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Maxim Ananyev Profile picture
Maxim Ananyev
@maximananyev
Research Fellow at @MelbInstUOM. Data & Analytics. Views are my own. I study political economy and disadvantage with admin data. UCLA alum. From Öskemen, 🇰🇿.
Jul 16, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I think I have read enough of Zygar's new book to understand what he's doing.

I have some reservations but I think it's an important project.

Let me share some thoughts.

1/ Image If you do not know who Zygar (@zygaro on this bird site) is - well, he is a legendary war correspondent, turned investigative journalist, turned founding editor-in-chief of TV Rain, who has recently reinvented himself as a writer of historical non-fiction.

2/
Jul 6, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Про текст Синьориты Фронтенда напишу, потому что это важная тема (если вы не знаете, о чем это - завидую).

Так вот.

Мы, социологи, подходя к любому тексту, понимаем, что личная позиция автора, выраженная в нем - это его наименее интересная часть.

Вот что более интересно:

1/ Очень часто текст выдает информацию, о том, в какой среде, он был создан.

Например, если вы читаете письмо английского аббата 14-го века о том что крестьяне совсем оборзели и должны работать и не бухтеть, требуя себе больше свободного времени и меньше налогов, то...

2/
Mar 12, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Bing AI is far more useful than Chat GPT for exploring the literature. Much less hallucination, much better access to the sources and the ability to summarise those.

Here is an example.

First, I asked it to summarise every chapter of "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson. It scolded me for submitting such a big request, split it into several smaller chunks but eventually gave me passable short summaries.

Then I asked it a more pointed question about one of the A&R claims. And it responded with a correct summary of their argument!
Feb 21, 2023 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
Navalny's 15 theses raised questions about his target audience: West or Russian opposition? Some accused him of self-promotion for the Oscars.

I believe he was speaking to "moderate Russians."

A 🧵 I refer to those who claim to back the government and the war whose commitment is weak as "moderate Russians."

Though they subscribe to propaganda, they occasionally exhibit moments of lucidity. Their allegiance is habitual, rather than conviction-based
Feb 5, 2023 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
This is an important perspective. But let me offer a defence of academics writing books.

There are 2 charges:

1. Academics can't add anything to the reports of journalists who have access,

2. Academics see this war as a professional opportunity.

I'll try to address both.

1/n First, what journalists do is valuable. They are very good at creating an hour-by-hour accounts of what happened, who talked to whom, and what decisions were made.

But academics are good at seeing big picture, providing context, and analysing systematic causes of things.

2/n
Dec 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ok @PopovaProf convinced me that this might be useful.

As a person of Russian ethnicity who can be charitably described on a good day as "liberal", I believe that post-war Ukraine's foreign policy is none of Russia's business. The leaders of future Russia should unequivocally support any course Ukraine takes, including membership in EU, NATO, or any other alliances.

I do not have any data but my impression is that this opinion is prevalent among people y'all describe as "Russian liberals".
Dec 3, 2022 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
Because it's a feature of Twitter to prioritise rage-inducing tweets, I was shown a lot of Holodomor revisionism lately.

Ok, the rage has been induced indeed.

So here's a 🧵on whether those arguments are consistent with the quantitative evidence (spoiler alert: they are not) I am not going to engage with each of those arguments separately - for that I would need the patience of @castletongreene and @ahatanhel - and I lack those.

Instead, I will distill them into three statements -- three lines of defence that revisionists often build.
Nov 7, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
This thread is making rounds.

I disagree with it. Let me outline why.

But first, let me highlight the part where we are in agreement. I do agree that area expertise is important, and many political science departments do not value it as much as they should.

Quantification without understanding where the data come from & what exactly is measured can lead people astray. There is no doubt about that.

But.
Nov 4, 2022 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
My subjective "top 10" of fakes by Russian propaganda for domestic audiences: stories characterised by shamelessness and idiocy.

# 10: "Polish intelligence wrote a report about catastrophic conditions of Ukrainian army"

Truth: No such report exists.

bit.ly/3DBqnFs Image # 9: "Europeans are protesting sanctions against Russia by posting photos of empty plates on Twitter"

Truth: No verifiable records of such protests exist. All the photos are posted by recently registered suspicious accounts.

bit.ly/3UuN7hf Image
Oct 25, 2022 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
According to the polls, the support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the lowest among the young.

38% is high but it's still lower than the 84% in the oldest group.

This is not the only way younger Russians are different.

A short thread on generational divides in Russia. The survey is from July, so pre-mobilisation.

Those who interacted with Russia's young people often confirm that they are different from older generations.

But these are impressions. What about systematic data?

Are they as fond of "strong hand" as their parents, for instance?
Oct 11, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
A thread on conversations with “moderate-to-nationalist” Russian contacts.

By “moderate-to-nationalist” I mean those who consume Russian propaganda uncritically but have not yet blocked me on Whatsapp. Because these are my contacts of 10+ years, I believe those attitudes are sincere.

But I cannot verify this.

I can be annoying, and people who are still talking to me who are not immediate family members are a self-selected bunch.

With these caveats:
Oct 10, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
When the help is most needed Red Cross pauses its operations in Ukraine.

I get the security concerns.

But local Ukrainian volunteers do not have a luxury to be able to pause operations.

Donate to Nova Ukraine, to KSE, to Economists for Ukraine, to other local groups. Nova Ukraine: novaukraine.org
Oct 3, 2022 • 27 tweets • 6 min read
The status of Russian language & Russian speakers in the post-Soviet countries is a difficult topic.

Experiences differ but let me offer my recollections -- as a Russian who was born and grew up in Kazakhstan. This is Ust-Kamenogorsk (or Oskemen in Kazakh), a regional center of East Kazakhstan, a home of 300,000 people.

My beautiful hometown.

I think it is 50% Russian now. It was 60% or even 70% Russian when I lived there (1990s - early 2000s).
Oct 1, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
What to read on Russian resentment.

1. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror, 2020

I like this book because it blows the hole in one of the dangerously popular (and wrong) views about Russia: the one about an imaginary "social contract" between Putin and Russians.

1/X In this theory, Russians gave up political freedoms and received economic prosperity in return. Sharafutdinova argues convincingly that economic prosperity was only a part of the deal. Another important part was a sense of identity and national pride.

2/X
Jul 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I have recently reread Harry Potter and was astonished by how much the Wizarding World resembled modern Russia.

1. Two types of media: (a) government propaganda and (b) insane conspiracies;

2. Teachers, with dubious qualifications, regularly abuse kids at school;

1/n 3. Two occupations command the most respect: a police officer, and a bureaucrat;

4. If a kid wants to become an entrepreneur, the parents will be horrified;

5. Those who become entrepreneurs make the most money on public procurement anyway;

2/n
Jun 13, 2022 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
People on this site enjoy threads about Russian pop-culture.

Russians, according to them, consume chauvinistic movies, read books where Stalin & Hitler fight NATO, listen to the songs about dying for Putin.

The problem: these threads are methodologically flawed.

A 🧵 ImageImage One cannot expect from a Twitter thread a rigour typically reserved for an academic article or a book. If you treat those threads as entertainment, there is nothing wrong with that.

But people are not treating them as entertainment.

They treat them as truth. It's a mistake.
Apr 21, 2022 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Про русскую культуру напишу, потому что очевидно, что еще недостаточно у вас в фейсбуках/телеграмах тейков про культуру.

Как доктор Стрендж в фильме Война Бесконечности, гляжу я в будущее и вижу только один способ спасти то, что еще можно спасти.

И это деколонизация.
Jul 30, 2019 • 11 tweets • 13 min read
@Jabaluck @yudapearl @fuzzydunlop123 @erinhengel @PHuenermund Hi everyone!

Recently, I have seen several things that applied Econ papers do that could be improved with DAG thinking.

1. Controlling for post-instrument confounders. AJR 2001 is the most famous examples, but even very recent papers in IO literature do this. @Jabaluck @yudapearl @fuzzydunlop123 @erinhengel @PHuenermund An example would be: we interested in the effect of some decisions on future competition in a certain set of product classes. We are concerned that (unobserved) profitability of might be a confounder. What do some people do? Control for _sales_ as a proxy for profitability.