321–328 of 328 posts
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I don't know. But it's well known that this test is based on academic achievement and that low-income Asians do very well.
only if you live in NYC. If you don't live in NYC you won't ever have heard of it.
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Digging and refilling holes is a metaphor, it's not meant literally. It's used in economics discussions to refer to any kind of economic activity that's taking place just for the sake of it. Debt and money printing are intimately linked in our system, to the extent that they're nearly the same thing, which is why I used them interchangeably. If you go back a few hundred years, money printing was pretty simple: the Ki…
There's more to unpack about welfare being "paying not to work" - 82 year olds, absence of employment in mining towns - but you've put the argument for small government well. You made me imagine a monkey driving a bulldozer. Keynes' error was to pretend that the monkey is a qualified operator who follows the drawings. But the more democratic a nation becomes, the more its leadership resembles a cork bobbing on the ti…
I think your description of Keynesian monetary policy in terms of addiction is interesting!
You can view 2008 as either caused by regulation or deregulation, it's a fascinating event in that way, and is why different parties were at loggerheads over it.
The view that it was caused by deregulation is as you say: banks were allowed to do risky things that leveraged up their risk until they were going to fail, and this provoked the crisis.
The view that it was caused by regulation is to observe that the only reason banks aren't allowed to collapse in the first place is the odd way in which they are regulated. A banking license is a regulatory permission to tell people they have $1000 on deposit whilst not actually being able to service such a withdrawal. In the case of a normal company like FTX, that's fraud. With the right license, it's not.
If retail banks weren't allowed to do anything with deposits except keep them safe, they could not have become endangered by bad aggregated mortgage debt, and then could have just been allowed to fail. It would have hurt investors a ton but bubbles always do - the ATMs would have kept working though and that's what politicians really respond to, the crisis of the innocent working guy. To fix this situation you don't pass a law, you repeal a law, hence, caused by regulation.
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Keynes has been discredited in recent years, it's odd that you think he's established anything. The Austrians were proven right and recent monetary policy reflects their view - you don't see much discussion of Keynes anymore. If you don't understand Keynes maybe that's why you don't realise that? To recap Keynes: his core idea was countercyclical monetary policy, i.e. to issue debt (print money) when times are bad an…
A warning to others: This is far more contested, and more nuanced, than this post makes it out to be. I believe this narrative as stated would not fly without lots of debate and pushback in any mainstream economics department today. Among many other things, the recent history (of inflation, recession, and economic growth over the past 4 years) is completely wrong: stimulus was used during the COVID recession (early 2…
COVID certainly saw stimulus be used, but I didn't say that's when Keynesianism was discredited. It's really happened during the post-pandemic recovery period.
The US claims to be experiencing strong growth right now, but there are reasons to be a bit skeptical of that. Opinion polls that have historically always tracked reported economic performance have now diverged significantly, with people telling pollsters that they feel the economy is poor whilst the government announces that it's actually doing great. This leads left wing economists like Noah Smith to claim that there's suddenly a sort of ignorance crisis in which people have suddenly stopped being able to assess their own economic security. I think it's more likely that US data has gone bad, ably assisted by a very pro-Biden civil service. For example one metric they use to measure economic strength is job openings, but read any thread about the job market on HN and you'll see lots of highly skilled people struggling to find work along with many reports of what appear to be fake job openings, held open just to collect CVs.
In Europe what we see is very weak or non-existent growth when controlled for inflation despite truly vast levels of immigration, i.e. real economy is probably shrinking in the UK:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-constant-pri...
Did shrink in Germany:
And inflation has reached very high levels.
For an Austrian "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". The post-COVID inflation is for them entirely a function of stimulus, which you'd expect to have a delayed impact in that case because when the stimulus money landed in people's bank accounts everywhere people might spend it was closed. The economy reopens, travel becomes possible again and that money starts flowing out of the bank. Inflation appears immediately, exactly as expected.
Again it's a clearer picture in Europe. The UK started rapidly raising interest rates at the start of 2022, just as COVID was ending. Two years of lockdowns had left the economy in a terribly weakened state, nobody in the UK would claim the boom times were back, yet the BoE left Keynesianism behind and ramped up interest rates to levels last seen just before the last crisis in 2008. Back then they reacted by dropping rates to zero. This time they reacted by raising them to historical norms. A pretty clear repudiation of Keynes.
I'm sympathetic to diversity statements. I get why some people want them, or some departments want them from applicants. From my experience applying to PhD programs, though, writing and insisting on them is...unacademic and often downright misguided. When you write them you're confronted with essentially justifying your existence as it fits into the often nonsensical groupings of DEI initiatives. Your research is not…
Are they insisting on them for PhD applicants now too?
For example, the University of Nevada, Reno's Physics PhD application gives the following as one of the writing prompts to consider to address admissions criteria:
"Describe experiences and activities that demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion."
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only if you live in NYC. If you don't live in NYC you won't ever have heard of it.
The test and controversy have been heavily covered in national media for years.
When I google for it, the top-10 news hits for it are mostly NYPost, City Journal, NBC New York, NYDailyNews, also Manhattan Institute, TheNation.
Even if you google "SHSAT site:latimes.com" you only get hits for NYT, etc.
SFChronicle has only ever mentioned it once, and that was in 2021 in the context of the local (SF) debate about Lowell HS's entrance exam: (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-s-Lowell-isn...). Googling "site:sfchronicle.com SHSAT" only has that one hit.
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You're welcome! What now? Well, economics isn't really that complex. Rule 1. Don't print money - it distorts the natural flow of information and incentives through the market, leading to misallocations. Rule 2. Get rid of fractional reserve banking. It's an unnatural privilege that other companies would be forbidden from engaging in (it's considered fraud if you don't have a banking license). This forces all interest…
I like your analysis elsewhere. But you can’t avoid misallocations always. Some risk has to be taken by everyone. Even the private markets miscalculate roi. You also can’t avoid debt (printing money). At the simplest, you can tell yourself you will postpone your own retirement to take the risk of misallocating resources yourself, for a gamble.
I'm not sure what you mean in your second paragraph. Keeping the monetary base stable is eminently possible.
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I like your analysis elsewhere. But you can’t avoid misallocations always. Some risk has to be taken by everyone. Even the private markets miscalculate roi. You also can’t avoid debt (printing money). At the simplest, you can tell yourself you will postpone your own retirement to take the risk of misallocating resources yourself, for a gamble.
That's true, but market misallocations do eventually correct (recessions). Government mandated misallocations can go on for decades without anything to naturally check them. I'm not sure what you mean in your second paragraph. Keeping the monetary base stable is eminently possible.