Top all-time · #168
Noah Smith
Personal blog · noahpinion.blogeconomicspolitics
Noah Smith writes Noahpinion, a personal blog at noahpinion.blog about economics and politics. Since 2023, 246 different Hacker News readers have linked it 751 times, most often “Manufacturing is a war now. And the democracies are losing”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Noah Smith's Noahpinion for economics and policy posts on immigration, tariffs, TikTok, healthcare costs and the dollar, mostly as evidence for their own point.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Posts called great, good and convincing; one commenter says a Cuba post lays out its case quite well.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Economics and other interesting stuff. Click to read Noahpinion, by Noah Smith, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Manufacturing is a war now. And the democracies are losing10 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2024-12-04
- Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system10 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2024-12-09
- "Paycheck-to-paycheck" and five other popular myths10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2024-12-04
- Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong9 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2023-05-20
- America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy5 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2023-10-23
- Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-03-17
- What will more intelligence do for us5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-07-26
- How not to be fooled by viral charts (2023)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-09-14
- Thoughts on techno-optimism: What it means to me, and why I support it5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-10-20
- Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-03-25
What Hacker News says?
I'm not referring to the credit. She had proposals to boost supply. Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing. A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction. To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing. To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-f…
Comment linking /p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-housing
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints as a story · 242 points
HN discussionA single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies ( https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-... ). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields. > Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough" Looks to me like this needs a spec…
Comment linking /p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-reduce
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted Decade of the Battery as a story · 135 points
HN discussion> but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. In practice this is not an issue, to the point it's hard to find cases where it ever happened. Collection of studies: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-... One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from nati…
Comment linking /p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-reduce
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted Why did U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years? as a story · 90 points
HN discussionA guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
Comment linking /p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-reduce
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted The U.S. needs to pay more attention to electronic warfare as a story · 86 points
HN discussionThis is the lump of labor fallacy. Adding people increases demand more than supply, meaning it increases wages. Immigrants also have complementary skills to natives, which further reduces risk. There is no empirical evidence of anyone's wages being lowered by immigration. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
Comment linking /p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-reduce
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted The U.S. economy is not crashing as a story · 73 points
HN discussion> Another option is that voters are just very stupid and fail to see that which is "obvious", repeatedly, despite billions spent on trying to make them "see". I think this is the correct options. I mean, look at the people who worked for him in the last administration: > So how do we explain this near-universal rejection of Trump by the people who worked with him most closely? I guess one explanation is that they’ve…
Comment linking /p/trumpism-is-kakistocracy
on “Trump wins presidency for second time”Submitted Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense as a story · 66 points
HN discussionThere is some reason to disbelieve the official numbers. They started dropping rapidly under Putin, while the number of unidentified bodies processed by the health system climbed more or less identically: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/russia-is-not-actually-a-very-...
Comment linking /p/russia-is-not-actually-a-very-nice
on “Alexei Navalny has died”Submitted Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class as a story · 65 points
HN discussionMany of those articles came out before TSMC received CHIPS Act grants. As soon as the CHIPS Act money was committed to TSMC, the factory was suddenly ahead of schedule. Noah Smith called it out here: > Three months after TSMC announced further delays at its $40 billion Arizona fabs, the chip manufacturer has now said the plant is expected to be operating at full capacity by the end of [2024]. > The announcement come…
Comment linking /p/at-least-five-interesting-things-d27
on “Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC”Submitted Problems in Gemini's Approach to Diversity as a story · 59 points
HN discussion> I don't particularly like Noah Smith (he's also in favour of protectionism and 'industrial policy'), but his https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-polandmalaysia-model has some good points also about Malaysia. Yeah: > On a trip to Turkey in 2018, I read How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell. Despite the fact that it didn’t get everything right, it’s probably the best nonfiction book I’ve ever read. * https://www.noahpinion.…
Comment linking /p/what-studwell-got-wrong
on “Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC”Submitted Where's the "Intelligence Explosion"? as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI'm trying to pull some things together. Mostly, a big part of the book is just a warming up of the tired 'Infant Industry argument'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument For now, have a look at https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/prejudice-free... to get an alternative look at Malaysia, one of the recurring example in 'How Asia Works'. (That paper is also just a really good read by i…
Comment linking /p/the-polandmalaysia-model
on “Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC”Submitted Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI as a story · 56 points
HN discussion1. What does the dark forest have to do with this? Because "the most senior OpenAI researchers" are shitposting on social media, we've an answer to the Fermi paradox??? 2. The dark forest is fun for scifi stories, but is mathematically bunk anyway https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-... https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1l06cnk/cool_w... https://www.projectnash.com/aliens-the-ferm…
Comment linking /p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-absurd
on “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”Submitted The death of San Francisco's Market Street as a story · 53 points
HN discussion> If China controls the recommendation system that decides what content people consume, then they can influence the narrative of the country. From Noah Smith: > Second, the refusal to sell the app tells us that the Chinese government would rather see TikTok destroyed than see it fall into American hands. Notably, that same government put up little fuss back in 2020 when the U.S. forced a Chinese company to sell the…
Comment linking /p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning
on “TikTok goes dark in the US”Submitted The Ukraine war is ultimately about Poland as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThere are a very large number of posts which follow the format of the parent post, each clearly aiming to make TikTok appear equivalent to US-owned social media platforms, while ignoring the actual issue that TikTok is an active propaganda arm of the CCP. TikTok's manipulation of the feed has been proven through extensive public studies: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning The pressing need to…
Comment linking /p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning
on “TikTok goes dark in the US”Submitted Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper as a story · 49 points
HN discussionAgain, the distinction I'm drawing is: 9/11 conspiracy theorists at least tried to present factual arguments for their claims. You haven't done so, and I don't think you ever will. (Insofar as your "claims" can even be hammered down -- they're incredibly vague.) It's not a point in your favor that your flavor of conspiratorial thinking is so widespread despite its thin evidence base. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/am…
Comment linking /p/america-doesnt-really-have-a-working
on “Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow”Submitted Europe Is Under Siege as a story · 46 points
HN discussion> 1. The people voted for smaller government […] The people voted for President and the people voted for Congress. If Congress, who under the US Constitution controls the purse, votes for a level of "X" spending why does the President get to decide to spend <X? > 6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. It is not obviously true. Because what you're cutting may be resiliency. T…
Comment linking /p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy
on “DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data”Submitted There's not that much wealth in the world as a story · 46 points
HN discussion
