Intelligence matters way more for age 0–25 than for age 25–50. Since this is a formative period, people often overrate intelligence.

But the really successful people at 40 aren't the ones who were brilliant, they're the ones who kept at it, who kept working, who kept learning. For example, at age 20, there isn't so much difference between people who are into and aren't into reading books.

If you're smart, you can ace everything, be at the top, even if you're not investing that much.

This was surprising — respondents to the AEA social media survey are still 10x more likely to be reading Twitter than reading BlueSky.

Rumors of Twitter's demise are greatly exaggerated?

Some more notes from the report in the thread 1/ I'm doing fine, but everyone else is having a bad experience!

>70% are positive or neutral on their own social media experience, but consistently <50% think social media is beneficial. 2/

A spicy datacolada post on the challenge of evaluating papers where the data are proprietary and experiments are difficult to replicate.

My main thought: re-analysis like this is vastly under-supplied.

Link and some thoughts in thread. 1/ Link:

The general absence of public dialogue like this around most published papers is a major flaw of how econ works.

This kind of discussion does happen in (closed) seminars and in the (secret) referee process, but it is of public interest. 2/datacolada.org/122

One last try at this, I’m not giving up!

We revere Shakespeare because (1) he was a master of the language; (2) his plays strike to the heart of human experience.

When we teach Shakespeare to young people, they’re only experiencing the first. At best! 🧵 Shakespeare’s contemporaries spoke the language and got the best of all worlds: masterful dialogue and emotionally resonant stories.

When young’uns read Shakespeare today, they have to do a LOT of work! Read the footnotes, re-read scenes, get help, use a dictionary, etc. 2/N

For high schoolers, and probably college students too, all English lit from pre-1970 should be translated into modern English.

If you were reading a German novel, you'd want a recent translation. Why the punishing unequal treatment of English language writers?

https://twitter.com/alz_zyd_/status/1874863049037033784

Of course if the original work holds up, like Hemingway, then no translation is needed.

If the original work is tedious and overwrought (hello, Dickens), significant abridgements are in order as well.

Fascinating paper on where 6000 global elites went to college. Billionaires, CEOs, heads of state, central bankers, etc.

In a word: Harvard.

Fully 10% of global elites went to Harvard. Elite US schools are over-represented (23% IvyPlus), but nobody comes close to Harvard.

🧵 The paper is Ricardo Salas-Diaz and Kevin Young. They collected elite biographies across a few important international domains.

Corporate elites: CEO and board
IO: World Bank, IMF, Basel Committee, etc
National Elites: Head of state & central banker
3rd sector: think tanks 2/N

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!

2/N

Some tweets from the NBER Economics of Talent conference.

Conference is focused on when/how we create pathways for very talented people to get to places where make big contributions to society.


1/? nber.org/conferences/ec… Laura Giuliano is presenting a paper on tracking with David Card — studies Florida's advanced math program, which allows kids in the top 20% to take accelerated math (geometry in 8th grade).

2/?

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)
2/n

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 🧵👇🏻
1/N

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.*

2/N

🤷🤷‍♀️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

2/N

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?

2/N

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.

2/N

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. 👇👇

1/N

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?
2/N

📣📣 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