Recent content on Will Rinehart
RIA Browser Agency → Regulation → Documents Loading… Browse — Choose an agency, then click a regulation title to see its RIA documents. Agency Loading agencies… Filter regulation titles Sorted by date completed (most recent first). Agencies: — Regulations: — Select an agency to load regulation titles. Documents Click a regulation title on the left. date completed: — docs: — No regulation selected…
I thought it would be helpful for my students (and for me) to have a cheatsheet of all the best public policy resources. The result is below. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var…
I’m fascinated with time, the history of wrist watches, how the clock made the modern world, how our modern months and days got their names, the concept of time keeping, the psychology of time, time’s importance in economics, discounting, and so on. These are my collected notes on time. Time, discounting, and time preferences A common theme in the behavioral economic literature is that…
Ever since I was a wee kid, I have been fascinated in military and space technologies. This is an ongoing list of projects and ideas that I still find fascinating. Space From Hacker News I found Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972), which lead me to Sciencemadness Dot Org. Years ago, decades ago, I found Sciencemadness and then forgot the site. Maybe you’d be…
Years ago, Bill Gates wanted to tax robots. See versions of that argument at Quartz, CNBC, and the New York Times. I can foresee two major classes of problems with taxing robots. First, there is a problem of definition within the taxing of robots. It is incredibly hard to define robots and automation in practice. When you look at Automation Direct, one of the biggest suppliers of robotic machines,…
Fiscal notes are a mundane part of the state budget process but I have begun wondering if they could be reformed. When a bill gets filed in a state legislature, an office within the legislature will score the bill, providing detailed information about the financial effects of proposed legislation. Fiscal notes enable lawmakers and the public to understand the potential implications on state…
This is a scratchpad of sorts for economists wanting to use ChatGPT. Some of my most used prompts: Rewrite this five times varying the length, structure, and sentence order I’m new to using ChatGPT and I am a (insert your profession). Generate a list of the 10 best prompts that will help me be more productive. (Insert content) Proofread my writing above. Fix grammar and spelling mistakes.…
I have been writing a lot about the abundance agenda. So what does the abundance agenda look like in practice? Eli has laid out some of the action items: If we wanted to raise American productivity, for example, we could simplify geothermal permitting, deregulate advanced meltdown-proof nuclear reactors, make it easier to build transmission lines, figure out why high-speed rail is so expensive,…
You’ve got questions, I’ve got data. Cities are changing and everyone wants to know the impact. What follows is a constantly updating FAQ that helps to answer the big questions in housing economics and urbanism. How do new market-rate apartments affect rental prices? When new market-rate housing gets built, what happens to everyone’s rents around the build? There are two…
Notes for Young Voices’s Feb 16, 2023 event: “The World with ChatGPT: Will Humanity Fit In?” Why now? Why are we talking about AI, again? Just five years ago, in a 2017 report, PwC made the claim that 38 percent of U.S. jobs were at risk of automation by 2030. Also in 2017, McKinsey released a report estimating that 16 million to 54 million jobs would be lost by 2030. While that is still seven…
One criticism of higher education, older than the current issues of DEI, was developed by the Marxists sometime in the early 2000s. They took issue with creeping neoliberalism in the academy. As Beth Mintz wrote in Marxist Sociology: Neoliberal thought considers higher education a financial investment for students, and it assumes that colleges and universities should compete for customers, just…
Since publishing some work earlier this year about vetocracy, I have been thinking about how we might be able to reverse the trends. Here are some ideas. Refactoring / reform We need to go fast, as Patrick Collison says. How can we accomplish that? Perhaps there are lessons to be learned with Japan’s housing policy. The Institute for Justice says we need to make permitting cheaper, faster, and…
About a year ago, I stumbled upon this Reddit thread: I’ve been reading Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ in which he details a ‘genealogy’ of the prison, punitive, and judicial systems and it made me start wondering if anybody has done a similar work relating to the origins and evolution of bureaucracy? It seems to me that bureaucracy could be examined and deconstructed through a similar lens of…
There are various forms of knowledge. Some examples and definitions follow. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that you know but cannot explain with sufficient detail that someone else can reproduce your actions. “This Japanese Shrine Has Been Torn Down And Rebuilt Every 20 Years for the Past Millennium” In addition to reinvigorating spiritual and community bonds, the tradition keeps…
America is changing. Millennials and Gen Z are coming of age. Here are all the ways that they are different from previous generations. Sex and gender According to Gallup data, about 21% of Generation Z adults now identify as LGBTQ. Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are unknown. The authors use data from the 2007…
In the leadup to the passage of the infrastrucutre bill, a WSJ article cited two studies “showing that expanding high-quality internet access could have significant economic benefits.” I did a little digging into the first study, from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. It found that universal high-speed internet service would raise labor productivity by 1.1%, using the results of a survey.…
Because I have so much work in broadband, I thought a compilation might be helpful. A couple of months back, I finished an estimation of the real extent of broadband availability in the US using data from Georgia. It is driven by an economic model I developed. The FCC’s data suggests that 97.5% of households have broadband access. My models suggest the real number is probably between 89.9%…
Reddit user BainCapitalist has a great explanation of why MMT doesn’t work in practice. The full comment is posted below. I’m assuming you’re subtweeting my MMT comment. I’ve noticed that whenever MMTers brigade that post they only ever complain about “the economic is science” part and they never actually address the substance of the comment. I suspect they…
China wouldn’t be putting the money into the moon if they thought it was just a land grab. There will be a market and they want to control it. It is a decade if not a century-long play. If you want to understand what is at stake, watch General Steven Kwast’s talk “The Urgent Need for a U.S. Space Force.” Here is the key graf from that talk: This is not a military race, this…
I was recently walking through research with a student on the James Webb Telescope (JWST) and the costs involved in the project. I thought I would lay out that process here. Go to the Wiki first. I know people might look down upon Wikipedia, but for government projects, the site will save you a lot of time. Then check the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO provides Congress, the…
In my little circle of the world, the debate between Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave on the impact of social media has been making the rounds. The overall event was fascinating, but towards the end, a statistician pushes back against Haidt in a heated way, which can be found here. The audience member says, I think at the heart of what you said was that anxiety in first among young girls had…
All Internet service providers are required to file data with the FCC twice a year (Form 477) describing where they offer Internet access service at speeds exceeding 200 kbps in at least one direction. This data is compiled into Form 477 data, which can be downloaded in its raw format on the FCC’s Open Data site. There is a lot of data here to access, but one of the most important datasets…
Musk has been consistent with his statements. More than a couple of times, he has advocated for making the algorithm “open source.” Most recently, he said he will “make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” Making the algorithms open…
I like to collect stories that subtly prove we live in a simulation. My favorite recent example only needed one line in the New York Times to suggest a deep irony in the arc of the universe: Bristling at pressure to make room for escalating numbers of students, longtime Berkeley residents have leveraged state environmental law to accuse the oldest University of California campus of essentially…
Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online, a report by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has said. Tweets We Like Aren’t Alike: Time of Day Affects Engagement with Vice and Virtue Tweets Abstract: “Consumers are increasingly engaging with content on social media platforms, such as…
Veritasium posted a really great video about clickbait a while ago that I have never been able to shake. In the video, Derek Muller dives into clickbait and his own experience with getting content out. It is an honest look at the difficulties in getting content shared. But the most interesting part features an interview with MrBeast. Both freely admit that they don’t really know which titles…
Congress has spent at least \$17.34 billion to get people online in the past two years. In late 2020, they funded the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBB) by \$3.14 billion. Then, on December 31, 2021, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) took over. This program is funded to the tune of \$14.2 billion. With all of the money going out, I’ve been wondering if there is any way we can…
A decade ago, the hype over automation took off. Pioneering work from Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne in late 2013 predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be lost due to automation. The study was cited widely, appearing in The Washington Post, The Economist, Ars Technica, and The Verge, among other outlets. By the middle of the 2010s, the acolytes for automation grew. Self driving…
Politics and political institutions The United States has among the highest influenza vaccination rates in the OECD. Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don’t (link) We find that face-to-face and FinTech lenders charge Latinx/African-American borrowers 6-9 basis points higher interest rates, consistent with the extraction of monopoly rents in weaker competitive environments and from…
From Reddit, a list of transhumanist papers: Future minds: Transhumanism, cognitive enhancement and the nature of persons I am a Cyborg: Identity, Peripheral Reflexivity and Transhumanism Cochlear implantation, enhancements, transhumanism and posthumanism: some human questions Transhumanism and the question of human nature The Machine in the (g) Host: At the Limits of Body and Identity in…
This essay was originally sent out via CGO’s email newsletter. Just before the pandemic, 77-year-old Patrick Quinlan got approval to build 10 new units of housing on a 17,400-square-foot lot in San Francisco. Getting permission to build new housing isn’t normally a news story, but Quinlan’s became one because he has been working on the project most of his adult life. Those ten units took…
Chapter 4 of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments has long stuck with me, but it has always left me wanting for more. The chapter is all about the moral distance of time, which is brought into sharp focus through the lens of the discount rate. Discount rates come from finance as a means of estimating the current value of a future project, what’s known in the biz as a net present value (NPV)…
All of my old Substack essays before the new format. The 15-hour workweek: a dream in search of economic roots Inequality in the attention economy Instead of being eradicated, should mosquitoes be vaccinated? What does it mean if the FDA made aging a disease? Every way of seeing (like a platform) is also a way of not seeing There might be too much advertising, but not for the reasons you think
This bibliography includes Communication theory The digital Philosophy Political economy and regulation Perception and cognition Journals, outlets and esoterica Wikiholes Communication theory Technological or Media Determinism by Daniel Chandler Sociolinguistic variation is the study of the way language varies (see also the article on Dialectology) and changes (see Historical linguistics) in…
Gabel, David, Joan Nix, and Bruce Mcnevin. “Net Neutrality and Its' Repeal: Small Firms' Shareholders Shrug While Large Firms' Shareholders Turn.” Available at SSRN 3427573 (2019). Abstract: The FCCs decision to repeal Net Neutrality governance of Internet traffic has not ended the debate over whether such protections are needed. This paper investigates the effects of changes in Net…
Late last month, I was on CSPAN’s Communicators, talking with Randy May about cancel culture. In part, the conversation was driven by May’s thought-provoking series, “Thinking Clearly About Speaking Freely.” Part 1, part 2, and part 3 have all been published. I have written on the topic of cancel culture elsewhere, but I want to highlight my final words on the program where…
I don’t know who wrote these, but here are notes on Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. Prologue. “We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Whereas…
“Algorithm appreciation: People prefer algorithmic to human judgment” Even though computational algorithms often outperform human judgment, received wisdom suggests that people may be skeptical of relying on them (Dawes, 1979). Counter to this notion, results from six experiments show that lay people adhere more to advice when they think it comes from an algorithm than from a person. People…
Document outline Everyone needs tools to deal with technology use. This section offers a list of tools for empowerment and some commonsense rules. People use social connections to think. Social media can acts as a thinking tool. As such, it has an effect on social cognition. People congregate online for a reason. They want to commune. They want to communicate with others. Every technology offers…
From an Astral Codex Ten comment, details about online community migration: The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you’re…
I’m working on a series of posts on tech philosophy, but before diving into the relationship between technology and the self, I think it will be helpful to lay out some fundamental theorems of cognition and technology as it relates to us as social beings. Just so I am being explicit, here are my model primitives. Homo sapiens are special because we are sapiens. Monkeys, ravens, octopuses and…
Are Millennials going to end up worse than their parents? In one way, they are already doing better. Recent Census data on income suggests that Millennials aren’t doing worse than their parents. Table P-10 located here lays out median/mean income for those 25 to 34 going back to 1974, adjusted to constant 2019 dollars. Quite clearly those aged 25-34 in 2019 are doing better than any group…
Short-termism is the excessive focus on short-term results to the detriment of long-term interests. It is widely assumed that companies are economically focused on short-termism, since they want to maximize earnings. I have found data all over the map on this idea. As I wrote before: It has been widely accepted that corporations often adopt short term strategies that attempt to maximize earnings.…
This piece was previously sent out in a CGO email. As a kid, I spent much of my time off in the summer months at my grandparent’s home in Olney, Illinois. This area near the Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky border is not what you’d expect to find in a state normally known for its flat fields of soybeans. It is a rural town that lives in the shadow of Illinois’ oil drilling boom in the 1950s.
Why hasn’t 3D printing come to clothes? “Pore structures and air permeability are properties that make comfortable clothes. In principle, it’s exactly these structures that define textiles, which you cannot achieve with 3D printing” https://buff.ly/2I9Bo47 The Hardware Lottery — Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have historically had different…
Regulation chills minor (but not radical) technological innovations. While there is suggestive evidence that regulations may have a stifling effect on innovation, there is as yet no rigorous economic framework to quantify the magnitude of such regulatory effects on innovation and the aggregate economy. This column proposes such a framework tests its implications on data from France. As the…
Over a decade ago, Tyler Cowen penned a post simply titled, “What I think I am nearly certain about.” I thought a similar exercise would be helpful, so here are the things with which I have strong confidence. Lexically prioritized, prosperity/wealth should be maximized. Innovation doesn’t make the world smaller. It makes the individual’s world bigger. No one should be held…
The United States has a problem with construction costs; building a mile of road or train track costs a lot more here than in either Europe or Japan. And while many are talking construction in regards to high home costs, few have made the connection to broadband. A review of public studies confirms what many in the business have suggested, construction costs constitute around 75 percent to nearly…
Once the dust has settled on COVID and life resumes, some trends that began in the pandemic might stick while others might simply pass. One area to watch in the coming years will be local civic engagement. In the coming years, politics might be relocalized. Beginning in the 1980s, the trend in politics has been towards nationalization. Driven by a changing media landscape, Americans became more…