Chief economist at @InnovateEconomy. Host of the EconTwitter Water Cooler, live on twitter spaces and downloadable here: https://xitter.cf/t.co/toyjfDruRu
Lancaster, PA
Joined June 2010
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What should we do about high skilled immigration and why? This is the topic of my huge new report with @LettieriDC and @cojobrien: Exceptional by Design. Quick thread on why I think you should read this report.
eig.org/exceptional-by-desig…
The point of George Borjas paper is that we should provide H-1Bs to employers who are underpaying specifically. If you are overpaying, his model suggests you won't get visas, because the underpaying is WHY you are willing to pay a fee.
This is the basis of the admin's proposed H-1B fee. A paper that aims to maximize underpayment.
Vice President JD Vance breaks down the data:
"If you are working as an H-1B visa in the United States of America, you’re earning $20,000 less than an American citizen hired in the same position. If you were brought in by one of these foreign outsourcing firms, you’re making $48,000 less than an American citizen in a similar position. So I’m sure that everybody here understands the game that is being played. You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers and, if you’re a corporation, you make a ton of money by under cutting the wages of American workers, replacing them with people who frankly shouldn’t be in the United States of America to begin with."
This guy has been on SNL literally for a quarter of a century (almost twice as long as the second place tenure record) because he has no other options.
If Shane Gillis were to come back to SNL, “I’m sure we would have a conversation … like a little kid” about what he could have done differently, @nbcsnl cast member @KenanThompson tells @sarafischer at #MediaTrendsLive.
Very funny that billionaires are like “I am leaving”. And Zucman’s response is “sorry no, my theory doesn’t allow this”
Adam Ozimek retweeted
Alice Evans has a severely under-read post on this topic. The main theme is that past a certain point a lot of gender equality progress happened via movements in civil society, which communism squashed. ggd.world/p/did-communism-sm…
In case you were wondering why CBS is letting Stephen Colbert go, he recalls "seeing Soviet posters basically saying 'in the west women are not allowed to do any of this.' There was a forward-looking feminist agenda to the communist enterprise." While Puck News's Julia Ioffe, promoting her new book, claims "I think a lot of people forget, including Russians, that Russia and the Soviet Union were the vanguard of world feminism. Russian women had the right to vote in 1917, largely irrelevant very quickly. In 1918 they got access to free higher education, paid maternity leave, child support, even from men who were not their legally married husbands, and they had to start paying when the woman was still pregnant. Let’s see, they got no fault civil divorce, they no longer needed their husband's permission for anything. In 1920, women got the right to abortion in the Soviet Union."
Adam Ozimek retweeted
This is amazing and shows what would have taken a vast manual effort in the past can be done as a hobby project very efficiently. Truly a new age of gaming and software ahead.
I ported @TimSweeneyEpic's 1991 shareware PC classic, ZZT, to the Nintendo Entertainment System using Claude Code. One of the most underrated games of the '90s
ASCII art on a NES is more fun than it sounds. It runs on a standard MMC3 cart, real hardware, new soundtrack!
Adam Ozimek retweeted
New tariff polling from @EchelonInsights continues to be brutal for Republicans. Look at the cross tabs, here:
- 68 percent of suburban households say reducing or eliminating tariffs would improve the cost of living a lot/some.
- 64 percent of parents.
echeloninsights.com/insights…
Whenever I see an aggressively stupid tweet by a giant account I know I’ve accidentally switched to the for you feed
Adam Ozimek retweeted
Would be a good topic for a book
Palmer Luckey warns America cannot compete with China’s population advantage forever through innovation alone: “We need 1 BILLION Americans minimum. Probably more like 2 or 3 billion.” 🇺🇸🇨🇳
“Yes, we need to get our act together. We need to do better at manufacturing, at defense, all these things. But everything is just biting around the margins if we’re 350 million people and they’re 2 billion people who are roughly the same.
How exceptional do we have to be to achieve a 10-to-1 ratio forever, in perpetuity? It’s not practical. It’s not logical.
I would say it’s even possibly a racist thing to believe that we can be so much better than China and the Chinese people that we’ll just beat them with a tiny fraction of the population.
We need to do better with what we’ve got. But we also just need a lot more people. We need 1 billion Americans minimum, probably more like 2 or 3 billion, with better demographics and better natural resources.
The Dutch once had the most powerful navy in the world. They didn’t lose that position because they fell behind on factories or shipbuilding. They became economically irrelevant.”
Both countries are competing with respect to declining birth rates. Both nations must be more willing to have children and expand the population growth exponentially over the next decade. The current economic path is unsustainable if our labor force begins to shrink even with artificial intelligence on the rise.
This is inaccurate and a drastic failure of imagination. It doesn't need to be annual. Only occasional.
The key problem is this:
Why would billionaires permanently leave California in response to a one-time tax owed if they lived there on January 1, 2026?
It would only make sense for them to leave if the tax becomes annual.
But if the tax becomes annual, it would also generate revenue annually — by virtue of, well, being annual.
Adam Ozimek retweeted
The OAI-HF incident, the Iranian critical infrastructure hacks, etc. (combined, of course, with our inherent vulnerability to pathogens and stuff like that) should be enough to widen the aperture of imagination on the very significant downside risks that are approaching.
But this idea @KelseyTuoc has of "a world where humans are without economic value" strikes me as a similar failure of imagination.
Even if a model can do large portions of the types of jobs Kelsey and I have better than we can, I reckon the extraordinary surplus that will correspond with those advances will mean a surge in demand for economic exchanges that only humans can fulfill.
People (myself included) will continue to want human beings to do certain things for them based on the very fact that they're human beings. I could come up with a hundred examples, but here are two that appeal to me personally:
1) Human tutors for my kids.
I don't want to turn my children over to machines, nor do most parents. AI will surely play a big part in developing lessons, but even if rapid technological progress sets in I expect to be very willing to pay a lot of money for a caring human guide. (And when we're surpassed as writers, it'll be people like Kelsey and me that are available to fill these roles.)
2) Live entertainment.
We like watching people do things well, be it on stage or on the field. We will continue doing so even when humanoids can play a concerto really well and shoot three-pointers.
As @ModeledBehavior puts it, don't underestimate the economics of the human touch.
Adam Ozimek retweeted
I wonder if Gibney produced a four hour documentary on Thomas Edison he would conclude that Edison was just a great hype man. Such goofiness.
They were not content to just make the one time greatest show absolutely terrible. Had to invent a way to sink lower
Adam Ozimek retweeted
This piece is a good example of what goes wrong when you have some story but not economy theory to map that to the data.
For example, it asks “So how could bird-flu-driven scarcity explain a price increase of 138%?”
The answer is in the article: demand for eggs is inelastic.
When the cost of eggs spiked in 2022, economists said bird flu alone was to blame. Anyone who suspected corporate price-fixing was dismissed as a crank.
Inside the alleged egg cartel the experts said couldn’t exist.
politico.com/news/magazine/2…
Adam Ozimek retweeted
It's I guess not the end of the world, but our comfort with the idea of Hollywood "true stories" that aren't actually true should is kind of troubling and under-discussed.
slowboring.com/p/our-culture…
Adam Ozimek retweeted
On that note, I appreciated @ModeledBehavior’s recent piece in @thedispatch:
thedispatch.com/newsletter/d…
Adam Ozimek retweeted
Some mild cooling in ADP employment growth in the 4 weeks through early October
Adam Ozimek retweeted
Hi, Ami. Thanks for reading.
Our survey, conducted by @EchelonInsights, reached more than 1,500 workers, among whom more than 600 were 2024 Trump voters.
Of those Trump-voting workers, only 44 percent say that the tariffs have helped the economy. Still, 69 percent of Trump-voting workers support the tariffs.
But while they support the tariffs, it isn't with much intensity:
Just 3 percent select tariffs as their priority. 24 percent of Trump-voting workers choose tariffs as what they'd least like elected officials to prioritize (among 7 options).
That said, 58 percent of Trump-voting workers rated the president's job on trade positively. But at the same time, 59 percent of Trump-voting workers say the tariffs have made their cost of living higher in the past year.
One of the most intricate findings is that among the roughly one-third of all workers who support the tariffs, only one-third say they support them if they raise prices. See slide.
tldr, people are complicated.
Link to full survey results below.
(And I'm glad to be in the USA too. 🇺🇸)
