Notices by Blair Fix (blair_fix@mastodon.online)

When Republicans say they stand for small(er) government, they mean it.

Here's how state government expenditures decline as Republicans gain legislative control.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/01/31/partisan-politics-and-the-road-to-plutocracy/

Republicans claim to hate taxes, but mostly they hate taxing the rich. Here's how the top marginal income tax rate declines as Republicans gain state power.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/01/31/partisan-politics-and-the-road-to-plutocracy/

The world discovers the Jevons paradox.

For three centuries, heat engines have grown more efficient. And for three centuries, global energy use per person has *increased*.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/05/18/a-tour-of-the-jevons-paradox-how-energy-efficiency-backfires/

If you prefer to consume your science in video form, you can watch the post here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaFJGd0NTLY

Counterintuitively, efficiency is not a tool for conservation. It's a *catalyst* for technological sprawl.

Here's my deep dive into the Jevons paradox.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/05/18/a-tour-of-the-jevons-paradox-how-energy-efficiency-backfires/

Peter Thiel says that competition is for losers. He's right of course.

The best way to concentrate wealth is to limit competition and buy your way to power. Here's a look at the evidence.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/11/23/stocking-up-on-wealth-concentration/

When it comes to the stock market, who benefits?

Surprisingly few people, it turns out.

Here is the correlation between income share and the stock-market-to-gdp ratio for every US income percentile.

For a shocking 87% of people, a rising stock market comes with a *declining* share of income.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/10/28/when-stocks-go-up-who-benefits/

@pluralistic

You could use pandoc to convert all the html files to plain text:

> for f in *.html; do pandoc "$f" -s -o "${f%.html}.txt"; done

Then cat all the files and pipe them to wc to get a word count:

> cat *.txt | wc

Billionaires love to claim that they've bootstrapped themselves into existence. But the truth is that billionaires are *socially made*.

How do we know that? Because we can use the social distribution of income to predict their numbers.

#billionaires

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/09/03/billionaires-are-so-predictable/