As a side note, I find it hilarious how Musk utterly failed with his rebranding of Twitter as X. Nobody, and I mean nobody, refers to it as just “X.” People either ignore “X” completely and just call it Twitter, or (most commonly) they say “X (formerly known as Twitter)” or some such. Or they make a portmanteau of the two names, as in Xitter.
Also, Twitter came with an obvious verb: to tweet. What verb means “to post on X”? To ex? To xeet?
Resource curse: It can be mitigated if ownership is dispersed among the population. It didn't happen in Texas because mineral rights belong to the land owner. Norway does the same thing with the sovereign wealth fund and Chile is not THAT dependent on copper.
Also Alaska. (This is of course a close relative of Georgism. The natural endowment of the land is treated as part of the Commons, and to access it you pay a fee to the government which is spent for the betterment of the people as a whole.)
The irony of the outrage machine aka X is sometimes you still find really cool and useful stuff like this…
“Multilevel modeling revealed that improvement was greater in the AK [acts of kindness] group than the CR [cognitive reappraisal] and SA [social activities] groups for social connection, and improvement was greater in the AK group than the CR group for depression/anxiety symptoms and life satisfaction. Time-lagged analyses indicated that public self-absorption mediated the effects of AK. These results converge with prior experiments to demonstrate the advantages of acts of kindness over prevailing CBT techniques.
My recommendation is to follow people who are interesting with a generally positive tone, and never ever use the For You tab, as the algorithm is going to optimize for outrage.
For people you want to check in on occasionally, but want to limit your exposure, add them to a list and check it on a limited basis. And of course, monitor your overall time spent on the app, and your phone in general, and don't forget to touch the grass once and a while.
One problem with the city density graph is that it doesn’t account for shape or natural population barriers. It makes the most sense for cities that are roughly circular, like London and Paris. New York is not circular at all, but extends eastward and northward from center. New York is extremely dense for a long distance (15 entire miles) moving eastward from Manhattan, but suburban New Jersey towns just across the Hudson River to the west is a full of single family zoned suburbs. The Hudson River is such a big natural barrier (not crossable by foot except on one bridge far north of downtown) that this is hardly relevant.
A second problem is that it is unclear what they are averaging over. New York has neighborhoods with over 70,000 people per square mile like Brooklyn Heights, where I used to live, and that is literally off the map.
As a game developer, I desperately hope my version of Noah’s clause (if only the next hit game WERE going to be developed in-house rather than by a distributed team) PROVES to be true, because I’d like to just SEE more of my co-workers again…but I have a number of truly beloved colleagues who think , as Marlo Stanfield immortally said, that I “want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.” We’ll see…
US energy independence: Obama does not get enough credit for this and Biden refuses to crow about it! policies to reduce demand for fossil fuels are great; policies to reduce supply of fossil fuels are stupid. This is one of the big problems of US environmentalists. If they put as much effort into taxing net CO2 emissions as they do to stopping pipelines and LNG exports [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports], the world would be a better place.
Did Obama invent, subsidize, promote or do anything at all to help horizontal drilling and fracking other than to claim the increased production was due to his administration?
LNG exports began in 2016 and now Biden wants to end them based on one bogus environmental study (or maybe to keep the domestic price of natural gas low to try to make himself look good, like he does when he goes around forgiving student loans or emptying the SPR to keep gasoline cheap).
One of unfortunate things about Biden is that he basically had to do stupid things like the LNG pause and then highlight them, while simultaneously hiding or low-key more moderate policies such as making energy cheaper.
I am not a Biden fan, but I think he governed much more from the center than people gave him credit for. I only learned about many of his policies that I agree from visiting sites like this. Alternately, his administration downplayed many of his more moderate policies. Presumably this was done to solidify his left flank.
By highlighting their leftward policy choices, they created an impression that could help put Trump in power. Very odd and self-defeating in some ways.
And totally inexplicable in political terms. Did he think he would be facing Bernie Sanders in the election in November and needed to steal some of is voters?
Yes, I only learned from Matt that Biden DID relax some retritins on H1B type visas. That the knd o then he should have done more of and trumpeted!
The question ought to be have the policies of President X (and his ability to work with Congress) made you better off.
I'd say the relief in ARA did, allowing US energy exports to increase did, some of the supply chain interventions (LA ports) did, but higher interest rates (forced on the Fed by failures to reduce the deficit) did not. And inflation which was terrible politically was not Biden's fault at all
But all the good things about wages and incomes is all the Fed's doing as was the surge in inflation and its subsequent control.
And of course the strong pre-COVID economy was likewise the Fed's doing. Trump's signature policy, the "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017" is a downer for economic growth.
So on a policy-for-policy basis, Biden's poor record beats Trump's abysmal record.
Inflation is the Fed’s fault because of the deficit, sure; but then you say Biden and the congress are not responsible for the deficit after having passed the IRA ($891B), ARA ($1,900B) and Chips & Science acts ($281B) compared that to the CBO estimates that Trump’s TCJA only reduced revenue by $1,500B over 10 years, not to mention that inflation only began to rise in 2021.
Not my argument. Inflation is the Fed policy outcome. Some part was good, it facilitated the equilibrating of relative prices when some nominal prices are sticky. Some part was a mistake, waiting too long to start reducing the inflation it had caused.
If a central bank is targeting inflation as ours is supposed to be doing, deficits do not cause inflation; defects cause higher interest rates.
All deficits are created equal. They (via the said higher interest rates) transfer resources (mainly) from investment to consumption. That's bad for growth. Higher taxes would be preferable.
Wages: I do not dispute you conclusions, but I do wish you and other people with real audiences would raise the issue that USG does not produce an index of wages. We do detailed unit value indexes, whihc for some purposes are OK, but they are not WAGES, not a comparison of a group of tasks performed for money at times t and t+1. It is absurd that the indicator that spiked in COVID when low wage worker were locked down and higher wage officer worker were WFH should be called "wages."
And while you are getting the USG to produce better economic information, please get Treasury to issue a series % of future NGDP securities so we can get an actual market expectation. And it's sort of annoying, too, that we only have TIPS for 5 and 10 years whihc means we do not have shorter term market inflation expectations.
> And furthermore, we see that the decline in consumer confidence is driven entirely by Republicans, whose sentiment crashed when Biden was elected, a year before rates started to rise
I may be reading the graphic wrong, as the dates are fuzzy, but it seems that everyone's sentiment started falling in parallel starting between Q1 and Q2 2021, everyone hit the low point in the trough at around Q2 2022, and everyone started climbing in parallel after that.
The difference between red and blue is just a level shift at the election, where you can see red drop sharply and blue jumped sharply, but aside from that all movements mirror each other in parallel across groups.
Purple basically did nothing at the election, minor wiggles, but followed all the same parallel trends as red and blue. By the end purple remains lower that in 2019 (and also lower than immediately after the election).
I think some of the mystery about "sentiments" vs "state of the economy" still remains, and isn't as simple as "driven entirely by Republicans "
We should assess the happiness effects of general consumption vs. purchasing a home you like. I wonder if the latter has an outsized effect on human happiness than the former.
The partisan gap in consumer confidence is about the same under Biden as under Trump, just with a sign difference. So it doesn't explain anything about why consumer confidence is lower than the fundamentals under Biden compared to Trump.
Lots of interesting information here, thank you Noah! I didn’t realize Paris was that much denser at its core than London, NYC, and Tokyo. I’ve been to Paris, and it’s not like it’s got a bunch of ginormous residential towers at its center. Are Parisian apartments just that much smaller than NYC apartments? Is it because Paris doesn’t have big parks at its center, like Central Park in NYC? Inquiring minds want to know.
Paris has a lot of 7 story buildings that take up the entire block, while most of the New York towers have setbacks pushing them to only fill a fraction of the block. A 7 story building filling the full block has as much usable space as a 14 story building filling half the block or a 28 story building filling a quarter of the block.
(Paris also doesn't have open spaces quite as big as the East River and Hudson River that make up so much of the 4 or 5 km radius from city hall.)
I really don’t know! The site has about seven different metrics that can be used, including weighted density, density, and total population, both cumulative and non-cumulative, and with or without large water bodies, but it doesn’t obviously explain what precisely any of them mean or how they are calculated, or which water bodies are large.
You don’t have to have high-rises to have extremely high residential density. Some of the most densely populated neighborhood in New York are full of tightly packed, relatively low-rise row houses. Residential towers often are not very tightly packed together
As a side note, I find it hilarious how Musk utterly failed with his rebranding of Twitter as X. Nobody, and I mean nobody, refers to it as just “X.” People either ignore “X” completely and just call it Twitter, or (most commonly) they say “X (formerly known as Twitter)” or some such. Or they make a portmanteau of the two names, as in Xitter.
Also, Twitter came with an obvious verb: to tweet. What verb means “to post on X”? To ex? To xeet?
To excrete. Naturally.
I regret that I have but one like to give to this comment.
So funny
Resource curse: It can be mitigated if ownership is dispersed among the population. It didn't happen in Texas because mineral rights belong to the land owner. Norway does the same thing with the sovereign wealth fund and Chile is not THAT dependent on copper.
Also Alaska. (This is of course a close relative of Georgism. The natural endowment of the land is treated as part of the Commons, and to access it you pay a fee to the government which is spent for the betterment of the people as a whole.)
The irony of the outrage machine aka X is sometimes you still find really cool and useful stuff like this…
“Multilevel modeling revealed that improvement was greater in the AK [acts of kindness] group than the CR [cognitive reappraisal] and SA [social activities] groups for social connection, and improvement was greater in the AK group than the CR group for depression/anxiety symptoms and life satisfaction. Time-lagged analyses indicated that public self-absorption mediated the effects of AK. These results converge with prior experiments to demonstrate the advantages of acts of kindness over prevailing CBT techniques.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2022.2154695
My recommendation is to follow people who are interesting with a generally positive tone, and never ever use the For You tab, as the algorithm is going to optimize for outrage.
For people you want to check in on occasionally, but want to limit your exposure, add them to a list and check it on a limited basis. And of course, monitor your overall time spent on the app, and your phone in general, and don't forget to touch the grass once and a while.
Wisdom!
One problem with the city density graph is that it doesn’t account for shape or natural population barriers. It makes the most sense for cities that are roughly circular, like London and Paris. New York is not circular at all, but extends eastward and northward from center. New York is extremely dense for a long distance (15 entire miles) moving eastward from Manhattan, but suburban New Jersey towns just across the Hudson River to the west is a full of single family zoned suburbs. The Hudson River is such a big natural barrier (not crossable by foot except on one bridge far north of downtown) that this is hardly relevant.
A second problem is that it is unclear what they are averaging over. New York has neighborhoods with over 70,000 people per square mile like Brooklyn Heights, where I used to live, and that is literally off the map.
If only “all the good jobs” were STILL downtown.
As a game developer, I desperately hope my version of Noah’s clause (if only the next hit game WERE going to be developed in-house rather than by a distributed team) PROVES to be true, because I’d like to just SEE more of my co-workers again…but I have a number of truly beloved colleagues who think , as Marlo Stanfield immortally said, that I “want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.” We’ll see…
Well, Obama did not give in to faux environmentalists to stop fracking. [I wish I coud say th same about XL pipeline!]
Biden had been OK too until the LNG export "pause."
US energy independence: Obama does not get enough credit for this and Biden refuses to crow about it! policies to reduce demand for fossil fuels are great; policies to reduce supply of fossil fuels are stupid. This is one of the big problems of US environmentalists. If they put as much effort into taxing net CO2 emissions as they do to stopping pipelines and LNG exports [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports], the world would be a better place.
Did Obama invent, subsidize, promote or do anything at all to help horizontal drilling and fracking other than to claim the increased production was due to his administration?
LNG exports began in 2016 and now Biden wants to end them based on one bogus environmental study (or maybe to keep the domestic price of natural gas low to try to make himself look good, like he does when he goes around forgiving student loans or emptying the SPR to keep gasoline cheap).
One of unfortunate things about Biden is that he basically had to do stupid things like the LNG pause and then highlight them, while simultaneously hiding or low-key more moderate policies such as making energy cheaper.
I am not a Biden fan, but I think he governed much more from the center than people gave him credit for. I only learned about many of his policies that I agree from visiting sites like this. Alternately, his administration downplayed many of his more moderate policies. Presumably this was done to solidify his left flank.
By highlighting their leftward policy choices, they created an impression that could help put Trump in power. Very odd and self-defeating in some ways.
And totally inexplicable in political terms. Did he think he would be facing Bernie Sanders in the election in November and needed to steal some of is voters?
Yes, I only learned from Matt that Biden DID relax some retritins on H1B type visas. That the knd o then he should have done more of and trumpeted!
The question ought to be have the policies of President X (and his ability to work with Congress) made you better off.
I'd say the relief in ARA did, allowing US energy exports to increase did, some of the supply chain interventions (LA ports) did, but higher interest rates (forced on the Fed by failures to reduce the deficit) did not. And inflation which was terrible politically was not Biden's fault at all
But all the good things about wages and incomes is all the Fed's doing as was the surge in inflation and its subsequent control.
And of course the strong pre-COVID economy was likewise the Fed's doing. Trump's signature policy, the "Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act of 2017" is a downer for economic growth.
So on a policy-for-policy basis, Biden's poor record beats Trump's abysmal record.
Discuss :)
Inflation is the Fed’s fault because of the deficit, sure; but then you say Biden and the congress are not responsible for the deficit after having passed the IRA ($891B), ARA ($1,900B) and Chips & Science acts ($281B) compared that to the CBO estimates that Trump’s TCJA only reduced revenue by $1,500B over 10 years, not to mention that inflation only began to rise in 2021.
Not my argument. Inflation is the Fed policy outcome. Some part was good, it facilitated the equilibrating of relative prices when some nominal prices are sticky. Some part was a mistake, waiting too long to start reducing the inflation it had caused.
If a central bank is targeting inflation as ours is supposed to be doing, deficits do not cause inflation; defects cause higher interest rates.
All deficits are created equal. They (via the said higher interest rates) transfer resources (mainly) from investment to consumption. That's bad for growth. Higher taxes would be preferable.
Thank you for your posts.
Also I’m shocked how few people remember that the Fed acted way too slowly when inflation was starting out.
Too slow but that does not mean inflation should never have gone above target.
Wages: I do not dispute you conclusions, but I do wish you and other people with real audiences would raise the issue that USG does not produce an index of wages. We do detailed unit value indexes, whihc for some purposes are OK, but they are not WAGES, not a comparison of a group of tasks performed for money at times t and t+1. It is absurd that the indicator that spiked in COVID when low wage worker were locked down and higher wage officer worker were WFH should be called "wages."
And while you are getting the USG to produce better economic information, please get Treasury to issue a series % of future NGDP securities so we can get an actual market expectation. And it's sort of annoying, too, that we only have TIPS for 5 and 10 years whihc means we do not have shorter term market inflation expectations.
Thank you. :)
> And furthermore, we see that the decline in consumer confidence is driven entirely by Republicans, whose sentiment crashed when Biden was elected, a year before rates started to rise
I may be reading the graphic wrong, as the dates are fuzzy, but it seems that everyone's sentiment started falling in parallel starting between Q1 and Q2 2021, everyone hit the low point in the trough at around Q2 2022, and everyone started climbing in parallel after that.
The difference between red and blue is just a level shift at the election, where you can see red drop sharply and blue jumped sharply, but aside from that all movements mirror each other in parallel across groups.
Purple basically did nothing at the election, minor wiggles, but followed all the same parallel trends as red and blue. By the end purple remains lower that in 2019 (and also lower than immediately after the election).
I think some of the mystery about "sentiments" vs "state of the economy" still remains, and isn't as simple as "driven entirely by Republicans "
We should assess the happiness effects of general consumption vs. purchasing a home you like. I wonder if the latter has an outsized effect on human happiness than the former.
IMO geography is far more of a constraint for HK and Taipei compared to Tokyo, rather than any policy choices.
The partisan gap in consumer confidence is about the same under Biden as under Trump, just with a sign difference. So it doesn't explain anything about why consumer confidence is lower than the fundamentals under Biden compared to Trump.
Compositional effects really matter when we talk about who is better off. Medians and averages hide a lot
"I have to be on Twitter for my job. Hopefully, you don’t."
Thank you for your service!
Lots of interesting information here, thank you Noah! I didn’t realize Paris was that much denser at its core than London, NYC, and Tokyo. I’ve been to Paris, and it’s not like it’s got a bunch of ginormous residential towers at its center. Are Parisian apartments just that much smaller than NYC apartments? Is it because Paris doesn’t have big parks at its center, like Central Park in NYC? Inquiring minds want to know.
Paris has a lot of 7 story buildings that take up the entire block, while most of the New York towers have setbacks pushing them to only fill a fraction of the block. A 7 story building filling the full block has as much usable space as a 14 story building filling half the block or a 28 story building filling a quarter of the block.
(Paris also doesn't have open spaces quite as big as the East River and Hudson River that make up so much of the 4 or 5 km radius from city hall.)
Great point. How are the rivers accounted for in those calculations?
I really don’t know! The site has about seven different metrics that can be used, including weighted density, density, and total population, both cumulative and non-cumulative, and with or without large water bodies, but it doesn’t obviously explain what precisely any of them mean or how they are calculated, or which water bodies are large.
You don’t have to have high-rises to have extremely high residential density. Some of the most densely populated neighborhood in New York are full of tightly packed, relatively low-rise row houses. Residential towers often are not very tightly packed together