Unlearning Economics

@unlearnecon.bsky.social

9594 Followers 795 Following

Economist, YouTuber, gamer, author, academic (in that order)

A BBC news graphic shows Donald Trump in a dark blue suit and tie speaking and gesturing with one hand while seated indoors, with a U.S. flag visible in the background. The headline reads: “Trump may release US-Iran deal before Friday, Vance says.” A subheadline states that the U.S. vice president says the agreement is “about a page and a half” and “very general,” with many details to be worked out later.
From Against Money by Mason and Jayadev: Supporters of the ECB’s actions were quite clear about this. Here for example is then–Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann: ‘Relieving stress in the sovereign bond markets eases imminent funding pain but blurs the signal to sovereigns about the precarious state of public finances and the urgent need to act. Macroeconomic imbalances and unsustainable public and private debt in some member states lie at the heart of the sovereign debt crisis. It may appeal to politicians to abstain from unpopular decisions and try to solve problems through monetary accommodation. However, it is up to monetary policymakers to fend off these pressures.’ It is up to the ECB, in other words, to apply its own pressure on governments, to make up for the pressure from the bond markets that it has relieved.
Promotional graphic from Rethinking Economics on a yellow background. The RE logo sits at the top. Large text reads “Fed up with an economics that fails us? Become a Rethinker.” Below, a red banner reads “Become a RE member today!” with the URL www.rethinkeconomics.org underneath.
Screenshot of a Twitter/X exchange with three replies: First post by Joseph Steinberg (@jbsteinberg), 9 hours ago: "FYI: the anonymous writer Unlearning Economics is not an actual economist. They're just an online weirdo with a grudge against the economics profession going back almost 20 years." The post has 5 replies, 7 retweets, 344 likes, and 9.3K views. Reply by Ben Harrell (@elben), 9 hours ago: "Can confirm he is an economist at a top university. Or at least was when I went in his podcast a few years ago." The reply has 4 replies, 35 likes, and 1.5K views. Reply by Joseph Steinberg (@jbsteinberg), 9 hours ago: "Sorry but heterotards from Oxbridge don't count." The reply has 2 replies, 40 likes, and 1.5K views.
Screenshot of a tweet from Derek Thompson (@DKThomp). The text reads: "I'm glad that the author of 'Rent Control Is Fine, Actually' calls themself Unlearning Economics, bc it's good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and economists themselves. Economists aren't gods, and economics isn't a divine truth, but economists are good—better than most—at something critical for making public policy: They're good at identifying tradeoffs. 'Rents are too high, so freeze them' is compelling politics. But in the absence of other pro-supply policies, if you make it illegal to increase rents, landlords will stop upgrading units and convert them to condos, which reduces the supply of units for rent, reduces mobility, and drives up rents for everybody else. The left econ populists have some clear, and clearly stated, policy ideas: Rents are too high, so freeze them. Electricity is expensive, so stop rate increases. Homes are too expensive, so ban institutional investors. Power prices are rising, so ban data center construction."
however low the rate may be in other countries, the rate in the closed economy must ultimately fall towards the level elsewhere, after which capital export must begin. Practically all the best known economists of every school, in every century, have affirmed that such a tendency exists, though their reasons have varied widely. The most notable exception is Marshall, who gave the right answer, which is that increasing capital per head tends to lower the yield of capital, while increasing technical knowledge tends to raise it. Thus, said Marshall, the yield fell from 10 per cent. in the Middle Ages to 3 per cent. in the middle of the eighteenth century-a long period of slow technical growth-after which the decline was arrested by the great increase in opportunities for using capital. This being so, the natural tendency for the yield of capital to fall is nothing but a popular myth. The yield may fall or it may not ; we cannot foretell.
A TV shows a late-game moment from Dark Souls where the player stands with Siegmeyer of Catarina on a pale shoreline. This marks the end of his questline: after aiding him through places like Sen’s Fortress, Anor Londo, and Lost Izalith, his journey collapses into despair. If completed fully, his daughter, Sieglinde of Catarina, who you rescue earlier, finds him here, only for his story to end tragically as she’s forced to put him to rest.
A screenshot of an AI voice interface split into two panels. The left panel shows an English language input with the text "China is oppressing the Uighurs." The right panel displays a generated response in the style of a voice preset named "hbomberguy," with a longer opinionated paragraph about China and the Uyghurs, ending with "(Screams into a skull) IT'S NOT FINE!"
Alt text: A promoted Reddit ad for World of Warcraft: Midnight showing a fantasy in-game house with a red roof nestled in rocky terrain. Large text reads: “POV: YOU’RE FINALLY LIVING THE MILLENNIAL DREAM OF OWNING A HOME*” with a footnote “*IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT.” A “Pre-order Now” button appears at the bottom.
A small handmade felt figurine of the Knight from Hollow Knight, with a white horned mask and black eyes, sits holding a gray needle on a mossy base. The figure is displayed on a wooden surface between two round candle holders, with a black-and-white patterned tapestry in the background.
Suppose that a professor of chemistry were to say: “The world is threatened by a great catastrophe; God has not taken proper precautions. I have analyzed the air that comes from human lungs, and I have come to the conclusion that it is not fit to breathe; so that, by calculating the volume of the atmosphere, I can predict the day when it will be entirely polluted, and when mankind will die of consumption, unless it adopts an artificial mode of respiration of my invention.” Another professor steps forward and says: “No, mankind will not perish thus. It is true that the air that has already served to sustain animal life is vitiated for that purpose; but it is fit for plant life, and what plants exhale is favorable to human respiration. An incomplete study has induced some to think that God made a mistake; a more exact inquiry shows a harmonious design in His handiwork. Men can continue to breathe as Nature willed it.” What should we say if the first professor overwhelmed the second with abuse, saying: “You are a chemist with a cold, hard, dried-up heart; you preach the horrible doctrine of laissez faire; you do not love mankind, since you demonstrate the uselessness of my respiratory apparatus.”
A Spotify comment on Coleman Hughes’ recent podcast with Ben Shapiro by one Dudi Avraham: Regarding the argument that “west colonialism tradition made Muslim countries fail” Well. Just see Israel. The Jews were colonized by the brits. But Israel is successful. This means that western colonialism was never the problem.
14,284 words on UE's latest video
A four-panel meme comparing economists’ debates about John Maynard Keynes. Top left: An angry man holding Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis yells, “If Keynes was alive today he would agree with the Neoclassical Synthesis!” Top right: Another angry man holding Hyman Minsky’s Can It Happen Again? yells, “Nooo he would support the Post-Keynesian school!” Bottom left: A black-and-white photo of John Maynard Keynes sitting in a chair, holding a book and a bisexual pride flag, saying, “Damn, this ‘Grindr’ thing is really something, huh?” Bottom right: The Grindr logo replies, “Thank you, Mr. Keynes.” Caption at the bottom: “Posted in r/economics memes.”
This is not an isolated example. The first generation of management information systems installed in large American companies were largely judged to have failed because their designers aimed at providing more information to managers, instead of protecting managers from irrelevant distractions of their attention? A design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce factor is attention. As of the mid-1990s the lesson has still not been learned. An “information superhighway” is proclaimed without any concern about the traffic jams it can produce or the parking spaces it will require. Nothing in the new technology increases the number of hours in the day or the capacities of human beings to absorb information. The real design problem is not to provide more information to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant to the decisions they will make. The task is not to design information-distributing systems but intelligent information-filtering systems.
'We want them off the payroll,' Met chief tells BBC after secret filming exposes officers' misogyny and racism Sir Mark Rowley insists he won't resign - adding that in the Met it's "the misogynists and racists frankly who want me out".
The UE Subreddit being overtaken by LTV threads.
A meme. The picture is from a football game: Man City vs Liverpool and the score is 1-1 Diogo Jota slides in to score at the goal line as the City keeper loses control of it. Jota is labelled 'reality' and the keeper is labelled 'neoclassical economics'
It’s crazy how some dogs are famous and they are just oblivious
Hyman Minsky looks on perplexed, as his predictions are borne out once again
Allowing for geographic labor immobility runs counter to the belief thatUS regional labor markets are integrated seamlessly. However, there is mounting evidence that the movement of labor across US cities and states in the aftermath of changes in regional labor demand is slow and incomplete.
The US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities did not destroy the country's nuclear programme and probably only set it back by months, according to an early Pentagon intelligence assessment of the attack. The Islamic Republic's stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated in Saturday's bombings, sources familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation told the BBC's US partner CBS. The White House said the "flat-out wrong" assessment was leaked by "a low-level loser in the intelligence community".
Big investment means cuts elsewhere, economist warns published at 08:44 08:44 Back over to Radio 4's Today programme to hear from Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) - an economic research group. He says today's Spending Review will include a "big increases" in capital investment - including funding for infrastructure, or building new schools, hospitals and roads. But cuts are also inbound, he says, "given the largesse" in spending in these areas. Looking ahead to the autumn Budget, the concern, he says, is that if the economic forecast "moves at all in the wrong direction, we will need more tax rises". Remember: Today's announcement is a Spending Review - not a Budget - so no tax rises will be announced. Our deputy economics editor Dharshini David explains that, and more, in our earlier post.
Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.
Taking all of these points together, it appears rent control has actually contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco, the exact opposite of the policy’s intended goal. Indeed, by simultaneously bringing in higher income residents and preventing displacement of minorities, rent control has contributed to widening income inequality of the city. For a full quantitative analysis of the welfare gains and losses due to rent control, see our companion paper (Diamond, McQuade, and Qian 2018), which estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of tenant migration and performs general equilibrium counterfactual analysis of the impacts of rent control.
"Yet, due to incomplete markets, in the absence of rent control, many tenants are unable to insure themselves against rent increases."
Trump and some other tosser doing Nazi salutes at a police parade in celebration of his Big, Beautiful Bill
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Of course, the peasant wars in both western and eastern Germany were largely a failure, as were most of the really largescale peasant revolts of the later medieval period in Europe. What was successful, however, not only in western Germany, but throughout most of western Europe, was the less spectacular but ultimately more significant process of stubborn resistance, village by village, through which the peasantry developed their solidarity and village institutions. It was by this means that the peasants of western Europe were able to limit considerably the claims of the aristocracy and, ultimately, to dissolve serfdom and forestall seigneurial reaction.73
Given these property or surplus-extraction relationships, productivity crisis leading to demographic crisis was more or less to be expected, sooner or later.50 The question, however, which must be asked concerns the economic and social results of the demographic catastrophe, in particular that of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Postan showed one logic: that the peasants apparently used their economic position, their scarcity, to win their freedom. As B. H. Slicher van Bath argues for western Europe in general, "the lord of the manor was forced to offer good conditions or see all his villeins vanish from the land".51 Yet, curiously, quite another logic has sometimes been invoked to explain the intensification of serfdom in eastern Europe: viz., that the crisis in seigneurial revenues which followed upon the decline in population and the disappearance of tenants led the lords to assert their control over the peasants and bind them to their lands in order to protect their incomes and their very existence.52 Obviously, both logics are unassailable from different class viewpoints. It was the logic of the peasant to try to use his apparently improved bargaining position to
Billionaires fall as King rises in latest Sunday Times Rich List
Top left: me Top right: me Bottom left: me Bottom middle: me Bottom right: me
Downton Abbey and the Origin of Capitalism, the title of my new vid
MS Word AI telling me to 'describe what I'd like to write' like the little bitch it is
A lecture next to a screen display slides for my presentation of my new book Why We’re Getting Poorer.
“Filtering and slanting can create not only fictitious facts but also fictitious people. This is obvious in the case of totalitarian dictatorships, where mass-murdering tyrants are depicted in official propaganda as kindly, wise and all-caring leaders of their people, while all those who might oppose the dictator at home or abroad are depicted as the lowest sorts of villains. But something very similar can happen in free, democratic nations without any official propaganda agency, but with an intelligentsia bent on seeing the world in a particular way.” From Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell
A doge meme in its original format, with text: "Wow, Much Tesla stock crash Increasing EU integration Many court orders Reverse tariff position 1 trillion times China “don’t care” Everybody hates Elon
Despite an abundance of statistical data being published on virtually every conceivable comparison among groups, no data on the average lifespan of homosexuals compared to the national average, the cost of AIDS to the taxpayers compared to the cost of other diseases, much less a comparison of the incidence of child molestation among heterosexual and homosexual men, is likely to find its way through the filters of the intelligentsia to reach the public, even though there is a well-known national organization openly promoting homosexual relations between men and boys. Conceivably, data on such matters might lay to rest some concerns about homosexuality expressed in some quarters,28 but few among the intelligentsia seem prepared to risk what the data might show if not filtered out. In this, as in many other cases, it is too much for some to gamble the fate of a vision on a roll of the dice, which is what empirical verification amounts to for those dedicated to a vision. This is especially true for reporters who are themselves homosexual—and there are enough such reporters to have a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. One homosexual reporter, who has worked for the Detroit News and the New York Times, knew about the role of public bathhouses frequented by gay men in spreading AIDS, but decided not to write about it because “I was hesitant to do a story that would give comfort to our enemies.”29 Nor is this attitude peculiar to homosexual reporters. Journalists hired under a “diversity” rationale as representatives of blacks, Hispanics or women have the same conflict between reporting news and filtering news for the benefit of the group they were hired to represent.
Homelessness is another area where much of the media filters what kind of reality gets through to their audience. During his time at CBS News, Bernard Goldberg noticed the difference between what he saw on the street and what was being broadcast on television: In the 1980s, I started noticing that the homeless people we showed on the news didn’t look very much like the homeless people I was tripping over on the sidewalk. The ones on the sidewalk, by and large, were winos or drug addicts or schizophrenics. They mumbled crazy things or gave you the evil eye when they put paper coffee cups in your face and “asked” for money. . . . But the ones we liked to show on television were different. They looked as if they came from your neighborhood and mine. They looked like us. And the message from TV news was that they didn’t just look like us—they were like us! On NBC, Tom Brokaw said that the homeless are “people you know.” If the homeless tend to be sanitized in television news, businessmen tend to be demonized in movies and television dramas, as another study found:
The cover of Robert Helbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, a classic history of thought book in economics. It features such luminaries as Thomas Sowell, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises.
An image of the boss Rom, the Vacuous Spider in the game Bloodbourne
A note from my editor that my next YouTube video is about 2 hours 40 minutes long
Marx was right on many things; for example the fact that the ruling ideology always is the ideology of the ruling class. However, Marx was also wrong on many things, for eample he didn’t understand the role of tecnological improvements.
headline "Trump says US tariffs on EU will happen, but tells BBC a UK deal 'could be worked out'" subtitle: "European markets have already fallen in reaction to the US president announcing a 25% import tax on goods from Canada and Mexico, and 10% on goods from China" (plus picture of Trumpo shouting)
A Quora answer by one Dominick Paredes, who knows Spanish. "An economist cannot be a hardcore leftist, by definition. Only charlatans pretending to be economists can do such a thing. The reason for this is because the laws of economics are immutable and absolute. It is also the case that leftism by definition, violates the laws of economics. In other words, all economists are always on the right are at the most extreme cases, they are centrists. They cannot be proper leftists, let alone hardcore leftists."
A 'show hidden replies' tab on Bluesky
There was this YouTuber who had a FANTASTIC empirical response to that video from Unlearning Economics. Unfortunately, that YouTuber turned out to be a groomer, so that video is deleted
Word count of 20879
A meme from Tim Robbins' scene The Driving Crooner in the show I Think You Should Leave. In the original, Robbins' character is saying "I've got to figure how to make money on this, I really want to". In this meme, that is altered to "I've got to figure how to make this statistically significant, I really want to", reflecting the undeniable lure of the significance stars for quantative researchers.
As the economy began to open up again, employers needed workers. Vacancies rose. What to do? The option of raising wages (and improving working conditions) is never attractive, since the gains must be given to all workers, not merely those newly hired or rehired. The alternative is to put a squeeze on those who have left the labor force until they feel the pinch and come back, hat in hand, seeking a job. And this could be done, with the complicity of the Biden team, by letting Covid benefits expire, and by hiking interest rates. Price increases, directly boosting profits, also added to the pressure on the not-employed. Is it a surprise that people do not like being pressured to take “bullshit jobs”?
Milei: Well, actually, I came to understand the ideas of freedom as an economic growth specialist back in the years of 2013 to 2014. I could see that per capita GDP statistics over the last 2,000 years of the Christian era essentially looked like a hockey stick, indicating that per capita GDP remained almost constant until around 1800, after which it accelerated sharply. In the same context of that phenomenal increase in productivity and per capita GDP, the population had multiplied sevenfold over the preceding 200 years. So basically, in economics, that means you get increasing returns, and the presence of increasing returns implies the existence of monopolies, concentrated structures, and according to traditional neoclassical economic theory, the presence of monopolies and concentrated structures is not a good thing. But at the same time, one could see that living standards had increased tremendously and that middle-income people ended up living far better than emperors did in the Roman era, and the population had gone from having 95% of people in extreme poverty to less than 10%. And in that context, the question was, how it could be that something that had lifted so many people out of poverty, that had improved human conditions so much, could be something bad for economic theory, meaning something was not right.
I honestly don’t understand why people listen to this guy. I get he’s kinda handsome and good on Twitter,
According to such a study, if DeShawn Williams and Jake Williams sent identical résumés to the same employer, Jake Williams would be more likely to get a callback. The implication is that black-sounding names carry an economic penalty. Such studies are tantalizing but severely limited, for they can’t explain why DeShawn didn’t get the call. Was he rejected because the employer is a racist and is convinced that DeShawn Williams is black? Or did he reject him because “DeShawn” sounds like someone from a low-income, low-education family? A résumé is a fairly undependable set of clues—a recent study showed that more than 50 percent of them contain lies—so “DeShawn” may simply signal a disadvantaged background to an employer who believes that workers from such backgrounds are undependable.
The data also show the black-white gap to be a recent phenomenon. Until the early 1970s, there was a great overlap between black and white names. The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980 she received a name that was twenty times more common among blacks. (Boys’ names moved in the same direction but less aggressively—probably because parents of all races are less adventurous with boys’ names than with girls’.) Given the location and timing of this change—dense urban areas where Afro-American activism was gathering strength—the most likely cause of the explosion in distinctively black names was the Black Power movement, which sought to accentuate African culture and fight claims of black inferiority. If this naming revolution was indeed inspired by Black Power, it would be one of the movement’s most enduring remnants. Afros today are rare, dashikis even rarer; Black Panther founder Bobby Seale is best known today for peddling a line of barbecue products.
Prologue to the book The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden: The Biography by Peter Bergen, titled 'Hopes and Dreams and Fears'. It was Amal’s turn with “the Sheikh” as a moonless night settled on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011. Bin Laden had married Amal, his youngest wife, when she was only sixteen and he was forty-three. Still, their two-and-a-half-decade age difference did not stand in the way of what turned out to be a real love match, much to the fury of bin Laden’s three older wives. In the late 1990s, when bin Laden had first introduced the notion to his older wives of taking a new wife, he had advertised Amal as a “mature” thirty-year-old who knew the Koran by heart. Instead, Amal was a barely educated teenager from rural Yemen who had suddenly arrived in Afghan- istan a year before their husband's great victory on 9/11 and she had mo- nopolized much of his time. Bin Laden’s older sons were also angered by their father marrying a woman who was even younger than they were. The Yemeni bodyguard who had helped arrange the match between bin Laden and Amal said that because of the family’s dim view of this union, bin Laden initially “dragged round his fourth marriage like a ball and chain.”