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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :)
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.