Next paper: Agarwal, Gaule, Jiang

How can we find people who are likely to excel in STEM, while they are still in their teenage years?

1/N

This conference is streaming btw: nber.org/conferences/ec… Einstein was a high-school dropout and failed the entrance exam at ETH in Zurich.

Finding Young Einsteins might be challenging!

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Live-tweeting @karthik_econ's presentation on state capacity at NEUDC.

Simple story of India's economy:
- Top 10% drives demand and growth
- Next 30-40% in service sector jobs supporting the top 10%
- remaining 50% left out, supported by welfare programs

Seems suboptimal 1/n @karthik_econ "The weak performance of the Indian state is one of the ten greatest challenges facing humanity" — Lant Pritchett 2008

Karthik: weak state capacity is the greatest barrier to India reaching its full potential.
2/n

A new India-China fact (to me):

The Chinese state prioritized primary education over secondary/tertiary, while the Indian state did the opposite.

Chinese primary enrollment rate passed India in 1950, secondary 1975, and tertiary only in 2000!
India still produces more Master degrees (but China more doctorates)
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The Latinx polling paper is excellent, but reaches the wrong conclusion. It has almost nothing to do with queerphobia, Latino voters just don’t like being called LatinX.

Politicians using the term "Latinx" lose 6 PERCENTAGE POINTS vote share. A 🧵👇🏻
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https://x.com/mfrmarcel/status/1850899401088377035

The authors’ take is something like this:

Hispanic voters are queerphobic, so we have a trade-off: use inclusive language (good), lose Democratic votes (bad).

But the evidence for this claim is really weak. 2/N

What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too?

And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates.

A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N Why we should care: science is arguably the most important force for human progress, maybe by a lot. More discoveries, better lives for all of us.

If there’s a kid who could make a foundational discovery, we want to make sure they don’t spend their lives in the mines. 2/N

My preliminary takeaway from the 3-year cash transfer study:

Poverty is a lot more than just not having enough cash. Many factors interact to keep people in a bad equilibrium.

Once you're in that equilibrium, cash transfers alone don't change your steady state. 1/N It's a bit obvious in retrospect.

But the recent zeitgeist has very much been one of "poverty is just low income, cash transfers are the answer."

Not to mention the Silicon Valley dreams of AI + UBI utopia.

2/N

📣 New working paper on residential segregation in India. We’ve been working for 5 years on this.

8 facts about residential segregation in India, from new administrative data. The situation is not great 🧵 1/N This is joint work with @thesamasher @kritarthjha @aadukia @brandonjoeltan

Summary: devdatalab.org/segregation
Media fact sheet: paulnovosad.com/pdf/segregatio…
Paper: paulnovosad.com/pdf/india-segr…

Let’s begin 2/N 👇

🚨Please stop calling this brain drain.

When there are high overseas returns to education, *more people get educated*.

Think about all the folk working their asses off for this exam, and then *staying in India*.

High returns for migrants are good, they build human capital. 1/N

https://twitter.com/StefanFSchubert/status/1666499415144538116

"Brain drain" is mostly a myth. It assumes the stock of educated people is fixed.

It isn't— when engineers are getting amazing international opportunities, *more people train to be engineers.*

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🤷🤷‍♀️New data: SHRUG 2 is out!! @devdatalab has been working on this for two years, a HUGE update to India’s coolest data platform:
1. Maps of *every* 2011 town and village, with ids
2. All data at every geography (villages, districts, ACs, etc)...
devdatalab.org/shrug

🧵1/N 3. Some of the only local data since 2018: Project Antyodaya village info + Facebook's satellite-detected wealth
4. Constituency-village keys
5. Detailed village- and town-level asset lists from SECC
6. Night lights, forest cover, air pollution

2/N

An updated graph of U.S. middle-aged mortality, this time with the crucial time series legend.

Other race/gender groups in thread 1/8 Mortality change among white men, age 50–54

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A 🧵 on our work on US mortality change, just out in AEJ:App, with @thesamasher and @charlierafkin.

We ask: how concentrated is the U.S. pre-Covid mortality crisis? Is everyone doing a little worse, or is a small subset doing catastrophically worse?

The graph is a spoiler 1/N White Americans without a high school degree have rising middle-age mortality rates.

But is it because: (1) it has gotten worse to be at the bottom of the education distribution; or (2) these ppl are more negatively selected, since high school completion rates are going up?

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Reasons you are probably overestimating the probability that Twitter dies:
1. Platforms die when their audience leaves. Twitter audience is bigger than ever.
2. Platforms survive longer than you think. MySpace, Tumblr, Flickr, even AOL are still alive.

1/N 3. Twitter's main asset is the network — you. You are all still here, even the ones who left are still here.

4. The media class despises Elon Musk and is cheering for his demise. They are extremely biased observers.

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I still can't get this terrible article out of my head. It's such a sign of where science has gone wrong. But all the incentives point toward academics spending their time and energy producing this kind of work. 👇👇

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nytimes.com/2022/10/12/hea… Background: my thread / ref report on this paper:

https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1580708436278640640

Why do scientists/journalists keep doing this?
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📣📣 New data alert: we @devdatalab are releasing open village and town maps for all of India. Find them at the top link here: devdatalab.org/shrug_download…

We wrote a post with some more details about the maps: devdatalab.medium.com/open-access-ge…

@thesamasher @tobylunt

1/5 Open village maps of India are shockingly hard to find. We stitched these from a range of open datasets.

These may be the only complete and open maps with Population Census links. Villages, towns, subdistricts, districts, states. Constituencies to come.

2/5

I don't know, I feel like the NYT should use a higher standard for reporting on Covid studies than for reporting on nutrition studies.

This study might be correct, but there are also a lot of reasons to think it might not be the final word. 1/N

nytimes.com/2022/10/12/hea… The authors surveyed a shit ton of people in Scotland to compare long-run symptoms of people with and without Covid.

The response rate was 16% (!), down to 10% for >1 year of followup.

2/N

An R&R resubmission where there are 100 pages of responses to the referees, but nothing substantive in the paper is changed.

What a waste of time for everyone involved.

Sadly, this is my modal experience when refereeing R&Rs. I understand why it happens — authors want to signal they took the comments seriously — a sufficiently voluminous response might raise the probability of publication.

They have probably been submitting this paper for 2 years and have very little desire to change it.

🐂 Excited to live-tweet @thesamasher's presentation of our new paper on long-run effects of India's canals on structural change.

At the very excellent STEG conference, with coauthors @alicampion13 and Doug Gollin

paulnovosad.com/pdf/acgn-canal…
1/N @thesamasher @alicampion13 52% of Indians live within 10 km of a major or medium irrigation canal. Most of these were built decades ago, by the British or soon after independence.

We use canals to study one of the oldest development questions: does agricultural productivity change lead to development?
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I’m live-tweeting @thesamasher’s talk at India Policy Forum: “Big, Open Data for Development:
A Vision for India.” with @AditiBhowmick18 @alicampion13 @tobylunt

1/N :🧵 The first modern census was conducted over three months in 1881. It was quite the undertaking at this time to visit every household in India. The data were collected and stored on paper, and analysis and graphs were drawn by hand. 2/N

📢📢 Registry mortality and excess mortality data for India is posted at github.com/devdatalab/cov… for six Indian states.

(all thanks to amazing work from a team of data journalists referenced in thread below).

Some notes on the preliminary findings 🧵 1/N

https://twitter.com/AditiBhowmick18/status/1410630562407075843

These data are new.

We don't yet know if these registries have backlogs or if they missed deaths during the worst of the surges.

We also don't know if these are COVID deaths or related to shutdown of the economy and healthcare sector. We don't have age and gender. 2/N

The overproduction of elites in... Ghana?

Fascinating RCT with 12 years followup finds that students massively overestimated the returns to completing high school.

nber.org/papers/w28937#… Their return -to-education estimates were waaaaay off:

Michael Kremer could be the first economist to win two nobel prizes, the first for RCTs in development, the second for advance market commitments for vaccines. If you are vaccinated against COVID right now, it is at least partly due to the ideas of Michael Kremer.