.

“People who do something new need some protection,” he said.

For the full commentary see:

Carl Zimmer. “Matter; The Problem With DNA Research.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 25, 2018 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 18, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Matter; Why Your DNA Is Still Uncharted Territory.” Where there are differences in wording between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The paper in PLOS Biology co-authored by Thomas Stoeger and mentioned above is:

Stoeger, Thomas, Martin Gerlach, Richard I. Morimoto, and Luís A. Nunes Amaral. “Large-Scale Investigation of the Reasons Why Potentially Important Genes Are Ignored.” PLOS Biology 16, no. 9 (2018): e2006643.

Kealey’s book, praised above, is:

Kealey, Terence. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

“Mass Deportation” Is Not in Trump’s Heart, but Is a Warning to Future Illegal Aliens

I am stressed by the image of the “mass deportation” of those who entered the U.S. illegally, but otherwise have been decent hard-working people. My plausible hope is that deep in his heart, Trump does not really mean it or plan it. Why “plausible”? Read the passage quoted below describing Trump’s visit with The Wall Street Journal editorial board.

At this year’s Republican National Convention, Mr. Trump vowed to undertake “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Editorial board member Kyle Peterson asks how large—does Mr. Trump intend to deport aliens who are law-abiding except for their illegal presence in the country, even if they have American spouses and children? Maybe not, Mr. Trump says: “We have a lot of good people in this country, and we have to do something about it, and I’d like to see if we can do it.”

Pressed for specifics, he demurs: “Well, I don’t want to go too much into clarification, because the nicer I become, the more people that come over illegally.” When he was president, “I said, ‘We’re going to separate your family.’ . . . It doesn’t sound nice, but when a family hears they’re going to be separated, you know what they do? They stay where they are, because we couldn’t handle it. . . . But the interest from the heart, yeah, something’s going to be done. . . . I mean, there’s some human questions that get in the way of being perfect, and we have to have the heart, too. OK?”

The implication is that the optimal immigration policy is a happy medium between restriction and openness. That’s certainly true and perhaps a truism. Mr. Trump suggests that he, the bully with a heart of gold, is just the man to strike the balance.

For the full commentary/interview see:

James Taranto. “The Weekend Interview; Trump Tangles With the Journal’s Editors.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 18, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses in original.)

AI Algorithms Lack Intelligence Since They Are “Just Predicting the Next Word in a Text”

(p. B5) Yann LeCun helped give birth to today’s artificial-intelligence boom. But he thinks many experts are exaggerating its power and peril, and he wants people to know it.

. . .

On social media, in speeches and at debates, the college professor and Meta Platforms AI guru has sparred with the boosters and Cassandras who talk up generative AI’s superhuman potential, from Elon Musk to two of LeCun’s fellow pioneers, who share with him the unofficial title of “godfather” of the field. They include Geoffrey Hinton, a friend of nearly 40 years who on Tuesday was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, and who has warned repeatedly about AI’s existential threats.

. . .

LeCun thinks AI is a powerful tool.

. . .

At the same time, he is convinced that today’s AIs aren’t, in any meaningful sense, intelligent—and that many others in the field, especially at AI startups, are ready to extrapolate its recent development in ways that he finds ridiculous.

If LeCun’s views are right, it spells trouble for some of today’s hottest startups, not to mention the tech giants pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI. Many of them are banking on the idea that today’s large language model-based AIs, like those from OpenAI, are on the near-term path to creating so-called “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, that broadly exceeds human-level intelligence.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman last month said we could have AGI within “a few thousand days.” Elon Musk has said it could happen by 2026.

LeCun says such talk is likely premature. When a departing OpenAI researcher in May talked up the need to learn how to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun pounced. “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” he replied on X.

He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “frontier” AIs, including those made by Meta itself.

Léon Bottou, who has known LeCun since 1986, says LeCun is “stubborn in a good way”—that is, willing to listen to others’ views, but single-minded in his pursuit of what he believes is the right approach to building artificial intelligence.

Alexander Rives, a former Ph.D. student of LeCun’s who has since founded an AI startup, says his provocations are well thought out. “He has a history of really being able to see gaps in how the field is thinking about a problem, and pointing that out,” Rives says.

. . .

The large language models, or LLMs, used for ChatGPT and other bots might someday have only a small role in systems with common sense and humanlike abilities, built using an array of other techniques and algorithms.

Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.

“We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart—but that’s not true,” says LeCun. “You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.”

For the full commentary see:

Christopher Mims. “Keywords: This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Pet Cat.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Oct. 11, 2024, and has the title “Keywords: This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat.” The sentence starting with “Léon Bottou” appears in the online, but not the print, version. Where there are small differences between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

People Thinking about the Rules They Have to Obey, Are Not Thinking about the Problems They Have to Solve

(p. A18) . . . I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

. . .

In every organization I’ve interacted with, the administrators genuinely want to serve the mission of the organization, but the nature of their jobs is to enforce compliance with this or that rule.

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up. I don’t know about you, but my health insurer sometimes denies my family coverage for things that seem like obvious necessities, but I let it go unless it’s a major expense. I calculate that my time is more valuable.

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion. These are two different mentalities. As Howard writes, “Studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems.”

. . .

. . ., Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, he illustrates how administrators control campus life . . .

. . .

Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.