An economist with a deep appreciation for both order and the absurd. Money & macro, culture & cooperation, and distant connections in any direction.
Joined September 2008
- Tweets15.3K
- Following858
- Followers3.6K
- Likes36.5K
Pinned Tweet
My Simmel Hypothesis paper is up at the Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
I argue that money made us WEIRD by loosening cultural-evolutionary constraints on our sacred values. Think of it as Georg Simmel + @JoHenrich.
Summary ๐งต below. link.springer.com/article/10โฆ
Cameron Harwick ๐พ๐ retweeted
In my culture we love freely associating on the basis of individual interests instead of on the basis of kinship ties โบ๏ธ
MMTers always act like "just print money bro" is a crude caricature and really it's about the fact that resource constraints matter not fiscal constraints (true!), and then their whole practical program hinges on "resource constraints are always slack" lmao
The entire Financial Times editorial board has published a piece urging Lula to cut government spending and appoint a finance minister who enjoys the confidence of investors.
I get the impression that the FT editorial board has never opened an economics book other than some outdated introductory macroeconomics textbook, perhaps something by Mankiw. Otherwise, it's hard to explain such astonishing arrogance and economic ignorance.
Lula and the Brazilian people have absolutely no reason to bow to the demands of financial markets. Brazil is Latin America's largest economy, a major regional power, and a country with a high degree of monetary sovereignty. Around 97% of the central government's debt is denominated in its own currency, the Brazilian real.
The relationship between the state and financial markets is therefore nothing like the FT portrays it. Brazil is not dependent on financial markets. On the contrary, financial markets depend on government spending, which creates financial assets for the private sector, while government debt denominated in the national currency is one of the instruments through which those assets are held.
What Brazil needs is not capitulation to financial markets, but an independent economic policy focused on expanding production, creating jobs, and improving people's living standards.
Armed with the insights of heterodox economic theory, Brazil has the potential to show the world what a genuine economic miracle looks like. ft.com/content/79785581-88c2โฆ
This is like those Chinese propaganda images that try to play up how evil America is but end up making it look incredibly cool instead
Convincing myself that "America Is A Gun" is a brilliant satire of people who fancy themselves cosmopolitan but don't actually know anything about other cultures beyond crude stereotypes, because there's no way someone could write that unironically, right...?
Devs from all the big browsers are over on the Mozilla bug tracker bagging out a rep from the Indian company that borked its certificates bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_buโฆ
Autumn leaves turn red because in the process of breaking down the chloroplasts in the leaves to reabsorb nutrients in anticipation of the winter, the tree also synthesizes a bunch of pigments to protect those nutrients from sun damage. ๐
"Instead of throwing their hands up at [an environment hostile to replication, early replicators] made transmission more predictable [by enclosing themselves in a membrane]... What are the enclosures that [replicating] thoughtforms create?"
As put forward in the beginning of The Selfish Gene, survival of the fittest is a special case of survival of the stable.
The early environment for replicators was also messy and chaotic, so the genes started to encode for vehicles (membranes) that would keep them protected and prevent modification. Evolution happens despite the replicators best efforts to prevent mutation.
Instead of throwing their hands up at the amorphousnouss of a body of water, they made transmission more predictable. I'd expect the same for thoughtforms.
What are the enclosures that thoughtforms create? Maybe they attempt to control the apertures of attention that fall on them to reduce transcription error.
Someone can wear black high-heels and that might inspire others to buy black high-heels as well, but it might not be the same brand. Louboutins, on the other hand, will more reliably cause the viewer to buy Louboutin's specifically, capturing more of the value of the investment.
How to square this with the proliferation of ideas we see on the internet? That memes are constantly remixed? I see this as akin to taking organisms and putting them on Mars. Their incentives didn't change but now their mutation rate is much higher due to the lack of magnetosphere.
On cooperation and kay-fabe:
I think cliques make sense in the same way that the paradox of altruism is resolved by seeing that genes are helping other instances of themselves increase in frequency.
If your idea brings attention back to my idea, that's a win. It can be via synergy or via conflict (like the positive-negative replicators that were the likely orgins of DNA).
"Humans aren't selfish optimizers, why do we listen to economists who pretend everything is about self-interest"
Because the more your ideology depends on unselfishness, the more of a burden you place on the unselfish, and the more selfish people you're going to get over time.
The point of economics is not to describe the world as it is, it's to describe the dynamic processes you set in motion when you fiddle with incentives. xitter.cf/C_Harwick/status/14200โฆ
Exploits are disequilibrium phenomena. People don't keep using insecure systems.
Agentic AI speeds the transition to equilibrium โ that's a good thing, even when it's disruptive in the short run! โ but not clear that it tips the balance in favor of offense or defense.
๐จ๐จ FRED is down, this is not a drill! ๐จ๐จ
โผ๏ธ PHP UPDATE: 4chan has gone read-only and Something Awful has shut its forums as American sites brace for the PHP patch.
4chan says it is "temporarily read-only while we await an urgent PHP security update."
Something Awful says the flaw "allows for the kind of hacking you see in movies (but in real life)."
Bookmarking service Pinboard, game publisher Choice of Games, history site Damn Interesting and the explain xkcd wiki are offline too, as is art site Fur Affinity.
DeviantArt is also down "for maintenance" but has not said why.
PHP's fix is due at 14:00 UTC, 10am in New York.
Boyd & Richerson in 2005: The more cultural variants spread horizontally (peer to peer) rather than vertically (to children), the more likely they are to be maladaptive, and this explains the demographic transition.
Cameron Harwick ๐พ๐ retweeted
Parents need to encourage their children to get married and have kids of their own.
New @FamStudies research from @lymanstoneky @PeterRFB @DrJasonCarroll shows us that parental influence can push people to want to have more children.
I find it interesting that so many people describe the way AI will transform society and don't realize they're describing how rationalized capitalism-bureaucracy has already transformed society.
You already live in this world! It's not so bad! The division of knowledge is ok!
Yuval Noah Harari: Just as cows can't understand money & stock market that controls their lives, humans won't understand the AI financial & bureaucratic system that will control us. AI are bureaucratic natives, born in the office. We are the cows of the future.
#MIHH
"Suppose you had [a superintelligent social information processor] building superstructures in space to expand its computational power while providing miraculous medical treatments and technological access to untold wonders"
My dude, that is capitalism! xitter.cf/itaisher/status/211201โฆ
Cameron Harwick ๐พ๐ retweeted
You saw this with the "Black owned business" stickers in 2020. If there are some ethnic or religious groups you won't smash, then your riot is a pogrom against the groups you will smash.
Cameron Harwick ๐พ๐ retweeted
The claim that itโs more impressive to get a given test score/GPA if you had a hard life is testable! We can look at whether they overperform predicted results once they get to college. Turns out they donโt.
If anything you write is still being read 400 years later, any word in your carefully chosen title is liable to semantic drift in a direction that makes you sound like a pervert. Good luck.
Cameron Harwick ๐พ๐ retweeted
It is an astonishing fact that half of all births in several Canadian provinces are to mothers not born in Canada. Immigration is 4-7 times native births.
Canada is witnessing one of the fastest demographic transformation in history and will soon be less European than Mexico.
