Bernard Guerrero retweeted
The "editorial" parts of NEJM, Science, etc. do so much harm to public perception of science. Why do this? Are we going to publish (basically the exact same essay) from a Pentecostal preacher? Science is too important for human prosperity to do this: kevinbryanecon.com/trust.htm…
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Takes on the election
1. To a first approximation, Republicans lost this hard because voters lost confidence in the Trump administration, not because of a positive agenda from the Democrats. Favorability of the Democratic Party was negative (-5). But Trump told voters to “vote like he was on the ballot”, and they did. The NBC exit poll found that 37% of voters approved of Trump, and 63% disapproved (-26). There’s just no winning the national environment with these margins.
2. There were essentially two major issues that voters cared about: 1) cost of living and 2) government corruption, both of which ~90% of voters said were “crucial or a major factor”. AI was not *that* big of a deal in this election - 56% said it was “crucial or a major factor”, but it’s really hard to disambiguate what voters feel about AGI and catastrophic risks (if anything) from ordinary median-voter NIMBYism around data centers. (It will, however, likely be a huge deal in the 2028 election when the impacts of AI become much more visible). Immigration was also not that big of a deal. Voters actually slightly favored Rs on immigration (+2), probably thanks to lasting backlash from the Biden administration’s laxity on border enforcement. It's unclear to what extent the war with Iran contributed aside from it raising the price of gas.
3. Data centers are probably not over. In fact data center ETF $DTCR was up nearly 2.5% today! It’s hard to understand why this is the case, but one hypothesis is that markets think ultimately, elites’ recognition of the immense economic and national security importance of data centers will override voters’ desire not to build them.
4. On cost of living in particular: one of the most important questions now is to what extent Dems will embrace economic slopulism (think rent control, broad asset taxes, and subsidizing demand) vs. “abundance liberal” policies like building more housing, cutting regulations, and embracing economic growth.
5. Thermostatic backlash is real. Voters hate incumbents. Political majorities shift constantly. The blue wave of 2008 was immediately followed by the red wave of 2010. Anyone predicting a durable multi-decade supermajority for Democrats will likely end up being wrong.
6. “Woke is back” is exactly the wrong lesson for Democrats to take from this, and Ro Khanna posting “DEI is back” doesn’t help. Using transgender issues as a proxy for “woke”, 52% of voters said trans rights have gone too far, compared to just 26% who said they haven’t gone far enough. Deep-blue Washington voted to ban trans athletes in girls’ sports, and Colorado voted to ban trans surgery for minors. Successful Democrats mostly avoided culture war issues.
7. Similarly, a lot of moderate or even right-leaning downballot measures passed, even in blue states. Eight states voted to require voter ID. North Carolina voted to cap state income taxes. California’s billionaire tax is on track to fail by nearly 11 points. Wisconsin voted to ban DEI in state government. Voters largely do not like left-wing ideas.
8. On the other side, “Demographics is destiny” (i.e. America needs to be a white nationalist/nativist country and heavily restrict immigration) is the wrong lesson for Republicans. White voters shifted 13 points to the left. Whites under 30 shifted 30 points to the left. Hispanics and other non-white groups shifted massively towards the right in 2024, and can be encouraged to do so again.
9. Moderates outperformed; radicals underperformed. Dems won by 13 points nationwide. Roy Cooper won by 19.6 in North Carolina (where Trump won by 3.2 in 2024). Jon Ossoff won by 18 in Georgia, where Trump won by 2.2. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine, both Bernie-backed supporters of Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and wealth taxes, both underperformed the national margin. In fact, Maine shifted slightly rightward. Dems were able to win deep red states like Iowa, Kansas, and Mississippi by running moderate, Republican-presenting, pro-border-security candidates. I suspect this is the main reason markets are up today. (For some intuition on how insane it is for a Dem candidate to win in Mississippi, Trump won Mississippi in 2024 by a larger margin than Harris won California!)
10. One of last night’s biggest winners was Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Under his tenure, Florida has gone from slightly red-leaning to reliably red. Republicans swept every statewide office, kept every House seat, and kept their majority in the State House and supermajority in the State Senate. In January, Florida will be the only one of America’s ten most populous states to have a Republican governor. DeSantis is genuinely smart and nuanced, lacks the baggage of figures like Vance and Rubio who are associated with the Trump administration, and did a great job as an administrator running Florida (see its high rate of domestic migration, zero state income tax, very low debt per capita, high education rankings, state budget surplus, etc). I would be unsurprised if he decided to run for President in 2028.
11. The other biggest winner was Jon Ossoff. Ossoff is a young, handsome, charismatic, moderate white male who won by 18 points in a state that went +2.2 for Trump in 2024. He achieved this in large part by focusing relentlessly on the two issues that mattered: the Trump admin’s corruption and the cost of living. He may very well be the Democratic frontrunner in 2028 (although, of course, it's far too early to make confident predictions about these things).
12. The biggest loser of all last night was Israel and the US-Israel relationship. Israel’s popularity in the United States has been in a steep, secular decline for years. Just 13% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans have positive views on Israel, and this is heavily skewed by age - younger voters are much more likely to oppose Israel. With Democrats taking both houses, it’s unlikely America’s level of political and military support for Israel will last for very long.
13. Gerrymandering doesn’t work under sufficiently strong margins for the opposing party. In political science, this is known as “dummymandering”. Dems are on track to flip 7 of North Carolina’s 14 House seats, shifting the balance of power from 10-4 Republican to 11-3 Democratic.
14. Trump quickly conceded that his party lost and he would be open to working with the Democrats. This was a positive update on Trump’s tendency toward authoritarianism. Many mainstream Republican figures, like JD Vance and Ted Cruz, quickly posted somewhat genuine mea culpas. There was a lot less coping than I expected. It’s possible that the loss had to be very painful for them to learn from it, and we wouldn’t have seen the same if Dems had won only 51 Senate seats.
15. Elections are truly a ton of fun to monitor live. There’s nothing like it. And prediction markets beat mainstream media in terms of timeliness and accuracy by FAR.
16. There’s a good chance none of this matters that much. Trump is still the president and still has veto power. Voters might turn on the incumbent Democrats in 2028. And historically, real GDP growth isn’t that different during eras where Ds controlled Congress vs Rs. Much of your probability mass should go towards “nothing ever happens”.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Tyler Cowen:
'I am not even sure what to say at this point. We need a radical revaluation of this work, and of the associated policy arguments. More generally, this is only a single step in the story of how AI is going to revise economic science, and indeed past research more generally. As I stress in many of my recent talks, there will be significant gains and losses in status, with the losses often outweighing the gains. I see this as one of those cases.'
Errors in the research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman marginalrevolution.com/margi…
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
I don't think i've ever seen a worse, more damaging interview for a candidate. Abdul was condescending, arrogant, dismissive and aloof. If he thinks he can win Republicans like this, he's making a big mistake.
Abdul is his own worse enemy.
WOW this exchange.
@BretBaier tried to give Abdul El-Sayed a chance to finally explain the 2012 letter in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Abdul awkwardly tries to speak over him.
This flailing defensiveness is why we’re on week 3 on this issue.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Another thing to understand about Zucman: engaging him is like trying to kick a football through a constantly-moving goalpost that also arbitrarily changes its height and width mid-kick.
He and his team at UC-Berkeley churn out a stream of working papers on inequality measurement that bake dozens of dubious assumptions into their data files, all of which "coincidentally" reinforce the headline figures that align with their political narrative. But finding and weeding out those assumptions is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task.
Zucman and coauthors Piketty and Saez do most of their work in Excel, and it's seldom ever straightforward. Instead you'll find some extremely questionable and undisclosed multiplier that's just guesstimated out of thin air...but it's buried 10 layers deep in a formula from a convoluted Excel spreadsheet, which changes the an input for another Excel spreadsheet that's used to create a ratio, which in turn goes into a formula on another Excel spreadsheet that's used to estimate a decade of missing data, which in turn alters the trend of their entire series. @VincentGeloso and I know this well because we've been scrutinizing their work for over a decade and have found dozens of examples of this sort of stuff.
But there's another twist to the PSZ universe: once you've done the work and found a problem in their data files that alters their main results in significant ways, they've already moved on to a "new" approach that conveniently hard-bakes all the faulty assumptions of the old approach into its source data while refusing to revisit them, and then layers them over with new paint, consisting of even more of the same style of Excel spreadsheet labyrinths that you now have to navigate to even figure out what they are doing. And what they do in their data files often diverges in substantial ways from how they describe it in their papers and descriptive appendixes.
While you're toiling away to figure out what they did in their last peer reviewed paper, they call up a friendly reporter at the NY Times and get him to publish a new non-peer reviewed statistical claim that grabs headlines and aligns with whatever wealth tax initiative they happen to be activisting for at the moment.
By the end, the goalpost has hopped around the field, changed its size and height multiple times, and been replaced by a new goalpost on the other end of the field that announces itself not through the referees of the field but via some sportscaster up in the broadcast booth who also happens to be openly cheering for their team.
Here's the best way to understand what Gabriel Zucman is up to on the California billionaire tax, and why it's a problem:
Suppose you were tasked with assembling a complex historical time series of an important economic indicator, but also suppose the data needed to build it is of widely varying quality. There are gaps in some years when components you need simply weren't measured. In other years the stats you do have are not as reliable. Or maybe the source changed the way it recorded things, or changed the underlying definition. And on top of all that, your indicator contains components that are simply hard to measure with any precision.
So what do you do? You'll inevitably have to make some discretionary calls on how to handle the challenges you encounter.
Zucman's inequality stats all face this problem. They draw on data that are often incomplete, and go back almost a century in some cases. Reliability varies, as do underlying sampling techniques that generated them. There are also gaps from things that aren't easily measured where you have to make a defensible judgement call on how to handle it. And each and every one of those calls affects your end results.
A rigorous researcher's judgement calls would follow certain defensible principles or rules that were clearly articulated and replicable. The effects of those calls would also distribute in different directions. Some would increase the final output number, others would decrease it.
In Zucman's work, we typically find the opposite. He makes judgement calls out of necessity, but they almost always go in the same direction, which is to show (a) rising inequality and (b) declining tax burdens on the rich. They always skew in a nonrandom direction, and that direction conveniently aligns with the political story he's telling about inequality and wealth taxes.
Or think of it this way: if you're assembling a century-long measure of income concentration it's quite plausible you may have to make 50 different judgement calls on how to handle gaps and uncertainties in the source data. If 30 of those cause your results to show higher inequality in cumulative, but 20 of those reduce inequality in cumulative, that suggests a fairly even distribution is at play. In Zucman's work (as well as his coauthors Piketty and Saez) though, you'll find situations where 50 out of 50 discretionary calls all happen to cause the headline measure of inequality to increase.
That's not random - it means that whenever they must make a choice on how to handle data uncertainty, they choose the path that confirms the political story they wish to tell. And this is why the various Piketty-Saez-Zucman measures of inequality are *always* on the high side compared to alternative measures of the same thing.
Overlay that with the fact that all three of them are partisan political activists who advocate for wealth taxes, and you see the problem. Their empirical academic work ends up skewing in favor of their political objective, even though it's masquerading as a data-driven exercise.
And that's why their empirical claims should be checked against other sources and heavily discounted when they do not align - which is frequently the case.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
A conversation that has happened many times in banking, with various flavor texts, from fintech to public banking to microfinance.
A: We think there is an opportunity to write loans to an underserved population.
B: At usuriously high rates?
A: No, at usual rates. Maybe lower.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Lavishly compensated darling of the French and international literary world, Édouard Louis, who teaches in America, explicitly justifies political violence. Just an absolute moral shitshow.
🔴 Édouard Louis : "Moi, je suis pour que l'on mette le feu aux rues de Paris ; je suis pour que l'on aille casser des choses. Faire de la politique, c'est avoir ou non du sang sur les mains : il n'y a pas de grande révolution sans débordements."
✅ Édouard Louis est un écrivain lancé par l’intelligentsia germanopratine de gauche radicale. Le noyau est le trio étroit avec @didiereribon et Geoffroy de Lagasnerie : "amitié" intense (vie, vacances, publications croisées), présentée comme un mode de vie alternatif à la famille et comme le pendant contemporain de Sartre/Beauvoir. Il est omniprésent dans les médias de gauche (@lesinrocks, @libe, @lemondefr) et à l’international (@guardian, @NewYorker, @nytimes).
✅ L'auteur de romans OUIGO revendique son inaltérable soutien à @JLMelenchon et à la @FranceInsoumise, avec @gdelagasnerie il publie des manifestes contre la famille ("structure pourrie") au profit de l’amitié, il est l'un des inspirateurs des délires adulescents de @Clemence_Guette et de l'@i_laboetie.
🕵️ @RadioCanadaInfo 🗣️ @FrDesouche
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
The thing that Democrats most want out of immigration policy — an impregnable external barrier that will let them go soft on interior enforcement without inviting new chaos — is not possible and this is more a governance problem than a messaging one.
slowboring.com/p/dont-get-co…
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Let me fix that tweet for you:
1. The people rioting in Paris are criminals who are committing crimes.
2. Destroying hard-working people’s businesses is evil and not a valid form of protest.
From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in.
In France, students and teachers are asking for safe schools, enough teachers and smaller classes.
In Spain, for affordable rent and housing.
In Albania, for good jobs and an end to corruption.
@JDVance says this is what happens when a nation lets in too many immigrants from the global south.
He is not just morally wrong, but misreading the moment.
The is what happens when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few.
This is what happens when young people lose hope in their future.
In America, let us listen to our young.
We need an economic and political transformation.
America's Next New Deal.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
What’s terrifying about this clip isn’t their ideals…these sweet gals’ hearts are certainly in the right place. What’s terrifying is they have the civic, political, and economic literacy of a 9 year old. When a charlatan like Abdul comes along with the Jr High class president schtick of “no more homework and the vending machines are all free!”, they fall for it.
I don’t know how you get to that age with ZERO understanding of supply chains, manufacturing, labor costs…but a lot of folks think that medicine and MRIs and hospitals just materialize out of thin air like unicorn farts. They’ve never built anything in their lives, so they have no concept of how things function…things are just…there. They think milk comes from the store. They think rich people don’t pay taxes, even though the top 1% fund 40% of government with their taxes already, and yet 40% of all Americans contribute ZERO federal income tax at all. These people don’t understand that you could tax the wealthy at 100% and it would only fund the government for 120 days. Then you’re screwed.
Too many Americans simply have zero understanding of how anything works, and even though they’re living in the easiest times in human history, they think things are “terrible out there”. These commie scammers roll through and promise them things that sound great, but aren’t possible in reality, and have devastating consequences if tried…but because they don’t know anything, they fall for it. Sadly, so many of our politicians and their advisors are such atrocious communicators, there’s like zero countervailing narrative to push back on the commie gobbledygook, so we are gonna have to learn the hard way. Guys…we just had a sample of socialism: Covid. We all got universal basic income, and it ended up tripling our costs and they’ll never go down. Ever. That one brief little experiment in command and control government will haunt us the rest of our lives. Bleak stuff, man.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
“Why don’t they try to make it cheaper instead of stopping the subsidy of unlimited government dollars going to it?”
You won’t believe what will happen next.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
The bar is **median earnings of high school graduates.** This rule is very sensibly saying college grads should be at least better off than people who never went to college at all.
It’s a crazy low bar. Fewer than 5% of programs are affected.
Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/NmmAzhf
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
The bioethics circle jerks during the Human Genome Project, which were allocated 5% of the project's funding, were a total waste of time.
They had countless conferences and workshops imagining bad things that could happen like punitive health insurance rates based on genetic risk, none of which actually came to pass. Meanwhile all the real issues that arose from ubiquitous DNA data, like accidentally doxing your criminal relatives with your own 23andMe data, were never imagined.
It's a condemnation of the precautionary principle. Philosophers can make up all sorts of hypothetical scenarios in a vacuum but it's nothing like actually trying things and seeing all the weird second and third-order consequences that emerge and *then* dealing with the unwelcome ones.
I've been suspicious of the philosophers hired by Anthropic who specialize in AI ethics for similar reasons that I'm skeptical of those who went into "bioethics": they form a closed subculture that delights in clever arguments without regard to the human suffering that can result. | ‘Suicidal Compassion’: Meet the Anthropic Officials Who Think AI Might Be Justified in Going Rogue Against the Humans Enslaving It freebeacon.com/america/suici…
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
As a resident of an economy, I live daily inside a massive experiment proving that it does work pretty much as supply and demand says.
So do you live inside it.
São Paulo is an enormous city. It exhausts me to drive across it.
Yet somehow every day when you go to get a morning coffee, there it is.
When you want to buy a new shirt, there it is.
If you had the misfortune to live in a country that so strongly denies market forces that it makes them illegal, such as North Korea or the old Soviet Union, this would not be the case.
The Soviets made endless jokes about it not being the case.
My latest column for @folha
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Say whatever you want but having the military sing Do You Hear the People Sing to a trapped Xi is a truly power baller move
白宫晚宴上的这一幕，《悲惨世界》经典旋律。不能不联想到背后有安排曲目的意味深长……
《Do You Hear the People Sing?》中文常译“你听见人民在歌唱”或港版填词“问谁未发声”，在2014雨伞运动和2019反修例示威中被大量传唱，大陆主流流媒体一度下架英文原曲。
香港教育部门后来禁止学校演唱带政治信息的歌曲，更著名的《愿荣光归香港》后来被法院禁制。
所以这首曲在中方官员耳朵里，应该比普通百老汇名曲更刺耳。这次现场主唱的是同一部剧里的《One Day More》，只是掺进了前一首的旋律和歌词碎片，没有把整首“人民在歌唱”完整唱出来。
这首歌在剧情中的位置，恰恰是学生革命者准备起义前夕。
没文化很可怕，也许，在礼炮与红毯之下，也深埋着嘲讽与暗喻……
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Indeed. My view is the same. One can be a consequentialist without being a paternalistic, rationalist who thinks they can calculate which acts (or rules) will produce the best overall outcome across every possible future. We gradually discovered that free speech and free enquiry tend to produce much better outcomes on the whole, not by utilitarian superforecasting, but by bitter experience: from repeatedly suffering the adverse consequences of doing the opposite. As Mill himself wrote, "However positive anyone's persuasion may be, not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences of an opinion, yet if he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility... These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity". Some callow moralists are intent on endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past.
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
Li Xunlei, Chief Economist at Zhongtai Financial: “The conclusion is clear: the places that built the most expressways were often those where freight demand grew the least.”
The East is Red has translated an article by Li Xunlei on how China’s infrastructure spending may have served the economy poorly, something he seems to have been worrying about even longer than I have.
He attributes local officials’ enthusiasm for infrastructure partly to the belief that “if you want to get rich, build roads first,” and partly to the tendency to measure performance by highly visible projects rather than underlying problems such as population outflows and weak local industries.
The underlying mistake is common, and not just in China. Policymakers too often treat infrastructure spending as a source of growth, so that when an economy faces institutional, demographic or other constraints that keep growth below expectations, their response is to increase infrastructure spending in order to goose economic activity.
But this often has it backwards. If those constraints limit productivity growth, the value of additional infrastructure is likely to be lower, not higher. Infrastructure spending, in other words, is not a source of growth. It is a cost of growth, and it makes an economy richer only when the productivity gains it generates exceed the cost of building and maintaining it.
Otherwise it makes the economy poorer. And the fact that local-government debt has grown so much faster than provincial GDP for nearly two decades suggests how years of overinvestment can leave less productive regions deeply indebted, with spectacular infrastructure but inadequate economic activity to support it.
It is encouraging that more and more Chinese economists and policy advisers are questioning this model. But changing it will be difficult. Infrastructure projects reliably produce a short-term boost to activity, making them especially tempting when growth slows and unemployment rises, until debt constraints finally make further spending impossible.
eastisread.com/p/li-xunlei-o…
Bernard Guerrero retweeted
If you want to know what's really on Americans' minds, ignore the news and social media, and just study this survey. Almost no one cares about 90% of the stuff you hear about.
news.gallup.com/poll/1675/mo…
A couple of observations and questions:
There's a lot of talk about the HuggingFace attacks, AI alignment, and possible threats emanating from rogue models, etc.
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8/ By analogy, ants certainly do not "reason" in any recognizable higher mammal fashion. But their behaviors are "designed" by evolution to maximize the probability of colony genetic survival, to the point of recognizing threats (like me moving to squash one)...
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