Nathan Lazarus

@bhboehlert @MattZeitlin For one thing, many of both are represented by AOC!

@MattZeitlin Am I the only one who thinks that the people of the Bronx and the people of Queens just aren’t that different?

The penthouse and the doorman

a net importer of oil, but rather whether the US is a net importer of oil and oil embodied products.

Cutting off oil to China will make American consumer goods more expensive because oil is an input into them. The way to determine the impact on US consumers, as carbon border adjustment advocates point out in that context, is not whether the US is… x.com/mattyglesias/s…

@captgouda24 The worst version of this is when people say to stop subsidizing them and start taxing them instead, which I swear I’ve heard

Note that when you look into these sorts of claims, the “subsidy” is simply that it is not taxed as much as they think it should be. You can argue the status quo is wrong, but you can’t really call it a subsidy, now can you?

The real puzzle is why the government left 4 billion on the table—where my Tullock paradox fans at? x.com/danprimack/sta…

@joefrancis505 @MoharirAdvait you about this one” and it incentivizes people to leave things out instead of presenting the full picture).

@joefrancis505 @MoharirAdvait you’d reject the null, say, only 0.1% of the time with that bar, so it’s like running a regression and checking whether p<0.001, you can do it but it’s not the standard (sadly I think it is often the standard to say “why isn’t every specification lining up, let me interrogate...

Can anyone see how it is possible to reconcile the description of Table 1 with the reality of Table 1? academic.oup.com/qje/article/14…

@RiccardoTrezzi In oil producing countries, oil doesn’t tend to be evenly distributed throughout the country either

You often hear in Italy that ‘tourism is our oil.’ Beyond the absurdity of the claim, these maps are quite revealing. They show which provinces saw the strongest growth in tourism (measured by arrivals) between 2008 and 2024. In percentage terms (left map), one province stands out: Sassari. Perhaps perceptions in Porto Cervo are a bit distorted relative to the rest of Italy? In absolute terms (middle map), however, two or three provinces — Bolzano, Venice, and Milan — absorbed almost all the additional flow between 2008 and 2024. And if that weren’t enough, total arrivals (right map) are extremely concentrated in just three provinces: Rome, Venice, and Bolzano. Still think “tourism is our oil” makes sense? And above all: how incredible is @KalistatData?” 🙃

Is the claim here that the Ukraine shock was bad for renewable energy companies’ profits? I’m skeptical of that for conventional supply/demand reasons. Do you believe that’s true of anything that chokes of oil supply e.g. blocking the Keystone pipeline? x.com/IsabellaMWeber…

@eltokh7 @aledinola @JohnRuf6 I’m curious about this, what is that?

@aledinola @JohnRuf6 You should install the Stata terminal utility and have your agent run it that way! Happy to explain more if you want

I started using VSCode with codex for my projects with latex, matlab and Fortran (ifx conpiler) and it works pretty well. Definitly recommend! Only downside: so far I haven't been able to run Stata from VSCode. The extension Stata MCP is quite buggy in practice

@realftucker @woketopiansa @NickTimiraos If you have an income, 100% of your assets isn’t necessarily risking ruin, betting 100% of the PDV of your lifetime earnings + your wealth is what risking everything would be (in theory, with non-stochastic earnings. With stochastic, PDV of your lowest possible lifetime earnings)

@woketopiansa @NickTimiraos There is a big difference between thinking and knowing is my point and there is no point in risking ruin for a 30% return.

While everyone was cheering chainsaws at CPAC, a tax economist put $342,195.63 — his entire life savings — into a prediction market bet that DOGE wouldn’t cut federal spending. His edge? He knew how the US government works better than the DOGE believers. His wife read the Kalshi comments from the people on the other side and grew *more* confident because “they didn’t seem to understand what they were buying.” He made $128K. Turns out knowing how the federal budget actually works was a better edge than a chainsaw.

@ben_golub @littmath I see your point for the “social effort directed” question, but that doesn’t seem right for the government’s counterfactual of “what if we directed more research here.” Like for another $150K professorship, you could pull someone away from finance who makes $1M/year.

@littmath Are you pricing the inputs at their outside option industry value?

For something I am writing I am trying to estimate how much we (the world) spends annually on attempts to resolve the Riemann hypothesis, Hodge conjecture, etc. It's hard to come up with an estimate greater than ~a few million USD per year on each, and much lower is plausible.

@semaforben @tallinzen You can’t have less than 1 child per filer with children, not necessarily good to show a region that couldn’t make sense.

@tallinzen Wait - is that a chart crime? It seems useful here, but you are a professional

love charts with two different y axes where one goes down to zero and the other ends at 1.4

@CentralUnplan @besttrousers @carney There are also service sector jobs where you get your schedule through an app

@besttrousers @carney Describing it this way is sus but I have in fact starting seeing jobs requiring two-step authentication log-in. Ofc there are ways around that it but can get onerous. Phones of course can be trivially cheap to buy, so this isn't a real barrier - but not having one can be rough.

@VincentGeloso @bhboehlert Similar result in Florida though journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

@bhboehlert Yes, but Clark whose paper I cite would respond that this is at the upper tail of the estimate and probably a bit of publication bias. I think this recent paper (I had seen the WP) is a good step in making that discussion. But I think more could be done.

Gregory Clark and Bryan Caplan (the latter in separate work) are challenging the claim that human capital has huge returns. They find returns closer to 0%-3%. This is something I have disagreements with (for reasons of interpretation, causal mechanisms etc.) but I have not seen this "big question" get the attention it deserves by economists. This is a topic that should be debated thoroughly rather than simply waived away. Link here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ky…

@wagesofwins An additional thing that strikes me as stupid about sharing net rather than gross revenue is that teams lose the incentive to keep expenses down because some of staff salaries is coming out of players’ pockets

The NBA keeps making the same salary offer to WNBA players. Essentially, these negotiations have become a sequel to Groundhog Day. But its not as funny. And apparently all we are learning is the NBA didn't understand the point of the original movie. wagesofwins.substack.com/p/groundhog-da…

@captgouda24 top-two vote, but there's still the same incentive (you want to lock the other party out).

@captgouda24 I like this but there would be crazy dynamics right around the 2/3-1/3 one party majority where the majority party is incentivized to run two candidates and get their voters to split. Would be better if your congressional vote share were the share of the total vote and not the

Democracy is not feasible with unchecked gerrymandering. Requirements for compact districts actually don’t do much — we need proportional representation now, before it’s too late. nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/gerrymanderi…

@JohnHolbein1 I liked this approach xkcd.com/1939/

Have you ever seen someone post a map like this and be like, "SEE, THE U.S. IS REPUBLICAN!" One response to this is "land doesn't vote; people do." In other words, by projecting votes onto a map, you are conflating dimensions. This next map better conveys the spatial distribution of people. However, another problem with the first map is that in the United States, no state ever votes 100% Democratic (blue) or 100% Replublican (red). Yet, this is how we are most accustomed to seeing our electoral maps illustrated. Here's an alternate version of the standard electoral map using proportional shades of purple. States that voted more Democratic were bluer shades of purple, and states that voted more Republican were redder shades of purple, all depending on the percentages of the total vote.