Property taxes should, in theory, make it so buying a home is more affordable and young people will have increased access to home ownership.

Let's look through the literature to see what really happens🧵

Firstly, higher property taxes get older people to move. Higher property taxes act as leverage since they're capitalized into house prices.

This reduces the number of people who own multiple homes, increases general ownership, and increases young ownership even more.

There's a popular belief that family wealth is gone in three generations.

The first earns it, the second stewards it, and the third spends it away: from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations!

But how true is this belief?

Gregory Clark has new evidence🧵 The first thing to note is that family wealth is correlated across many generations. For example, in medieval England, this is how wealth at death correlates across six generations.

It correlates substantially enough to persist for twelve generations at observed rates of decay:

The Catholic Church helped to modernize the West due to its ban on cousin marriage and its disdain for adoption, but also by way of its opposition to polygyny.

The origin of this disdain arguably lies with Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian🧵 Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho argues with a Jew that Christians are the ones living in continuity with God's true intentions.

Justin sees Genesis 2 ("the two shall become one flesh") as normative.

In his apologetic world, Christians are supposed to transcend lust.

The effects of charter schools on student test scores are meta-analytically estimated to be small.

In this study, the largest estimated effect was estimated to be equivalent to ~1.35 IQ points, for mathematics scores, which consistently showed larger effects than reading scores. Similarly, the estimated effect of parents' preferred schools and of elite public secondary schools on test scores is around zero.

Amazing!

The missing heritability issue between SNP heritability methods and traditional pedigree-based estimates has now shrunken to just 12%.

Thanks to large-scale whole-genome data and simultaneously estimated phenotypes, there's not much missing heritability left!

https://twitter.com/LoicYengo/status/1988658354059899157

This analysis has several advantages compared to earlier ones.

The most obvious is the whole-genome data combined with a large sample size. All earlier whole-genome heritability estimates have been made using smaller samples, and thus had far greater uncertainty.

This policy change has resulted in liberal experts coming out of the woodwork to allege that the policy is...

Intended to discriminate against Hispanics and Indians!

This one even alleged that this is discrimination on the basis of genetic race differences!

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1988373544456401340

Trump deserves some praise for getting people to fess up to their hereditarian views on this matter.

Also, frankly, the policy is reasonable.

No fat people, no psychos, no sick people who will be burdens.

The only exception should be for those *paying for treatment here*.

Here are some choice Watson quotes to think about.

"I wouldn't have married a gum-chewing vegetarian." Just being correct:

I'm going to humbly request that everyone stop dunking on John when he isn't even wrong.

Firstly, the reason for the hollowed out middle between -1.96 and 1.96 (p = 0.05) is not due to calculating CIs from abstracts instead of full-texts.

The original source showed that!

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1985838196647694845

The original source for the Medline p-values explicitly compared the distributions in the abstracts and full-texts.

They found that there was a kink such that positive results had excess lower-bounds above 1 and negative results had excess upper-bounds below 1.

I got blocked for this meager bit of pushback on an obviously wrong idea lol.

Seriously:

Anyone claiming that von Neumann was tutored into being a genius is high on crack. He could recite the lines from any page of any book he ever read. That's not education!

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1986317171857711597

'So, what's your theory on how von Neumann could tell you the exact weights and dimensions of objects without measuring tape or a scale?'

'Ah, it was the education that was provided to him, much like the education provided to his brothers and cousins.'

A new study just came out on this topic.

Using data from almost 14 million young people in England, they found that COVID—but not COVID vaccination—was broadly associated with heart problems.

The myocarditis bump (which is milder than real myocarditis) was also small.

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1929723103992860859

This study also provides more to differentiate viral myocarditis from vaccine """myocarditis""", which again, is mild, resolves quickly, etc., unlike real myocarditis.

To see what it is, first look at this plot, showing COVID infection risks by time since diagnosis:

This analysis falls flat when you look into these people or think about how so many other "vons" were not as brilliant.

Von Neumann's brilliance preceded formal education and any tutoring. His advanced math tutor noted that he was smarter than him from their first meeting!

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1985771038605468120

Von Neumann was noted to be eidetic by 3.

By 6 he could divide two 8-digit numbers immediately in his head.

He picked up multiple languages by 7, long before his similarly-instructed cousins and brothers.

By 8, he could do calculus.

His precocity *inspired* hiring a tutor.

What do studies say about "freezing the rent"?

Let's have a thread🧵

First thing's first: Most studies agree that rent controlled units have lower rents, but also the supply of rentable units goes down and un-controlled units see their rents increase.

Uh-oh! Rent control also means that fewer homes get built, and it means that housing quality drops.

After all, if you can't raise the rent, what incentive do you have to make everything sparkly and neat?

I'm not taking a stance on whether inflammation drives cancer, but I will say it's very true that GLP-1 drugs reduce inflammation—a lot!

Tirzepatide at any dose greatly reduced levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and interleukin-6, two important inflammation markers:

https://twitter.com/SimoneSyed/status/1985401799931548148

I have actually had people thank me for getting them on this stuff precisely because they had inflammation issues that these drugs *immediately* solved for them.

Here's an example I've posted before: this man's back pain was cured!

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1952412061322940628

The CDC's new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) didn't put out immunization guidance for 2025-26.

So some researchers got together and did the government's job for them. Here's what they found🧵

First, the RSV vaccine is great for preventing hospitalization! The next thing up is the flu vaccine.

These are still showing a touch lower efficacy than in previous years, but they're still

(1) good
(2) worth it
(3) even more worth it for infants and children

How rich are American workers?

Very!

After accounting for taxes, transfers, cost of living differences and so on, American workers make far more than their counterparts across the OECD. Is this just because Americans work more?

No. That has something to do with it for some comparisons, but it's not everything.

Americans are also more productive and they get to take home more of what they earn.

Wow!

Across basically all of Europe, people at higher income levels are now *more likely* to become parents!

This is a stunning shift! Among men, this relationship goes a while back now, and in several places, the income gradient has gotten more extreme.

Wolf packs are remarkably good at respecting each other's established borders. The project this data is from sometimes releases videos of how this plays out.

For example, here's a video of this playing out for a few wolves over a single day in Spring.

Air traffic control has a major problem in the pipeline.

ATCs are underpaid and overworked.

99% of control towers were understaffed in 2023 and the number of communication mishaps and near-misses between commercial aircraft skyrocketed.

I think the solution might be drones🧵 You might think: Wait, haven't drones been smashing into planes recently? How are they going to help?

That's true! I've attached some pictures of drone-related damage. It's real and getting worse, I'll give you that.

The answer lies in drone communication.

The story of peanut allergy is entering its final chapter.

Nowadays, we are beating back both peanut and other food allergies, and all it took was telling parents the right thing to do🧵 The story begins in 2000, when the American Academy of Pediatrics decided to issue some simple advice to parents: Have your kids avoid peanuts early in life. Don't expose them until they're at least three!

The CEOs managing Sweden's biggest companies tend to be smarter, taller, and to have better personalities. The highest-paid CEOs in Sweden also tend to be taller, smarter, and to have better personalities.

Individuals with higher genetically predicted intelligence tend to end up working more prestigious jobs. They tend to be more emotionally stable, healthier, satisfied with life, richer, and educated too.