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Links and tweets 4/7/23

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Links and tweets 4/7/23

America as a suboptimal currency zone

Samuel Hammond
Apr 7, 2023
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Links and tweets 4/7/23

www.secondbest.ca
  • Michael Lind has a forthcoming book, Hell To Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America, due out May 2nd. He discusses it on Andrew Sullivan’s latest podcast here.

  • On related note, behold: the power of tight labor markets.

Twitter avatar for @ArmandDoma
Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma
We just had the lowest unemployment rate for Black Americans in recorded history
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2:59 PM ∙ Apr 7, 2023
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The black unemployment rate is structurally higher than the white unemployment rate, especially for black men. I think the reason is mainly regional, as roughly half of African Americans live in the South. After the North industrialized, the South began an uneven and still-incomplete process of productivity convergence. Persistent differences in labor productivity created a delta in North-South unit labor costs, analogous to the productivity delta between Germany and the Eurozone periphery. The South thus takes longer to reach full employment than the North for a given level of aggregate demand. This goes to show that America is far from an optimal currency zone, especially given our imperfect fiscal union.

  • Niskanen’s housing team makes the case for manufactured housing.

  • Emad Mostaque talks with Peter Diamandis and explains why he signed the so-called “pause letter.” His reasons are compelling: New supercomputers are coming online within the next 6 months that will cut training costs by >20x. Mostaque argues it would be wise for the major AI labs to use this time to double-down on securing their training processes before we enter a world in which powerful, unaligned models can fit on a thumb drive.

  • Malcolm and Simone Collins on why “Fertility Collapse Demands New Cultures.” Second to AI, aligning modern cultures with replacement-rate fertility is arguably the biggest challenge of our time.

  • Preppers gonna prep:

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