What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
Although his training is not in economics, Richard Reeves draws on economic research, as well as research from the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science, to tell an under-told story. The book explores the problems faced by boys and men, the roots of those problems, and possible policy solutions.
I particularly appreciated The Journey of Humanity because it is an ambitious and deep story about the past tens of thousands of years of economic development that is also well grounded in a growing economics literature into the deep origins of growth
Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.
How to improve your HUGE major life decisions, like whether/who to marry, whether to have kids, where to live, career paths, and such — where you can’t use the usual checklist/data approach. This economist addresses self-identity, “deepest self”, and “something I was meant to do”. You can’t use a pro/con checklist with an item that says “lose respect for myself”.
But the thing is, you can’t have this if you don’t have an oxygenated planet because it’s all, in the end, it’s about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat? And if you don’t have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you’ve got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out.
All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent.
The drone-like architecture of the multicopters is simple, but as the rotors are responsible for keeping the unit at a constant altitude with hover power, they represent an energy-intensive version of VTOLs. Their range is, therefore, short, typically less than 20 miles.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
A longer maturity of debt protects the government from a temporary increase in the short run interest rate, and it gives it more time to adjust to a permanent increase.
If a fiscal expansion takes place when output is already at potential, monetary policy is likely to tighten, leading to higher interest rates and thus a smaller effect or even no effect of the fiscal expansion on output.
while the growth rate may well affect saving and investment, there is no tight
relation between growth rates and interest rates, either on theoretical or empirical
grounds.
the electric technology used for cars only has to beat energy hogs that are below 10% in efficiency, our everyday car. But to qualify for aircraft use, the technology has to equal or beat what is used today, which is at the 30% to 40% efficiency level using modern turboprop or turbofan engines.
It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
A fine intro to investing if you think you can reliably beat the market or that active trading is a good use of energy. If you're already bought in on index funds though, you won't find much here.
The problem that companies like Apple need to solve is not preventing exploits forever, but a much simpler one: they need to screw up the economics of NSO-style mass exploitation.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective is the best book on the country’s adoption of sustained economic growth at the turn of the nineteenth century, full stop.
No matter what your model of obesity is, in order to explain the development of an obese body, energy imbalance has to be a link in the model’s causal chain.
This economics thought experiment is a classic book originally written in 1946. Like most books that follow Nassim Taleb's "all books worth reading are at least 20 years old" rule, it has timeless lessons throughout. It tackles all kinds of ongoing political/economic concepts like rent control, minimum wage, tariffs, "saving industries", and more.
Using history to understand our present is a great impulse, but it means some of the false myths we tell about the Black Death and Renaissance are doing new damage, one of the most problematic in my view being the idea that sitting back and letting COVID kill will somehow by itself naturally make the economy turn around and enter a period of growth and rising wages.
when the main communication channels are asynchronous text and video calls (as would be the case in a remote work setup) the influence of the loudest person in the room wanes. It's transferred to the best communicators.
And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.
Their words now
Both of those forecasts were wrong. Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone – including me – predicted.
We can use the last decade to predict the future prices of solar power. Not by looking at the cost of solar as a function of time, but by looking at the cost of solar as a function of cumulative scale of the solar industry.
Add these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.
The data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
It's basically the Vim of audio editing software, so I wouldn't recommend it if you don't have the time and energy to heavily invest in customizing it for your workflow, but I can move like lightning in this thing.
Alan B. Krueger, Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life: From the economist who revealed the secrets of the minimum wage comes this look at the economics of the music industry. Its disruptions by technology to economics of songwriting and concert tours, the music industry offers important financial lessons. Kreuger, an economic rock star himself (he was former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers) left us far too soon.
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
In order to understand Marx, you really do need to know something about Hegel. It's a mistake to think you could read Marx as a scientist or an economist without understanding the Hegelian framework of his thought. That's why I chose to begin with Hegel.
Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn't, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.
As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages.
As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages.
A fascinating book exploring the role of energy in biology and evolution. It explains how eucaryotic life emerged and why it grew in complexity, while bacteria have remained unchanged in their simplicity for billions of years. It also presents the best theory of abiogenesis we have, and a lot more.
Behavioral science can play an even more important role in the policymaking process in coming years if practitioners instead begin with some of the large-scale questions that economic policymakers face and then develop insights that, often as a complement to more traditional policy tools, can help solve them.
If you’ve enjoyed Narcos, you’ll like this book. The world of drugs, cartels, gangs, violence, and prisons looked at from the perspective of an economist.
An ecopragmatist book making a compelling argument that urbanization, nuclear energy, and genetic engineering are good for the environment and must be pursued. This is all counterintuitive — environmental movement traditionally despises those things. But we’ve gone so far changing Earth, there might not be another choice.
The history of humankind from 2 million years back all the way until today. Fascinating read. I liked that it wasn’t just a list of events, but an overarching “theory of history”. Also enjoyed that this one topic was presented through many lenses: history, evolutionary biology, archeology, economics, even philosophy and theology.
The real problem is the absence of firms small and large to employ people productively. The root of the problem is political instability, economic uncertainty, and a country’s high cost structure, among other things. A government’s attention is properly on these bigger issues.
This is a book by a philosopher and an economist about a topic that was neglected for a very long time in social analysis. So there's lots about it in the 18th century – Adam Smith and people like that – and it's about how esteem, which is their word for the respect that you give to people who have achieved things against a certain standard, can be used to motivate people to do good things.
Why Nations Fail is by two of my favourite economists, two very close friends and co-authors of mine, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They're tackling a subject that I've worked on with them, and they do a great job of bringing it to life and making it vivid.
This is a roundabout way of telling you that companies are not sensitive to small differences in employee wages because employees are so darned expensive anyhow.
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
You really want to be attached to Profit Centers because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you.
Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
I write my books and comics scripts in Scrivener. Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
Meir Statman, one of my favorite behavioral economists, has written a great book on how investors can overcome their base urges and make better decisions:
Any effective monetary stimulus would be expected to raise long term rates.
Their words now
I predicted that aggressive QE would raise long term interest rates, a view which seemed to be refuted by the response on T-bond yields to the March 2009 Fed QE announcement.
For these pundits, the most dismal indicator is that we have a Republican Administration. They have been gloomy for six years now.
Their words now
I will add that I was definitely not expecting Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to have ventured so far away from the idea of investment-quality mortgages that they had enough exposure in subprime loans to wipe out their capital.
Just like Britain, Europe can’t live on its own renewables. So if the aim is to get off fossil fuels, Europe needs nuclear power, or solar power in other people’s deserts (as discussed on p179), or both.
For most materials, the embodied energy per unit weight is greater than or equal to 10 kWh per kg – the same as the energy per unit weight of fossil fuels.
planes are already almost as energy-efficient as they could possibly be. Planes unavoidably have to use energy for two reasons: they have to throw air down in order to stay up, and they need energy to overcome air resistance. No redesign of a plane is going to radically improve its efficiency.
Differences between the general public's positive economic views and economists' resemble other judgemental anomalies: Laypeople and experts systematically disagree.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.