Nicholas Decker
@captgouda24
Econ student, liberal, aspie, bi. Michael Kremer stan. I ❤️ optimal auction design. Spend more on drugs. Open borders now! alt @NicholasD91704
4.7K Following 34.4K Followers
The thing about California is that you can steal a house at will. Just so long as they don’t defend themselves in court and perjure themselves, they’ll going to get off. California could stamp this out, but aren’t.
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Why do we assume that billionaires’ political influence is a negative externality, as opposed to a positive or neutral one? Where is the systematic evidence that billionaires as a group hold (and advocate for) net bad policy views?
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@bashu_thanks @strangestloop welp, missed my connection so I've got time
pretransition tess/posttransition tess
I await people saying we shouldn’t have arrested Warren Jeffs and other fundamentalist Mormons for raping children, because it’s oh so important we preserve unusual cultures.
Leaving primitive tribes uncontacted is fundamentally contrary to human dignity and equality. Their way of life is worse. We have the ability to improve it, but choose not to, because we do not really, truly believe they are human. We treat them as animals on a game reserve.
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If people on the Sentinel Islands are people, really people, we would consider it a crime against humanity to let them languish imprisoned by the sea. But we don’t consider them people. Our treatment is the same we extend to apes. Mute indifference to suffering.
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Leaving primitive tribes uncontacted is fundamentally contrary to human dignity and equality. Their way of life is worse. We have the ability to improve it, but choose not to, because we do not really, truly believe they are human. We treat them as animals on a game reserve.
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selfcestslop: it's the hot new thing
the destruction of the special family-clan bond is the very first thing any developed country needs to do on the road of socialist development.
I have been on the road for two months with no more clothes than are contained within a backpack. It can be done.
You need substantially fewer belongings than you think.
Travel with a single carry-on bag. Don’t even bother with toiletries — You can buy them at your destination. Wash your clothing every few days. 98% of what we own isn’t really all that necessary at all.
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Stanford’s mandatory class on Economics assigns 45 pages of canonical Western economics writing against >500 pages of contemporary work organized around identification, breakfast cereals and settlers mortality.
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The add-ons when booking a flight are getting more and more creative
These arguments are indistinguishable from saying that we should leave abused children with their parents because it's their culture.
Leaving primitive tribes uncontacted is fundamentally contrary to human dignity and equality. Their way of life is worse. We have the ability to improve it, but choose not to, because we do not really, truly believe they are human. We treat them as animals on a game reserve.
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For ~40 years, we've assumed RBC models imply a tiny welfare cost of business cycles.
In a new paper w/ V. Carvalho & @matias_cova2 we show that it's an artifact of the single‑sector assumption.
Drop it, and the cost is ~100x larger.
A 🧵 (1/n, n= 12)
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Traveling around the world, I’ve noticed that rich people look just about the same everywhere. It’s only the poor people who change.
This is a really special paper.
In 2001, Thailand's government unexpectedly gave every village 1 Million Baht (about $25,000) to form a village bank. The results were puzzling. The price of credit didn't change, and neither did investment. Instead, consumption rose dollar for dollar. What? Why? How? 1/
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Leaving primitive tribes uncontacted is fundamentally contrary to human dignity and equality. Their way of life is worse. We have the ability to improve it, but choose not to, because we do not really, truly believe they are human. We treat them as animals on a game reserve.
Show more
Caste is old -- really old. It was emphatically not the creation of the English colonists, but something that emerged thousands of years ago. The high castes, who oppressed and exploited the low castes, are not originally from India -- they came down from the steppes.
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In 2001, Thailand's government unexpectedly gave every village 1 Million Baht (about $25,000) to form a village bank. The results were puzzling. The price of credit didn't change, and neither did investment. Instead, consumption rose dollar for dollar. What? Why? How? 1/
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