Cameron Harwick 👾🏛
@C_Harwick
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An economist with a deep appreciation for both order and the absurd. Centered on money & macro, but liable to stray to distant topics in any direction.
Joined September 2008
My Simmel Hypothesis paper is up at the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. I argue that money made us WEIRD by loosening cultural-evolutionary constraints on our sacred values. Think of it as Georg Simmel + @JoHenrich. Summary 🧵 below.
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**Then** you could meaningfully horse race intelligence vs other personality factors.
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If you're gonna do a lexical factor analysis right, find the factors of a broader *cognitive profile* rather than walling off an artificial concept like "personality". I'd guess the first factor would be intelligence, which would then get partialed out of the remaining factors.
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Something that bugs me about research like this.Big Five is a factor analysis on "personality words" in English corpi. What's a personality word? Is lexical count a reasonable way to weight the data? Is a scale of personality *perceptions* even the sort of thing we want?.
Question 4: Is IQ a better predictor of life outcomes than personality (i.e., taking into account someone's Big Five personality scores all at once)? . No, personality generally predicted outcomes as well or better than IQ did!
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Crazy how much ink gets spilled over ill-posed dichotomies. Many such cases!
Moral realism/anti-realism is such a weird dichotomy. Are languages real? I think so. But to say "moral rules are real in the same way that languages are real" makes you an *anti*-realist. Weird.
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Sometimes I'm tempted to say that there should be no philosophers who did not arrive at the field from the outside.
No grand theory is worth the time of day unless its author has first approached it from a mundane research program.
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Greif: "Laws can be a component of an institution even if they are not followed. In Turkey, building code regulations change the division of surplus from not building to code by enhancing the bargaining power of inspectors and increasing the level of bribes they can collect.".
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Social organisms are expected to have worse individual-level resistance to parasites, especially ones that weren't going to reproduce anyway. (Memetic analogs?)
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There was an @owenbroadcast comic about getting assigned a historical war to be really into when you turn 50, and I've never really cared about the civil war that much but it feels ominously predestined that that's gonna have to be mine.
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My mom is a descendant of Robert E Lee's Brother. My dad is a descendant of Wesley Merritt, a Union general who later became the first American governor of the Philippines.
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>"Is it a serious methodological critique or just a leftist grousing that economics isn't leftist enough".>he doesn't understand.>"It's a good polemic sir".>read it.>it's leftist grousing.
"Economics today resembles Catholic theology in medieval Europe: a rigid doctrine guarded by a modern priesthood who claim to possess the sole truth. Dissenters are shunned. Neoclassical economics has become the Aeroflot of ideas." Much truth in this.
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A modest proposal for the vibecode era (storing photo IDs in an unsecured cloud vault counts too)
The Tea app has been hacked, and you can go download 59.3 gigabytes of user selfies right now. The hack is real. A picture from someone I know who signed up just to see what was on there was in it. This was an obviously vibe-coded app and was bound to be insecure.
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Ironically, when you *don't* feel economic pain in the second case, that means monetary policymakers are doing a good job. Trump can only gloat about the stock market **because Powell is competent enough** not to let chronic slowdown turn into acute recession.
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Ironically, when you *don't* feel economic pain in the second case, that means monetary policymakers are doing a good job. Trump can only gloat about the stock market **because Powell is competent enough** not to let chronic slowdown turn into acute recession.
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When you *feel* economic pain, that has nothing to do with the president, and it'll be fine in a year. When GDP growth slows by half a percentage point so you're half as rich as you otherwise would have been in half a century, you don't feel it. But it matters a lot more.
Today's newsletter: A lot of economic experts confidently predicted the US economy would be in crisis by now after the initial Trump tariff announcement. Four months later, what should we make of the fact that today's economy feels . sort of fine? . I think seeing the full
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RT @SethAMandel: Hamas's strategy laid bare: keep Gaza close to a hunger crisis and occasionally flip the switch to get the world to pressu….
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How to interpret this:.• 10^100 shrimp have the moral value of e^-807m humans. • 30-50 feral hogs have the moral value of e^-227 humans.
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Accounting:.• Grok estimates 18,000,000 generations since LCA btw feral hogs & humans.• ⇒ R(hog)≈2^-36,000,000.• R(shrimp)×10^100 <> R(hog)*30?.• ⇒ -1200m log(2) + 100 log(10) <> -36m log(2) + log(30).• ⇒ -1164m log(2) <> -226.85.• ⇒ -806,823,318 <<< -226.85.
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By this accounting, 30-50 feral hogs have more moral value than 10^100 shrimp.
Actually, Grok suggests that 10^100 shrimp is 361,000 orders of magnitude too low
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