broke: teach the kids to code because it's employable woke: teach the kids humanities because it's important to know about art, philosophy and other languages bespoke: teach the kids to code because it's important to know about art, society, philosophy and other languages

this is why quantitative social scientists, the perfect balance of both worlds, should be in charge of everything.

Today, as ever, is a good day to encourage friends, colleagues and family to get off of Twitter

Have a favorite AEJ: Economic Policy paper from the past three years? Submit your nomination at the link below! www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/ho...

Maybe it also helps if I make clear what I’m advocating for. When we do what we now call association studies, we should instead be clear that our goal is to generate evidence for a causal effect. We carefully state our estimand, are explicit about our causal assumptions and…

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps: /1

Curriculum shapes more than skills as taking STEM in high school boosts tech careers—but also shifts politics as boys grow more conservative and girls more progressive, from Robert Ainsworth, Rajeev H. Dehejia, Andrei Munteanu, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Miguel Urquiola www.nber.org/papers/w34502

Gentle reminder that a correlation coefficient isn’t a particularly great way to quantify the effect of a dichotomous treatment. See also www.the100.ci/2025/07/28/w...

Great paper with important implications for understanding life cycle inequalities. For example, one can see how strong memory of in labor market trajectories can lead to amplification of the experience of early career discrimination. Recommended!

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

New evidence that twin estimates of heritability should be adjusted downward by about half

Urban's new affordability tracker highlighted by @usnews.com shows how earnings across the country haven’t kept pace with rising costs.

Recently accepted by #QJE, “Digital Distractions with Peer Influence: The Impact of Mobile App Usage on Academic and Labor Market Outcomes,” by Barwick, Chen, Fu, and Li: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

First ISI Wealth Conference ✅ Lots of exciting wealth research, new international connections, and a constant flow of novel ideas. My personal highlight, of course, was this successful and all-important Bavarian rite-de-passage. Two taps! 💪💪 Thanks to everyone for making it a success!

Day 3 #isimunich #ISIWealthConference

Day 2. #ISIWealtheConference2025 #isimunich

Day 1. #isiwealthconference2025 #isimunich

The Green Book Project is a fantastic resource for anyone trying to understand the full weight of the Jim Crow era, and how segregation —not of homes and where Black families could live— but the segregation of everything. #EconSky #GreenBookProject

Academic economists forming connections on social media show a bias toward certain races, genders, and elite institutions, say researchers at @mcgill.ca, Sao Paulo School of Economics, and MIT. #econsky www.aeaweb.org/research/cha...

💉New study of HPV vaccine shows “robust population-level effectiveness & herd protection in adolescent girls & young women” From 2006-2023: ➡️ Proportion of vaxxed women positive for high-risk HPV-16 & -18 types fell 98.4%, proportion of unvaxxed women fell 71.6% 1/2 jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

New WP: We study how minimum wage increases affect poverty and food hardship in the U.S from 1981-2019. Different from recent work, we study the Supplemental Poverty Measure + two measures of food hardship, factor in cost-of-living differences, and more. www.iza.org/publications...

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

The WWII GI Bill made millions of veterans homeowners, but it also increased Black-White gaps in homeownership and wealth. Results demonstrate how historic policies not only exacerbated past inequalities but also how these inequalities have persisted and intensified into the present.

Remember, if you encounter what seems like an implausible survey finding, ask: 1. Were survey respondents selected randomly or was this an opt-in poll? 2. Could the results, especially for young adults, be driven by bogus respondents? Keep this post in mind: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/... 🧪

Interesting new paper on “A Dozen Challenges in Causality and Causal Inference.” After 30+ years of progress in causal inference, the authors lay out the biggest challenges in current research. Good teaching resource! @guidoimbens.bsky.social @smaglia.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2508.170...

You can now read the entire introduction to MAKE YOUR MANUSCRIPT WORK on the @princetonupress.bsky.social website ⬇️

Finally, the last 3!

Without further ado, here are the number of Guggenheim fellowships for the social sciences over time broken down by field. 9 total figures, sharing in alphabetical order. I updated the data to include every winner each year (even if that person wins in another year). Did I mention I love numbers?

Why Inequalities Persist: Parties’ (Non)Responses to Economic Inequality, 1970–2020 new paper in APSR. How do parties react to inqeuality levels and changes to these levels?

Large Language models (LLMs) do not simulate human psychology. That's the title of our new paper, available as preprint today (1/12): arxiv.org/abs/2508.06950

Part V! Two more installments to come. @pkrugman.bsky.social @stone-lis.bsky.social 👇👇👇

How has Wall Street increased income and wealth disparities? @pkrugman.bsky.social explains why the financialization of the U.S. economy has been a major driver of inequality. stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/predatory-fi...

May not be what you’re looking for but @dingdingpeng.the100.ci & @koumurayama.bsky.social come to mind These Are Not the Effects You Are Looking for: Causality and the Within-/Between-Persons Distinction in Longitudinal Data Analysis

I'm looking for good pedagogical materials on causal inference in (observational) longitudinal data (also just 2-4 time points), e.g. interrupted design, pre-post design. I have a feeling economics has written lots to be imported to cogsci but I see only pieces & no overview. @p-hunermund.com ?

Business owners in Brazil systematically favor co-partisan workers in hiring, promotion, and pay. Assortative matching is larger than for race or gender, and rising over time.

We're hiring! Please share with your networks! The Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of assistant professor in the field of demography of health and aging beginning in August 2026 jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Nice figure! There's also a helpful blogpost by @vincentab.bsky.social that discusses different ways to include age as a predictor.

Let's say you want to include age as a predictor in your model. How do you do that? Here's an illustration of three options -- it's for a paper I'm working on (so if you feel like anything could be tweaked...).

Without Abner I wouldn’t be writing. I’m not a trained journalist, I’m an ex-corporate executive that got cancer and my life fell apart. While in treatment I used my time to research Christian extremism and NAR. Abner gave me a chance and endless support. They have lifted us up, now it’s our turn 👇🏼

Am proud to have been one of the authors of this report for @runnymedetrust.bsky.social, along with great colleagues from @lseinequalities.bsky.social . Please come to our launch next Tuesday at 6.30.

NEW PUB ALERT!!! 🚨 My paper shows how East Asian women in relationships w White, Black, and South Asian men construct racialized masculinities in romantic contexts. I reveal how these processes can both challenge and reinforce gender and racial hierarchies #Sociology doi.org/10.1177/2332...

Excited to share my article with Blue Sky! I introduce the term “compulsory mothering” to show how race, class, gender, and communal childrearing shape Black women's experiences of childlessness. doi.org/10.1111/jomf...

Coefficient plots are in! You see them all over. A while back, I heard someone argue that we should use smoothed CIs in our coefficient plots, like below. This aligns with Gelman's principle: the difference between “significant” & “not significant” is not statistically significant. Thoughts?

Blog post (fixest vignette) on "Collinearity": something everybody faces one day but for which there's not much guidance. Trying to clarify how econometrics software handle collinearity and what one should do about it. #RStats #EconSky Comments welcome lrberge.github.io/fixest/artic...

Introducing the {messy} package | Nicola Rennie nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #rstats It looks very useful for creating, you know, messy datasets that one can use in classes on data tidying

You have conditioned on your outcome (Y) by conditioning on a descendent of your outcome (Z). This is known as type 4 overadjustment bias (see: journals.lww.com/epidem/fullt...). This introduces dependencies between all causes of the outcome, thus opening backdoor biasing paths (e.g X<>Uy>Y).

Causal inference folks, can you please explain to me why conditioning on Z is bad here (case-control bias in journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....) I've simulated it, it's bad, I just don't get the intuition 🤔 @pwgtennant.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci @rmcelreath.bsky.social @p-hunermund.com

"The median DGE heritability for behavioral phenotypes is .048. Let that sink in for a second. How different would the modern history of behavior genetics be if back in the 80s one study after another had shown that the heritability of behavior was around .05?" Excellent question!

I know it's a rough time to be talking science, but in case anyone wants some distraction, I wrote about the Tan et al (2024) analysis of heritability and polygenic indices for complex human behavior. Title: Is Tan et al The End of Social Science Genomics?