Given how long they've been preparing this operation lots of things seem very sloppy:

- internal propaganda: russian population mostly shocked, mainly blacking out media channels. No enthusiasm for this anywhere - diplomacy: xi, erdogan, modi all completely unprepped, nothing offered to them beforehand. Strong "why should i expand any political capital on this sh... ? vibes from all of them"
The madman speech: completely unnecessary, firmly pushed germany into "we have to sanction" camp

Very hard to know what is propaganda on all sides currently, but I am seeing more and more videos that line up with this account that russian soldiers were/are not fully aware what they are being sent to do. See this exchange

https://twitter.com/aliostad/status/1497519061554630658

There has been a lot of talk about how all of this has been provoked by nato expansion, a lot of it coming from the people telling us we were all freaking out unreasonably in worrying about a real invasion, but also from some very thoughtful people. I have thoughts on this. First of, I think it's good to be introspective and to be open to your own errors in the past and also to be able to put yourself in your adversaries mind and understand what drives them so as to figure out the best possible reactions, so I am not opposed to these thoughts.

Stumbled-upon papers of the week : Mobile Phones🤳 reduce election fraud✉️✅🕵️
That's what data from the Afghan 🇦🇫 2009 election shows:

Exploiting borders between areas with and without 🤳 coverage 🌐 shows:
- 🤳🌐 leads to 4% less fraudulent votes, 8% less fraudulent stations

My colleagues @pengzell and @ArunFrey who researched learning losses due to school closures in 🇳🇱 ask you to predict learning losses after the second wave.

They told me they'd be happy if particularly the superforecasters following me could have a look

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… but really everyone who wants to predict how school closures will affect learning. Have a go.

"The Wealth of Parents" joint work with @DBoertien and @mettegoertz where we look at the evolution of homogamy in parental wealth (do children from rich families marry each other?) is out in Demography now link.springer.com/article/10.100… 👇 thread Using 🇩🇰Registries allows us to link individuals to parents who give yearly wealth declarations. So we look at

1) When people form a couple how correlated is the wealth of their parents?

2) Does this change over time?

3) does homogamy change across the wealth distribution?

Since there is interest in the German self-emloyment help scheme, my mother is self-employed and applied for it two days ago. It's pretty impressive, she got put into a 300.000 people virtual queue for applicants in Berlin which resolved in 23h and then filled in her info. The information required is pretty minimal, the idea is to automatically process all the applications fast, send 5.000 euros to the bank accounts of self-employed people who cannot do their business right away and then check if that person was only elligible for less way later.

Starting a thread summarizing Coronavirus research.

Disclaimer: I am not an epidemeologist and studies are being produced very quickly and on often sketchy and problematic data. I will try my best to summarize as good as possible. 1. Studies on infection and mortality rates.

Our do rich kids marry each other paper? We look at couple formation based on parental wealth in 🇩🇰 and find
1) it is much lower than in previous work on US
2) it is getting stronger over time
potentially strengthening effects of parntering on inequality osf.io/preprints/soca… the paper is written together with my amazing co-authors @DBoertien and Mette Gortz, who is so awesome she does not need a twitter account.