Do-Gooders

O, what great conversations we'd have!

@BobMurphyEcon By about 95%. 1-10^3/10^4. But also that is a hint that the 3rd number is most likely a 5, 6, or 8. That’s pattern theory.

Suppose you are trying to guess someone's 4-digit PIN. You peek as he's typing it in and see that the last number is a 9. By how much did you just reduce your search time?

Every socialist scheme boils down to the same formula: take wealth from those who create it and redistribute to those who vote for you. They dress it up as "justice" but socialists fundamentally believe productive people owe them something simply for existing. Look at Venezuela's oil revenues or Cuba's sugar wealth—socialists always inherit functioning economies, then systematically destroy them through redistribution schemes. They call entrepreneurs "exploiters" while living off the taxes entrepreneurs pay. The productive class builds civilization. Socialists then vote to confiscate it. Pathetic.

@mungowitz @cwage And yet, even game theory didn’t prevent him from telling us how sound Fannie and Freddie were, with little systemic risk, in 2003.

@rohanpaul_ai @elonmusk I wrote a replacement for Quickbooks in 3 days without ever touching a line of code. SAAS is a commodity now.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on current frontier model's ability to break the security of almost all current software. "These models are definitely, like really gonna break pretty much all software out there, maybe already, we don't know."

@pmarca @elonmusk

It will cost more than that, and it will still never happen. There is no chance. It is not possible.

@DA_Stockman “under normal traffic” doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The same reason why tax increases never pull in intended revenue. Their exports will fall.

Let's see. Iran was earning $50 billion per year before the war from oil exports, and under a blanket of sanctions. Now its $100 billion per year sanctions free. Also, the $2 million per ship through Hormuz will generate up to a $90 billion per year of fee income under normal traffic. So what was $50 billion per year of dark money is potentially $150 billion of greenbacks and yuan. Looks like the mullahs have been reading "The Art of the Deal", too.

@HooverInst @JohnHCochrane I cover this in my book. Paying interest on bank reserves and on excess capital via RRPs sterilized the new money it had created and injected into the economy.

What's really on the Fed's balance sheet? And did its expansion actually drive inflation? In this week's Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant, @JohnHCochrane cuts through one of the most misunderstood issues in economic policy. Full rant on Freedom Frequency: thefreedomfrequency.org/p/whats-really…

@pmarca There will be temporary pain, but productivity and quality of life will improve. Prices will fall and leisure will increase. Hopefully, people find meaning in their less toilsome lives.

Claude knows! —> The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Why AGI Unemployment Panic Is Economically Illiterate Let me lay this out with full rigor, because this argument deserves to be prosecuted completely rather than waved away with a sound bite. I. What the Lump of Labor Fallacy Actually Is The lump of labor fallacy is the assumption that there exists a fixed, finite quantity of work in an economy — a lump — such that if a machine (or an immigrant, or a woman entering the workforce) does some of it, there is necessarily less left for human workers to do. It treats employment as a zero-sum pie. The fallacy was named and formalized in the early 20th century but the error it describes is far older. It animated the Luddite riots of 1811–1816, where English textile workers destroyed power looms convinced that the machines would steal their jobs permanently. It drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology in the history of industrial civilization. Every single time, the catastrophists were wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally, fundamentally, categorically wrong — because they misunderstood the nature of economic production itself. The reason the fixed-pie assumption fails is this: demand is not fixed. Work generates income. Income generates demand for goods and services. Demand for goods and services generates new categories of work. This is an engine, not a reservoir. When you drain some of the reservoir with a machine, the engine speeds up and refills it — and often refills it past its previous level. II. The Classical Economic Mechanism That Destroys the Fallacy To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself. There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously: Channel 1: The Productivity-Demand Feedback Loop (Say’s Law, Modified) When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either: ∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or ∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or ∙Both. Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something — including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs. This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers — it freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy didn’t run out of work. It metamorphosed.

@SenWarren Read some Bastiat! I can't stand reading your dumb takes on econ.

In the middle of an affordability crisis driven by Donald Trump, Trump is killing a plan that lowers student loan costs. It's shameful.

@elonmusk Amazing accomplishment. Bravo!

Over 500 rocket landings now

@p_m_robinson Jealous. Were you ever able to spend time with him and Rose at Sea Ranch? That would have been incredible.

Thirty-two seconds of my hero, Milton Friedman, at his very Miltonest. Lord. Was I lucky to have known that man.

Wealth growth will always have a slightly-below-zero bound. There will always be those whose wealth shrinks over time (e.g. retirees). Economic growth expands the distribution from that bound. The distribution stretches, and those at the top will always grow more than those falling below zero. But, as the OP points out, Americans have become 337% wealthier since 1976, on an inflation-adjusted basis. That's incredible. Capitalism for the win!

Also misleading as this is a prime case for log transformation, to show percent changes not dollar changes.

Getting ratio'd. Americans aren't as stupid as these people think.

@naval What a great time to be alive. Progress is going vertical, all at once.

A lot of software is about to get a lot better, right before it becomes unnecessary.

@esrtweet @elonmusk I wrote an entire book on unintended consequences, where the net impact is negative. And that’s almost every program.

The Iron Law: "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero." The Stainless Steel Law: "The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero." This is from an expert who desperately wanted the conclusion to be the opposite. But the impact is never zero. It's always, actually negative. Because the money taken from taxpayers at gunpoint and spent on these programs is wasted. The effect is value destruction.

@CAgovernor @GavinNewsom If only our governors had financial education.

This week, I issued an executive order launching a new effort to expand women's access to financial education in California. We're working to break through historic barriers and ensure more women across the Golden State have the tools to fully participate in our economy.

If only there were a school of economic thought that could have predicted this. 🤔 msn.com/en-us/money/ma…

@JoshWalkos @Mark_J_Perry I shot that video. No attribution.

Yet another scam in California.

@Noahpinion Depends on the agent. Some woke companies filter and spin results.

AI is a force for moderation. If I'm a Republican, and I talk to AI, I'm talking to something that was trained on data from both Republicans and Democrats. So the AI is more likely to pull me towards the center. noahpinion.blog/p/save-us-digi…

@RoKhanna @FordsTheatreNPS Now if we could just get you and the rest to read my book. The world would be a better place.

1776 at ⁦@FordsTheatreNPS⁩ is a must watch for all of my colleagues in Congress. Absolutely brilliant! An inspiring reminder that our founders were deeply divided on the question of independence itself & how they worked to overcome divisions to give birth to our nation!