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SleepingAristocrat

@feudaldozing.bsky.social
111 followers 176 following 1.5K posts

He/Him. Uruguayan econ undergrad trying to figure stuff out!

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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Unless you’re literally part of the FMOC, macro forecasting feels like trying to use knowledge about how cars work to predict where a car on the road will go. Maybe you can do it, but it will be because you know the person behind the wheel more than anything else.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Cauchy stands out as a real oddity among french intellectuals of the era in how conservative he was. Like, total royalist tradcath freak. First ever smart social conservative.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I guess we’ll see. Like, ultimately I’ve found pure theory type macro much less credible than the Chris Sims derived SVAR/Local Projection approach, where statistical identification comes from other places.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I also fundamentally think that none of these patches manage to get around the fact that aggregation is… a fugazzi but inevitable assumption most of the time, and while I can “believe” it for IO it gets silly for macro. Yet they still do welfare calculations!
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
These are all patches. Might still be worth pursuing, but they’re still all fundamentally ways to fix percieved deficiencies in standard models while still keeping the microfounded bedrock. It’s the only type of invariant (aside from like, the budget constraint) accepted.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
here’s a nice article by a statistical physcist whose thoughts I broadly share, at least the first half. He’s wrong about bits of it (the problem is in fact experiments) but I found it insightful. I’d appreciate your thoughts! mcrcsm.substack.com/p/a-scientif...
mcrcsm.substack.com
A scientific revolution for economics?
Macrocosm's vision for modelling in economics
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
For SVAR’s and local projection type empirical models there’s broad agreement yes, but there’s more to methodology than that. I personally think the methodological critiques levied at modern macro have merit.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I really don’t agree. Whether you think the microfoundations revolution was justified is an existing methods divide that matters a lot. Like Krugman may work in the New Keynesian tradition but he’s an Old Keynesian at his core, unlike say Jon Steinsson or a neofisherian like Martin Uribe
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Personally I find that a lot of this is essentially intellectual masturbation just to barely (if that) outperform ISLM with adaptive expectations. At a certain point you have to wonder if all the intellectual effort to make stuff microfounded is worth the squeeze.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The idea that there are no more schools in econ is true except for macro, where it’s exaggerated but still a thing
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Real potterheads know that Snape/Sirius is where it’s at. Like drarry on steroids.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I agree with the quoted tweet though. Everyone’s too good to be a hack. You really notice it in how econs treat Krugman, apparently he’s a hack now because he’s unapologetically partisan. Sorry, Krugman seeing what the Republican party really is is a mark in his favor
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
He was Thiel funded up until ~2015 iirc, so not that strange.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
For America specifically, I think could actually solve a lot of their right wing radicalization problems with a simple trifecta: just admit DC as 3-5 states. Instant structural game changer. Brazil… idk if there’s a consititutional equivalent easy way to deal with their mass of fash voters
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Makes me wonder if a posh brit would also sound posh speaking Spanish.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The queen of the Netherlands has a pretty recognizable posh Argentine accent when speaking Spanish, with some drift due to living abroad for years. Makes sense given her background. What’s more remarkable is that she apparently sounds posh when speaking dutch too. Genuinely wouldn’t have guessed
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
When the first member of ABBA dies you just know everyone will be like “thank you for the music Agnetha”
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Setting aside that this is infeasible, you’re misunderstanding the mechanism for misogyny, which is sex segregation. For the workplace or schools, you can force integration by removing formal barriers or quotas, while keeping performance the same or even improving it. For sports this isn’t possible
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The nature of sports as naturally sex segregated makes it impossible. Can’t really ban them, and even if you make them open to everyone they will naturally self segregate. In this sense you will always have jocks, and they’ll always replicate the same fratbro esque dynamic
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
A dream I have that will likely never be fulfilled is seeing a blue whale while scuba diving.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I meant legitimacy among dem politicians. They’re the ones who need to be convinced
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I think the 245 dc states idea is clever but won’t happen, dems don’t have that dog in them and will see it as trying a coup. On the other hand, 3-5 states isn’t near as brazen, and can be sold as giving them a taste of their own medicine re: gerrymandering, while still being a huge structural shift
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
You can kinda maybe sorta do this with “national income” by using prices as your weights, and draw from economic theory. No such credible equivalent that I’ve ever encountered from psychometrics, it all feels like guys having endless debates about how to best calculate the GDP of the soviet union
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Maybe you can think of intelligence as a mapping from the set of abilities at all mental tasks to the real numbers, but not obvious at all that such a mapping exists, or that you could even find it in the first place. Would need to have some non arbitrary way to weigh different mental tasks
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This is obvious from observation. You’ve never had certain school subjects you were better and worse at? In fact I think the opposite is actually really rare. Never met someone who got uniform X% in every subject, in every grade.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Basically no one actually believes in “multiple intelligences”, and think it’s cope. Sorry guys, but it’s a real thing! Being good at one mental task does not necessarily translate into being good at a different one! Same way being good at one sport doesn’t mean you’re as good at all of them
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Taylor Swift should go on Shark Tank
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Doesn’t the nature of land make psot scarcity literally impossible? Like, even with star trek replicators. Can’t make more of the same location.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
What is a consistent estimator, if not a shadow on the wall?
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The global epstein class being aware of Uruguay isn’t a surprise, they all summer here, either in Jose Ignacio or Punta del Este depending on exactly how elite they are, but still. Super strange.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
…huh? I mean, not totally bizarre, Uruguay is a leftist wet dream in many ways yet a big chunk of its investment model is attracting FDI via Free Zones, maybe they’re angling for that, but still, bizarre.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Hitsbongsis: Woke fascism
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The ideal is a holistic system that’s mostly opaque, though with the knowledge that grades + standardized test do matter so there’s still a strong incentive to study. You’d still want to screen for stuff like honesty and curiosity though, but without it being common knowledge to stop goodharting
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Bad idea. Not every quality you want in your potential students can be measured, and there’s such a thing as distorting an incentive too much. Milgrom and Holmstrom (1991) is the key reference here I think.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
It goes
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I think that the US has so much elite churn (constantly pumping out new industries and minting new billionaires) that it becomes much harder for any given family name to be recognized as “the rich guys”
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The archetypal patrician family in Argentina is these guys: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchore...
es.wikipedia.org
Anchorena (familia) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The Roosevelts were actually an example of the type of family who’d be considered “patrician” by Latin Americans (certainly what I thought when I read about them!) but yes, the difference is that no one in the US would think to distinguish them that way today.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The US seems much less classist than the rest of the Americas. Refreshing. Like, a family can have 4-5 generations of money here and still be new because they have an Italian (terroni) last name (Di Tella, for a concrete example) instead of a basque last name (Álzaga). Ridiculous in a US context.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Italian old money goes crazy though. What the fuck do you mean your family has had that palace in Rome for “twenty generations”. Unbelievable levels of parasitism. At least the new gens decided to go into film masterpieces like Sharknado 5 instead of politics
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The latin american concept of “patrician” families being those whose wealth predates the nation (like the triple A’s in Argentina) is maybe historically useful but feels silly beyond that. (Interestingly enough the US and Canada don’t seem to have this, wonder why
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Under some definitions the only countries with “old money” are Italy and Japan, maybe Spain. This is stupid though, and not analytically useful. I’m curious thought about when the cutoff should be. I think 3-4 generations makes sense, though it probably varies by region
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Yeah. Though this might (?) change with drone tech? Depends on how many a single person can control at once
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Basically one wonders why they’re not juche democrats. They’re not as rabidly partisan as I’d expect, especially after Trump and Elon took a chainsaw to USAID to kill the untermench
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
They’re often way too tolerant of evil people. Scott Alexander is evil. Aella is evil. Richard Hanania is evil. Sam Hammond is evil. All Republicans are evil. Politicization would help the movement a lot, in that it would naturally purge these types.
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Eh kinda. I’m very sympathetic to EA, often enough a lot of the criticisms is clearly just personally motivated by the fact that it makes them feel guilty for not donating more (vegans cause similar reactions) but at times I do wonder if I’m being too charitable
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The modern right doesn’t seem to really have something like as far as I can tell but that’s because they don’t believe in anything. Maybe tax cuts? If your most important principle is selfishness hard to argue for taxes, even if they would be used for other goals you have
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Maybe Palestine for left-wingers? Feels kind of icky to say but it does fit
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Essay itself is kind of whatever, annoying writing style too, but this specific idea/insight is really good. Some ideas really do have gravitational structure. Wonder what else is like this outside these people
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SleepingAristocrat @feudaldozing.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Eh idk. Argentina is a healthy democracy with a strong democratic culture, and has been for decades despite its voters and political class being chock full of morons and who always vote for infinite slopulism. Maybe the world will become Argentina.
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