Roope Ohlsbom

Economist. Climate and energy. Bluesky:

[Roope Ohlsbom @OhlsbomR]

Ever wonder what the role of allocation of employment is when studying management practices? How does Finland compare to other countries? Look no further:

Management Practices and Allocation of Employment: Evidence from Finnish Manufacturing
#EconTwitter

https://t.co/7WYWsn6PUT

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

There is now a solid body of evidence showing that internet availability is causing a variety of outcomes that adversely affect democracy

The answer may have something to do with platform algorithms, such as curated newsfeeds (e.g., on Facebook) or ranking of posts (e.g., the “for you” feed on X).

Algorithms have long been in the sights of researchers and regulators as potential culprits of polarization because of their opacity and their known focus on maximizing user engagement and platform dwell time with little regard for the quality of curated content. https://t.co/IInHHOwBwI

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

Is it the phones?

A new paper uses AT&T's 2007–2011 iPhone monopoly as a natural experiment and finds that iPhone access sharply reduced births, especially among younger women.

Smartphones may explain 33–52% of the post-2007 decline in U.S. fertility.

[Caitlin Knowles Myers @Caitlin_K_Myers]

It’s (at least partly) the phones, y'all.

New NBER WP this morning with Zeke Hooper: we estimate the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in US births from 2007–2011. #econtwitter🧵
https://t.co/0SVniEzeI9

[Niall Stanage @NiallStanage]

This is a devastating interview.

Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good.

Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[TheFrenchie @ML3democrats]

Remember when they said Zelensky desecrated the sanctity of the White House by not wearing a suit

[Brian Cardone 🏴‍☠️🇺🇦 @cardon_brian]

Good god this is a crazy interview. Listen as Scott Pelley describes how Bari Weiss wanted journalists at CBS to cover the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota. This is why we can’t have oligarchs running our news outlets, this is absolutely devastating.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

Reporting from the Financial Times on Xinjiang remains incredibly grim:

* In some areas, 90% of children are taken from parents to be educated in boarding schools where they aren't allowed to speak Uyghur
* Officials monitor who eats during Ramadan and report those who skip meals
* Basic items like prayer mats and religious text are considered illegal contraband
* Adult Uyghur women are pressured to marry Han Chinese men, and there are official goals to sterilize a certain % of them.
* Xinjiang has the largest prison capacity in the world relative to population
* Huge numbers of Uyghur prisoners are now being shipped across the country in forced labor schemes, as a way to dodge Xinjiang sanctions/boycotts
* The CCP shut down all 10 existing Uyghur-language publishers, none remain. They fed one university's book collection into a shredder.

There's a lot going on the world, but it's worth remembering that China is still actively engaged in cultural genocide. They're barely even hiding it, they openly talk about the need to 'correct' Uyghur culture and create 'ethnic unity'. They are openly destroying an entire culture as efficiently as they can, cutting children off from parents, restricting language, restricting religious practice, forcing sterilizations and intermarriage, imprisoning anyone who resists the tiniest amount and shipping them out to forced labor factories. That is what the CCP is.

https://t.co/gHK9ZS38Vx

[Endre Stølsvik @stolsvik]

This is so fascinating to me: Those scientists were *so spot on*. You should read the paper, it is eerie how those projections are tracking what we now observe. In 1982.

[Jack @jackcoder0]

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.

Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.

The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

Five cancers that used to be death sentences. Pancreatic. Glioblastoma. Triple-negative breast. Renal. Melanoma. The median survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer is still 6 months. Glioblastoma, 15 months.

Now personalized mRNA vaccines are producing complete remissions in some of these patients. Not responses. Remissions.

BioNTech’s pancreatic cancer vaccine has 6-year follow-up data. 8 of 16 patients who mounted an immune response are still alive. For a cancer that kills 95% of patients within 5 years, that's incredible.

Topol’s pyramid here maps the trajectory. From broad checkpoint inhibitors at the base to personalized neoantigen vaccines at the peak. The technology is climbing.

[Sanna Kurronen @KurronenS]

En usko, että epäluottamuksen taustalla on leikkauspuheet vaan se, ettei nykyisiltä eläkkeensaajilta voida leikata mitään.

Nuoret maksavat itsensä kipeiksi nykyisten eläkeläisten eläkkeitä, eikä tällä julkisen talouden uralla ole mitään takeita että itse saa puoliakaan siitä.

[Roope Ohlsbom @OhlsbomR]

Yritykset näkevät Suomen talouskehityksen kuluttajia positiivisemmin, odotukset lähikuukausille aiempaa valoisammat.

Erityisesti kaupan alan yritykset, jotka yleensä kärsivät heikosta kuluttajien luottamuksesta, nyt optimistisina ⬅️saattaa ennakoida kasvukäännettä. #yrittäjät

[Roope Ohlsbom @OhlsbomR]

1/3 Kaikkein pahimmat pelot Iranin sodan vaikutuksista taittuivat; isossa kuvassa luottamus edelleen poikkeuksellisen heikkoa.

Asunnon ostoaikeet ovat alimmalla tasolla sitten vuoden 1998. Reaalitalouden mittareissa näkyvä orastava kasvu ei vielä näy ihmisten arjessa. #yrittäjät

[Roope Ohlsbom @OhlsbomR]

2/3 Tällä hetkellä suurin riski on Iranin sodan pitkittyminen. Jos energian hintashokki leviää talouteen laajemmin, kasvaa paine korkojen nousulle. Nousevat korot olisivat myrkkyä kuluttajien luottamukselle ja Suomen talouden elpymiselle.

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

When it comes down to it there is not one issue more important than this and it’s largely ignored by everyone on all sides

[Kenny Torrella @KennyTorrella]

These two charts drove me kind of crazy for a few weeks so I wrote about what might explain them.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Trump just got exposed for running the biggest insider trading operation in American history.

Nancy Pelosi traded $5 million in stocks and Congress lost its mind.

Trump literally executed $750 MILLION worth of stock trades in ONE quarter while being President.

His ethics filing just dropped and the numbers are genuinely unprecedented in history:

Between January and March 2026, Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million.

That's roughly 60 trades PER DAY.

While signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, and making policy decisions that directly impact the companies he's buying and selling.

Now here's where it gets really insane:

On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

Three months later, on May 8, he stood at a Mother's Day event at the White House, thanked Michael Dell by name, and told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell."

Dell stock surged 14.6% that day to an all-time high of $263.99.

Since Trump's February purchase, Dell is up 96%.

And 5 months BEFORE Trump bought Dell stock, Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to Trump Accounts, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to a sitting president's signature program in modern history.

So the timeline goes: Dell donates $6.25 billion to Trump's program -> Trump buys Dell stock ->Trump tells America to buy Dell from the White House podium -> Stock hits all-time high

And that's just ONE stock...

The same filing shows Trump bought Nvidia stock on February 10. One week later, Nvidia announced a massive chip deal with Meta.

He bought more Nvidia stock one week BEFORE his own Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia.

He bought Intel stock starting in March 2026. The US government already owned a 9.9% stake in Intel worth over $41 billion. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social praising Intel, writing that "Intel Stock continues to rise."

Intel jumped 3% in after-hours and is now up 140% year-to-date.

He bought Palantir stock while his administration was actively handing them billion-dollar government contracts for immigration enforcement and defense.

He bought Robinhood stock while his own Trump Accounts program uses Robinhood as the broker.

He's currently sitting on over 100% profit on AMD, Intel, Bloom Energy, Marvell Technology, and at least 10 other positions.

Every single president since Lyndon B. Johnson has used a blind trust to avoid exactly this situation. But Trump didn't.

His assets sit in a trust controlled by his own children, and the filings show a broker acted as agent on several trades.

The White House says the portfolio is "independently managed."

But here's what independently managed looks like:

Buy Dell stock. Three months later, publicly endorse Dell from the White House. Stock hits all-time high.

Buy Nvidia stock. One week later, your own government approves their chip sales. Stock rips.

Buy Intel stock. Post about Intel on Truth Social. Stock jumps. The government you run already owns a 10% stake.

Buy Palantir. Hand them contracts. Buy Robinhood. Route a federal program through their platform.

Nancy Pelosi got absolutely destroyed for her husband's stock trades.

Her husband's total disclosed trades in his most controversial year were worth roughly $5 million.

Trump just disclosed up to $750 MILLION in a single quarter.

While making the actual policy decisions that move these stocks.

This isn't a left or right issue.

We're talking about the President of the United States averaging 60 stock trades per day in companies his own administration regulates, contracts with, and publicly endorses.

What do you think?

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn.

Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now!

[Linch @LinchZhang]

i don't really believe in the midwit meme normally but I think this quiz is a good example of the midwit meme, or at least multiple levels of thinking:

0. ppl who can't read pick randomly
1. dumb ppl who can read but too dumb to model or care about other ppl pick red
2. ppl with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue
3. ppl a little bit smarter and could think through the game theory overall pick red and think they're smart to do so
4. ppl smarter than 3 and capable of seeing the big picture and realizing that they don't want to leave ppl in #0 and #2 dead so they pick blue.

There might be more levels after that but #4 feels like a kinda robust equilibrium, with enough adherents.