afoll

@Scholars_Stage @lukeburgis Huh? The Harvard Classics were first published in 1909 and I’m not even sure that was the first commercial attempt at a Western canon. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_C…

Great books as a concept was invented in the 1910s and 1920s and is not some civilizational tradition as often claimed; the implicit version of western civilization it teaches is a false one, giving the Greeks too much credit and erasing the Germanic contribution wholesale; it tends to have a teological vision built in that culminates with the destruction of the enlightenment in modernism and WWI and thus presents a nihilistic vision of human potential and of the civilization to which we are heirs; it the canon is frozen in 1930 and does not incorporate any of the compelling ideas that have transformed the world since about 1930; philosophy is a poor way to understand the world and its history, and is less useful than history, poetry, rhetoric, language So of the other things that were stunted out of the canon to stuff more philosophy in; there is no correlation between studying these books and living a virtuous life, or even an efficacious one.

What is the strongest argument from the political Right AGAINST Great Books programs? I can't imagine it's the "the humanities are dead, study STEM" argument, which has currency in Silicon Valley, but maybe I'm wrong.

@Osinttechnical To be fair, this missile did lift the lid from the surface to the air.

New footage confirms that an errant Russian surface to air missile was responsible for the tank roof toss at the Moscow Oil Refinery this morning.

@florianederer Can you translate this to American English please? Is Messi Lebron and Ronaldo Tom Brady?

Individual preference predictors for Messi: 1) Progressive ideology 2) Interest in politics 3) Highly educated Ronaldo: 1) Short video consumption 2) High self-confidence 3) Authoritarian orientation

A government agency spending $300 million in taxpayer dollars to produce sterilized flies sounds like a dream scenario for a DOGE team looking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. newsmax.com/platinum/screw…

@RiccardoTrezzi For those of us out of the loop, do you have an introductory piece on this issue?

🇫🇷 And so, even INSEE has thrown in the towel and revised its 2023 GDP estimate upward with a massive revision. I'm not surprised at all, since this is exactly what I've been arguing for the past five years: Euro Area GDP is underestimated, and by a significant margin in my view. And this is far from over, as there are still many puzzles that remain unresolved. Speaking of which... hey, @istat_it, you're next on the list, aren't you?

@Noahpinion It’s shocking to me how little my consumer experience has changed in the last 6 months (AI agents themselves being the obvious exceptions).

Maybe demand for consumer software is just saturated. noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-mor…

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

@TECleveland @cremieuxrecueil Despite some bogus grants, a lot of government is like this cartoon. I bet this "small team" would find a line item for "screwworm sterilization" and delete it, not knowing that they just devastated American farming: theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

@patio11 @erikcorry @politicalmath justice (vaccines were essential to reopen schools, public school students were disproportionately Black/Hispanic). Amazingly, six month later CTU tried (but fortunately failed) to shut down schools for the fall semester. Meanwhile, us under-65 cancer patients hustled

@patio11 @erikcorry @politicalmath explicitly say “teachers get dibs” so they gave Phase 1B access to “frontline essential workers.” That included first responders, teachers (even though schools were closed?), and grocery workers/deliverers. CTU’s lobbying framed prioritizing teachers as a matter of social …

It is not fully recognized, but the "experts" who signed this letter were not really representative of true experts in the field. Lots of PhDs candidates and med school students in this group. The problem was that the real experts were too timid to object. They didn't want to be called racists so they let this left-wing group take the megaphone and become the voice of institutional public health and science.

@webdevMason Feels at least as likely that this reflects more sorting by party on cultural issues

Extremely predictable turn of events

@Noahpinion I felt like this was pretty obvious from Lina Kahn’s Amazon-bashing article that appeared in YLJ back in 2017. Just very ideological and devoid of intellectual merit.

All those years I was advocating for stronger antitrust, I had no idea how looney the leaders of that movement were. I knew the econ papers, but I didn't know what was happening in the back rooms of Washington D.C.

@TheStalwart I’ve had a lot of fun vibe-coding. but *as a consumer* I can’t tell for the life of me how software is getting better. like what is one app/software that is new or has gotten materially better in the last 6 mos? (Havelock and the AI bots themselves the obv exceptions)

Good thread from John. The importance of fast feedback loops is probably the strongest argument that coding is (at least somewhat) distinct from most other types of white collar labor. (And even there, tons of people still have coding jobs)

@joefrancis505 Chips on the table, I grew up in Mississippi and did my MSc at Warwick, and Coventry felt obviously poorer than my poor (by American standards) hometown, so I am Team Garicano on this week’s version of this debate

@joefrancis505 It’s very interesting and surprising to me that Energy did not contribute more to output per hour wedges. Do you have data to share there?

I looked today at why US output per hour has grown faster than in France and Germany. It's due to Big Tech, finance, real estate, and health care. From a European perspective, these sectors can seem more like pathologies of American capitalism than something to emulate. 1/5

@IvanWerning @BrianCAlbrecht Do you have / can you share a link to the slides please?

Thanks Brian. Price theorist to price theorist. You put your finger on a step that is key. Feels trivial ex-post, but was big when we realized it. I was hoping figures in paper did same job as in slides, but I guess lack of step by step animations make them less effective or fun. Or more work. Let me see if I can improve that.

I actually think the part that will be more useful for most economists is the general mapping between market power and standard supply and demand curves. That's pretty quick in the paper, but the slides lay it out more explicitly. I'm excited to see how we can harness that.

@lugaricano @ATabarrok @paulkrugman @ProSyn @Ph_Aghion @a_bergeaud Thanks!

.@paulkrugman has argued Europe is not suffering an economic decline relative to the United States using Purchasing Power Parities. In this post (a revision, without paywall, of our @ProSyn one on Friday), @Ph_Aghion @a_bergeaud and I explain why a chain of current purchasing power parity (PPP) indexes tells us nothing useful about productivity growth. We make four points: First, a PPP measures purchasing power across places at one moment; a deflator compares prices across time in one place. A sequence of current-PPP comparisons is not a measure of real growth, because the prices used to value output change from year to year. Second, the two indexes need not agree. Difference the current-PPP comparison of France and the US across years and you recover the difference in their real growth plus a price residual. By 2024 the two are roughly 18 log points apart, enough to neutralize nearly all the measured growth divergence between France and America. This is due to two reasons Technology (our third point): where products improve fastest, as in information technology, the gap is largest. If a country doubles its computer output while the international price of computers halves, current PPP records no increase in value. (We all agree here.) Fourth, the baskets. It is impossible to find a basket of products that is simultaneously representative within each country, comparable across countries, and stable through time. (A novel point in the discussion). Convert GDP every year with a current PPP and French output per hour grows at a similar rate to the US. The match is built by the conversion. Nothing in it measures how much more either country produced. Krugman has now answered to our column, in a post dated May 30. I think we are not that far. We agree that European productivity growth has trailed the US for three decades; a current-PPP chain and a national deflator answer different questions; and the weighting mechanism is part of the story. We disagree on one. Krugman reads the flat current-PPP line as evidence Europe is not falling behind; we see it as the product of moving the price measurement stick every year. Finally, like @MESandbu on Friday in the @ft, @paulkrugman suggests as reductio ad absurdum that we should be willing to accept, if we believe our numbers, that the NL was way ahead of the US average in 2000 and declining ever since. We do not find the counter-example compelling. The counter example shows a clear decline of the Netherlands over a long period of time. That is the point!. Our claim (see my two Europes post): 1. Core Europe was very close to the US or higher 2 decades ago. 2. Every year since then we have seen much slower productivity growth. This has become particularly dire more recently. 3. This matters, particularly for our influence, our ability to sustain our welfare states, and our ability to pay for defense and other market goods. siliconcontinent.com/p/the-mismeasu…

Is ChatGPT 5.5 funny now?

In support of below, I cut my teeth in economic consulting. For AWP/P&C reasons, I could never say that we ghostwrote reports for relatively famous academics. I do think collaboration improves writing, and that authorship can be a claim of accountability rather than creativity