POLITICHE DEI TRASPORTI: SENSO COMUNE vs. BUON SENSO. 🧵 "Una delle idee oggi più diffuse e popolari in materia di investimenti nei trasporti è che la strada può venire alleggerita trasferendo una parte del traffico verso altri tipi di trasporto.

Hayek recalls his first visit to the US at age 23 “I was anxious to go to America to improve my knowledge of economics... I arrived in New York in March 1923 with exactly $25 in my pocket.” “I was to start as a dishwasher in a Sixth Avenue restaurant next morning at 11 o’clock. Then as a great relief to me—and a source of everlasting regret now—I never started washing dishes.” “On that morning, a telephone call came: Professor Jenks had returned and was willing to employ me.”

"Pritchett and Lewis do not just show that their preferred measures of basics correlate with GDP per capita. They run 100,000 simulations in which they randomly draw one indicator from each of seven basic domains of human wellbeing (health, education, nutrition, water and sanitation, housing, poverty, and natural environment) and combine them with randomly chosen weights. They then look for the specification that produces the weakest possible relationship with GDP per capita. Even their worst-case result, which they achieve by rigging the index so that air pollution counts 40 times more than adult mortality and 29 times more than extreme poverty – a weighting scheme no serious researcher has ever proposed – nevertheless still shows countries getting meaningfully better as they get richer. These authors tried 100,000 different combinations of indicators and weights, specifically looking for a way to break the relationship. They couldn’t find one." open.substack.com/pub/unseen…

"The argument commits a category error: it confuses matter with value. The Earth is indeed a closed system of atoms. But economic growth does not count atoms — it counts the value those atoms deliver to human beings, and that value lives in arrangement and knowledge, not in mass"

This is a great graph. The point is not time. The x axis is gdp per capita. The point is that growth does benefit all. The idea growth only benefits the rich is dramatically false. timely given Stieglitz, Pketty et al recent degrowth noise.

Non è vero che le auto elettriche pagano più tasse di quelle a benzina. Di Francesco Ramella ilfoglio.it/economia/2026/06…

And the idea that effort should be rewarded is dumb beyond recognition. Unless one uses an Abacus instead of a PC, in that case, good luck finding a private employer. I can give you an example: in Italy, there is a stamp duty on cars. There is a whole apparatus to manage that...and the income from that is less than 20% of existing taxes on fuel. The smart person would fire all those people, abolish that tax, pass it on fuel (it's also more environmentally friendly since you pay in proportion of how much you emit) and save millions. BUT, those are "public employees". they are not even told that they are a mob of VERY effective unemployed. they merely jumped the queue for unemployment benefits. There is also another signaling effect: that stamp duty is going to regions. Its existence means regions do not trust the central government to apportion any eventual revenue to them fairly and/or on time. Otherwise, THEY should be proposing that. @SignorErnesto @ramella_f @MarcoCantamessa @petunianelsole

Troppe tasse per le auto elettriche? O per le termiche? ilfoglio.it/economia/2026/06…

La spesa pubblica nel 2025 è stata di 1.150 miliardi. Nel 2019 di 870. L’inflazione cumulata dal 2019 al 2025 è stata del 19,4% per cui la spesa, per rimanere invariata, avrebbe dovuto essere di 1.040 miliardi. Invece è di 110 miliardi più alta. L’argomento centrale del dibattito pubblico dovrebbe quindi essere quello dell’efficacia della spesa pubblica, visto che il paese, malgrado tutto questo, non cresce e fa, comunque fatica, in certi territori più che in altri, a garantire i servizi, anche quelli essenziali. Conseguenza della spesa a questi livelli è la pressione fiscale effettiva, al 47,7 per cento del Pil, visto che ISTAT aggiunge al Pil 217 mld di economia non osservata. Ebbene, a fronte di tutto questo, quale l’oggetto principale di confronto e dibattito?La patrimoniale, evidentemente per spendere ancora di più dell’esagerazione che già si spende.

"Because of the way that population, economic growth, and technological change feedback into each other, it’s hard to get much beyond 3C of warming or below 2C of warming. The greatest failure of the IPCC’s scenario making enterprise has been to obscure this basic dynamic rather than illuminating it."

A way to see the amazing history of economic growth and declining poverty over the last two centuries.

🇦🇷 Nei mesi scorsi sui media e da accademici italiani l'Argentina è stata spesso dipinta come un disastro. Al netto degli ovvi problemi del Paese, la realtà è sempre stata l'opposto. A conferma, ieri nel silenzio dei media e dei soliti (un caso) S&P ha *alzato* l'outlook. spglobal.com/ratings/en/regu… Ecco i grafici dell'economia 🇦🇷 1/N

Fa eccezione quello sui trasporti che è perfettamente centrato sui dati disponibili.

I dati raccontano una storia diversa da qualche decennio. Ma, insomma, meglio tardi che mai.

Found it. All u need to know to think about the Piketty, Stiglitz et al. proposals:

Secondo l’Unicef in Argentina🇦🇷 la povertà infantile è caduta al 42,5% nel 2025, il livello più basso dal 2018. In valore assoluto sono -3 milioni di bambini poveri rispetto al picco del I semestre 2024 (67,1%) e -2,1 milioni rispetto a fine 2023 (58,5%), prima del governo Milei.

Going mainstream?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, economic growth is driving broad improvements to climate-sensitive outcomes (like crop yields), and rich countries are the main places broadly reducing their environmental impacts, largely thanks to innovations and political space for environmentalism facilitated by growth. Links below.

"We live in an age of manufactured scarcity” I honestly struggle to think of one sentence that could be a worse description of recent decades. Literally more than a billion persons have been lifted out of poverty over a few decades. It’s just an extraordinary achievement even at the scale of human history. Surely we can do even better but I cannot see how their text can be read seriously. It’s like we invented fire and they’d complain the night has never been darker and colder.

I don't know what Piketty, Stiglitz, and co. are smoking. Global poverty rates have never been lower. Progress on basic global health and wellbeing measures has been amazing over the past few decades. "End of the road"?!? Come again!?! theguardian.com/commentisfre…

La gestione del personale da azienda privata non è lo stesso che essere un’azienda privata. Quello che conta è chi è lo stakeholder che comanda