I just created a primer to summarize my research on health care (the many ways in which conventional wisdom is wrong). Much of this content was previously spread across several posts, and some of it is new. randomcriticalanalysis.com/w…

This is yet more brilliant work by Parker. The government can constrain Medicare prices: And this lowers manufacturer revenues: Leading to less R&D spending, and then to fewer new medical devices and patents: And lower overall product quality:

How credible was the "credibility revolution"? How robust is empirical research in economics? We just replicated a year's worth of the American Economic Review & had economists predict robustness. Here's what we learned. econstor.eu/handle/10419/295…

New article by me: The rise in reported maternal mortality rates in the US is largely due to a change in measurement. ourworldindata.org/rise-us-m… The change was adopted by different states at different times, resulting in what appeared to be a gradual rise in maternal mortality.

No, it 𝘪𝘴 the calories. All calories, particularly palatable and energy-dense foods, such as fats and sugars, are much more affordable and accessible today than at any other time or place in history. The Hadza don't have DoorDash. x.com/sixers2772/status/1780…

But @EricTopol the point is that America is *not* an outlier when you account for the fact it is so rich x.com/EricTopol/status/17175…

This week in Everest regressions…

In PNAS today, Greg Clark documents the inheritance of social status in an impressive dataset on 422,374 people born in England between 1600 to 2022. Clark finds a strong persistence in social status going from close to distant relatives, which fits a model dating back to RA Fisher's 1918 work on correlations between relatives due to additive genetic effects and assortative mating. Clark's modeling implies a very high (0.57) correlation between spouses' underlying genetic components affecting social status. The high correlation between spouses' social status (and underlying genetic components) implies that social status has greater persistence across generations than if spouses were not correlated in their social status. It is possible that more complicated models may turn out to explain Clark's and other data better. However, Clark shows that a simple model of additive genetic effects and assortative mating (with limited non-genetic inheritance effects, except for wealth) can fit correlations between relatives' social status over a long time period — a time period in which dramatic social changes have occurred in education and employment. This is a remarkable piece of empirical work that anyone wanting to explain the persistence of social inequalities across generations should take seriously. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.23…

Between 1962 and 1995 Italy would occasionally release 35% of its entire prison population on one day through a broad, sweeping pardon. Unsurprisingly, these pardons drove up crime very substantially. deliverypdf.ssrn.com/deliver…

Cool new study in @CPPJournal that revisits and reanalyzes data from the classic Kansas City Patrol Experiment. Findings suggest even in areas much larger than "hot spots," proactive patrol had a nontrivial suppression effect on crime. #AcademicTwitter onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…

Meh x.com/blair_fix/status/16582…

Actual communism is bad for your health kirkegaard.substack.com/p/ac…

This brings to mind the graphic, below, from the NYPD’s very thorough, comprehensive 2015 report on Quality of Life Policing. The intro by @CommissBratton is worth a read. nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/…

How many anti-semaglutide articles has the Guardian published now? More than a dozen I think, attacking it from every spurious angle possible. It’s always weird to be reminded that your reasoning (to me it seems obviously a positive thing) is wildly different from someone else’s:

A culture transplant helped get us the New Deal: "[I]mmigrants influenced American political ideology during one of the largest episodes of redistribution in US history — the New Deal..."

New research collaboration with the European Central Bank (@ecb) First paper: Reassessing Euro Area financial integration, looking through the financial activities taking place in European “onshore offshore financial centers” (OOFCs) — Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands.