Hilliard MacBeth

Nothing says free-market capitalism quite like a pharmaceutical company charging $80,000 for a drug developed with taxpayer-funded research.

🚨🛑 A little background for my post-Keynesian and MMT friends, and an explanation of what the fuck I've been doing on this account for the last six weeks. Back in 2022, I met Steve Keen on a random livestream and ended up showing him a rather sophisticated pandemic model for Covid-19 I had developed for British Columbia, Canada, using his system dynamics software, Ravel. I had actually started using his software back in 2017, when I was working at a box factory and experimenting with ways to optimize productivity through system dynamics modeling. Around the same time I first met Steve on that stream in 2022, I opened this Twitter account. I also started a YouTube channel producing system dynamics modeling tutorials, primarily focused on macroeconomics. Before that, I had deleted Facebook, Instagram, and pretty much every other social media account I had back in 2017 because I couldn't stand that shit anymore. "Just when I thought I got out, they pulled me right back in!" In 2023, I began developing a large national economic model that led to a lot of unique opportunities and rebranded myself as Relearning Economics. I started posting historical economic quotes, which eventually became a regular feature of the account. Interestingly, quite a few accounts doing the same thing today appeared after I started doing it. Unfortunately, most of them turned out to be libertarian accounts. Along the way, I met a tremendous number of economists, researchers, and systems thinkers. Those connections eventually turned into a steady side income from economic modeling contracts. Over time, I accumulated a substantial collection of unpublished models, experiments, and research that I wanted to make publicly available. That eventually led to GDP Dynamics. I launched @GDPDynamics and its corresponding website this past summer as a home for my economic models, forecasts, and research. Much of the forecasting and modeling work is available to the public for free, while a premium membership provides more detailed analysis and additional research. It has already developed into another source of income, allowing me to spend more time doing what I actually enjoy: building economic models. Around the same time, I decided to retire the Relearning Economics identity, return to using my legal name on Twitter, and establish GDP Dynamics as a separate brand. Besides when you have the last name Keynes and you work in the field of economics, I could I have not returned to it. Another factor was the release of my book, Beyond Equilibrium: A dynamic Keynesian Approach to Macroeconomics. After two and a half years, posting historical economic quotes had become rather dated and redundant relative to what I was trying to accomplish. It certainly helped build an audience, but it also came with an enormous amount of bullshit. For nearly two years, I dealt with a constant stream of Austrian economists and libertarians attacking practically anything I posted. Share a John Maynard Keynes quote and suddenly you're accused of supporting pedophilia. Discuss fiscal policy and you're a communist. Apparently, I'm a communist despite spending a considerable amount of my spare time developing software, negotiating contracts, selling economic modeling services, and running a business. Some days I feel like the most oppressed entrepreneur in economics. The personal attacks were relentless. I received countless threats of violence from anonymous keyboard warriors, none of whom I took particularly seriously. Nevertheless, dealing with that shit almost every day for a couple of years becomes exhausting. And this brings me to my Post-Keynesian and MMT followers. I've watched how our side of the economics community has been treated, particularly by the Austrian and libertarian crowd. The constant insults, accusations, and personal attacks. Being called retards, faggots, woke libtards, communists, and just about every other insult these people can manage to string together. I've seen perfectly reasonable economic discussions turn into absolute cesspools because somebody dared to question the intellectual foundations of Austrian economics. When I returned to using my legal name and separated the GDP Dynamics brand from my personal account, I had a little social experiment in mind. Social media has become a clickbait shithole, populated by countless little ideological echo chambers. People spend more time defending their intellectual tribes than actually learning anything. In my case I find it particularly frustrating because I'm in the business of economic forecasting, not abstract fuckery. So, beginning September 15th, I started a calculated campaign of what I would describe as chud-style economic ragebait, primarily directed at Austrian economists and libertarians, with the occasional shot at New Keynesians and neoclassical economists. Over the following six weeks, those posts generated millions of impressions. There were three reasons for doing this. First, I'm fascinated by how systems behave. That's probably obvious considering I spend a substantial amount of my life building nonlinear dynamic models. Social media is itself a complex system of feedback loops, reinforcement mechanisms, incentives, and emergent behavior. I wanted to see what would happen if I deliberately changed the nature of the content being introduced into that system. Second, I wanted to change the composition of my audience. My historical quote posting had attracted what I estimated to be somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 Austrian and libertarian followers who had very little interest in my actual economic modeling work. I wanted to shed much of that audience and develop a healthier balance of people genuinely interested in macroeconomics, system dynamics, and the research I publish. Based on the substantial follower turnover I've observed in my X Premium analytics over the past six weeks, that objective appears to have been achieved. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to return some of the bullshit that I and many others in the post-Keynesian and MMT communities have endured on this platform which specifically accelerated after Musk took over. After two years of watching these people casually throw around personal insults, threats, and accusations, I figured it might be entertaining to give them a taste of their own medicine. Judging by the extraordinary amount of crybaby fuckery coming from libertarians over the past six weeks, I can say that particular objective has been rather satisfying. Those folk might be more woke than the woke woke(s)... But there is also a more serious observation here. What this experience has reinforced for me is just how ineffective social media can be as a platform for distributing substantive intellectual work. You can spend months developing an economic model, testing its behavior, validating its results, and writing a detailed explanation, only to reach a fraction of the audience that a deliberately provocative two-sentence post can attract in a few hours. Sadly this post that I have put effort into will mean little to nothing in a few hours and will probably get very low engagement because it's to long and complex for the TikTok generation. The incentives overwhelmingly favor emotional reactions, ideological conflict, and instant gratification over research and meaningful discussion. Millions of impressions do not necessarily translate into people reading your work, understanding your models, or engaging with the underlying economics. This is one of the reasons I established GDP Dynamics as an independent platform. I would rather have a smaller audience genuinely interested in my research than millions of impressions from people arguing about something they haven't bothered to understand. And for anyone wondering whether I've become permanently consumed by Twitter/X ragebait, I can assure you I haven't. Will I stop, I don't know, If George Selgin gets any more emotionally damaged by my posts about David Graeber, he might end up on Prozac or some other antidepressant and if that's the case I will never stop. In real life, I ride downhill mountain bikes for excitement, work on economic models, consulting work and run the GDP Dynamics site. As a Canadian I go to a lot of hockey games, say "eh" a lot and cut down trees with and axe. I'm probably more libertarian than a libertarian Most of the stupid shit I post on this account is written while I'm sitting on the toilet. Not this one, I put some time into this some it can be forgotten about tomorrow.