More from @mattyglesias
Nov 5
I think the question of affordability is being conceptualized a bit incorrectly by the political system because of reluctance to acknowledge that inflation is primarily a macroeconomic phenomenon that needs macro solutions.
The rate of inflation has slowed a lot from its peak but not only has the price level failed to revert (probably impossible) the inflation rate itself has not fallen to the Fed’s target.
Solving this requires either higher interest rates (which nobody wants) or fiscal austerity (which they want even less) so there’s a lot of interest in diagnosing a distinct affordability problem that would have some other solution.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 16
Really interesting new paper — while Americans *wages* are very stable from mo…
More from @mattyglesias
Nov 5
I think the question of affordability is being conceptualized a bit incorrectly by the political system because of reluctance to acknowledge that inflation is primarily a macroeconomic phenomenon that needs macro solutions.
The rate of inflation has slowed a lot from its peak but not only has the price level failed to revert (probably impossible) the inflation rate itself has not fallen to the Fed’s target.
Solving this requires either higher interest rates (which nobody wants) or fiscal austerity (which they want even less) so there’s a lot of interest in diagnosing a distinct affordability problem that would have some other solution.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 16
Really interesting new paper — while Americans *wages* are very stable from month-to-month their actual *earnings* show incredible fluctuations because hours worked are highly variable.
There are a lot of different potential sources of variation in hours worked, but the authors show that the dominant one is on the demand side — many employers like a “just in time” labor model where the workforce has unpredictable schedules.
christinahydepatterson.com/_files/ugd/322…
There’s a lot more detail and analysis in the paper (which frankly could have been multiple papers) but I think key results are that workers struggle to smooth consumption across this instability and their behavior suggests they really dislike the instability.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 12
Key point in here from @Noahpinion — even if the AI tech turns out to be exactly as promising as the bulls think, it’s not totally clear whether this would mean high margin businesses.
noahpinion.blog/p/americas-fut…
A slightly random example but passenger jetliners have definitely worked out as a technology, tons of people use them and they are integral to the whole world economy.
But the combined market cap of Boeing + Airbus is unimpressive.
Jetliners seem a lot more important and impressive than the idea of a big box building supply store, but in terms of market cap Home Depot > Boeing + Airbus.
Technology is hard but then business is also hard.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 8
There’s a wide open opportunity for the center-left to re-engage with patriotism and the American tradition as the American right gets increasingly brain-poisoned by European (or white Southern African) racialist ideologies.
slowboring.com/p/national-con…
The whole idea of “national” conservatism makes sense in Europe where there were significant conservative motives behind the project of European integration which was supposed to be both anti-Communist and also broadly pro-business.
In that context, yes, you could instead have a distinctly “national conservative” viewpoint that says those things are less important than the distinctive national autonomy and identity of each individual European state — states that themselves mostly have an ethnic basis.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 29
Another way of organizing my thoughts on UBI research.
Poverty can be straightforwardly ameliorated with cash grants.
Poverty is also associated with a lot of bad outcomes and people sometimes refer to that whole bundle as “poverty” but instead let’s call it “shmoverty.”
In the global context, research indicates that reducing poverty with cash grants also makes a lot of progress against shmoverty.
The domestic evidence on shmoverty impacts looks much weaker.
slowboring.com/p/what-cash-ca…
Since shmoverty is bad, it’s worth thinking about programs in part in terms of their impact on shmoverty.
I think the best evidence is that cash is no worse on this score than certain cash-like benefit programs so there is an efficiency case for switching them to cash.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 27
It’s because the classes are harder!
You *could* make really hard humanities classes to weed out the weakest students, but schools in practice don’t do that so it actually is the case that science majors are smarter and harder working.
The hardest class I took as an undergrad was a philosophy of math (Gödel, Tarski, etc) class that was cross-listed with the computer science and math departments and it was clearly *not* the hardest class that those kids took.
I also dipped into some history classes as electives, and those were definitely easier than the philosophy classes.
Again, not because history is *inherently* easy — the professors just didn’t assign that much work and didn’t grade it as harshly. These things are choices.
Read 4 tweets