Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

18/11/2024

https://youtu.be/ixJWDeytuWQ?si=pTJUVVKbfeg2VuQL

The debate in capital theory between FA Hayek and Frank Knight was a very important episode in the history of economic thought, this is one of the papers in ...

18/11/2024

https://youtu.be/NA1C_lK-zPY?si=P8Gh3mWHFKkZgBTc

This important paper actually includes comments on it from two other economists included at the end like an appendix.

10/11/2024

You know what's funny? Most people who criticize eurocentrism and Western values prefer egalitarianism, which is also a philosophical preference that comes from Europe, and many of them prefer socialism, (also a form of government first thought up and tried in Europe) or Marxism-Leninism, both of whom were European.

If you say don't like the West, that's fine, but you gotta prove it to me by actually advocating for something that isn't European in origin.

10/11/2024

I want to start off this post by saying I didn't vote in the election because neither candidate was good enough to get me off my couch and to the polls given the fact that I can barely afford gas and this being the 1st time hearing this guy, I like him and impressed overall...

That being said, right in the middle of it, he starts talking about facts over feelings when it comes to crime rates and he keeps referring to discrepancies in "surveys" versus FBI and police data to make the point that the crime rate has decreased over the last 2 years since 2022.

He should have named the main survey, it is called the NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey) which is done by the Department of Justice. They actually employ real statistucians and data scientists to do this unlike the FBI who employs 0 statisticians or data scientists. Here's the link
https://bjs.ojp.gov/programs/ncvs

More importantly, the steel man argument he should try to refute is that the crime rate is still way up compared to 2019 right now, not that it has continued to get worse every year since then. As a hypotheticql, if the crime rate in 2021 was 50% higher than it was in 2019, but it is has decreased by 20% as of right now since it's recent peak in 2021, it would still be much higher now than it was before 2020 which is the real issue at concern here.

https://youtu.be/vN7ktvb11Oo?si=nl2fZq995rvr5snp

Bridget sits down with Ravi Gupta to unpack Trump’s big win and the divides that continue to shape today’s political landscape. They dive into the intense em...

09/11/2024

https://givesendgo.com/GD7KS?utm_source=sharelink&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=GD7KS

I am in a very tricky situation in my life right now, which has been a long time coming and one that I saw as a possibility from a mile away. I am a 29-year-...

24/10/2024

https://youtu.be/sn5pVFgqiO4?si=CntNpnbswk62B42m

This video is just a recording of me reading the 3rd and final article in my 3 part series of articles showing how Behavioral Economics was prebunked before ...

18/10/2024

Believe it or not, in the immediate aftermath of the infamous San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires in 1906, during roughly a third of the entire housing stock in the city was destroyed in just 3 days, there was not a housing shortage in San Francisco?

How could there not have been a housing shortage with a one-third decrease in the supply that happened practically overnight??

Simple, they didn't have rent control laws in San Francisco until 1979, there were no zoning regulations, there were no historical building ordinances, there were no Karens who complained about more people moving into their neighborhood to the city or the county, there was no federal department who came in to tell landlords that they couldn't allow the density of persons per square foot of floor space in their buildings could not be exceeded, etc.

05/10/2024

I find most professionals with important jobs to be underwhelming and disappointing when I meet them and have to obtain services from them or what with them about how they know what they know.

Specifically doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, economists, and data scientists. Learning all of that stuff is so hard and remembering it is even harder, I could never become any of those things. But I think it is important for those who do to be excellent, not good, not great, but excellent.

I have had general practitioner doctors take me off of my muscle relaxers for my hands and the medication that reduces the frequency of my stomach cramps because of potential negative health consequences when I am older if I keep taking them long term. I told this doctor that I wouldn't make it to middle age if I can't work because my hands and stomach are cramping all day so can't do my job. She just looked at me blanky and said something like but it is counter indicated in this chart about it. The chart is clearly meant for generic users, I am clearly not a generic user.

Most importantly, I would much rather only live to the age of 50 with only 40% of the pain and discomfort I experience without taking these medications that I experience when I do take them than I would live to 79 in misery. I am a sovereign adult of sound mind, I should be able to make that call, her job should be to provide me with the information about the potential bad long term effects so I can make my decision in an informed manner.

The muscle relaxers were prescribed to me originally by a specialist neurologist called a movement specialist who I saw after seeing a normal neurologist who said my specific issue with my hands (severe dysgraphia, dystonia, and dyspraxia/development coordination disorder) was beyond his competence... I think he knew what he was doing better than this GP does.

13/09/2024

I got let out of work at my temporary job (which is in Irvine) 3 hours early yesterday, so in trying to be creative and proactive, I swung by UC Irvine to ask if I could get some emergency advice from the career councilors in their career center since all of my extreme financial woes and emergencies have been a result of the 80k I stupidly borrowed to finish my degree there (the first half of which I borrowed when I was clinically depressed, something I think it would be wise/prudent of companies offering student loans to ask about during the application process and instantly reject anyone who answers yes, although I was not when I borrowed the second half later on, so I have no excuse there), and guess what, they said they do not offer career counseling services to alumni...

The best part is that it is still summer session there, so I was the only person in the career center, there weren't other people who were current students who I would be preventing from being seen during the time I would be seen by a career councilor. This is all just fascinating to me, how students studying a full time course load have a career at the same time anyway lol??

If any of you reading this have children or neices or nephews who are thinking about going to college, please let them know that they need to check if this is the case at the colleges they are interested in before applying. It was interesting to me they don't even pretend to care if their degrees actually help you get or keep a job in any way on the back end, but they do use stats about the average boost in early and middle career earnings of their students (who graduate, so already a biased sample) in their marketing material they send to potential applicants on the front end.

More importantly, if you know anyone who is young and has one or more serious conditions or disabilities that absolutely will predictably effect their productivity in a negative way, do not encourage them to take on any debt for any reason including for college because low productivity means low earnings (salary + benefits).

According to economics, workers are paid in proportion to their marginal revenue product, this means if they generate roughly $20 per hour of work they do on average, they will be paid about $20 per hour in a competitive labor market because if they are paid more than that, companies will go bankrupt and if they are paid significantly less by one employer (e.g. $10 per hour), another greedy employer will offer them a little bit more but still less than $20 (e.g. $11). If someone is slow cognitively and their hands don't work like me, no amount of formal schooling is going to make them a productive worker with a high marginal revenue product at 90+% of all jobs types, and you should be honest with them about this instead of blowing smoke up their ass to make yourself feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

20/08/2024

https://www.economicforces.xyz/p/is-a-40-tariff-a-good-idea

What plain economics can tell us

15/08/2024

20/06/2024

It appears that a large part of the negative impact on the adult lives of children who grow up without fathers because their fathers left them is genetic or at least heritable. Although I should say, the paper referenced here should be replicated before I would feel confident about its results:

Caplan and Candor

14/06/2024

I was able to get ahold of the authors of both of these books via email before finishing this article to make sure I understood their theses correctly. And one of them (Bryan Caplan) Tweeted this review out this morning after I sent him a link to it asking for feedback and/or constructive criticism, or clarification!

Note: This article will be much easier to understand for anyone who has taken (and understood and remembered) at least one economics…

14/06/2024

According to the 2022 book The Myth of Left and Right:
In 2004, at the height of the Iraq war, 54% of self identified conservatives and 37% of self identified liberals thought it was important for America to actively participate in world affairs.

But by 2016, 63% of conservatives were saying that they wanted other countries to deal with their own problems; while only 27% of liberals agreed.

13/06/2024

This is the best title for a blog post of all time

The title says it all.

12/06/2024

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable"...In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
~ George Orwell in Politics and the English Language (1946)

07/06/2024

This attitude and behavior is why housing is so expensive in certain parts of the United States. People who think that their property, which they bought should extend to the view they have from their property, i.e. their neighbors' property, without having to buy that other property or even attempt bargain with their neighbors by offering them money not to change something they don't want to look at.

Instead, they just go to city hall and bitch about it, and the way many localities have it now is that almost any complaint, no matter how petty is taken as a justification for preventing whatever the neighbor wanted to change on his property, or the developer wanted to build on the property/ies he wanted to buy. The presumption is on the wrong end of the situation and the threshold is too low.

People love to complain about things.

03/06/2024

This is a really interesting and important paper in the Economics of politics

This is an interesting paper about how Mises and Bastiat, two legendary figures in economics, had a more correct understanding of why governments in western ...