Noahpinion

> Still plenty of stuff to complain about, but the job market looks far different than in the natural sciences or humanities. Yup. Economics [0] and comp sci are basically the only doctoral programs worth going into at this point (at least if you're an American citizen). You can debate which one is _more_ worth it, but the fact is that if you're doing anything else, you're in a for a world of pain. [0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/if-you-get-phd-get-economic…

Productivity has skyrocketed since the 1970s in the durable-goods sector, but not so much in the rest of the economy: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/tfp-and-great-stagnation.ht…

Best I can tell, market monetarism devolves to assumptions/beliefs about which strength of the EMH to use and about volatility. I'm interpreting "market monetarism" as "use an NGDP futures market". This should (IMO) be viewed as a decent summary: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/excess-volatility-and-ngdp-… I am not 100% sure I actually understand the post - I'd think that a "low pass filter" could be applied to Fed actions to address this, but it could easily be that I'm simply wrong about that. I have two competing biases - one, control theory, and two, a skepticism of how the EMH works out in real life. Also, it's not clear to me exactly what would happen if the Fed simply adopted say, a 4% inflation target.

Would you recommend reading it? This review claims it's too rambling and confused to make it worthwhile[0]. [0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5…

He's right of course. It's essentially the "billionaires in gated communities guarded by robot drones" argument. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-robot-lords-and-end-of-… It's amazing how many things look like a tragedy of the commons (rather than a wonderful efficient market) when you hit boundary conditions.

Here on HN, I believe there's the effect of a shouting class when it comes to crypto [1]. I think we can take it as a fact that the broad opinion of HN is that many crypto-related links satisfy the hacker's curiosity as outlined in HN's guidelines. That's why we see frequent posts on the front page. A large group is upvoting. But when you look into the comments of the threads, I find that often the topic is discussed unfairly and in a very polarizing and political fashion. Links also disappear rapidly from HN as they get flagged heavily. I've gotten this confirmed from dang via email. As a blogger, I've learned that for my arguments to have impact, I usually have to be fair to both sides of the spectrum, for the argument to land. And this is what I've come to observe isn't happening in HN discussions on crypto. It's very a very aggressive, personal and destructive controversy from both sides. A classical flamewar. It's sad, as I think the topic could have much more depth. - 1: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-class.html?m=…

At the general level, I doubt anyone is surprised to see this story, and there will likely be more to come as tech flocks to Austin (though it was already a notable tech hub with some of these pressures already before the billionaires decided to give it the seal of approval). To me, the more interesting question here is how does Austin avoid what happened to SF, where tech hollowed out nearly all of its existing culture and then tech workers began to complain it was bland. Real estate and zoning policy is going to be key here. I've seen a decent deal of discussion about "Yuppie Fishtanks" [0] recently and generally it seems to be supported that massively increasing the housing supply is one of the best ways to keep rents intact and avoid hollowing gentrification. For the existing Austin residents here, how is the city approaching it thusfar? Do people think this is another SF gentrification story in the making, or is something different? [0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/yimbyism-explained-without-…

Is this really that surprising? Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations? Also, if there was ever a time to be concerned about the owners of media organizations controlling the narrative this is not it. The media, and the ruling class more generally, being pissed off that the peasants are daring to speak back and have their own non approved opinions is behind the never ending stream of invective directed at the big tech companies[1]. Martin Gurri’s book on this loss of control, The Revolt of the Public, is amazing by the way[2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/19/the-collapse-of-… [2] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-of-the-pub… https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/book-review-revolt-of-publ…

> "hope" does not work in economics. Numbers do, and they do not add up. Economics is not about math, precise and inevitable. Economics is about people and their social interactions. Economists try to model social interactions with numbers, but don't mistake the map for the territory. What does it mean in human terms that Japan has high debt? Is your argument that Japan will inevitably default? Sophisticated traders are willing to lend more money for 30 years at less than half a percent interest [1], so smart people must judge default risk to be very low. Is your argument that somehow Japan is doomed because of this debt? Even if they default, what does that really mean on a human level? Would millions starve? Would society collapse? Maybe Japan's history, customs, language and social cohesion are worth more than you think. And, just for the record, Western stereotypes of Japan as a collectivist society are no longer true [2]. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/japan [2] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/japan-is-not-collectivist-s…

Exactly. Math isn't a set of procedures, it's a way of thinking. Without understanding that way of thinking it is impossible to be an educated person. "Most mathematicians at one time or another have probably found themselves in the position of trying to refute the notion that they are people with "a head for figures." or that they "know a lot of formulas." At such times it may be convenient to have an illustration at hand to show that mathematics need not be concerned with figures, either numerical or geometrical. For this purpose we recommend the statement and proof of our Theorem 1. The argument is carried out not in mathematical symbols but in ordinary English; there are no obscure or technical terms. Knowledge of calculus is not presupposed. In fact, one hardly needs to know how to count. Yet any mathematician will immediately recognize the argument as mathematical, while people without mathematical training will probably find difficulty in following the argument, though not because of unfamiliarity with the subject matter. What, then, to raise the old question once more, is mathematics? The answer, it appears, is that any argument which is carried out with sufficient precision is mathematical, and the reason that your friends and ours cannot understand mathematics is not because they have no head for figures, but because they are unable [or unwilling, DRH] to achieve the degree of concentration required to follow a moderately involved sequence of inferences. This…

Here's the problem. You're talking about traders, but where is the capital? You can't have a financial market purely based on currency speculation. If we're going to talk about bitcoins as though it were an asset (store of value), rather than a money supple (unit of account or medium of exchange), then we need to verify which properties of an asset it possesses. Do bitcoins provide a consumption utility stream? Do they yield dividends. What sorts of productive risk-taking do they represent? When I buy a stock, it will perform well if the risks it takes in providing mutually beneficial exchange with business and households are successful. For bitcoins, there is no systematic market risk, because there is no capital stock. Why? The same reason as always. Deflation increases the burden of debt which decreases investment, even though the economy is awash in savings. Our national economies do not possess cycles as you describe them. Here's a good article about macroeconomic business cycles: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/is-business-cycle-cycle.htm… While the level of inflation fluctuates in our economy, it does so on a much smaller scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation_Ancient.svg. What really jumps out from that graph is how the best economic prosperity the world has ever seen coincides with fiat currency ending the threat of deflation.

It isn't difficult to find critiques of the book from different economists. The problems they find in the book are much more substantial than quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. For example: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000… https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-menger https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.html

Having a Math degree doesn't make you a mathematician if you've stopped doing Math since then… That's even more true if, as Noah Smith, you got your diploma in order to become a pundit. From his own words[1]: > Back in 2006, the original reason I thought of getting an econ PhD was actually to become an econ pundit and writer. [1]: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/life-update-leaving-stony-b…

Another one by Noah Smith, again another left wing economist on why Debt is a poor book : http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000…

Yeah, that also struck me as more of arising from an "antagonistic, competitive" culture vs a collaborative/cooperative one. And as Facebook shows, "everyone shouting and whoever gets the loudest wins[1]" definitely sucks too. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there were at least some lessons from the creation / history of RRoO that could actually translate. [1] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-class.html

Here’s a good critique of Debt by Noah Smith: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000…

Thanks for linking that. It does a good job of drawing out some of the feelings I had when I read Debt. On the one hand I'm very glad I read the book. I found it very enlightening in terms of various aspects of history and anthropology, as well as enlightening about various leftist ideas. On the other hand I can't say I came away feeling like I had read a "correct analysis" or that I really understood any better how anything worked. (I'm quite surprised to see so much praise for it on HN actually and such little challenge, the sad news about the passing of its author notwithstanding.) [EDIT: There are also some good counterpoints to Noah Smith's critique in the comments, for example https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-500…

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/examining-mmt-model-in-deta… Noah Smith talks about how MMT is a pretty slippery concept to pin down.

https://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/25833504237 >Nobody half-understands a topic as lucidly as Malcolm Gladwell. Unless he's found one case study claiming the contrary. https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/big-data-vs-big-hair.html >And now, finally, just for fun, we have the Coup de Gladwell: >“I think millennials are very trusting,” Gladwell said. “And when they say they’re not...they’re bullshitting.” >And there you have it, folks. Who needs data when you have Gladwellian Pronouncements. The future is not the era of Big Data...it is the era of Big Gladwell. I don't trust Malcolm Gladwell to fully understand a topic, much less explain it to the public. This particular article is also suspicious because he's been pro-tobacco for decades: https://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/

For SF, SOMA residental towers ("Yuppie fishtanks") seems like the way to go: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/yimbyism-explained-without…

It's really not. First of all, the affordable housing market isn't where the housing market was most inflated so the author's entire premise is wrong. Secondly, the author of that article is pretty clearly shilling to privatize Fannie Mae. Thirdly, nobody here seems to understand what the community lending standards actually were and just wants to use it as a post to rest their argument on. This is a much better, though still critical of the CRA article that goes into actual detail on what the problems were: https://www.city-journal.org/html/financial-crisis-and-cra-10483.html But it's still an overly reductive and misguided argument. As Noah Smith points out here: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/did-risky-mortgage-lending…

I agree that the headline and tone of this article are engaging in unnecessary hyperbole, but this description of Noah Smith's views and arguments are not consistent with what I've read. I don't see him arguing for a Grand Theories perspective of economics, and he grounds his arguments in empirical evidence and is vocal about the need to do this. I also think you have contrived an exaggerated view, attributed it to him, and are arguing against that. I'd like to see more quotes to back up your argument because it is difficult to find it persuasive. Doing a quick search I found an older blog post where he touches on a lot of the same points that you just did, so maybe you agree with him more than you think: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-reason-macroeconomics-d…

It's not really an extreme claim. Honestly, if you're speaking on economic issues and the model you're using only has two lines: Supply and Demand, you really shouldn't be speaking. Here is a good little blog about how the S/D graph for labor is unscientific. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/an-econ-theory-falsified.ht…

Macro has a pretty bad reputation, but economists often point to successes of the field as a counterpoint. Noah Smith points to four areas: Matching theory, discrete choice theory, gravity trade models, and auction theory [0]. Does anyone know about these topics? Are they really as successful as their proponents claim? [0]http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/is-economics-science.html

Yep: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-shouting-class.html

Supply is the only way to get out of the problem facing US cities today, and it's entirely a regulatory problem: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/laissez-faire… http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-nimby-challenge.html

This was a good article, but I think it was good because of the portrait it paints of the man he met. I'm not calling all the claims about having learned something "about Japan" unwarranted, but let me offer by way of counterbalance this invaluable essay I read some time ago and to which I've returned whenever someone brings up Japan like this. [0] [0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/let-me-explain-japan-for-we…

Not sure if this is the original source, but at least the first where I saw this calim: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/11/a-bet-is-a-ta… And another view: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.fi/2013/05/bets-do-not-necessarily-reve…

I wouldn't use Noahpinion to learn about market monetarism. See Scott Sumner's comment on this very piece at https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/excess-volatility-and-n… > Also, it's not clear to me exactly what would happen if the Fed simply adopted say, a 4% inflation target. In practice, they seem to have an inflation ceiling, not an inflation target. But it has not too much to do with nGDP targeting. (Or only insofar as nGDP targeting right now would suggest looser money, so going for more inflation would do the same thing.) Also, are you talking about a 4% level target?

The article is actually fairly silent on the reasons so read into it what you will. If anything the author is endorsing his friend's book without giving away the thesis and if the link is accurate it covers a wide range of factors. As for Deirdre McCloskey, as Noah Smith says,"do not believe things that Deirdre McCloskey says just because she says them." http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/deirdre-mccloskey-says-thin…