Thread.

On the left, you can see a map of corruption indexed by the number of mob crimes per 100,000. On the right, you can see corruption indexed by how much people steal from the public purse.

And in the middle, a map of inbreeding.

Clannish people do clannish crimes. Though it's noted in the image, I want to reiterate that the corruption measure on the right is reverse-coded, so higher values indicate lower corruption.

The correlations with consanguinity are 0.65 and -0.52, and they hold up splitting the country in half and in other specs.

The largest price-fixing operation in U.S. history took place when @tevapharm hired a woman to do "price increase implementation."

Through LinkedIn & Facebook, she organized a multi-billion dollar cartel, singlehandedly increasing generic drug prices.

There are lessons here🧵 When the cartel started, the companies in question started filing ANDAs, the FDA's "Abbreviated New Drug Applications" to start selling a generic version of an existing drug.

You can see that the involved parties started filing and getting approvals en masse.

Multifamily rental management companies have recently begun adopting algorithmic pricing tools to adjust their rents.

In recent years, about a quarter of buildings and a third of all units are managed with these tools.

What's the effect?🧵 The answer to this question depends on when you ask it.

Early adopters who picked up the technology in 2007, for instance, saw small decreases in asking rents, as well as small increases in occupancy rates.

Algorithmic pricing was making the market better for customers!

The end of affirmative action should have brought about major changes at American universities.

But did it?🧵

One piece of evidence it did is that the Black student share declined: Another piece of evidence is that the Hispanic share declined:

It's well-known that a very small portion of the total criminal population is responsible for the overwhelming majority of all crime.

A new study shows that this is also true of prison misconduct:

Just 10% of prisoners are responsible for more than 70% of misconduct in prisons! The above numbers were for males. Here are the numbers for female prisoners.

The numbers are eerily similar.

I used to like this chart, but now I think it's too misleading and we should leave it behind in 2024.

🧵 The key issue is how household size is adjusted for.

In the OP image, they divide by the square root of household size. This is problematic because it means Gen Z incomes are being inflated to the extent they live with their parents.

I was reminded of this yesterday when looking into national IQ estimates.

The "pseudo-analysis" style of critique is to just spit out tons of possible problems, to nitpick, and then to assume that means a whole enterprise is rotten without even checking if the critique holds. The people who engage in this style of critique (example below) don't care for scientific reasoning about these topics.

They want purity by their arbitrary and inconsistent standards, not correctness, not a 'best effort' to get make progress on finding answers.

This post got 50,000 likes and it never even pointed out the actual issue with the calculations, it just took issue with framing and it expressed that Kareem is too inept to find sources.

But what's new?

Kareem debunking thread below Kareem says this is a "textbook example of how to lie with statistics."

It really isn't, but let's see what he bases this on.

The first thing he says -- his "main criticism" -- is that the data isn't provided. But for Kareem, this is completely meaningless.

'The patient always lies.'

A major problem with the healthcare system is that patients lie to their doctor.

Most patients will even privately admit that they lied when they were informing their doctors about their issues. Their reasons for doing this often aren't very good: Patients want to avoid getting lectured, they don't want their doctor to call them fat or tell them their snacking habits are unhealthy. They're afraid the doctor will judge them or think they're stupid or immoral, and they don't want the doctor to tell their family.

Napoleon was the best-performing general in European history, and it's not even close.

His Wins Above Replacement (WAR) simply dwarfed everyone else, including Caesar. You know who underperformed?

Robert E. Lee!

Gray reputation, poor realized performance. He faced a lot of disadvantages, but it's clear he also made a lot of bad choices, like ordering Picketts' Charge.

The Home Office rape gang report cited several studies that reported the ethnicities of rape gang members and it concluded that there wasn't reliable evidence of Asian overrepresentation.

But every study providing data showed there definitely was🧵

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1875007472316084692

If you throw in the numbers from Cockbain's (2018) study, the overrepresentation is on the order of hundreds of times.

If Asians are 6.1% (8.6%) vs Whites being 87.6% (83.1%) of the general population, that report has them at 380.56x (256.06x) overrepresented.

Have you noticed that people seem younger at the same ages? 40 is the new 30, 30 is the new 25, and so on?

There's something to it. People nowadays are aging more gracefully, and what makes this more interesting is that it's a global phenomenon.

Let's talk five "capacities"🧵 Psychological capacity is indexed by self-reports: How do you feel, how are you sleeping, etc.

Locomotor capacity is indexed by measured walking speeds, the classic chair stand test, etc.

Vitality capacity is indexed by grip strength, forced expiratory volumes, and hemoglobin A

Thread on millionaires.

8/10 millionaires didn't receive an inheritance and only 3% of millionaires received more than a $1 million inheritance.

Millionaires generally made their own money. Their top careers also generally aren't business founders.

They're engineers, accountants, even teachers. Less than a third (31%) even managed to average a $100,000 income over the course of their careers and a third never made six figures in any year they worked.

Not true!

H-1B workers are actually highly-paid, with median earnings around the 90th percentile wage for Americans in general.

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1874918027982172626

There is a sense in which Sanders is sort-of correct, but it's not the common interpretation of what he's saying.

That is, 'H-1B workers make less than the prevailing wages for their occupations'

But since this is legally prohibited, it's untrue without additional qualification

Firms that won more H-1B visas in the first large-scale lottery had higher total employment growth.

🧵 The timeline here is simple. Here's an outline:

In the U.S., immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than natives do.

But this wasn't always so true!

In the 19th century, immigrants and natives were much more similar in terms of how often they committed crimes🧵 One possibility?

Changing racial composition in "US-Born". This might happen because Blacks--who do crimes at higher rates than Whites--were a growing share of that category.

But that isn't it. Subset to Whites, same result, albeit with different timings and magnitudes:

A few days ago, Biden commuted the death sentences of almost every federal death row inmate.

Every single person whose sentence Biden commuted was verifiably evil and clearly earned the death penalty.

Let's go through all 37🧵 Shannon Agofsky drowned a bank manager alive, received life in prison, and in prison, kept talking about how he was itching to beat up other prisoners.

Then he killed a fellow prisoner by stomping his neck in and causing him to drown in his own blood.

On camera. Guilty.

The vast majority of people support high-skilled immigration, whether they supported Trump or Harris.

Where the two camps meaningfully disagree is with respect to refugees, illegals, and immigration for the sake of diversity.

It's important to disambiguate immigrant groups. The strong support for high-skilled immigrants broadly held up in another poll from back in April when Biden was still in the running:

"Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable."

This quote describes Pirenne's thesis that Antiquity—the period when economic activity concentrated in the Mediterranean—ended because the rise of Islam destroyed the flow of trade across it. The decline in trade that resulted from differences in faith had profound consequences for the economic geography of Europe.

Byzantine economic activity depended on trade, and it collapsed, whereas the Frankish economy, which was never trade-dependent, transformed.

Robustness tests are supposed to show a study's results hold up no matter how you reasonably change the specification

But we live in a world with p-hacking, and people p-hack robustness tests

Compared to unshown robustness tests (blue), what we get is suspiciously significant! This is the distribution of z-values for different tests in economics papers, coupled with the robustness tests their authors presented, and other, plausible robustness tests they didn't.

Clearly people p-hack, and they p-hack tests that are supposed to make us think they didn't

Psychotic people follow scripts.

Let's talk about the glass delusion, the Middle Ages' bout with a mass psychogenic illness marked by people believing they were made of glass. Glass was a valuable commodity in Europe. It was primarily owned by the noble and well-to-do, and it had a notable purpose in alchemy.

Its perception as the technology of the time was as one that's both fragile and valuable, like the nobility.