Economist #AustrianCapitalTheory—If you don't believe me, just see the #BRICS failure to create a new monetary system, we are just better at it.
Texas
Joined June 2021
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𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝.
𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬. 𝐅𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 & 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
A inicios de este mes estuve en la que es, sin duda alguna, una de las conferencias más bitcoiners que quedan en el circuito de eventos, @Wo_Bitcoin.
5 años, que se dice pronto, haciendo comunidad en un país que, al menos en apariencia, no necesita Bitcoin. Lo bueno es que los bitcoiners sabemos que todos los caminos llevan a Bitcoin y año a año nos unimos para recordarlo.
Gracias a @decentralized_b por contar conmigo 🙌🇪🇸
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
Since Zucman is saying "but we were peer reviewed!" as a defense of his work from AI audits, I'd encourage you to look at his two big papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics from 2016 and 2018.
Both got a rapid single round of R&R within 2-3 months of submission date and both were accepted by the journal within 2-3 months of that revision. Both were up on the journal's website in under a year.
Now I don't have any special insight to what the referees on these two papers said. But I do know that this is an extremely rapid submission-to-print timeframe for a complex empirical article at a top economics journal. And it's especially rapid considering that people were pointing out problems with the working paper versions of both while they were still under review, and most of those problems remain unaddressed.
For comparison, the Auten-Splinter income series (which is the most direct competitor to PSZ's 2018 QJE piece) took FIVE YEARS of rigorous peer review back-and-forth between its initial submission in 2018 and its acceptance in 2023 at JPE. @VincentGeloso and I first released our critique of a different part of Piketty-Saez's data series in 2017. It took multiple rounds of rigorous review and back-and-forth edits on every section before we landed at EJ in 2022. I suspect that what these papers experienced is much more in line with the norms of a heavy and rigorous peer review at an A-list journal.
IOW, I consider it highly unlikely that the <1 year rapid turnaround that SZ and PSZ got twice in a row at QJE is anything remotely common at that or any other top journal.
European hiring rules are genuinely insane.
For example - if you own a company in the Netherlands and one of your employees gets sick, you are required to pay at least 70% of their wages for up to 2 years.
If they can't go back to work after 2 years and you haven't done enough for their reintegration, you pay their wages for 1 more year. And you can't fire them until after that extra year!
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
Moral clarity is when you realize that progressivism has absolutely no redeeming quality. It teaches people nothing but prejudice and hatred under the pretense of justice and compassion.
There is no space for agency in it which is fundamentally why it is so utterly inhumane.
When they look at the world, all that they see are groups of people vying for power over one another. And, because power is all there is in the world, all hierarchies and all forms of inequality are intrinsically illegitimate and direct evidence of oppression by those above over those below.
In the plainest of English possible, it is **exactly** as Bill Maher once put it: they looked at the Middle East and concluded the Jews look more pale than the other ones, so they sided with the terrorists.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
It’s amazing how people can come on this app and given takes on topics they clearly aren’t familiar with. Honestly, these posts are disrespectful to both MMT and the mainstream
Tbh I think MMT has been reasonably well borne-out? it’s not a theory that says you never get inflation. It says inflation is driven by real-economy shortages and/or gluts of their version of the money supply. COVID produced real supply shocks and the MMT version of the money supply has exploded over the last decade.
Yes, different financial commitments require different people given humans are not homogeneous.
Rental commitments are short & mid term atost while loan commitments are long-term
Very different circumstances
Economists must read this
"En un famoso estudio de 1998, se preguntó a estudiantes y profesores de Harvard en cuál de dos mundos preferirían vivir: uno en el que ganan 50.000 dólares y los demás ganan 25.000; o uno en el que ganan 100.000 dólares y los demás ganan 200.000. (Se les dijo que los precios eran iguales en ambos mundos.) Entre el 38 % y el 56 % de los participantes afirmaron que preferirían ganar solo 50.000 dólares siempre que los demás ganaran aún menos. Los resultados fueron similares en China y en otras muestras de Estados Unidos. Y estas cifras deben considerarse, obviamente, como límites inferiores, dado que admitir que te importa más el estatus no es la respuesta socialmente deseable."
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
A heartbreaking aspect of MIT’s terrible treatment of @DMSabatini was the damage to his young associates. Dismantling his lab derailed their careers. MIT considered them acceptable collateral damage. I should know; I gave one a bench in my lab so they could finish their work.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
Important community note:
I’m not. A lot of people died. A lot of people were killed. Brutal. But yet the Chinese largely respect Mao. Ask yourself why. Because there are many countries where they absolutely despise their strongmen or even put up museums to display the brutality of previous dictators. China is not one of those countries.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
It is not permitted to publicly criticise Mao in China.
nytimes.com/2021/11/02/wor…
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
Since Zucman is now lashing out publicly against the AI audit, here's a thread where I document several dozen examples of errors and questionable assumptions that collectively bias the Piketty-Saez-Zucman stats on inequality toward their political objectives.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
The AI response may well be imperfect, but it does raise a legitimate concern: your choice of which criticisms to engage with seems to consistently lean in one direction. Which is the criticism I made for years in many peer-reviewed papers.
Rather than focusing on the AI response, appeals to authority, or rhetorical flourishes, I would welcome a substantive engagement with the arguments that Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) and I have developed across multiple papers, which have so far gone largely unanswered.
The same applies to the work of Auten and Splinter, Josh Rauh, and Sylvain Catherine.
I think there is a basic principle of scholarly debate at stake here. It is difficult to invoke the importance of serious academic criticism while declining to engage with substantive objections from researchers who have devoted considerable effort to examining your work. This is particularly true when those objections are sometimes characterized in ways that do not accurately reflect the arguments being made.
We are serious scholars raising serious questions. Surely, it is reasonable to expect that these arguments receive the same consideration as criticisms you have chosen to address.
I am not asking for much—simply a fair and substantive engagement with our actual arguments. Ignore how mean Tyler was to you. That is not important to scholarship debates!
Hello @elonmusk and @tylercowen ,
You have just decided to publicly attack our research, six days before the vote on the California billionaire wealth tax.
Your attempt to discredit our work and that of our numerous academic colleagues is pathetic.
Let’s take a look. 🧵
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
I don't know why so many people on the political left feel compelled to adopt maximally critical stances vis-à-vis markets. They paint themselves into all sorts of corners like this one where they feel compelled to defend Mao...
The only thing that works in China is where they liberalized markets. And even that can't be left to really work right because liberalizing markets can challenge their monopoly on political power. They can't even get their state apparatus to work right because everyone lies about everything all the time.
Why would you not start somewhere defensible like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Norway? No. Some of them just go straight to Mao. But I bet they properly historicized their disciplines, though. 🤣
More seriously, don't they care about hitting their targets? I mean, we can have legitimate disagreements about the role of governments, but once you picked obectives... check if you hit the target?
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
These attempts to defend a mass murdering dictator are simply bizarre.
A reminder for those who forgot recent history that there was a time - not that long ago - when France used to have its own independent view of the world.
A time when France's range of acceptable opinion on China was wide enough that its flagship news magazine (not at all known for its communist leanings) hailed Mao as "a giant of history, poet, strategist and prophet" on a 1976 cover 👇
And a time when a centre-right French president - Giscard d’Estaing - mourned him as "a beacon of world thought" (letemps.ch/monde/asie-oceani…).
Today, saying something even remotely positive - or even neutral/nuanced - about China immediately gets you branded as a "CCP propagandist paid by China to bring down the West" 😅
I laugh but it's actually pretty sad when you think about it: not that France should go back to calling Mao - or Xi - a prophet, but, almost by definition, a country whose range of acceptable opinions has so dramatically shrunk in so little time has entered a new dark age, branding every dissonant voice a heretic and every attempt at understanding an act of treason.
Which means, somewhat paradoxically, that those who refuse the doxa and still dare to express nuanced opinions, and get called traitors for it, may actually be the most patriotic of the lot, those who believe in France the most.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
With all the respect you are due, this retelling of MMT is so frightfully muddled it risks saying nothing at all! If the core of MMT is 'real supply shocks dictate a rise in the price level' then you have landed yourself right back into the middle of neoclassical theory.
Tbh I think MMT has been reasonably well borne-out? it’s not a theory that says you never get inflation. It says inflation is driven by real-economy shortages and/or gluts of their version of the money supply. COVID produced real supply shocks and the MMT version of the money supply has exploded over the last decade.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
In a libertarian society, PARENTS determine whether their children work, NOT the market. In the US, "less than 5%" of children worked in factories "from 1870 on, not because of legislative intervention but because of parents' attitudes & income." THE AMERICANS: An Economic Record, pp. 169-170, by economist Stanley Lebergott.
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
Anyone can do this kind of thing now, but it requires trustworthy humans to verify it all. Without that, it's just a slop bomb.
Errors in the research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman marginalrevolution.com/margi…
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
Honestly, yes. The econ profession is extremely hierarchical and deferent to authority; few junior people will risk their careers by exposing errors by older, prestigious researchers. So doing it pseudonymously -- but checkably! -- makes sense.
Many people have valid criticisms of SZ, but something sits poorly with me here. An anonymous website, very limited information on prompts, data, etc, and suddenly broadcast by a popular blog...Is this really how we want Econ research to move forward?
marginalrevolution.com/margi…
Ááron Sepúlveda-Cué retweeted
In my Hayekian room I was eating my Misesian fish with a side of Böhm-Bawerkian chips and Rothbardian sauce in the most roundabout plan possible through employing capital goods (read: forks and knives) that lengthened the average intertemporal period of investment, when I saw this illuminating photo.
I immediately said: ‘wow, I must maximise my choice function by employing scarce means to satisfy my highest ends!’ and day-dreamt that my Hicksian indifference curve had intersected its tangency point at last.
But it was not to be. For J.M. Keynes came and said: ‘you will never have this, because your decisions and speculative-motives are GUIDED by animal spirits!’ and Piero Sraffa spit in my drink for no reason.
