Hannes Malmberg commented on my review of Saez and Zucman in response to a point I made about the elasticity of capital supply:

I think you are confusing demand and supply elasticities of capital.

The revenue calculations hinge on the elasticity of capital supply, i.e., how fast capital supply rise with the interest rate (how much more do people decide to save).

The Piketty spiral, in contrast, hinges on the elasticity of capital demand, i.e., how fast the interest rate fall with increasing capital (i.e., how fast firms and companies switch away from using capital when it gets more expensive).

There is nothing theoretically preventing us from having an almost horizontal capital demand curve, and an almost vertical capital supply curve. In such a world, a capital tax raises a lot of revenue, but increasing the savings propensity increase the capital stock without reducing the interest rate. (...)

I think he is basically right, and I'll partially retract section 3A of my prior post. (The rest of the post basically stands independently.)

"Partially", here, because reconciling the TToI revenue assumptions and the Piketty wealth spiral requires taking a specific stance on the slope of the capital demand curve, which should be considered a nontrivial burden that the authors don't even purport to defend. But we'll get there, hold on.

(1)

First, how did I make this mistake? Basically, by forgetting the Intro Econ that I never took, and making an implicit assumption about capital demand.

Specifically, I implicitly assumed (and didn't realize I had assumed) that the capital demand curve was downward-sloping. Why? Probably for the same reason that Bryan

Or, the coming debate on moral incidence of taxes

You're going to hear a lot about the triumph of injustice in the next 6-12 months. Or rather, you're going to hear a lot about The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (2019).

For one thing, the two economists have signed on as economic advisors to 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has for years been putting questions of economics and notions of justice front-and-center. But more generally, economic justice is having a moment, and I prophesy that you'll hear more about it before you hear less.

So this is my first real attempt to understand exactly what kind of moment it is, in the best way I know how -- by writing. Specifically, by writing a review that unpacks TToI for non-economists. (I am an economist, but not the kind that helps p— I mean, not a macroeconomist. I have macro­economists in my blogroll; that's my primary qualification here.)

One note before we begin: I really don't want to wade into the Economics-Twitter debate about academic standards and practices that arose around the publication of TToI, when review copies were circulated to journalists before economists, and the data tables were delayed from the book release by a few weeks. I think that that discussion of Saez and Zucman's work is framed to produce heat rather than light, and I'm not particularly interested.

So we start the discussion with what we know now, setting aside the question of how we got here. Go somewhere else if you want

One of the things I've appreciated about living abroad is that it's helped me better understand context that I used to be swimming in. Sometimes it's context on the breadth of the human condition, but sometimes it's just my daily lesson on filter bubbles.

Google knows enough at this point to show me SCMP articles about the MTR/Cathay Pacific thing (no I'm not going to link this, because my point is precisely that maybe five people reading this know enough not to have to look it up). If it was the MTA that had banned an American Airlines ad depicting a you don't know what goes here, do you?, then I'm near-certain that it'd be all over (my) Facebook. But no, I logged in today just to check, near-certain that I wouldn't find a single mention of it. I was right.

This isn't an objective fact about the world; it's a subjective fact about who I'm talking to. Somewhere, someone has a Facebook feed full of this; they're just not talking to me. The people who are talking to me are talking about other things. I'm talking about other things to them.

The conversations that everyone knows everyone is having are optional. The "everyone" that everyone knows everyone means by "everyone" involves a choice. Not in the sense that you or I could choose different ones, but in the sense that all of us could. No moral ontology where some things must always be talked about survives contact with a world in which sometimes everyone chooses to just not talk about them, to talk about something else.

So then, what will we talk about

My Faults My Own (and other rossry.net and r-y.io subdomains) are now available over HTTPS, with certificates from Let's Encrypt. (cf. https://blog.rossry.net/https)

The setup took nontrivial effort, so I've narrated it here for my or your future reference. I don't think there's anything technically novel here, and there may even be an HTTPS-setup guide for 2019 somewhere else that dominates mine for usefulness, but there wasn't one easy-to-find enough that I found it, so here we are.

(0)

First, the dramatis personae:

Let's Encrypt (hereafter "LE"), a project of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, issues free TLS (née SSL) certificates; they recommend that site administrators with shell access use the LE client Certbot, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

My Faults My Own, and other rossry.net and r-y.io subdomain services, are happily hosted by Digital Ocean (this turns out not to matter), running nginx on Ubuntu 14.04. (Certbot supports many other servers and OS setups as well; I'm listing my specifics here just as context for the following narration, especially as this combination specifically has some tricky issues.)

My domain registrar and DNS provider, Namecheap, sadly does not really support Certbot's automated DNS-based authentication (necessary for a "wildcard certificate", which will cover all of *.rossry.net), and I don't want to manually mess with DNS records every 90 days to get new certificates issued.

Fortunately, joohoi/acme-dns is a lightweight DNS server intended specifically to help automate ACME DNS challenges, and even comes with a certbot hook by the author. The dns-01 challenge protocol of the Automatic Certificate Management Environment standard involves setting _acme-challenge.

Well, it's been a crazy calendar year in any number of ways...and here at the end of it, I have a few commitments to uphold. I remain committed to donating at least 10% of my income to the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts at the end of 2018.

(0)

While I've recently been conducting some independent research into investment strategies for effective altruists (results forthcoming), I haven't been particularly active in producing my own independent opinions on the effectiveness or value of organizations. So, as in 2017, my perspective here is primarily a synthesis of a raft of conversations I've had with a (uncredited) gaggle of friends and friends-of-friends.

I cover logistics (1a), donor lotteries (1b), my general approach to non-lottery donations (1c), the specific charities I’m supporting this year (2a, summary), and further reading in the form of evaluators’ reports and personal writeups (3

I'd read plenty of thinkpieces explaining ways that Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One was shallow, bad, and/or problematic, but I had an evening to burn, so I went to go see it with a friend of mine.

I'm glad that I did; I enjoyed it a lot. (I'm going to say ~nothing about the 'and/or problematic'; just not going to go there today.)

(1a)

On its face, it's a effects-rich action-romp. And in that genre, it felt reasonably well-done, if not particularly deep (though it had its thematic notes, see 2A below). It would have been super easy for the plot to get stuck in a side-quest, but it somehow never really seemed to fall into that trap, and the pacing felt brisk throughout. The visual effects managed to be on the right side of intentionally-oversaturated without Hobbit levels of oh-come-on. My advice is to get a giant bucket of popcorn and sit back to just enjoy the show. (For more notes on what I enjoyed about the visual style, see 2B below.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the occasional witty quip of dialogue that dropped out of the blue -- the consistency was well below films or TV series that

i. e., Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle; excluding Perhaps the Stars

I have many wonderful friends who consume far more media than I can ever hope to keep up with, so I'm pretty much always inundated with recommendations that I know I'll never get to. But when the same book is independently recommended to me by a (grad student in philosophy) old friend from college and a (mathy, rationalist-y) work colleague, I'll sit up and listen. And shortly thereafter, buy the entire trilogy on my Kindle for airport reading almost on the spot. Which turned out to be a good choice.

My spoiler-free recommendation is that the trilogy is extant first three books of the quartet are a brilliant feat of worldbuilding with a triple-helping of shockingly clever philosophy stirred in, clearly pitched at nerds by a dyed-in-the-wool nerd sci-fi fan. Its stylistic quirks are sometimes charming and sometimes frustrating, but it never really gets bogged down long enough for me to despair of getting back to the good parts soon (and yes, they keep coming, through all three books). Rarely have I felt such absolute joy at discovering piece after piece of an author's world.

(1)

Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning and its sequels share much of what I enjoyed about Anathem -- incessant, rich, clever worldbuilding, characters who deeply believe that ideas matter (and aren't utterly stupid about it), and a sort of wish-fulfillment adventure for