NYC found that recidivists were mostly the cause of what we call street crime. Of the 122,000-ish people arrested in NYC in 2024, 8% had more than 3 arrests. 92% had at least two.
And yes, had we bought into the GW Bush SS fix, we’d be in a far better situation. In the exact same way, the parties have demonized the immigration issue; they do the same thing to SS and Medicare fixes. Now it seems both parties have bought into “do nothing” which I must say they have fully accomplished.
I agree that it’s nice to see someone say something positive about Bush’s proposed SS reforms. The plan needed some adjustments, but it was a good idea. My main concern about it was that it would be corrupted by pressure to allow too much freedom (risk of piling into crypto eg) and to farm it out to rent-seeking financial companies in the name of efficiency. Like most privatization schemes, it would make a few people rich while meeting none of the efficiency goals.
Anyhow, never going to happen, so no point gaming it out.
I don't think this is an accurate comparison. The Japanese National Pension system is a centrally-managed fund (like many state and union retirement funds), while Bush was proposing voluntary, individually-managed accounts for future SS recipients. That is not a "fix" that compares to the Japanese system.
But I took Noah's point to be that Japan's government-administered fund designed to maximize returns for the entire system (and hence, all beneficiaries) mitigates the effect of the nominal deficit. Bush's plan was a to allow primarily wealthy future retirees (who had the income to invest) to feather their own nests because they were upset that weren't getting "market returns" from Social Security. Those are very different approaches, and the former would have had a much better chance of passage if it had been proposed with near-zero trading commissions for the Social Security Fund, an activist approach to Fund management, etc.
Like Noah I used to enjoy Stewart, but I became disenchanted long ago---even though he can still make me laugh---because what he's doing to economics is the same as what he's doing to everything else. Any time you have a complicated issue, it's easy to create suspicion of the "experts" by pointing at apparent flaws in their approach that can only be explained away with long boring details, or at the times the experts were wrong. And equally easy to present seductively simple solutions that can only be refuted by long boring explanations.
It's a great way to tear everything down but not very useful for building anything up.
It's the refusal to learn that ultimately makes this kind of commentary unserious and unhelpful. Just yesterday I heard Bernie claiming that "60% of all Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck" again. Oy. Get some new, accurate material already.
It also just furthers the lack of trust people have in experts and institutions. Like no expert or group is right 100% of the time, you aren't proving intellectual superiority by being negative. He isn't as bad as Rogan since he is acting in good faith and is self deprecating but still trying to force simple answers out of people that deal in nuance and specifics isn't a good way to go about things. I also cannot believe he is even going to try and give Oren Cass the time of day...
The progressive movement would do a lot better in polls and elections if it dropped the romantic concept of asocially-behaving individuals as "heroic rebels driven into despair by the evil racist system" and recognized them for who they are: people who don't mind victimizing others to get their way, both collectively (non-payment of fare, littering - "someone else will take care of that for someone elses' money!"), and individually.
It is exactly the poorest quintile of the society which suffers the most when this sort of behavior is silently tolerated, because they just cannot afford moving to a richer quieter neighbourhood or take their Tesla to work instead of taking public transport.
The remark about Bush's proposed Social Security privatization seems out of place. That proposal would've diverted a portion of current workers' Social Security taxes into, basically, IRAs. It would not have been a single national hedge fund / Sovereign Wealth Fund. It would've been a great opportunity for Wall Street to skim off excessive fees, and direct people into actively managed funds that charge even more fees. Look at what the median 401k plan management fee is, and what the average fund fees are. It's scandalous. If you happen to have an employer that gives you access to a really good plan with Vanguard, sure, a 401k can be great. But a ton of them are rip-offs, charging like 75-100 bps. If you don't have any better option for tax-deferred investment it can still be worthwhile, but people should be mad about this!
The other problem with Bush's proposal was that it was a _carve-out_. He wasn't proposing any serious way to replace the money that was being diverted, in terms of paying for current retirees' benefits, he was just spending down the "Trust Fund" T-bills faster. And the people who opted into the private accounts would be _giving up_ some or all of the defined benefit they otherwise would've received from Social Security.
If I were going to try to properly reform things, I'd do something like:
(1) To shore up the defined benefit plan, uncap the amount of income subject to the tax (without raising the max benefit), and make ALL income subject (not just wage income), while making taxability of SS income phase in starting from a fairly low level, and switching to a chain-weighted inflation measure for the annual COLAs on what the max benefit is.
(2) Create a sovereign wealth fund, which offers a kind of "national 401k plan" with very low fees. It has a bunch of assets, and claims on those assets are sliced into tranches, with the tranches containing mixes of assets that are appropriate to different target retirement dates.
(3) By default, you have some payroll deduction that goes into your account with the national retirement plan, going into the tranche for maturity when you're 65. You're allowed to go in and change things so, for instance, some of your contribs are going towards a fund that has a closer target date, because you're intending to use that slice of funds in five years as a downpayment on a house.
(4) Access to your national retirement funds is through a Postal Banking system, and you also get a basic low- or no-interest checking account with that. So now nobody is "unbanked".
(5) Set up Cory Booker's "baby bonds" idea, and also run that through the SWF. Your initial endowment is set up for a target date around when you'd be 20, although if you decide you don't want to spend the money on education, once you're over 18 you can move funds to other target dates.
(6) Withdrawals are allowed prior to retirement for education, for funding downpayment on a primary residence, and for funding starting a small business (with the last of those approved by some similar process to how SBA loans are qualified).
(7) As a fun side benefit, now that everyone has a bank account, you can implement a UBI by just crediting everyone's account with money once a week, and the Federal Reserve has a new monetary policy tool: They're allowed to adjust the UBI up or down, within some band (say, 50-150%) around the base level (which rises with inflation). "Helicopter drop" money.
Booker's plan would've provided funds to low-income families on an ongoing basis -- it's been described as a kind of "universal basic wealth" plan.
The "Trump Accounts" plan provides a flat one-off payment of $1k for kids born in the next few years, and then even that provision goes away. It provides no government money after 2028, but if you're well-off enough to have the spare cashflow, you can tax-shelter up to $5k/yr. Overall benefits of the plan would be heavily concentrated on the upper income quintile, who face steeper tax rates, and can afford to fully take advantage of sheltering income.
What do you mean "make the case for economics"? It exists, it's real, it functions in predictable ways. Do physicists need to "make the case" for physics?
Yes we do. Physics departments almost always have dedicated communicator roles or outreach roles. I was taught introductory quantum mechanics by Brian Cox. His role within the department was explicitly outreach, not research.
This is making the case for physics, by educating people about what physics does and what it helps us do. This only feels self evident because you grew up with bill nye the science guy and not bob fran the economist man.
I take your point, of course, that complicated subjects need "brand ambassadors" to make them culturally relevant (so that students will study them and governments will fund them), but I think we're talking about a populist movement that wants to deny the utility and/or reality of Economics for purely political reasons, which is not something that I have seen done with Physics. I know who he is, but never "watched" Bill Nye, but also went to high school that taught Economics along with Physics, Biology, Calculus and Trig, at a point in time when none were considered "fake science".
I was going to say something like this. If economists feel like they have such a large target on their backs maybe they could try being more pro-active about presenting solutions that speak to the values that the left holds dear. Namely, reducing inequality, ending poverty, reducing pollution and so on.
Lots of economists talk about this crap about all the time.
But these aren't easy problems. For one many (but not all) of the people in poverty are there because of poor life choices.
For example, it's been shown that if you follow the steps of the success sequence you have a 97% chance of avoiding poverty
1. graduate high school
2. get a job
3. get married (and stay married) before having kids
What other result what you expect if you don't do these things except a really high chance of poverty?
Worse, many liberals HATE teaching this crap in schools, but it's really powerful. Follow these steps and you will almost certainly have a much better life.
But it's not something economics can fix. People need to make better choices. Government can try and educate the people on them, but liberals tend not to want government to do that.
But that's not a replacement for making good choices in life. And I say this as someone that made plenty of bad ones earlier in life. Magically when I stopped making those bad decisions though my life got better
Making good choices is good. It’s just not an option for everyone — least of all those with the obstacles faced by the poor (parenting, resources, genetics, health, poverty brain…).
I was a direct beneficiary of your fifth point, about how limiting H1B visas encourages American corporations to move jobs to other countries.
In 2016, recognizing that Trump’s inauguration would impact their ability to import talent from overseas to Seattle, Microsoft sought to expand their presence in Vancouver BC. This was tied to the goal of creating a tech corridor from Vancouver to Seattle (and ultimately Portland), knit together with high speed rail.
Acting on the assumption that tech corridors tend to be anchored by collaboration among faculty members at research universities in neighboring cities (e.g., Duke and UNC; Stanford and UC Berkeley), I got hired by the University of British Columbia, using a grant from Microsoft made to UBC and the UW, to be a matchmaker linking faculty at the two schools. The idea was that UBC and UW were the logical anchoring institutions, but because they are located in different countries, their faculty needed incentives to get to know each other. We focused on a few topics (smart cities; cancer research; wildfires), and eventually expanded our efforts to all of the public research universities of the Pacific Northwest region, under the moniker of the “Cascadia Innovation Corridor,” an economic development initiative based in Seattle, also supported by Microsoft.
Few of us imagined back then that Trump would win a second term. Because of my employment at UBC for five years, my wife and I got permanent residency in Canada, an outcome of huge psychological benefit as of a year ago.
Though "trust the science" in economics would have the same problems has it does in other realms that have serious political consequences: The scientists have a hard time keeping their recommendations about the facts uncontaminated with their collective desires for action. But since the scientists are generally from a particular class, their class interests (and even fads) show up in their recommendations.
This is notorious in climate change, where the scientists deeply want to stop CO2 emissions, so they tend to bias their assessments of the facts increasingly alarmist. E.g. omitting to mention that climate change isn't going to cause the human population to decrease or even the GDP/capita to shrink, even if it is unaddressed, though it will degrade both. But the public is much less willing to pay costs now for benefits in a few decades, so they stymie climate fixes, and simply deny the facts.
But the same thing can happen with economics; can you get a bunch of economists together to assert the facts without coloring them with their class tendencies? At the least, economists accept the basic utility of the market system, which the public has never been convinced of. (Hell, in a lot of cases, the public doesn't even understand it, they think stores set prices without restraint.)
And in Stewart's case, I think that the question he wants to ask is "Given that I disagree what the distribution of [something] is right now, how can we change it?" Most economists don't study that question.
Really not an accurate assessment of what climate scientists do. Advocates and activists, perhaps. We would all be much better off if actual climate scientists (Mann, Hausfather, etc.) were driving the narrative.
So much wrong I presume this is just trolling? If nothing else, to the last point, obviously there is tons of economic research on wealth and income distribution. Perhaps Piketty might be a name you'd recognize?
Exception? I encourage you to Google/ChatGPT on this a bit more.
Paul Krugman? Joe Stiglitz? Raj Chetty's extensive work on opportunity, how people escape poverty? David Autor and Angus Deacon writing on the China shock and the whole "deaths of despair" narrative amongst the working class?
Where do you think these statistics on inequality are even coming from - who do you suppose is doing all that legwork and researching these topics?
Even ideas that are widely disliked by economists (like MMT) are also supported and researched by minorities of economists.
To be clear I wasn’t referring to academic work that the public doesn’t read.
I’m going to run a personal experiment and monitor my media encounters with economists and see what proportion are pushing ideas that might speak to those on the left.
"In Escape From Capitalism, economist Clara Mattei offers an uncompromising defense of a Marxist account of society and makes the case for democratic control of the economy"
It points out the concerns for Social Security caused by unsustainable deficit spending, and the CBO economists also call out how "Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration is also putting pressure on America’s fiscal situation"
But seriously, do the exercise you mentioned. Watch where economists are cited and what they are saying. I think you will find they are quite engaged with relevant topics.
I watched all the interviews with Jon Stewart, and I agree that Jon doesn’t know much about economics. However, he openly admits this at the beginning of the interviews. I think it only looks like he’s bashing economists because he’s asking them questions they can’t or won’t answer, which in turn makes them look stupid.
For example, Jon wants to know how the US can completely overhaul its health care system so that people don’t go broke when they get sick. In the debate with Thaler, they went on about nudging and shoving. The idea of nudging is Thaler’s legacy and it’s great, but it also implies incremental change, while Jon wanted him to take his insights from behavioral economics and think big about creating a better health care system. Unfortunately, Thaler didn’t really seem to engage with this idea and kept sidestepping it.
I feel like Jon’s team should have prepped Thaler better for these kinds of big-picture questions. Overall, the interview felt like a missed opportunity. They could have had a very productive discussion about how to drive large-scale change using ideas from behavioral economics, but instead it turned into a fruitless discussion about microeconomics and incremental tweaks.
"I don't know much about economics, but I have some very strident and deeply held opinions on the subject...." Ultimately, if your host is not actually interested in exploring and explicating ideas, but it committed merely to performing a crowd-pleasing schtick for his self-selected audience, the best choice is to not feed the beast of populist ignorance about your subject. (Cf., Donald Trump)
The problem is that he's been doing this for 25 years. If you are commenting about economics and politics for 25 years, you should have learned something by now.
But this conversation really just high lighted John's ignorance on this topic and made you wonder why you should pay attention to literally anything he says
Agreed- with low electricity prices (in red states), good freight rail and relatively cheap land prices, automated manufacturing should be competitive in the US (in states where they let people build)
Problem is that you need skilled foremen (low level engineers, basically), industrial design and workflow people and robots (which are mostly made in Europe and Asia).
AI should reduce the skill level needed for people monitoring and bug-fixing an automated process, though
@noahpinion you use the word "parlous" twice in this post and it's not a word that I see used regularly. In both contexts the word "perilous" would have had the same effect. Is that a deliberate choice or just a personal preference?
Hm. I don't think of "parlous" as meaning the same thing as "perilous". If something is parlous, its condition is risky, but it also has connotations of being risky _because_ the thing is dilapidated or has been neglected. If I say a country's finances are in a parlous state, that means they're at risk of bankruptcy, but it also suggests that past governments have mismanaged things. Whereas they might face financial _peril_ just because of some exogenous shock, even if everything had been fine a month earlier.
On that graph of expected unemployment compared to actual unemployment, it’s true that the gap for recent graduates has grown a bit in recent years for college graduates - but you actually have to go all the way back to 2018 for the gap to disappear! I don’t think anyone thinks that AI was taking jobs from recent graduates *before* the pandemic. At most, you could attribute a slight increase since 2022 to that, but it seems more likely that whatever other structural factors were already subverting expectations in the years leading up to 2022 have continued.
Decoupling US and China and migrating some of the world's manufacturing baseaway frm China would be much more if the US did not have tariffs and other import restrictions on _other countries._
Fare gates are interesting - they work to keep fare dodgers out - however in London we have some lines without any fare gates (DLR) that seem to be just as safe and raise just as much money as the rest.
The key perhaps is lower criminality in general, cameras and ease of payment - you just tap your phone or credit card on a card reader when entering or exiting. Makes paying very easy and quick, and means that you have many stations without any permanent attendants (reducing costs significantly.
They do have occasional spot checks - where they confirm that everyone on the train has a ticket - but these are not very often. (Twice a month or so.)
The question is what happens when the spot check finds someone who is a repeat offender? Also what does (or would?) the police (and the operator) do if the same intensity of disorderly conduct crops up around stations and on the trains?
It seems in the US this is a really neglected *and* hard issue. (Well, not like the mental healthcare chasm, homelessness, overdependence on cars, and lack of criminal-justice reforms would be much easier to fix anywhere.)
For example in Budapest the public transit operator had to put security guards for a few years on the excellent (frequent and with a ridiculously large coverage area) night bus service to keep too problematic people from getting on the buses.
Night connections are a special nightmare everywhere, mostly because of the increased inebriation of the patrons (well maybe not in Afghanistan, but everywhere where booze is legal), and indeed the usual way to make them safer is to deploy guards, especially in known "hubs" with lots of night bars.
Your credit card/phone is your ticket - it charges you when you tap out based on your journey length.
London's system is very effective - you basically don't have tickets anymore - you just tap in and out and they charge you the correct fare. There are daily and monthly caps on spending (which means you don't worry about unlimited charges).
Re: your snark on Cass, manufacturing employment and PMIs also fell consistently after the passage of the CHIPS act, infrastructure bill and the “IRA”. So trillions in Keynesian, government directed economic planning and investment was an absolute failure through ‘23, ‘24 and ‘25 (three years following passage). I suppose that means everyone will stop defending that as an idea? Given the size of that spending and the three year runway, I’d say that the case for those policies is weaker than for tariffs. But we can check back in 2028-29 (giving a three year runway from the imposition of tariffs in ‘25)
All we know for sure is that privately directed AI and data center capex is having an impact - which has little to do with either Trump or Biden’s industrial policies. They picked other horses.
Matt Stoller had one of the more interesting takes on AI
Grok version of a longer article
The article (from Matt Stoller's BIG newsletter, in a "Monopoly Round-Up" piece dated around early February 2026) discusses "The System of Record Problem" in American enterprise software.
Core idea: Many of the most profitable big software companies (e.g., in healthcare like Epic, finance like Salesforce/Workday, government/regulatory systems, etc.) sell themselves as the single authoritative "system of record" — basically the central database + workflow that becomes the irreplaceable nervous system of an organization.
Why this creates a problem:
Once embedded, these systems are extremely hard to replace (high switching costs, regulatory lock-in, massive data entrenchment).
Vendors exploit this by turning into "extraction machines" — raising prices, bundling unwanted features, delivering mediocre innovation, providing poor service, and behaving more like monopolistic utilities than competitive software firms.
Customers hate them but feel trapped ("one throat to choke" becomes "one throat we can't choke").
Broader implication: This lock-in dynamic helps explain why large parts of corporate/government America run on outdated, overpriced, frustrating software — and why some analysts see vulnerability in today's high software valuations if AI or other forces start threatening these entrenched moats.
Economists have a branding problem in the US and that is downstream of the structure of where the public sees them.
In Germany, for example, economists work for the central bank, but also for the health ministry and various other government ministries. Economists work on health technology assessment that decides how much the health system should pay for drugs.
In the US, the impression is that professional economists just work for big business or in parts of government that serve big business.
And the impression while not strictly true, has a basis.
We used to have an office of technology assessment that was there to brief Congress on new technologies. It served as an independent research body. The Republicans killed it in 1995 to make sure that the only information about new technology that Congress would get would be from the hardworking lobbyists of God fearing American corporations.
That is to say, when Americans hear about "economists", they are very unlikely to hear about anyone working for the public interest. Instead, they are going to hear about some person working for bank or hedge fund.
This leads to the kind of mistake that Jon Stewart made.
Yeah this is the other issue. A lot of non-economists use econo-speak as propaganda for their self-interest and this is what the public associates with economics.
There are thousands of economists employed by the private sector in Germany. Running a bank, large manufacturer or financial firm would be very difficult to do without economic advice. And why is the assumption that a person employed by the government is working for the public interest? Just look at Trump’s cabinet and you can see that’s obviously incorrect.
I'm not saying that Europe doesn't have private economists. I am saying that, relative to America, there are more prominent public economists than there are in the states.
NYC found that recidivists were mostly the cause of what we call street crime. Of the 122,000-ish people arrested in NYC in 2024, 8% had more than 3 arrests. 92% had at least two.
And yes, had we bought into the GW Bush SS fix, we’d be in a far better situation. In the exact same way, the parties have demonized the immigration issue; they do the same thing to SS and Medicare fixes. Now it seems both parties have bought into “do nothing” which I must say they have fully accomplished.
I agree that it’s nice to see someone say something positive about Bush’s proposed SS reforms. The plan needed some adjustments, but it was a good idea. My main concern about it was that it would be corrupted by pressure to allow too much freedom (risk of piling into crypto eg) and to farm it out to rent-seeking financial companies in the name of efficiency. Like most privatization schemes, it would make a few people rich while meeting none of the efficiency goals.
Anyhow, never going to happen, so no point gaming it out.
The Dow was at 12,000 in 2007, it closed yesterday above 50,000. Yeah, our politicians are too f’ing stupid
Remember what happened to the stock market around in 2008?
That under sells it. The Dow generally doesn't include reinvested dividends.
I don't think this is an accurate comparison. The Japanese National Pension system is a centrally-managed fund (like many state and union retirement funds), while Bush was proposing voluntary, individually-managed accounts for future SS recipients. That is not a "fix" that compares to the Japanese system.
Voluntary, maybe, the point was investing some of the funds of SS would have helped with the looming 23% mandatory cut to benefits.
But I took Noah's point to be that Japan's government-administered fund designed to maximize returns for the entire system (and hence, all beneficiaries) mitigates the effect of the nominal deficit. Bush's plan was a to allow primarily wealthy future retirees (who had the income to invest) to feather their own nests because they were upset that weren't getting "market returns" from Social Security. Those are very different approaches, and the former would have had a much better chance of passage if it had been proposed with near-zero trading commissions for the Social Security Fund, an activist approach to Fund management, etc.
Presumably that's supposed to say 80%? Otherwise these numbers don't make much sense.
Like Noah I used to enjoy Stewart, but I became disenchanted long ago---even though he can still make me laugh---because what he's doing to economics is the same as what he's doing to everything else. Any time you have a complicated issue, it's easy to create suspicion of the "experts" by pointing at apparent flaws in their approach that can only be explained away with long boring details, or at the times the experts were wrong. And equally easy to present seductively simple solutions that can only be refuted by long boring explanations.
It's a great way to tear everything down but not very useful for building anything up.
It's the refusal to learn that ultimately makes this kind of commentary unserious and unhelpful. Just yesterday I heard Bernie claiming that "60% of all Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck" again. Oy. Get some new, accurate material already.
It also just furthers the lack of trust people have in experts and institutions. Like no expert or group is right 100% of the time, you aren't proving intellectual superiority by being negative. He isn't as bad as Rogan since he is acting in good faith and is self deprecating but still trying to force simple answers out of people that deal in nuance and specifics isn't a good way to go about things. I also cannot believe he is even going to try and give Oren Cass the time of day...
The progressive movement would do a lot better in polls and elections if it dropped the romantic concept of asocially-behaving individuals as "heroic rebels driven into despair by the evil racist system" and recognized them for who they are: people who don't mind victimizing others to get their way, both collectively (non-payment of fare, littering - "someone else will take care of that for someone elses' money!"), and individually.
It is exactly the poorest quintile of the society which suffers the most when this sort of behavior is silently tolerated, because they just cannot afford moving to a richer quieter neighbourhood or take their Tesla to work instead of taking public transport.
The remark about Bush's proposed Social Security privatization seems out of place. That proposal would've diverted a portion of current workers' Social Security taxes into, basically, IRAs. It would not have been a single national hedge fund / Sovereign Wealth Fund. It would've been a great opportunity for Wall Street to skim off excessive fees, and direct people into actively managed funds that charge even more fees. Look at what the median 401k plan management fee is, and what the average fund fees are. It's scandalous. If you happen to have an employer that gives you access to a really good plan with Vanguard, sure, a 401k can be great. But a ton of them are rip-offs, charging like 75-100 bps. If you don't have any better option for tax-deferred investment it can still be worthwhile, but people should be mad about this!
The other problem with Bush's proposal was that it was a _carve-out_. He wasn't proposing any serious way to replace the money that was being diverted, in terms of paying for current retirees' benefits, he was just spending down the "Trust Fund" T-bills faster. And the people who opted into the private accounts would be _giving up_ some or all of the defined benefit they otherwise would've received from Social Security.
If I were going to try to properly reform things, I'd do something like:
(1) To shore up the defined benefit plan, uncap the amount of income subject to the tax (without raising the max benefit), and make ALL income subject (not just wage income), while making taxability of SS income phase in starting from a fairly low level, and switching to a chain-weighted inflation measure for the annual COLAs on what the max benefit is.
(2) Create a sovereign wealth fund, which offers a kind of "national 401k plan" with very low fees. It has a bunch of assets, and claims on those assets are sliced into tranches, with the tranches containing mixes of assets that are appropriate to different target retirement dates.
(3) By default, you have some payroll deduction that goes into your account with the national retirement plan, going into the tranche for maturity when you're 65. You're allowed to go in and change things so, for instance, some of your contribs are going towards a fund that has a closer target date, because you're intending to use that slice of funds in five years as a downpayment on a house.
(4) Access to your national retirement funds is through a Postal Banking system, and you also get a basic low- or no-interest checking account with that. So now nobody is "unbanked".
(5) Set up Cory Booker's "baby bonds" idea, and also run that through the SWF. Your initial endowment is set up for a target date around when you'd be 20, although if you decide you don't want to spend the money on education, once you're over 18 you can move funds to other target dates.
(6) Withdrawals are allowed prior to retirement for education, for funding downpayment on a primary residence, and for funding starting a small business (with the last of those approved by some similar process to how SBA loans are qualified).
(7) As a fun side benefit, now that everyone has a bank account, you can implement a UBI by just crediting everyone's account with money once a week, and the Federal Reserve has a new monetary policy tool: They're allowed to adjust the UBI up or down, within some band (say, 50-150%) around the base level (which rises with inflation). "Helicopter drop" money.
"To shore up the defined benefit plan"
Defined benefit plans don't work. The ones that are left are all in massive fiscal trouble.
They _can_ work, you just need to be more conservative on the relationship between contributions and benefits.
Is the baby bond the different from what Trump is proposing?
Booker's plan would've provided funds to low-income families on an ongoing basis -- it's been described as a kind of "universal basic wealth" plan.
The "Trump Accounts" plan provides a flat one-off payment of $1k for kids born in the next few years, and then even that provision goes away. It provides no government money after 2028, but if you're well-off enough to have the spare cashflow, you can tax-shelter up to $5k/yr. Overall benefits of the plan would be heavily concentrated on the upper income quintile, who face steeper tax rates, and can afford to fully take advantage of sheltering income.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/22/17999558/cory-booker-baby-bonds
Economists have to make the case for economics, dummy. No one else is gonna do it for them.
What do you mean "make the case for economics"? It exists, it's real, it functions in predictable ways. Do physicists need to "make the case" for physics?
Yes we do. Physics departments almost always have dedicated communicator roles or outreach roles. I was taught introductory quantum mechanics by Brian Cox. His role within the department was explicitly outreach, not research.
But his role is/was to "make physics cool" and to attract students and funding to the field, not to argue that physics is real, not a "fake science".
This is making the case for physics, by educating people about what physics does and what it helps us do. This only feels self evident because you grew up with bill nye the science guy and not bob fran the economist man.
I take your point, of course, that complicated subjects need "brand ambassadors" to make them culturally relevant (so that students will study them and governments will fund them), but I think we're talking about a populist movement that wants to deny the utility and/or reality of Economics for purely political reasons, which is not something that I have seen done with Physics. I know who he is, but never "watched" Bill Nye, but also went to high school that taught Economics along with Physics, Biology, Calculus and Trig, at a point in time when none were considered "fake science".
Yes, I agree it is very unfortunate that the correct ideas do not spontaneously appear in people's heads.
I was going to say something like this. If economists feel like they have such a large target on their backs maybe they could try being more pro-active about presenting solutions that speak to the values that the left holds dear. Namely, reducing inequality, ending poverty, reducing pollution and so on.
Lots of economists talk about this crap about all the time.
But these aren't easy problems. For one many (but not all) of the people in poverty are there because of poor life choices.
For example, it's been shown that if you follow the steps of the success sequence you have a 97% chance of avoiding poverty
1. graduate high school
2. get a job
3. get married (and stay married) before having kids
What other result what you expect if you don't do these things except a really high chance of poverty?
Worse, many liberals HATE teaching this crap in schools, but it's really powerful. Follow these steps and you will almost certainly have a much better life.
But it's not something economics can fix. People need to make better choices. Government can try and educate the people on them, but liberals tend not to want government to do that.
Poverty is most proximately caused by not having enough money. So give people in poverty more money.
we've been trying that for 50+ years.
But that's not a replacement for making good choices in life. And I say this as someone that made plenty of bad ones earlier in life. Magically when I stopped making those bad decisions though my life got better
Making good choices is good. It’s just not an option for everyone — least of all those with the obstacles faced by the poor (parenting, resources, genetics, health, poverty brain…).
We can effect the choices that people make though. And we can definitely educate people about the consequences of those choices.
Too often liberals seem to be afraid to preach what they practice.
I was a direct beneficiary of your fifth point, about how limiting H1B visas encourages American corporations to move jobs to other countries.
In 2016, recognizing that Trump’s inauguration would impact their ability to import talent from overseas to Seattle, Microsoft sought to expand their presence in Vancouver BC. This was tied to the goal of creating a tech corridor from Vancouver to Seattle (and ultimately Portland), knit together with high speed rail.
Acting on the assumption that tech corridors tend to be anchored by collaboration among faculty members at research universities in neighboring cities (e.g., Duke and UNC; Stanford and UC Berkeley), I got hired by the University of British Columbia, using a grant from Microsoft made to UBC and the UW, to be a matchmaker linking faculty at the two schools. The idea was that UBC and UW were the logical anchoring institutions, but because they are located in different countries, their faculty needed incentives to get to know each other. We focused on a few topics (smart cities; cancer research; wildfires), and eventually expanded our efforts to all of the public research universities of the Pacific Northwest region, under the moniker of the “Cascadia Innovation Corridor,” an economic development initiative based in Seattle, also supported by Microsoft.
Few of us imagined back then that Trump would win a second term. Because of my employment at UBC for five years, my wife and I got permanent residency in Canada, an outcome of huge psychological benefit as of a year ago.
"we trust the science" needs to include economics
(re Stewart item)
Though "trust the science" in economics would have the same problems has it does in other realms that have serious political consequences: The scientists have a hard time keeping their recommendations about the facts uncontaminated with their collective desires for action. But since the scientists are generally from a particular class, their class interests (and even fads) show up in their recommendations.
This is notorious in climate change, where the scientists deeply want to stop CO2 emissions, so they tend to bias their assessments of the facts increasingly alarmist. E.g. omitting to mention that climate change isn't going to cause the human population to decrease or even the GDP/capita to shrink, even if it is unaddressed, though it will degrade both. But the public is much less willing to pay costs now for benefits in a few decades, so they stymie climate fixes, and simply deny the facts.
But the same thing can happen with economics; can you get a bunch of economists together to assert the facts without coloring them with their class tendencies? At the least, economists accept the basic utility of the market system, which the public has never been convinced of. (Hell, in a lot of cases, the public doesn't even understand it, they think stores set prices without restraint.)
And in Stewart's case, I think that the question he wants to ask is "Given that I disagree what the distribution of [something] is right now, how can we change it?" Most economists don't study that question.
Really not an accurate assessment of what climate scientists do. Advocates and activists, perhaps. We would all be much better off if actual climate scientists (Mann, Hausfather, etc.) were driving the narrative.
So much wrong I presume this is just trolling? If nothing else, to the last point, obviously there is tons of economic research on wealth and income distribution. Perhaps Piketty might be a name you'd recognize?
The exception that proves the rule? Where are all of the think pieces by economists on how to reduce inequality and end poverty?
Exception? I encourage you to Google/ChatGPT on this a bit more.
Paul Krugman? Joe Stiglitz? Raj Chetty's extensive work on opportunity, how people escape poverty? David Autor and Angus Deacon writing on the China shock and the whole "deaths of despair" narrative amongst the working class?
Where do you think these statistics on inequality are even coming from - who do you suppose is doing all that legwork and researching these topics?
Even ideas that are widely disliked by economists (like MMT) are also supported and researched by minorities of economists.
To be clear I wasn’t referring to academic work that the public doesn’t read.
I’m going to run a personal experiment and monitor my media encounters with economists and see what proportion are pushing ideas that might speak to those on the left.
Even when I go to Jacobin the top item I see onthe upper left is from an economist!!
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/capitalism-democracy-economy-politics-socialism
"In Escape From Capitalism, economist Clara Mattei offers an uncompromising defense of a Marxist account of society and makes the case for democratic control of the economy"
A quick search of the NYT for "economist" finds some of the most recent items are
CBO warning about Federal debt levels: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/business/federal-debt-record-levels-budget-office.html
It points out the concerns for Social Security caused by unsustainable deficit spending, and the CBO economists also call out how "Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration is also putting pressure on America’s fiscal situation"
The other recent item is basically a YIMBY (is that Left?) article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/business/economy/america-new-cities-irvine.html
But seriously, do the exercise you mentioned. Watch where economists are cited and what they are saying. I think you will find they are quite engaged with relevant topics.
but a lot of the ideas from the left are wrong!
I did try to give a sample of authors and works that have gone mainstream though. All those would be in the New York Times.
I watched all the interviews with Jon Stewart, and I agree that Jon doesn’t know much about economics. However, he openly admits this at the beginning of the interviews. I think it only looks like he’s bashing economists because he’s asking them questions they can’t or won’t answer, which in turn makes them look stupid.
For example, Jon wants to know how the US can completely overhaul its health care system so that people don’t go broke when they get sick. In the debate with Thaler, they went on about nudging and shoving. The idea of nudging is Thaler’s legacy and it’s great, but it also implies incremental change, while Jon wanted him to take his insights from behavioral economics and think big about creating a better health care system. Unfortunately, Thaler didn’t really seem to engage with this idea and kept sidestepping it.
I feel like Jon’s team should have prepped Thaler better for these kinds of big-picture questions. Overall, the interview felt like a missed opportunity. They could have had a very productive discussion about how to drive large-scale change using ideas from behavioral economics, but instead it turned into a fruitless discussion about microeconomics and incremental tweaks.
"I don't know much about economics, but I have some very strident and deeply held opinions on the subject...." Ultimately, if your host is not actually interested in exploring and explicating ideas, but it committed merely to performing a crowd-pleasing schtick for his self-selected audience, the best choice is to not feed the beast of populist ignorance about your subject. (Cf., Donald Trump)
The problem is that he's been doing this for 25 years. If you are commenting about economics and politics for 25 years, you should have learned something by now.
But this conversation really just high lighted John's ignorance on this topic and made you wonder why you should pay attention to literally anything he says
One of my biggest frustrations with discussions of onshoring industrial production is the idea that manufacturing jobs will return.
They won’t. Labor in the USA is too expensive. The only way manufacturing grows here is if robots are doing most of the work.
That doesn’t mean that producing more locally would be bad, just that it won’t do much for jobs.
Agreed- with low electricity prices (in red states), good freight rail and relatively cheap land prices, automated manufacturing should be competitive in the US (in states where they let people build)
Problem is that you need skilled foremen (low level engineers, basically), industrial design and workflow people and robots (which are mostly made in Europe and Asia).
AI should reduce the skill level needed for people monitoring and bug-fixing an automated process, though
@noahpinion you use the word "parlous" twice in this post and it's not a word that I see used regularly. In both contexts the word "perilous" would have had the same effect. Is that a deliberate choice or just a personal preference?
Hm. I don't think of "parlous" as meaning the same thing as "perilous". If something is parlous, its condition is risky, but it also has connotations of being risky _because_ the thing is dilapidated or has been neglected. If I say a country's finances are in a parlous state, that means they're at risk of bankruptcy, but it also suggests that past governments have mismanaged things. Whereas they might face financial _peril_ just because of some exogenous shock, even if everything had been fine a month earlier.
On that graph of expected unemployment compared to actual unemployment, it’s true that the gap for recent graduates has grown a bit in recent years for college graduates - but you actually have to go all the way back to 2018 for the gap to disappear! I don’t think anyone thinks that AI was taking jobs from recent graduates *before* the pandemic. At most, you could attribute a slight increase since 2022 to that, but it seems more likely that whatever other structural factors were already subverting expectations in the years leading up to 2022 have continued.
Decoupling US and China and migrating some of the world's manufacturing baseaway frm China would be much more if the US did not have tariffs and other import restrictions on _other countries._
He said in a post today that the point of tariffs is as a cudgel to extract concessions and favours from other countries. Any other countries.
Fare gates are interesting - they work to keep fare dodgers out - however in London we have some lines without any fare gates (DLR) that seem to be just as safe and raise just as much money as the rest.
The key perhaps is lower criminality in general, cameras and ease of payment - you just tap your phone or credit card on a card reader when entering or exiting. Makes paying very easy and quick, and means that you have many stations without any permanent attendants (reducing costs significantly.
They do have occasional spot checks - where they confirm that everyone on the train has a ticket - but these are not very often. (Twice a month or so.)
The question is what happens when the spot check finds someone who is a repeat offender? Also what does (or would?) the police (and the operator) do if the same intensity of disorderly conduct crops up around stations and on the trains?
It seems in the US this is a really neglected *and* hard issue. (Well, not like the mental healthcare chasm, homelessness, overdependence on cars, and lack of criminal-justice reforms would be much easier to fix anywhere.)
For example in Budapest the public transit operator had to put security guards for a few years on the excellent (frequent and with a ridiculously large coverage area) night bus service to keep too problematic people from getting on the buses.
Night connections are a special nightmare everywhere, mostly because of the increased inebriation of the patrons (well maybe not in Afghanistan, but everywhere where booze is legal), and indeed the usual way to make them safer is to deploy guards, especially in known "hubs" with lots of night bars.
Well DLR has no late night service - so that probably helps. (Ends around 11pm).
I've not seen the consequences of a spot check failure - but we have a robust transport police so it might be pretty tough... but not sure at all.
How do they check if riders have a ticket when everyone just taps their card to get on? Do they have a card reader or something?
Your credit card/phone is your ticket - it charges you when you tap out based on your journey length.
London's system is very effective - you basically don't have tickets anymore - you just tap in and out and they charge you the correct fare. There are daily and monthly caps on spending (which means you don't worry about unlimited charges).
Oh and yes - when they check your ticket they have a NFC card reader that confirms you are in the system and have tapped in.
In switzerland, which also works on random checks, they have a machine reader. It will scan the paper ticket or a transit card.
Great roundup, thanks.
Re: your snark on Cass, manufacturing employment and PMIs also fell consistently after the passage of the CHIPS act, infrastructure bill and the “IRA”. So trillions in Keynesian, government directed economic planning and investment was an absolute failure through ‘23, ‘24 and ‘25 (three years following passage). I suppose that means everyone will stop defending that as an idea? Given the size of that spending and the three year runway, I’d say that the case for those policies is weaker than for tariffs. But we can check back in 2028-29 (giving a three year runway from the imposition of tariffs in ‘25)
All we know for sure is that privately directed AI and data center capex is having an impact - which has little to do with either Trump or Biden’s industrial policies. They picked other horses.
Matt Stoller had one of the more interesting takes on AI
Grok version of a longer article
The article (from Matt Stoller's BIG newsletter, in a "Monopoly Round-Up" piece dated around early February 2026) discusses "The System of Record Problem" in American enterprise software.
Core idea: Many of the most profitable big software companies (e.g., in healthcare like Epic, finance like Salesforce/Workday, government/regulatory systems, etc.) sell themselves as the single authoritative "system of record" — basically the central database + workflow that becomes the irreplaceable nervous system of an organization.
Why this creates a problem:
Once embedded, these systems are extremely hard to replace (high switching costs, regulatory lock-in, massive data entrenchment).
Vendors exploit this by turning into "extraction machines" — raising prices, bundling unwanted features, delivering mediocre innovation, providing poor service, and behaving more like monopolistic utilities than competitive software firms.
Customers hate them but feel trapped ("one throat to choke" becomes "one throat we can't choke").
Broader implication: This lock-in dynamic helps explain why large parts of corporate/government America run on outdated, overpriced, frustrating software — and why some analysts see vulnerability in today's high software valuations if AI or other forces start threatening these entrenched moats.
Link
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/i/185554921/the-system-of-record-problem
Economists have a branding problem in the US and that is downstream of the structure of where the public sees them.
In Germany, for example, economists work for the central bank, but also for the health ministry and various other government ministries. Economists work on health technology assessment that decides how much the health system should pay for drugs.
In the US, the impression is that professional economists just work for big business or in parts of government that serve big business.
And the impression while not strictly true, has a basis.
We used to have an office of technology assessment that was there to brief Congress on new technologies. It served as an independent research body. The Republicans killed it in 1995 to make sure that the only information about new technology that Congress would get would be from the hardworking lobbyists of God fearing American corporations.
That is to say, when Americans hear about "economists", they are very unlikely to hear about anyone working for the public interest. Instead, they are going to hear about some person working for bank or hedge fund.
This leads to the kind of mistake that Jon Stewart made.
I think some people have "economics" confused with the finance industry - they think economists work for Gordon Gekko instead of universities.
Yeah this is the other issue. A lot of non-economists use econo-speak as propaganda for their self-interest and this is what the public associates with economics.
There are thousands of economists employed by the private sector in Germany. Running a bank, large manufacturer or financial firm would be very difficult to do without economic advice. And why is the assumption that a person employed by the government is working for the public interest? Just look at Trump’s cabinet and you can see that’s obviously incorrect.
I'm not saying that Europe doesn't have private economists. I am saying that, relative to America, there are more prominent public economists than there are in the states.
Bingo.