economist, writer • int'l & european political economy and macro, geoeconomics, history, climate • host: @eurotrashpod, @statesmarkets • ✍🏼 book on trade
London
Joined October 2009
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An accompanying piece to my Odd Lots episode.
It's not just about the technicalities of comparing living standards: the obsession with relative decline and 'competitiveness' is a form of declinism: "the unwitting last refuge of great power delusions."
🧵 phenomenalworld.org/analysis…
New Left EViews retweeted
“They’ve killed a lot of Americans” is one of these brainless cliches every blob stenographer cites. Iran has killed approximately zero US civilians in the past 40 years, the US, without provocation, killed 120+ school girls in a double tap strike 9 months ago.
Rep. Adam Hamawy tells a seemingly incredulous CNN anchor that, when it comes to Iran, the United States is “making adversaries when we should be making friends.”
@HamawyForNJ | @CNN
New Left EViews retweeted
Watched Scorsese’s Age of Innocence for the first time last night and all I’ll say is they should have ended it with Daniel Day Lewis looking straight at the camera and saying wistfully, “our age of innocence is collapsing”
Vol. 2715: Nobody understands anything about 18th century warfare and everyone condescends the past.
هذا اغبى تكتيك عسكري بالتاريخ
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
التشكيلات الخطية كانت التكتيك القياسي في القرنين الـ18 والـ19. البنادق الناعمة كانت غير دقيقة وبطيئة التحميل (3 طلقات في الدقيقة تقريبا)، لذا سمحت الصفوف الكثيفة بنيران مركزة، والسيطرة على الجنود في دخان المعركة، والحماية من هجمات الفرسان.
britannica.com/topic/tactics/… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_ta… teachinghistory.org/history-conten…
New Left EViews retweeted
Having one of those days where I mourn the loss of the usable internet. It's become so degraded and empty, so full of bullshit and devoid of life, so much more difficult to navigate and enjoy. It's all platforms, products, sponsored posts, scams, scams, scams.
New Left EViews retweeted
100% this. This framing also lets DMs avoid confronting their own lack of imagination, much of which stems from policymaking that starts from constraints, real or invented (mostly the latter).
Once again, I agree with @NewLeftEViews. A problem in this discourse is people inferring that a person who says “China’s advantage in manufacturing has stunted the development of other DMs” is accusing China of having behaved badly, rather than merely trying to describe reality.
New Left EViews retweeted
crazy to see the climate discourse regress in like 2 years from “green transition thru targeted uncapped subsidies with labor & EJ strings attached” to “remove guardrails, fast-track everything, and let the market sort it out.” what happened to the New Washington Consensus guys
New Left EViews retweeted
before they even get there they want their own dictatorship: the accrual of all the spoils of the economy leavened only by their own ability to dispense welfare to whomever their high council of EAs deems fit
New Left EViews retweeted
In @thenation in print and online today with my coauthors asking: "How many self-described socialists really believe in a socialism after capitalism anymore?" thenation.com/article/societ…
New Left EViews retweeted
lol if you thought UK utility costs were choking us to death now...
🚨BREAKING
The Financial Times has just revealed that Thames Water’s US hedge fund creditors are close to agreeing a ‘last and final’ deal to take over the company.
A handover to US hedge funds. A continuation of the privatised chaos. And a huge reward for the people who have run our water into the ground.
The deal would see them allowed to pollute our rivers and seas without consequence - in exchange for an upfront payoff.
This deal is absolutely outrageous, in every regard.
112 MPs have already called for special administration of Thames Water.
A cross-party group of MPs - who scrutinise the Environment Department - have said that the creditors’ proposal should be rejected and Thames Water should be brought into special administration.
And the former Environment Secretary rejected a previous version of the creditors’ deal in June. This new version is not better in any way.
@andyburnham promised to reverse Thatcher’s legacy of privatisation. He promised public control of life’s essentials.
This really is the moment of truth for Andy Burnham. If he allows the water supply of 16 million people to be sold off to US hedge funds - how can we take him seriously about any of his promises?
NO DEAL to the Thames Water creditors. Special administration now.
It’s neither a science nor is it ‘value free’ (which is a red herring anyway) and there’s an ocean between this delusional proposition (that nobody serious believes) and the notion that it’s entirely what we make it to be, that everything is just political and that there are no constraints on political ambition that can adequately described by economics/political economy.
New Left EViews retweeted
1/3
Reuters: "His concerns underscore a dilemma for Beijing. While European leaders and IMF officials argue the yuan remains undervalued and unfairly benefits exporters, Chinese policymakers worry that a rapid rise squeezes thin exporter margins, threatens jobs and weakens one of the few reliable drivers of economic growth as domestic demand remains soft."
reuters.com/world/asia-pacif…
New Left EViews retweeted
looked up the definition of confirmation bias and it means exactly what I always thought it did
New Left EViews retweeted
The media, political and think tank elite come from such a microscopic section of the country that they have no idea at all what the country is really like
New Left EViews retweeted
Some people do not learn from mistakes: the European Commission's new fiscal rules of 2024 use 90 percent debt ratio as an additional rule for guiding debt reduction, while this number was debunked more than 10 years earlier. This is not evidence-based but error-based policy.
A 28-year-old UMass graduate student got a homework assignment to reproduce a famous economics paper, couldn't make the numbers match, and found a spreadsheet mistake in a study that politicians had used to argue for budget cuts.
His name is Thomas Herndon.
In 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, published a short paper called Growth in a Time of Debt. Its headline finding: once a country's public debt goes above 90% of its economy, growth falls off a cliff. In their numbers, average growth for that group was minus 0.1%.
It came out right after the 2008 financial crisis, and it spread fast. In the US, the Paul Ryan budget cited it as its only evidence on what high debt does to growth.
In Europe, an EU commissioner pointed to the research in a speech. In Britain, George Osborne cited the authors by name.
Herndon was a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, taking a class called Econ 753: Applied Econometrics. The big assignment was to pick a well-known paper and replicate it.
He picked this one. He couldn't get the same results.
He asked the authors for their spreadsheet, and they sent it. When he spotted the problem, he called his girlfriend over to make sure he wasn't seeing things.
He wasn't.
> One formula stopped five rows short
> That quietly left out five countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark
> Some available years of data for other countries weren't included
> The way the averages were weighted let a single bad year in one country count as much as decades in another
Herndon and his professors, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, published the critique in April 2013. Fixing the problems, average growth for the high-debt countries came out to 2.2%, not minus 0.1%.
Reinhart and Rogoff publicly admitted the spreadsheet error. They disputed the other criticisms and defended their broader view. Economists still argue about debt and growth today.
But the formula was wrong, and for about three years nobody had publicly caught it.
A student doing homework did.
Most people assume famous research has been checked many times. Often the first person to really check it is someone with nothing to lose and an assignment due.
Have you ever found a mistake in your boss's spreadsheet and kept quiet?
New Left EViews retweeted
Perhaps you think I'm overly sentimental or narrow-minded in emphasising love marriage?
Economists might rather focus on employment, political scientists examine laws and representation.
Allow me to explain,
Women's desire for love, devotion, care and emotional companionship within marriage is NOT some minor aspect - 'just about coupling',
It is a fundamental shift in EVERYTHING.
She is not just marrying to be some guy's servant, provide sex & raise his babies. Nor is she following family duty & obligation.
Radically, she is saying "my feelings and happiness actually matter", "I am worthy of love", "I will only accept someone who cares about my happiness".
In the global history of patriarchy, that is a revolutionary expression of women's wants & self-worth.
New Left EViews retweeted
Personally, I think it was poor form of the New Yorker to publish something where he did not nothing criminal, yet is easily identifiable.
Similarly, I'm not a fan of people posting intimate DMs about relationships/ dating apps.
If we collectively raise the costs of asking people out, or being in a relationship, then they will become less appealing.
And that seems... sub-optimal. 🤷♀️
There are dozens of us
