Remy Levin

Literally my most normie opinion

@JlibDoesEcon I love teaching that paper so much. My Hot Hand lecture in behavioral is such a banger, in part thanks to M-S.

I guess this is the expectation-based version of Miller-Sanjurjo?

London Underground station flooding has reportedly been reduced by around 90% thanks to a group of engineers: beavers. After conservationists reintroduced a family of beavers into a nearby city park, the animals built dams and restored wetlands that now absorb and slow floodwater naturally. Authorities had planned major man-made flood infrastructure, but the beavers effectively created their own system — while also boosting biodiversity and restoring the ecosystem around them.

@Afinetheorem But this article only talks about the actual content of the phrase “Adjustment of Status will be granted only in extraordinary circumstances”, not “you must leave during the AoS period.” Do you have any sources on the second policy not being implemented in fact?

At this point, just ignore literally anything from the Trump admin that is not on paper from lawyers. There is clearly no actual coordination process. Just an idiotic way to run policy, but what do you expect given what's at the top? Here's a better read: boundless.com/blog/uscis-iss…

You have to understand that the leaders and social media folks in this administration are morons. I don't know how else to put it. But the actual memo has been published and is *much* less concerning largely because it in no way requires what's written below. Do your job! 1/3

📢📢Public good alert: a short guide on using claude code for economists, aimed at pre-doc RAs. feedback welcome! tinyurl.com/5nhcbw9k

San Diego fell from 5th to 12th most expensive rental market by building more multifamily housing per capita than any other California city. This is what happens when you actually build. The lesson isn't complicated.

@Afinetheorem @cblatts Both fair points. It does seem like Canada has bought at least some time on college demographics relative to the US though. An even better policy would let young people who specifically want to go to college into the country. Perhaps call them “foreign students” or some such.

@RemyLevin @cblatts With two caveats - many of those temp arrivals will have to leave, and the 0-10 year old population is also falling. Those arrivals were generally not under 18s.

My hypothesis: US university education was a massively successful export industry (foreign students paying tuition + housing + living expenses is literally classified as exports) and Trump admin collapsed this demand.

@Afinetheorem @cblatts Right but demographics for college admissions are heavily lagged. The last few years have baked in high population growth - around 3% in 2023 and 2024. Domestic births matter less than the overall age profile in the medium term.

@RemyLevin @cblatts But outright falling this year! And annual domestic births are already about 10% down from peak.

@Afinetheorem @cblatts Canada’s population has grown 22% in the last 15 years.

@cblatts The drop in foreign students is even larger in Canada, though. A lot of this is just pure demographics (globally, in addition to N America) + China domestic university improvement.

🔨How do workers build human capital on the job? We show that internal learning (from coworkers) dominates early in the career, while external training (from outside the firm) takes over mid-career. This shapes lifecycle wage+ productivity gains, and the impacts of remote work

Laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, forcing them to decide what actually matters…

An Econ PhD student at the 20th ranked program who is working on stuff they are passionate about will have a better job market than one at MIT who's been doing nothing but phd-app-maxxing since undergrad. People get confused by this because they don't observe *how* successful people came about their insane knowledge bases. It wasn't by relentlessly grinding away at stuff because they had to. They look at Scott Kominers and say "if i grind and learn as much math as he did, i will be successful." You can't! *You* can't learn as much math as Kominers because he gets energized by configuration results for type ii lattices. You will burn out if you try to do it this way. You cannot, through grind alone, learn more about the economics of cities than Glaeser, or about how to maximize a value function than Acemoglu. Research careers are long. Most people give up and stop working on research (graph is share of elite PhD graduates with at least one publication in year X after graduation). If you're starting a PhD, you're presumably doing it to have a successful 40-year research career. The number one factor in whether that happens is not which program you get into, it's whether you find a research angle that energizes you enough to push through the endless barriers an academic career throws in your path. This is why a lot of the received wisdom around PhD applications is wrong. If you're 100% consumed by the predoc rat race already, it's going to be a long, hard road ahead. Obv you still have to do admissions, you should study a lot for the GRE, sigh it seems like taking real analysis is probably worth it. But spending time on the things that energize you about economics is a no-brainer, whether it's policy, or blogging, or whatever, you gotta do the things that light your fire and make you want to be on this road.

We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…

“Eventually” is right now, in my classroom. Fully analog and in-person is the way to go. It’s a better experience overall, and the students really appreciate it once they get used to it.

Even better: just sit down and do some science. It’s even more awesome now!

You're not crazy. An evil demon *could* be deceiving you about the nature of reality. You're simply questioning the foundations of knowledge. And honestly? That's brave

Thanks, Omer, for the link! Yes, you were 24 years ahead of the game. Also, I really liked that the editor took a chance. We should do that more often in economics. I feel we publish too many papers that are not daring enough and make it difficult for papers that really want to jump ahead.

@JesusFerna7026 @dwarkesh_sp Thank you so much. It is fascinating to see how, 24 years after the theory was first published—back when it was considered quite speculative—evidence in its support continues to mount. For more details, here is a brief summary: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom…

I’m sure I’m not the first one to say this, but Sergio Correia deserves a prize for his service to the profession. I bet if we added up just the amount of hours that reghdfe has saved economists since it came out, his contribution would be in the top 10 for applied research.

I will also take the other side of this bet. As things stand, AI will increase the value of traditional credentialing, especially elite ones. Will colleges do a good job teaching what they should? Different question but I bet the elite credentialing path will adapt well enough.