As part of my dive into how “affordable housing” came to cost almost $600,000 per unit in Los Angeles, I had a conversation with @HeidiEMarston that I’ll be thinking about for some time.

nytimes.com/2022/10/23/opi… What does it mean to trust an agency? One answer is that you can trust an agency that is transparent, heavily audited, tightly bound by rules and regulations, highly accountable to the public or other overseers.

Let’s call this trust-through-transparency.

On the podcast, I've talked around this experience, and how it changed the way I see pregnancy and reproductive choice. But I've tried not to say too much, because it was @annielowrey's story to tell.

Now she's told it, at least some of it. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… I'll only add: The idea that any legislator would force her, or anyone else, to undergo this much agony and this much danger, is unthinkable to me. But it's the reality now in much of the United States.

This is an important counterargument, so let me encourage you to read it — @Sifill_LDF's full thread, not just this one tweet — and try to answer it, and some others, and explain why I think Twitter is ill-suited for the central role it plays in our politics.

https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1519418028445900801

The nature of Twitter is it shrinks everything down to units of a single thought, image, video, and then makes it possible for that unit to go viral, reaching communities it would never reach and building a community behind it.

Musk's tweeting today is making me more confident of the argument I make here.

I don't think he'll change the platform that much, at least not soon. But I think having the owner of the platform tweet like he does will change the feel of it dramatically. nytimes.com/2022/04/27/opi… On some level everyone here is providing free labor for Twitter.com. It's weird.

But now we're going to be providing free labor for Elon Musk. And Musk will be making clear his contempt for the views of a lot of the people creating on his platform. Do they stay?

We were making incredible progress on child poverty and then we just...stopped.

Worse, we're now going backwards, fast. nytimes.com/2022/04/17/opi… One response I've heard to this column is that there are ways the Child Tax Credit could be better designed, or targeted.

I agree, and we all have our ideal design ideas here, but we're not seeing negotiations over design bog down. The policy expired, and Congress moved on.

If you read what Putin is saying, this is as much or more a war over Ukrainian identity than it is over border security. And as Fiona Hill explains here, that's really being missed both in Putin's motivations and miscalculations. nytimes.com/2022/03/08/pod… Putin thought the Russian identity in Ukraine far stronger than it is, which would've made invasion easier. He thought the Ukrainian identity far weaker than it's proven. He thought the change in Ukrainian identity to be a Western plot, not authentic movement.

Just an insane decision. And note that this lawsuit is being brought under the California Environmental Quality Act, though everyone, on all sides, knows the issues here aren't environmental.

So please, stop telling me how CEQA has already been fixed.
sfchronicle.com/politics/artic… It's worse than that: The kinds of housing politics winning here do huge damage to the environment by pushing people further into car-dependent sprawl, by pushing people out of the state, and, long-term, by undermining actual environmentalists.

There was a lot to like in Joe Biden's State of the Union, but it felt like two speeches, not one.

Which is a shame, because it really was one speech, not two. Russia, inflation, and energy are deeply linked. 🧵

nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opi… Take Russia.

The first speech Biden described the financial war we're waging against Putin in an effort to turn his tanks back. And it really is massive, as @adam_tooze explains in this podcast. nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opi…

It's going to be an exquisite bit of irony if, after helping Donald Trump win the election in 2016, Putin becomes the reason Trump can't win the election, or even a Republican primary, in 2024. A lot of Republicans have been looking for a safe issue on which to attack and try to outflank Trump.

Trump's love of Putin may prove to be it, particularly given Trump's continuing praise for Putin just in the past few days.

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1498284758442336265

From what I can tell, we don't really know how Russians understand this conflict, given their Putinized media, and so how they will understand the crushing economic retaliation coming their way.

Do they blame the West for it, and unite? Blame Putin, and divide? Neither? If anyone has good links for understanding or tracking what Russians believe, and what they're seeing or not seeing, drop them below, and I'll try and thread them here.

Sharp piece by Paul Krugman. nytimes.com/2022/02/22/opi… I'll also say, to one of Krugman's points: I was skeptical that corporate greed is what drove inflation, but I've moved more towards the view that cultural permission to raise prices is helping to sustain it.

"The problem of distraction can just as well be framed as a problem of loneliness."

Always read @LMSacasas: theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/attending-to… "It is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness, in which the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds...

So I'm thrilled to see the Biden administration begin explicitly talking about a new supply-side economics.

But I don't want to see that just become a rhetorical frame for Build Back Better.

They need to go a lot further, and they can. nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opi… Part of it is I think even Democrats aren't used to thinking about how government can really change the supply side anymore.

They think about it in terms of social insurance, and labor supply, and basic infrastructure, but that's really it.

Pfizer's submitted data says 2 doses works for very young kids.

FDA pushing Pfizer to test three doses to get a stronger response for older kids suggest safety isn't the issue.

So why not let parents who want to vaccinate their children, start vaccinating their children? This is what an emergency authorization is supposed to be, as I understand it.

It's not full authorization.

But because there's no alternative treatment, and the safety data is sound and efficacy data promising, you can get one, if you want one.

3 is particularly important here.

Assuming those pushing the corporate greed story also believe corporations were greedy in 2017, is the idea that something about the pandemic gave corporations way more pricing power with which to deploy their greed?

https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/status/1491842095832653831

Or if it's that corporations got more greedy post-pandemic, why are they also raising wages?

One problem that feels irresolvable to me is that we need to talk about the groups doing things but those groups are rarely well coordinated, and often not even groups. I feel like the best retort now to anything I write is: Who do you mean by Democrats/Republican/the left/the right/the media/the public health community/VCs etc

So a lot of mainstream economists want to defend their honor on coming to a different view of deficits without MMT, and I don't disagree!

But what I said was MMTers focused attention on real resource constraints, which is different.

https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/status/1490847001772281857

We just had decades of arguments over sustainable debt-to-GDP levels. They were thought to be lower in the Aughts.

Then, as Jason is saying, there was a move towards thinking they could be higher. But the spending constraint was always some debt-to-GDP ratio.

So I'm not enough of a macroeconomist to know if it's true that what MMT says that's new isn't true, and what it says that's true isn't new.

But I'll say that MMT has absolutely changed the things that MMT's critics will say are true.

https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1490424197180497921

I'll give an example: MMTers really like the Keynes quote "anything we can actually do, we can afford."

Their critics say: It's a Keynes quote! So it's something the Keynesians knew.

But in years of reporting with Keynesian economists, it is definitely not how they talked.

I’m going to back a few days in Discourse Time, and say something I think has been missed the Joe Rogan/Covid mess (I realize there are now other messes).

Once you’re here, all the answers are bad. They’re all bad because they all harm the thing you’re trying to protect: Trust. Having one of the most popular podcasters in the world become a platform for vaccine misinformation?

That’s bad, for obvious reasons.

And to add: which way does the causality point?

The research and example I use suggest high levels of trust in institutions lead to better outcomes. That probably leads to more trust! It can be a positive feedback loop.

Or it can go the other way, and in America, it has.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1490414746025308161

But I'm also not convinced the relationship between trust and institutions is solely or mainly mediated by institutional quality or performance.

It me.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1488982053487923201

One thing testing positive for 12 $*%&#^# days makes you think about is how often you've walked back into society still contagious with the flu or cold you felt mostly recovered from.