Also a reminder that ‘joined up government’ sometimes means things like the Home Office giving dubious travel data to HMRC, so you just get ‘joined up dysfunction’
Patrick Schneider
@patricksecon.bsky.social
Assistant Professor @ Imperial Business School, formerly LSE & Bank of England Macroeconomist interested in distributional effects of macro policy. patrickmschneider.com
AI is getting to be as smart as a PhD - the kind of PhD who would fabricate all the data for a research paper on the impact of AI. amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
Diabolus Ex Machina
This Is Not An Essay
amandaguinzburg.substack.com
As I note here, really zero reason to believe Elon is stepping away from anything. This is all a crisis comms campaign. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-...
Don’t Fall For Elon Inc.’s Press Campaign
We’re in the midst of a storm of articles — variously encomiums,...
talkingpointsmemo.com
The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.
Melaine Le Roy@subfossilguy.bsky.social · last yr.Aerial view westward over the Blatten deposit and the newly formed lake upstream! 🧊🌊 📷Via Christian Petit/Linkedin
The real problem with the Supreme Court’s expected Fed carve out is not that it lacks a principle but that the real principle isn’t articulated. The reason it will carve out the Fed is functional but it won’t say that. And its jurisprudence doesn’t leave room to ventilate the functional arg.(1/8)
A man named Elias Rodriguez just shot dead two Israeli embassy staffers at a Jewish museum in DC, shouting “free Palestine!” An awful, criminal act that puts Israel back in a victim position. I’ve never seen a just cause attract such a high % of counterproductive “allies.” 🧵
Sigmund Freud’s ‘psychology’ is still getting parents in hot water
Lee Hurley@hleehurley.com · last yr.The Times blaming Malcolm X today
Correct take. If it’s good to force people to save for retirement, we don’t need to also compensate with tax breaks. This is true even if we’re only trying to force some people to save (eg because they have present bias)
David Sligar@davidsligar.bsky.social · last yr.the weirdest argument for a tax break is the vague idea of moral ‘compensation’ for forced saving under super. if super is a net good for people, why does it require consumption? if not, why do we do it? a totally discretionary policy we then ‘compensate’ people for. makes no sense
My god. What an abomination. www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...
Trump administration working on plan to move 1 million Palestinians to Libya
Details are murky and no final agreement has been reached, but the plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libyan leadership.
nbcnews.com
The ISA landscape is so confused. Exhibit 1: you can keep funds in cash within a stocks and shares ISA. Removing the Cash ISA would just preference one type of institution over another (banks). on.ft.com/4mjY2ZI UK ministers consider cutting tax-free cash Isa allowance
UK ministers consider cutting tax-free cash Isa allowance
City groups think such a move will attract money into equity funds and domestic shares
on.ft.com
New NBER WP by @kbuzard7.bsky.social @laurakgee.bsky.social and @olgastoddard.bsky.social finds mums are 1.4x more likely than dads to get a callback from schools, despite no request for the skew.
Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
nber.org
This Labour government’s apparently policy in office is to somehow improve growth/productivity while attempting to force a larger share of the overall workforce into lower value add employment and undermining profit centres. It’s definitively an unconventional approach!
Opinion from the FT's Editorial Board: 'The US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.' www.ft.com/content/f5fd...
A world historical crime, taking place in full view, with the perpetrators so convinced of their impunity that they can brag about genocidal intent, and it’s hard not to agree with their calculation that no one will stop them and no one will be held accountable
Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says
Bezalel Smotrich says Palestinians will ‘leave in great numbers to third countries’, raising fears of ethnic cleansing
theguardian.com
We need to replace all compensating variation evaluations with numbers of thumbs. Interpretable like CV, but much less likely to be biased in favour of wealthy people’s preferences.
DLC@dlc.bsky.social · last yr.
How better to celebrate Easter than with a discussion of whether Donald Trump is a Leviathan or Anti-Leviathan? New post from me about whether it makes sense to use theories about dictatorship to understand Trump's kind of chaotic authoritarianism. 1/n benansell.substack.com/p/donald-tru...
Donald Trump's Anti-Leviathan
What if we abandoned the social contract for the state of nature?
benansell.substack.com
This is remarkably close to what we had six days ago. The average tariff rate of most European nations was about 1%.
Bloomberg News@bloomberg.com · last yr.Elon Musk hopes for a “zero-tariff” system between the US and Europe that would effectively create “a free trade zone,” he said on Saturday
New post from me about Trump's tariffs and why Harold Macmillan was right - we Brits are truly Greece to America's Rome - because our Brexit-era compulsion to think everything was 'simple' has a Trumpian heir. A short thread. 1/n benansell.substack.com/p/simple
Simple
Or perhaps not
benansell.substack.com
Video obtained by my colleague Farnaz Fassihi shows how the IDF deliberately attacked, over several minutes, a convoy of ambulances and other emergency vehicles in #Gaza. #Israel wrongly claimed that the vehicles drove without emergency signals and headlights. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/w...
Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On (Gift Article)
The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of the incident, which described the vehicles as “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency ...
nytimes.com
Comparisons like this really aren’t meaningful. Do the same for the 1929 crash ($34bn lost peak to trough) to see why. % down is better. This graph says more about market gains in the intervening period than losses in the last few months
This, by @zacgross.bsky.social, is very smart take on how Albo should respond to the Trump tariffs open.substack.com/pub/gross/p/...
The Smart Way to Retaliate Against Trump’s Tariffs
Why make your own citizens pay, when you can make Big Pharma do it instead?
open.substack.com
Colbert: the art of taxation is like plucking a goose to max feathers and min hissing Trump: I love the sound of hissing in the morning
Chris Murphy@chrismurphyct.bsky.social · last yr.Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.
The formula is a distraction. Reverse engineered to justify Trump's misguided obsession with bilateral trade deficits. The issue to focus on is how the rest of the world should respond now that the US is no longer part of the rules based trading system
The formula isn’t *that* mad - it’s exactly what chatgpt would suggest if you asked it to design a policy to eliminate trade deficits and ignore all other considerations. Terrible policy, but coherent given its single-mindedness
Ben Ansell@benansell.bsky.social · last yr.I suppose the good news on Liberation Day is that the US decided that in the end VAT probably isn’t a tariff and just used a mad formula based on their trade deficits to figure out their ‘reciprocal’ tariffs.
“Assuming that offsetting exchange rate and GE effects are small enough to be ignored…”
Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · last yr.This is their "methodology." ustr.gov/issue-areas/...
🤯 ChatGPT almost certainly responsible for the tariffs on uninhabited Antarctic territories as well
Wojtek Kopczuk@wwwojtekk.bsky.social · last yr.I'm going to go with "too much"
Elon Musk just called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, so it’s worth reiterating: All functional retirement schemes, public or private, pre funded or pay as you go, are claims on future production - there's just no way, at scale, of storing current production for use during retirement
