Lawson Power

Enthusiast

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Marcus Aurelius was right, the moment you are disturbed by insult or pleased by praise, you are still a slave.

[Cameron Kusher @cmkusher]

I am convinced no one really knows what will happen if we cut migration. A growing portion of the community wants to find out and the current government is terrified about having to find out so the messaging is now reducing migration will make everything worse.

[Michael Easter @Michael_Easter]

Michael Jordan once drank 10 beers, played 36 holes of golf, then hours later dropped 52 points on the Cleveland Cavs.

That season, he also won the NBA Championship and was named league MVP.

[Brizz-Chan (Mr drive) @billybrizzle420]

Sorry kid you need a college degree to send emails for our company have you considered operating huge dangerous machinery that runs at 1500 degrees

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Friends, the problem of statistics is that even if they worked (they don't), whatever is derived statistically ONLY applies to groups never to single individuals.
You are not hiring a subcontinent, but a single individual. Variance determines the max.

[Naval @naval]

The time to be most ambitious is when you have nothing to lose or nothing left to gain.

[sourcery @sourceryy]

David @friedberg on the hypocrisy of @RoKhanna:

"This is some dude who has a $300M net worth. His children have memberships at 3 country clubs."

"The dude lives in a $10M house in Washington, DC."

"And he used to be the moderate Silicon Valley guy who would go around to all the tech CEOs and founders and VCs and be like, 'Give me your money. I'm a moderate. We're going to make the Democratic Party work for you.'"

"Then he saw the tides change, and he's like, 'Oh, this is yum, yum. I'm going to run for president in 2028.'"

"Just to be clear on this, he is so unlikable, I think he'll likely end up being Secretary of Housing and Urban Development if AOC is elected president."

"I do not disagree with him or Gavin or anyone else that tax policy in America is fucked up."

"When billionaires borrow against their unrealized capital gains, they should pay capital gains tax. Capital gains tax should be 40%, not 15% or 18% or 20%. In fact, labor should pay less. Income tax should be much lower. Capital gains should be much higher. That would be a fair tax policy."

"I don't know a lot of people who are wealthy who will look me in the eye and truly disagree with that."

"It's a lot of bullshit when we all say, 'It incentivizes investment.' Great, it incentivizes investment. What are you going to do with your excess capital if the tax rate is 40% versus 20%? You're not gonna invest it now? Of course you're going to fucking invest it."

"But instead of those practical solutions like I just laid out, they're all like, 'Let's go fire up the fucking socialist train because it's worked so well in fucking Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union and all these other places.'"

"What both parties are missing is a policy agenda that says: Here's the shit we have to do to keep America from going down the socialist death spiral. And they all should be fucking doing it, both sides."

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

Last week I posted a new paper with Patrick Norrick: “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World.”

We chose the title deliberately. No society in history has experienced the fertility levels now seen in South Korea, China, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, and many other countries. Our knowledge of the causes (and of the economic consequences) remains far more limited than most public discussion acknowledges. Much of what we write is, at best, educated conjecture.

The paper also struggles against a space limit. We wrote 20,000 words, far from the 250,000 or so we would need to address some issues in more detail (if I had the time and resources to hide away for a year, I could do that, but not now). That means some ideas are only sketched.

Nonetheless, we emphasize several important points.

First, fertility has fallen very fast everywhere: rich and poor countries, east and west, north and south, conservative and liberal societies, religious and non-religious societies (with the exception of the Jewish population of Israel; fertility has also collapsed among the Muslim population within the pre-1967 borders), you name it. Even in sub-Saharan Africa we see fast and unprecedented drops in fertility (alas, from a high initial level).

Second, and this is really interesting, the fertility collapse has been concentrated in poor and lower-middle-income countries much more than in rich countries. By now, income per capita and fertility are positively correlated within OECD countries. We conjecture this will hold globally in a few decades.

Third, and related to the second point, the fertility collapse has been concentrated among poor and lower-middle-income women within countries. In countries such as the U.S., the rich and highly educated now have more children than the poor and less educated.

Fourth, we document why we do not understand the data from the U.N. World Population Prospects. See, for example, Tables A.1 and A.2.

Fifth, we explain why some proposed mechanisms struggle when confronted with the data.

A more subtle point is at work here. Many commentators do not seem to understand the difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Yes, births might have gone down because fewer women are in long-run relationships. That is the proximate cause. But you need to explain why fewer women are in long-run relationships (the ultimate cause), and saying that they spend more years in school, to take one example, does not get us very far. Why do they spend more years in school? Once you start down the whole chain of reasoning, things become much harder than they seem.

The paper can be found here:

https://t.co/VrCHr0lBPa

Comments always welcome!

[Lawson Power @Lawson_Power]

@sbkaufman Big fan Scott. As a teacher, very hard to envision mid-bottom quartile kids being able to truly yield benefits of personalised, flipped approach. Half of the kids I’ve taught are so far from discovering autonomy or disciplined enough to get the benefits of a flipped approach.

[Lawson Power @Lawson_Power]

Demis is partly correct. Probably looks more like, half of school is AI-augmented, half is totally ‘old school’ with zero tech to build fundamental skills. He’s too smart to see that bottom-quartile children cannot access the info cornucopia he imagines.

[sophie @netcapgirl]

superintelligence for $1200/year is maybe the greatest consumer surplus that’s ever existed

[James Clear @JamesClear]

The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning.

[Mark Humphery-Jenner, PhD @humpheryjenner]

Optimal CGT rates are near zero. A high CGT rate does not maximize total revenue after you consider second-order effects, such as the growth impact of investment, fiscal spillovers (i.e., stamp duty, corporate tax, payroll tax), lockin effects, and asset/jurisdiction shifting.

[kache @yacineMTB]

you get better at doing things by doing things

[Ronan @Ronanchamberss]

Starmer probably joining Anthropic

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

> you’ll never start a rocket company
> you’ll never build your own engines
> you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts
> you’ll never survive three launch failures
> you’ll never reach orbit
> you’ll never win NASA’s trust
> you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS
> you’ll never compete with Boeing
> you’ll never compete with Lockheed
> you’ll never make rockets reusable
> you’ll never land a rocket vertically
> you’ll never land one on a drone ship
> you’ll never reuse a booster
> you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times
> you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing
> you’ll never lower launch costs
> you’ll never launch every month
> you’ll never launch every week
> you’ll never launch multiple times a week
> you’ll never carry astronauts
> you’ll never replace Roscosmos
> you’ll never fly civilians to orbit
> you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale
> you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever
> you’ll never make satellite internet work
> you’ll never make satellite internet fast
> you’ll never make satellite internet affordable
> you’ll never serve rural customers
> you’ll never serve aircraft and ships
> you’ll never build a methane rocket engine
> you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work
> you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever
> you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V
> you’ll never build it out of stainless steel
> you’ll never launch Starship
> you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship
> you’ll never relight Raptor in space
> you’ll never bring Super Heavy back
> you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms
> you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide
> you’ll never change the economics of space
> you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you
> you’ll never win
> you’ll never IPO

Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.

Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Chris Hohn: "Pre-Financial Crisis, I had a look at Credit Suisse. I sat down with the then CEO Brady Dougan and put his balance sheet in front of him from the annual accounts and said, 'You have a multi-trillion-dollar balance sheet. Can we walk through the line items because I don't understand it?' He said, 'I don't either.'"

[JB @JBTHEPLUG1]

Much to do, much to learn, much to be.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Major cheat code for life: The ability to reset fast. You can start over at 10am, 2pm, or 6:30 at night. Zero reason to let one bad hour carry into the rest of your day. You can’t control what hits you. But you can control how long you sit in it.

Resilience is a superpower.