https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/a-summer-reading-list-for-the-bright…

Out of 736 Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 702 are “part of the same academic family.” Only 32 researchers out of this network have won the Nobel Prize. English physicist, John W. Strutt (1842-1919) won the Nobel in 1904. Strutt’s student J. J. Thomson (1856-1940) won the Nobel in 1906. Thomson’s nine students…

You *massively* reduce the chances that those people experience homelessness. The benefits to homelessness prevention exceed the costs. “Do Homelessness Prevention Programs Prevent Homelessness? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial”

Similar to the Soviet Union, private entrepreneurship and market activity was much more widespread the regime or foreign observers/scholars tended to acknowledge. By comparison, the Soviet Union’s “second economy” was also estimated at 10-20% of their GDP The USSR’s planned economy gave rise to a massive, unofficial “second economy” that arguably kept the system functional.…

The post-2000s work of David Harvey exemplifies this. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08969205221137765 The vast majority of Marxists, especially in academia, have abandoned the rigor of political economy—rooted in the primacy of production and production relations—and with it, they have abandoned the revolutionary essence of Marxism.* * https://brill.com/display/title/72195?language=en&srsltid=AfmBOoqPv2iC0m-U2o-5KLCH92J0p1NLRqmsP2f_zI0WaE2Iffzm3Mi4

Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueae115… NotebookLM podcast-summary of the paper, informative take on the paper: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/63637ff2-0afe-4574-ba93-2acad6eed752/audio?pli=1 What were these knowledge sharing societies? What was happening in the eighteenth century? The eighteenth century witnessed an increase in the production of ideas, both scientific and technical. Yet, for many potential entrepreneurs, accessing the stock of knowledge was difficult.…

People think that the share of immigrants in their country is higher than it actually is. In most countries, the overestimation is more than 10 percentage points. Source: https://ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-11/ipsos-the-perils-of-perception-2024.pdf

Is GDP accurate? Barro argues that our measures of GDP are systematically biased because they include investment both when it occurs, and when we get higher output as a result. Thus, higher capital/output places will have spuriously higher GDP. First, though, we should know what GDP is trying to measure. It is not measuring welfare…

Reinhart/Rogoff (2010) had an impact on the policy debate; policy-makers used their results (threshold in public-debt-to-GDP of 90% beyond which growth slows) to argue for austerity. But what does the evidence tell us about growth effects of higher public debt? Several papers argue that there is indeed evidence for a negative causal effect of higher…

The “stationary bandit” view of the state derives from Mancur Olson. In the state of anarchy, some people are bandits who profit by stealing from others. This theft prevents people from increasing output, though. It is profitable for the bandit to settle down and impose taxes. By guarding their population from other bandits, it is…