Economist | General equilibrium effects matter | PHD from @CarnegieMellon | Asst. Director LAEF @UCSB | Asst. Prof. University of Austin (UATX)
Santa Barbara, CA
Joined August 2014
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Nick Pretnar retweeted
@Gabriel_Zucman and @BDGesq have repeatedly described Rauh et al. (2026) as “deceptive” and its expectations as “irrational.” One may disagree with their assumptions. But there is a standard dynamic-policy framework under which their basic logic is perfectly coherent. A thread 🧵
Nick Pretnar retweeted
BREAKING: Palantir's Alex Karp says OpenAI will never IPO.
His theory: nationalization is the only real exit.
When asked what the S-1 risk factors look like, Karp's answer was simple: there is no S-1.
The liability exposure from frontier AI is so large that no public market can absorb it.
The only entity big enough to backstop it is a government.
If Karp is right, OpenAI doesn't become the next Google.
It becomes a utility. Or a weapon.
The most valuable AI company in the world may have no clean path to public markets.
Is nationalization actually the most likely outcome for frontier AI labs?
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC today: closed models can absorb a company’s proprietary knowledge into someone else’s system, while open-weight models let the company keep that knowledge, customization, and control inside its own environment.
"When you use a closed model and you pay for tokens, the reason the tokens are discounted is not so they can grow the market. They’re discounted so that they can get access to their IP, so that their models get better.
And there was functionally no honest conversation about this or disclosure.
Now, that’s point one.
Point two is: without an application layer and without post-training, which is currently being done with open-weight models on the classified side—and it’s just taking off across America because it’s cheaper and ends up being safer, and you control your future and your present"
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From "CNBC Television" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)
Nick Pretnar retweeted
@grok can you take all these heads and morph them into a supervillain called "Claude", it is the ultimate annoying work colleague that is apparently in "HR" but all they seem to do is go around and tell people they're in trouble for being effective and efficient with their productivity whilst having a sense of humour. Make it photorealistic with strong Dario influences
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Actually, GDP sucks. I say that as an expert on reconstructions of national accounting. But it sucks in the way that all critics never say: it understates the massive gains in wellbeing that humanity got.
If you shift to things like estimates of VSL (value of statistical life) or try to account for the value of good quality, willingness to pay/accept, you find that we massively underestimate the gains. What GDP does well is a) cycles; b) movements and direction; c) short-run gains; d) consistency and availability; e) level comparisons across places
The problems of the "better measures" is that they are hard to create now and then. They cant cover all places and societies. Thus, GDP makes a pretty decent job given its limitations.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
como quitar la depresion en un video de 1 minuto:
más eficaz que los libros de autoayuda xitter.gq/RoyalSerf/status/20739…
Nick Pretnar retweeted
How much does a high markup tell you about market power?
When factors other than price matter, like time, the markup tells you less than you'd think. We show that across a range of imperfect competition models
Now out at JET with Tom Phelan and @nickpretnar
Nick Pretnar retweeted
The typical person's preference for redistribution is entirely based on vibes about the level and rate of change of inequality ("perceived inequality").
There is ~zero relationship between perceived inequality and objective measures of income or wealth dispersion.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Here's a project I've been working on recently: a vision of what happens if Europe doesn't take AI seriously, inspired by AI 2027 europe2031.ai/
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Said much of the same last week, but this is for the most part true, and most people don’t realize this (It marginally depends on what state). Definitely true in CA. Before everyone says, well it’s only income tax or the rich take a larger share, please see this graph: wid.world/document/why-is-eu…
Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
So excited to finally share my job market paper!
The post-Floyd “Great Awokening” was driven by affluent white liberals and emphasized recognition over redistribution.
Consistent with elite capture of identity politics.
Feedback very welcome! Link below.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Footage from Mosques all across UK.
Quotes: ‘Oh Allah! Curse the infidels and the polytheists…tear apart their unity and ruin their houses.’
‘Oh Muslim, the stones will say ‘behind me there’s a yahoodi (Jew), come and kill him.’
‘Oh god kill them (the Jews and the ‘enemies of Islam’) indiscriminately and do not leave any of them alive.’
Note at no point does anyone in the various audiences raise any objections.
This is by far the most widespread and most dangerous form of bigotry and intolerance in Western societies at present. And it’s been imported, and allowed to rapidly spread, by ‘liberal’/mainstream politicians and activists who build their careers by vilifying anyone who mentions it’s a problem as an Islamophobe and a racist. And who respond to each brutal jihadist atrocity by obfuscating, claiming that atrocity had nothing to do with Islam, forcing the focus onto ‘hate’ (by which they mean, anyone who’s disgusted by this Islamist lunacy), and introducing laws to censor frank discussion of the religious underpinnings of the threat.
Truly suicidal.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
"People who believe that words can harm tended to be younger, female, non-White, and politically liberal...[they] had worse mental health: they reported being more anxious and depressed, less resilient, & having more difficulties in emotion regulation." How about that.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
I spend way too much time on social media debunking "economic slop" promulgated by lawyers pretending to be economists, so I built Show Me the Model: a tool that uses AI to check whether the economic reasoning in an essay actually holds up.
showmethemodel.io
Give it a URL or paste some plain text, and the tool flags hidden assumptions, internal inconsistencies, and other problem areas, and tells you how a real economist would think through the issue.
Right now, it has 4 "personas:" macro, trade, IO/price theory, and labor. The tool first figures out which persona is right for the job, and then uses a parallelized prompt scaffold specific to that persona to process the source text.
Here are some example outputs based on some essays that triggered me hard:
Citrini Research's viral essay on how AI could trigger a self-reinforcing financial crisis rivaling the GFC:
showmethemodel.io/#/results/…
American Compass on the harms of trade deficits:
showmethemodel.io/#/results/…
@oren_cass on why Built-to-Rent should be banned:
showmethemodel.io/#/results/…
American Compass on the "China Shock:"
showmethemodel.io/#/results/…
@michaelxpettis on why China's trade surplus reduces global output:
showmethemodel.io/#/results/…
Try it yourself at showmethemodel.io. You'll need to bring your own API key (OpenAI or Anthropic), and a typical analysis costs $0.50–$1.50.
It's super preliminary and will probably break on you. I'd love feedback about both the functionality as well as the quality of the output.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Yale Budget Lab Exec. Dir. @marthagimbel on the shrinking appeal of U.S. debt: "We are currently the boyfriend at the beginning of the Hallmark movie in the big city, where the girlfriend is still going out with him even though she knows that it's wrong."
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Unrealized gains tax for Gen-Z:
You buy a Pokémon card for $50.
Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You're keeping it.
The government says: "Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes."
You: "…I didn't sell it."
Government: "Don't care. Pay up."
You don't have $100 lying around. So you're forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.
Next month? That card drops back to $50.
Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.
That's a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don't pay you back the tax...
Now picture this.
Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can't afford it. She's lived there 30 years. It's paid off.
But some website says it's worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn't have.
So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.
Gone.
To pay a tax on money that was never real.
Now picture the opposite.
Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is "valued" at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.
Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.
He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn't exist anymore.
Does the government give him his money back?
No.
Does the government give him his truck back?
No.
Does the government care?
No.
They sold this idea as "taxing billionaires." But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They'll be fine.
You know who won't be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who's had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.
You're not taxing wealth. You're taxing people for owning things.
It's like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.
They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.
There is enough money. More tax isn't needed. It's all a lie. But you've been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.
I hope you understand what's at stake.
Nick Pretnar retweeted
Angus Deaton on the Credibility Revolution
Nobel Prize-winning economist Deaton offers a sober assessment of the credibility revolution in econometrics. He also highlights the value of seeking out “important mechanisms that are plausible, interesting, and worth thinking about.”
Nick Pretnar retweeted
This is the best interception I have ever seen AT ANY LEVEL! Lone Peak High and @Utah_Football commit Kennan Pula with the jaw-dropping pick! #SCtop10