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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
, 4 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
Not only did the WSJ compare real to nominal, it looks like they also treated a multiple as a percent change (i.e. they treated "290% of previous levels" as "a 290% increase", when actually it's a 190% increase).
The WSJ cites Adam Levitin for their housing and tuition cost numbers.

I found this recent book by Levitin with the following figure:
books.google.com/books?id=SmxuD…

It appears both errors are originally Levitin's!!
These errors are from Levitin's book "Consumer Finance Law: Markets and Regulation".

amazon.com/Consumer-Finan…

@AAndriotis @shaneshifflett @kenbrown12 check it out! Levitin is obviously making two big (and very simple) errors in how he describes this data.
I mean, you can obviously see that Levitin describes an increase from 100 to 290 as "a 290% increase". It's right there in the text.

That's just obviously an error.
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Good speech about development progress and challenges in Ethiopia. Ends on a very Studwellian note.

imf.org/en/News/Articl…
And here's a good study of Ethiopia's recent industrial policy.

brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…
Wow, sounds right out of Studwell.
Read 3 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Oh my God. The WSJ is comparing housing and tuition prices to REAL income instead of NOMINAL.

That needs a correction.
In case you're interested in what these numbers should look like, here is a graph.
Alright, now that I'm back at a keyboard, let's take a look at what these numbers really SHOULD look like.
Read 12 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
"We should be scared of unions and minimum wages because they'll cause faster automation" is one of the wackiest takes I regularly see on this website.

Imagine being scared of policies that raise wages because those policies might also cause faster technological progress.
If robots are going to make some segment of the populace totally unemployable, and unions accelerate that process by a few years, what we need is not de-unionization, it's Universal Basic Income. Because in that case, the robots WILL be take over soon enough no matter what.
That said, Germany, Japan, Sweden and Denmark have a lot more robots than we do, plus stronger unions, and their human workers aren't going obsolete, so I'd say that if this is a worry, it's a worry for the far future.
Read 3 tweets

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Dr. Çağrı Mert Bakırcı
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
#Actually, moderate Democrats seem to be more popular with general election voters after all. 53eig.ht/30HJdqf
Bernie's polling is decent, but that he does the 2nd-best against Trump (after Biden) is partly an artifact of name recognition. For instance, Buttigieg polls worse than Bernie vs. Trump. But Buttigieg actually has better favorables than Bernie among voters who know who he is.
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Nate Silver
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#Actually, early presidential primary polls are fairly predictive. 53eig.ht/2PtbSd7
You have to adjust for name recognition, though. Biden, at just south of 30 percent, is still something like a 2:1 underdog. And Bernie's position at 20 percent, as I wrote yesterday, is tenable but not great.
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Nate Silver
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#Actually, the chart actually shows clear evidence of the beer-wine frontier, with certain types of sprits (e.g. scotch, brandy/cognac) straddling the frontier. 🍺🍷
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Conspirador Norteño
@conspirator0
There was a burst in activity on the #FireRosenstein hashtag this past weekend. Let's see what there is to see, shall we? (thanks @SpencerH8sTwitr for putting us on the hunt)
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The accounts pushing the #FireRosenstein hashtag are mostly right-wing accounts; however, the opposite is true of the phrase "fire Rosenstein" - here the #Resistance conversation is larger and louder.
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