Mrożek @MrozekLib

Karol Nawrocki, doktor historii, oddał hołd obrońcom Monte Cassino, czyli 1. Fallschirmjäger-Division der Luftwaffe dowodzonej przez generała Richarda Heidricha :3

Based

Kacper Kita @KacperKita

2 days ago

Francja: Rada Konstytucyjna zablokowała przyjęty niedawno przez parlament zakaz korzystania z mediów społecznościowych dla dzieci przed 15. rokiem życia, uznając że w nieproporcjonalny sposób ograniczałby on swobodę wypowiedzi.

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@elliotismz Cases* 🥲

@elliotismz Many such cades

After reading yesterday the new entry on Capitalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by @chiaracordelli, I decided to buy her book “The Privatized State.” I started reading it and, nearly right away, I bumped into Figure 4.1, reproduced here (from the Kindle edition). There are a dozen reasons why this figure does not make sense. But perhaps the most glaring one is the units. In 2012, Federal Government Current Expenditures were $3.77 trillion: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGEXPND Look at the Y-axis: annual federal spending (a loose way to refer to the data I just pointed out; that is fine) runs to a bit less than $40,000,000 trillion. This is absurd by seven orders of magnitude. And the same mistake appears twice in the same figure. The dotted line, labeled “in millions,” sits at around 1.5 million on that very same axis, which would be 1.5 million million federal employees. Let me be nice and assume that this is a “minor” typo, that the Y-axis should go from 0.5 to 40, and that there are six extra zeros. Even then, the figure is off by an order of magnitude: spending in 2012 is reported to be a bit less than $40 trillion. Any macroeconomist knows that U.S. GDP in 2012 was about $16.25 trillion (or at least carries the right order of magnitude in their head). Federal spending of $40 trillion in 2012 is again absurd. In fact, no standard unit reproduces the numbers plotted. Federal outlays in 2012 were 3,774 in billions and 3,773,503 in millions. Neither is around 37,000,000. The shape of the line is fine. It rises by a factor of about 5.4 between 1960 and 2012, which is roughly what inflation-adjusted federal outlays did over that period. So, somebody plotted a real spending series correctly and then mis-scaled it and mislabeled it. My strong suspicion is that the units were off in the Excel file, and that the error then survived the writing of the book, its production, and a prize committee, without anybody stopping to ask whether the numbers on the axis could possibly be right. And this matters beyond one book, because the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just commissioned an entry on capitalism from the same author. I am not asking here for detailed knowledge of the economy. I am asking for an author who knows the orders of magnitude of the U.S. economy I learned when I was a junior in high school and took economics for high school students (“comercio,” it was called back then), and for the kind of scholarly care that would have caught an error I found in less than five minutes of browsing. Now you are probably going to tell me: “typos happen to everyone.” Yes, but there is a “thinko” that runs much deeper. The author writes (page 143): “Consider this striking figure: while federal spending in the United States increased very significantly between 1960 and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the number of civilian workers remained more or less unchanged (see figure 4.1).” This is a key part of the argument that we have somehow “privatized the state”: we spend much more with roughly the same number of civilian workers. You cannot make that statement from Figure 4.1. First, because most of the growth of federal spending since 1960 has been transfers, mainly Social Security payments, health, and interest payments, and federal grants to state and local governments. You do not need many civilian workers to process transfers no matter how large they are. In fact, with modern computers, you probably need far fewer than in 1960. In comparison, state and local employment, now paid for in a much larger part by federal grants, went from about 6 million to about 19 million, a fact not only ignored in the discussion but also leaving the reader with a completely wrong impression about the number of government employees. And this is not an obscure objection: Dilulio’s article, the very source cited for the figure, makes the point in plain prose: “the state and local government workforce roughly tripled.” To be fair, transfers do not dissolve the puzzle entirely. Even setting them aside, real non-transfer spending still more than doubled while the federal headcount stayed flat. But the rise in the real wages of federal employees (real government wages need to keep at least roughly in line with private-sector wages and the latter grow with economic growth) and in the cost of equipment (an F-35 is between five and ten times as expensive as an F-105 in real terms, depending on how you count) means that federal spending will grow mechanically even when the number of civilian workers remains unchanged. At the end of the day, the book is not just about political theory. It is about facts regarding the effects of privatizing government services. Is it a bad idea to privatize government services? Perhaps. I do not know, and I am more than willing to listen to both sides of the debate. For example, I am quite skeptical that privatizing many activities of the U.S. armed forces, as the U.S. has done over the last decades, is a good idea. After spending a few hours reading it, the book does not help me reach any conclusion. It treats the data as decoration, as Figure 4.1 makes plain, and a central empirical claim resting on a figure like this one will persuade only those readers who already agree with the conclusion. Finally, a minor point. The caption of the figure says: “Published in ‘The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government’ by John J. Dilulio Jr., Washington Monthly, January/February 2015, washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/janfe….” I clicked the link, and the figure is not there. I will give the author the benefit of the doubt, since webpages are not stable and the figure may have been removed. But the main text of the article does not cite the figure either. And, from the same pen, we have, a few years later: “From all these exchanges, an ‘equilibrium,’ perhaps a ‘general equilibrium,’ spontaneously arises in a capitalist economy.” “Perhaps” you could see this one coming.

Jak się okazuje nawet dość często! Problem jest taki, że większość odbiorców ma taką dziwną wizję bankructwa państwa jak bankructwa gospodarstwa domowego: trzeba się wyprowadzić z domu, sprzedać rodowe srebra i chować przed komornikiem. Tymczasem dzisiejsze bankructwa to przede wszystkim jakaś forma restrukturyzacji - często nawet nie całości, a części zadłużenia; konieczność (polityczna) akceptacji zewnętrznych planów naprawczych czy… likwidacja oszczędności i siły nabywczej własnych obywateli.

Today I read the new Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Capitalism by @chiaracordelli. It is, simply put, a bad piece of scholarship. I will illustrate it with just one passage using one of my most popular posts ever: “A guide for students of economics: Ten statements that demonstrate that someone does not understand modern economics or what an equilibrium is, and that you can safely ignore everything else they say.” x.com/JesusFerna7026… I quote from the entry when it talks about Hayek and Friedman. “From all these exchanges, an “equilibrium,” perhaps a “general equilibrium,” spontaneously arises in a capitalist economy.” Compare with my explanation (which builds on the tradition of Hayek and Friedman): “Equilibrium is not meant to describe the daily state of the world. It is a conceptual device used to understand the outcome of our models under the assumptions we make.” The entry continues: “This in turn means that the factors of production that are capital and labor are employed in their most efficient proportions. Also, produced goods and services flow through markets to where, at the margin, they are most valued, making these markets efficient, too.” Compare with my explanation: “Equilibrium is often conflated with efficiency, but equilibrium merely reflects decentralized consistency, not welfare maximization. Market power, externalities, incomplete markets, nominal rigidities, and frictions routinely produce inefficient equilibria. I often teach a first-year macro graduate course, and not a single one of the equilibria I define is efficient.” The article continues: “Inherently, it has no real crisis tendencies that it cannot self-correct. Capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with” Compare with my explanation: “Equilibrium is sometimes misinterpreted as a static state in which nothing evolves. In fact, many equilibria are sequences of probability distributions over states driven by shocks, policy rules, and endogenous responses. Learning dynamics (Bayesian updating, adaptive rules, experience-based expectations) can occur within equilibrium if the evolution of beliefs is self-consistent.” And finally: “Capitalism goes wrong when it is politically interfered with” Compare with my explanation: “Some interpret equilibrium as a laissez-faire concept. In fact, equilibrium analysis is the foundation of modern policy evaluation. Fiscal, monetary, and regulatory interventions work through equilibrium responses (prices, wages, interest rates, quantities) and must satisfy equilibrium conditions to be credible. Equilibrium is a tool for policy design, not a barrier to it.” None of this is deep. I knew it as an undergraduate student in college. Hayek and Friedman were subtle economists who, yes, defended market economies but who understood economics much better than the author of the entry. I recently argued that institutions waste their credibility by engaging in political activism instead of scholarship. How can I trust now the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Hegel, for example, if the entry on Capitalism would fail my undergraduate course at Penn?

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026

9 months ago

A guide for students of economics: Ten statements that demonstrate that someone does not understand modern economics or what an equilibrium is, and that you can safely ignore everything else they say. 1. “Equilibrium means the economy is stable or at rest.” Many assume that an

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@holyfuckinkitty ... wychodzi kolejna książka od niego. Liczę że to samo wydawnictwo w Polsce się za to weźmie, żeby ładnej serii twardych opraw nie przerwać

@holyfuckinkitty Ale z drugiej strony, najbardziej wciągnął mnie świat z "Kiedy byliśmy sierotami", bo kontekst wszystkich wydarzeń to dla mnie zupełna historyczna egzotyka Najlepsza postać to James z "Okruchów dnia". Aż mi się zachciało re-read którejś zrobić. Ale w przyszłym roku...

youtu.be/wixzainceAE?si… Przegapiłem trailer. Liczę, że będzie peak

Mrożek @MrozekLib

a year ago

Przeczytałem prawdopodobnie wszystko, co w formie książkowej wydał Kazuo Ishiguro Żadnym innym autorem nie byłem jeszcze tak oczarowany i zachwycony, o jego książkach mógłbym rozmawiać godzinami Mam nadzieję, że wkrótce wyda coś nowego

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@MikolajPisarski + szkiełko spawalnicze przed obiektywem

@MikolajPisarski iPhonem dziewczyny :pp

@2137Poraj Zeszyt

Excellent delivery from #NoDueDate bookclub.

@elliotismz No, but I think that this whole cost was included in the payment for the participation in the book club that I've made in December (there was a discount). For international participants it's a little bit more expensive

@MateoDonReale @Silwer__ Gdyby ktoś był wierzący, to może traktować to wszystko jako zalecenia do życia osobistego, realizowania się jako dobry człowiek. I od takiej etyki można oddzielić politykę, której zadaniem nie musi być prowadzenie do zbawienia, tylko tworzenie warunków, które je ułatwia

@TymoosO @jappazolla @MikolajPisarski piw.pl/298-proza-dale… 🫠

@TymoosO @jappazolla @MikolajPisarski W takich warunkach tylko beletrystykę, najlepiej coś wydanego w drobnej formie Albo tutorial jak kupować bilety z wyprzedzeniem 🫡