Sometimes when I’m walking outside I sing verbal-brain-noise-type stuff under my breath without realizing I’m doing it, and today’s instance was singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” except with the lyrics “big money … big data … big money … big data … ”
Went 1.5 blocks before noticing
Even economists who think they have discovered reforms they believe will make a meaningful difference admit the impact of these policies is relatively small. (There is some consensus on what shouldn’t be done, but that’s not helpful for most places outside of North Korea and Venezuela.) The problem is especially acute in the rich countries because they have no obvious models to imitate or aspire to.
According to Jason Furman, who ran the Council of Economic Advisers during Barack Obama’s second term and has joined us on Alphachat, the inability of policy to affect aggregate prosperity is underappreciated. It also has radical implications.
[…]In advanced economies a lexicographic framework that focuses exclusively on distributional analysis and then only to growth when the distribution of different policies is the same is generally likely to be appropriate under a broad range of social welfare functions. This is because the distributional effects of many policies are orders of magnitudes larger than the growth effects.
Those marxists at the financial times are at it again.
At the risk of turning this into my particular hobbyhorse, this is why I hate the Kaldor-Hicks criterion so much. “As long as the economic winners of a certain pie-slicing regime could HYPOTHETICALLY compensate the losers, then we should do it.” It was hammered every time I was in white-collar policy circles how important Kaldor-Hicks is to be obeyed. I know for a fact some of my classmates now work in the federal government and places like the IMF.
It turns out that enriching the rich and powerful often passes Kaldor-Hicks and so we as a society do it. And then for some mystical unknown fucking reason the winners don’t compensate the losers. Whoopsies!
As a result, people are suddenly scrapping over resource allocation to ensure it only goes to their tribe whom they can (supposedly) trust to reciprocate! HOOOOOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED!?!?!?
(via multiheaded1793)
I’m finally getting off of SSRIs entirely (after having been prescribed Prozac to help me get off Lexapro, which did the trick). Last dose of Prozac was 8 days ago.
I keep thinking I’m noticing things like increased emotional lability and general sense of “passion” (both positive and negative), which would make sense but could easily just be me imagining things. But one thing I definitely am experiencing – whether because of discontinuation effects or for some other reason – is increased anger and irritability, relative to my very low baseline even before the SSRIs.
I feel like this so rarely that it’s kind of novel, honestly. Especially the way that justified anger mixes with “anger with no object” so that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. I keep thinking about certain subjects that make me angry for reasons I could explain, but when I ask myself “if those things didn’t exist, would I feel differently?”, the answer is “no, I’d still have this feeling that I ought to punch a wall for some reason (if not any specific reason).”
tag yourself, I’m topological Joe
i’m proving theorems without \infty-categories
I’m annihilated by a Morava K-theory. Not by all of them, but being annihilated once is enough.
(via identicaltomyself)
