Back to econ in a second, but let's have fun: how about 50 correct moderate takes: 1) Ukrainians are heroes who suffered a ton. 2) Putin obviously covets Georgia and the Baltics also. 3) EU not in talks because they basically have no hard power; France even lost the Sahel. 1/x 4) The far right European parties are bad. 5) Pretending parties that win state and EU elections, and are in govt in NL and AT and IT, aren't legitimate will not end well. 6) And in fact EU & UK speech laws not on side of liberty. 7) (but EU food and kid culture is better!) 2/x

France just held a big AI summit. They want to build up their tech sector. Global prosperity would be enhanced by this. But I can't tell you how insane EU regulation is here, and how it inadvertently enhances market power of big US firms. Let's look at GDPR, for example. 1/x You may think this is just "accept cookie" banners and rules so, like, your personal medical information isn't sold. Not at all. Let's imagine you are a tiny US software company, doing a hundred bucks a month of sales in Europe. What's required? 2/x

Curious about the wide range of reactions to o3 Deep Research. I went through some cases where people found "bad results". I think I understand what is going on - part of this is just bad UX choices by OpenAI, part a misunderstanding of what the model is for. 1/x So o3 is a reasoning model - an LLM. Deep Research grafts web search, python tools, and a fine-tuned model to use those tools to gather additional data on top of o3. It can't read gated articles, has a mediocre OCR for public pdfs, can't read dynamically generated webpages. 2/x

The new OpenAI model announced today is quite wild. It is essentially Google's Deep Research idea with multistep reasoning, web search, *and* the o3 model underneath (as far as I know). It sometimes takes a half hour to answer. Let me show you an example. 1/x So related to the tariff nuttiness, what if you wanted to read about the economics of the 1890 McKinley tariff, drawing on modern trade theory? I asked Deep Research to spin up a draft, with a couple paragraphs of guidance, in Latex, with citations. 2/x

The tariffs are insane; everyone knows that if Congress voted in secret, Senate would be 95-5 against. This whole situation is based on the ignorance of one man, and the lack of fortitude among Congress to push back. It will harm all four countries. So what should Canada do? 1/x Facts: most N. America trade is intermediate goods, Canada is (much) more reliant on US intermediate than US is on Canada, "negotiation" tough b/c the policy is bad for the US as is (hard to threaten someone who isn't even maximizing US welfare!). 2/x

I have friends on that AEA committee on social media but seriously, read this report and tell me if you think it is a fair, scholarly, and nonpartisan look at evidence. There are like a half dozen potshots at people who disagree with a certain political consensus. 1/4 Evidence that doesn't support narrative is buried in appendices (eg, in every question there is no gap in harassment by race, so despite the text, no data on that factor is shown at all), "#econtwitter" is seen as neutral environment (it was very left wing applied micro) etc 2/4

Since immigration reform might be on the table: mostly family green cards and H1B via lottery is crazy. Just auction then off with age and field adjustment and a background check + some method for high grit strivers to come in numbers. Abundance! I'd also make it de facto unrestricted for developed countries where net migration isn't huge. This is status quo for Canadians, Chileans, Singaporeans, Australians by treaty (E3, TN, H1B1). No issues except less friction. If future Jensens, Katlins & Elons want to come let them!

Super excited to publicly launch "All Day TA", a product @joshgans and I have been working on with our team over the last year. Short version: if you teach in spring, you will want to use this! It's the future of higher education. A short thread: 1/x @joshgans Today, we lecture, give exams, see student gets 7/10, move on. Educ lit clear that individual tutoring, tracked to level of each student, much more effective - but costly. In Algebra 1 type courses, orgs like @khanacademy have great million $ tools. What about *your* course? 2/x

For new PhD students in social science (and some old professors - I sure needed this a few years ago!): prepared some notes on what the "2024 PhD Tech Stack" should look like. Goal: your research is replicable, accessible, and efficient. 1/9 Replicable: whether or not the journal requires a full replication file, there is *no reason* every table and result in your paper can't be created with one line of code, and *no reason* you can't find every change you or a coauthor made. It's called version control! 2/9

Job market candidates: a quick thread on how the econ market works, incl. at business schools. 1) It is not unusual to get many 100s of applications. Nobody reads them all first-pass. Most places take a quick glance at letter/cv/intro, and keep the top x%. 2) You may think there are well-thought-out ex-ante fields schools will hire in. Sometimes this is true - but sometimes "general" ads are not actually general due to internal dept bargaining. You can't know - and sometimes the dept doesn't know yet - so don't worry about it.

It's Nobel Day, and the prize goes to Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson! I believe AJR 2001 is the most cited economics paper of the 21st century (~20k!). A brief thread on why this literature was so influential, and slightly controversial, and my read on how AJR got here. 🧵1/x Briefly: "AJR polecon" posits 1) institutions, laws & culture persist 2) even if their origins can be for somewhat random reasons 3) leading to differential growth 4) with no 'end of history' liberal democracy trend 5) but societies where broad talent is used productively prosper

It's Friday and I'm feeling a bit feisty, so...I think a lot of innovation economists don't realize just how much influence UCL IIPP is having on policy, esp. in Europe. They are super connected politically and I don't think politicians realize how nonstandard their work is. 1/x IIPP is basically Mazzucato and friends. Almost every economist there is super heterodox. Ex: a housing policy paper commissioned by UK govt by them popped up on my feed. It was a long "it's not supply" argument. Here is the final post; look at who it is "of interest" to! 2/x

Econ friends: if you don't code w/ LLM (Cursor + Sonnet is best right now), huge mistake. Seriously, just throw out your Stata license. Karpathy here is literally one of the world's best coders (Stanford PhD under Fei-fei, head of AI at Tesla, cofounder OpenAI, amazing teacher).

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1827143768459637073

Hacker News, Twitter, etc. are full of "I don't see how this is useful. *My* problems are harder." Dude, *Andrej Karpathy* writes his code this way now. It's not magic - you still need to think. But "2x improvement" from 2023 is now more like 4x productivity improvement.

The hardest thing to explain to non-academics is how different technical rigor is across fields. Here's (yet another) article in PNAS, of course handled by Fiske, of course in psych, that we would have desk rejected. Paper is "Can Names Shape Facial Appearance?" 1/n The question is (and I have no idea why we care, to be honest) whether names match facial appearance, even if we go beyond gender/race/obv religion. Their headline result? Yes, but only for adults, so people "grow into" their faces. 2/n

A lot of bad AI policy is being driven by the fact that one side of the debate is sometimes really odd. "I don't believe exercise, Ozempic or calorie counting work, so I do a crazy fast every 3rd month" is literally the science of the most famous AI alignment guy. 1/3

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1816925777377788295

Many EA and alignment folks are really thoughtful and reasonable. But there is a blind spot in their separation of better knowledge (they are often smart!) vs. different preferences. Two ppl may disagree on policy b/c one has better info or b/c they have different goals. 2/3

Massive OpenResearch basic income papers are out (@smilleralert @dbroockman @evavivalt @AlexBartik @elizabethrds). Very much worth reading - my view is that it is an incredible RCT and an incredible disappointment. RCT was USD11400/yr for 3 years, 1k treatment, 2k control. 1/x The study was crazy, by the way. Very low attrition, time diaries, *blood draws to measure health*(?!) My favorite: they got Ilinois to pass a law that this RCT income wasn't taxable & didn't change other-benefit eligibility. That is, it was a net post-tax increase in income! 2/x

I came to U Toronto from Chicago today 10 yrs ago on Canada Day. So a short thread on Canada from an US perspective. And yes, living in Toronto is like living in NYC and talking about the US overall, but I've also been from Tuk to Tofino to rural Newfoundland & Quebec. 1/23 Best thing about Canada is the cultural emphasis on "be nice". Politeness is really the country's core value, very good for quality of life. I had a car in downtown Saskatoon stop for me to cross the road *when they had a green light*. 2/x

Many folks might be surprised at the low technical level of a lot of published academic research. A good example: snowball sampling. Get a small initial sample, ask for their friends/contacts, and build the sample from there. 178000 papers on Google Scholar using this. 1/4 In top 5 econ journals, the term has been used 7 times: either as a warning not to do it, or in the uncontroversial Trow/Coleman case where you are either measuring a dyadic variable (hence need both parts of the dyad) or are tracing out the size of a population. 2/4

Back from a great Paris conference last week after 4 visits to France in the last year - it's a very economically interesting country at the moment, with the caveat that it's not clear how much of this is Macron vs. long-run change. A short thread. First, the good: obvious cultural supremacy, the clear #2 after the US. Wemby, the Olympics, LVMH and the other fashion conglomerates, Lupin, Mbappe, Cannes, 2 straight World Cup finals, Djadja, Ernaux, Michelin cuisine, still huge and young Francophonie + the enviable lifestyle.

Toronto's President is at parliament today + injunction is coming to end encampment. I understand people have strong feelings on this issue & deep disagreements. I get it. War is awful. Intractable problems are intractable for a reason. I think we're close to resolution, though. That said, as our President mentioned, there have been 38 incidents reported to police. 6 of which he said would fit defn of hate crime. On day 1, both @mattgurney and I saw "Go back to Europe". A guy yelled about Hitler. The university has removed hateful posters almost daily.

A short note on the encampment that's now set up here in Toronto @UofT. I snuck into it today (I told them I was a fellow comrade who'd stepped out to get a cig - not exactly crack security). I think it's only fair to talk to the folks and see what's going on before judging. 1/x I did start recording video, just to ensure nothing was misinterpeted, when a fellow wanted to remove me from the site. I'm not trying to embarrass these kids, so won't post it, but suffice to say what I'm saying below is documented. 2/x