Ben Hughes

Software engineer, travel hacker, jazz piano noodler, flightless bird aficionado.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@eggie5 What a wild interview! Maybe more wild than the Sutton one.

[Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht]

Populists across the spectrum, left and right, hate economists. I joked its some puzzle but I think there's a simple reason. It's not about liking capitalism or something.

And the disagreement is almost always about how to reason about problems, not about values.

Populists want solutions. Economists offer trade-offs. I'm not the first to point this out but its a huge distinction.

A carbon tax doesn't solve climate change. It prices carbon so people make better decisions at the margin. To the populist, that sounds like accepting the problem.

Same with manufacturing. A tariff doesn't create jobs. It shifts them, from the millions of workers in industries that buy steel to the 160,000 who make it. To the populist, "protect American workers" sounds like a solution. To the economist, the question is: which American workers?

We can go down the list. Rent control intends to help renters. It produces housing shortages. The populist sees the economist opposing rent control and concludes: you don't care about poor people.

As Sowell put it: "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

I think, not surprising, the economists are right.

It's more than just two different approaches. Thinking in trade-offs forces you to trace each step: who actually bears the cost of a tariff, what happens to housing supply when you cap rents, how a carbon tax changes behavior at every margin.

You can't skip ahead to the answer. You have to follow the chain. This is why economists spend careers doing exactly this and still argue about the answers. That's what it looks like when you take the problems seriously.

The populist skips all of this based on some intuition pump. Think of the person on a group project who's so confident in the answer that they never bother learning the material. That's populist economic reasoning from inside the discipline. The confidence comes from not having looked at the trade-offs closely enough to see how hard they are.

Stewart is the populist left. Oren Cass is the populist right, and he's more dangerous because he sounds like an economist, and plays one on TV, without putting in the work of thinking about trade-offs.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@itskyleconner @OOSScot @RoamingNorway Business Class 😎

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

This is insanely hardcore

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

IMO one of the biggest benefits of travel is just acquiring a scaffold to hang future knowledge on. Places that had similar embeddings in my mind before I saw them (Chongqing vs Chengdu, Abu Dhabi vs Dubai, Wroclaw vs Warsaw, etc.) become extremely distinct, and future facts become much stickier.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

Jazz jam session this Tuesday Aug 13th, 7pm at Duck Foot Brewing (Miramar).
House band: 𝄢 Gedeon Deák, 🥁 Jeno Somlai, 🎸 Michael Standal, 🎹 Ben Hughes, with Hannah Lentz organizing. Come get a beer and hang, or sit in!

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@bryan_caplan I was just there this past week. Beautiful island, and hardly any Americans (vacation destination almost entirely for Europeans).

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@brupm The reason you don’t see that is there is some law requiring airlines and OTAs show the *final* price only (which would be most welcome if applied to hotels also). So the classification of sub-components doesn’t matter - you price shop on the total.

[Fin Moorhouse @finmoorhouse]

A puzzle:

Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@elidourado You got an M3 Max, didn’t you. What a beast of a machine! MPS only around 25% improvement over CPU on PyTorch though.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@PointsToPointB Just wait until he’s a toddler. Every airline will be like Spirit on a bad day.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@joonspoon Exquisite.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

Underground train stations have some of the most surprising and beautiful architecture in the world. Here's a few of the best:

1. Alisher Navoiy Station, Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1977)

[Tim Leunig @timleunig]

If you have never studied economics, this article is close to the perfect 10 minute course in how economists think, and why economics is useful in answering big questions including war and peace. And economists will like it too. Thanks @MargRev

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Don't be a doomer - Superb summary by @Noahpinion (similar to the facts & arguments in Enlightenment Now). https://t.co/aerOxv7mgP

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Instant nominee for the “unintended consequences of public policy” hall of fame

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

@DaddyBodyNoGym @NateSilver538 That no one pays for the middle seat in advance doesn't mean it flies empty - most of the time it will not. So you'll probably end up swapping with the middle person onboard anyways, and end up needlessly paying extra for the aisle/window one of you didn't end up sitting in.

[Ben Hughes @eigen_ben]

This piece really spoke to me. As much as I’ve enjoyed my travel hacking days, this new chapter of my life (with wife and baby) are just as exciting but in a different way. Thanks @OneMileataTime. https://t.co/H1tfEHcHSN

[Paul Fairie @paulisci]

A List of Things People Blamed on Jazz

🧵