Comment by ericdykstra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericdykstra | Hacker News Reader

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Comments on a couple of the selections:

- Grit - I can see why it's caught on, it's pretty well-written and informative, but it's not one of the stronger books in the genre and I don't think it will stand the test of time. I recommend The Willpower Instinct - by Kelly McGonigal and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise - by Anders Ericsson in its place.

- The Rent Is Too Damn High - Matt Yglesias is an intellectually dishonest pundit and I recommend staying away from anything he publishes. He's a leading representative of what Nassim Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiot[1]. He deleted 3000 tweets praising Obamacare that look bad in retrospect[2][3]. He's also mentioned directly in the Podesta emails as a pundit to be "cultivated."[4] This article from 2011 [5] points out numerous examples of his sloppy reporting and intellectual dishonesty where he doesn't own his mistakes, deletes critical comments, etc.

1. https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211...

2. https://twitter.com/BuffaloBlueBear/status/79120869059868262...

3. https://twitter.com/JimmyPrinceton/status/791127776388583424 (check the whole thread)

4. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31954

5. http://www.chequerboard.org/2011/02/matt-yglesias-the-one-ma...

Can you provide a more clear link to evidence of your claim that Yglesias deleted 3000 tweets about Obamacare? I see images of a few tweets deleted. Perhaps Twitter is showing us different messages below the message you directly linked.

I don't have a link, but he deleted his whole tweet history a couple months ago. I never saw an explanation, but I doubt it had to do with his attitude towards Obamacare, which is well documented elsewhere, and which hasn't changed that much.

Sorry, while editing my post I ended up with a ridiculous-looking sentence (obviously all 3000 of those tweets weren't about Obamacare). It looks like at this point he's deleted almost all of his history all the way up through ~November 16th. At the time though it looked like it was just a block of tweets[1], which happened to include a couple of his most popular tweets ever (including the one screenshotted above about Obamacare). The timing of the original deletions was at the same time news was coming out about big premium increases under Obamacare next year, which is where the link between the tweet deletions and Obamacare came from. That may have just been a coincidence, though. It doesn't take away from the fact that he doesn't stand by the opinions he spews to 200k followers.

You can see in the 2nd link is my previous post that someone caught a screenshot of a tweet-deleter app spamming his timeline (this was in late October, I also saw those tweets in real-time), which means he's done another round of cleansing, basically deleting his entire tweet history.

1. https://twitter.com/edhendel/status/790994649972224002

Has anyone evaluated the actual arguments in the book? I've arrived at the view that the high cost of housing in the UK is causing us more problems than the obvious one of reducing incomes available for other forms of consumption or investment, and I would appreciate an insight.

The basic premise is that not only do restrictions on housing development make housing more expensive, but it creates an overall drag on the economy as well, because people that could be working in high productivity industries choose to work in less productive jobs to avoid a high cost of living. (Productivity in the economic sense of GDP per employee, not anything personal.)

For example, a great programmer turns down a job at Facebook because they want to have a family or afford a house. Instead, she takes a job at an insurance company in Columbus, OH. Or someone gets an aerospace degree but doesn't want to live in LA, so they don't work at SpaceX. It's hard to give examples that don't sound like they're demeaning the life choices people make, and the book is much better than my off the cuff ones. Plus he gives data as well as better explanations.

I cannot speak to the rest of Matt Yglesias' work, but I read TRiTDH. I found the book to ring true and be consistent with what I learned in my Masters of Urban Planning program and a decade's worth of reading books and news about urban development and economies.

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