software gnome, bikes and stuff, economics, crotchetiness
Feb 22, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The most alarming theory I currently hold is that Putin, like several other rich and powerful men, is a fairly heavy anabolic steroid user
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Dec 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Something I've changed my mind about: I'm no longer lukewarm on student debt cancellation, I'm now somewhat cold on it. You can't bemoan increasing educational polarization of America while pushing a policy that's both objectively regressive and would greatly exacerbate it
The idea that non-college voters wouldn't be upset that a significant proportion of a $1.7 expenditure went to, like, Harvard law school grad and people with masters in underwater basket weaving from NYU seems self-evidently preposterous to me
Jul 15, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A fun exercise is to look at projected costs of enormously ambitious climate change mitigation projects and realize even the most expensive ones are considerably cheaper than WW2 was as a share of world GDP
A fun one is assuming we can do direct air capture at the quite conservative cost of $500/ton. We currently emit 43B tons of CO2 a year, so to completely arrest rise of CO2, it'd cost $21T a year, which is just about 25% of the world's $84T GDP
Jun 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's magical thinking that there's a technological fix that stops powerful authoritarian governments from controlling the flow of commerce and bullying multinational corporations. "Cryptocurrency" can't fix this
I'll add that a hypothetical world where no government can shut down bank accounts or seize assets–which I still maintain cannot happen–is a world where it's impossible to tax anything and provide even a modicum of a welfare state. This is an enormously unpopular agenda.
Jun 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In extremis, there are lots of policies that obviously and logically have certain effects. But a lot of discourse is people claiming since we've never hit the margins where these effects happen, the margins don't exist. See minimum wage debates!
Would a $1000/hour minimum wage have disemployment effects? Yes, it would obviously bring the entire economy to an immediate crashing halt or, at the very least, involve ruinous levels of inflation. Yet because our minimum wages have been so low for so long...
Aug 22, 2018 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
People saying that we've lost the battle against climate change really seem deeply, perhaps intentionally, ignorant of the range of policy options we have. They are correct that simply gradually cutting CO2 emissions isn't sufficient, but...
... the tiny amount of research we've done on direct carbon air removal suggests we can do it for less than $200/ton. Removing 10 GT/year will cost us 2.3% of *current* GDP, which is far less than estimates of the cost of climate change itself.
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