When Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute asserts that I'm "confused" about jargon in the trust literature, is he correct?

Of course not. Bayesians, update accordingly.

New post at Heterodox STEM, generously hosted by @DorianAbbot, Uslaner and Keefer cameos.

Short🧵: In a new response to my Heterodox STEM post, Nowrasteh says "Garett cites older papers that used inconsistent terminology."

But Keefer, a founder of trust+growth regressions, uses interpersonal trust as a synonym for generalized trust in 2022 and 2025.

In answer to the @ATabarrok question, "Why aren't we treating AI as a Sputnik moment," I offered changing voter demographics as a key reason.

America added a lot of new voters after 1957!

Tabarrok at @margrev today cited a paper on rising zero-sum thinking, which finds a... @ATabarrok @MargRev B/W zero-sum worldview gap is bigger than the M/F gap, about the same as the strong Dem/strong GOP gap:

In January, S&P gave a low grade to Ethena, the “synthetic dollar.”

It said Ethena’s delta-neutral approach was pretty risky.

Speaking for myself and not for @Bluechip_org, I agree, and I’ll explain in more detail here. How does Ethena work?

Informally, it buys Ethereum as well as portfolio insurance on that Ethereum.

My claim is that good portfolio insurance is really expensive-- so expensive that on average it’ll be a money-loser.

I build my case in part on the “overpriced puts puzzle.”

The paper does not show foreigners commit crimes at the same rate as Germans

Instead, it claims to explain why foreigners commit crimes at higher rates than Germans.

So the title is the opposite of the truth.

Academics, please point out this error candidly, openly. I hope @tylercowen & @ATabarrok will note the misinterpretation of multivariate regression in this paper.

And @mattyglesias could help the cause of improved empirical debates by pointing the difference between claiming something is false versus explaining why it's true.

In Ek's excellent new @JPolEcon piece on migrants to Sweden, he reports a "significant dispersion in human capital across countries [of origin] with a 90/10 percentile ratio of 3.2."

So, which are at the 90th percentile?

The ethics review board wouldn't let him tell us.
🧵: The screenshot above is from his ReadMe file here, part of a ZIP that includes all of the replication data.

These words should be enough to find the files via a Google search:

"Replication Data for: Cultural Values and Productivity"

Prof. Cook on TCT:

"A great example of Jones’s descriptive abilities lies in a description of task diversity.. by Adam Smith.. The positive channels of diversity are limited to specific settings, while the negative channels of diversity are broader & more likely to be realized." "Jones’s greatest strength is in his ability to distill novel research into easy-to-understand concepts... His examples are excellent and easy to follow, and he frames the problems in a way that promotes further curiosity and exploration."

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

Talent Transplant en français:

"Cardinal Richelieu [favored] talent importation, encouraging... the establishment of small, industrious communities of Spanish conversos... and discreetly shielding these economically productive ‘peregrinos’, or wanderers, from persecution." engelsbergideas.com/essays/battlin…

Bryan Caplan:
"[N]one of the.. papers on [immigrant assimilation] I’ve read seriously worried that self-reports.. severely understate assimilation."

From the paper I cite on Page 20 of TCT:
"[S]avings rates might suffer from self-reporting bias. To address such a concern..." If Bryan Caplan is concerned that self-reporting bias of subjective attitudes might be driving cultural transplant findings...

....Then I hope he chooses to focus on the transplant of savings behavior I report in Chapter 1 of TCT.

Page 25 of The Culture Transplant:

The private return to AGI will plausibly be as low as the private return to HGI:

About 1% more output per IQ point.

So an IQ 400 AGI can do about 20X of an average person.

If you're looking for god-tier AGI, that ain't it. The paradox of IQ is that the private return to IQ (a measure of human general intelligence) is pretty low, but the payoff to IQ at the national level is pretty high-- enough to explain half or more of the percentage differences across countries.

sup.org/books/extra/?i…

This is clarifying:

The Deep Roots literature, first summarized in this 2013 piece in the Journal of Economic Literature, is a big obstacle to Nowrasteh's views on immigration policy.

And he knows it.

So here's a short thread on key mentions of "ancestry" in this famed paper.

https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1609604178799624193

From the abstract of the first Deep Roots literature review:

"A growing body of new empirical work focuses on… the effects of historical variables on contemporary income by explicitly taking into account the ancestral composition of current populations."
scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

Culture Transplant cameo, cross-posted at WaPo:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… "In.. The Culture Transplant.. Jones.. points out that just 7 countries (the US, China, Japan, South Korea, France, Germany & the UK) are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s patents, research grants, scientific publications, & Nobel prizes."

washingtonpost.com/business/want-…

Deep Roots theory argues in part that cultural ancestry shapes the modern prosperity of nations.

If your critique of Deep Roots is to weight nations by population, you should:

1. Test the "T" in the Deep Roots SAT scores.
2. Notice that China Grew Fast.
dropbox.com/s/ebo170ghy2zz… I've given the above presentation to two academic audiences so far, glad to present it to other interested audiences upon request.

Some countries try authoritarian development--loosely, "The China Model"--and fail completely. Why?

Marcel Gautreau's JMP sets out to answer that question for Syria.

In brief, market liberalization weakens the power of elites to rent-seek and to respond to regime threats. Assad wasn't "born to rule," he was an ophthalmologist whose older brother died in a car crash. Assad was trained in the UK, knew what life in the West was like.

Assad also had de facto run Lebanon, a more prosperous state, so he saw how markets could work in the Levant. Plus: