Nuno Rafael Gomes

A collection of #family #aphorisms and #heuristics that shaped the way I think, behave and navigate the world. A 🧵👇

Parabéns ao Torreense por este feito histórico!

A especialidade do Irineu Teixeira: "confundir alhos com bugalhos".

Incrível, mas é a realidade ⬇️

Se ainda há dúvidas sobre quem, efectivamente, manda em Portugal... O Ministério Público, obviamente. Não são os políticos que, bem ou mal, elegemos, é mesmo o Ministério Público. Já estivemos mais longe da queda desta Terceira República nascida no 25 de Abril de 1974.

True. And History will be rewritten again and more easily for the future generations.

Gazze'de, bir erkek kardeş annelerini kaybettikten sonra küçük kardeşini teselli ediyor. Susmak ihanete ortak olmaktır…

Caríssimo Fabian: Só em Portugal o Grupo Jerónimo Martins emprega cerca de 33 mil pessoas, a maioria com filhos e muito bem. E já agora, o CEO do Pingo Doce ganha bem menos que um bom jogador profissional de futebol, mesmo em Portugal, e, que eu saiba, não empregam ninguém.

In a couple of weeks a mythical dragon throwing fire everywhere will be shown alongside these "pictures". #Sarcasm

Old news, from 11 months ago: linkedin.com/posts/ryanbres… And the HR Department changed its name to "People Team". Cosmetics?

Foi feita justiça com a médica, Diana Pereira, que teve a coragem de denunciar más práticas no Hospital de Faro. O 'bem' também vence !!!

Hello, clown 🤡 !

Deutschland gewinnt wieder.

E para que não restem dúvidas sobre a importância do bom transporte público nas cidades (principalmente das mais densas), e como diria o outro (Guterres), "é só fazer contas" ⬇️ Ignorar esta matemática só revela a incompetência atroz da esmagadora maioria dos nossos políticos.

O planeamento urbano vertido nos diferentes PDMs por esse país fora ignora: - O brutal aumento do custo de construção de habitação (~20%) com caves. - O fim do carro como propriedade (TVDE, condução autónoma, subscrições). - A importância do bom transporte público nas cidades.

A 24-year-old Israeli man was arrested at Ercan Airport in northern Cyprus (TRNC) after airport security found four human embryos in a cryogenic “Life Pack” container in his luggage. He was bound for Mexico via Istanbul. He was charged with illegally transporting human cells/tissue and remanded in custody. Source: ynet

Smartphones are not the explanation for the recent decline in fertility. Instead, they are an accelerator of deeper forces already at work. Let’s start with the facts. Fertility is falling almost everywhere: in rich, middle-income, and poor countries; in secular and religious countries; and in countries with high and low levels of gender equality. The decline accelerated around 2014. So, no country-specific explanation will work unless you are willing to believe that 200 distinct country-specific explanations arrived at roughly the same time. Smartphones look like the obvious candidate: the first iPhone was released in 2007, and global adoption has been astonishingly fast. Economists understand the first major decline in fertility in advanced economies, from 6 or 7 children per woman throughout most of human history to about 1.8, that occurred between the early 1800s and roughly 1970, well before smartphones. The main drivers were a sharp fall in child mortality (effective fertility was rarely above 3 and often close to 2) and the shift from a low-skill, rural agrarian economy to a high-skill, urban industrial one. We have quantitative models that fit these facts well. Country-specific factors mattered too, of course. Proximity to low-fertility neighbors accelerated Hungary’s decline, while fragmented landowning structures accelerated France’s. But these were second-order mechanisms. This is also why most economists long considered Paul Ehrlich’s doom scenarios implausible. We forecast that fertility in middle- and low-income economies would follow the same path as in the rich, probably faster, because reductions in child mortality reached India or Africa at lower income levels (medical technology is nearly universal, and most gains come from handwashing and cheap antibiotics, not Mayo Clinic-level care). Much of what we see in Africa or parts of Latin America today is still that old story. But in the 1980s, a new pattern appeared. Japan and Italy fell below 1.8, the level we had thought was the new floor. By 1990, Japan was at 1.54 and Italy at 1.36. This second fertility decline began in Japan and Italy earlier than elsewhere, driven by country-specific factors, but the underlying dynamics were widespread: secularization, an education arms race, expensive housing, the dissolution of old social networks, and the shift to a service economy in which women’s bargaining power within the household is higher. The U.S. lagged because secularization came later, suburban housing remained relatively cheap, and African American fertility was still high. U.S. demographic patterns are exceptional and skew how academics (most of whom are in the U.S.) and the New York Times see the world. My best guess is that, without smartphones, Italy’s 2025 fertility rate would be about 1.24 rather than 1.14. I doubt anyone will document an effect larger than 0.1-0.2. Italy was at 1.19 in 1995, not far from today’s 1.14. The TFR is cyclical due to tempo effects, so I do not read too much into the rise between 1995 and 2007 or the decline from 1.27 in 2019 to 1.14 today. The direct effect of smartphones is not zero, but it is not, by itself, that large. Where social media, in general, and smartphones, in particular, matter is in the diffusion of social norms. What would have taken 25 years now happens in 10. Social media are not the cause of fertility decline; modernity is. But they are a very fast accelerator. That is why social media are a major part of the story behind Guatemala (yes, Guatemala) going from 3.8 children per woman in 2005 to 1.9 in 2025. Without them, Guatemala would also have reached 1.9, just 20 years later. Modernity, in its current form, is incompatible with replacement-level fertility. By modernity, I do not mean capitalism: fertility fell earlier and faster in socialist economies than in market economies. Socialist Hungary fell below replacement in 1960, and socialist Czechoslovakia in 1966 (both experienced small, short-lived baby booms in the mid-1970s). By modernity, I mean a society organized around rational, large-scale systems and formalized knowledge. Countries will not converge to the same fertility rate. East Asia is likely stuck near 1, possibly below, given its unbalanced gender norms and toxic education systems. Latin America faces the same gender problem plus weak growth prospects, so I expect something around 1.2. Northern Europe has more egalitarian family structures and might hold near 1.5. The very religious societies are probably the only ones that will sustain 1.8. All of this could change with AI or changes in population composition. We will see. But on the current evidence, deep sub-replacement fertility is the “new new normal.” Unless we reorganize our societies, better learn to handle it as best we can.

We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…

Acho que é melhor nem começar a fazer perguntas sobre esta notícia... Não me apetece ser cancelado, banido ou silenciado mais uma vez nesta chafarica... Mas que apetece começar a fazer perguntas, apetece. Mas vou-me conter.

Oeiras é mesmo um Portugal à parte 😂 #Isaltino

Tesla: "You'll own nothing and be happy."