I read @JohnHCochrane ’s wonderful post on price gouging. It represents the economist view to a T. But what it misses is why that isn’t convincing to so many people. So what gives? 1/ngrumpy-economist.com/p/praise-for-p… If toilet paper is usually $1/roll and suddenly is $10/roll, all consumers will be pissed off (even those willing to pay $10) but if there is a supply shortage, some people won’t have toilet paper; say, the half of the market willing to pay only $5/roll. 2/n

Guess I had better tweet about the new Whitehouse tax on crypto mining. It is a straight 30 percent on the cost of electricity. The rationale is environmental — both local and global — as well as keeping electricity prices down (you know, the opposite)

whitehouse.gov/cea/written-ma… What will happen? Crypto-mining will fall in the US but rise elsewhere. So this is a “beggar my neighbour” effect unless the tax goes global. Electricity use in the US will fall a bit because most probably will be reallocated to other uses than mining. 2/n

OK kids. Today we celebrate Christmas in a specific way. Here's why. 1/n When your mother and I were growing up in Australia, Christmas Day was full of hardship as all the stores were closed and there was nothing to do. 2/n

Here is a thread about the current Twitter chaos. I think the right starting point to understand this is that a week or so ago, Twitter went from distributed, passive ownership to private ownership. 1/n What do we expect to happen when distributed ownership gets consolidated? We expect there to be better alignment of interests between ownership and management. In this case, the same person. 2/n

I have now had a chance to read the Judd/Heckman correspondence. I did so wearing my hat as an 'expert' in the economics publishing process. Listen up kids, this is a window into what's going on here. 1/n sites.google.com/site/commentso… Co-editors at journals sometimes disagree but for the system to work, they need to respect each other. Heckman clearly disagreed with the previous decision and wanted to reverse it. But he had to follow a procedure. 2/n

Hot take: Big Bird is not, in fact, a bird. Big I’ll grant you.

I want to close out my participation in the "should you read the classics" with a final tweetstorm. Specifically, I want to address the opportunity cost argument against reading the classics. 1/n As economists, we have to take that seriously. That is why we end up with "we should do this in undergrad and grad school" which is not controversial. The question is: should you read the classics post-tenure? 2/n

A quick thread on my new NBER working paper today (my first on Covid in a year). nber.org/papers/w29075?… The paper examines vaccine passports and whether they might be a tool to increase the demand for vaccines. The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is no. 1/n The starting point is a model of vaccine hesitancy where people also choose how much social distancing to do. If you are vaccinated, you don't do any (it's economics). If you are unvaccinated, you do. Thus, choosing to be vaccinated involves weighing up the costs & benefits. 2/n

I've noticed that the journalists/opinion writers who have migrated to Substack are writing better pieces than they have in years. They are up in terms of length, reading age-level and complexity of arguments. 1/4 I think this is a consequence of the change in underlying business model. When you sell ads, you need views. That means you want a product that attracts the marginal customer. When you sell subscriptions, that may seem to also hold but it doesn't. 2/4

Suffering today from a condition I named 25 years ago as "loss of result" or LOR. LOR occurs when you are working to prove a proposition/theorem and you work out instead it is not true. 1/ This can happen because you made a mistake (that's often) or because your intuition was incorrect (less often). The latter one usually is a nuance. The generality of the result is weakened. But this time I suffered a complete LOR. 2/

OK time to weigh in on the Gigi Foster COVID-19 view for Australia. I'll do this as academics should but to forecast I am disappointed she took these views to the media without research backup. [1/n] There are two ways out of the COVID mess: immunity or suppression. Suppression, done properly, is the least damaging to both health and the economy. Many countries have done this including South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, Iceland, .... [2/n]

Here is what @JustinWolfers claimed regarding toilet paper hoarding: “Once they have more toilet paper, people aren’t going to pooh more.” Now, in times of crisis, we need sober and accurate economic analysis & this statement is quite disappointing ...

forbes.com/sites/susanada… I think it is typical of macroeconomists to unduly aggregate things. In this case, @JustinWolfers is focussing on the total amount of excrement per person. We can agree that this is sensibly considered to be invariant to the amount of accessible toilet paper but ...

Libra is a Digital Traveler’s Check. That’s all. Time for a thread to right this ship. [1/n] Many moons ago, it was hard to travel with money. Your bank wasn’t in other locations and currency exchange was hard. [2/n]

1/ Here is a tweetstorm explaining why @paulg is wrong and @vkhosla is right on why a higher income/wealth tax is unlikely to deter growth entrepreneurship. @paulg @vkhosla 2/

Here is a simple example: suppose that a venture has a 1% chance of creating a $1 billion for an entrepreneur and 99% chance of creating nothing. Suppose that entrepreneur's other option is a safe Wall Street job netting $3 million over the relevant time period.