In a recent essay about the racial politics of the Trump movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates concluded with a warning: It has long been an ax...| noahpinionblog.blogspot.com
Well folks, it's been a fun 10-year run at this little website. I'm moving on to a new platform: Substack! Here's the new Noahpinion:| Noahpinion
Rabbits make great friends. Unfortunately, rabbits are not as popular of a pet as they ought to be, thanks to two big misconceptions. Let's start out by busting these myths.| Noahpinion
I recently wrote a post at Bloomberg Opinion arguing that "bad behavior" - drug use, violence, single parenthood, and idleness - is not the main cause of poverty in advanced nations. As evidence, I cited the country of Japan, which has extremely low rates of drug use, violence, single parenthood, and idleness, and yet which has a poverty rate almost as high as that of the U.S., and significantly higher than those of wealthy European countries. Since Japan has so little bad behavior and still ...| Noahpinion
I know sweeping historical analogies are silly, but I've always been partial to the analogy between the Middle East's recent decades of war and the Thirty Years War of early modern Europe. So let's run with that and see where it takes us.| Noahpinion
What is MMT, the heterodox economic theory that has captivated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, made its way into the Green New Deal discussion, and inspired dozens of thinkpieces and critiques? What does it say? How can we tell if it's a good theory or a bad one?| Noahpinion
I'm a huge fan of living abroad, and I think many more Americans should do it. Living in a big, rich country with relatively few other countries nearby, Americans don't tend to travel overseas much. And of course, a great many don't have the economic opportunity to do so. I think there should be government programs that help young Americans travel and live abroad, and I think more charities, religious organizations, and other nonprofits should focus on helping people go overseas.| Noahpinion
Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital firm focused on the future of work. In this guest post, he explains what he thinks is wrong with the way the "ride sharing" companies treat their workers.| Noahpinion
Usually, Bloomberg Opinion understandably does not want me to repost my Bloomberg articles at this blog. But they made an exception for my Alternative Green New Deal plan. So here it is.| Noahpinion
If you do not read "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium," by Martin Gurri, you will not be sufficiently prepared for the world to come.| Noahpinion
"He was ugly on the outside, and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside."| Noahpinion
Tyler was good enough to give me a review copy of his new book, "Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals", so here is my review!| Noahpinion
YIMBYism is the idea that cities need to build more housing in order to relieve upward pressure on rents. In Northern California, where I live, YIMBYs tend to get into fights with progressives about market-rate housing. YIMBYs don't want to build only market-rate housing, but they think market-rate housing has to be an important component.| Noahpinion
Now is a GREAT time to travel to Japan. The country has really opened up, thanks to Abenomics, a weak yen, and the impending 2020 Tokyo Olympics. New technology has also made it a lot easier to get around the country, and to find cool stuff. Japan is in the middle of a huge tourism boom, and who knows how long it'll last, so you might as well be part of it. Go see the world, take a trip to Japan!| Noahpinion
"Hey, there ain't no space between us!"| Noahpinion
I'm going to do the inadvisable, and argue with Brad DeLong. Hopefully this will turn out OK, since it's in response to Brad doing the inadvisable and arguing with Paul Krugman (thus breaking at least two of his own rules).| Noahpinion
Bryan Caplan is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the signaling theory of education, and this theory plays an important role in his new book, "The Case Against Education". But I've always had a number of problems with this theory, and also with its application to the education policy issues. Recently, I wrote a Bloomberg View post in response to an essay Bryan wrote in The Atlantic that was adapted from his book. Now, Bryan has responded to my post. He makes many interesting points, ...| Noahpinion
I've sworn off macro-bashing. I said what I had to say. And I'm seeing lots of young macro people doing good stuff. And the task of macro-method-criticizing has been taken over by people who are better at it than I am, and who have muchbetter credentials. My macro-bashing days are done.| Noahpinion
So, Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize, which is pretty awesome. If you've read Thaler's memoir, you'll know that it was a long, hard, contentious fight for him to get his ideas accepted by the mainstream. And even though Thaler is now a Nobelist and has been the AEA president - i.e., he has completely convinced the commanding heights of the econ establishment that behavioral econ is a crucial addition to the canon - resistance still pops up with surprising frequency in certain corners of the...| Noahpinion
There's a particular style of argument that some conservative economists use to dismiss calls for government intervention in markets:| Noahpinion
On Twitter, I wrote that I disagreed with Brad's ideas about speech on college campuses. Brad then requested that I write my ideas up in the form of a DeLong Smackdown. So here we go.| Noahpinion
I recently wrote a fairly well-received Twitter thread about how the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 1980s and early 1990s accurately predicted a lot about our current world. Our modern society is totally wired and connected, but also totally unequal - "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed", as Gibson was fond of saying. Hackers, cyberwarfare, and online psyops are a regular part of our political and economic life. Billionaires build spaceships and collaborate with the government to s...| Noahpinion
Every so often, I see a news story or tweet hyping the fact that a modest but non-negligible percent of Americans said some crazy or horrible thing in a survey. Here are two examples:| Noahpinion
I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the a16z podcast (a16z stands for Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm). The topic was free trade, and the other guest was Russ Roberts of EconTalk.| Noahpinion
Via Tyler Cowen, I see that Ljungqvist and Sargent have a new paper synthesizing much of the work that's been done in labor search-and-matching theory over the past decade or so.| Noahpinion
This is the old Noahpinion archive. Noahpinion continues at noahpinion.substack.com| noahpinionblog.blogspot.com
There has been much discussion lately concerning the word "derp" and its appropriate usage. For example, Josh Barro used the word to desc...| noahpinionblog.blogspot.com