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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Ah looks like they’re working on this! bsky.app/profile/pfra...
1 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
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John Burn-Murdoch@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social |
9577 followers 175 following 64 posts
Columnist and chief data reporter the Financial Times | Stories, stats & scatterplots | john.burn-murdoch@ft.com
📝 ft.com/jbm
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Ah looks like they’re working on this! bsky.app/profile/pfra...
1 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Fantastic! And great to see that the key people here actually understand the merits of threads 😃
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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lol I’ve become so data-brained that I read this as “mean (average) world syndrome” and got very confused about why this was related to the average 😂
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Checked this out when I first joined, but it meet any of my requirements unfortunately, and I think fundamentally misunderstands what makes a good thread.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Maaaan, I’d really have hoped they’d have provided a solution to this by now 😢
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Here’s the column again in full: ft.com/content/e577...
Culture and language are often overlooked in discussions about economics and development, but I think this is a fascinating and vital topic.
Kudos to @jaredcrubin.com and co for a brilliant and thought-provoking paper.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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We know what a society that denigrates progress looks like. The pre-industrial world was one of mass conflict, exploitation and suffering. If we are to avoid backsliding, advocates for innovation, growth and abundance must win the economic culture war.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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As well as GDP, the drive for progress brought us modern medicine, longer and healthier lives, plentiful food supplies, dramatic reductions in poverty, and more and cheaper renewable energy. The challenges facing the modern world will be solved by more focus on progress, not less
1 replies 6 reposts 16 likes
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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To be clear, some people take a different view. Many look at the world around them and say that a rebalancing of priorities from perpetual progress to caution is no bad thing. But I think this would be a big mistake.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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I tend to agree. A zero-sum world is a more worried world, and as well as obstructing progress, these views are often associated with populism, nativism and conspiracy theories. Here’s an earlier thread of mine from the other site that gets deeper into that twitter.com/jburnmurdoch...
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Here, Ruxandra Teslo makes a persuasive argument that the growing scepticism of technology and the broader rise in zero-sum thinking is one of the defining ideological challenges of our time www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/ideas-matt...
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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This explains a lot of recent negative trends. To take one narrow example, in a society based around ideals of progress and abundance, things get built. In a society preoccupied with downsides, things get blocked. Increasingly our society is the latter
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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This brings us to the present day, and that striking pattern: A culture of progress made the west, but over recent decades western culture has been moving away from values of progress and betterment. In their place, a culture of caution, worry and risk-aversion is on the rise.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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This is a crucial point: Language — particularly in books — doesn’t just describe the world as it is, it describes the world as it could be. Writing about how to progress to a better future can make that better future more likely. Writing about worries can create a worried world
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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And NB it’s not just that people write more about progress when their country is progressing. Britain’s cultural shift preceded its economic acceleration, as did Spain’s
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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What happened next? The countries’ economic trajectories followed suit. Britain’s adoption of a culture of progress, science and experimentation was followed by industrialisation. Spain was 200 years later in adopting a similar culture, and 200 years later to industrialise
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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But we can go further: take two countries that were similarly prosperous before the industrial revolution but then diverged: Britain & Spain. Britain underwent the reformation and adopted a culture of using science & experimentation to increase wellbeing. Spain went the other way
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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They found a marked rise in terms related to progress and innovation starting in the 17th century, supporting the idea that “a cultural evolution in attitudes towards the potential of science accounts in some part for the British industrial revolution and its economic take-off”.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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The researchers analysed the contents of 173,031 books printed in England between 1500 and 1900, tracking how the frequency of different terms changed over time, which they use as a proxy for the cultural themes of the day.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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While persuasive, Mokyr’s theory has until recently been only that: a theory.
But a fascinating paper published last month puts some evidence behind the argument bsky.app/profile/jare...
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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But another theory comes from Joel Mokyr, who argues culture was key. British thinkers like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton championed a progress-oriented worldview, centred on the idea that science and experimentation were key to increasing human wellbeing imf.org/external/pub...
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Some place a greater emphasis on the role of Britain’s institutions, while others argue that ideas simply emerged as a result of increasing interactions among growing and densifying populations.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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One of the most compelling arguments comes from US economic historian Robert Allen, who argues that high wages and low energy costs in Britain created strong incentives to substitute energy and capital for labour and to mechanise manufacturing processes cepr.org/voxeu/column...
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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The industrial revolution was one of the most important events in human history. Technological breakthroughs kicked economic output off its centuries-long low plateau and sent living standards soaring. Yet there’s still disagreement over why it took off when and where it did.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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My column this week explores how language and culture have historically played under-rated roles in human progress, and what that means for our present and future ft.com/content/e577...
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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NEW: analysis of millions of books published over the centuries suggests western society is shifting away from a culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion. I think this is one of the most important challenges facing us today.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Interesting! Didn’t know that.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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All of that is true, but I don’t see any reason to doubt that the same dynamics will apply elsewhere. It’s a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Here’s my column in full (free to read for the first 300 clicks) on.ft.com/3FV0X7k
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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And third, to get the most out of gen AI while avoiding its pitfalls, we should treat it as an extension of ourselves, collaborating closely and checking its outputs as we would our own. It is not a separate, infallible assistant to whom we can defer or hand over responsibility.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Second, the more multi-faceted your job, the less risk of it being automated out of existence. The gig-worker model of performing one fairly narrow task for multiple clients (even if you perform it exceptionally well) is especially exposed.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Taken together, the studies tell us three things. First, how the use of generative AI is regulated will be key to its impact on jobs. Online freelancing is about as unregulated a labour market as you will find. Without protections, even knowledge workers are in trouble.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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While the second — termed “centaurs” — divided labour, handing off more AI-suited subtasks while focusing on their own areas of expertise. A bit of simple or repetitive data work might be given to ChatGPT, but the consultant took charge of its interpretation, for example.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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But two groups of consultants managed to avoid that pitfall. The first — termed “cyborgs” by the study’s authors — completely intertwined their efforts with ChatGPT, constantly moulding, checking and refining its responses. They were in almost constant conversation with AI.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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But there was a catch: On a more nuanced consulting task, which involved analysing and interpreting some data in a non-obvious way that was only clear after a careful reading of qualitative materials, AI-assisted consultants fared worse, because GPT missed those subtleties ⚠️
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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This makes intuitive sense: large language models are best understood as excellent regurgitators and summarisers of existing knowledge. The closer your knowledge already is to that limit, the smaller the benefit from using an LLM. Generative AI essentially "levels up" skills.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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The study also found a pattern that is now common in research on the impacts of using generative AI: The biggest performance gains came among the less highly skilled workers.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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The results were striking. Productivity shot up. And not only did AI-assisted consultants carry out tasks 25 per cent faster and complete 12 per cent more tasks overall, their work was assessed to be 40 per cent higher in quality than their unassisted peers.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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There’s been lots of research in this space, but the most fascinating thing I’ve seen was a study from Harvard Business School, where hundreds of management consultants at one of the world’s biggest firms were randomly assigned to either use or not use ChatGPT in their work.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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BUT a big caveat: The online freelancing market covers a very particular form of white-collar work and of labour market. Digital gig-work is not representative of most knowledge work. So what do we know about the impact of AI higher up the ranks of the professional class?
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Most strikingly, the study also found that freelancers who previously had the highest earnings and completed the most jobs were no less likely to see their employment and earnings decline than other workers. In other words, being more skilled was no shield against disruption.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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The steeper decline in earnings than jobs is particularly striking, because it means that not only is generative AI directly taking away digital freelancers’ work, it’s also devaluing the work that they do still carry out.
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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NEW: Generative AI is already taking white collar jobs An ingenious study by @xianghui90 @oren_reshef @Zhou_Yu_AI looked at what happened on a huge online freelancing platform after ChatGPT launched last year. The answer? Freelancers got fewer jobs, and earned much less
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Always, *always* idea first! Data first is a recipe for one of two disasters: • You spend three days digging into the data and find there’s nothing interesting • You find a striking trend, and then a subject matter expert points out that it’s because the definitions changed
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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No good for me: • Can’t include charts • A good thread is not a big chunk of text split into equal sized chunks. It’s a series of separate points, some longer and some shorter
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Denominator: all people aged 25-59 holding at least a bachelor’s degree Numerator: among that group, those who are working in jobs classified (by economists, not me) as not requiring graduate-level skills
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Oh, and a bonus chart that I think will fry a lot of people’s brains and break a lot of narratives: For all the talk of six figure costs of college in the States, here’s how much debt graduates leave university with in the UK and US vs other countries
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Thank you! Though wow that was *a lot* more cumbersome than posting on X/Twitter 😅
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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In conclusion:
Stop saying we send too many people to university, and start saying we’re not creating enough graduate-quality jobs. End of rant.
Here’s my column in full (free to read for the first 300 clicks) on.ft.com/3MljMEl
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John Burn-Murdoch
@jburnmurdoch.bsky.social
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Short-changed graduates are just another symptom of the British economic disease. If you have low investment and low or zero productivity growth, then when your grads enter the job market, they’ll have fewer and weaker opportunities than grads in a country that had higher growth
3 replies 17 reposts 60 likes