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7 Apr, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Sorry capitalism solved this problem in 2016 with cheap desalination. Israel government has been trying to become a water exporter since the sixties for geo political reasons and they finally cracked cheap desalination.
Its been a public-private partnership to keep researching this for decades, and Israel is now a major water exporter to the middle east. scientificamerican.com/article/israel…
Just capitalism solving another scarcity constraint as soon as it became relevant. Nothing to see here. Business as usual, optimists right again, etc.
Capitalism is incredible at rolling out mature technologies. As soon as they have crossed the boundary into cheaper/better they become ubiquitous globally in a very small number of years.
De salination is cheaper than ground water extraction now in lots of places so expect desalination to become a significant fraction of global water use within a handful of years.

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More from @IronEconomist

Iron Economist Profile picture
30 Mar
This is terrible behaviour really. Real world data shows us closer to 85% reduction in hospitalisations in actual usage in both Israel and UK. Another Noble Lie that will burn down institutional credibility.
The clinical trials end points were typically around 150 cases. That really isn't enough to judge these numbers reliable. You would have expected only 0-1 hospitalisations in the vaccinated group even if it was ineffective.
Also... the NIH literally put out a statement that AZ reporting a lower number in a press release for effectiveness was potentially misleading, so, hypocrisy too.
Read 4 tweets
Iron Economist Profile picture
15 Jan
I regret to inform you that what is happening in Manaus should scare everyone witless. theguardian.com/world/2021/jan…
It looks from the reports like all cause mortality is currently running ~6x normal in a population that is 90% under fifty. But worse, Manaus already achieved herd immunity, and certainly a high level of infections.
Levin et all applied their age specific mortality to a sero-study of 66% and got similar expectations to actual fatalities give the age structure. Good conditional evidence the sero study was ~accurate despite some sampling flaws.
Read 7 tweets
Iron Economist Profile picture
9 Jan
What’s so weird about this article is that in the middle he basically admits that the YIMBY argument is correct.
Here he says that if a new development lures new rich people to the city it puts upwards pressure on all housing! This is the YIMBY argument! If you build more luxury housing and it increases the per capita stock it puts downwards pressure on all housing!
Even in this concocted argument where inwards migration causes prices to rise, it must by the same argument be putting downwards pressure on the city they left.
Read 6 tweets
Iron Economist Profile picture
22 Dec 20
This is a terrible idea. The reason it’s a terrible idea is that it’s virtually impossible. People who have worked with real data for years are often still abjectly terrible at it. As evidenced by the number of well credentialed experts who were revealed as charlatans by Covid.
See also the number of people who think that supply and demand do not apply to housing.
The number of criminologists who refuse to accept that almost all of the two massive crime waves in America were driven by lead poisoning. And probably also teen pregnancy rates.
Read 11 tweets
Iron Economist Profile picture
22 Nov 20
They also attend properly to the effects of reporting lags in death:
This leaves them with the following sample:
And they find the following:
Read 17 tweets
Iron Economist Profile picture
3 Sep 20
So there seems to be a myth taking hold among the twitter commentariat that a lot of housing economists think that the rise in house prices in the UK is well explained by interest rates alone. This.... is not the expert consensus. Here is a thread of papers (in no partic order).
Nice recent paper using a planning dataset from the uk:
cpb.nl/sites/default/…
Starts with a nice little literature review:
Read 18 tweets

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