For years, I've been opposed to athletic recruiting at elite academic institutions; it seems obvious to me that athletic accomplishment is but one factor that should be considered individually and in the process of building out a well-rounded student body. In particular, the prioritization of athletics over artistic, musical, and scientific excellence during the university recruiting process has always struck me as a quirk of history.
This quirk of history recently made the national news when investigators discovered that certain coaches were taking bribes from wealthy parents in order to push students through the recruiting process.
What confuses me isn't that this happened, but that university leadership didn't take this opportunity to modernize the system. This would have been the perfect catalyst to take a national stand and act with courage and intellectual fortitude in order to attempt to switch the Ivy League from Division I to Division III, or to remove itself from the NCAA entirely. Instead, university leaders took the path of least resistance, instituting minor and insignificant policy changes which do nothing to address the root cause of the problem: allowing college admissions to be warped by the need to recruit athlete-students rather than student-athletes.
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Cyberwar and the Economic Battlespace
Note that cyberwar for the purposes of this essay is meant to refer to mechanisms of conflict that are fundamentally oriented around gaining access to siloed intellectual property, rather than the conventional definition which is more expansive and includes political manipulation and the targeting of traditional military target with cyber-weaponry, sometimes resulting in the destruction of physical property.
As an increasing amount of aggregate global value comes from intangible, non-traditional assets such as human capital and intellectual property, and as the relative value of raw materials and commodities decreases, modern nation states face a new competitive landscape. In particular, while historical conflict was zero sum as a result of finite amounts of geographic space and the fixed resources contained within a given border, modern conflict also involves attempts to develop, destroy or redistribute these more abstract resources.
These abstract resources have a number of attributes which make them challenging to think about without updating our fundamental assumptions which underpin many classical theories of conflict. This essay focuses on the conflict over intellectual property, but I believe that conflict over human capital is equally fascinating given trends towards specialization and a much wider distribution of human capital across the population.
Intellectual property has long been a challenging type of capital to protect; the asymmetry between the high cost of developing new technology and the relatively low cost of deploying existing technology makes it a tempting target for competitors. If achievable, acquiring access to technology without bearing the development costs is a strong strategy.
Further, unlike in a traditional conflict, transferring technology between combatants does not harm either entity on an absolute basis: technology transfer eliminates the profit that can be extracted by producers of the technology, but the intrinsic value is often increased, and always conserved.
In these terms, belligerents in cyberwar could be considered as fundamentally moral from the perspective of a finite game: by stealing proprietary property and releasing it publicly, access to that technology would become broader, increasing the amount of value in the world.
At the limit, as the share of "abstract value" created by access to new technology increased relative to the share of "raw value" defined by access to physical materials, it would be theoretically possible to completely redistribute value across the population, resulting in a non-violent Marxist equilibrium ("from each according to his ability to each according to his need").
However, from a capitalist's perspective, this equilibrium would also signify the end of progress. If the only way to create new value is through developing new technology, and the pervasive theft of intellectual property decimates the return on capital that a private entity can expect to obtain from the development of new technology, markets will no longer be able to function to fund and develop new technology, and this equilibrium will represent a pyrrhic victory. Without the ability to fund innovation in present by relying on proceeds from the future, technology would stagnate and one of our most unique assets as a species (the ability to shape our own evolution) would be destroyed.
As such, cyberwar represents a fundamental battle between socialist and capitalist values: if you believe that technology development would occur at the same rate without market incentives, it is fundamentally moral to redistribute it as soon as its developed. If, on the other hand, you take the other side, and especially you believe in non-linear compounding growth of knowledge and technology, this equilibration is likely the single greatest threat to progress for our species, and you should probably take up arms in this quintessentially modern form of battle.
The good news, though, is that once we start fighting over abstract goods, with abstract weapons, in abstract spaces, the only true harm that is possible in the present is relative, which means that even the price of conflict is fundamentally abstract and requires discounting into future.
And how fun is that!
As an increasing amount of aggregate global value comes from intangible, non-traditional assets such as human capital and intellectual property, and as the relative value of raw materials and commodities decreases, modern nation states face a new competitive landscape. In particular, while historical conflict was zero sum as a result of finite amounts of geographic space and the fixed resources contained within a given border, modern conflict also involves attempts to develop, destroy or redistribute these more abstract resources.
These abstract resources have a number of attributes which make them challenging to think about without updating our fundamental assumptions which underpin many classical theories of conflict. This essay focuses on the conflict over intellectual property, but I believe that conflict over human capital is equally fascinating given trends towards specialization and a much wider distribution of human capital across the population.
Intellectual property has long been a challenging type of capital to protect; the asymmetry between the high cost of developing new technology and the relatively low cost of deploying existing technology makes it a tempting target for competitors. If achievable, acquiring access to technology without bearing the development costs is a strong strategy.
Further, unlike in a traditional conflict, transferring technology between combatants does not harm either entity on an absolute basis: technology transfer eliminates the profit that can be extracted by producers of the technology, but the intrinsic value is often increased, and always conserved.
In these terms, belligerents in cyberwar could be considered as fundamentally moral from the perspective of a finite game: by stealing proprietary property and releasing it publicly, access to that technology would become broader, increasing the amount of value in the world.
At the limit, as the share of "abstract value" created by access to new technology increased relative to the share of "raw value" defined by access to physical materials, it would be theoretically possible to completely redistribute value across the population, resulting in a non-violent Marxist equilibrium ("from each according to his ability to each according to his need").
However, from a capitalist's perspective, this equilibrium would also signify the end of progress. If the only way to create new value is through developing new technology, and the pervasive theft of intellectual property decimates the return on capital that a private entity can expect to obtain from the development of new technology, markets will no longer be able to function to fund and develop new technology, and this equilibrium will represent a pyrrhic victory. Without the ability to fund innovation in present by relying on proceeds from the future, technology would stagnate and one of our most unique assets as a species (the ability to shape our own evolution) would be destroyed.
As such, cyberwar represents a fundamental battle between socialist and capitalist values: if you believe that technology development would occur at the same rate without market incentives, it is fundamentally moral to redistribute it as soon as its developed. If, on the other hand, you take the other side, and especially you believe in non-linear compounding growth of knowledge and technology, this equilibration is likely the single greatest threat to progress for our species, and you should probably take up arms in this quintessentially modern form of battle.
The good news, though, is that once we start fighting over abstract goods, with abstract weapons, in abstract spaces, the only true harm that is possible in the present is relative, which means that even the price of conflict is fundamentally abstract and requires discounting into future.
And how fun is that!
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