Posts Tagged ‘tweet’
“Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair”*…
Mike Konczal unpacks happens when one takes the AEI graphic of items that have had high and low inflation, but extend it to all categories…
This graphic is in the news again:
Its creator is Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who last posted an update to it in July 2022. He’s been doing a version since at least 2016, and if you read enough economics blogs or content you’ve probably seen some iteration of it.
People are talking about it again after Marc Andreessen posted it under the headline “Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment.” Andreessen describes what people generally take away from it – blue line capitalism and dynamic, red line government regulations and stagnant…
Matt Yglesias noted on twitter that he’s “come to think it’s misleading — by being very selective in which categories of labor-intensive services it chooses to chart, it’s generated a narrative that relative price shifts are just about government regulation.”
That seems correct to me; these categories are pretty loaded. Let’s see if we can do better by including every possible category… let’s download all of the current Consumer Price Index (CPI) data off the BLS download site…
Since the BLS is constantly changing categories, we have to select the items that exist in both January 2000 and February 2023 to duplicate the chart. That leaves us with 62 categories. Doing a quick glance (and seeing in Perry’s own chart) the year-by-year evolution over time doesn’t really tell us much, so we can go with a simple bar chart for overall change. Let’s chart that here in full:
There are a few key takeaways looking at it this way:
In our version of the AEI chart the number one item isn’t health care but ‘delivery services,’ which is “fees for delivery of items such as letters, documents, and packages at non-US Postal Services facilities.”Think UPS or FedEx. This is pretty far from a government monopoly, indeed it’s the private sector alternative to a government program. But it is services and it is labor intensive.
The biggest thing, to me, isn’t “regulations” but whether it’s a service or a good…
More on how and why that matters in “A Better AEI Graphic of Inflation Over the Past 20 Years.”
* Sam Ewing
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As we ruminate in the rise, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
Special Beach Blanket Edition: Roll Over, Eustace Tilley…
In your correspondent’s quest to highlight mash-ups of note*, an interruption of the annual idyll to share the exquisite pleasure of Kanye New Yorker Tweets (c.f. also here): the actual twittering of the Taylor Swift-interrupting hip hop climber, set to drawings that have graced the pages of The New Yorker.
Consider for example:
Many, many more here.
*Other mash-ups: C.f., e.g., here, here, or here…
As we celebrate the serendipitous results of radical juxtaposition, we might recall that it was on this date in 30 BCE that Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last pharaoh to rule Egypt (and storied lover of Antony) committed suicide. Historians from Strabo and Plutarch have reported that the Queen did herself in by having an asp bite her. But earlier this year, the German historian Christoph Schaefer challenged this account, declaring that the queen had actually died from drinking a mixture of poisons. After studying historic texts and consulting with toxicologists, Schaefer concluded that the asp could not have caused the slow and pain-free death reported. Schaefer and his lead toxicologist Dietrich Mebs insist that Cleopatra used a mixture of hemlock, wolfsbane and opium.
Another asterisk for the record books…
Homage is where the heart is…
On the tenth anniversary of the release of The Matrix, Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett invested 440 hours in painstakingly recreating 990 frames of the film– the famous “Bullet Time” dodge sequence– in Lego.
See the finished sequence:
And marvel at the extraordinary fidelity of their craft in this side-by-side comparison:
ToTH to Scott Beale and Laughing Squid…
Readers might want to tweet the news that the “Top Words of 2009” (as culled by the Global Language Monitor) are in. The winner? “Twitter— the ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters.” (And then again, readers might want to choose their words carefully…)
As we wander around Plato’s cave, we might take celebratory dip in the pork barrel today in honor of Andrew Jackson, whose election as 7th President of the U.S. (as solemnized by the Electoral College) on this date in 1828 both manifest and accelerated America’s shift toward its democratic (if not Democratic) future.
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