Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬's Threads

Sep 30 • 14 tweets • 5 min read

A few years ago I was chewing on a graphs like these ones.

Apartment-dwelling is rising over time. But the evidence suggests that apartment-life is not great for family formation. It's hard to add SFH given land constraints, commute times, etc. So what to do about housing? 1/🧵

The first and most obvious step is just: remove any obstacles that do exist for more dense, young-family-friendly SFH. We wrote a big report on that topic at @FamStudies back in March. We tackled affordability, how to get more dense starter-home neighborhoods, crime, etc.

Aug 6 • 15 tweets • 3 min read

I AM ONCE AGAIN BEGGING THE CDC TO FIX THE OBVIOUS ISSUE HERE

I *think* the official vital statistics data is based on actual gestational mothers, but I'd like CDC to clarify that in public.

In the meantime, birth certificates need to be listing legal, genetic, and gestational parentage ON. SEPARATE. LINES.

Jul 21 • 16 tweets • 4 min read

Are you online? Then you've probably seen the takes: rich men should just marry a pretty, submissive Applebee's waitress. There's a whole genre of tweet that seems to fantasize about highly available food service workers.

I decided, at my peril, to take it seriously and test it Who is right? The online Waffle House Fantasists, or @CartoonsHateHer 's pro-girlboss takes?

In today's post at @FamStudies , I argue.... kind of neither!

Jul 16 • 7 tweets • 2 min read

SO this actually isn't what's going on.

What's going on is way more interesting!

UNIQLO is vastly further up the retail foodchain in the US than it is in Asia.

KFC and McDonalds are way fancier in Asia than America.

Why?

Because the export versions are always the best versions. Exporting intrinsically creates costs: transport, transactions, often tariffs. As a result, exporting is rather challenging for most firms, which is why most firms do not export products.

Firms that do export products are entering a larger, more competitive space, so have to compete harder.

Jun 27 • 4 tweets • 1 min read

The best historical analog for the US is not, in fact, the late Roman Empire.

It is the 18th century Qing Dynasty.

Interesting times may yet be ahead of us. Society undefeated in war with an incredible reputation containing a massive share of world GDP and a huge leading advantage in technology and population originally ruled by a cadre of highly capable settler-militarist leaders ultimately brought down by the ability of technological upstarts abroad to bleed it of its wealth, hook its people on drugs, and exploit idiotic internal divisions to pick it apart. Plus a bunch of corruption, weird cults of personality, and just weird cults along the way.

Jun 25 • 32 tweets • 9 min read

It's a mystery what's happening here! Such a mystery! Science has no answer for why dog deaths have risen 240% since 2017!

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1937917274154823816

My prior on trend breaks like this is the same as @cremieuxrecueil : they're usually due to a change in data generation.

But in this case it's not. The ICD code rules did not change. The reporting system did not change.

And other animal deaths didn't change as much:

Jun 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read

I think it would be great to have the BLM+NFS produce a GIS map that shades out all the lands which are 1) outside the states of eligibility 2) covered under wilderness protection rules, 3) covered under ongoing rights rules, 4) not buildable, 5) excessively remote

But in practice, the reasons against this are:
1) The point of the nomination-and-consultation process is to leave discretion to states and localities! That's literally the point! DC deciding which lands are right for disposal would defeat the point of the policy!
2) Rule changes for federal lands are implemented routinely via statute, federal land sales do already occur (public purpose rules, etc), changes in land statuses do occur (upgrades of NPS lands, etc), and AFAIK none of these have ever been paired with an expectation that a Senator's office should hire an ArcGIS team to work up an interactive parcel-level map of half of the land area of the United States

It's actually plenty to just have the statute say what the rules are! "Point at the map exactly what's for sale."

Nothing. Literally nothing. This law establishes zero acres for sale.

It mandates the BLM and NFS to find acreage which fits the rules stipulated.

Now, a totally fair critique is: "What if they can't find enough acreage to fit the rules stipulated?"

And I think that's definitely a weak point in the drafting! I hope they fix it in conference!

In practice I don't think it will be an issue.

Jun 20 • 21 tweets • 6 min read

The thing about the conservatives opposed to selling Federal lands (e.g. I noticed @L0m3z ), is that they clearly have not actually read @BasedMikeLee 's actual bill. Massive failure of literacy on the part of the based right.

So let's look at the bill! First, what kind of land can be sold?

This turns out to be complicated. The answer is basically Bureau of Land Management Land or Forest Service Land (with exceptions). So what kind of land CANNOT be sold?

Jun 17 • 9 tweets • 2 min read

Nice work highlighting a cool study showing a Gene-Environment interaction!

Kids with "bad genes" for schooling who have the "good luck" to be born in a rich household do just fine!

Unless the parents divorce, in which case they regress to genetic expectation.

https://twitter.com/WendyRWang/status/1935048449696690340

Paper abstract.

Jun 10 • 13 tweets • 4 min read

This article is circulating again.

In the ensuing 5 years, I'm not sure 100% of the article is correct. The scale of historic under-reporting of police-related homicides was probably larger than I allowed for here.

But the basic thesis that police violence is escalating holds up in more recent data. Here are CDC estimates of "deaths of legal intervention" exclusive of executions. These should overwhelmingly be deaths involving police officers, though I think they might include some deaths involving prisoners.

May 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read

i'm sorry, but this is nonsense

exactly what share of guys in 1300 do you think had a study or a social club!?!?

i literally wrote a history of social clubs in america and what all scholars basically agree on is they were more-or-less invented in the 18th century and popularized in the 19th and collapsed by late 20th; they had less than a century of real heyday because they were actually a massively inefficient mode of social organization. moreover, their existence was for a specific reason:

male labor productivity had FINALLY broken above subsistence providing some excess leisure opportunities, but this was really just because social norms had prevented women from capturing any of the gains. as soon as women started capturing gains from modernity, the market for male social clubs vanished, because it was an insane arrangement from the beginning.

May 28 • 33 tweets • 6 min read

There's a popular myth that when men get promoted, it causes marriage stability, but when women get promoted, it causes divorce.

This turns out to be wrong, but understanding why it's wrong is surprisingly complicated! So to start with we have to understand something: men usually earn more than women, and this gets more true as marriages go on, as women exit the workforce to raise kids more than men do.

Apr 30 • 7 tweets • 2 min read

Amish people have a lot of babies.

But just how many babies exactly?

In a new paper at @DemographicRes , I and some brilliant coauthors use two totally different measures to measure Amish fertility and show that it is likely in decline.

The blue line is actual registry data on Amish families, the red line is a broad catchment of all Pennsylvania Dutch-speakers. Either is a good proxy for "Amish people generally," and for both, "line go down."

Apr 23 • 15 tweets • 4 min read

western Med Punics (think Carthaginians) were basically completely genetically separated from Levantine Punics.

this kind of casts into doubt some of the argument that Rome's unique advantage was its ability to incorporate disparate peoples via citizenship since this genetic signature is just gonzo, Punics clearly a multiethnic identity despite strong cultural similarity

Apr 18 • 5 tweets • 1 min read

it seems to me many people did not realize that large sections of Decker's post appears to be quotes from founding fathers. i'm not sure how intentional this was on his part but it would have been hilarious watching courts try to be like "quoting the declaration of independence is hate speech" also i will just lay down a marker:

if any election does not occur on its regularly scheduled day, or if government policies cause voter participation to fall more than 30% as a share of the adult population vs. the average of the last 10 elections

i think that's the line

Apr 15 • 29 tweets • 7 min read

reminder: there continues to be zero scientific evidence of harms from the covid vaccination

https://twitter.com/EmeraldRobinson/status/1912134071687295450

lol at the dumdums responding here

my favorite response is "but Lyman some people had some side effects!"

oh no, side effects! wut will we ever do!

this kind of paranoid safetyism has got to go, folks. we need strong, prosocial, risk-taking behavior, such as getting vaccinated

Apr 10 • 8 tweets • 2 min read

The primary use of artificial wombs if they become available will not be by women to free themselves of biological burdens and thus attain liberation, but rather will be by men to free themselves of relational burdens and thus eliminate the need for decent treatment of partners. Yes, there are lots of men who would like to have children and happily hire nannies for them 24/7. I regret to inform you this is indeed A Type of Guy.

https://x.com/kaschuta/status/1910389638910337449

Apr 1 • 17 tweets • 4 min read

Today I am dropping some truth bombs.

We should make seniors pay full freight on property taxes.

The relationship between too-low property taxes and bad demographic outcomes is not subtle. The states with low property tax rates have MUCH larger gaps between fertility preferences and outcomes than states with other kinds of low taxes.

Mar 24 • 7 tweets • 2 min read

Approximately 15-25% of everything we know about global fertility comes from basically one source: the Demographic and Health Surveys.

The contract funding them seems to have been cancelled.

If you're worried about falling fertility, this is a five-alarm fire.

This piece is cowritten by me and @MoreBirths . Our take here is basic: the DHS surveys are a well-run program yielding very clear benefits to the U.S. and are a key tool we have on hand to figure out how to tackle low fertility.

Losing this tool is not good at all.

Mar 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

raising retirement age reduces fertility

there's a TRADEOFF between "adapting" to demographic decline and "solving" demographic decline!

many strategies that help societies cope in the near term make demographic balances worse later on.

when grandmas have to work later in life, they provide less childcare

Mar 17 • 22 tweets • 7 min read

Today at @FamStudies we released a new study of almost 9,000 reproductive-age Americans showing that the only path to a more family-friendly America is opening up new land for single-family housing (thread).

https://twitter.com/SecretaryTurner/status/1901634637606035462

The heart of our study is this graph, which shows the results of a randomized forced-choice (conjoint) experiment where respondents had to choose, between different housing options, in which they'd be most open to having (more) kids.

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