Fantastic podcast episode. At one point @katewagner.wehwalt.net points out that McMansions come in all sorts of styles, including post-modern, which consists of oddly arranged rectangles. Behold my neighbor, completed ca. 2024. The owner is from Texas. www.patreon.com/posts/143733...

We should introduce a new heuristic for judging academic careers: If they pursue the same field than their famous academic relatives, it's likely because of networks not ability.

On this point, any regrets from the progressive nonprofit industrial complex for vilifying Claudia Sahm for blowing the whistle on Summers in 2020? Or was it all worth one failed administration’s worth of fancy economic policy appointments?

Damn, almost makes you feel sorry for @americanprogress.bsky.social building their whole economic policy platform around him, until you remember that they put Neera back in charge and so not cleaning house when you have the chance seems to be their MO! The dangers of gerontocracy.

gosh I wonder why they called her peril www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

😬 👇 😬

A lot of the (often quite powerful!) guys emailing Epstein were asking him for dating advice, which seems to suggest that they saw his own sex life as aspirational.

I highly recommend everyone to read this article for background on Summers’s entwinement in “progressive” economic policy nonprofits, including how that entwinement seriously undermines & compromises their work: www.thecaravelgu.com/blog/2020/12...

If I’ve got my timeline right, this is Larry Summers emailing his buddy Jeff Epstein for advice on how to creep on younger women *a couple days* after the publication of the Miami Herald piece that made him the country’s most infamous sexual predator.

It’s hard to be surprised by the actions of a man already known as the “Prince of Darkness” who sits atop a professional renowned for misogyny (good time to revisit @claudia-sahm.bsky.social, will post link). But by god I am surprised. Even now, Larry Summers repugnance continues to surprise me.

The emails have Summers reporting to Epstein about his attempts to date a Harvard economics student & to hit on her during a seminar she was giving.

Forthcoming book review in the JEL: "Monopsony in Labor Markets: Theory, Evidence, and Public Policy by Brianna L. Alderman and Roger D. Blair" by Marshall Steinbaum. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Alternately, the possibility of *monkey's paw curls* Representative Marshall Steinbaum.

I’m starting a new subfield: the History of the History of Economic Thought.

Oh my god @dkuehn.bsky.social is in the JEP. Live footage of Phil Magness

The week in review: @econmarshall.bsky.social on anti-monopolism as an ideology of the left, and Amna Akbar, @sameer-ashar.bsky.social, and @jocelynsimonson.bsky.social on movement law under fascism. Plus, the best of LPE from around the web 🧵👇

Chicago on Chicago crime (H/t @pricelaborecon.bsky.social)

Today, @econmarshall.bsky.social continues the discussion about Antitrust and Marxism, making both the radical and moderate case for anti-monopoly as an ideology of the left.

Important piece from Marshall. Dismantling kleptocracy is the most urgent goal, & anti-monopoly policy must be part of that. The problem we face, as I tackled last week, is that with very few exceptions, U.S. anti-monopoly policy has been antitrust, & has ranged from weak to counterproductive.

Excellent essay! It rebuts Marxist pessimism about the anti-monopoly movement, highlights the importance of contesting Capital's control of economic production, and ties it all into the recent failures of the movement (particularly wrt. the recent anti-monopolisation case against Google).

I have a new piece in @lpeblog.bsky.social “Anti-monopolism as an Ideology of the Left” responding to @gabrielwinant.bsky.social’s “provocation.” lpeproject.org/blog/anti-mo...

this is not quite an anti-trust tragedy but it's certainly some kind of capital market regulation problem if people can buy assets that provide huge public goods specifically in order to destroy the public good provision

This morning I was filming ICE abducting sometime in Petworth. One of the agents told me "the last US citizen that did this he put in cuffs all the way to the courtroom".

Taking as given that some of the labor share of GDP has shifted to the self-employed/pass-through share, 1. Is that share “really” labor or capital income? 2. Among the self-employed/pass-through share, is it the low earners who are “really” capitalists or the high earners who are “really” workers?

This is a good piece about the unstated assumptions underlying political data analytics, and specifically Wins Above Replacement. As so often in economics, once you make the counterfactual you’re measuring candidate performance against explicit, the inference you claim cannot possibly be supported.

Very sad to hear Malcolm Rutherford died. The world can be divided into people who do and do not understand the history of our discipline, on the basis of whether you have or have not read his book “The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947.” #econsky

Ugh. Didn’t realize Marshall Steinbaum was here

I never made a trailer for the show, but this episode with Marshall Steinbaum on the NTY’s farcical coverage of college students and the University of Chicago’s dabbling in crypto may as well be it @econmarshall.bsky.social www.buzzsprout.com/2396665/epis...

The University of Chicago’s present financial difficulties are the very-long-run result of the successful effort by Stigler, Friedman, and Director to purge the influence of Robert Maynard Hutchins from the university & American higher education more broadly. www.buzzsprout.com/2396665/epis...

A big problem is university presidents trying to transform their institutions into something at odds with their prior identity, at the behest of delusional board members, and running into severe financial difficulties, which they blame on woke professors.

Criticizing student debt cancellation as a Brahmin Left demand is itself Brahmin Left.

Carefully 👏 distinguish 👏 causation 👏 from 👏 correlation 👏 except 👏 when 👏 talking 👏 about 👏 educational 👏 attainment 👏 and 👏 earnings 👏 (or 👏 wealth 👏)

NEW PIECE: Powell and the Federal Reserve System has already failed to meet the moment and not defending Lisa Cook will seal both Powell's and the Fed's fate. www.crisesnotes.com/powell-will-...

I had a professor of Jewish Studies at UChicago who made the administration very angry because every year he made a proposal for the university to create an on-campus memorial to the worldwide victims of the UChicago economics department.

🆕 RFBerlin Discussion Paper: @meltemdaysal.bsky.social, Hui Ding, @maya-rossin-slater.bsky.social and Hannes Schwandt study the spread of respiratory illnesses among children and the magnitudes of externalities on younger infant siblings over the short and long-run. www.rfberlin.com/network-pape...

Remember Jason Richwine? Whatever happened to that guy and why hasn’t he been made head of a federal agency?

J Edgar Hoover was happy to deploy his guys as political henchmen & partisan operatives, but he consistently vetoed this. He considered it beneath the dignity of his agency, which existed to demonstrate advanced scientific methods to local law enforcement, not to patrol the streets.

A good episode if I do say so myself. Listen and join our petition against the Ariel University MOU by emailing [email protected]

brilliant

Has anyone in Development Econ run an RCT where you stop doing colonialism and see whether outcomes improve in treatment villages relative to control? #EconSky

“As the meritocratic model of what higher education is for comes under more and more pressure in light of its evident failures, these offerings tell us what the conservative response will be: raise the drawbridge, keep out the rabble.” @econmarshall.bsky.social

I like when people throw in "this disproves Real Business Cycle theory" to a random empirical micro paper because 1. everything disproves RBC, and 2. they're the ones who said you have to micro-found macro models, so live by the micro-foundation, die by it, etc etc.

Note that the FDIC's 2023 survey of "National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households" asks crypto questions, and surprise surprise, the "banked" use crypto far more than the "unbanked". fdic.gov/household-su...

Agh googling my own name now defaults to “Sheinbaum”. A fate worse than death for an academic.

Playing the hits.

The real problem with the Supreme Court’s expected Fed carve out is not that it lacks a principle but that the real principle isn’t articulated. The reason it will carve out the Fed is functional but it won’t say that. And its jurisprudence doesn’t leave room to ventilate the functional arg.(1/8)

Americans favor labor unions over big business now more than ever, analysis of new data @epi.org from me & Adam Reich of Columbia Labor Lab. In data back 60 years, Americans' sentiments are both warmer toward unions & cooler towards big business than ever before. www.epi.org/blog/america...

JUST IN: Pittsburgh voters have approved a ballot that bans the city from privatizing the local water and sewers system. The measure passed by a very large margin. This was one of my guide of the main races to watch today: boltsmag.org/whats-on-the...

I see we're still misunderstanding how to do distributional analysis.