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Matt Darling 🌐🏗️ Profile picture
Matt Darling 🌐🏗️
@besttrousers
Senior Employment Policy Analyst @niskanencenter. Chief Neoliberal Shill 2023. Labor/behavioral economics and causal inference.
Mar 14 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
New piece!

The US has seen record-low unemployment rates below 4% for years, but there's a twist.

People are unemployed for much longer than they used to be when the unemployment rate was comparably low. (1/16) Image Before 2008, the duration of unemployment was almost never above 20 weeks.

Since 2008, it has rarely been *below* it. (2/16) Image
Feb 29 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Really interesting paper - I especially found this chart interesting. In the last 8 years there's been big shifts in what skills people *think* people are going to need.

"Uncertainty is our only certainty when it comes to AI and the future of work."
Image "A third intervention would be to increase public investment in career guidance and counseling in high schools, community colleges, and four-year colleges"

I'd also add that we should fund more of these programs through the DOL, not just education. Image
Jan 30 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It is not true, as @CHSommers suggests in this article, that economists have "decisively refuted" the wage gap.

In fact, the paragraph here is making a fundamental error in statistical analysis. "Controlling for occupation" is inappropriate as occupation is affected by gender. It is literally a textbook error - see excerpts from "Mostly Harmless Econometrics" by @metrics52 and Pischke, or "Causal Inference: The Mixtape" by @causalinf.
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May 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Work requirements" are basically cargo cult employment policy.

You are going through the forms of increasing employment, but not thinking through the mechanisms. Image Good example of what I'm talking about.

You start out with "everyone should work," butwhen you start thinking through the mechanics, you end up with "We should administer federal programs on the basis of signed log-in sheets which are then passed to the relevant administrator." Image
May 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One thing I enjoyed about the "La Sombrita" discussion is that roughly every 12 hours Twitter's estimate the cost of the project doubled (the highest I saw was $500,000).

(As @kristoncapps points out, the project cost taxpayers $0). I do think this is an important point and something that could use broader attention - how do you do pilots that effectively demonstrate the need for non-pilot projects? Image
May 24, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This paper does not include any evaluations of work requirements.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Nice piece by @tobyburns1 on work requirements, featuring me and @keds_economist.

thehill.com/business/40157… Image "Use existing databases to verify work" is a bit of an "assume a can opener" moment.

There just isn't a real time database of "how many hours did a given American work last month" that agencies can draw upon.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I want to note again that I don't think there has been a wide shift in consensus here? There have been a couple of good papers that arguably* support the "greedflation" hypothesis.

But of course there are! NBER *alone* published ~100 papers a month.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Work requirements*are* red tape - it's making people do extra paperwork, and it doesn't increase the number of people with jobs. turning a big dial taht says "paperwork" on it and constantly looking back at the labor force for approval like a contestant on the price is right
May 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is not accurate - the most rigorous papers in this typically show no effect of work requirements on employment.

This is a major problem with the policy! Image Here's what the @USCBO says: Image
May 16, 2023 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Looking forward to meeting oomf in person. "this is one of the best books I have ever read."

! Image
May 16, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I had a good conversation with @MarkVinPaul about issue after his book event, so I'm glad to see this essay.

I think the difference in our views is mostly about the highlighted sentence.

Here's a thread to clarify my objections a bit (1/10): Image First, I don't think loopholes are "easily fixed" in general (look at US tax law!).

(2/10)
May 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@CommunityNotes here is not helpful.

"COVID-19 recovery, rather than any effort by the current President." is not a useful dichotomy. You can certainly say the graph suggests the President plays a bigger role than he actually does.

But easy to imagine a counterfactual recovery with a lost decade for employment.

(Ie, what happened in the 2010s)
May 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I enjoy that this tweet is very crafty about the meaning of "by".

"graph twoway bar payems_delta, by(president)" @ernietedeschi to @CommunityNotes:
May 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'm not *quite* sure I agree with the premise here.

eg, recession indicators (Sahm rule, Chauvet/Piger) aren't really showing this. ImageImage Putting on my monetarist hat, interest rate increases in and of themselves don't indicate that monetary policy is tight, as much as they had previously been loose.
May 5, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
I thought this piece was pretty inaccurate it many respects. 1.) They are confusing accounting claims for causal claims.

@joshbivens_DC EPI report is a great decomposition showing that profits are a big *component* of price increases - that's a very different claim than they are the *cause* of price increases.
Apr 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
You didn't hit a religious taboo; you expressed strong opinions on a topic while displaying basic misconceptions. That modern computers have more computational capacity than early 20th century humans is not an effective argument - it's a demonstration that you are not informed about what the discussion is about.
Apr 26, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I think @jbouie made the most important point about the recent @TheProspect piece.



With that handled, I have a relatively small bone to pick with this section: Image I don't think this segment is about "whether democracy rules over technology" at all.

Both Carlson and Shapiro seem to think that this is a policy choice, and they are coming to different conclusions about which choice they would advocate for.
Apr 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Been talking about this for a while - people MASSIVELY overrate the importance of external validity. So many discussion of policies (for example, the effects of building housing) where people insist that a study from Cincinnati has zero relevance to Cleveland.
Mar 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I went on reddit for the first time since early Covid.

My last post to /r/neoliberal was a banger. Image I am now going through the comment section, letting everyone who thought this was a bad idea know that it led to the fastest employment rebound in US history.
Mar 28, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I am ALWAYS looking for an excuse to talk about Cohen and Dupas 2010!

web.stanford.edu/~pdupas/CohenD… A few years ago, people were reticent to donate anti-malarial nets to the poor.

There was a lot of concern that people would not properly use the nets that they got through donations, and we needed "skin in the game" through co-pays to ensure that the nets were used correctly.