economics

Do not FUCKING present the results of a simulation model as fact.

They're giving grants to K–12 school districts conditional on students filling a FAFSA. Lambs to the slaughter much?

People spend cash and credit differently. I've a hard time believing people would spend $40,000 they had saved up themselves, on for example a four-year degree.

@jacobandrs0n Not sure if we were talking about Al Jazeera but I had a very good perception of both the BBC for example bbc4 and Al Jazeera English. It wasn't until I met a lot of Arabs at work that I learned that Al Jazeera Arabic is more tabloid

@isomorphecon There is certainly an argument to be had that government media subsidies are not a good incentive for pure truth-seeking.

This will offend many people, but the rosy connotations that the word 'journalism' or 'journalist' has in the English language, that journalism is closer to impartiality than advocacy, and that journalists are defenders of truth, is largely untrue. The line between the pursuit of influence and reporting is largely non-existent today, and I'm not sure that's a new thing, although maybe much worse post-social media than in the era preceding that. And this isn't just a reflection of our natural cognitive biases. It's also the information systems and the incentives they give us; e.g., competing for attention and clicks to just be financially sustainable let alone impactful. The only journalism that is reliably absent of politics is a just-the-facts reporting of events with maximally neutral wording and absence of evaluative language, which on an objective, observed basis, AI does better than humans (although humans can do it).

@Alea_ Sad.

🛑 SENATOR HAWLEY: INTRODUCING A BILL TODAY TO SUSPEND THE GASOLINE TAX

@MeganTStevenson "the most important principles" This sounds very much like a school of thought, not the questions themselves.

Part of it is that policy is not very much influenced by research. But also, I'm not convinced that there are major knowledge gains to be made still in social science. The most important principles were developed a long time ago.

Am I the only social scientist that thinks the marginal returns to social science research are pretty low? I mean, I enjoy it & think it's interesting. But I don't think it’s improving the world much. Imo society oversupplies social science and undersupplies medical research.

@mathoyos "rarely"? Was there a time that a cross country regression established causality?

Cross-country regressions, for example, can be useful and informative, but they rarely establish causality on their own. So if we take empirical credibility seriously, going back to macro development cannot mean simply going back to the old empirical toolkit. 3/6

I strongly agree that development economics should return to the big questions: why some countries industrialize, transform, and grow, while others do not. These are the questions that made the field central to economics and to policy in the first place. 1/6

Noah, you're 45 years old and you've never worked. It's long past time to stop having opinions.

Counties where the majority of adults (25 and up) have a bachelor's degree or higher:

It's far from clear that literature was creating any knowledge at all, much less turning Manila into Seoul. Again, that's not to say there aren't important Qs to take up esp with new methods + new data. But some humility re the past history of macro dev is probably warranted

Not going to understand this one. Cheap credit is cheaper, but has also massively distorted our society.

I have heard this critique for ages, including from Esther Duflo. Aside from the fact that people have agency, and so the whole thing is a bit moot, I have three comments. - One chairperson of the math dept at MIT once told me “the students who join RenTech are not usually the ‘best’ students. They are the more restless ones, who may have trouble to find a PhD topic, or focus on one.” This is to say that I really don’t think that there is a realistic chance that a great scientist would go into quant, and that quants would make great scientists. You’d see at least some former quants being called back to research and doing well. In reality, people self-select. - Everyone loves a little welfare calculation. It’s fun. But let’s not take it too seriously. The Socialist Calculation Debate was settled almost a century ago. Nobody knows anything. Liquidity? Price discovery? Spillovers. Stuff is complicated. - If anything, the real substitution is between quants and entrepreneurs/technologists. Many recent cases of “possible HRT quants” starting unicorns have made the news recently. But even there, I think the market equilibrates. The competition is stronger. More people try the startup route, or join Anthropic. It seems quite all right.

The 1950's and 1970's social security panics both led to tax rises to actuarially balance the old age survivors fund. chatgpt.com/share/69e11da2… It would have been a good idea to increase the taxable base in 1997, right ahead of a huge income dispersion that won't quit.

"we are desperate—DESPERATE—for school bus drivers!" Offering: under $50k

@AngusBylsma I see the contradiction, but don't know what else I'm supposed to infer

10 mins in: “there is no British capitalism. Only capitalism in Britain. There is no American capitalism. Only capitalism in America.” 60 mins in: “it’s always different. There’s Swedish capitalism, Brazilian capitalism, American capitalism, …” Says it all really

We have a live data feed of global wheat prices, whomever that's relevant to. Could you provide accurate, true data about wages and opportunities? Indeed basically does. LinkedIn at least lets people know how many white collars have applied. And then, Instawork.

Also why do we accept that economics ~ banking. Students <20yo would prefer some useful life advice to (1) debates laid before the powerful which no pleb will ever get a say in (2) technical definition of chained inflation.

It's all "supply and demand" until the labor supply demands more money

wow, Yale? Awesome. So you must have gotten, like, a perfect SAT score, and then later, as an adult, concluded that your mission in life was to hire Filipino dispatchers and office assistants to pump sophomoric mathematical references to somehow make you money