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Notes -
This tweet from an economists caught my eye.
“One of the biggest gaps in economics is explaining why outcomes differ across countries.
Why is homeownership lower in Germany? Why do the rich live the center of the city in Argentina, but in the suburbs in America?
We don't have great frameworks to answer these Qs.“
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1786042798275277144?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Is this a question we really don’t know the answer to or a question that good people have learned to not consider the frameworks that are explanatory? I feel like the white nationalist and the woke can easily answer this question. One side will say racism and the other side will say diversity is not our strength and people fled from crime.
Wikipedia has the Great Migration occurring 1910-1970. And White Flight as occurring 1950’s-1960’s. Cities largely built before then have dense urban cores . Those cities built after are endless suburbs. Of course cars took off as a middle class thing around this time period too. Argentina might be a higher percent European ancestry than any country in the world.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
Two somewhat related examples are liberals who believe that "the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice" being confronted with what in their mental framework are inexplicable political reversals such as the election of Trump or the repeal of Roe v. Wade and (I imagine this one might be a bit more controversial here) economists who don't connect the economic malaise in the US after 1971 with the peak in domestic oil production and subsequent higher energy costs because their thinking has become almost entirely divorced from the actual material inputs that drive the production of goods and services.
The peak of US crude oil production seems to have been a few months ago, but as far as I can tell "wtf happened in 1971" style rhetoric is still in full effect.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m
I thought it was pretty obvious, even a given, that the "what happened in 1971" site had chosen the year 1971 deliberately to imply that the only/chief reason was that US scrapped the gold standard for good then.
Yes, but also because it's damn close to so many things shifting. Maybe it was gold, maybe it was oil, but by god something changed.
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