Principal Research Associate, Urban Institute; Adjunct Prof, GWU. Studies apprenticeship at Urban. Writes on Buchanan, Nutter, and 20th C. history of economics.
I'm pleased to share a draft of my new paper, "W.H. Hutt, economic liberalism, and "iron-clad" white rule before the rise of South African apartheid"
I focus on Hutt's first twenty years in South Africa, 1928-1948, to shed light on what came later.
155 years ago today John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, setting in motion a long chain of events that would one day give us National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
If you like this and are interested in an economist's take on what came next, the importance of Reconstruction, and the tragedy of its failure check out
@TrevonDLogan
's paper on Black politicians in reconstruction:
After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.
I know there are lots of people upset because major news media outlets are giving MMT coverage, but trust me in the Great Recession it was even worse: they gave Austrian economics coverage.
I think if more economists spent more time talking to the people theyโre studying as a part of the research our understanding would be so much more advanced than it is now.
In 46 seconds he has documented the age of the establishment and the tenure of three employees. Incredibly efficient longitudinal linked employer-employee data collection happening here. Forget VP, get this guy a job with the LEHD at Census.
Woke up to this. I think itโs time to block Noah. I remember when he was a normal, dorky economist. Heโs gotten pretty unhinged (even before this). You canโt just jump on here and claim young people are cheering slaughtering babies. Itโs a lie and it stokes conflict.
The frustrating thing about this is Fryer knows the Durlauf and Heckman criticism of the paper as well as anyone and he knows thatโs what most economists think is the problem and he just pretends it was that people didnโt like the result. 1/2
โWe didnโt find any racial bias in police shootings.โ
Economist Roland Fryer tells
@bariweiss
at
@uaustinorg
about the 2016 paper on policing bias that led to his need for an โarmed guardโ for over a month and the academics who told him not to publish.
One thing you just know is that Jared Bernstein repeatedly drilled into Biden that Christina Romer was right and Larry Summers was wrong and the economy runs on aggregate demand, not vibes.
I, for one, do not think economists provided the technology for take off growth at all. I donโt think we as economists can plan or design that. I do think it happened to the human race and that it is understandably a big part of what economists study. But we didnโt do this.
Iโm seven years out of my PhD and Iโve actually never been invited to do a seminar or workshop. Panels and briefings galore but not that.
In any case, I was invited this morning to the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke. It made my week - a nice affirmation.
Gaza is 140 sq miles so thatโs 43 bombs per square mile. My neighborhood, Kingโs Park West in Fairfax, is 3 square miles. Maybe yours is similar. Thatโs 129 bombs dropped in my neighborhood. Two million people are living that now, and who knows what theyโll announce tomorrow.
Dozens of fighter jets and helicopters attacked a series of terrorist targets of the Hamas terrorist organization throughout the Gaza Strip.
So far, the IAF has dropped about 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets.
This guyโs family was among about thirty killed. At a building targeted in Southern Gaza (where they were supposed to go to avoid the bombing).
Now be serious: Do you think there was intelligence Hamas was there or do you think there was intelligence
@AlJazeera
was there?
Aljazeera' s brave veteran journalist Wael Dahdouh's wife, son and daughter were killed in an Israeli airstrike which targeted a shelter house they had fled to. Wael received the news while on air covering the nonstop Israeli strikes on Gaza!
@nhannahjones
What's nuts is that you have responded at length. Desmond/NHC, Desmond/Rosenthal, Dunmore, etc. I've been reading back and forths on these since 2019. What they mean when they say "you don't respond" is "I'm mad you're not persuaded and I have written yet another thing about it".
"No friend of the school-choice movement (and no historian) should whitewash the unambiguously segregationist midcentury Virginia voucher program."
I've got a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal:
Libertarians could have spent the last 30 years fighting to elect justices who would protect bodily autonomy but we supported fascists who like tax cuts for the wealthy. The gap between libertarianism the ideology and libertarianism in practice is just gut-wrenching.
The Climate Change Committee report that claims that Net Zero measures will *make* money is based on post-Keynesian model? Bit like getting the Ludwig von Mises Institute to model the effects of inflation targeting. Not exactly mainstream econ!
I remember Thanksgiving, 2009, my father in law (an engineer who lives in a DC suburb) started explaining to his high school age sons that the Great Recession happened because of the federal debt and I was like "hoooooly shit stop stop stop just give me the floor for two minutes"
One of the most cynical things about the Cato immigration crew to me has been this idea dating to Friedman that we can have open borders but that means we canโt have the welfare state. Bullshit. Nowrastehโs own research shows immigrants use means tested welfare at lower rates.
The New Deal and Great Society were only possible *after* the borders were closed. Ryan wants to copy the 1920s immigration laws that made The New Deal and Great Society possible.
I wrote a book about that (among other things).
I think:
1. PhDs are convinced in different ways than non-PhDs, and
2. PhDs in different fields are convinced by different types of evidence/argument.
Does this make PhDs per se the issue or is it even right to think PhDs are worse than non-PhDs? I donโt know.
This is not a subtweet of anyone in particular and it's going to annoy some people since I have a lot of PhD followers/friends and also I'm a stubborn guy myself but...one thing I'm noticed is that once someone gets a PhD, it become 10x harder to convince them they're wrong.
My forthcoming Journal of the History of Economic Thought paper, "James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the โRadically Irresponsibleโ One Person, One Vote Decisions," is now available on their preprints page!:
Itโs really important for people to understand that what is happening now is much worse than the Great Recession. I understand itโs hard to process that we are living through a series of historic crises, but itโs imperative that we understand thatโs whatโs happening.
This second bill should absolutely be bigger...but for perspective, the entire American Recovery and Reinvestment Act โ aka โtheโ stimulus bill for the Great Recession โ was $831 billion. CARES was $2.2 trillion. This is progress!
Theyโd been there for days. Hamas wasnโt there. Itโs not about Hamas, itโs about Gazans. Understand that, please: Itโs not about Hamas, itโs about Gazans.
My paper on Milton Friedman, democracy, and the IMF is now out at History of Economic Ideas! I find HEI is very difficult to access, but a draft is also on SSRN and Iโm happy to share of prints.
Would you believe that Thomas Nixon Carver, the professor who taught the main class on socialist economics at Harvard from ca. 1901-1920s, also wrote an essay describing Marx's Capital as an example of "crank literature" in 1902?
We need to stop acting like โskills based immigrationโ is โsoft on immigrationโ. Skills based immigration is a euphemism for keeping out immigrants without the right degrees, complexion, or earning capacity and who could benefit most from coming. 1/2
Because restrictive immigration policies and costs of migration select for migrants that are relatively successful compared to natives.
This requires only a rudimentary understanding of factors in play here. Did GMU fail you or are you being deliberately obtuse?
In a country supposedly infected by "white supremacy," "white privilege" and "systemic racism" how did all of these non-white minority groups get to be SO successful in the US, outearning the typical White American household?
@Ravarora1
@bariweiss
@CHSommers
@stevenfhayward
I am pleading with economists to stop assuming terms like "public goods" or "shortages" or "efficient" are used by normal people the same way they are used in a technical context.
This new plagiarism round is getting unbelievably stupid very quickly and you can tell they're not serious when you look at their "solution." They're literally asking them to put quotes around the name of a survey. /1
"factors that affect pay โฆ hours worked, willingness to do โฆ dangerous work, willingness to relocate, willingness to do technical work without people contact โฆ After controlling for all 25 factors, โฆ gender pay gap not only disappears but reverses"
If more people accepted that economics is the study of how the economy works rather than the science of some verbalized optimization problem weโd be better for it. I donโt even mind neoclassical optimization as a tool but building it into economistsโ self conception is a mistake.
From Caroline's 3rd grade teacher: "Good afternoon! We are studying economics, and Caroline told us you are an economist. Would you be interested in coming to our class for a lesson/presentation/discussion? If so, when would work best for you?"
"Art Laffer has a tendency to shoot his mouth off when he shouldn't"
- Milton Friedman, 1972
Every project I launch feels more fun than the last. Can't ask for more in life than that.
He's probably researched it more than me, but is a volcanic island in the middle of an ocean covering half the Earth really the best place for your survival bunker (especially with rising sea levels)?
I feel like I'd shoot for somewhere remote and inland.
Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a massive $100 million compound in Hawaii with an underground bunker, escape hatch, and a โblast-resistant door.โ
The 5,000-square-foot underground bunker will be self-sufficient with its own energy, food, and water supply,
@WIRED
reports.
People assume too much about what these numbers mean sometimes but I assure you they mean something and itโs absolute true and good that real GDP per capita has been on a relentless and historical unprecedented upswing.
@jimpfaff
@GovofCO
The Gadsden flag is a proud symbol of the American revolution and a iconic warning to Britain or any government not to violate the liberties of Americans. It appears on popular American medallions and challenge coins through today and Ben Franklin also adopted it to symbolize the
I just found out my paper on Warren Nutter's involvement in undermining Salvador Allende in Chile was accepted for publication at Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology!
A revised version of the paper is here:
Interacting on here with
@NathanTankus
about something totally different tonight reminds me that over the last two months Iโve realized I was wrong here and he was right. I never revisited the thread though. Iโm not sure appropriate protocol but it seems like I should say it! /1
As an instructor at GW and an alum I find this extremely troubling. I donโt want to make presumptions about what these people (who I assume were students) were intending to communicate, but they are responsible for anticipating that others would understand it as a threat. /1
Member of Congress talking about how theyโre going to turn the home of two million people โinto a parking lot.โ
Genocidal, demonic, death cult shit.
People are missing a sense of proportion when this isnโt the most pressing threat right now.
That Rashida Tlaib is facing a pathetic censure attempt but Rep. Max Miller faced zero pushback from his colleagues over this deranged comment tells you everything you need to know about the motives here.
In light of developments in Florida and West Virginia around academic freedom, I thought I'd share a new working paper of mine:
โA purge of bigots is more important than one of Communistsโ: Robert Singleton, James M. Buchanan, and Angela Davis at UCLA
I guess itโs not strictly a lie because Iโm sure he got these types of responses he describes but thatโs definitely not why he got the backlash on the result. It wasnโt because people didnโt like the answer. 2/2
Today is the anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende. Most people know about the Chicago School's relationship with Pinochet. In this paper, I share a lesser known connection between Chicago grad Warren Nutter and U.S. intervention in Chile.
I've always found it strange that people act like Ancient Astronaut Theory diminishes ancient peoples', when it's just an elaboration on what ancient peoples said happened: beings came from the sky and provided wisdom of various sorts and even stayed and intermingled.
@historyinmemes
No, aliens did not build the pyramids. Our ancestors were given the first engineering knowledge from the so-called "guardians of the sky" who, according to the Ancient Astronaut Theory, were flesh and blood extraterrestrials who visited Earth long ago and imparted knowledge. They
@opinonhaver
Yep. โThere can actually be multiple bad things, not just The One Bad Thingโ and โthe best thing may still be badโ are hard realities for a lot of people to embrace.
I think itโs that we think in hot takes now and that means it needs to stay short, simple, and extreme.
R&R at Journal of the History of Economic Thought!
This was a very nice ref report intro!: "This is a terrific paper! I have no doubt that it will be nominated for the HES best article prize. So many puzzles are cleared up and new ones opened."
You can learn a lot about a white personโs worldview from whether they think the default assumption is that a Black person who got a job is underqualified or a Black person who got a job is overqualified. A lot about their understanding of how society works is built into that.
In any event, the kind of racism Tucker is throwing at KBJ happens to Black people *all the time* in the legal profession. We're constantly asked to *re*prove that we're "qualified" by white people who are never satisfied no way.
And all of us develop different strats to deal...
Our offer was accepted!
3.7 acres practically at the peak of the Blue Ridge, a few hundred feet from Shenandoah National Park and about half a mile from the Appalachian Trail, with a cozy little 240 sq foot shack (โcabinโ seems too grandiose) that comfortably sleeps all of us.
The Iraq war was one of the main things that radicalized me as a 13 year old. Sure I was very cringe about it, but just because youโre cringe doesnโt mean youโre not right
You could certainly elaborate that Friedman was personally opposed to segregation, as I do in a forthcoming RHETM article. But thereโs literally not a single thing in this paragraph thatโs inaccurate. Pretending thatโs not true is unhealthy for the history of economics.
@delong
@amw_stanford
I have no idea what he's thinking, but possibly something like that. I believe Ford. Something like that would be consistent with this level of anger which seems like it COULD be genuine (although people at this level can be pathological liars, so maybe it's a show).
@ProfDBernstein
@teasri
@Econ_Marshall
@JakeMGrumbach
You think Friedman was prescient because shortly before the end of a 15 year guerrilla war that the white supremacist government was losing Friedman foresaw a violent aftermath and attributed it to... the lack of white rule? This is prescient?
Mentioning Neumark and Wascher's (2000) reanalysis of Card and Krueger (1994) with EPI data but not mentioning Card and Krueger's (2000) reanalysis of Card and Krueger (1994) with payroll data in the same AER issue. ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ๐ฉ
There are lots of reasons why I think itโs insane that economists donโt do more qualitative research but the biggest reason is that I donโt understand why you wouldnโt be more excited than anything else to talk to people who live the reality of the thing youโre captivated by.