Steven Bosworth
@sjbeconobot.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Reading He/him, autistic
I think the issue is live again, somewhat, because of the poli-sci view that people really hated the covid inflation, which wasn't that far off IMO the best central banks could do under the circumstances. The alternative being less inflation and a big recession.
Reminds me of Ali G /Borat or any of the SBC personas where the character wears thin pretty quickly but the comedy comes from people interacting with it seriously. If you wonder why people are laughing at the bin, they’re not, they’re laughing at you.
Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · last mo.I don't think I've ever seen a group of people take a joke quite as badly to heart as this lot have this week
If I could associate YIMBY with one historical thinker it’d be Ricardo, so, close enough?
Mikhail Gorbaechev@mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social · 5mo agoHot take: YIMBY analysis of housing policy is at its core substantially more Marxist than the liberal rights-based view of housing that comes from a lot of the left.
Wholly agree. And will add that this stems from UK elites’ cynicism about the possibility of materially improving the lives of the British public. We must keep feeding resentments & cultivating new ones!
Toby Buckle@polphilpod.bsky.social · 3mo agothe anti-trans bathroom ban is very bad—it's also a sign uk democracy is failing my latest with @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-t...
Even Euston to Birmingham will have no meaningful impact on reducing WCML congestion, for that the whole way to Manchester needs to be finished.
Jim Pickard@pickardje.bsky.social · 3mo agoin 2010 ministers said phase 1 of High-Speed 2 (from Old Oak Common to Birmingham) would be finished by 2026 now the completion date has been pushed back to between 2036 and 2039 with the final leg to Euston not set to be finished until as late as 2043 price tag up from £80bn to £103bn
Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer & Welch (1992) say it’s ok if the paper’s been cited by others, or so I’m told I haven’t read it /s
Hadas Weiss@hadas.bsky.social · 3mo ago
Conspiracy theory: the past 10 years of British political intrigue are Ed Miliband’s attempts to House of Cards himself into No 10 www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Keir Starmer faces ‘judgment day’ as Mandelson vetting debacle grows
As revelations mount and accusations fly, prime minister prepares for MPs’ anger and Olly Robbins’ testimony early next week
theguardian.com
One of the least edifying parts of my job is having to snitch to the Home Office about whether international students are attending class. Consider that if someone is willing to pay £20k to not study maybe they should have been given a work visa.
I now pronounce the name of the letter “H” as if it begins with a(n) h 😬
Judah Grunstein@judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 5mo agoTo my horror, I recently noticed I've begun pronouncing my t's. There should be a warning about this in the Life in the UK study guide.
nearly wrote a long explanation of why one can agree with the general sentiment "all art is political" or even the more ambitious "everything is political" while also thinking that the sense in which Crash Bandicoot is political is different from the sense in which the Communist Manifesto is
I wrote an article for Harper's Bazaar about what it's like for trans people in Kansas (spoiler: it's bad). Read, share, and send some love to your trans loved ones.
Kansas Stripped Trans Citizens of Their Driver’s Licenses. Here’s What Happened Next
For trans people living in the state, existence has begun to feel like a high-stakes test with no right answers
harpersbazaar.com
Yeah I strongly dislike the left anti tax movement. There's no having a society just on the back of soaking the rich, even people far lower down the inequality ladder have to contribute. That's fine. We're all in this together.
ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com · 5mo agonot really the time for this particular discussion, but for the record, this is a stupid idea www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
The policy being announced here is putting higher marginal tax rates on married women's income which makes what he said even weirder than what you'd think based on the headline.
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 6mo agoReform’s Danny Kruger criticises UK’s ‘totally unregulated sexual economy’
A leftist named Marx, praising every technology handed down from self-interested capitalists seeking only to enhance their power and profits.
Paris Marx@parismarx.com · 6mo agowhy won’t the left just praise every technology handed down from self-interested billionaires seeking only to enhance their power and profits?! clearly, they’re the ones in the wrong if they can’t get on board 😤
Help my country is in a Condorcet cycle and can’t get out
Ok I wanna do this just for pizza. Over-rated: Impossible Under-rated (globally): New York style Under-rated (US specifically): Roman style Under-rated (🇺🇸&🌐): Chicago style Accurately rated: Neapolitan style (laudatory), St Louis style (derogatory)
Kevin Zollman@kevinzollman.com · 8mo agoTime to start a bluesky Christmas fight: Most over-rated and under-rated cuisine? For me: Over-rated: French Under-rated (globally): Mexican Under-rated (US specifically): Indonesian
What share of the present-day labour force would be necessary to produce the world GDP of 1800? 10% doesn’t sound like a bad guess.
jake@yetanotheruseless.com · 8mo agoWhat I want to know is: how far is unsatisfactorily boring is this stuff going to get us? What happens when we find out that like 90% of the GDP is fucking rote as stuff a non-reasoning model can memorize how to handle? It's still a dumb/clever hunk of sand, but we're also basically not needed?
This is far from over, but I tend to agree. Authoritarian attempts are prototypical cases of multiple equilibria: when the key actors believe that it will succeed, they are more likely to join, which makes it more likely to succeed. When that belief crumbles, the probability of success vanishes...
Max Berger@maxberger.bsky.social · 8mo agoIn the last few weeks, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Trump and his regime are totally cooked. They can only stay in power by stealing elections—but they can only do that if enough people are willing to help them. They’re in a downward spiral and can’t pull themselves out of it.
Remember when Larry Summers made the lazy inference that fewer women in science means they must be less able? @mardelgiu.bsky.social and I wrote a paper exploring the consequences of this lazy inference for occupational segregation which we term the "Larry effect:" www.iza.org/publications...
When Matthew Met Larry: Explaining the Persistence of Gender Underrepresentation in High Status Organizations
What explains the persistent under-representation of women at the top organizations within high status occupations? The phenomenon has been documented...
iza.org
Steven Durlauf@durlauf.bsky.social · 9mo ago1/ Egalitarianism should begin at home. I link to this article by @bencasselman.bsky.social in light of the communications between Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein that have just been released. The released emails and the fact of friendship are vile. www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/b...
Imagine you time travel back to 1847 and you find the left response to industrialization is a) machines will never be as good as human weavers or b) we need to copyright loom patterns or c) it’s a speculative bubble. You’d say “Y’all. Not helping. What you need is obviously a labor movement.”
Economists think of ourselves as social scientists. It’s other social scientists who seem to think we are STEM, or think that we think of ourselves as STEM. We also do cite other socsci. fields, though fwiw there is a clear asymmetry in feelings of not being cited appropriately.
Sheila Liming@seeshespeak.bsky.social · 10mo agoBREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name
If I understand correctly, Senate R’s have a trilemma between a) not succeeding in taking away health insurance from the working poor, b) getting rid of the filibuster, or c) letting Trump nuke Article 1 of the constitution and are going to choose c)
An outsider may be forgiven for assuming the British love rules. They hate them in fact. But they also hate each other so it cancels out. Revealed preference only gets one so far..
Materialist Gnostic@walmsley.bsky.social · 10mo agodo the british just have a fetish for making things crimes
Anyways consultants are not paid because they possess useful advice. They are hired to stand behind what the buyer wants to do and accept blame / verify good money was paid for it.
Steven Bosworth@sjbeconobot.bsky.social · 10mo agoWeirdly lamentable that ai won’t after all be destroying jobs in the consulting industry.
A friendly reminder as Nobel season approaches, the Nobel Prizes are not real Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
