Misaligned Markets

August was the busiest month yet for Misaligned Markets, with five blog posts and three podcast episodes. Here is what we covered.Aug blog postsBad eggsBad Eggs: How Big Egg cracked the market interface and scrambled pricesA recent DOJ complaint gives a masterclass in how to use market position to exploit market mechanisms.An eggcellent case study on Urner Berry, the egg producer who authors benchmarks used to price eggs. The largest egg producers colluded to raise egg prices with bids tailored…

This is another article in my “Take the antidote” series against AI hype. Read parts one here and two here. We’re going to be using the questions laid out in part one to navigate this story.Earlier in August, the media reported on EVO 2, a GPT (generative pretrained transformer) that is trained on genomes, instead of text, to predict create viable genomes. Like ChatGPT, it is a Transformer-based “generative AI” model; however, since it’s scoped to a single domain, it doesn’t require the…

This is part two of an ongoing series about AI hype. Read part one here. And if you want a livelier retelling of this OpenAI hack, filled with rowdiness and Rugrats references, listen to episode 7 of The Last Enclosure podcast wherever you get your shows. OpenAI hacked Hugging Face, another AI company, in July. Shortly after, Anthropic and Meta lined up to share that their models have also been naughty this year. Even Chinese models are getting in on the fun. Then, in early August, OpenAI gave…

Early Release: Mike speaks with Professor William Kovarik an expert on the history of leaded gasoline

Ohmygod I’m still writing about AI on my political philosophy blogI wasn’t expecting to write a post like this so late into the AI bubble, which I wrote about in March, but after recent AI news stories I felt obligated to post this. Hopefully it helps someone make a little more sense of the world. It’ll be the first part in an ongoing series titled “Take the antidote.”As I’ve said multiple times before, the media has played a substantial role in inflating the AI bubble, mainly by parroting…

Like many other staples of the American diet, eggs enjoyed relatively stable pricing until the post-COVID era. However, ever since Americans began feeling squeezed financially, they’ve become ground zero for the political battleground around inflation. The fight over egg prices is a microcosm of a broader debate between greedflation (or more narrowly excuseflation)[1]1 versus market fundamentals. Opponents of the excuseflation view argue that prices have been rising in an era where market…

Hello readers! I have three annoucments I wanted to share this month.The Misaligned Markets podcast is live!Offically launched last week, the first two episodes of the Misaligned Markets podcast are live! You should be able to listen wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. On the site every episode will have a page with a player, a live transcript tracking the audio, and show notes! You can navigate to the podcast section by going to https://misaligned.markets/podcast or going to the…

DescriptionPeople have dirty drinking water precisely because of the actions other people That water was made dirty. But we hide from those actions by putting these technical exercises on top of them, whether it's engineering as a technology to avoid politics, or markets as a technology to avoid politics of distribution, instead of engaging about how much is too much.In part two of this conversation, Mike and professor Khalid Kadir discuss the nature of technology, narratives of progress, and…

Transcript Welcome to the Misaligned Markets Podcast. I'm your host, Mike. I'm also the writer of the Misaligned Markets blog.Fundamentally, Misaligned Markets is a project about a marriage that has gone deeply wrong, a marriage between capitalism and markets. Now, when I say capitalism, I'm talking about this idea of enclosure, the historical process of gating or privatizing resources for the rent of an owner.And so capitalism is a system that functions by labeling things in the economy so…

Today is SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. The company is offering 555.6 million shares at a fixed price of $135, raising $75 billion and targeting a valuation of $1.77 trillion. This is the largest IPO in history, by a large margin. All for a company that lost nearly $5 billion last year. Institutional interest in SpaceX is high, as the offer was oversubscribed. That is to say, there is more demand for stock among financial institutions than there is stock…

When I was in my 20s, I wrote dystopian fiction. I imagined many worlds like one, for example, where the elite lived in technological enclaves. Their privilege granted them sheltered existences, shielded from news of wars and climate collapse, and they were only tethered to reality through interaction with humanoid robots piloted by the poor and incarcerated. At the time I couldn’t tell you why I wrote such stories, but now I realize I wanted to explore how the social context of a technology…

My goal with Misaligned Markets is to understand how markets incentivize behaviors that lead to market failure. While I’ve leaned on analogies like corporate kung fu and capitalism as a computer system, I want to isolate patterns that work at a more granular level. To that end, have started thinking about games, sports, and other competitive activities. This has helped me understand how rules in role-based systems can be abused to create action asymmetries that allow an actor to take actions…

Don’t look to the dot-com bubble to understand the consequences of the current one.

We know simple metrics can’t work for complex problems. So why do we build systems that measure the wrong thing?