My friend @itsafronomics wanted to know the breakdown of student debt by income, so I pulled data from the SCF.

Student debt is more concentrated amongst high earners, but disproportionately amongst Black borrowers. The plot below plots the average within Income Quartiles.
1/n

But those are the averages. What's the share that's above 10k? (This is the Biden current cutoff for debt forgiveness, so a useful benchmark).

For comparison, 20% of white Americans have student debt, and 31% of Black Americans.
Let's contrast that with say, above 20k. I was surprised at how high the share remains.
When we get to 50k of student debt, or more, we see it's only about 5% of the US, and around 8% of Black Americans. Strikingly, it's a huge share of high income Black Americans (this is a known fact in the education literature, I believe).
So what does this look like put together? Overall, we see a higher share of Americans with debt above 10k, and 20k. We would cover a decent amount with 10k, but miss Black Americans especially.
Across the income distribution, the people at high incomes who would benefit disproportionately appear to be Black.
This was a useful exercise for me, as I hadn't looked hard at the numbers. All this data is publicly available here: https://t.co/T9yUGzwiOv
A good point raised was regarding the share of the dollars that would go to black borrowers under the different cutoffs. Everything above is within group.

The following exercise says: if we forgave 10k, 20k, and 50k, what share of dollars goes to Black Americans?
It's worth noting that the share to Black Americans is far lower in the high income group, and that's because they're less represented there, even though they have higher levels of debt.
Here's the data and code if you wanted to play with it: https://t.co/KdZTVMzvmd

More from Economy

Let's discuss how little you actually understand about economics and energy.

The first thing to understand is that energy is not globally fungible. Electricity decays as it leaves its point of origin; it’s expensive to transport. There is a huge excess (hydro) in many areas.


In other words, it can also be variable. It's estimated that in Sichuan there is twice as much electricity produced as is needed during the rainy season. Indeed, there is seasonality to how Bitcoin mining works. You can see here:

Bitcoin EXPORTS energy in this scenario. Fun fact, most industrial nations would steer this excess capacity towards refining aluminum by melting bauxite ore, which is very energy intensive.

You wouldn't argue that we are producing *too much* electricity from renewables, right?

"But what about the carbon footprint! ITS HUGE!"

Many previous estimates have quite faulty methods and don't take into account the actual energy sources. Is it fair to put a GHG equivalent on hydro or solar power? That would seem a bit disingenuous, no?

Well that's exactly what some have done.

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My top 10 tweets of the year

A thread 👇

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I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹