Like many, I loved the Jenny Nicholson review of Disney's failed Galactic Starcruiser.

The last section, on her worries about the direction of Disneyworld writ large, really left me thinking Baumol's cost disease is just a huge threat to the model. Disneyworld really built its brand around interactions with people. The idea is that you're gonna meet cast members and they're gonna be really nice and hospitable and in-character and magical.

The problem is people are expensive, and they get more so all the time.

I'm tired of watching "AGI theorists" on unending media tours over a product that
(1) they didn't build
(2) is specialized software rather than a general intelligence--so not even in their nominal area of expertise What they rely on is mostly that you don't want to sound like a lame person who throws cold water on a cool product, so critique (2) usually doesn't get raised.

But let me be lame for a second.

My contempt for the institution of “pharmacies” is certainly coming to a middle.

I won’t be getting my kid’s medicine tonight because the note saying “grab some mupirocin” hasn’t arrived yet. Under our system, I have to pay a middleman for his expertise (basic literacy, picking up items off shelves) that I am for some reason assumed to be unable to do myself.

I have some points on Sam Bankman-Fried and risk. (Rather significantly, he strongly advocated taking more risks.)

Ex post, obviously he got bad results and transferred much of that risk onto unsuspecting customers.

But even ex ante there were some issues with his approach. This thread that Matt and others have pointed to is very revealing, and I think it makes only a partially correct argument.

First, he notes that people are risk-averse because each individual dollar declines in importance to them as they get richer.

https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1592881362612412416

Why not skyscrapers filled with large living spaces? We'll have tons of new living space, what with all the skyscrapers we could build. The other time you see this fake choice is when people say there's a "revealed preference" for the suburbs.

This is a major red flag that someone doesn't know what a revealed preference is. Give them a little rope, and watch them hang themselves.

I'll explain.

There is something very "cheems mindset" about the idea that people and institutions cannot schedule events at times that are convenient for them unless the federal government alters all time across the board. Consider the position of the late-risers who "want more daylight."

Well apparently you don't want it enough to wake up at 7 instead of 8!

Except wait. You actually do! You just have the government redefine numbers so that you don't notice the 7 when you look at your phone!

The wild-type COVID vaccines sure looked like they did a ton to stop wild-type COVID transmission.

We had a great summer, and those who got vaccinated in early 2021 are to thank for it.

I think it's worth revisiting that June 2021 era to cast light on what's happening now. Remember, public health officials back then were openly talking about herd immunity---and they seemed to be right to do so, at least with respect to the wild type!
cnbc.com/2021/06/17/dr-…

🧵 1. My much-awaited (by nerds) response to @besttrousers now arrives!

I am happy about some things, but overall I take a less optimistic tone than Matt's thread.

https://twitter.com/AlanMCole/status/1453444381227298825

2. I wrote about some of my pessimism here.

I worry that for as long as the pandemic is going on, we won't get true "full employment" because people are (rightly) recognizing that jobs and market consumption have become worse, relative to time at home.

fullstackeconomics.com/how-covid-19-b…

This is so untenable. The ask is huge in terms of money and awful for distributional tables, and Biden's margin is so, so narrow.

Maybe they think it's Biden's problem to solve, not theirs. But do they want to be in the minority in 2023?

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1443259807444705285

Full SALT is like $85 billion per year.

There's a cheat here in that TCJA expires, so they just have to get it to the TCJA expiration. But it's still a ton of money.

Even the $3.5 trillion number, which isn't going to happen, is $350 billion per year to play with.

The way the constitution is supposed to work, in theory: Congress tells the President what to do by passing laws.

The way it works in practice: Congress delegates tons of stuff and the President has a random set of arbitrary and expansive but ultimately incomplete powers. Congress then positions itself as, basically, Poasters and Cable News Contributors who comment on what the president does.

And because of thermostatic public opinion and ideological heterogeneity, the President's cohort of loyalist Poasters in Congress is like <40%.

1. 🧵: What's the deal with those buttons everywhere in online shopping where you can pay for stuff with Affirm?

I wrote about this for @fullstackecon today.

fullstackeconomics.com/these-companie… 2. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm talking about this little message, which you can find in all sorts of places.

Their biggest business recently has come from Peloton, but they're expanding out rapidly.

Republicans are not going to help with the debt limit while the reconciliation package is alive.

It is simply a nonstarter politically.

This is not my "negotiating position" or "posturing" or whatever. (I don't have a vote.) It's just my read of things. There are tons and tons of conservative people in the country who don't want the reconciliation bill, and they will perceive a debt limit vote as "enabling" it.

This force already exists, and no individual member has any control over it.

January 2020 was an amazing place in the online discourse.

https://twitter.com/AlanMCole/status/1442937810856517632

I don't worry about a slow response to the next pandemic, because obviously we've now seen that threat. (Kind of like how I don't worry about the precise 9-11 attack mechanism happening again.)

But I do wonder how many other glacial-pace reactions there are in the multiverse.

1. It sure looks to me like @TaxPolicyCenter is abandoning its longstanding rules for scoring tax plans in order to find a way to make the Biden tax pledge true.

As far as I can tell, they have never before excluded excise taxes in this way.
taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-way… 2. Excluding corporate taxes is already an extremely questionable proposition: during 2017, the corporate tax provisions were distributed to the taxpayers that TPC thought most likely to benefit from them.

1. Today's Full Stack 🧵 is on Josh Gottheimer and the SALT caucus.

The best read of these members, is that they represent a growing demographic of high-income Democrats, many of them indifferent to raising taxes, if not actively hostile.

fullstackeconomics.com/why-democrats-… 2. You can see it in their rhetoric. They're happy to dip into anti-tax tropes.

These are out of step with mainline progressivism, but that's fine; parties are always going to have to be big tents.

Today I chronicle the SALT Caucus, many of whom use unabashed anti-tax rhetoric you'd expect of Republicans.

I say you are what you argue; they are functionally filling an anti-tax role, especially in the context of current Democratic negotiations.

fullstackeconomics.com/why-democrats-… Democrats are gaining quickly among high-education, high-income voters, and the SALT caucus districts are full of them.

The best explanation is that these members are just looking out for their constituents. Other priorities are secondary at best.

The conceit of this story, if you follow it carefully, is that Facebook is to blame for "health misinformation."

Okay, I'm listening.

The example of "misinformation," though, is the Chicago Tribune.

washingtonpost.com/technology/202… The story also went to the New York Times.

Though I am not sure what their traffic stats are like, the Times version gets shared on here dozens of times per week. twitter.com/search?q=https…

NEW content release: my final long-form @JECRepublicans paper, TIME TO BUILD.

I completed this paper while working at the JEC, but I've since left and founded something new. The link is official JEC content, but these words are my own.
jec.senate.gov/public/index.c… The policy prescription is @jbuhl35's favorite meme. Build. That's the whole thing.

But the devil is in the details. There are tons of policy inefficiencies across multiple institutions that hold back our heroic protagonist, the construction worker.

1. Time for today's Full Stack Economics 🧵.

I'll link the piece below for some of the basics, but try to add some additional commentary for you!

The big picture: Democratic tax wonks took a huge defeat here, and it looks pretty decisive.
fullstackeconomics.com/how-a-key-bide… 2. In this case, I think there's good reason for most people to root for them to get a moderate version of step-up repeal. It's a real hole in the income tax that should be plugged.

And if they look for revenue elsewhere, they'll probably end up going for something much worse.

1. 🧵 to summarize @binarybits's piece on crypto regulation, which was excellent and helped me understand what the stakes are.

Crypto, for a time, got itself a regulatory reprieve, kind of like Uber did, with the help of some careful diplomacy early on.
fullstackeconomics.com/cryptocurrency… 2. Not all regulators are rigid and stuffy people, and some of them actually think new innovation is kind of cool and they let it be for a while.

This also happened to some extent with e.g. ride-hailing and with self-driving cars.

If China keeps its nominal economy roughly on track through expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, Evergrande's default won't do much to harm the world economy. The story will just go away. You'll forget about it within a year, if not a few months.

This may seem like a boring, obvious point, but this isn't really about Evergrande--it's about 2007-2009 in the U.S., of course.