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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
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22 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
On most policy issues I can articulate the main arguments on both sides even if I don't agree. Antitrust is an exception. I know that antitrust skeptics love "the consumer welfare standard," but I don't think I could explain it to say nothing of making a coherent case for it.
It's not even that I'm strongly on the other side. I'm really how the law should be enforced differently. But the idea that everything has been going great for the last 40 years is hard to take seriously.
I think there is something to this. Pre-1980s antitrust laws was a mess and bork proposed a lowest common denominator of situations where everyone agreed action was needed.
So he sort of made antitrust rigorous by proposing to just ignore most of the hard cases. Which could be appealing if you were frustrated by contradictions in the more ambitious regime that preceded it.

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More from @binarybits

Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
18 Mar
Annalee is a former Ars colleague and I enjoyed working with her, but I didn't fid this persuasive. Substack's pitch is that their platform makes it possible for some writers to build up a large enough paying audience to make a living as a newsletter writer.
As far as I can tell, that's true. @mattyglesias, for example, said in February that he had around 9,000 paid subscribers. At $8/month with a 10 percent Substack cut that works out to almost $800,000 in annualized income. And that was after just three months.
However, the New Yorker has reported that he took a Substack Pro deal where he gets $250,000 over the first year and only 15 percent of his first-year subscription revenue. In retrospect that was a bad deal, but he presumably didn't know how successful his newsletter would be.
Read 9 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
17 Mar
This @Noahpinion case that we're in for massive productivity growth is great. He talks about how electric inventions in the late 1800s drove productivity growth in the 1920s and suggests we might see similar delayed productivity benefits from the Internet. noahpinion.substack.com/p/distributed-…
I actually expected him to make a slightly different analogy: to the 1929-1960 period. In the 1930s scientists and engineers were inventing stuff, but weak aggregate demand prevented them from being adopted rapidly.
Then the pressure of war accelerated innovation in manufacturing. When the war ended we applied military innovations (like new manufacturing techniques and better airplanes) to civilian uses. I could see a similar sequence happening today.
Read 7 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
5 Mar
People are dogpiling @mattyglesias for his completely reasonable view that copyrights should last for about 30 years. One of the more ridiculous counter-arguments is that royalties from old books can serve as an author's pension.
The vast majority of books generate near-zero revenues after 30 years. And the ones that do generate significant revenues after 30 years almost always generated revenues before 30 years too.
As an author you don't know how well your book will sell in 20 or 30 years. So if your book is selling well now you should be saving a chunk of the revenue and investing it in a retirement account—just like anybody in any other profession.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
13 Feb
This is a really telling list. The most vocal Republican Trump critics in 2017-18 Senate were Flake and Corker, neither of whom ran again. Republican Senators seem to believe they'll pay an extremely high political price for opposing Trump, even now that he's out of office.
It's hard to imagine the Senate ever convicting a president in an impeachment case, no matter what he or she does. Political realities mean only a tiny fraction of the president's co-partisans will ever vote to convict, and opposition parties never get close to 2/3 majorities.
Which is a little bit terrifying because it means that presidents now have immense latitude to do whatever they want.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
12 Feb
Elon Musk has said multiple times that the new Tesla Roadster will have a "SpaceX option package" that uses compressed air thrusters to give faster acceleration and possibly tighter turning. Will this actually happen?
For what it's worth I think he's probably serious. It doesn't seem that hard to do and the kind of people who drop $200k on a sports car seem pretty likely to drop another $50k to shave a few more miliiseconds off their 0-60 time.
Or more importantly to be able to tell people at parties that their Tesla has the SpaceX option package.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
12 Feb
Matt has a paywalled piece arguing that examination-based elite schools aren't actually better than regular schools. I found this interesting because it cuts strongly against my own intuitions. I think people might be misreading the studies on this. slowboring.com/p/the-misguide…
As Matt summarizes here, studies on the value of selective high schools compare the results of students who were just above the admissions cutoff to those who were just below, and finds little difference. Image
This seems like convincing evidence that going to a selective school isn't that valuable for a student at the margins of the admission criteria. But that's a different claim than saying the school isn't good for its average student.
Read 9 tweets

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