Patrick Schneider

Sahara desert also

This is a feature of pretty much any technology that reduces the cost of doing x -> lowers the expertise threshold to participate; for another example see Lime Bikes

Such a perfect dinner companion too RIP

I’d love to see this chart too if you can share

Also a reminder that ‘joined up government’ sometimes means things like the Home Office giving dubious travel data to HMRC, so you just get ‘joined up dysfunction’

Jaw-dropping reporting by Haaretz www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Diabolus Ex Machina This Is Not An Essay

AI is getting to be as smart as a PhD - the kind of PhD who would fabricate all the data for a research paper on the impact of AI.

amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

Don’t Fall For Elon Inc.’s Press Campaign We’re in the midst of a storm of articles — variously encomiums,...

As I note here, really zero reason to believe Elon is stepping away from anything. This is all a crisis comms campaign. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-...

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

You should team up with Matt Levine: everything is either a bank or securities fraud (and why not both?)

One of the central points in Plato’s Republic, isn’t it?

The real problem with the Supreme Court’s expected Fed carve out is not that it lacks a principle but that the real principle isn’t articulated. The reason it will carve out the Fed is functional but it won’t say that. And its jurisprudence doesn’t leave room to ventilate the functional arg.(1/8)

A man named Elias Rodriguez just shot dead two Israeli embassy staffers at a Jewish museum in DC, shouting “free Palestine!”

An awful, criminal act that puts Israel back in a victim position. I’ve never seen a just cause attract such a high % of counterproductive “allies.” 🧵

Sigmund Freud’s ‘psychology’ is still getting parents in hot water

In this paper my coauthor and I find you can’t rationalise mandatory contributions and tax concessions as an optimal policy *unless* the concessions solve a political problem (in our paper, they’re necessary to get new workers to opt into the system)

tinyurl.com/mr8y9ph9

Why? As OP notes you can’t give the whole of society a tax break. Concessions on retirement contributions just mean higher taxes on something else -> optimal choice depends on the marginal social impact of each of these two taxes

Correct take. If it’s good to force people to save for retirement, we don’t need to also compensate with tax breaks.

This is true even if we’re only trying to force some people to save (eg because they have present bias)

Trump administration working on plan to move 1 million Palestinians to Libya Details are murky and no final agreement has been reached, but the plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libyan leadership.

My god. What an abomination. www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

That’s a remarkable level of hubris if so. The UK’s sluggish productivity growth was the main economic issue before being eclipsed (in the news) by Brexit and Covid

Which is stunning, given how their campaign promises all hinged on those unplanned policies getting growth going again

The ISA landscape is so confused.

Exhibit 2: one of the main types of ISA is called ‘Stocks and Shares ISA’. Two words for the same security.

UK ministers consider cutting tax-free cash Isa allowance City groups think such a move will attract money into equity funds and domestic shares

The ISA landscape is so confused.

Exhibit 1: you can keep funds in cash within a stocks and shares ISA. Removing the Cash ISA would just preference one type of institution over another (banks).

on.ft.com/4mjY2ZI UK ministers consider cutting tax-free cash Isa allowance

yeah on second glance I was wrong - the surpluses of the other countries add up to more than the UK and US deficits, so your OP was the right interpretation; apologies

The US’s deficit is the bit that’s unexplained by the bars in the graph

Can confirm from my own experience - we always put my name first, but the doctor & school always call my wife first.

From the abstract: "Our findings underscore a process through which agents outside the household contribute to within-household gender inequalities." Indeed.

Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

New NBER WP by @kbuzard7.bsky.social @laurakgee.bsky.social and @olgastoddard.bsky.social finds mums are 1.4x more likely than dads to get a callback from schools, despite no request for the skew.

This Labour government’s apparently policy in office is to somehow improve growth/productivity while attempting to force a larger share of the overall workforce into lower value add employment and undermining profit centres. It’s definitively an unconventional approach!

This would *add* an inflationary bias into the optimal policy rule. The fed has no control over tax and spend, but the denominator and numerator act differently when there’s inflation inflation so…