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Repost: I will never get to go to Hong Kong [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 26, 2022
202 views
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  • Noah Smith recounts his experience visiting Hong Kong during the height of the protests in October 2019.
  • He and his friend, BB, attended a peaceful protest in a small urban park and witnessed a tense standoff between protesters and police.
  • The next day, they found themselves in Salisbury Garden, surrounded by thousands of protesters, and witnessed a fight between protesters and police.
  • They then moved to Nathan Road, where they heard the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” for the first time.
  • Noah realized that the protesters were fighting for national self-determination, but that Hong Kong would make a tiny country and had no chance for independence.
  • He observed the steady Chinese pressure that had led to a loss of economic opportunity and sky-high rents, fueling the anger of the protesters.
  • He and BB experienced tear gas and witnessed protesters beating a man they said was a “Chinese spy.”
  • They eventually escaped the protest zone and returned to their hotel.
  • Noah ends the story with a warning to China that the culture of Hong Kong lives on in the minds of a generation of Hong Kongers, and the more they integrate Hong Kong into China, the more pieces of that culture will have a chance to spread.

Click HERE for original. Published December 26, 2022

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Unlearning the macroeconomic lessons of the 2010s [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 22, 2022
268 views
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  • The 2010s were a time of unlearning old macroeconomic lessons, with the housing crash, financial crisis and Great Recession turning much of the conventional macro wisdom on its head.
  • The 2020s, however, have seen a return to more orthodox macroeconomic ideas, with the events of the past two years suggesting that the heterodox “lessons” of the 2010s were incorrect.
  • Examples include the idea that market crashes do not always cause recessions, that asset prices do not always affect the real economy, and that quantitative easing and the zero interest rate policy (QE and ZIRP) may not cause inflation.
  • The 2010s taught us to be wary of bubbles and the potential for banking crises, and the 2020s have shown us the importance of fiscal and monetary policy in managing aggregate demand.
  • The financial crisis of 2008-09 showed the importance of government backstops in the mortgage market and the dangers of excessive debt.
  • The 2020s have demonstrated that government borrowing can cause interest rates to rise, and that easy money can lead to inflation if aggregate demand is high.
  • Ultimately, basic Keynesian macroeconomic intuition still stands in the 2020s, just as it did in the 2010s.

Click HERE for original. Published December 22, 2022

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Ghana, you were doing so well! [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion], Politics
December 19, 2022
269 views
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  • Ghana recently defaulted on most of its external debt and is experiencing high inflation, leading to an economic crisis.
  • Ghana is an important country for African development, as it is one of the leading candidates to become the “first mover” in the region.
  • The crisis was caused by a rapid depreciation of the Ghanaian currency, the cedi, which made it harder to afford imports like food and fuel.
  • Ghana’s government borrowed a lot of external debt over the past 15 years, which raised government debt to about 100% of GDP.
  • Ghana’s inflation is not due to an attempt to pay off external debt by printing local currency, but rather due to businesspeople expecting the government to eventually print money to pay off its debt.
  • Ghana’s government wisely defaulted on its debt, drastically lowering the country’s overall government debt burden and making it easier to get a bailout from the IMF.

Click HERE for original. Published December 19, 2022

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The internet wants to be fragmented [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 16, 2022
254 views
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  • The internet used to be an escape from the real world, but now the real world is an escape from the internet due to the centralization of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
  • Centralizing the world’s social interaction on two or three platforms was profitable, but it caused a lot of toxicity and outrage.
  • Twitter’s “dunk mechanism” encouraged toxicity and outrage, and the company’s hapless, incompetent management resisted any attempts to change this.
  • People are now taking their discussions off of Twitter and into smaller forums, like DM groups, WhatsApp, Signal, and Discord.
  • Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused further disruption, and it remains to be seen whether this will cause an exodus of users.
  • In place of centralized social media, we are seeing fragmentation, with apps like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram becoming more popular.
  • Fragmentation is necessary to restore the old internet, as it allows people to exit and move to a different forum if they don’t like the current one.

Click HERE for original. Published December 16, 2022

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Techno-optimism for 2023 [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 11, 2022
215 views
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  • Technological advances in the 2010s were often undervalued and dismissed, but 2020 has seen a surge of cutting-edge technology helping to sustain society and defeat the pandemic.
  • Generative AI applications, predictive AI, and protein folding have all seen major advances.
  • The solar revolution is going from theoretical to actual, with a huge surge of global investment and the IEA predicting that renewables will generate more electricity than either coal or oil five years from now.
  • Batteries are also seeing cost drops and promise to transform our physical world, while green hydrogen may help resolve the solar intermittency problem.
  • Biotech is seeing advances in mRNA vaccines, synthetic bio, stem cells, Crispr, and more, while launch costs are transforming the space industry and quantum computing is seeing steady advances.

Click HERE for original. Published December 11, 2022

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The big NEPA roundup [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 9, 2022
277 views
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  • NEPA is a procedural requirement for any project with federal involvement to do an environmental impact review before starting construction.
  • NEPA reviews often take several years to complete and can be used as a weapon by activist groups to delay or cancel projects they don’t like.
  • Op-eds have argued that NEPA allows excessive community input and is un-democratic, and that progressives are doing themselves a disservice by opposing Joe Manchin’s proposed permitting reforms.
  • Abolishing NEPA and replacing it with other procedures for enforcing environmental law has been suggested, though no guidance has been given on how to do that.
  • NEPA is a federal law that requires environmental reviews for certain projects, but it often delays projects that would improve environmental quality.
  • Think tanks have proposed various reforms to NEPA, such as extending favorable treatment to renewable energy projects, limiting judicial review, and creating special “corridors” with reduced permitting requirements.
  • Defenders of NEPA argue that it is necessary to protect the environment, and that delays are often due to other environmental regulations or lack of bureaucratic capacity.
  • They also suggest that NEPA can be a tool for speeding up decisions by coordinating information sharing between agencies.
  • NEPA is seen as a major obstacle to rapid deep decarbonization of the US economy.
  • Reforms to NEPA have been proposed, such as increasing agency staffing, using programmatic Environmental Impact Statements, allowing more renewable projects to use Environment Assessments and Categorical Exclusions, imposing time limits on some NEPA reviews, and requiring agencies to consider the positive environmental effects of a construction project.
  • James W. Coleman suggests that Congress should step in to restore a balance between making reviews more predictable and timelier while maintaining their rigor, and that energy projects should receive expedited review in the D.C. Circuit, with permits eventually being immunized from invalidation under NEPA if they are forced to wait an unreasonable length of time.

Click HERE for original. Published December 9, 2022

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The dream of bringing back Bell Labs [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen
In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]
December 8, 2022
191 views
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  • Bell Labs was a famous corporate lab in the mid 20th century that was responsible for many breakthrough discoveries.
  • The rise of university research and the decline of corporate labs has changed the way America innovates.
  • There are attractive features of big corporate labs that the new innovation supply chain might lack, such as multi-disciplinary research and focus on general-purpose technologies.
  • A national electrical utility, Energy Bell, could potentially be a way to bring back something akin to the old Bell Labs.
  • The university-DARPA-startup innovation system is likely here to stay, and should be focused on making it more efficient, purposeful, and well-integrated.

Click HERE for original. Published December 8, 2022

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