ftav

Is Stephen Miran... right?

Real gross domestic product per American rose less between 2007 and 2019 than it did between 1929 and 1941. The Great Depression is typically viewed as having been more severe because the initial downturn was sharper, but the stagnation in living standards following the financial crisis was roughly as bad.

noahpinion.blog

The death of Market Street

Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren't added. The direct cost of this policy is pretty obvious. When people can't park in a parking garage on Market, and when Uber and Lyft can't pick people up and drop people off on the street, it makes businesses on the street less attractive to visit.

noahpinion.blog

What if our biggest problems aren’t economic?

It's not just government redistribution giving Millennials a boost. By the time they hit their mid 30s, their market income was well ahead of Gen X or the Boomers (and yes, this is adjusted for the cost of living). They had caught up in wealth, too.

noahpinion.blog

Economists should be worried about birth rates

Economics is far too hierarchical and closed of a profession. Younger and less accomplished researchers routinely defer to the authority of famous and senior figures, and critics from outside the field are typically brushed off. I believe the hierarchical, closed culture of econ has resulted in a research literature that has been too skewed toward the priorities and intuition of top authority figures.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #86: Unintended consequences

High-skilled immigrants don't compete with locals for a fixed pool of jobs; they lure investment to an area, so that the pool of jobs expands. This second effect, more often than not, outweighs the competitive effect, so that native-born Americans actually benefit from the presence of foreign skilled workers.

noahpinion.blog

Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy

The fundamental danger isn't human obsolescence, it's that humans will be outcompeted for scarce natural resources. It's possible that AI will grow so valuable that its owners bid up the price of energy astronomically — so high that humans can't afford fuel, electricity, manufactured goods, or even food. At that point, humans would indeed be immiserated en masse.

whyisthisinteresting

The Tax Free Year Edition

The total number of hours worked in industry increased 3.3% in 1969, and then fell 1.8% in 1970. The number of women working in industry increased 6.2% in 1969, and stayed high in 1970, before falling again in 1971. The biggest impact might have been in the balance of payments.

noahpinion.blog

Book Review: "Power and Progress"

The historical examples it cites simply don't support a narrative of out-of-touch technologists inventing the wrong sorts of technologies and hurting workers in the process. The book embraces a highly questionable definition of 'power' in which persuasion in an open democratic society is painted as a threat.

noahpinion.blog

I have never been working class

Class in some countries is about the past; you can be a shabby aristocrat if your grandfather was the Earl of Whatevershire. In American policy discussions, class is often implicitly about the present — where you lie in the income and wealth distributions this year. But on some level, everyone knows that class in America is really about the future.

ftav

Not the future. Don't talk about the future.

A company that replaces a billing department with a chatbot interface records lower costs and higher output per worker. The national accounts register a productivity gain. But the hours that patients spend decoding their own tests appear nowhere — not in labour statistics, not in GDP.

fs.blog

The Best Summary of Atlas Shrugged

The crisis was not caused by the producers. It was caused by a society that believed it could consume achievement while attacking the people who make achievement possible. Without the producers, the system that exploited them can no longer function, and society collapses.

noahpinion.blog

JD Vance's crusade against GDP is wrong and bad

The American right is simply tweaking these arguments to make them more appealing to their own base... So they want some way to neutralize this objection, so they can do things that will, in fact, make America poorer.

noahpinion.blog

No, China did not manage to avoid a crash

According to China's official statistics, the Chinese economy shrank by 0.8% in the second quarter of 2022: China's growth is usually reported in year/year numbers, but quarter/quarter is how the U.S. and most countries do their reporting. So by the kind of measurement Americans are used to hearing about, China's economy officially contracted at an annualized rate of over -3% in the second quarter of 2022.

noahpinion.blog

The American age was the human age

The past has become more valuable than the future to many Americans; they cling desperately to the power to enforce stasis, preserving a facade of the country they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that country great.

noahpinion.blog

Will China, Inc. be zombified?

Caballero, Hoshi, and Kashyap argue that evergreening was very bad for the Japanese economy, because it hoovered up scarce resources that better companies could have used to grow. With all of those crappy loans clogging up their books, Japanese banks couldn't lend to healthier companies. With big zombies like Daiei still able to employ large amounts of Japan's best managers, young scrappy upstarts were deprived of talent.

noahpinion.blog

Degrowth would make Europeans into "Europoors"

They see degrowth as a grand project to unify and reinvigorate the political left — a Big Idea to fill the hole left by the collapse of communism in the 20th century. Each buzzword or stock phrase is a shout-out to a particular faction of the European left — 'decolonial' leftists angry about colonialism, climate activists, old-line socialists still angry about 'neoclassical economics', unionists who want job guarantees, social democrats who care about housing and education and welfare, and so on.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #83: I told you so!

The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide.

noahpinion.blog

Why Europe should put up trade barriers against Chinese goods

Even if one country is better at making everything, it doesn't have a comparative advantage in everything. That's impossible. Every country has a comparative advantage at something! That's why in the theory of comparative advantage, trade is balanced. In the real world, China's massive trade surplus means that trade is not balanced; much of the time, China isn't trading goods for other goods, it's trading goods for IOUs.

dwarkesh.com

Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?

If David Ricardo woke up and somebody told him all those jobs did get automated, and then asked him, 'What do you think the prime-age employment rate is in 2026?', I think he'd be surprised to be told it was the highest it's ever been other than 2000. What David Ricardo ended up missing is that you have these economics of structural change, where everything that got automated became cheap. People had more money to spend, and then they started spending it on services.

noahpinion.blog

The way we treat pigs is a sin

Furthermore, vegetarianism, though morally laudable, has an obvious economic limitation — when one person refuses to eat meat, it lowers the price of meat for everyone else, which raises other people's meat consumption and partially offsets the vegetarian's action.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #82: Staring in wonder at the world

Immigration — even low-skilled immigration — creates a labor demand shock that balances out the labor supply shock (because the same immigrants who supply labor also demand products that are made with labor). Almost every study finds this.

noahpinion.blog

All non-drone militaries are obsolete

The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system.

honest-broker.com

Movie Theaters Are Coming Back (for the Saddest Reason)

Showing films in theaters is good for audiences, because it's the best possible way of experiencing cinema. Showing films in theaters is good for filmmakers, because it amplifies the artistry and grandeur of the idiom. Showing films in theaters is good for communities, because it supports the local creative ecosystem and provides jobs in the neighborhood.

noahpinion.blog

Why shoplifting is bad

Every time you shoplift, in other words, you're stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You're stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You're contributing to food deserts. You're raising unemployment. You're making food less affordable for the most vulnerable.

lennysnewsletter.com

What Claude Design is actually good for (and why Figma isn’t dead yet)

The practical limits of AI design tools (spoiler: you'll hit credit limits fast)

noahpinion.blog

Updated thoughts on industrial policy

Dismissing the whole idea of industrial policy out of hand — as the World Bank and others did in the 1990s — is simply a policy of self-imposed ignorance.

stratechery.com

2026.16: Servers, Satellites, and Stars

The key to understanding and analyzing tech has been appreciating the implications of zero marginal costs, which govern the economics of everything from chips to software to services. AI services generally fall under the same rubric — fixed costs in terms of data centers and chips matter more than marginal costs (mostly electricity) — but the worsening shortage in compute means it is opportunity costs that matter more than ever.

wired.com

Heatbit Maxi Pro Review: a Space Heater That Also Mines Bitcoin

Electricity rates have gotten so atrocious that this Heatbit wants to offset your costs with bitcoin mining. But the math doesn't add up.

noahpinion.blog

Maybe you should have bought an electric car

If you drive a gas-powered car, you are economically vulnerable to these periodic price shocks. If you drive an electric car, you are not vulnerable. It's as simple as that.

noahpinion.blog

Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI

The fact that we call most of the new tasks "services" doesn't change the fact that the set of new human tasks seems to have expanded faster than machines have replaced old ones.

readtrung.com

6 Takeaways From Citrini's Viral AI Doomer Article (and a Bunch of Rebuttals)

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

noahpinion.blog

Something feels weird about this economy

From a bird's-eye view, this economy looks pretty normal and healthy. Under normal circumstances, I'd be inclined to not even write a post about the macroeconomy this month. But underneath the surface, two interesting things are happening.