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Reposted by Matt Darling

Guy Berger @econberger.bsky.social · 2h

yikes

Guy Berger @econberger.bsky.social · 2h

Lots of federal government workers filing initial claims as the shutdown got started. I imagine their CC will spike next week.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 9h

Fair!

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Reposted by Matt Darling

Ben Casselman @bencasselman.bsky.social · 9h

SCOOP: The Bureau of Labor Statistics is preparing to release the September C.P.I. report despite the shutdown. (Exact date still unclear -- almost certainly not the original Oct. 15 date.) #EconSky #NumbersDay

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 9h

Plenty of subsistence level farming villages out there where a car is a rarity.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 9h

> You're not going to find a village headman who doesn't own a car but can command the same pool of laborers as a bronze age king.

I'm not sure about this? At least for some definitions of "command" or "same pool".

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Reposted by Matt Darling

Pete Rhom-BOO!-erg @prhomberg.bsky.social · 11h

Children should graduate through the stages of the internet.
Middle schoolers and younger get dial-up.
High schoolers get cable, but desktop/laptop only.
When you turn 18, you get a web-connected phone.
(Yes, this does roughly correspond to my own childhood)

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 14h

Pivot to video.

Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 14h

It's super interesting that the Cratchits, who I think were supposed to be representative of a normal 19th century London family, now read to people as "ah this must be the absolute bottom of the barrel."

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 14h

Is percentage growth the right way to look at this? Wouldn't the states that expanded Medicaid in 2014 (blue states) just have a higher base?

Seems like "percent of the population that signed up for ACA since 2021" would be more useful.

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Reposted by Matt Darling

John @johnlk.bsky.social · 14h

There is terrible A Christmas Carol discourse going on!

Bob Cratchit is not intended to be an example of extreme poverty. He's at the bottom of the lower middle class, and the fear is of descending from bare respectability into poverty, not that he *is* in poverty.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

Haha, fair enough!

(I will say the base rate of "making a dumb argument because you only loosely understand the concepts" is very high and the base rate of "designing an argument to appeal to Matt Darling" is very low)

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

Gets to it a little bit in the next section:

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

Oh, I don't think that's quite the argument he is making? It's more like "people are worried about unemployment, but there are a lot of frictions (such as union/occupational licensing rules but not exclusively them) that will limit this."

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

""with a certification" is doing a lot of lifting there imo"

?

That's only 2% of the labor market, right? Or am I missing something?

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

Reading the transcript he mostly means "can't make medical diagnoses" which I don't think is really a licensing issue per se.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

It's sad that no one really replaced Thoma (or even early 2010s MR) as a general resource.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

I don't think that is right? BLS estimate is 1/4th.

(Maybe you are right about optionality?)

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

The argument doesn't even make sense? Like the robots aren't covered by licensing restrictions.

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Reposted by Matt Darling

alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 15h

mark anderson learned economics on youtube

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 1d

ANDREESSEN: "The employment shifts everybody’s worried about are .. not going to happen at anywhere near the velocity people think .. because a significant percentage of jobs in the U.S. are licensed or unionized .. in a way where they literally cannot be replaced.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_1c...

Marc Andreessen and Charlie Songhurst on the past, present, and future of Silicon Valley

YouTube video by Stripe

www.youtube.com

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 15h

Especially funny because "purple" was like ostentatiously wealthy.

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Reposted by Matt Darling

proactiveretcon.bsky.social @proactiveretcon.bsky.social · 16h

I remember doing the math on the Edict on Maximum Prices from the third century CE and realizing that a set of clothes was very roughly about as expensive as a car today.

The mechanical loom and sewing machine changed the world so much we can barely understand the world before it.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 16h

"The son of my best friend is visiting! Put the FINEST rugs on the porch!"

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 16h

It's funny how much depictions of wealth/poverty are hard to interpret across centuries.

In "The Illiad" the reader that Menelaus is ostentatiously wealthy:

- Has a jug made of silver
- Has a table made of wood
- Helen puts a whole dang wool blanket on her chair so she is comfy

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Reposted by Matt Darling

Jenny Schuetz @jennyschuetz.bsky.social · 17h

Very cool new job posting! Social Science Research Council is hiring a Program Director to help launch a new Abundance Academic Network -- terrific opportunity to bridge social science research with current policy debates. Details below:
job-boards.greenhouse.io/socialscienc...

Program Director

Brooklyn

job-boards.greenhouse.io

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 17h

Like most of the non-alternative universe content is just them eating a nice dinner.

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