I am delighted to share that I am joining the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy @sppgatech as an Assistant Professor next January! This was a serendipitous opportunity and I am so thankful it did not pass me by. Looking forward to starting a new chapter in Atlanta!

I will not be tricked into having any kind of hope about the Sixers, I was raised better than that.

I concur.

An excellent housing policy success story

Great to be featured in @bencasselman 's excellent NYT article on the economics of AI. Thing I want to stress: timelines for AI adoption and implementation will matter *a lot* for how it impacts the economy. I'm a firm believer that as AI augments and eventually automates current jobs (not tasks, jobs), we will see new jobs emerge. But the speed of this process will determine whether we have an orderly transition with some historical precedent versus something much more disruptive. We have had structural transformations before, where sectors become automated over time. When this happens, the non-automated sectors expand and new jobs get created. You can see this in the relationship between agriculture (automated) vs. services (non-automated) below. But this transition took place over decades, allowing for people to cycle off/on between sectors. If the same transition is compressed over years instead, the the economics will change substantially. We will need much more scope for public policy to manage it.

Advice for PhD students in economics about using AI, from the brilliant Isaiah Andrews. This should probably be circulated to all PhD cohorts economics.mit.edu/sites/defa…

do you guys remember when we had to write "set more off?"

A mixed strategy equilibrium.

Maybe it was.

Did you know that @Arnold_Ventures has a standing RFP for causal research proposals related to crime and the criminal justice system? Send us your ideas! We aim to get you an answer fast (within 3 months). All we need from you is a 3-page LOI that describes the intervention you're testing and the research design you're using. (Link below.)

This is rent seeking, plain and simple

This is a really astonishing claim: Students in Mississippi & Louisiana score higher on reading tests than students in California & New York despite spending way less money per pupil and having higher child poverty rates. Decided to double check the data because, if true, this should be alarming for blue state leaders. And yup, it checks out. Reading performance (NAEP 2024, Grade 4 reading, average scale score): Mississippi: 219 Louisiana: 216 New York: 215 California: 212 Child poverty (SAIPE; “estimated percent of people age 0–17 in poverty,” 2023): Louisiana: 25.2% Mississippi: 24.3% New York: 18.6% California: 15.0% Per-pupil spending (public K–12 “current expenditures per pupil,” FY2023, inflation-adjusted to FY2023 dollars) New York: $29,588 California: $18,568 Louisiana: $14,822 Mississippi: $12,238 It should be unacceptable to spend that much more taxpayer money while delivering worse results for students.

It’s Pub Day! My first book, The Science of Second Chances, hits shelves today. I can’t wait to hear what y’all think. I hope you find that it fills you with hope and optimism about what is possible in the public safety space. ✨

Naked propaganda be like:

BREAKING: The Supreme Court has struck down President Trump's tariff authority, saying his claim of emergency authority to issue sweeping tariffs to America's trading partners was unlawful. supremecourt.gov/opinions/25…

Intermediate macro instructors: You probably need to talk about the impact of AI on the labor market. But to make contact with the notion that this can destroy jobs and potentially reduce wages you need to introduce the task-based model of production. Cobb-Douglas (or CES) just doesn't cut it for this issue. You might consider using my undergrad textbook chapter on production where I cover this topic in a way that (I hope) is accessible to undergrads (see section 7 of the chapter): jonsteinsson.com/teaching/pr… I also have a pretty detailed discussion of how technical change affects the labor share and the recent apparent fall in the labor share (section 6), which is obviously related to the AI issue.

t-distribution as n → ∞

Nutrition research is so broken.