Ben Meadows

Well how about that

I’m starting to wonder if our (well-intentioned) ideas of “boundaries” have become *walls* to true-community building. The most meaningful acts of love are at a minimum… deeply inconvenient, and usually are painful. But worth it.

The demand for forecasts goes up when there’s an unforeseen shock, which is when forecasts become the least accurate.

Alternatively, I’ve never been more excited to unleash my students’ raw talent on gnarly research questions. On pace for best student projects ever.

I still don't think we have crystal-clear, I-will-hear-no-objections evidence of AI's effect on the macroeconomy. And yet. If you asked me "what would change your mind here?" I'd probably say, "emerging evidence of a productivity boom combined with a major slowdown in tech sector hiring and employment." This week, we got both.

Interviewer: What's your biggest strength? Me: Machine Learning. Interviewer: What's 6 + 9? Me: 0. Interviewer: Incorrect. It's 15. Me: It's 15. Interviewer: What's 4 + 20? Me: It's 15.

(Pulls up a chair) “and you won’t believe the alarming norms that have formed around it, creating billions of dollars in economic value a year from a fish that’s almost never kept for consumption. ”

Hate that our state is used as a measuring post of "poorer" ... *but* there are many things that make Alabama amazing that folks continually ignore.

@mikekofoed Keep on doing the good work! We need economic literacy more than ever and I hate our professions aversion to educating the public.

Just got booked for Memphis, Knoxville, Nashville, KSL, and the Deseret News. I can already feel my kids rolling their eyes. Gonna be a crazy day!

In recent weeks, some political and academic commentators have celebrated the decline in the trade deficit and linked it to tariffs. However, the latest data — including today’s release — confirm the opposite narrative. The deficit surged in early 2025 as firms front-loaded imports ahead of the tariffs. In the following months, imports fell (and with them the deficit) due to elevated inventories. In the latest month, likely as inventories were depleted, the deficit has returned to its starting point — confirming the more solid post-tariff analyses by serious economists.

My best guess at what's going on is that we lack sufficiently developed theories to rigorously forecast anything and so we have to guess at everything. We then fall back on our intuitions about what kinds of guesses feel reasonable. And intuitions are hard to update.

15% of the population of Ireland entered the US between 1851 and 1860 9% of the population of Norway entered the US in the 1880s 6% of the population of Italy entered the US from about 1900-1910

“They told me eating two large pizzas would make me gain weight, but that didn’t happen after I threw up the pizza.”

If you want to shop at farmers markets, go for it. But, the middle here isn't billionaires. It's truck drivers, packers, forklift drivers, refrigeration systems etc. It's a logistical miracle that allows American's to buy potatoes 4-times cheaper than at farmers markets.

Costco Rotisserie chickens are cheaper per pound than raw, typically. Boomers keep using “splurge” in the weirdest ways…

“CEO of Hot Pockets ™ says that ‘most, if not all’ meals will be fully replaced with Hot Pockets ™ within the next 12 to 18 months”

Populists across the spectrum, left and right, hate economists. I joked its some puzzle but I think there's a simple reason. It's not about liking capitalism or something. And the disagreement is almost always about how to reason about problems, not about values. Populists want solutions. Economists offer trade-offs. I'm not the first to point this out but its a huge distinction. A carbon tax doesn't solve climate change. It prices carbon so people make better decisions at the margin. To the populist, that sounds like accepting the problem. Same with manufacturing. A tariff doesn't create jobs. It shifts them, from the millions of workers in industries that buy steel to the 160,000 who make it. To the populist, "protect American workers" sounds like a solution. To the economist, the question is: which American workers? We can go down the list. Rent control intends to help renters. It produces housing shortages. The populist sees the economist opposing rent control and concludes: you don't care about poor people. As Sowell put it: "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." I think, not surprising, the economists are right. It's more than just two different approaches. Thinking in trade-offs forces you to trace each step: who actually bears the cost of a tariff, what happens to housing supply when you cap rents, how a carbon tax changes behavior at every margin. You can't skip ahead to the answer. You have to follow the chain. This is why economists spend careers doing exactly this and still argue about the answers. That's what it looks like when you take the problems seriously. The populist skips all of this based on some intuition pump. Think of the person on a group project who's so confident in the answer that they never bother learning the material. That's populist economic reasoning from inside the discipline. The confidence comes from not having looked at the trade-offs closely enough to see how hard they are. Stewart is the populist left. Oren Cass is the populist right, and he's more dangerous because he sounds like an economist, and plays one on TV, without putting in the work of thinking about trade-offs.

@asymmetricinfo I pay for frontier model GPT. Every day I see it do impossibly difficult stuff in second, but also fail at stuff that normal professionals in my field can do. I expect that to continue for a long time; we'll eventually re-calibrate our ideas of what's difficult and what isn't.

Oh so the model is just a PhD student