adamn

What jobs actually get people houses like these?

A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:

A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:

don’t say "this man looks gay". say "this man has an elegance to his heterosexuality"

Meryl Streep says Stanley Tucci has “an elegance to his heterosexuality”: “Stanley has an elegance to his heterosexuality, his undeniable heterosexuality, which is formidable. Not that heterosexuality is better than any other kind of sexuality, it's just that elegance - real, unforced, natural, unstyled elegance - is sometimes harder for straight men. I’m not looking at anybody here or intending any slight, but I'm just saying.”

No offense but I saw some leftist adjacent globes being like "actually the unlearning econ guy has a great academic background". This was much worse than I expected.

I'm glad that the author of "Rent Control Is Fine, Actually" calls themself Unlearning Economics, bc it's good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and economists themselves. Economists aren't gods, and economics isn't a divine truth, but economists are good--better than most--at something critical for making public policy: They're good at identifying tradeoffs. "Rents are too high, so freeze them" is compelling politics. But in the absence of other pro-supply policies, if you make it illegal to increase rents, landlords will stop upgrading units and convert them to condos, which reduces the supply of units for rent, reduces mobility, and drives up rents for everybody else. The left econ populists have some clear, and clearly stated, policy ideas: - Rents are too high, so freeze them. - Electricity is expensive, so stop rate increases. - Homes are too expensive, so ban institutional investors. - Power prices are rising, so ban data center construction. ... All these policies feel like solutions because they're brisk, they name enemies, and they take on the most visible source of frustration. But they are much better as villain-naming exercises than they are as a complete public policy. On their own, each creates other problems: less housing built, less clean electricity built, abdicating energy policy by encouraging AI firms to build data centers abroad in unsavory countries with more emissions, etc. I can't think of a single economic populist idea that wouldn't be helped with a little dose of economics, which is why it's troubling when I see the left participating in, and even celebrating, the great unlearning of economics.