Luke Heeney
@heeney_luke
Economics & energy tech nerd @MIT, reformed BCG consultant ⚡️ founding editor at @inflectionptswk
Right now Australia has an incredible opportunity to bring US-style innovation down under, thanks to Trump. We should, to improve economic dynamism and build for an abundant future. Here’s how to do it! My piece in today’s @smh with Sarah Davis👇
Australian econ twitter immediately strikes back at @Noahpinion. Go Matt!
LIFE HACK: you can just unsubscribe from newsletters you don’t like. Constantly sigh, like I did, every time ‘Noahpinion’ hits your inbox? Simply hit the big button
Noah has started a war with Australian politics Twitter. He’s won the first battle. We will emerge victorious
He walked right into that one
There are many ingredients to reform. The story of banning non-competes offers lessons for future efforts and some optimism for Australian policymaking. Michael Brennan and Dan Andrews on "How Australia Banned Non-Competes" [Full article in next tweet]
Non-compete clauses kept 3 million workers tied to lower pay 🚫. Labor is scrapping them for low & middle income earners💰. #auspol
Awesome paper finding huge benefits from relaxing zoning constraints in NYC, even once you account for the big costs of redevelopment vrollet.github.io/files/city_str…
West Coast start up people should stop dunking on East Coast start ups. East Coasters are finding new laws of physics to try and build physical things the world needs, taking on massive development and career risk to do this. Vibe coding ain't the be all and end all.
This was so clearly telegraphed ahead of time that I wrote about it at the start of February
just pathetic they were surprised by getting hit on rare earths
IO, trade, and the solar industry in one paper. Am I in heaven?
Academia must be the only industry where extremely high-skilled PhD students spend much of their time doing low value work (like data cleaning). A 1st year management consultant outsources this immediately. Imagine the productivity gains if PhDs could focus on thinking
Progress shouldn’t be rationed - abundance should be the goal. In the inaugural edition of “Inflection Points”, I outline a vision for an Australia with more homes, faster trains, and sensational universities: inflectionpoints.work/articles/the-a… #auspol @inflectionptswk
On the other end of the funnel: should prospective PhD students up the bar on programs to enroll in, even though competition has stepped up *again* for PhD spots?
The academic job market is bad and will likely get worse. Research job openings have dropped sharply, just as economists laid off from government roles are flooding the market. Current PhD students should have candid conversations with their advisors about their prospects. If…
We're launching Inflection Points, Australia's new home of long-form writing for pro-growth, pro-abundance policy. Our cracking first issue just dropped. Follow along for a more prosperous Australia!
🚨We’re launching the FIRST issue of Inflection Points 🚨 - Michael Brennan & Dan Andrews - Katie Roberts-Hull - Jonathan O’Brien - Andrew Leigh
Finally, my electrical engineering degree is useful in econ! Now to convince the admission committees...
💻 If you’re serious about computation in economics, you eventually need to get serious about hardware. And that includes FPGAs 🔌. ⚙️ Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) allow users to configure programmable logic blocks to execute specific algorithms, avoiding the…
This is the most important paper in international climate policy. It's also my favorite paper! Must read for climate + econ wonks
This paper was quite a journey with my excellent coauthor, @ALashkaripour I’m proud that it found the best home I could imagine. Here is a summary 🧵
This is a masterpiece of a paper. It is possible, merely through tweaking the scoring system of Medicare Advantage, to generate at least $4.5 billion in additional annual surplus. I came away feeling as though I had seen magic be done — let’s see how he answered this! 1/
West Australian Greens leader Brad Pettitt has a simple message for his party colleagues on the east coast: quit the inner-city NIMBYism because high-rises are not the enemy. afr.com/politics/feder… ($) #wapol #auspol article from Friday 4 July edition.
My entire PhD and academic career hopes 🤝 extremely weak BLP instruments
The claim here that we can't (or won't) build more than 50 homes per hectare is puzzling. When Marcus Spiller's SGS colleagues estimated housing capacity in Boroondara LGA, they assumed 75-100 homes per hectare even for 'general' residential areas. abc.net.au/news/2025-07-0…
Relevant again. Now Labor
All my finance mates on $200k at 24 years old are stoked to hear that the Greens will make lower-income tax payers help them pay off their HECS debts