Authors Noah Smith
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"Competitive wokeness", like "virtue signaling" and "preference falsification", seems to be something people on the right say in order to pretend that people on the left don't really believe what they claim to believe.
Basically we have a whole bunch of ways of saying "You can't possibly believe that!!". Which helps us avoid the terrifying fact that yes, people generally do believe it.
Of course, "believe" doesn't mean what it means in econ class. It means that people get a warm feeling from asserting something, even if they don't know what it means. "God is omnipotent", etc.
A lot of times we believe extreme things, simply because asserting those things all together in a group gives us a warm feeling of having an army on our side.
It's not competitive wokeness. It's COOPERATIVE wokeness.
"Virtue signaling" isn't fake or pretend. It's real.
"Virtue", when it comes right down to it, means membership on a team.
Sometimes, to prove you're on a team, it helps to say something people on the other team could never bring themselves to say.
"She now finds herself in the uppermost echelons of the culture industries, where woke liberalism is de rigueur and departures from it are stigmatized." @reihan on Taylor Swift's swing towards politics: https://t.co/cKW4LoY9IV
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) October 11, 2018
Basically we have a whole bunch of ways of saying "You can't possibly believe that!!". Which helps us avoid the terrifying fact that yes, people generally do believe it.
Of course, "believe" doesn't mean what it means in econ class. It means that people get a warm feeling from asserting something, even if they don't know what it means. "God is omnipotent", etc.
A lot of times we believe extreme things, simply because asserting those things all together in a group gives us a warm feeling of having an army on our side.
It's not competitive wokeness. It's COOPERATIVE wokeness.
"Virtue signaling" isn't fake or pretend. It's real.
"Virtue", when it comes right down to it, means membership on a team.
Sometimes, to prove you're on a team, it helps to say something people on the other team could never bring themselves to say.
This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.
My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl
If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.
In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir
But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...
Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.
Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.
has written about this problem:
Imagine for a moment the most obscurantist, jargon-filled, po-mo article the politically correct academy might produce. Pure SJW nonsense. Got it? Chances are you're imagining something like the infamous "Feminist Glaciology" article from a few years back.https://t.co/NRaWNREBvR pic.twitter.com/qtSFBYY80S
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) October 13, 2018
My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl
If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.
In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir
But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...
Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.
Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.
has written about this problem:
To be honest, I think this is just the effect of Twitter.
If you're on Twitter all the time - as every political commentator now is - it's easy to think that whiny, big-talking Twitter slacktivists are "the Dems".
But what's happening out there on the ground?
This is another reason I think Twitter is so bad for society.
It convinces intellectuals and commentators that practically everyone who's on their side is an extremist.
Which makes them tolerate extremism out of a (false) feeling of necessity.
If you stay on Twitter too much (which we all do now), you start to think that the typical left-of-center person is some British wanker who quote-tweets "Imagine thinking this" to anyone who doesn't like the idea of "ending capitalism".
But he is not typical.
A majority of Americans are not on Twitter.
But *every* journalist, commentator, and intellectual *has* to be on Twitter.
So every journalist, commentator, and intellectual comes face to face with big-talking slacktivist faux-extremists day in and day out.
It's a problem!!
Online bubbles full of shouty faux-extremists are, in general, fine.
The difference is that every journalist, commentator, and intellectual is essentially forced to exist in THIS bubble, because their jobs require it.
Twitter is a dystopian technology.
(end)
If you're on Twitter all the time - as every political commentator now is - it's easy to think that whiny, big-talking Twitter slacktivists are "the Dems".
But what's happening out there on the ground?
— VeryHiddenGeniusHat (@Popehat) October 18, 2018
This is another reason I think Twitter is so bad for society.
It convinces intellectuals and commentators that practically everyone who's on their side is an extremist.
Which makes them tolerate extremism out of a (false) feeling of necessity.
If you stay on Twitter too much (which we all do now), you start to think that the typical left-of-center person is some British wanker who quote-tweets "Imagine thinking this" to anyone who doesn't like the idea of "ending capitalism".
But he is not typical.
A majority of Americans are not on Twitter.
But *every* journalist, commentator, and intellectual *has* to be on Twitter.
So every journalist, commentator, and intellectual comes face to face with big-talking slacktivist faux-extremists day in and day out.
It's a problem!!
Online bubbles full of shouty faux-extremists are, in general, fine.
The difference is that every journalist, commentator, and intellectual is essentially forced to exist in THIS bubble, because their jobs require it.
Twitter is a dystopian technology.
(end)
1/OK, let's take a little break from Coup Twitter, and think about an economic issue:
How can we build up the wealth of the middle class?
2/The typical American has surprisingly little wealth compared to the typical resident of many other developed countries.
This is a fact that is not widely known or appreciated.
3/Now, some people argue that stuff like Social Security or social insurance programs should be included in wealth. But I chose to focus on private wealth because I think having assets you can sell whenever you want is important to
4/For many decades after World War 2, middle-class wealth in America was on a smooth upward trajectory.
Then the housing crash came, and all that changed. Suddenly the rich were still doing well but everyone else was seeing the end of their American Dream.
5/Why the divergence?
Because the American middle class has its wealth in houses -- specifically, in the houses they live in.
It's the rich who own stocks.
How can we build up the wealth of the middle class?
2/The typical American has surprisingly little wealth compared to the typical resident of many other developed countries.
This is a fact that is not widely known or appreciated.
3/Now, some people argue that stuff like Social Security or social insurance programs should be included in wealth. But I chose to focus on private wealth because I think having assets you can sell whenever you want is important to
Yes, these numbers don't include things like Social Security, just privately held wealth. They're not an attempt to capitalize every possible future income stream.
— Noahtogolpe \U0001f407 (@Noahpinion) January 10, 2021
4/For many decades after World War 2, middle-class wealth in America was on a smooth upward trajectory.
Then the housing crash came, and all that changed. Suddenly the rich were still doing well but everyone else was seeing the end of their American Dream.
5/Why the divergence?
Because the American middle class has its wealth in houses -- specifically, in the houses they live in.
It's the rich who own stocks.
1/OK, so. Let's talk about Left-NIMBYism.
We all know about Right-NIMBYs, rabidly protecting their white-flight suburbs from Those People. And there are plenty of liberal NIMBYs too.
But NIMBYs of the Left are also a force to be reckoned
2/Left-NIMBYs have developed a canon of interlocking, mutually reinforcing beliefs about housing and urbanism.
These beliefs are mostly false, but they form a powerful "canon" that quickly ossifies into a hardened worldview.
It looks something like this:
3/Fortunately, Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs has written an article that perfectly encapsulates the Left-NIMBY worldview (and quotes me in it!).
So this is a teachable
4/Robinson selectively quotes a Bloomberg article of mine (https://t.co/iamRrW6oei).
Look at the part he quoted, vs. what I actually wrote!
Pretty different, eh? 😉
5/In fact, as I wrote in the article that Robinson failed to read more than one line of, it's theoretically possible that Left-NIMBYs COULD be right that allowing market-rate housing drives up local rents.
I take that possibility very seriously, as do YIMBYs.
We all know about Right-NIMBYs, rabidly protecting their white-flight suburbs from Those People. And there are plenty of liberal NIMBYs too.
But NIMBYs of the Left are also a force to be reckoned
2/Left-NIMBYs have developed a canon of interlocking, mutually reinforcing beliefs about housing and urbanism.
These beliefs are mostly false, but they form a powerful "canon" that quickly ossifies into a hardened worldview.
It looks something like this:
3/Fortunately, Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs has written an article that perfectly encapsulates the Left-NIMBY worldview (and quotes me in it!).
So this is a teachable
4/Robinson selectively quotes a Bloomberg article of mine (https://t.co/iamRrW6oei).
Look at the part he quoted, vs. what I actually wrote!
Pretty different, eh? 😉
5/In fact, as I wrote in the article that Robinson failed to read more than one line of, it's theoretically possible that Left-NIMBYs COULD be right that allowing market-rate housing drives up local rents.
I take that possibility very seriously, as do YIMBYs.
1/Lots of tech companies and workers are making noises about leaving San Francisco, LA, NYC, and other "superstar" cities.
Some are predicting a shift to remote work and distributed companies.
Let's take a hard look at what that would actually
2/We're all familiar with the trend of tech companies and other knowledge industries (finance, biotech, etc.) piling into a few tech hubs, raising rents and house prices.
Now some think the advent of Zoom, Slack, etc. might reverse this trend.
https://t.co/nQVCJrKvrB
3/But escaping the superstar cities is going to be tough.
The forces keeping tech companies in places like SF are so strong that these regions have essentially become prisons for these companies.
4/In order to escape the prison of the superstar cities, tech companies and other knowledge industries will have to overcome the Four Jailers of Industrial Clustering:
1. In-person office productivity
2. Thick market effects
3. Knowledge spillovers
4. City life amenities
5/I'm actually pretty optimistic that companies can find ways to make remote work productive.
Studies show that working from home *some* of the time actually tends to raise
Some are predicting a shift to remote work and distributed companies.
Let's take a hard look at what that would actually
2/We're all familiar with the trend of tech companies and other knowledge industries (finance, biotech, etc.) piling into a few tech hubs, raising rents and house prices.
Now some think the advent of Zoom, Slack, etc. might reverse this trend.
https://t.co/nQVCJrKvrB
3/But escaping the superstar cities is going to be tough.
The forces keeping tech companies in places like SF are so strong that these regions have essentially become prisons for these companies.
4/In order to escape the prison of the superstar cities, tech companies and other knowledge industries will have to overcome the Four Jailers of Industrial Clustering:
1. In-person office productivity
2. Thick market effects
3. Knowledge spillovers
4. City life amenities
5/I'm actually pretty optimistic that companies can find ways to make remote work productive.
Studies show that working from home *some* of the time actually tends to raise