Hello, median voter theorem in ageing societies, my old friend …

RT @sapinker: Mental Health Crisis—or Crisis of Overdiagnosis? By @AdamOmaryPhD profectusmag.com/mental-heal… via @Profectus Magazine

@ATabarrok is correct: this is bad stuff. As has happened before, the Trump ppl have ID'd something that needs improvement--the research-funding process--and are implementing measures, esp. political loyalty tests, that'll make the situation much worse. bit.ly/4eiEOR1

I have similar concerns about the future of research/the academy, but without tenure (and won't be getting it in time). Things are about to get wild.

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…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, economic growth is driving broad improvements to climate-sensitive outcomes (like crop yields), and rich countries are the main places broadly reducing their environmental impacts, largely thanks to innovations and political space for environmentalism facilitated by growth. Links below.

Contrary to popular belief, the period of human history when men could vote but women couldn’t was relatively brief. For most of human history, no one could vote - not men, not women, not anyone. [Link below.]

The former ICE commander-at-large apparently believes that the US has "106 million illegals who are here"--about 31% of the population. One out of three US people? I mean, I'm in a crowded cafe right now and... well, where are they?

One of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value.

This aged unfortunately well.

The longer people are in academia, the more they realize that when reading papers it's best to ignore Intro, Discussion etc. and just look at Methods and Results journals.plos.org/plosone/ar…

I strongly endorse this outstanding report, commissioned by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew Martin, Chancellor of Washington University on the State of Scholarship. It is a cri de couer about the state of the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. The object of scrutinty is "a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity." The report is properly nuanced in identifying subfields in which the scholarly enterprise has been damaged and as opposed to blanket disciplinary condemnations because of problems in particular areas. vanderbilt.edu/principles/st…

Most experiments fail, and negative results rarely get published. This means LLMs are unaware of the outcomes of most experiments.

"Looking back on the tragedies of the last century, one is struck by the ambivalent role of intellectuals. They often were the ones to give the signal for revolt against oppression; but equally often they laid the groundwork for the fanaticization of spirits, the moral chaos...

This is correct and extremely embarrassing for US democracy. What’s also bad is the number of people, political scientists among them, who show up to tell you there’s no other way and you’re damaging the civic fabric by pointing out how ridiculous it is.

In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy. Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service.

None of your pop-culture crap on *this* airplane, thank you very much.

AEA meeting is a different object now. Registrations still declining, but more slowly.

'We promise to undo some of the insane shit we imposed on you last time we were in power' is certainly a bold strategy.

Thank you @IPSTCKenya for hosting us. Looking forward to our great collaboration. @Uni_of_Essex @uniessexgovt @hdorus