Jason Abaluck

Took me under 5 minutes to turn a normal, smart 13-year-old against the minimum wage. Contrary to almost everyone, the textbook argument IS intuitive. It's just emotionally unappealing.

It doesn't matter if you're a moral person. You still don't deserve to be a billionaire. No individual deserves so much more unilateral power than others, which is harmful to society, and nothing useful is lost in incentive difference between $10 million or so and billionaire.

The problem is that you are reading for vibes instead of content. Shleifer has a specific political bent. I don't completely share that. Stop reading the paper as an argument for private provision, and reread it as a theory of when public vs. private provision is desirable -- the latter is what economists broadly agree on.

Personal news: I am writing a book! The conversation around birthrates has grown toxic. The truth is that fertility decline is mostly a consequence of greater freedom and opportunity, and seems unlikely to reverse. We can deal with the downsides -- if we confront them head on.

These kinds of macroeconomic effects are hard to study empirically since technology diffuses across borders so a truly clean experiment would require multiple separate earths where we could randomize population. However, it's also very hard to write down internally consistent models that account for the basic stylized facts about economic growth, but where some counterveiling benefit of smaller populations offsets the value of population in generating more non-rival ideas. It's not that there aren't possible counterveiling forces, the issue is that the population -> non-rival idea mechanism is very natural and powerful. We know there is also a quantity-quality trade-off in terms of investing in children. But if you think the quantity-quality trade-off outweighs the "more ideas" channel, try to write down a formal model with any kind of realistic parameter estimates that leads to this conclusion! (or ask GPT pro to do this, then ask GPT pro to critique it's own model and ask whether it believes the conclusion). I think you'll find it's very difficult to get anything defensible that implies this. On the point about fertility being hard to change, I half agree. I think you are right that asking, "What accomodations reduce the badness of low fertility rates?" is an important question. I much prefer that as the focus of the book! But: a) the return to policies targetted to increase fertility (e.g. direct payments if you have children) may be quite high and b) there are policies beyond the historical variation that we've seen that would likely lead to very large changes in fertility. e.g. suppose China decided that every family with 3 or more children was an "honored family" that would get access to superior healthcare, admissions advantages at schools and colleges, wage subsidies, etc... So you're being too fatalistic about this.

These kinds of macroeconomic effects are hard to study empirically since technology diffuses across borders so a truly clean experiment would require multiple separate earths where we could randomize population. However, it's also very hard to write down internally consistent models that account for the basic stylized facts about economic growth, but where some counterveiling benefit of smaller populations offsets the value of population in generating more non-rival ideas. It's not that there aren't possible counterveiling forces, the issue is that the population -> non-rival idea mechanism is very natural and powerful. We know there is also a quantity-quality trade-off in terms of investing in children. But if you think the quantity-quality trade-off outweighs the "more ideas" channel, try to write down a formal model with any kind of realistic parameter estimates that leads to this conclusion! (or ask GPT pro to do this, then ask GPT pro to critique it's own model and ask whether it believes the conclusion). I think you'll find it's very difficult to get anything defensible that implies this. On the point about fertility being hard to change, I half agree. I think you are right that asking, "What accomodations reduce the badness of low fertility rates?" is an important question. I much prefer that as the focus of the book! But: a) the return to policies targetted to increase fertility (e.g. direct payments if you have children) may be quite high and b) there are policies beyond the historical variation that we've seen that would likely lead to very large changes in fertility. e.g. suppose China decided that every family with 3 or more children was an "honored family" that would get access to superior healthcare, admissions advantages at schools and colleges, wage subsidies, etc... So you're being too fatalistic about this.