My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do

Nobel prize winning economists have no authority relative to anyone else on what the distribution of income or wealth should be.

The key quote from an op-ed that advocates against bringing back standardized testing in UC admissions: "Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates." nytimes.com/2026/09/16/opini…

Search on Mac Finder is no longer functional. I write the exact file name and it gives no results.

You looking for a roadmap to how to become a millionaire, or perhaps you are concerned that inequality is outrageously high? Either way, this book is a must read.

Late-September 2001, someone mailed Anthrax to the networks from the mailbox across the street from my office in the Princeton IR Section. For the next year my mail arrived irradiated in plastic baggies. These were the conditions under which I wrote my job market paper.

I sat on those steps with a friend who worked at the Deutsche Bank building. The plaza was full of WTC workers on lunch breaks. Four days later I saw the plane hit on live TV. There's a trauma that I never really processed. Princeton classes weren't cancelled and I was TAing an econometrics section two days later. The world changed but we kept working. On days like this I feel the grief that I largely suppressed.

I’ll bet $5 million at 1-to-100 odds that humanity survives the next ten years.

In the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, 24% of active unemployed searchers say they are considering only WFH jobs. Could preferences for WFH + fewer opportunities be the reason that unemployment duration has been rising since 2023?

I'm really sorry to hear this and thank you for sharing. I hope there is a path to recovery.

Only 3 universities in the top 30 U.S. News rankings are test-free for the upcoming application cycle: UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego.

Add a third axis and we have the Roback model. Even then, you can see what cities are productivity powerhouses, especially in that fourth quadrant.

I'm coming to think that data center hysteria has been manufactured as the opening bid to overcome community resistance to nuclear.

Manufacturing share of employment is a productivity story. It plateaued in 2009 when productivity stalled out.

Took my kid to a k-pop concert. Wild.

Same thought but for bookstores. Bookstores are generally unprofitable, but nice to have in the neighborhood.

I don't think there can be much debate at this point about whether federal borrowing is crowding out private investment, the question is how much.

West Oakland is the new industrial heartland.

Policy-proposal: For every 10% increase in the minimum wage in fast food lower the sales tax in that sector by 2 p.p.

In 2021 there was a lot of discussion on labor market distortions from expanded UI. In retrospect, the first-order problem was fraud and poor screening.