https://t.co/mgWQbsFQGN
1/Today's @bopinion post is about Trump's taxes, and what they show about how America allocates capital.
We appear to have some big problems.
https://t.co/mgWQbsFQGN
Why would creditors give money to a guy who wastes the money on bad businesses and doesn't even pay them back?

Why hasn't an abundance of cheap capital caused the return on financial capital to fall? Interest rates are low, but stock returns have held up strongly.

When you increase the supply of loanable funds, prices are supposed to go down. In other words, cheap capital should fund a lot of marginal businesses that compete away profits...
Simcha Barkai and Matt Rognlie have both written about this:
1. https://t.co/OLln8npr8b
2. https://t.co/BY1EWyluD7
https://t.co/xNzE9SO8nY
https://t.co/BY1EWyluD7
And it doesn't really explain Trump, does it? He's not a monopolist, and he doesn't even make profit. He's just a huckster who can borrow cheaply because he's famous.
Financiers are willing to throw tons of cheap money at big powerful companies or at famous hucksters like Trump, but charge inordinate prices to fund new entrants or marginal businesses.
We need to figure out what's going wrong, and fix it!
(end)
https://t.co/dHVCEQGa9q
More from Noah Smith 🐇
This is so dumb and incorrect and wrong it's unbelievable.
Facts.
Facts!!
FACTS FACTS
Moar
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. is quickly approaching \u201ca moment of crisis\u201d because of the \u201crecord number of migrants\u201d spilling into the country https://t.co/QuiWPcXswA
— POLITICO (@politico) October 20, 2018
Facts.

Facts!!

FACTS FACTS
Moar
"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.
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.
More from Trump
💥💥💥Situation Update, Dec. 3rd – Trump invokes foreign interference provision of his 2018 executive order, authorizing military response to cyber warfare, see NSPM 13 💥💥💥 [M.Adams]
⁉️ ✅ Ask yourself this question: What was the purpose of yesterday’s White House speech about election fraud and vote-rigging?
✅ If you think it was all about Trump communicating to the people, think again. This speech was really about Trump communicating with Chris Miller
✅ and the DoD about foreign interference in the U.S. election while laying out the key national security justifications that are necessary to invoke what I’m calling the “national security option” for defending the United States against an attempted cyber warfare coup.
⭕️ Decoding President Trump’s Dec. 2nd speech:
https://t.co/G9kmUfVQzS
🇺🇸Consider what Trump said in yesterday’s speech. About 95% of this speech was filler. Only 5% really matters, as I detail below:
1. First, he lays out that he has a sworn oath to defend the United States
2. Constitution against the wartime “siege” that’s underway:
As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege.

⁉️ ✅ Ask yourself this question: What was the purpose of yesterday’s White House speech about election fraud and vote-rigging?
✅ If you think it was all about Trump communicating to the people, think again. This speech was really about Trump communicating with Chris Miller
✅ and the DoD about foreign interference in the U.S. election while laying out the key national security justifications that are necessary to invoke what I’m calling the “national security option” for defending the United States against an attempted cyber warfare coup.
⭕️ Decoding President Trump’s Dec. 2nd speech:
https://t.co/G9kmUfVQzS
🇺🇸Consider what Trump said in yesterday’s speech. About 95% of this speech was filler. Only 5% really matters, as I detail below:
1. First, he lays out that he has a sworn oath to defend the United States
2. Constitution against the wartime “siege” that’s underway:
As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege.
To those who want to actually help Claudia Conway after her mom (Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former aide) posted her underage daughter’s nudes to Fleets, fill out a report on the NCMEC CyberTipline.
CPS refused to help her.
#HelpClaudia
Kellyanne Conway has a well-documented history of verbally abusing, gaslighting, and threatening her daughter. It gets worse when highly public things go viral (such as exposing the truth about Trump and Conway catching COVID-19 last October). Kellyanne coerces false statements.
Insider did a thorough chronological background of the history of exposing her parents abuse and control of her here: https://t.co/ncjaEyLOSC
We all know that “statement” last year was coerced. She talks constantly about being abused by them.
Personally? I suspect Kellyanne is a narcissist. From my own experience being sexually and emotionally abused by a narcissist, they are obsessed with controlling the narrative (coerced typed statement), discrediting their victim (posting her nudes) & gaslighting
If you haven’t experienced gaslighting or aren’t familiar with it, it’s when someone causing you harm (physical, emotional, sexual, financial, etc) twists the facts and asserts that reality is just you being delusional and you don’t actually understand what happened.
CPS refused to help her.
#HelpClaudia

Kellyanne Conway has a well-documented history of verbally abusing, gaslighting, and threatening her daughter. It gets worse when highly public things go viral (such as exposing the truth about Trump and Conway catching COVID-19 last October). Kellyanne coerces false statements.
Insider did a thorough chronological background of the history of exposing her parents abuse and control of her here: https://t.co/ncjaEyLOSC
We all know that “statement” last year was coerced. She talks constantly about being abused by them.

Personally? I suspect Kellyanne is a narcissist. From my own experience being sexually and emotionally abused by a narcissist, they are obsessed with controlling the narrative (coerced typed statement), discrediting their victim (posting her nudes) & gaslighting
If you haven’t experienced gaslighting or aren’t familiar with it, it’s when someone causing you harm (physical, emotional, sexual, financial, etc) twists the facts and asserts that reality is just you being delusional and you don’t actually understand what happened.
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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".
The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.
Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)
There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.
At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?
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
The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.

Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)

There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.

At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?