Siegmeyer of Catarina

Lots of idle talk lately about what men like and don't like. 🤔 It's time to settle this, once and for all! 😤 (RT for reach)

By now, I have published a fair number of papers, and one more acceptance would have close to zero marginal impact on anything that matters professionally. But getting my survey on “Deep Learning for Solving Models” accepted into the Journal of Economic Literature made me genuinely happy, for reasons that have nothing to do with my CV. I had the misfortune of studying my undergraduate degree in economics at a quite awful institution. Two professors, David Taguas and Alfredo Arahuetes, were outstanding, and I owe them a great deal. The rest were well below any reasonable professional level, and some violated the basic standards of ethical conduct. They had no business teaching economics at any level, let alone at a university that charged tuition and claimed to prepare students for professional life. I had to work out most of my education on my own. The surveys published in the Journal of Economic Literature were how I did it. I spent hours in the library’s reading room going through one survey after another on topics I had never been properly taught. Some helped more than others, but collectively they gave me a solid enough foundation that, when I arrived at Minnesota for my PhD, I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that I was ahead of nearly all the other first-year students, including some who held master’s degrees, despite the fact that I had finished my undergraduate degree just six weeks before. I owe the Journal of Economic Literature a debt I will never be able to repay. Publishing a survey there is the closest I can come to trying. So, the thought that some student somewhere, working on her own in a library or on a laptop, might find my survey useful gives me tremendous satisfaction. But there is a broader point worth making. Even in the world of AI, the profession has an important mission in making educational material widely available. Textbooks, surveys, teaching slides, these are public goods in the economist’s sense: high social value, insufficient private incentive to produce. This is also why I post all my slides and teaching material online: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/deepl… We do not reward these activities nearly enough, and their supply is well below what any reasonable social planner would choose. I do not have a good proposal for changing this, and I would welcome suggestions. What I do find heartbreaking is that many of the great economists of the past couple of generations never wrote textbooks on their areas of expertise. I do not mean this as criticism. All of them maximize, and perhaps they all suffer from the same bias I suffer from: the belief that one can always do it next year. But I often think about the hours of pure intellectual pleasure I would have had reading “Time Series Econometrics: An Advanced Textbook” by Chris Sims or “Methods in Structural Estimation” by Pat Bajari. Those books do not exist. They should.

@SEgiev If the paper is written by a celebrity, it's allowed to speculate wildly in the main results section.

In economic history papers authors are often allowed to speculate a bit in the penultimate section of the paper (after all the empirics and checks). This is a good practice, and it should be allowed more broadly. It’s often the case that these speculations make the paper more interesting and indicate where others should dig.

Ah, my audience is filled with men of high culture, who understand that nothing is sexier on a woman than Maoism. 😍 Also, shout out to the 6.5% who are MSM, we love you guys.

> Invent an infinite energy glitch > Give it to your former enemies > They decide to stop using it and buy power from geopolitical rivals > Won't help you help them keep the power flowing What did they mean by this?

@FlorinBilbiie The only "question" my research answers is "Where can I publish this material so that it 'counts' for tenure review?" Everything else is decoration.

The most interesting question, and the only one you are probably interested in, goes well beyond the scope of this paper.

@R2Rsquared @maxgoedl You're telling me that Portugal and the UK were not always bffs? 🫣😳

In 1507-15, the Portuguese crown built the fort of Our Lady of the Conception in Hormuz, to control trade from India and charge hefty tolls to passing ships. From the outset, holding the fort and controlling the Strait of Hormuz required constant fighting with local emirs; by 1662 the Shah of Persia (backed by British forces) took it for good. After a detailed account of the back-and-forth in a fierce and bloody seven‑month naval battle in 1521–22 in the Strait of Hormuz, Commander Saturnino Monteiro, in the first volume of his treatise "Batalhas e Combates da Marinha Portuguesa,” concluded: "...and thus ended this stupid and useless war of Hormuz, with everything remaining as it had been before."

Tech bros are *this close* to reinventing prostitution from first principles

@Jonheathcote Too bad most people's jobs don't have an intensive margin 😏

The average American worker now has to work 2 more minutes to buy a gallon of gas. Almost enough to make you think about buying an EV. (ht @jmhorp)

Lots of idle talk lately about what men like and don't like. 🤔 It's time to settle this, once and for all! 😤 (RT for reach)

@fqroldan @cmatthes_econ *Long term debt blocks your path* he he nothing personal kid

@cmatthes_econ @40yoap I mean it already does. You just linearize right around the steady-state which has a wonderful open set around it where the default probability is zero. Equilibrium found, Blanchard-Kahn conditions satisfied, you can plot all kinds of impulse responses, all of it

Shut up, nerds! Dynare 7 is out and now it does HANK. HANK confirmed for commoditized. Your missed this train (too)! dynare.org/download/

@aledinola Same as matlab, scipy, etc etc

@40yoap I have to check again, but it seems that some stuff (computation of steady state via time iteration) is outsourced to mex files written in Fortran (of course)

@RBCtabris Sad. DS2 is the only one I can't get myself to like and play. The visual style is just bad. The movement and controls are just awkward. The models are just off-putting. Overall, a terrible package. I love 1 and 3, and BB, Sekiro, and ER. Didn't try DeS.

Did Zendaya ruin Dune? Yes, of course. BUT! This video more than makes up for it.

@cmatthes_econ x.com/pzoch5/status/…

@40yoap Next up: Dynare comes for sovereign default models. Sorry dude

@pzoch5 @mean_field_zane Not yet, because it can't do heterogenous households AND firms. Only then we can hope to understand the ECONOMY. Maybe we'll also need heterogenous politicians? 🤔

@40yoap @mean_field_zane No, on the contrary! We will finally understand THE ECONOMY

@mean_field_zane @pzoch5 Have fun explaining to a general audience why what you did is better and different from what some other guy achieved in a few seconds, with Dynare. 😏

@40yoap @pzoch5 >SSJ See, this is *why* I have the advantage, lol.

@pzoch5 @mean_field_zane And you think... I would consider that any sort of problem? Interesting...

@40yoap @mean_field_zane MC -> 0 Insider here: Dynare 8 will solve all kinds of sovereign default models, confirmed.

@mean_field_zane @pzoch5 Sorry, you're too late. SSJ is so mainstream now that even Dynare does it. Except 4,259 new HANK extensions by next week. Step up your game, Senpai.

@40yoap @pzoch5 “HANK”.