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Sam B. (he/him)

@sbarbour.bsky.social
148 followers 256 following 345 posts

Community college econ instructor; music nerd

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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 22h
AI is good for making decisions we don't want to make (but desire the outcomes thereof). "I'm not racist, I'm just doing what the system AI instructed me to do."
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Is the problem that corporations are powerful or that they make unacceptable decisions? Because I think it's the latter. Lots of people are against M4A because they don't trust the gov't. They can at least cynically trust corps to make as much money as possible.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Later McCloskey admonished Sheik to read Hayek - and he began to say that he had, but she just went on lecturing. I'm not all that familiar w Sheik's work (although from what I can tell it's quite interesting) but it seems like he was unfairly marginalized, as so many heterodox econs are.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I saw Anwar Sheik once on a panel - he had just recently published "Capitalism" - and the thing I remember in particular was, after he finished, Deirdre McCloskey got up and said, in her usual cantankerous way, "Anwar, that's all very nice, but, the thing is, you're wrong." 1/
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
A real successful 1A day here on campus. Heavy hitters. Big student turnout. Engaged questions. My notes for the academic freedom panel is a sort of Cliff Notes of how I approach this thing. This is it. My whole talk.
Notes app reads: Neoliberalism weaponizes bias to justify austerity. Austerity creates corporate universities. Corporate universities are unhealthy organizations. Unhealthy organizations cannot inculcate or defend academic freedom. Without academic freedom to check administrative power,  corporate universities will translate austerity into financialized predation. Predation undermines public trust in higher education. Death spiral accelerates.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
On the one hand, I think AI is ruining online learning. On the other hand, they're going to have to start charging for it sooner or later, and when they do, most students won't be able to afford it. On the other, other hand, they might also be priced out of college by then, so...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
He controls it like Xi controls China: technically, yes, but in practice, it's a sprawling set of overlapping institutions. But it's not ridiculous - without competition, there's no need to push the envelope, there's no need to respond to viewers. Media will serve the interests of shareholders.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Elizabeth Anderson's "Private Government" is criminally underrated. Libertarians have no trouble with private companies wielding power - if a monopoly wants to inflict misery because it's profitable, that's fine. It's only *public* decision making they have a problem with.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The NYT has a way of making Dems sound like Bolsheviks - "don't scare the middle" they plead, as the administration terrorizes minorities and dismantles the administrative state. I think it's more accurate to say that political moderation is a wilderness in the 21st century.
nytimes.com
Opinion | What Mary Peltola Knows About Winning in Red States
Inside the weird campaign that could flip the Senate to the Democrats.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
"A leader without followers is someone just going for a walk" - John Boehner
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Listening to the discussion of Medicare for All I could not help wondering about infrastructure - like, we need more nurses, we should probably build more hospitals, we should ensure obstetrics is easily accessible, etc. M4A doesn't seem to solve any of that.
nytimes.com
Opinion | What Does Abdul El-Sayed Believe?
The Senate nominee talks about his view for the future of the Democratic Party.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law."
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Reminds of the Silicon Valley Bank failure, when libertarians suddenly became ardent supporters of government intervention in the financial sector.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We Americans have a terrible time discussing social hierarchy - do people want unfairness in the economy addressed? Yes, but. Tim Wu talks about Jackson and FDR as populist upswings - both relied on support from white supremacists. If that's fairness, I want nothing to do with it.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Affordability Is a Winning Message for Democrats. But There’s an Even Better One.
If Democrats can embrace what affordability is really about, they might do even more than win elections.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Bots take money from people who need healthcare and give it to the people who own the bots. Which is why they wanted the bots in the first place.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Right, okay everybody, I’ve had a lot of meetings and talks this week and I have to share some top line thoughts. Things are quite a bit worse than i am usually willing to share with people because panic does no good. It’s kinda bad. The baddies have the wind at their back. No denying that.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
For real, though.
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Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026
May her cup runneth over (but also we need to tax her too)
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I have this very specific memory of walking out of an Asheville diner after breakfast and being greeted by a mountain view that hit me like a choir of angels. It's an awfully pretty place, North Carolina.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Trump's supporters see much of post-war US history as the ongoing subversion of social and cultural norms - betraying the constitutional order in the pursuit of restoring desired social hierarchy is entirely permissible.
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Kristin Du Mez @kkdumez.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Aspire to live in such a way that reporters write stories on why people don’t like you. 🙃 baptistnews.com/article/what...
baptistnews.com
What’s so upsetting to evangelicals about Kristin Du Mez?
Unfortunately, not everyone in evangelicalism receives Du Mez’s scholarship with such openness, says Rick Pidcock.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I was looking through some econ discussions over on the other site that (consisting largely of Hayekians lecturing non-Hayekians) and this is just so refreshing.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
WTAF
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
When God snatches your hairline back, you got to love the Devil.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
That is one of the pithier things I've heard in some time.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
David Crowley wins and the NYT is falling all over itself talking about a massive defeat for socialists and progressives. Also, there was apparently a GOP superpac campaigning for Hong because they thought she'd be easier to defeat. What does it even mean to be a moderate Democrat?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I rest my case.
Conservative historian Niall Fergusson writes "Tyler A Harper simply experienced a microcosm of the American academy's decline and fall."
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Ladies and gentlemen, the definitive take on TA Harper's Atlantic article.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Some historian of economic thought should write a paper called "Das Noah Smith Problem" about the confusion between liberal advocacy of shareholder interests and voter interests.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
What Galloway fails to grasp is that, in order to have the kind of successful men he imagined, you need lots of underpaid workers. If you want to help "unremarkable young men" you'll need to redistribute income away from "successful" households, and they won't like that.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Scott Galloway: America Abandoned Its ‘Unremarkable’ Young Men
And what society can do to help a struggling generation.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I went through the quote tweets of this post and it's nearly all negative - and I can't imagine the author put it out just to humiliate herself. Someone besides me surely read this as meaning "Mamdani's grocery stores just might work." But who?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
So, if a grocery store were a public enterprise, it could reinvest its returns instead of delivering them to investors, and that could allow it to offer lower prices?
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Isabella M. Weber @isabellamweber.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Grocery margins are low is a frequently rehashed point to argue against Mamdani’s public grocery stores. Grocery is indeed a low margin business. But its median return on invested capital is above that for all firms, so it is NOT a low profitability business. Let me explain. 🧵
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
What I can't get over is the glee w which people predict black market groceries - like, here's a guy trying to help people and there's this Malthusian cheerleader squad going "haha! helping only makes it worse! better to let them starve!"
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
It's classic "shocking, but not surprising" stuff and we mostly just let it go I think because conservatives are so damn good at righteous indignation that it seems pointless to even say anything.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
One of the Juno ladies who owns a bunch of bars in Maine said she'd implemented family leave policies as a favorable comparison w the DSA. These are folks who believe you should do the right thing voluntarily (which, of course, means you can opt for the wrong thing, if that's more profitable).
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
More adventures in old-time music. buttondown.com/sbarb/archiv...
buttondown.com
July update
“Let me explain…there is too much. To sum up…”Indigo to Wesley as Wesley revives after being mostly dead, while in the middle of storming Humperdink’s...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Looking at this conjures up voices from X insisting that, if only you would read and study their research, you would see that workers are better off than ever, and all we need to do is to move further in this direction...
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LPE Blog @lpeblog.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Today, @madisoncondon.bsky.social & @lookheron.bsky.social explain how modern Law and Economics scholars continue to overlook legal scholarship that draws upon non-neoclassical economics. And to help correct this oversight, they offer a valuable overview of that scholarship!
lpeproject.org
The Economics that Law and Economics Ignores
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Absolutely one of my all time favorites.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Condolences to you and your family.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
This is my congressional rep, Lauren Underwood, who hails from Naperville, a diverse suburb of Chicago. She's a Registered Nurse who has tirelessly advocated for improvements in our health care system. Democrats should be promoting more candidates like her.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
I'm just screaming into the void here, but, like, there are all these folks insisting that things really aren't that bad - I mean, I'm fine, but also, I'm one serious accident/illness away from poverty - and that maybe things were actually better for ordinary Americans before the New Deal...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
The Games shop in my small country town is packed every weekend with folks playing Magic, Warhammer, and Dungeons & Dragons. Meanwhile I'm putting together square dances in a church basement.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
I'd wager that 30% are the ones with good insurance and access to responsive medical services; the same who would howl with rage in the face of systemic change. The health care system prioritizes enforcement of social hierarchy over improvement of living standards, and thus was it ever.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I used to think of myself more-or-less as a normie lib, but Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are becoming hard to stomach for me. Like, why does it seem like they accept the conservative frame of politics as basically true?
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
If AI is a bubble, what will make me most upset is that investors hyped it instead of increasing wages or, God forbid, paying taxes.
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Derf Backderf @derfbackderf.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
THE DISSIDENTS is the true story of the political cartoonists who draw for the provocative magazine, THE MASSES. What they show in their cartoons is a country spiraling into darkness, under attack by saboteurs, and brutal private militias, plagued by racism, and rocked by class war. Out Sept. 15.
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
I haven't heard anyone speak well of this report. It's all wailing and gnashing of teeth over "degrowth" and how the authors want to immiserate us all. So, like, is that it? The conservatives won?
share.google
Global Justice Report: the World Inequality Lab maps a path to €5,000-a-month average incomes for all countries within +1.8°C of warming - WID - World Inequality Database
Global Justice Report: the World Inequality Lab maps a path to €5,000-a-month average incomes for all countries within +1.8°C of warming The newly released Global Justice Report sets out a new vision ...
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Sam B. (he/him) @sbarbour.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
I married into a family of Cubs fans in 2015 and the following year's World Series was complicated for me.
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