Ah, but only one of the authors is at Chicago. We/yl left in order to be a researcher at Microsoft Research.

It's actually kind of funny how much hostility I feel towards this guy based purely on his CV. I think it's: 1- his CV is more or less exactly what I would have fantasized for myself as an undergrad; 2- I hate my undergrad-self; 3- therefore I must hate him. Not super rational!

1: Your logic seems impeccable to me.

My views on the University of Chicago are (I think) well known here but the real problem is law schools. The law schools fucking love "come up with an insane terrible counter-intuitive proposal." They are where intellectual rigor goes to die, as I'd hope the internet would have made clear to everyone by now.

Typical shit framing in the opening paragraph. There's minimal to no evidence that immigrants hurt the working class, and some evidence they help- certainly help in demographic terms for funding gov't retirement programs that the working class most heavily rely on- but of course they had to bothsides it so it's, "Hypocritical Dems say they care about the working class but they want to pander to Big Business and allow immigration!"

I'm actually now pro-economist, albeit not pro-University of Chicago economist. The tipping point was realizing that historians trying to do economic history without econ training are EVEN MORE bullshitty and ideological and way less theoretically grounded than the economists, but with extra NOW I AM GOING TO BLOW YOUR MIND YOU SQUARES prose (yes I am talking about your crappy books Sven Beckert and Ed Baptist). By contrast the economists are relatively modest and rigorous. '

But even these lame American historians of capitalism are like 8x better than law professors.

I couldn't actually read the whole thing, but I think my favorite part is that it is presented as a cure for prejudice. Everyone will love foreigners once they get to have one of their own!

6 There's a really bad sitcom in there.

X. Trapnel, I left you a note in the health thread. If you send me an email I have advice which might be helpful for some of the issues you mentioned (I'll leave you alone after this, but wanted to try one time).

It's weird that Princeton has a valedictorian.

This is just their one-off policy proposal for a magazine. Their serious academic work in the law schools is proposing a system in which instead of regular voting people would be allowed to buy votes (on a "quadratic" scale) so as to maximize "efficiency" of decision-making.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956

My views on the University of Chicago are (I think) well known here

I'm not entirely clear on your view of it. Are you in favor of leaving it as rubble? Or were you going to erect tracts of affordable housing where it used to stand?

Permanent rubble on display, something like the Gedächtniskirche in Berlin, so all who pass will remember the destruction and the need for it to be destroyed.

Also, the tacky 20th Century University Gothic architecture would make for some really picturesque ruins. The broken remains of Rockefeller Chapel would be terribly imposing.

I think at least a portion of it should be converted to a homeless shelter. Maybe the dorms?

OK. Done.

I thought you were sowing the ground with strontium-90?

Listen, I have a lot of ideas. Sorting through the contradictions is your problem.

Yes, Donald.

Honestly Trump has taken literally all the fun out of my fake dictator schtick. I'm really just going through the motions now for old times sake. I'm going to flee the fake dictatorship for fake exile in a villa on Lake Geneva.

Be the emboldened unnattractive brown immigrant Empress Clinton that would make Trump most shit his pants that you want to see in the world.

19 Does the notion of an ekranoplan full of bikini-clad ninja bodyguards no longer appeal?

19.1: Not the greatest, nor yet the least, of his many crimes.

21 - Don't worry. My fantasy exile villa is capacious enough to include many of the bikini-clad, and is on a hover-vehicle friendly lake. I'm not giving the people back their money any time soon.

I also notice you havn't lifted a finger to provide relief to the hurricane-ravaged Turks and Caicos.

Weren't we keeping part of it as a cautionary museum and archive maintained by the association of the revolutionaries who sacked it, like the Stasi HQ?

I couldn't actually read the whole thing, but I think my favorite part is that it is presented as a cure for prejudice. Everyone will love foreigners once they get to have one of their own!

To be fair it does seem like wealthy people in California love their immigrants they receive as the requisite "nanny".

I think my favorite part is that it is presented as a cure for prejudice. Everyone will love foreigners once they get to have one of their own!

Yes, that does sort of draw the eye. "It is hard to demonize the person who lives in your basement, or the basement of your neighbor, and has increased your income greatly" - displaying impressive ignorance not only of American history but also of the way that live-in servants are treated in much of the world.

While the program might seem crazy at first, it would not be that different from the existing H1-B program, except that individuals like Mary rather than corporations like Google and Exxon would sponsor the workers. Second, the program is not that different from the au pair program run by the State Department, nominally under the J-1 cultural exchange visa program, but in reality a nanny migrant-labor program used by upper-middle class American families.

I read incredulously all the way down to this paragraph, when it became apparent this article was a satirical piece intended to open people's eyes to the absurdities / potential for abuse in our existing H1-B / J-1 visa programs. Well played!

This reminds me of when some Twitter private equity guy and pundit seriously proposed a labor draft of people who are not into the labor force as a way of raising the labor force participation rate. Call it something slightly different but keep the power relations the same and most people would happily take slavery back.

Hell, we already have prison laborers working for well under a dollar an hour so that they can afford to purchase video calls with their families from the prison. My instinct about the GOP's tough-on-immigration stance is that it's largely posturing. They don't really want all of the immigrants deported; they want them all to stay here but live in constant fear of deportation so that the threat of state violence is constantly looming lest they complain about things like wage theft or a lack of bathroom breaks.

I really can't see any good reason that it should be harder to get American citizenship than it is to purchase a firearm in Texas.

There's a lot of shitty scholarship in all disciplines, but law professors and economists love to write papers in both my disciplines that display all the intellectual rigor, research, and good faith of a 19th century dilettante phrenologist. Of course the NYTimes and stuff laps that shit up, when "social science" studies come out that "prove" that Southern Europeans are lazy and profligate, or black people are inferior, or poor people only need 4 hours of sleep a night.

I think economists are quite a bit better than law professors, but it's really the now-fashionable practice of faithfully repeating social science abstracts as though the authors' central conclusions can simply be believed without further examination is really pretty dangerous. Damore is a recent example of how bad this can get.

I've been thinking for a while that most Americans would support bringing back slavery if they got to own their own slaves but someone else paid for them. A big government-funded personal slavery program is the kind of socialism that could work in America. (With the customary racial divide between slaves and owners, of course.)

The authors of the linked piece are capitalist running-dogs, and as such their proposal is more market-based and will only exacerbate inequality among the slaveowning class.

Trivers!

8: I already emailed you at the address in that thread (I tried again just now)...

The worst thing Trump did was ruin LaVar-Ball-hating.

5: Economists are terrible. The only thing worse than an economist opining on the economy is when a non-economist does it.

That's about where I ended up.

I used to work with economists. A shocking amount of their job involves making shit up.

THAT'S "STYLIZED FACT" TO YOU

The real world turns out to be hard to make equations about.

I feel like it bears repeating, that capitalism isn't an a priori. It's deemed good b/c it achieves certain socially desirable goals. To do that, requires that it stays within certain limits. A capitalism that either (a) fails to stay within those limits, or (b) flat-out doesn't achieve the socially desirable goals, doesn't get a pass just b/c "it's capitalism, henghh".

These moral imbeciles don't understand any of this, just as HFT jocks don't understand the social utility of allowing joint-stock corporations and trading in assets. They act as if nothing will change in the larger social system (in which they're embedded) as a result of their actions, so it's alright for them to exploit *whatever* "inefficiency" or loophole they find.

And this doesn't even get to Brad Delong's argument that the optimization function at the root of markets is itself morally repugnant (it weights the "information signal" from those with the least money (and hence greatest need) the least, and vice-versa for those with the most money).

It's all not just morally repugnant, bu intellectually fraudulent.

The authors of the linked piece are capitalist running-dogs, and as such their proposal is more market-based and will only exacerbate inequality among the slaveowning class.

Yeah, but teo, they're talking radical markets. And they have a book coming out in the spring. And apparently this book will show us how easy it is to advance both equality and economic growth while solving any number of seemingly intractable social problems (at least one problem per chapter, I'd guess, and I figure the book will have, what? seven or eight chapters? so that's a lot of solutions!). And it's market-based, sure, but it's also "radical," because of their freakonomically contrarian spin.

It's all there in the brief but tantalizing final paragraph of the linked piece:

Immigration is just one of any number of social problems that can be solved with what we call "radical markets." By exploiting the logic of the market in an area that is normally bureaucratized, we can advance equality as well as economic growth.

Radical markets exacerbate inequality radically.

Emersonion econ-trolling has held up better than contemporary economics.

This sort of "economics" has the same relationship to real economics (e.g. practiced well-respected mainstream economists) as blockchain has to real distributed systems & databases.

Viz, none.

Isn't Posner an actual villain? Isn't he the judge most responsible for gutting antitrust law?

Any pretense that Glen We/yl is not a "real economist" is absurd codswallop. He is one of the leading lights of his cohort.

(I have had an email exchange with him asking about his work of divided minds - also known as Faustian agents.)

I believe Walt is thinking of Eric's father, Richard, who is a judge and was important in the so-called law and economics movement.

Institutionalism already provided a way of thinking about law and economics, but never mind that.

I was about to say that I have no idea who We/yl is, but then I realized that he's widely mocked on econ's 4chan (Econ Job Market Rumors) for reason. (I didn't make the connection because they usually refer to him by euphemism.)

I meant "for some reason". (I don't know the reason. There are lots of jokes about quadratic voting as well.) The rumor is that he did not get tenure at Chicago, and that's why he's at Microsoft Research.

I also assumed that "Posner" was Richard. Christ, now there are two Posners? I can't win.

Posner and Weyl wrote this article on how inherited wealth is NBD. I hope some day to be so successful that my children write thumbsuckers about how the fact that they inherit my elevated class position is NBD.

Ah, Chicago.

I also assumed that "Posner" was Richard. Christ, now there are two Posners? I can't win.

Wasn't there an Eve Posner too? Some sort of a libertarian pundit? It must be a slightly different surname because I can't find her.

You're mixing legal families. Eve Tushnet, daughter of well-known but extremely not at all conservative law professor Mark Tushnet.

Judge Posner certainly helped, with a lot of others, to weaken antitrust enforcement and found the genuinely awful law and economics movement but I believe in the past two decades his facing up to the institutional reality of being a judge substantially cut back on the propensity for weird econo-ideological fantasias and led to greater pragmatism. Odd that this seems not to have moved the son out of fantasyland at all.

My grandmother's maiden name is Posner.

That's it! Combining "Eve Tushnet" and "Eve Peyser", you end up with "Eve Posner".

What the heck, I haven't heard the name Eve Tushnet in many a year and now I discover that she has become the public spokesperson for voluntarily celibate lay Catholic lesbians.

56.2: Yes, I check on her every couple of years because she crosses my mind, and I have to verify that such a person actually exists.