Noahpinion

I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was. I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website. A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are : Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different. https://arnoldkling.substack.com/ Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world https://www.noahpinion.blog/ Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/ Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/

I am long-time fun of Economist, but unfortunately the quality decreases. E.g. last issue EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices. First, I find they did not explain their model well. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Second, the correlation does not imply causation or whether extrapolations are solid. It looks like there might be mistakes on that front and there are many spurious correlations (e.g. high energy in the past might mean high unemployment). Third, so far the country experiencing freezing is the Ukraine due to power outages. Just one sentence mentioning, whether in Ukraine for sure many people are going to die due to distrusted power, heating or water supplies. So far on general economics, I love: https://noahpinion.substack.com/ Though, it is hard for me to find comprehensive Economist replacement.

My recommendation is to check out economics blogs and newsletters. I am a big fan of Noah, and there are a ton of great ones on Substack: https://www.noahpinion.blog/ Why do I like these? It switches the discussion to the impact and cost to society. This removes it from being a belief system and shifts it more to taking action and justifying it with data. For example, if you want to build a wall across the USA / Mexico better, don't talk about why you believe that is important... let's talk about costs of building a wall of that size; let's talk about how effective it is based on data from areas with walls, let's talk about how much immigrants power the USA and contribute to our economy using data, let's talk about how we build houses without immigrants, let's talk about crime stats showing that immigrants commit less crime than non-immigrants, let's talk about how we can expand legal immigration to create more jobs for everyone, etc... The comment section on Noah's Substack is great.

Ive read quite a bit, including one of my favorite articles, "It's probably the phones": https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phones But then you kind of dove into the deepend there. Spy devices, 1984, etc. I think a more tempered approach is useful here

I found Noah Smith's piece on this a good read. It's from November 2023 : "People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone" [1] "It’s important to clarify, by the way, that the phrase “Arsenal of Democracy” doesn’t refer to the size of our existing military, nor does it refer to our military spending. It refers to our military production potential — how much military equipment we could make in the event of a long conventional war against a major power like China." [1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-the-arsenal

I think people are, rightly or wrongly, identifying goalpost moving re: coding agents are only just this year working well enough to impact work. I'm reminded of a quote I read last year from one of my favorite writers, Noah Smith: > The debate over whether AI is taking people’s jobs may or may not last forever. If AI takes a lot of people’s jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn’t take a lot of people’s jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it’s about to take everyone’s job. Sometimes those people will find some subset of workers whose employment prospects are looking weaker than others, and claim that this is the beginning of the great AI job destruction wave. And who will be able to prove them wrong? Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-and-jobs-again

> * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-... Woah, this is really a “worst person you known just made a great point” moment for me.

They have a new kind of R&D organization that may be worth emulating. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-has-invented-a-whole-new-way (partially behind paywall, sorry)

The focus on ground-level retail as opposed to multi-story retail is a bit disappointing. This Substack post from Noah Smith does a really great job explaining why density for retail is also an important part of creating walkable neighborhoods: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/a-better-way-to-build-a-downtown

Perhaps worth noting that there are situations that tariffs can be considered a good idea: * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good It's just that generally speaking, most of why they're being implemented by the US now are not valid.

Noah Smith also wrote a IMO nice review of the Abundance book [1]. I'm very happy that problems like this are discussed: > This is only one way that Klein and Thompson would have us focus on outputs instead of on inputs. Progressives love to focus on the number of dollars the government spends on high speed rail or green energy; Klein and Thompson would have us focus instead on how much actually gets built as a result of that spending. [1]: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-abundance.

YIMBYism is having a much greater impact in red states. Noah Smith (left wing blogger) has a fascinating article on it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-states In Austin, TX, rent has been falling for 2 years because they've been building so much new supply: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/

There are a very large number of posts which follow the format of the parent post, each clearly aiming to make TikTok appear equivalent to US-owned social media platforms, while ignoring the actual issue that TikTok is an active propaganda arm of the CCP. TikTok's manipulation of the feed has been proven through extensive public studies: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning The pressing need to ban it on security grounds likely extends further into non-public knowledge - Let us not forget that in the current political landscape it's pretty hard to get both major parties to agree on anything, then to actually also vote that way: but that's what happened with regard to TikTok.

A few months back, the author of "Homelessness is a Housing Problem" gave a talk where I live and it's quite worth watching if you don't have time to read the book: https://youtu.be/W4rBe1fGPZU?si=xV2Ai789WXZ548nG&t=442 (linked to where he's about to start talking to skip all the intros and thanks and so on) There's this article, also, with the main points: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about We need to build a lot more housing - of all shapes and sizes - in the places where people want to live.

See perhaps "Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system": * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-main The margins and ROE for health insurance companies aren't that big, health providers on the other hand… Of course that doesn't necessarily mean the insurance companies are useful: * https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/health-insurance-is-a-racket But given the realpolitik of when Obamacare was passed, the current US system was probably the only way at the time to get to universal healthcare. The ACA barely managed to get passed after all (219–212 and 60–39): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” ― Otto von Bismarck

> It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck. This is oft repeated by politicians (including Bernie Sanders recently), but I've seen some good arguments why this can be a misleading claim. Ex. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/paycheck-to-paycheck-and-five-other

> Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs." > I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward. It's not that I don't want to engage. I just don't want to be submerged there all the time. I want to spend most of my time surrounded by 'my people' and only once in a while peek outside. Let me recommend an article by Noah Smith where he argues (IMO convincingly) why he thinks that the internet works better as a fragmented thing https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented

This article covers a lot of the history. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships Basically the US wasn’t great at shipbuilding post civil war due to high costs. WWII was an existential threat so cost was no object, and we coasted on that capacity for a long time.

It's tempting to play tiny violins for marketers who have, as a post below puts it, been "following us round smelling our farts to see what we had for breakfast". But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform and subject to that platform's political and social filters. Is that good? Noah Smith thinks so [1], but it's not hard to think of disadvantages. [1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented

Dumb decision, but we really just gotta build more homes mainly. A good overview of why this is the best solution to homelessness: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about

I'd say there's a great-er probability of a cold war now, but I get my opinions from Noahpinion https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/happy-fun-cold-war-2-update.

... microeconomics works amazingly well! scroll down and look at that graph! https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder… also go to and read about the studies https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/142905737/the-evidence-is-in-favor-of-ma… and you can see the exact numbers from the datasets, these are all spherical cow parameters basically!

You are poorly informed: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-american-wealth The wealth and income gaps between Europe and the United States are growing: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-09/europe-s-economy… which strongly argues against great unionization.

>If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are experiencing secularly stagnating growth Is growth really what we should care about though? Would you prefer to live in a poor society that's growing rapidly, or a rich society that's stagnating? In terms of your quality of life (medical, food, housing, education, etc.) you're going to have a better time in the stagnant-but-rich society. The American economy is actually doing super well right now btw: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-american-wealth

Actually median (and poorer) households did well between 2019 - 2022. See https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf or the related blog post https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-american-wealth . This chart doesn't seem to be about households alone.

Noah Smith[0]. I appreciate his level-headed analysis and how he usually backs up all his claims with sources and statistics. I was never much into economics before I found his Substack, but now I read it regularly and I feel like I've learned a lot from him. [0] https://www.noahpinion.blog

Great Link! See also all the other articles on various countries named The Developing Country Industrialization series by the same author here: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-developing-country-industrializa…

There is a significant lag between rate changes and effect, unless its a second-order expectations effect. Following folks like Noah Smith and Brad DeLong[1], I suspect that it isn't the rate hikes, and the rate hikes are actually threatening an uneccessary recession. [1] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/is-the-fed-hiking-too-fast

That's the only way we land on affordable housing in a market economy. For the record, the City of Berlin is one of the largest owners of rental property in... the City of Berlin. And, Germany is definitely a market economy. That said, in the United States, this would be probably be impossible. The economy and politics is much too classically liberal. (I'm not talking about Democrats == liberal.) Yes, I agree with your main point: "All new supply is good supply, period." Japan is very fair about this: The cities look visually sh-tty (during the daytime) -- architectural eyesore / concreted mess... but the prices are reasonable for middle class people. Noah Smith wrote about it: Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall Ref: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed-a-lot

https://noahpinion.substack.com/ "Noahpinion - Economics and other interesting stuff"