Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Iron Economist Profile picture
Iron Economist
@IronEconomist
Genius Billionaire Playboy Economist. "The Arch Cheem" - Anya Martin
Oct 8, 2024 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
That’s because almost all the correlational claims turned out to be false when a decent causal study turned up. Let’s just go through a few cases where large literatures of correlational studies failed causal tests: School quality. Large numbers of correlational studies say going to a good school improves student academic outcomes but causal studies reveal it’s ~entirely unobserved selection. Image
Mar 24, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
So in the last round of yimby discourse I discovered that there are a lot of people who think landlords is the reason for high rents. Well I’m pleased to discover I have a found a EU city that banned landlords! So, how do we think it went? here is the article, Rotterdam introduced a ban on investors buying new BTL. eur.nl/en/ese/media/2…
Image
Mar 19, 2024 • 32 tweets • 9 min read
Ok, I have had enough wine to engage with this insane piece. It’s time to get started. This thinking here refers to the fact that supply lowers demand. It’s just flatly wrong. Image
Oct 9, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Ok, let me introduce you to Seething Wells. Opposite hampton court palace in Surbiton, its under the RBK (kingston) planning authority, Kingston is one of the richest boroughs in London. This is a former industrial site which was, until 1992, actively in use by Thames water for water treatment. It has filter beds and is generally a classic brownfield site. Its completely closed to the public and an awful eyesore.
Oct 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Since my TL is doing spicy history takes today apparently here’s mine: it’s completely pointless to try and reach history to children. Most history makes no sense without a well founded theory of mind of a wide variety of personalities and without that it’s just boring facts. To pick a famous example, in history as taught in school clement atlee can never be anything but a credulous naive fool. As an adult when you realise he was an officer in WW1 and have met a few more people broken by their pasts…that makes complete sense.
May 7, 2022 • 43 tweets • 9 min read
Its really kinda sad that even user friendly languages like python are here, so for once I will talk about my true expertise on here: Iron's guide to getting started with Python. Im gonna assume that you have a factory settings windows 10 computer, and have managed to download a recent-ish version of python from the python website. So open windows powershell from the start menu and type "python --version" and you should see
May 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It’s important sometimes to step away from the money/finance view in favour of the real view. The BOE thinks we will spend an extra 2% of National income on energy prices. And that is to get the same amount of energy. That extra 2% is therefore just a real hit to standards of living that cannot be avoided. So with wages growing at 4% nominal, to reduce real spending by 2% to account for this hit, we ‘need’ 6% inflation.
Feb 18, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Whenever you see massive trends and changes in individual behaviour the default assumption should usually be "its chemical". Lead and Crime gets a lot of airtime, but its not the only example, so lets do a little thread.
Feb 15, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I think this is correct but to riff of a bit. I think the internet has democratised information to a very real degree and that this has both created incredible opportunities and problems. First the opportunities: For the cognitive elite, the internet is an incredible boon. It’s made genuine polymaths almost common. People with PhD level expertise across three or more fields and now not unusual.
Jul 6, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So much I want to say about this! If a UBI leads to fewer people that is Good Actually. Because it implies several things (1) Those employees don't enjoy their work. (2) There is large utility to redistribution, (3) Many people work more than they want to.
May 28, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This paper is a very interesting and easy read on outcomes for extremely gifted children in australia. TLDR: failing to radically accelerate profoundly gifted students is very bad for them and dramatically harms their ability to learn to socialise. files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746… The argument that you should keep gifted kids with their chronological age so they "learn to socialise" turns out to be completely wrong:
Apr 7, 2021 • 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…
Mar 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Jan 15, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Jan 9, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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!
Dec 22, 2020 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Nov 22, 2020 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
They also attend properly to the effects of reporting lags in death: This leaves them with the following sample:
Sep 3, 2020 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
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/…
May 12, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
ONS now recorded 46380 excess deaths by May first. Deaths are coming off but there are still going to have been many thousands since May first, we are certainly over 50k already, and it seems doubtful death rates will fully normalise before we reach 60k. 60000 deaths is 0.1% of the population. This means a sero-prevalence at 10% would lead to an IFR of 1%. In the last ten days we have had three pieces of information that make it likely the total attack rate closer to 5% than 10% in the UK, and consequently an IFR near 2%.
Apr 24, 2020 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
So I was reading this excellent analysis of how GRR Martin's books differ from the medieval world, and it brought together a few thoughts I have been having for a while: acoup.blog/2019/06/12/new… One of the reasons I find history so fascinating, is that it somehow reveals how our modern world is anomalous, and I think one way in which our world is particularly unusual, is the lack of real constraints on elite behaviour.
Mar 25, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Absolutely mad to me how many people are credulously reporting the FT headline that ‘up to half of U.K. may have been infected’ when the paper plots a variety of results and to get that one you have to assume an IFR 100x smaller than consensus. No wonder the researchers ‘weren’t keen to criticise the government’. They probably know perfectly well the IFR is likely around 1%.