NYTimes: “In [Akira Kurosawa’s] “Seven Samurai,” a village regularly plundered by brigands seeks protection, hiring a group of masterless samurai, who are professional killers willing to work for a daily portion of rice and their own code of honor. The film has three movements: the leisurely gathering of the samurai, the painstaking organization of the village and the convulsive final battle. The battle is an astonishing example of ensemble orchestration and percussive editing, but Kurosawa’s artistry is sensational throughout the movie. The film is a seamless synthesis of Hollywood naturalism, Soviet montage and stylized acting, verging on Kabuki, most evident in the outlandish physicality of Toshiro Mifune’s performance as the most obstreperous of the Seven. (His bongo-bassoon theme is only one of the bravura musical touches by the composer Fumio Hayasaka.)”
WSJ reviews “Superconvergence”: ““Our world today is more livable for more of us than at any point in human history,” Mr. [Jamie] Metzl asserts. In the words of a 2013 Oxford report that he cites: “Now is the best time in history to be alive.” What’s more, humanity is just getting going. Revolutions in genetics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence are amplifying one another—and converging. Some may worry about the dangers of interfering with nature, but Mr. Metzl, a former White House fellow and science autodidact, thinks that such worry is misplaced. We’ve been “meddling with living systems over tens of thousands of years,” he writes, and the effort has worked out pretty well for our species. Now he foresees exponential progress. It is possible, he says, to imagine scientists “unleashing the miracle of human innovation on a planetary level,” giving us the capacity to “redirect evolution and recast life in all its dimensions.” Propelling Mr. Metzl’s breathless narrative is the conviction (shared by many “exponential” thinkers in Silicon Valley) that we’re not just getting better but getting better faster, in part because of global interconnectivity.”
FT: “Ceteris paribus — all else being equal — is a popular principle in the study of social science. By assessing the partial impact of one variable upon another, practitioners can develop causal theories. Sometimes, however, this can encourage blinkered thinking. The appeal of causal models lies in their simplicity. Rule of thumb is often preferred to convoluted explanations. Emphasis is placed on theories that pitch schools of thought against one another, Keynesianism versus Monetarism, for example. But the real world is a complex system full of feedback loops, reverse causality and tipping points. Ceteris paribus is an essential tool for controlled studies, but in an evolving economic, technological or social environment, following the principle of mutatis mutandis — changing what needs to be changed — is essential.”
Edmund Phelps: “My focus is on grassroots innovation – ordinary people, as I call them, participating in the economy, using their imagination to create new products and new methods of production. My indigenous theory differs sharply from Schumpeter’s theory in which innovation is exogenous coming mostly from scientists and navigators outside of the economy. Western societies are rife with dissatisfaction and despair. For some time I have been pointing to the loss of modern values – mainly individualism (not to be confused with selfishness), vitalism, and the desire for self-expression – as a major cause of the loss of dynamism, thus the slowdown of innovation and economic growth. This is not to say there is no innovation happening. We’ve still got a few geniuses out there, some of whom have new ideas of immense commercial value. But we’re not going to get anywhere close to the mass of innovation that we had from the 1880s until about 1970 until a more fundamental shift in societal values occurs. With the vast and ever widening rift between the political left and right, I find it hard to imagine that the needed changes will occur soon.”
