This is not an upside down checkered rabbit...

Great to see the New York Times Interpreter column by @amandataub picking up from our conversation. Let me try to offer a few additional thoughts that did not make it into the column. A key observation from Amanda's scatter plots is that the pattern of rural versus urban population consolidation is a correlate of populist support both in East- and West Germany. But, as with Brexit and the UK (see here: x.com/fetzert/status/1808156…) the populist narrative around immigration has hardly any bearing on net foreign migration as most rural areas hardly see any absolute immigration. But, they very much are exposed to politicians channeling of populist narratives on immigration, aided by appalling terror attacks and a changing media multiplier thanks to social media (direct.mit.edu/rest/article/…). The climate crisis, aging populations, along with often deep geographic attachments (think: care relationships, family) make it vital for societies to consider strategies for spatial consolidation that create a broad coalition of support. This spatial consolidation is happening, as in particular young, healthy and educated folks move to larger cities. In the receiving cities it creates insider- outsider conflicts as insiders are quite happy to benefit from rising rents and property prices, creating a conflict dimension there (see academic.oup.com/jeea/articl… and warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom…). But equally smaller towns and rural areas seeing declines experience the doom-loop breed discontent. It is exactly here where working from home is a vital vector to expand the reach of agglomeration. Good and affordable physical transportation and digital connectivity are crucial enablers. But this creates another feedback mechanism whereby invested city folk, financial institutions and the traditional monetary system may struggle with the pace of rapid structural change (think: offices warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom…). The conflict in Ukraine, the escalating climate crisis and the implications this has more broadly are putting these tensions into context. Climate action through decentralized energy provision (think: solar and wind) can benefit smaller communities through revenue sharing. Working-from-home can help expand the reach of cities and benefit broader agglomeration. Digitization and AI can speed up slow bureaucracies and reconfigure the state, slow down some of the rural-urban migration dynamic as AI will replace many high skill service jobs in cities and increased defense spending may, as has been the case more traditionally, benefit more rural communities and come with more infrastructure investment. Globally, it is imperative to work towards new governance of the global trading system given the many escalations and this will have to come with rethinking services and service sector trade to ensure climate action becomes an economic and social win-win. All the necessary conditions are there.

Mysterious ‘cold blob’ in the Atlantic suggests the AMOC is weakening A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water “conveyor belt” in the Atlantic is slowing down newscientist.com/article/252… docs.google.com/document/d/1…

For those interested: GameChanger interviewed me about my work with Max Mihm and Lucas Siga on zero-sum thinking: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… This podcast series is aimed at non-specialists, and I have learned a fair bit from the other episodes.

Useful set of slides. I'd add that survey experiments are often also used for policy advice in ways that overlook the general political equilibrium. The two main issues are that (i) people self-select into the messages they receive (whereas in the experiment they are forced to engage with the message) and (ii) there is counter-framing in the real world (which requires us to understand how people deal with conflicting cues/messages). It may well be that a message produces some desired effect in an experiment, but fails to do so in the real world because the GE effects trump the partial equilibrium effect. For a basic explainer, see also: github.com/jacob-edenhofer/P…

Very helpful thread

I'd argue that pushing for degrowth will likely have corrosive effects on broad public suppport for stringent climate policy. Given that degrowth is essentially one big device for turning ever more policy domains into zero- or even negative-sum games, the room for Pareto-

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Strait of Hormuz, be like...

That paper was already amazing back then and I maintain it's making some really great points plus empirics of course

The business with the business with the state...

It should be obvious that, if behavioral targeting, exploitation of behavioral biases/cognitive limitations prevails, then only a "crowd stochastic noise" revolution can help rebalance power in economies. That is: we need to add more random choices in our day-to-day life.

Pinkland awakens...🌞🔥

Just squeezing a bit of inflation here, and there...

All just... projection issues.

It will be interesting to see how the next 6 weeks shape up...