Basil Halperin

@captgouda24 tfw your historically-informed analogy is historically uninformed

I also dislike the fatalism of the permanent underclass discourse, but am equally tired of people using euphemisms like “transition costs” instead of figuring out how to help the people we know will be impacted What’s our plan for unemployed college grads and older clerical workers? Retraining programs have an awful track record, and anyway what do we retrain people to? What happens to colleges, healthcare, and the tax base in a world where white collar firm work is no longer the easy path to middle class stability? Plenty of urgent, unsolved, and politically salient questions that do not require a referendum on full automation @carlbfrey: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

Here is one more similarity between @BasilHalperin and Bennett McCallum: they both hold/held academic positions at the University of Virginia! Here is a Bennett McCallum memorable conference we held back in 2023: mercatus.org/economic-insig… (2/2)

Scott Sumner on @BasilHalperin: "I see Halperin as a pragmatist in the tradition of Bennett McCallum, which is one reason why he’s my favorite young macroeconomist... Like McCallum, Basil Halperin seems to have absorbed both the best of New Keynesian economics and the best of Milton Friedman thought. He also favors NGDP targeting. He also seems to have excellent intuition about which sort of macro models are plausible and which are not—a skill that’s hard to teach. Even their personalities seem a bit similar, as both come across as being very polite." (1/2) scottsumner.substack.com/p/basil-halper…

1/🆕 New NBER paper: 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗜 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵? Under empirically grounded calibrations, a singularity could arrive within just a few years of automating AI research. 🧵 📄 nber.org/papers/w35155