Klopt OK, het klopt niet helemaal, sommige proffen zijn natuurlijk sadisten, maar dat zijn uitzonderingen. Het punt is dat, zoals Marchant uitlegt, de "buisvakken" (statistiek, economie, bij de ingenieurs thermodynamica 😉) inderdaad gewoon intrinsiek moeilijk zijn, en dat je /

The generals and admirals who planned the invasion of Japan had no idea of the Manhattan project, so the assumptions they used in their planning give an interesting insight in the scale of the massacre that would have taken place without the nuclear bombs. /

https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/status/1657505487531786240

Extrapolating from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it was expected that US casualties would range in the hundreds of thousands (with up to two millions in the most pessimistic scenarios) - at least a doubling of the US body count until then. /

In "Nudge", @R_Thaler and @CassSunstein often argue that neoclassical economics assumes that humans behave as if they're Mr Spock, while, in reality, we behave more like Homer Simpson. There's an implicit assumption in this analogy that Mr Spock is the normative reference/ point : deviations from the Spock standards are suboptimal, and what they call "libertarian paternalism" should nudge people towards the choices they would make if only they were more like Spock. But @juliagalef beautifully illustrates why Spockism is not the right standard for /

Hidden within the @ITF_Forum report on #micromobility "30 km/h is the maximum limit recommended for cars in city streets to reduce the risk of death or serious injury from a collision of cars with pedestrians and other vulnerable road users."

itf-oecd.org/sites/default/… On the topic of shared micromobility itself: "Shared micromobility predominantly replaces walking, cycling and public transport trips yet could also substitute short car trips. The broadest benefit ...could be increasing
the catchment area of public transport. " /

The history of mobility according to Sempé (thread). Phase 1 Phase 2

Streetart in Brussel. Van Noordstation tot Thurn & Taxis. Thurn en Taxis tot Sint Katelijne

The best point yet I read in @HansRosling 's "Factfulness": in the past, people did not live in balance with nature. They *died* in balance with nature. As Hobbes already knew, live was short, nasty and cruel. / I quite often say that books are highly recommended, but "Factfulness" is a must read in the most literal sense of the word: it should be put on the school curriculum. Not just because it sets so many things straight about the world, but because it is one big argument in /

In case you wonder, The Code is a history of Silicon Valley. And it's really good if you're interested in innovation and innovation policy. Of course, it doesn't replace academic work on those topics, but, besides being entertaining, it also /

https://twitter.com/LaurentFranckx/status/1355487916542275584

brings together a lot of important facts that are forgotten. The crucial role of defence spending in kickstarting the Valley is known - what is less obvious, is that defence industry only came there because the American top brass was worried that a Soviet first strike /

Leuk opinie artikel. Als ik nu de "Blake en Mortimers" uit mijn kinderjaren herlees, zie ik ook wel hoe stereotypisch en "fout" het allemaal is. Maar ik heb "Indiër" echt nooit geassocieerd met een "trouwe dienaar" die mij als "Sahib" aanspreekt. Ook zonder sticker. /

https://twitter.com/De_andere_Kris/status/1355471626767380480

Stom trouwens dat de huisknecht van Mortimer gekleed is als Sikh maar dan Moslim blijkt te zijn 🤪

I haven't seen "Margin call" so for me the best film ever about financial markets is "The big short". It's a real thriller, and, as far as I can judge, as accurate as movies go. It also shows something important: it takes a lot of guts / to go short. Shorters make money when they go against the market "consensus" that a security will go up. Given that there is no upper bound to the amounts of money they can lose if their assessment is wrong, they face very strong incentives to be very well informed. That's also/

"To what extent can supporting carpooling reduce road congestion?" - an analysis for Belgium with the PLANET model of the Federal Planning Bureau.
plan.be/uploaded/docum… The relatively modest potential for increasing the occupation rate for cars can be explained by the relatively small share of trips for which such an increase is a realistic option, and by the inconveniences linked to the organisation of carpooling. Nevertheless, /

Started reading "The populist temptation" by Barry Eichengreen. First interesting point: not all economic crises are as likely to result in political swings to the extremes. Banking & financial crises are particularly bad in this respect, / because they are seen to result from the actions of selfserving bankers (who are obviously not seen as part of the "people"), and often require bailouts by the state (which is then seen as profiteering). I guess there's some truth to this. /

Ethiopia's experience with the difficulty of making former agrarian workers fit in an industrial setting, which requires punctuality and discipline, is indeed reminiscent of something that happened during the industrial revolution/ economist.com/node/21787918?… via @TheEconomist With technological changes at the end of the 18th century, coordination became important. Until then, "manufacturing" mostly took place at home, and an individual's productivity often fluctuated from day to day, depending on his personal circumstances /

I am now at page 278 of "Radical Uncertainty" by @ProfJohnKay and @projectmervyn and I have now come across this: "How many of us would contemplate buying a flight to a specified airport on 3 August 2030, contingent on the weather at that destination at that time and the / political situation in that country in that year". This sentence unwittingly illustrates the key point of the book: as late as in 2019, they didn't consider constructing an example where the flight was contingent on the absence of a pandemic. QED /

@PeterHerreman Tomorrow 😉. Have a zoom birthday party at 7 pm @PeterHerreman As promised, I will now try to answer your question, Peter. I hope that @thimodenijs will also find the answers to his question in what follows. I must admit I don't find these obvious questions, as they are extremely broad. /

Er is hier gisteren een discussie gevoerd over supermarkten en apothekers, die mij herinnerde aan een van de belangrijkste begrippen uit het economisch denken: de rente. En vooral aan de vraag: wie ontvangt een rente? Eerst even ter herinnering: het ging dus over de vraag of het verantwoord was dat supermarkten mondmaskers zouden verdelen terwijl apothekers vonden dat zij daar het alleenrecht op hadden. /

Een draadje over huisvuilophaling, ter aanvulling van de discussie van deze namiddag @LodeCossaer @petervanderhey6 . Goed, het gaat dus niet meer over rioleringen, maar er zijn analogieën tussen beide problemen / en ik ken het huisvuil een beetje beter, en kan het dus beter onderbouwen met concrete elementen. Een twaalftal jaar geleden heb ik een studie gedaan voor de Europese Commissie, met als voorwerp: hoe kan de werking van de markt voor gerecycleerde producten worden verbeterd? /

I try to refrain from tweeting about topics I know nothing about, but I had made the same reflection. But I also think that the problems facing epidemiologists are similar to those faced by economists. First, there is the problem of forecasting with problematic data /

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1240106802617909249

For instance, one thing that has become very clear now is that, without systematic testing of people without symptoms, you have no idea of what is going on, or rather that your idea of what is going on is based on biased data. /

Raghuram Rajan reviews Thomas Piketty's "Capital and ideology". So a few tweets as meta -review 😉
ft.com/content/5a393b… There are several points where Rajan's review is in line with mine goodreads.com/review/show/30…
We both have a very deep respect for the incredible and seminal data collection performed by Piketty and his team, and acknowledge that the book contains a lot of very interesting and /

My review of "Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets" by John McMillan. 4*. Thanks for the recommendation @DianeCoyle1859 /

goodreads.com/review/show/26… @DianeCoyle1859 "When non-economists want to dismiss an economic approach to a specific problem, they often say that "economists have a blind faith in markets".
To economists, this always sounded as a very strange claim. /

This year, we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of one of the most important works ever in the field of economics: Pigou's "The economics of welfare" /
britannica.com/biography/Arth… If that doesn't ring a bell, Pigou laid the theoretical foundations of what we would now call "pollution taxes". Following this work, the whole idea of protecting the environment, even if it increases the cost of doing business, is completely mainstream in economics. /