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unlearnecon.bsky.social
Unlearning Economics
@unlearnecon.bsky.social
9K followers 770 following 940 posts
Economist, YouTuber, gamer, author, academic (in that order)

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unlearnecon.bsky.social
This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in a good while
A Spotify comment on Coleman Hughes’ recent podcast with Ben Shapiro by one Dudi Avraham: Regarding the argument that “west colonialism tradition made Muslim countries fail” Well. Just see Israel. The Jews were colonized by the brits. But Israel is successful. This means that western colonialism was never the problem.
November 23, 2025 at 3:24 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
cool
14,284 words on UE's latest video
November 3, 2025 at 12:30 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
A four-panel meme comparing economists’ debates about John Maynard Keynes. Top left: An angry man holding Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis yells, “If Keynes was alive today he would agree with the Neoclassical Synthesis!” Top right: Another angry man holding Hyman Minsky’s Can It Happen Again? yells, “Nooo he would support the Post-Keynesian school!” Bottom left: A black-and-white photo of John Maynard Keynes sitting in a chair, holding a book and a bisexual pride flag, saying, “Damn, this ‘Grindr’ thing is really something, huh?” Bottom right: The Grindr logo replies, “Thank you, Mr. Keynes.” Caption at the bottom: “Posted in r/economics memes.”
October 30, 2025 at 12:37 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Herbert Simon on the internet and attention, 1996
This is not an isolated example. The first generation of management information systems installed in large American companies were largely judged to have failed because their designers aimed at providing more information to managers, instead of protecting managers from irrelevant distractions of their attention? A design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce factor is attention. As of the mid-1990s the lesson has still not been learned. An “information superhighway” is proclaimed without any concern about the traffic jams it can produce or the parking spaces it will require. Nothing in the new technology increases the number of hours in the day or the capacities of human beings to absorb information. The real design problem is not to provide more information to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant to the decisions they will make. The task is not to design information-distributing systems but intelligent information-filtering systems.
October 28, 2025 at 9:08 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Interesting one for @dsquareddigest.bsky.social: who should be accountable in this situation?
'We want them off the payroll,' Met chief tells BBC after secret filming exposes officers' misogyny and racism Sir Mark Rowley insists he won't resign - adding that in the Met it's "the misogynists and racists frankly who want me out".
October 2, 2025 at 8:27 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
POV: you allowed people to talk about the labour theory of value in your subreddit www.reddit.com/r/Unlearning...
The UE Subreddit being overtaken by LTV threads.
October 1, 2025 at 11:29 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
THIS IS NOT A DRILL! My actual book launch event - which is only 6 months late - is at LSE October 13th, you can sign up here:

www.lse.ac.uk/events/why-w...
September 23, 2025 at 7:18 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Found this old meme I made, which includes Diogo Jota ❤️
A meme. The picture is from a football game: Man City vs Liverpool and the score is 1-1 Diogo Jota slides in to score at the goal line as the City keeper loses control of it. Jota is labelled 'reality' and the keeper is labelled 'neoclassical economics'
September 19, 2025 at 9:18 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
It’s crazy how some dogs are famous and they are just oblivious
August 3, 2025 at 12:37 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/domw...
Hyman Minsky looks on perplexed, as his predictions are borne out once again
July 31, 2025 at 9:57 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Economics papers are just objectively funny sometimes www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Allowing for geographic labor immobility runs counter to the belief thatUS regional labor markets are integrated seamlessly. However, there is mounting evidence that the movement of labor across US cities and states in the aftermath of changes in regional labor demand is slow and incomplete.
July 4, 2025 at 12:27 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Luv 2 read politics in 2025 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities did not destroy the country's nuclear programme and probably only set it back by months, according to an early Pentagon intelligence assessment of the attack. The Islamic Republic's stockpile of enriched uranium was not eliminated in Saturday's bombings, sources familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency evaluation told the BBC's US partner CBS. The White House said the "flat-out wrong" assessment was leaked by "a low-level loser in the intelligence community".
June 25, 2025 at 9:14 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
This just isn't true though is it
Big investment means cuts elsewhere, economist warns published at 08:44 08:44 Back over to Radio 4's Today programme to hear from Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) - an economic research group. He says today's Spending Review will include a "big increases" in capital investment - including funding for infrastructure, or building new schools, hospitals and roads. But cuts are also inbound, he says, "given the largesse" in spending in these areas. Looking ahead to the autumn Budget, the concern, he says, is that if the economic forecast "moves at all in the wrong direction, we will need more tax rises". Remember: Today's announcement is a Spending Review - not a Budget - so no tax rises will be announced. Our deputy economics editor Dharshini David explains that, and more, in our earlier post.
June 11, 2025 at 8:12 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
I remember this. In the abstract, they say that rental units declined by 15% but when you unpack this it's only the rent controlled ones! So like 7 percentage points of that 15 are still rental units, just not ones subjected to rent control. Misleading!
Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law. Gentrification Effects.—The previous section shows that rent control incentivized landlords to substitute away from an older rental housing stock toward new construction rentals and owner-occupied condos. Combining our estimates of rent control’s effect on the number of owner occupants (8.1 percent) and renters living in rent control exempt housing (7.2 percent) suggests that 15.3 percent of the treated properties engaged in renovations to evade rent control. Since these types of
June 9, 2025 at 10:22 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Still just the strangest point to make about all this. Preventing displacement of minorities is bad because it result in wider income inequality!
Taking all of these points together, it appears rent control has actually contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco, the exact opposite of the policy’s intended goal. Indeed, by simultaneously bringing in higher income residents and preventing displacement of minorities, rent control has contributed to widening income inequality of the city. For a full quantitative analysis of the welfare gains and losses due to rent control, see our companion paper (Diamond, McQuade, and Qian 2018), which estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of tenant migration and performs general equilibrium counterfactual analysis of the impacts of rent control.
June 9, 2025 at 9:35 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Economist-world is so funny. Who other than an economist would consider anti-rent-increase-insurance a possibility?

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
"Yet, due to incomplete markets, in the absence of rent control, many tenants are unable to insure themselves against rent increases."
June 9, 2025 at 9:24 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Went on truth social to check the ‘Elon did a Nazi salute’ post (it’s fake). What I did find was an image of trump doing one! Great
Trump and some other tosser doing Nazi salutes at a police parade in celebration of his Big, Beautiful Bill
June 8, 2025 at 12:41 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Thanks Indeed - only 15 years late and you didn’t help at the time, but thanks
Hi Cahal, your data entry and proof-reading experience could be a good match for this part-time receptionist role at Maldron Hotel Manchester City. If you’re seeking a position that involves guest interaction and offers development opportunities, you can apply now or view the job description to learn more.
June 6, 2025 at 9:54 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
We don't need to leave it all up to revolution!
Of course, the peasant wars in both western and eastern Germany were largely a failure, as were most of the really largescale peasant revolts of the later medieval period in Europe. What was successful, however, not only in western Germany, but throughout most of western Europe, was the less spectacular but ultimately more significant process of stubborn resistance, village by village, through which the peasantry developed their solidarity and village institutions. It was by this means that the peasants of western Europe were able to limit considerably the claims of the aristocracy and, ultimately, to dissolve serfdom and forestall seigneurial reaction.73
May 22, 2025 at 12:50 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Robert Brenner on the 'demand-supply' interpretations of the Black Death
Given these property or surplus-extraction relationships, productivity crisis leading to demographic crisis was more or less to be expected, sooner or later.50 The question, however, which must be asked concerns the economic and social results of the demographic catastrophe, in particular that of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Postan showed one logic: that the peasants apparently used their economic position, their scarcity, to win their freedom. As B. H. Slicher van Bath argues for western Europe in general, "the lord of the manor was forced to offer good conditions or see all his villeins vanish from the land".51 Yet, curiously, quite another logic has sometimes been invoked to explain the intensification of serfdom in eastern Europe: viz., that the crisis in seigneurial revenues which followed upon the decline in population and the disappearance of tenants led the lords to assert their control over the peasants and bind them to their lands in order to protect their incomes and their very existence.52 Obviously, both logics are unassailable from different class viewpoints. It was the logic of the peasant to try to use his apparently improved bargaining position to get his freedom. It was the logic of the landlord to protect his position by reducing the peasants' freedom. The result simply cannot be explained in terms of demographic/economic supply and demand. It obviously came down to a question of power, indeed of force, and in fact there was intense Europe-wide lord/peasant conflict throughout the later fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, almost everywhere over the same general issues: first, of course, serfdom; second, whether lords or peasants were to gain ultimate control over landed property, in particular the vast areas left vacant after the demographic collapse.
May 22, 2025 at 12:17 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Good to know we're staving off the next Glorious Revolution

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Billionaires fall as King rises in latest Sunday Times Rich List
May 16, 2025 at 8:39 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Lifted from my discord
Top left: me Top right: me Bottom left: me Bottom middle: me Bottom right: me
May 14, 2025 at 4:06 PM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
My next video will be:
- Short
- Accessible
- Hopefully more appealing to women (gotta improve that 80/20 split)
Downton Abbey and the Origin of Capitalism, the title of my new vid
April 28, 2025 at 9:48 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
MS Word AI telling me to 'describe what I'd like to write' like the little bitch it is
April 25, 2025 at 8:18 AM
unlearnecon.bsky.social
Just setting up at Conway Hall in London for my Easter Sunday book talk!
A lecture next to a screen display slides for my presentation of my new book Why We’re Getting Poorer.
April 20, 2025 at 1:08 PM