This is the old Noahpinion archive. Noahpinion continues at noahpinion.substack.com
Well folks, it's been a fun 10-year run at this little website. I'm moving on to a new platform: Substack ! Here's the new Noahpinion: https://noahpinion.substack.com/ Thanks for reading, and hope to see you at the new site!
Rabbits make great friends. Unfortunately, rabbits are not as popular of a pet as they ought to be, thanks to two big misconceptions. Let's start out by busting these myths. Myth #1: Rabbits can't be litter trained. In fact, most rabbits are really easy to litter-train. Just put the litter box next to the hay feeder , and they will litter-train themselves! Here's my setup: There are a few…
I recently wrote a post at Bloomberg Opinion arguing that "bad behavior" - drug use, violence, single parenthood, and idleness - is not the main cause of poverty in advanced nations. As evidence, I cited the country of Japan, which has extremely low rates of drug use, violence, single parenthood, and idleness, and yet which has a poverty rate almost as high as that of the U.S., and significantly…
I know sweeping historical analogies are silly, but I've always been partial to the analogy between the Middle East's recent decades of war and the Thirty Years War of early modern Europe. So let's run with that and see where it takes us. The Thirty Years' War In the early 1600s, most of Europe was involved in a gigantic war (which really lasted more than 30 years if you count other associated…
What is MMT, the heterodox economic theory that has captivated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , made its way into the Green New Deal discussion , and inspired dozens of thinkpieces and critiques? What does it say? How can we tell if it's a good theory or a bad one? These are incredibly important questions. Thanks to Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal, MMT has very quickly gone from an obscure…
I'm a huge fan of living abroad, and I think many more Americans should do it. Living in a big, rich country with relatively few other countries nearby, Americans don't tend to travel overseas much. And of course, a great many don't have the economic opportunity to do so. I think there should be government programs that help young Americans travel and live abroad, and I think more charities,…
Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital firm focused on the future of work. In this guest post, he explains what he thinks is wrong with the way the "ride sharing" companies treat their workers. ____________________________________________________________________ AS GOES UBER, SO GOES THE NATION HOW MIGHT IT LOOK TO NEGOTIATE A “TREATY OF SILICON VALLEY?” Roy Bahat Lyft could go…
Usually, Bloomberg Opinion understandably does not want me to repost my Bloomberg articles at this blog. But they made an exception for my Alternative Green New Deal plan. So here it is. *** The planet is in grave danger from climate change. No reasonable person can doubt this fact. Drastic and immediate action is needed to reduce global carbon emissions. But that doesn’t mean that any sort of…
If you do not read " The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium ," by Martin Gurri, you will not be sufficiently prepared for the world to come. Well, you probably won't be anyway. No one will! But this book brings together a startling number of important threads of contemporary politics, geopolitics, public affairs, and media, and weaves them into a coherent,…
"He was ugly on the outside, and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside." - Wesley Yang, "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" Wesley Yang is not here to make you feel comfortable. He's here to find your most vulnerable places, and then, methodically, to poke you in those places. To pierce the veil of optimism that you use to get through your days. To make you think thoughts like:…
Tyler was good enough to give me a review copy of his new book, " Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals ", so here is my review! This is a philosophy book. It tries to answer the question of what a society's priorities should be. That's interesting, because Tyler is usually a very circumspect guy who doesn't like to come out and make strong…
YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents. In Northern California, where I live, YIMBYs tend to get into fights with progressives about market-rate housing. YIMBYs don't want to build only market-rate housing, but they think market-rate housing has to be an important component. NorCal progressives, in contrast, tend to think that…
Now is a GREAT time to travel to Japan. The country has really opened up, thanks to Abenomics, a weak yen, and the impending 2020 Tokyo Olympics. New technology has also made it a lot easier to get around the country, and to find cool stuff. Japan is in the middle of a huge tourism boom, and who knows how long it'll last, so you might as well be part of it. Go see the world, take a trip to Japan!…
"Hey, there ain't no space between us!" - a flight attendant who saw me reading this book This is a very important book about a very important topic (segregation and race relations). It is also a book that strongly agrees with my priors about how the world works. And not just my priors, but with my desires - I want segregation to be a bad thing. So because I'm so biased in favor of this book's…
I'm going to do the inadvisable, and argue with Brad DeLong. Hopefully this will turn out OK, since it's in response to Brad doing the inadvisable and arguing with Paul Krugman (thus breaking at least two of his own rules ). The topic is globalization. Krugman has a new essay in which he lays out what seems to be a rapidly crystallizing conventional wisdom on the recent history of globalization.…
Bryan Caplan is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the signaling theory of education, and this theory plays an important role in his new book, " The Case Against Education ". But I've always had a number of problems with this theory, and also with its application to the education policy issues. Recently, I wrote a Bloomberg View post in response to an essay Bryan wrote in The Atlantic that…
I've sworn off macro-bashing . I said what I had to say. And I'm seeing lots of young macro people doing good stuff . And the task of macro-method-criticizing has been taken over by people who are better at it than I am , and who have much better credentials . My macro-bashing days are done. But sometimes I just have to offer macro folks some marketing advice. The new defense of DSGE by…
So, Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize , which is pretty awesome. If you've read Thaler's memoir , you'll know that it was a long, hard, contentious fight for him to get his ideas accepted by the mainstream. And even though Thaler is now a Nobelist and has been the AEA president - i.e., he has completely convinced the commanding heights of the econ establishment that behavioral econ is a crucial…
There's a particular style of argument that some conservative economists use to dismiss calls for government intervention in markets: Step 1: Either assert or assume that free markets work best in general. Step 2: List the reasons why this particular market might be unusual. Step 3: Dismiss each reason with a combination of skeptical harumphing, handwaving, anecdotes, and/or informal evidence.…
On Twitter, I wrote that I disagreed with Brad's ideas about speech on college campuses . Brad then requested that I write my ideas up in the form of a DeLong Smackdown. So here we go. Brad's post was written in a particular context - the recent battles over right-wing speakers at Berkeley. More generally, the alt-right has been trying to provoke conflict at Berkeley, seeing an opportunity to gain…
I recently wrote a fairly well-received Twitter thread about how the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 1980s and early 1990s accurately predicted a lot about our current world. Our modern society is totally wired and connected, but also totally unequal - "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed", as Gibson was fond of saying. Hackers, cyberwarfare, and online psyops are a regular part of our…
Every so often, I see a news story or tweet hyping the fact that a modest but non-negligible percent of Americans said some crazy or horrible thing in a survey. Here are two examples: 1. " A chilling study shows how hostile college students are toward free speech " The most chilling findings, however, involved how students think repugnant speech should be dealt with...It gets even worse.…
I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the a16z podcast (a16z stands for Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm). The topic was free trade, and the other guest was Russ Roberts of EconTalk. Russ is known for making the orthodox case for free trade , and I've expressed some skepticism and reservations, so it seemed to me that my role in this podcast was to be the trade skeptic. So I…
Via Tyler Cowen , I see that Ljungqvist and Sargent have a new paper synthesizing much of the work that's been done in labor search-and-matching theory over the past decade or so. This is pretty cool (and not just because these guys are still doing important research at an advanced age). Basically, Ljungqvist and Sargent are trying to solve the Shimer Puzzle - the fact that in classic labor search…
In a recent essay about the racial politics of the Trump movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates concluded with a warning: It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of…