Miguel I. Solano Weblog

I haven't modeled this properly but, as a -very- crude comparative statics only, bottoms-up heuristic, think of the many tens of millions of US white-collar households who, essentially overnight, do not have to spend over a third of their income on transportation anymore, while still receiving the same salary due to wage stickiness — multipliers aside, that consumption shock alone may be on the order of a trillion dollars of newly suddenly disposable middle class income, or ~5% of the US GDP.

Even with a conservative multiplier (and, admittedly, lots of ansätze), my irresponsible guesstimate is a possible economic boom roughly at least half as large as the post-WWII miracle or so (or possibly higher), with possibly 6-9% GDP growth in 2021-22, followed by a likely short contraction due to fed action or 'mean reversion' effects due to overabundance of tulips for two quarters or so, and then followed by a burst of nearly historically unprecedented US GDP growth figures in the (lower) double digits in 2022-23 —which would transform the nation (and, with some lag, the world).

P.D. February 2, 2023 — I missed in retrospect a (possible) extra effect of rising asset prices on household incomes; and underestimated the persistence of inflation and severity of fed action needed. The broader claim still stands.

From time to time I cannot help but dream distantly of an utterly quixotic, 'let the rising sea open the nut'-like, algebraic geometry attack on circuit lower bounds from the 'outside in' so to speak — the (crude) motivating observation being the fact that classical Cayley-Menger varieties in rigidity theory works so well in the first place despite how, well, classic and 'un-étale'-y the techniques are.

I thus wonder whether a much more 'modern' and unabashedly 'cohomological'-y (however technically outsize and forbidding-seeming) program may be worth charting at least.

An experimental homage to Gabriel García Márquez on the energy crisis. Assisted by GPT-3.

[…] They had never been more lucid in any act of their lives as when they forgot about their loved ones and the pain of their loved ones and shut all their screens and windows again so as not to be disturbed by any temptations of the world, for they knew then that their fate was written in that text. It was the fate of the world, written many many years ago, countless decades ahead of time. Then the blackouts began, sudden, impervious, filling the nights with the voices and murmurs of their neighbors, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. They were so absorbed that they did not feel the second surge of blackouts either as their cataclysmic extent shut entire continents, lighting the sky with violent flashes of sunlike blue-green. The world was already a fearful whirlwind of lament and darkness being spun about by the wrath of the blackouts when they skipped several lines towards the end of the text so as not to lose time with facts they knew only too well, and they began to read about the instant that they were living, deciphering it as they lived it, prophesying themselves in the act of reading the last lines of the text, as if they were looking into a speaking mirror. Then they skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of their end. Before reaching the final line, however, they had already understood that they would never leave that world, for it was foreseen that the world of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the blackouts and exiled from the memory of the world at the precise moment when they finish reading the text, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because those condemned to live one hundred years later did not have a second opportunity on earth.