quant (is rebranding soon)

Why haven’t working hours decreased more? Keynes predicted substantial economic growth to lead to a 15-hour work week by 2030. He was right about growth, but way off the mark on labor/leisure hours. Why?

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch I think that choice is mostly network effects tbh

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Ah, I missed the context thought you meant the elasticity of quality wrt revenues, not elasticity of usership wrt quality. I would still disagree with the latter claim assuming that there are substitutes. Bluesky/Mastodon are free but evidently people choose not to use them.

Congressman @JakeAuch introduced a 50% excise tax on digital advertising. This would make in-person advertising more competitive and change the incentive structure for tech companies. SF should take note!

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Brother I just said quality would decline but the behavioral elasticity is probably small

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Okay so again, if quality won’t meaningfully decline and folks won’t be barred from using it, governments have a free money spigot with no meaningful consequences they haven’t yet used.

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Yes. That would do what you want but I think both of these are bad ideas

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch You could also place a per-account tax on social media services that increases the larger the service is (going from like 1¢ per account to $100 or something), which would be more parsimonious, yes. But taxing half of ad revenues would likely reduce usership as well.

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Well given that it’s nominally free, I think the elasticity wrt quality is not that large (on the extensive margin)

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch And if quality declines... what will happen to user counts?

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Yes, if you are omniscient, fine. The informational requirements of something like this are insurmountable.

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch The concern is that social media has negative externalities bc there are marginal social costs and individual cost/benefit calculations mean it is overused. Decreasing the marginal benefits of using social media also fixes the negative externality issue

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch They will just invest less in quality, and at sufficient levels quality will decline. There are various margins on which firms may respond to taxes. I’m quite confident you’d need very high taxes for the actual networks to turn down users.

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Because if we can tax half of Meta/X/etc’s ad revenue away and have no consequences for consumers in any way that reduces ownership, we clearly should have pulled that lever a decade ago.

@publicgoodsfan @landvaluetax @JakeAuch Marginal cost is incredibly small. Do you seriously think instagram would start kicking people off the site if we taxed ads?

@quant_____ @landvaluetax @JakeAuch If you decrease the profits firms can realize from providing a service, they tend to provide less of that service.

@johngfriedman Yea 6-4 lol

@quant_____ I was in transit, so only saw the score. England won?

I quite appreciate the French. But this makes me happy.

@johngfriedman Still watching?

@felpix_ Yes, for other reasons

this france v england gonna have its own wikipedia page

This game is absolutely insane

@landvaluetax @JakeAuch I’m not confident the externalities are large. I personally deleted instagram years ago to save time, but the evidence altogether is not very strong. Besides this, why would taxing advertising decrease consumption?

@quant_____ @JakeAuch Huge negative externalities from social media consumption, similar to cigarettes Maybe 50% is too high but 25% isn't

@BenShindel Oh yes lol

@quant_____ oh wait also you could just do log-y right?

This chart style is a MAJOR chart crime for three separate reasons, two of which inflate the perceived growth for longer stretches of continuous leadership, arbitrarily: 1) Going from 120-140 is lower relative growth than going from 100-120! (This is just how exponentials work). Every time the chart “resets” to 100, the growth will by nature look slower on the graph even if the rate is the same! 2) It’s not normalized by time in office in a coherent way, so of course ppl with longer stretches in office would experience more growth. 3) GDP growth in nearly all developed countries was fastest in the 2-3 decades following the world wars for obvious reasons, and these charts tend to start in the postwar period where there was the greatest growth potential. All of these things compound to make the author’s points (which aren’t very compelling if you plot the data in a more sensible way).

@ppavnr I wouldn’t personally do it but is selling peptides that bad?

Not sure how common of an experience this is - but deeply unfortunate when someone you went to high school/college with begins trafficking in peptides or selling courses in e-commerce

@BenShindel Ahhh I see exactly what you mean now. Thanks If you were to address this particular issue alone, would you just plot yoy growth in each year for each term?

Like, the y-axis is growth from the original baseline. So at an extreme example, going from 500 to 600 in a year looks as “steep” as going from 100 to 200, but the latter is actually 5x faster annual GDP growth! So if a country just experiences constant 5% annual GDP growth, it will look less steep at the start of a new administration on this chart.

public distrust of bureaucracy/admin is sufficiently large that its just probably underrated at this point

@BenShindel I do agree with 2 & 3

> "Every time the chart “resets” to 100, the growth will by nature look slower on the graph even if the rate is the same!" I don't get what you're saying. The indexing is such that 120 in t+1 always reflects 20% yoy growth. If the rate is the same, the slope will be the same, right? Maybe the point is that indexing obscures the real principal, and you should expect lower growth at these levels (in % terms), but this would just make earlier terms look better and later ones worse.

@outerspaceisaac or schizophrenia. framing is all the difference

@outerspaceisaac solipsism

what do you call that feeling where all of a sudden you become suspicious that everyone else is a bot