In the 1980s, Nestlé was moving into infant formula markets in low-income countries.

With each new market entry, moms switched from breastfeeding to unclean water, and infant mortality increased substantially; 200,000 excess deaths per year. 1/n Amazing — Nestlé saleswomen dressed in nurses uniforms to pitch their product to women in hospitals right after delivery.

Marketing memos were very direct on this — "medical staff are more likely to influence mothers with regard to the [best food] for their babies" 2/n

David Roodman writes: consumers of economic research are more truth-seeking than the producers.

Here is Roodman's recap of his re-analysis of a set of papers on temperature and judge decision-making.

The comment process is not working that well!

Gory details in 🧵 1/ Here is the Gelman blog post:
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/02/who…

Here is @davidroodman's reanalysis:
econstor.eu/handle/10419/3… 2/

Interesting: Konhee Chang studies what happens in suburban neighborhoods in Florida when large-scale property owners move in and convert suburban homes to rentals.
1/ Entry of these firms substantially changes the ownership composition of neighborhoods.

2/

The most essential stabilizing feature of a society is a status hierarchy that young people—especially young men—can reliably climb by following a clear and pro-social set of rules.

1/ It is thus much better to have a society where the young have low status and the old high, than a society where one group has high status at all ages, and another is always low.

Everyone is willing to do their time. But if you don't see a path up, you will tear things down. 2/

Deep meritocracy is fundamentally unstable, because elites can't tolerate their kids losing. They will engage in destructive status competition with each other, and also just directly corrupt the institutions. 1/ Anyway, non-elites don't stand a chance in a pure performance-based merit system, because elite parental investments have such high returns. In practice, we don't get meritocracy anyway. 2/

This @TheZvi post on AI cheating is worthwhile and asks many of the right questions.

But he's wrong to conclude that AI means what you learn in college doesn't matter.

This really misses the point. College builds brainpower like going to the gym builds muscle. 🧵
You don't learn algebra so that you can solve polynomials in your future job.

You learn it to develop the capability to formalize problems and solve them in abstraction.

Understanding how and when problems can be formalized is really really really useful.

2/n

Every econ referee report should include two scores out of 100: (1) Accuracy; (2) Importance.

These scores should be public and should follow the papers.

This would have all kinds of benefits:

1. It would reduce the incentive to submit to all 5 top five journals

🧵 1/n If your paper has 4 60's already from the other top 5s, maybe you'll get it into JPE, but everyone will know it's a marginal JPE.

This is better than our current system, where people whisper "oh that paper is really weak, it just barely made it to JPE." 2/

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 👇