One of my favorite responses to an Acemoglu institutionalism paper was the response to his paper on the impacts of the French Revolution where the authors went
'You just made up a bunch of dates! Using correct dates, the alleged reform effects disappear.'
As is often the case, if someone is alleging that history occurs in discrete leaps, they are probably wrong. Change is far more often continuous in nature.
Amy Wax got in trouble for remarking that she'd not seen a Black student in the top quarter of a Penn Law class.
Thanks to hacked Columbia data, we can see that she was...
Probably right!
In the decade before her statement, there were just two top-25% Black students.
It is *totally* plausible that she never met these students. And it's also plausible that she rarely saw Black students in the top *half*, because each year, the number of them was just 1-4.
But, despite being 8% of the class, they were ~40% of the bottom 10%-ranked students:
Note: Penn is on-par/slightly less elite than Columbia, so it's likely that the Black students there were somewhat *worse*, as the article notes, making her claims more likely.
This all comes from @zagrebbi's latest article. It's well worth a read!
- His license is suspended
- He was once a soldier for a Mafia family
- He's telling me about his time in Rikers
- He's showing me YouTube videos
- He's telling me his theories about Jews
He's telling me about gang wars he was in ad a kid.
He's wondering why all the Chinese girls are lined up - for an audition?
He says to go to Mother's Ruin for latin prostitutes.
All of this entirely unprompted.
"Yeah, these African guys, yeesh"
"I couldn't fuck that whore because I got the erectile dysfunction."