Met a Brazilian-American Lyft driver from San Diego who passionately attacked the racism of Republicans, then switched to passionately defending Bolsonaro.
If I were Thomas Friedman, I could tell you what this means.
More from Noah Smith
Today's @bopinion post is about how poor countries started catching up to rich ones.
It looks like decolonization just took a few decades to start
Basic econ theory says poor countries should grow faster than rich ones.
But for much of the Industrial Revolution, the opposite happened.
https://t.co/JjjVtWzz5c
Why? Probably because the first countries to discover industrial technologies used them to conquer the others!
But then colonial empires went away. And yet still, for the next 30 years or so, poor countries fell further behind rich ones.
https://t.co/hilDvv0IQV
Why??
Possible reasons:
1. Bad institutions (dictators, communism, autarkic trade regimes)
2. Civil wars
3. Lack of education
But then, starting in the 80s (for China) and the 90s (for India and Indonesia), some of the biggest poor countries got their acts together and started to catch up!
Global inequality began to fall.
It looks like decolonization just took a few decades to start
Basic econ theory says poor countries should grow faster than rich ones.
But for much of the Industrial Revolution, the opposite happened.
https://t.co/JjjVtWzz5c
Why? Probably because the first countries to discover industrial technologies used them to conquer the others!
But then colonial empires went away. And yet still, for the next 30 years or so, poor countries fell further behind rich ones.
https://t.co/hilDvv0IQV
Why??
Possible reasons:
1. Bad institutions (dictators, communism, autarkic trade regimes)
2. Civil wars
3. Lack of education
But then, starting in the 80s (for China) and the 90s (for India and Indonesia), some of the biggest poor countries got their acts together and started to catch up!
Global inequality began to fall.
"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.
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, 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
