Garett Jones finishes his trilogy
In the last 10 years, economist Garett Jones has been writing a series of books, a trilogy to be exact: Jones says in the post-script: THIS IS THE FINAL BOOK…
Solar and wind are very expensive
Danish cheaper energy activist Bjørn Lomborg posted this on X: The obvious problem here is that maybe electricity prices just reflect prices overall (presumably because electricity generation in part costs…
GDP, yes, but GDP per what?
Many free marketers have an almost religious devotion to seeing GDP lines go up. The American subset of these are therefore quite happy when they see plots like this one…
The content economy on X
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter/X, he started monetizing it. There are two types of monetization schemes: 1) subscribers, which work the same way as every other platform (monthly sub, some…
Do you (also) have a bullshit job?
I just ran this poll on Twitter/X: (I consider non-profits/NGOs to be public sector because they have tax benefits.) The attentive reader will notice that the ratios are not the…
End stage global capitalism
Let's define global capitalism as market economy combined with relatively free movement of labor (people) and capital. This is approximately world we live in. We have an unequal world to…
The anti-boomer story
The anti-boomer story goes like this: There was upon a time a happy, functional western civilization. Then came one generation who voted for a lot of welfare increases. The same…
Explaining global variation in internet speed
I saw this on Twitter earlier today: The narrative seemed right, so at first I retweeted. But then I looked closer at the map and realized it couldn't be right.…
The value of intelligence
There are many studies that report correlations between intelligence -- however measured -- and economic outcomes, mainly (self-reported) income. This is however somewhat abstract since correlations are unitless. They don't…
The practical utility of selection for hiring
Over at SlateStarCodex AstralCodexTen commenter Himaldr asked me: >"because strength of the correlation has a linear relationship with the expected return of using it for selection (hiring) purposes."< Can you…