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An American Whitopia would be a dystopia
In a recent essay about the racial politics of the Trump movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates concluded with a warning: It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness...
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Realism in macroeconomic modeling
Via Tyler Cowen, I see that Ljungqvist and Sargent have a new paper synthesizing much of the work that's been done in labor search-and-matching theory over the past decade or so. This is pretty cool...
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a16z podcast on trade
I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the a16z podcast (a16z stands for Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm). The topic was free trade, and the other guest was Russ Roberts of...
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The margin of stupid
Every so often, I see a news story or tweet hyping the fact that a modest but non-negligible percent of Americans said some crazy or horrible thing in a survey. Here are two examples: 1. "A chilling...
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What we didn't get
I recently wrote a fairly well-received Twitter thread about how the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 1980s and early 1990s accurately predicted a lot about our current world. Our modern society is totally...
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Speech on campus: A reply to Brad DeLong
On Twitter, I wrote that I disagreed with Brad's ideas about speech on college campuses. Brad then requested that I write my ideas up in the form of a DeLong Smackdown. So here we go. Brad's post was...
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Handwaving on health care
There's a particular style of argument that some conservative economists use to dismiss calls for government intervention in markets: Step 1: Either assert or assume that free markets work best in...
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Defending Thaler from the guerrilla resistance
So, Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize, which is pretty awesome. If you've read Thaler's memoir, you'll know that it was a long, hard, contentious fight for him to get his ideas accepted by the...
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The "cackling cartoon villain" defense of DSGE
I've sworn off macro-bashing. I said what I had to say. And I'm seeing lots of young macro people doing good stuff. And the task of macro-method-criticizing has been taken over by people who are...
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Sheepskin effects - signals without signaling
Bryan Caplan is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the signaling theory of education, and this theory plays an important role in his new book, "The Case Against Education". But I've always had...
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DeLong vs. Krugman on globalization
I'm going to do the inadvisable, and argue with Brad DeLong. Hopefully this will turn out OK, since it's in response to Brad doing the inadvisable and arguing with Paul Krugman (thus breaking at least...
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Book Review - "The Space Between Us"
"Hey, there ain't no space between us!" - a flight attendant who saw me reading this book This is a very important book about a very important topic (segregation and race relations). It is also a book...
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Noah Smith's Japan Travel Guide
Now is a GREAT time to travel to Japan. The country has really opened up, thanks to Abenomics, a weak yen, and the impending 2020 Tokyo Olympics. New technology has also made it a lot easier to get...
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Yuppie Fishtanks: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand"
YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents. In Northern California, where I live, YIMBYs tend to get into fights with progressives about...
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Book Review: "Stubborn Attachments", by Tyler Cowen
Tyler was good enough to give me a review copy of his new book, "Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals", so here is my review! This is a...
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Book Review: "The Souls of Yellow Folk," by Wesley Yang
"He was ugly on the outside, and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside." - Wesley Yang, "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" Wesley Yang is not here to make you feel comfortable. He's...
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Book Review: The Revolt of the Public, by Martin Gurri
If you do not read "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium," by Martin Gurri, you will not be sufficiently prepared for the world to come. Well, you probably won't...
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A proposal for an Alternative Green New Deal
Usually, Bloomberg Opinion understandably does not want me to repost my Bloomberg articles at this blog. But they made an exception for my Alternative Green New Deal plan. So here it is. *** The...
View ArticleGuest post: Roy Bahat on Uber, Lyft, and the future of work
Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital firm focused on the future of work. In this guest post, he explains what he thinks is wrong with the way the "ride sharing" companies treat...
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Where should Americans live if they live abroad?
I'm a huge fan of living abroad, and I think many more Americans should do it. Living in a big, rich country with relatively few other countries nearby, Americans don't tend to travel overseas much....
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