Listened to Sinica podcast with Tooze who is totally agog over China, even learning Chinese currently at HSK-2 Tooze seems totally incurious about the great puzzle: why have other countries not grown like China, what exactly has China done that other countries cannot imitate?

Many people talking about it, some of even excerpting from it like quotations from Mao but the most interesting thing I heard in the Sinica podcast with Tooze is that he’s now HSK 2 going on HSK 3.

In more than a month of international air conditioner discourse, no one ever pointed that air conditioner installations per capita plotted against GDP per capita also, like everything else, follows a Kuznetsian inverted U-shaped trajectory on account of European high incomes :-)

I don't think anyone has ever quite expressed it as such, but Richard White's 2011 history of the transcontinentals is tantamount to a scathing indictment (from a left-populist perspective) of a vastly socially costly industrial policy failure & misallocation of resources...

Does 'firing' mean (1) Make the pliant legislature remove the unnamed governor of the central bank or (2) dispatch the marines to storm its building after the unnamed governor says he cannot be fired. If (2), must the marines also occupy the central bank regional offices too?

Just read a (non-economics) working paper which identifies a big puzzle but then brags about solving it at long last. Yet there's nothing of the kind. The proposed 'solution' is so trivial as to merely restate the original puzzle and push the mystery farther back into the past.

Just read a (non-economics) working paper which identifies a big puzzle but then brags about solving it at long last. Nothing of the kind. Its 'solution' is so trivial as to merely restate the puzzle & push the mystery farther back into the past. But I can't say anything! 😭😭😭

The current industrial policy discourse is so strange. Most people who argue for it today, do it on the grounds of strategic & geopolitical necessity, so welfare effects are irrelevant. But other people who support it keep debating the welfare effects!

Frenchmen of Indochinese origin have the smallest income gap with the white 🇫🇷 pop. In fact 🇫🇷-born Asians have higher incomes than whites, except when controlling for education & location (i.e. 'should' have even higher incomes since more educated & cluster in richer regions)

Congratulations to @dkedrosky & @nunopgpalma on their "Brazilian gold influx impoverished 18th c Portugal through Dutch Disease & delayed industrialisation via a political-institutional resource curse" paper. But double congratulations to Davis for his first academic publication!