Günter J. Hitsch

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

Chicago politics: The infamous Chicago parking meter concession is being sold by its current private owners. The Mayor refuses to disclose the details. https://t.co/9clCTX6fyD via @BlockClubChi

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

I cheered these arguments - and made them myself - back when I was a smug, 20yo no-exceptions libertarian drenched in Ayn Rand (you know the type - I am sorry).

Back then, I would give the purist libertarian/ individualist argument for why $15 in annual taxes that help save millions abroad from HIV, malaria, and starvation was nonetheless a violation of my property rights and a path to parasitic dependency for those impoverished orphans born with HIV.

Now, I'm still generally libertarian. But also much older, with a greater sense that life is short, we're all just passing through, and ideological purity should not be an automatic barrier to making life easier for people who have it worse than me.

So while I get the libertarian argument below, I also know we do not live in theory - we live in the real world where millions of real people can die as a consequence of our decisions. And people who are THAT offended that their "coerced" $15/yr helps save millions of lives have let ideological purity sacrifice their humanity. And if that makes me a sell-out "statist," so be it.

(and I'm not trying to pick on John, who is expressing a common framework that I once adopted myself).

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

It's almost as if capitalism really does work

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@btshapir 😂😂😂

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

Lots of critical replies to @cblatts post. I agree there’s a difference in degree between the illiberal left and right, but the trend in anti-classical liberalism on the left is very bad.

[Chris Blattman @cblatts]

Woke extreme left and extreme right have in common an incapacity for pluralism. I never use the word fascist lightly, but I think the left in this country is becoming more like it than the right

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@jt_kerwin The superiority of these journals is evident from the fundamental role of the number 5 in our universe (it’s no coincidence that statistical results are “significant” when p < 0.05). We certainly wouldn’t want the top 6 or, god forbid, the top 7 journals.

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

On top of my reading list

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Famously (there is a beautiful Works in Progress piece on this) in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton told an audience in Toronto that medical schools should stop training radiologists, since AI would soon outperform them at reading scans. Ten years later, there are more radiologists than ever, and they earn more than they did then.

Hinton was right about the task, but he was wrong (so far!) on the future of the radiology profession. Times have never been better for them. The gap between those two claims, the difference between tasks and jobs, is the subject of a paper I have written with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, and that we release today: "Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle: How AI Redraws Job Boundaries." (Very relatedly we are also finishing the first draft of our book "Messy Jobs" on AI and Jobs!! You will be the first to hear).

We start from the observation that the growing literature on AI and labor markets measures the AI shock by task exposure: people count how many tasks AI can perform in a given occupation AI can perform, and infer that more exposure means more displacement. Eloundou et al. published a paper in Science in 2024 that started this literature, and many follow the same logic. The inference they make is that the more exposed tasks, the worse the outcomes.

This is incomplete, because labor markets price jobs, not tasks. A radiologist does not just sell image classification, but does many other jobs: triages cases, communicates with other physicians, trains residents, makes the difficult decisions, and signs a diagnosis. The market buys a bundled service. The question AI poses is not whether it can do one task inside the bundle. The question is whether that task can be pulled out.

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https://t.co/wEYMfjGbeX

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@alexolegimas Which debate? — Mercifully I��m not on Twitter frequently enough. I learned a lot from Tyler Cowen, and btw, his “Modern Principles of Economics” textbook with Alex Tabarrok is outstanding.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Hummm... Let me think this through ...So when tariffs go down, prices decrease. Could it be that when tariffs go up, prices increase?

H/t @Birdyword

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@OlegUrminsky @btshapir The goal justifies the authoritarian means. Where else have I seen this lately?

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@OlegUrminsky @btshapir “potentially outlier views” 😊

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@btshapir So who would you vote for among the _eligible candidates_ in the NY election?

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@OlegUrminsky @btshapir I fully agree. Or, expressed differently, much better than Mamdami or Brandon Johnson.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

in 2011, the president of antifa hired me to give fashion consultancy to the organization. i recommended everyone wear navy suits with tan shoes, dress sneakers, and golf polos with slim chinos. if you arrested everyone today wearing these things, you'd destroy antifa

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@BrianCAlbrecht I 💯 disagree. If you strategically avoid criticism you create bad science and you should not be an academic.

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@itaisher What is true, however, is that Economists could do a much better job making their ideas more comprehensible to the general public.

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@itaisher I’m trying to understand how you get triggered by an article that has been written again and again for decades. "Economic theory bad, need better economic theory." 😎

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@itaisher Is there a concrete example you have in mind?

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@bendreyfuss Well, you got a sense of humor. Most people who’re online all the time don’t, and it makes them insufferable 😉

[Günter J. Hitsch @Guenter_Hitsch]

@MeganTStevenson Fine, but concerns about statistical power should be ex-ante, not ex-post considerations. Like, you dismiss an imprecise null even though the imprecise yet statistically significant result gets accepted.