Two days in, 2,671 development economists from 126 countries have joined @ideadevecon.bsky.social! @owenozier.bsky.social lays out why development economics needed a global home. Now on the @cgdev.org blog. Read it, then add your name: idea.devecon.org 🌍 www.cgdev.org/blog/introdu...

I remember listening to Gorsuch being grilled by the Senate during his confirmation hearings on NPR, how he caterwauled over and over about how "🥹 It's the LAW of the LAND!!! 🥹" Why do we have those hearings? What do we expect to get from cheap talk?

As I was telling @keithreierson.bsky.social this week, there is always daylight between revealed and stated preferences, but that is particularly true in Minnesota, where we *say* we want nice things, but do not give ourselves the means of getting them. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

This passage from @davebrady72.bsky.social's 2025 JCI article is 🔥

I've been down on and critical of development economics in recent years (see marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/14... and marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/14...), but idea.devecon.org, by Dean Yang et al., looks awesome *and so much more inclusive than anything that came before.* Kudos to a great initiative!

Graphic design is my passion.

Nice new papr by @kris-inwood.bsky.social and coauthors: The geography of economic mobility in 19th-century Canada onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Discuss: If the author had been from, say, the University of Kentucky instead of Stanford, that work would have been cited < 100 times.

New paper out in Applied Economic Letters with Dusty White! We checked every external hyperlink in the top 5 econ journals (2011–2020) and found: ➡️ 52% are dead ➡️ 25% of "working" links don't even show the original content anymore. Gift link to the paper in response ⬇️

Chi dorme coi cani si sveglia colle pulci, Signora Presidente.

Sounds like a fine opportunity for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, though.

this will be devastating to all the people who naively ate Cheetos for their nutritional properties

You will take my Cheetos from my cold, dead hands.

ICQ, c. 1997-1998.

Oh boy. Oh dear.

Can we talk about Wikipedia? It went from a source which serious people didn't really trust ("because anyone can edit it") at the start of my career to essentially a one-stop-shop where most people look up stuff (often without going much further), giving it credence through convenience 1/

An empirical test of what Paul Fussell discusses in BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

'In the words of a wag whose name escapes me: “Econometric theory is an industry with a very large output but no sales.”' www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I asked Claude to make me a free guitar tuner for when the battery gives out on my tc electronic PolyTune: marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/wp...

The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes & dreams that were never fulfilled... #booksky #books #thriller #suspense #romance #novels #geopolitical #mythological #darkromance #women #fiction #fantasy #crime #sifi #sff #author #readers #indie

When the deeds don't match the words...

It's incredible that the entire panic over "ultra-processed foods" is based on the results of just *five* RCTs, four of which were less than three weeks long. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I should frame this.

My Stepmother is an Alien vs. Predator

Geoeconomics and Rethinking the Logic of Trade conversableeconomist.com/2026/06/11/g...

@jhihyunliu.bsky.social's JMP is finally out, and it's a fine piece of economic history as well agricultural, development, and environmental economics. Natural disaster and intergenerational occupational choice in agriculture: Evidence from the US Dust Bowl onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

We need to talk more about our responsibility to training doctoral students in a time when AI can make their work appear polished but their understanding and independent abilities remain weak. I'm grateful to @marcfbellemare.bsky.social, who shared this post with me: ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Noé Nava made a (free) Claude skill based on ch. 2 of Doing Economics, here: github.com/noejn2/revis... That said, I fear Noé is a bit pollyannish about what referees are actually willing to do. I was involved last year in a case where one of the other reviewers used genAI to write his "review"...

Love me a good old tautological manuscript status update.

Everyone who stayed there for fear of losing their followers and having to rebuild their follower base elsewhere is enabling this. This is ESPECIALLY so of journalists driven by Main Character Syndrome more than by any real desire to inform the public. History will not look kindly upon that.

Your daily DiD tweet 😉

"Pronoun police"? Please. The proper term is the gendermes.

The death spiral of reading is one of my biggest concerns these days in education. Students don't do the reading, so we gradually assign less and less in hopes that they actually do it. Smartphones have destroyed attention spans (myself included), and with AI, all bets are off.

Rent control disincentivizes new housing, you say? Who, oh who could've foreseen this? www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Awkward.

Conditioning on my (thankfully) erstwhile corner of the research world: Technology adoption in low- and middle-income country agriculture.

I suspect this might be the best photo I ever take

A friend turned me on to the Maintenance Phase podcast, which I'm becoming addicted to. Love how @michaelhobbes.bsky.social and @yrfatfriend.bsky.social take a chainsaw to a lot of the BS, bromides, and bro science surrounding food and ag. The (good) kind of anger that can fuel a good workout.

I just remembered that Cortana was a thing and it's amazing the ability the human mind has to just repress trauma and forget about it.

What was that I said about applied econometrics bing hard to publish in econometrics journals, even the ostensibly "applied" one(s)? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Now out in the Journal of Comparative Economics and open access (not sure who pays for that :) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Huh. I wonder if we'll see a huge increase in the adoption of new ag technologies #iykyk

This one made me and my wife laugh to tears.

Pillow Man is out of the running to be GOP nominee for MN gov. Seems like a fresh breath of sanity.

À propos of nothing, I haven't heard of a single Canada Impact+ Research chair offer being accepted (or made, for that matter), and the first round was happening in March...

This result fits with my own (obviously anecdotal) experience: LLMs are powerful scalers in clearly demarcated areas (data analysis, directed literature review, etc.), but are pretty bad at thinking outside of the box – regardless of methodology, i.e., theoretical, empirical, or experimental.

Oh, cool. Another paper on difference-in-differences. (And the very fact that this could refer to any of about 100 papers published this week alone explains my blasé attitude.)

Oh.

"F*ck it, we're doing five blades." Joking aside, this seems super interesting: "Triply Robust Estimators," by Athey et al. in JAE: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Really cool how academic publishers have managed to innovate in finding a whole new way of being extremely irritating... Like, what's the problem that they're trying to solve, here?