huitzitziltzin

> The richer a country or region the less children there are.

Used to be true but now has changed. The richer have more children. See a recent survey on the new economics of the family by Mathias doepke of northwestern.

Not in one of the three main cases considered here. This is the Swedish “save to win” system - the number of lottery tickets depends on your bank account balance. (The other two cases for which they have data are more conventional lotteries.)

> start considering overdose deaths amongst addicts as suicide.

What in the world would that accomplish? Does this framing help us reduce these “suicides” ? Or is your proposal a way of helping us think there’s nothing we can do and ignoring it?

On the contrary it seems to me like an extremely unhelpful way of framing the problem.

Major daily newspapers are very good about this already.

Every time the Washington post uses the word ‘Amazon’ they note who their owner is. The New York Times has a public editor whose sole job it is to crap on the broader NYT organization when they get stuff exactly like this wrong.

There are many, many lower quality organizations which aren’t careful, but the major newspapers are good on this.

Subscribe to a major daily newspaper on physical paper???

No pop up ads, no auto play videos, no cookies, no tracking of any kind.

Few if any conspiracy theories appear in the major national dailies. Sure you can definitely quibble with the Post, NYT or WSJ on many issues but on average and outside of the editorial pages they are very good.

Except that we currently have no ability at all to make sure these models tell the truth? You could ask a LLM about a historical event and get weird BS as an answer. I think Facebook had a serious problem with its science language model a few months ago? Great teachers don’t scale is true, but LLM’s are not even minimally competent teachers.

Another interpretation is that this is generally how the FDIC likes to do things: take over on Friday and reopen on Monday. Not sure that will happen in this case but the regulators get two days to prepare to reopen, which at least in recorded US history is seamless and without risk for retail depositors.

I don’t think firms would fire a lot of employees (!) before first trying to access credit markets to do something as basic as cover a short term low-risk obligation operation like payroll.

There is a well-established market for covering short term corporate obligations like this. Many firms large and small avail themselves of it. Take your audited financial statements and you can find lenders. While there may be a few firms who can’t make payroll in the short term, even then I would expect layoffs would be a last resort.

This tweet thread seems written for maximum drama with a minimum of supporting information.

If saying I’d like more context and that I could buy OP’s claim makes me guilty of having strong and ‘insulting’ opinions… then IDK yeah I guess I do?

FWIW I’ve read a lot of history of US interventions in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. I have an opinion about most presidents in that regard - as I noted support by US presidents for murderous dictators is pretty common!

I don’t have a strong opinion about carter on that front which is why I asked for more. So far in this thread I’ve seen East Timor mentioned. Do you have anything else to offer?

Sorry man but both this

> deregulate transportation,

and this

> appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed

were and remain unambiguous policy wins. It’s not even close. There isn’t a serious economic argument in favor of high inflation or the pre carter transportation regulation scheme. (Source: myself, an economics professor.)

For a better evaluation of the “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context on who you are talking about. I could buy that one being a bad decision, though certainly not an uncommon error for a US president in the 20th century.

There are plenty which don’t. Look at the smaller US cities.

You can get large, relatively new houses in Youngstown, OH for less than $150/sq foot. Similar prices can be found in Omaha, NE or Iowa City, IA or Oklahoma City, OK. (For reference I looked for houses with at least four bedrooms in all places.)

This isn’t a matter of the cost of construction. It’s a matter of supply not keeping up with demand due to very very very stringent regulations on land use. None of this has to happen. This is a self-inflicted wound.

My wife is a native Spanish speaker and an ardent feminist to her core.

It has always really bothered her about Spanish that (for example) you refer to one million women as “ellas” but one million men OR one million women and one man as “ellos.”

Despite this, she just cannot get behind -x endings in Spanish.

Good luck to them but if there’s one thing we learned during the pandemic as educators it’s that large online lectures are awful and generally ineffective.

Very few of us economists will actually say “yes an impression is going to happen next year.” Nearly always we say things like: “we believe there is an elevated probability of a recession over X period.”

This isn’t to weasel out of taking responsibility. This is an extremely hard problem. (How many recessions have there been for which we have good data? Probably fewer than 20.)

The set of numbers which can be written with finitely many members of a finite set of symbols is countable, sure.

That doesn’t sound like the claim the author is making in the sentence I quoted but maybe I am being uncharitable?

This part:

> Here's how: consider the set of numbers that cannot be described using any finite collection of symbols. Such numbers must exist *because there are only a countably infinite number of numbers that can be described using a finite collection of symbols*, but there are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers.

That’s clearly wrong. The real numbers between 0 and 1 (an uncountable collection) are describable with a finite collection of symbols - the digits between 0 and 9. Each real number is an equivalence class of sequences with the same limit. (It’s been a while since I took real analysis but I believe this is the construction due to Weierstrass?)

What sort of madness would lead anyone to want to share a currency with Argentina of all places? No offense intended, but it’s one of the most aggressively mismanaged economies in South America. (Venezuela obviously is the winner in that category.)

Every time I read a review of this book when it came out, the review author would say something like “wow! great! So exciting, EXCEPT in this area *where I am an expert*, the authors got X, Y and Z badly wrong.”

There were reviews like that when it came out from people in a bunch of disciplines, certainly in anthropology and prehistory included.

Graeber’s prior book about Debt has been widely criticized in my own field. As a result I haven’t felt like it was worth the time to invest in this one even though the topic and the idea seem extremely interesting.

It seems like the authors have an axe to grind and a story to tell and whatever evidence they find against it is either ignored or misinterpreted.

Counting only half of his contributions to law and economics would be more than enough of a legacy

While I don’t endorse most of this piece, it’s worth pointing out that Detroit has not always been bleak. Within living memory it was a very prosperous city

Try seeing how fulfilled you are making the least money you’ve ever made! Maybe very fulfilled, maybe not at all.

If you don’t like what you are doing, do something else. I don’t know if it’s worth trying to project your personal dissatisfaction into some broad diagnosis of social ills. Many of the alternatives to the rat race are pretty dismal.

Sure, that’s a fair description of how he probably got started in his criminal behavior. But that’s not the situation he’s in now! He needs to think (or should be thinking) about how to minimize his time in jail.

He’s in serious serious legal jeopardy and he keeps opening his mouth. That’s a very, very bad strategy.

I guess to answer my own question he probably has his head so far up his own … that he can’t imagine why he should take anyone’s advice about anything, including lawyers.

How does this guy have two parents who are law professors and do things like this? And his various interviews!

No lawyer would tell him that’s a good idea. Just shut up! Maybe he’s still in his rebellious-teenager, parents-are-always-wrong phase?

If on the other hand he knows there’s no way to avoid serious time he should just plead guilty and go for the best deal he can get!

This is so mystifying.

Did they commit a crime? This is not a trolling question. There is no doubt in my mind they defrauded their investors.

But they are not a bank and are not subject to those regulations. IIUC, their terms of service are written in such a way that they became the legal owner of crypto deposited with them.

I am no lawyer and certainly I think the founder deserves to go to jail for running what seems to me like a naked Ponzi scheme, but to charge the guy with a crime you need to satisfy certain legal definitions.

Probably this is something which just takes time but it may take time because the prosecutor will need a legal theory? I would love to see comments from a lawyer about this.

This seems like the most likely section, though I am not a lawyer:

https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=7.48.120

If so, one issue this might turn on is the establishment of a causal link between something these firms are doing and a negative health impact.

That’s going to be extremely difficult to establish and is far, far from established. I’m not unsympathetic to this case but I am not that optimistic.

Happy to hear a legal perspective though.

Is there a specific law that these firms are supposed to have violated? (Does there need to be? I am not a lawyer.)

Does the school district have standing to sue on behalf of the students? (Is the injury that they pay more for mental health services for students?)

I’m genuinely curious. There’s a surface analogy to the cases against opioid manufacturers and distributors, but those are controlled substances whereas YouTube is clearly not.

There isn’t even a clear causal effect of the from YouTube -> depression, IMO. Research on this has been quite low quality.

And what about the role of the parents who are the owners of the phones on which their children run TikTok?

Again genuine curiosity here, not trying to be a jerk.

Julia Computing offers Julia Hub. Not sure if that’s what you’re looking for but maybe.

Since I have taken Econ 101 and taught it, it’s worth pointing out that literally no one thinks this is how housing markets work.

You can draw a set of supply and demand curves which keep prices the same under a supply increase, but not bc “large corporate interests keep prices pinned.” More important is that that special case is not relevant to housing markets.

There is also relevant empirical work on this issue. Increase supply and prices will fall. I’d bet you a billion dollars on that outcome.

Yeah. Which would probably reveal that not only are content moderation decisions really hard, they are extremely boring, require a huge number of meetings, and probably in many cases involve consulting lawyers

The revelations I have read so far have been extremely underwhelming. Content moderation of any kind is hard. The easy cases don’t take up most of your time or energy. These emails read like people doing their best. Maybe my decision would have been different but maybe not.