In fact, we could just perhaps form some kind of partnership with countries across the Pacific that aren’t China to make it easier for us to trade with each other. Wouldn’t cost taxpayers much of anything! If only someone had thought of this sooner…

For the price of Santa Monica bungalow, you can own the largest building in St. Louis.

“.. Without immigration, the US working-age population would be shrinking, and this seems likely to remain the case for the rest of the decade. Immigrants are taking all the jobs because, on net, no one else is available.”

Justin Fox #LFPR #NFP 🇺🇸
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Kentucky votes to keep drunk drivers on the road.

I'm waiting for my delayed flight out of DCA and saw this ad (I think Scott Lincicome saw the same one).

How much waste, not just in ads, goes towards trying to fend off regulators?

Or, in so many other cases, seeking rents from them? #TransactionCosts

Oh man if only there were a way for the US and New Zealand to work more closely and counterbalance China's growing clout in the AsiaPac region!

My friend (and now co-author) Alexis Akira Toda has a paper (with multiple co-authors) in the Journal of Econometrics that causes significant damage to the pre-1960 inequality estimates of Piketty, Saez and Zucman. Probably even more than those of Auten, Splinter, Phil Magness…

Digital trade FTW:

Very cool. 🤖

Some days it takes real work to recommit to the idea that this administration's foreign economic policy is better than the last administration's.

This piece by Walter Olson deserves to be widely read/disseminated RE, the falsehood of rampant non-citizen voting being spread by Trump and Co.

theunpopulist.net/p/the-rights-b…

WRAL headline:
'NC Republicans look to spend more on private school vouchers, after wealthier families left out'
Eye. Roll.
If by wealthier families, they mean everyone above Tier one, sure.
There are 4 tiers. Only Tier 1 (lowest income level) families get priority and were the…

Almost every online discussion of China Shock 2.0 gets major parts of China Shock 1.0 wrong—what it was, what drove it, what it caused, and/​or what happened next.

Scott Lincicome explains... cato.org/commentary/get…

#CatoTrade

Peak coal? Hmm, how to put it: no.

The world added last year ~60 GW of coal-fired power capacity, the most since 2016 (China, that green champion, accounted for more than ⅔ of the increase), according to a new report.

#CoalTwitter #energytransition
globalenergymonitor.org/report/boom-an…

Number of H-1B revocations have doubled. What explains the surge? Also, the number of revocations are extraordinarily high. What explains this?

These 11 supposedly frighteningly consolidated mega-companies, nine of which primarily make snacks and soft drinks (which is a lot of competition), represent about 0.5% of worldwide GDP.