Professor at UC Berkeley. Labor economics.
Joined May 2021
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From the piece: The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020...This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions.
Jun 12
California universities dropped the SAT to help low-income and minority students. The policy is doing the opposite, writes Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. thefp.com/p/bring-back-the-s…
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Jun 13
When an obstructionist Berkeley resident invoked an environmental quality regulation to block new student housing, the CA state legislator removed the relevant regulatory barrier in a matter of weeks.
When there is a political will to act in CA higher-education, change can happen very quickly.
The fact that the reintroduction of standardized testing in admissions is being slow-tracked in an endless bureaucratic process is a political decision.
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Alex Mas retweeted
Jun 12
New from me for @TheAtlantic: the consequences of rising national debt and high deficits feel far away, but actually they're already here. The government’s deficits have saddled many American families with higher costs, largely from rising interest rates. 1/
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Jun 13
I've been telling everyone that an AI that can clean the SIPP in 5 minutes is too powerful for public use.
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Jun 13
Disappointed to learn that the result of the 1400 UC faculty asking that SATs be reinstated in admissions is a blue ribbon commision that will produce a report on May 2027.
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Jun 13
We are on track for a full decade of an admissions policy that harms high achieving students, especially those from less advantaged backgrounds.
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Jun 13
The billionaire tax on the CA ballot is being opposed by the State Building and Construction Trades Council and the California Teachers Association.
Do these unions have a valid concern?
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Jun 13
Two reasons they oppose it is capital flight and because public investments require dedicated funding streams rather than one time windfalls. Sensible points.
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Alex Mas retweeted
Jun 11
"The Regents vote went completely contradictory to the faculty recommendation to retain the SAT...what I keep hearing from people is your faculty want this. 1400, 1600, whatever. And the January 2020 report that unanimously recommended retaining standardized testing from the faculty, which the Board of Regents then unanimously voted against." -- President Milliken (just now in a meeting of the Assembly of the Academic Senate)
O.M.G.
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Jun 11
Would the COVID shutdowns have been as severe if we were in the middle of the AI boom?
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Jun 11
According to the mathematical calculations on my TI-84, growth is *the* strategy.
Jun 11
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…
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Jun 11
We are entering the era of more papers using a dataset than observations in the dataset. What happens then!?!
Jun 10
Fable = game changer ‼️
Today, I downloaded and cleaned:
- CPS / MORG / March Supp
- SIPP back to 1996 panel
- PSID back to 1968
- SCF back to 1989
- entire NLSY79/97
- PWT 10 / 11
- a couple dozen FRED, World Bank, and OECD time series
This is totally insane! 😳🤯
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Brett Matsumoto, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, told lawmakers he was committed to maintaining the integrity and independence of the agency bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Alex Mas retweeted
Jun 10
When Canadian universities unionized, it raised faculty salaries and compressed their distribution by lifting the lowest salaries, say researchers at @econuoft, @BerkeleyHaas, and @MemorialU. #Chart aeaweb.org/research/chart/un…
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Jun 9
Hypothesis: Degrowth ideology tends to be embraced in countries already stuck in stagnation as a way to justify the stagnation.
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This plan is incompatible with freedom- a global class of planners telling us how long to work, how much we can grow, what we can eat. It is also completely wrong. All advances for climate (including the huge drop in battery and solar and wind costs) have come (and will come) from more innovation, more competition, firms that grow and invent and innovate and produce energy solutions that replace fossil fuels. If you enforce degrowth in the West you will kill for ever the climate agenda.
Jun 4
The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us.
We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.
What would it take to achieve high prosperity and equality while remaining within planetary boundaries?
The World Inequality Lab is very excited to launch the #GlobalJusticeReport.
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Alex Mas retweeted
Jun 7
Growth caps. Good luck with that.
Jun 4
The key finding of the report is that energy transition alone will not suffice.
We need to combine it with "sufficiency" to stay within 2 degrees. This includes labour hour reductions, growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits.
Community note
This report uses a ~4.8°C baseline. In May 2026, the U.N. climate panel officially retired this scenario (RCP8.5) as "implausible." Updated projection: ~3.5°C. Sources: NYT & Washington Post, May 2026.
nytimes.com/2026/05/26/cli…
washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
lemonde.fr/en/environment…
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Alex Mas retweeted
Remote work hurts mental health. New research out in Science with @emma_k_h and Amanda Pallais. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Alex Mas retweeted
Jun 2
More than 1,100 University of California math and science professors are urging UC regents to reinstate college-entrance exams, saying that unprepared students are lowering academic standards and draining teaching resources. 🔗 on.wsj.com/4uP9fFA
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Alex Mas retweeted
Jun 1
"The University of California Needs the SAT Back" via @WSJ wsj.com/opinion/the-universi…
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