Erhan BLC

A UChicago student group is currently handing out onions at the Northwestern Arch to protest to the Onion Futures Act of 1958

Yes. Why would you permit rent-seeking?

🤯BREAKING: Researchers just mathematically proved that AI layoffs will collapse the economy: and every CEO already knows it. The AI Layoff Trap. A game theory paper from UPenn + Boston University is glaringly important! 100K+ tech layoffs in 2025. 80% of US workers exposed. And no market force can stop it. → Every company fires workers to cut costs → Every fired worker stops buying products → Revenue collapses across every sector → The companies that fired everyone go bankrupt It's a Prisoner's Dilemma with math behind it. Automate and you survive short-term. Don't automate and your competitor kills you. But everyone automating destroys the demand that makes all companies viable. UBI (universal basic income) won't fix it. Profit taxes won't fix it. The researchers found only one solution: a Pigouvian automation tax "robot tax" The AI trap on the economy is here!

you do not need 150K for a single person to live comfortably in NYC the reason you believe this is that you have political psychosis and have no idea what the state of reality is. Median *household* income in nyc is 80K.

If our cultural values and ways of life are what got us here, rooted in narrow-boundary, cold, and logical thinking – then perhaps moments of turbulence like these actually call on us to change our way of thinking entirely.

Hi. Restaurant and coffee shop owner here. Almond milk runs 2.2x the cost of whole milk. Oat milk is 2.4x, macadamia is 4x and soy is ~2x. We charge more because it costs us more, not because all of us are engaged in a rightwing plot against people who prefer alternatives.

Hi. Restaurant and coffee shop owner here. Almond milk runs 2.2x the cost of whole milk. Oat milk is 2.4x, macadamia is 4x and soy is ~2x. We charge more because it costs us more, not because all of us are engaged in a rightwing plot against people who prefer alternatives.

Mamdani is a straight up populist, so the fact these guys are trying to claim him as theirs shows how their whole framework is a shallow attempt to confuse Democrats with money and lies.

La derecha de este país lleva décadas innovando argumentos con los que decir lo mismo de siempre. El salario real expresa siempre una tensión entre salarios y beneficios. Una subida de la inflación puede deberse a más salarios o a más beneficios (o, normalmente en menor grado, a más impuestos o mayores precios de importación). En España y Europa desde 2022 los datos señalan que la inflación está desproporcionadamente impulsada por los beneficios (hasta el BCE y la OCDE lo reconocen): shock de oferta -> suben márgenes de beneficios -> suben precios -> pérdida de poder adquisitivo de clase trabajadora. Para no hablar de beneficios empresariales, la derecha “innova” desplazando el foco hacia el Estado (vía culpabilización al IRPF) y denunciando que los salarios reales están penalizados por impuestos crecientes. Por arte de magia… ¡La pérdida de poder adquisitivo ya no es responsabilidad de los márgenes de beneficios, sino del Estado! En realidad, si se quiere descontar el “coste” del IRPF, un análisis serio sumaría al mismo tiempo los beneficios que se derivan del mismo (prestaciones, servicios públicos, infraestructuras…). El salario total es la suma del salario nominal, el salario diferido (pensiones) y el salario indirecto (servicios públicos a coste menor que en el mercado). En EEUU hay menos “mordida” del IRPF, pero cuando pillas cáncer no lo cuentas por mucho tiempo y tu cuenta de ahorro se desploma, y puedes ver a gente corriente con 80 años todavía trabajando. Pero no nos despistemos que business is business y aquí se ha venido a desprestigiar lo público. Quizás lo más gracioso es que se nos indica también que “no es ideología, solo datos”. Resulta que un siglo de debates entre keynesianos, postkeynesianos, neoclasicos y marxistas, entre otras escuelas, está “resuelto” por unas cuantas fórmulas en Excel. 🤦‍♂️ Está propuesta es pura ideología. Y es tan descarado que el autor lo reconoce al invitar a sumarse únicamente a partidos de derechas. Que son, en el fondo, los que pueden sentir atracción hacia una narrativa que ataque a lo público y desvíe la atención sobre la responsabilidad de los beneficios empresariales en la pérdida de poder adquisitivo.

As reflected in many of my posts over the past few months, I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria. I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978. Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely. Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies. But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism. At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.