Ben Goodman

@RalphMcGinnis @HeerJeet He got a bachelor's degree in 1972, which would be very impressive if he wasn't born until the following year history.princeton.edu/people/sean-wi…

Sean Wilentz remains the ultimate boomer academic.

@Patrickwebb @micah_erfan @jdcmedlock Inheritance is a form of income, so inheritance (but arguably not estate) taxes are authorized by the 16th amendment, and more importantly this is a state proposal.

@micah_erfan @jdcmedlock Estate taxes are a direct tax on property without being apportioned by population, which violates Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution.

>That modest one-bedroom apartment you wanted to leave your family to help them get on the property ladder? The mayor will take half of it. This is wrong. The bill contains a $1.75 million primary residence exemption and the 50% marginal rate doesn’t kick in until $30 million

@wastetime "Just look at the graph! You can't tell me that's a coincidence" is a much less compelling argument once you realize that most of it has to be a coincidence

@benpgoodman @DKThomp It doesnt need to be to support Daniel's claim

This is an easy nomination for the Mt Rushmore of viral misleading charts for reasons I’ll link below (but basically: “mental hosp population = lotta older women/prison pop = lotta young men”) Which got me thinking: What are the other top viral misleading graphs these days?

@wastetime @DKThomp Unless you think deinstitutionalization made a lot of old men get much younger, the drop in young and middle aged male mental patients is not nearly large enough to explain the rise in prisoners

@DKThomp Lol all the male graphs support Daniel's claim

@jdcmedlock Clearly a bunch of mental patients got reincarnated as young men and turned to crime to avenge the loss of their beloved hospitals

People will look you dead in the eye and tell you that correlation implies causation here without disaggregating the numbers to see if that makes any sense.

@OptionsSly Those aren't flaws, they're a proof by contradiction (or technically just modus tollens): 1. Gas consumption can't rise 2. If prices fell, consumption would rise 3. Therefore, prices can't fall

@jdcmedlock Didn’t have James posting slop on my 2026 bingo card I’ll be nice and just point out obvious flaws

Such an unserious solution to gas prices in the face of supply constraints. Krugman said it best 26 years ago

@reconfigurthing Transparent Newcomb is a much better framing of the problem than the Hitchhiker, since it primes people to selfishly maximize instead of muddling things with considerations of honor, gratitude, and reciprocity

(Parfit's Hitchhiker is equivalent to Transparent Newcomb, Newcomb with transparent boxes, btw)

PSA: You should think about Parfit's Hitchhiker instead of Newcomb's problem. It's a much less contrived scenario, and gets at the core issue much more cleanly. I kind of worry that Newcomb's problem is more viral just because it's more confusing.

@KelseyTuoc Is there a concise off-Twitter summary of what she's been doing on this bill that I can send to my MA-based brother so he can yell at her?

Elizabeth Warren turned out to be one of the most profound disappointments imaginable as a Senator. Presented as a technocrat interested in what works, actually the absolute worst of the slopulists.

@Noahpinion That's based on a study of people who got caught. It doesn't tell us how evil smart people are, only that they're some combination of better at not doing crime when they'll be caught and punished, and better at getting away with it.

One reason I'm not so scared of autonomous superintelligence. When you're really smart, you usually realize that being evil is dumb.

Jeeze, what sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open your skull and ate up YOUR brains and imagination?

@FabricioNakata Forcing your employees to pay you kickbacks should be and probably is illegal even if their jobs are real

If you're reaction is "well, that's illegal and we should punish it" consider that if the worker was hired to do something socially destructive rather than nothing then it's hunky dory.

The whole idea behind the EITC is to induce people to work who otherwise wouldn't, on the margins. This means I should be able to do good business hiring people to do nothing and having them kick back their pay plus half the refund.

@tszzl @tyler_m_john "I love God" would be "Deum amo." Amo dei, if it's grammatical at all, would be "I love something belonging to God."

@tyler_m_john the one flaw I found in his talk is that amodei clearly means I love god in straightforward Latin. Scott, as a verbal savant, would easily have noticed this as well but chose to ignore it for the narrative. which is troubling for the rest of his exegesis

Can't believe I had never read Scott Alexander's "Antichrist Lecture." Never letting my Evangelical mom find out this exists.

@jaycaspiankang The procedure is Parliament invites the Dutch to invade

Can someone go overthrow the royal family and storm buckingham palace but leave the rest of the government largely intact? Feels like we need to swap these royals out and not sure why there’s not a procedure for that. Like what if Wayne Rooney just declared himself king?

@stutozer Bender thinks that language has meaning to humans because we at least sometimes interact with the underlying reality our words represent

@binarybits No expert of course but I don't see too much difference here? Language has meaning to humans because we connect words together with metaphors within some kind of internalised dictionary. Doesn't sound too dissimilar to LLM concepts clustering in vector space

This piece about the left being out to lunch on AI is really good.

"There are secret highly effective affordable medical treatments that the elites who run the government won't let you use" is just a straightforwardly true statement now.

@watchUFAtv "Sparingly"? "Limited minutes"? He missed the first half of the season due to college commitments, then he was on the field nearly 40% of the time. I guess that's limited compared to the maximum he is physically capable of playing, but still seems weird

Potential Breakout Stars In 2026 🌟 Full story: watchufa.com/league/news/20…

@SchizoLLC @jtc_ai @ArmandDoma True, but carrying on a tradition of ignoring what the 13th says in favor of what was obviously intended isn't "suspending the Constitution"

@jtc_ai @ArmandDoma All of the jurisprudence on the draft is insanely bad. They basically invalidated the letter of a law that can’t be written more clearly and they did it during WWI, a war we had no business being involved in.

I wouldn’t give a shit if an authoritarian dictatorship if it had my exact idiosyncratic set of weird policy beliefs, down to the obsession with zoning law and Keynesian economics, I would still oppose it because people deserve to be free. Period.

@siicamore @myhandle Nonexistence

@myhandle What did you expect out of nonfat half and half?

man-made horrors beyond my comprehension

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@NovaFoundries @gregm12 I think we've reached the limit of how far we can take this discussion without digging deeper into economic models than is really practical on this platform. Have a good day!

I think you're wrong on both accounts. Firstly, you are conflating CPI Inflation with Asset Price Inflation. CPI looked 'stable' in real terms, but we didn't have monetary neutrality, we had *massive* asset inflation: - 1987–2019 Nominal Wage Growth: ~200% (roughly 3x). - 1987–2019 S&P 500 Growth: ~1,200% (roughly 13x). If money were 'neutral,' wages and assets would have risen at roughly the same rate. They didn't. Why is that? It's because the money supply expanded, but it was trapped in the financial sector, inflating assets 4x faster than wages. That is the definition of the Cantillon Effect playing out over decades. Secondly, the claim that the Cantillon Effect is only 'short-run' was true in the 1700s when money entered the economy through purchase of grain. NOW new money enters through the financial sector (Central Bank -> Primary Dealers -> Financial Assets) and when the Fed lowers rates, it doesn't give workers a raise - it makes it cheaper for a hedge fund to buy a house or a corporation to buy back its own stock, i.e., the money does NOT move to wages to restore neutrality, it stays in the asset loop, permanently elevating the price of housing relative to labor. What you call a 'short-run' distortion is actually a 'long-run' structural 'feature'.

2 paragraphs I’d want everyone to internalize open.substack.com/pub/scottsumne…