The Mafia is undoubtedly cool.

It makes for good TV and good movies, and some even argue that it makes for economic growth, that it 'greases the wheels'.

But I've never believed this theory, and I think there's considerable evidence against it🧵 Italy is the homeland of the Mafia, and though they've tried everything to get rid of them, they're still around.

Check this date out: They're still doing anti-Mafia stings in 2025!

Why have autism rates risen over time?🧵

I have just put out an article dealing with numerous misconceptions about this topic, and a complete explanation of why autism diagnoses have become more common.

It starts with acknowledging that more kids are diagnosed than in the past: But this is misleading for a few reasons.

One has to do with how this data was sourced. We didn't have a DSM with autism in it before 1980, so all the oldest people in this cohort were diagnosed as adults.

Adults are underdiagnosed. Go out of your way to diagnose? Same rates.

In 2016, researchers found that the minority-White wage gap was overestimated by about 10% because, at work, non-Whites tended to partake in more leisure, waiting around, etc.

They delayed releasing the study out of fear Trump would "use it as a propaganda piece." They explicitly admitted that they let their personal politics get in the way of releasing a study with contentious but correct findings.

That doesn't inspire trust, but at the same time, given the topic, it might!

Aspartame?

What is it? Where is it from? What does it do? Is it harmful? What do health agencies think of it?

And why might the HHS be planning to ban it from American food?

Here's the aspartame review thread🧵 Aspartame is a sugary sweet synthetic molecule that's 200 times sweeter than sucrose.

More than half of the world's supply comes from Ajinomoto of Tokyo, better known for bringing the world MSG.

When you match different American ethnoracial groups on socioeconomic status, the known differences in intelligence still persist. This shows up in many datasets and persists whether using measures of parental or attained socioeconomic status:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1659419519427723264

I don't think Bernie realizes what he's asking for🧵

The Bennett Hypothesis holds that universities alter their prices to capture additional funding that becomes available to students.

When Grad PLUS loans rolled out, the most exposed programs jacked up prices more:

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1913660170971783176

If you want to "fix" this situation within reason, you need to cut funding.

Doing that has disproportionately negative impacts for the educations of people from socioeconomically worse off backgrounds. Or in other words, it hurts upward educational mobility for the poor.

Compared to twenty years ago, kids are eating some types of ultraprocessed foods more and some types less🧵

For example, one thing there's proportionally less of is sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. Meanwhile, there's relatively greater sweet snack consumption. Overall, the ultraprocessed food (UPF) consumption share is up across young ages to similar degrees.

The increase is definitely there, but it isn't dramatic. For example, going from 61% to 67.5% is an 11% increase in twenty years.

Today the President has provided an outline for the direction of medication pricing over the next four years.

This is related to broader deregulatory efforts that are likely going to end up making Americans a lot better off🧵 The executive order starts off by noting the administration's efforts to reduce drug prices the first time around.

These efforts were centered around deregulation and promoting transparency in the concentrated, often-cartelized and captured healthcare marketplace.

The Flynn Effect🧵

People tend to understand it as an indication that earlier generations were a lot less intelligent than we moderns.

Or if they're read up on the literature, they now think things are reversing.

Both are wrong! Take a look at this chart of Norwegian data: If you don't understand what those tests are like, here are some example questions:

A new UBI experiment has come out.

This time... it seems like it worked🧵 The study took place in Germany and was centered on the experiences of 107 people aged 21-40 who lived alone and had earnings between €1,100 and €2,600 per month.

The experiment provided them with €1,200 per month for three full years.

Many women have found that they get pregnant more easily after getting on GLP-1 drugs.

But women aren't the only ones noticing improved fertility:

There's now clinical trial evidence that GLP-1s improve sperm parameters. The largest clinical trial published so far on this subject came out in 2023. It involved 110 men aged 18-35 with metabolic hypogonadism being sorted into one of three conditions:

A: The group seeking fatherhood.
B: The group not seeking fatherhood.
C: The group of already-dads.

A brilliant new paper found that brain drain can literally kill🧵

The paper is all about what happened when Sweden's doctors decided to pack up their stethoscopes and scalpels and go to work in another country. The story begins with the curious economic divergence of Norway and Sweden.

Over time, Norway has become vastly richer than Sweden primarily because it's become Europe's premiere petrostate.

With surging oil prices, their GDP leaped ahead at a staggering pace:

Mathematicians in Renaissance Europe partook in academic duels to win one another's respect, students, assets, and academic positions.

A duel like this is how the cubic equation became known—the first real algebraic discovery since the Babylonians.

Let's talk angry Italians🧵

https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1909751769711640615

The cubic equation was sought after by numerous ancient civilizations, from India to Greece, and despite attempts, a solution was never found

You're probably familiar with these equations, but they're of the form x^3 + cx = d

Without a squared term, we have a "depressed cubic"

I've written two articles on this topic.

I think I have a via negativa answer—one based on what does not cause the effect.

Firstly, the birth order effect shows up from the first surviving child. If a previous sibling died young, the "social firstborn" has the advantage Second, even in large samples, there's cross-cultural inconsistency.

In this case, researchers looked at immigrants to Norway and found that in some cases, their birth order effects were null or went the opposite direction.

Researchers put together an incredible workplace wellness program that provided thousands of workers with paid time off to receive biometric health screening, health risk assessments, smoking cessation help, stress management, exercise, etc.

What did this do for their health?🧵 So, for starters, this program had a large sample and ran over multiple years.

Because of it, we have evidence on what people do with clinical health info, with exercise encouragement and advice, with nutritional knowledge, through peer effects, and so on.

If the Trump administration wants to reshore economic activity, they need to increase the throughput of American ports or America will end up bottlenecked there.

They should subsidize port automation and crush the longshoremen union to make this happen.

Think about the effects: Another thing to keep in mind: knock-on effects!

If ports become more efficient, horrid arrangements like going to more distant ports to avoid waiting would come to an end, or at least be reduced in their extent:

India and China were both poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa in 1990, but they liberalized their economies and pulled away.

Sub-Saharan Africa seemingly refuses to grow and has gained less than $1,000 in GDP PPP per capita over the past three decades. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world's worst basket-case.

A very large share of the economies in the region are built on foreign aid, and even in relatively-prosperous South Africa, all growth from the 20th to 85th percentiles is due to redistribution!

The dual-use side of industrialization isn't just about the ability to convert one factory to another type of factory, but also about having the types of workers who know how to do that, and who know how to set up more factories.

Knowledge really does decay. Remember tritium? With everything nuclear-associated, China has a positive learning curve, meaning that they get better at producing the same things, with the same materials, once they've done it once, twice, thrice, etc.

But in the U.S., nuclear has been neglected; all nuclear knowledge decays.

The state of Louisiana has managed to reduce its Hepatitis C death rate by nearly a sixth in just a few years through a clever public health program🧵 Louisiana's success has to do with the recent development of a miraculous change in how Hepatitis C (HCV) is treated.

Prior to 2013, HCV was primarily treated with drugs like interferon and ribavirin, but the drugs were not consistently effective at clearing the virus.

We finally have large-scale cross-sectional functional connectome scans for people aged young and old.

The finding that was most interesting to me in all this is that the brain's functional connectome seems to grow until about age 38, whereafter it starts shrinking. Ignore the tails, because they're impacted by variance.

But speaking of, it seems that the global variance in the form of the connectome also grows until about age 28, whereafter it starts becoming less variable.

Pirenne's thesis holds 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.