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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Similar disconnect in immigration discourse. Even immigration that "benefits the economy" can reduce welfare in a lot of intangible ways. But that's not necessarily a knock on those indicators!
Gonna say I called this one. "BuT cRiMe Is FaLlInG" was always kind of a dodge, and – as of the past couple years – doesn't even work anymore.
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@quantumdaybreak @mattyglesias @RichardHanania Both of them indulge a little disingenuous trolling, though perhaps Richard's is a bit more flamboyant about it.
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@hamandcheese "Inherently left-wing" doesn't seem necessarily true, but certainly history is written (and perhaps the lightcone is colonized) by the wordcels.
Cthulhu swims toward moral rationalism, which often, but not always, lies leftward.
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@Dr_Alex_Crimi But yeah, NotebookLM looks good. I tried the podcast feature once, but the chat looks more useful
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If you could replace everybody's opinions in the Democratic party with Matt Yglesias', would you do it? If you could replace everybody's opinions in the Republican party with Richard Hanania's, would you do it?
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Guy who pretends to care about the deficit for the purpose of crapping on tax cuts but then opposes the only thing that could possibly make a meaningful dent in the deficit (don't be that guy)
The world’s richest man is up all night doing drugs and talking about huge cuts to programs serving the elderly, sick, and disabled.
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Everywhere, monotheism spread because monotheists were good at administration. Pencil pushing is an evangelical strategy.
“But there are thousands of manuscripts!” Yeah, they’re written in Arabic because Musa hired a bunch of Arabs to run the bureaucracy of his empire.
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When debating scalpel vs hatchet, never lose sight of how bad things actually got
"In 2023, PBS boasted that 68% of its programming was BIPOC or 'diversity-related,' and that BIPOC employees comprised 48% of new hires, while women accounted for 75% of new hires. 'Race is a major determining factor in decision-making,' the high-ranking source said."
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Extremely weird that there's been such an effort over the past few decades to push a conventional wisdom that suppressing feelings is never good, that you have to express and confront them to be healthy. There is a reckoning long overdue for the mental health establishment.
Surprisingly, ignoring worries can improve mental health. Evidence: After practice blocking out fears, people were less anxious—and less depressed 3 months later—especially if they had high anxiety or PTSD. Not all concerns demand attention. Some thoughts are worth dismissing.
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@alexwadecraig It's not universalizable, but it's self-consistent. In fact I might say the puzzle of moral preferences is why "i am me" is not the *only* proposition with normative force.
@ElliottThornley @Oliver_S_Curry "What is the difference between me and everyone else that justifies placing myself in this special category?" I'm me, and what insane self-negating brainworm could convince someone that that's not sufficient?
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@alexwadecraig Seems like Kantian ethics would require *externally* consistent preferences (amoral selfishness is internally consistent). Which raises the non-obvious phylogenetic question: how did that quality of preferences pick up normative force?
Binmore on Kant: "his claim to fame as a moral philosopher is based merely on his having invented one of the fallacies of the Prisoners' Dilemma before anyone else"
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