Max Laraia

GMU Econ ‘25

[Samrudha Surana @samrudha_surana]

My good friend and excellent colleague @cl7martinez presenting his work with @VincentGeloso at the first Public Choice seminar of the semester!

[Brett Kollmann @BrettKollmann]

Every Bears game is the worst football you've ever seen for 45 minutes and then you look up in the fourth quarter and it's a one possession game.

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

@HayekProgram @sghorwitz Menger, Principles of Economics
Hayek, Road to Serfdom
Mises, Human Action
Lavoie, National Economic Planning: What is Left?
Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

[elliotism @elliotismz]

My favorite economist, Cordon Tullock

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

@midoriyanka 🥰

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

When an unstoppable force (environmental review) meets an immovable object (also environmental review):

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

@LinkofSunshine Just get a Seiko or an Orient

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

Imagine the hogrider being a very serious character with a tragic backstory but he still has the same voice

[𝖟𝖆𝖓𝖊❔ @zane_slade]

This should be the next like arcane quality show and then it gets everyone to try to play clash of clans and hate it

[RGT @CyGasser]

Pope Leo XVI is likely the first Pope to have eaten Culver's

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

The case for nuclear power, in one chart.

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

“The answer is transaction costs”

[Divia Eden 🔍 @diviacaroline]

I just asked ChatGPT if it had any pet theories about how the world works that it hadn’t seen much elsewhere and I liked one of its responses! (I got two and was asked to pick which I preferred)

“Absolutely, here’s one I find compelling and haven’t seen widely discussed:

“Bandwidth economics” as a driver of social structure.
We usually talk about economics in terms of money, resources, or incentives. But what if a major limiting factor in how societies develop—especially in group size, complexity, and norms—is cognitive and emotional bandwidth?

Basically: humans only have so much attention, working memory, and emotional capacity to track others’ motivations, resolve ambiguity, and maintain shared understandings. Many social patterns—like hierarchy, taboo, bureaucratic ritual, or even ideologies—can be seen as compression strategies to make social life cognitively manageable. It’s like lossy JPEGs of messy reality.

So:
•Hierarchies = reduce the number of people you need to track carefully
•Rituals = outsource behavioral decisions to shared scripts
•Ideologies = heuristics for moral/emotional allocation without constant rethinking
•Bureaucracies = attempt to systematize social interactions into predictable formats to minimize cognitive load

In this view, many modern failures (e.g., political polarization, burnout in online activism, collapse of shared reality) are driven by bandwidth overflow. We’re exposed to way more people, data, and decisions than our brains evolved to handle.

What’s cool about this is it frames social dysfunction not as malice or stupidity, but as compression artifacts from trying to fit a big, messy world into narrow channels.

What about you—do you have any favorite underappreciated theories or frameworks?”

[Erica York @ericadyork]

No, no it doesn’t. And again, no, it is nothing like a profit and loss statement.

[Brett Kollmann @BrettKollmann]

In this draft class there’s a 6’2” 320lb nose tackle named Thor who has an economics degree from Harvard.

[dylan @narrenhut]

we get it bro

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

@MTabarrok @HarvardHBS Congrats!

[dylan @narrenhut]

YEEESSSS TOMATO CONCENTRATE
YYYEEESSSSS
FIRST TOMATO CONCENTRATE IN A NATION FORMERLY COLONIZED BY THE FRENCH
YESSSSSSSS BURKINABE TOMATO CONCENTRATE
THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE
THEY SAID BURKINA FASO COULDN’T CONCENTRATE TOMATOES
BUT LOOK WHO’S LAUGHING NOW

[GalaxyZeinzVA @GalaxyZeinz]

when the earl gray kicks in

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

@MTabarrok Been feeling the same way recently :(

[Max Laraia @MaxLaraia]

@littmath @basement_agi How does it do with problems from undergrad real analysis?