One of the least edifying parts of my job is having to snitch to the Home Office about whether international students are attending class. Consider that if someone is willing to pay £20k to not study maybe they should have been given a work visa.

I now pronounce the name of the letter “H” as if it begins with a(n) h 😬

(laudatory)

nearly wrote a long explanation of why one can agree with the general sentiment "all art is political" or even the more ambitious "everything is political" while also thinking that the sense in which Crash Bandicoot is political is different from the sense in which the Communist Manifesto is

I wrote an article for Harper's Bazaar about what it's like for trans people in Kansas (spoiler: it's bad). Read, share, and send some love to your trans loved ones.

Yeah I strongly dislike the left anti tax movement. There's no having a society just on the back of soaking the rich, even people far lower down the inequality ladder have to contribute. That's fine. We're all in this together.

The policy being announced here is putting higher marginal tax rates on married women's income which makes what he said even weirder than what you'd think based on the headline.

A leftist named Marx, praising every technology handed down from self-interested capitalists seeking only to enhance their power and profits.

Help my country is in a Condorcet cycle and can’t get out

Ok I wanna do this just for pizza. Over-rated: Impossible Under-rated (globally): New York style Under-rated (US specifically): Roman style Under-rated (🇺🇸&🌐): Chicago style Accurately rated: Neapolitan style (laudatory), St Louis style (derogatory)

What share of the present-day labour force would be necessary to produce the world GDP of 1800? 10% doesn’t sound like a bad guess.

This is far from over, but I tend to agree. Authoritarian attempts are prototypical cases of multiple equilibria: when the key actors believe that it will succeed, they are more likely to join, which makes it more likely to succeed. When that belief crumbles, the probability of success vanishes...

Remember when Larry Summers made the lazy inference that fewer women in science means they must be less able? @mardelgiu.bsky.social and I wrote a paper exploring the consequences of this lazy inference for occupational segregation which we term the "Larry effect:" www.iza.org/publications...

Imagine you time travel back to 1847 and you find the left response to industrialization is a) machines will never be as good as human weavers or b) we need to copyright loom patterns or c) it’s a speculative bubble. You’d say “Y’all. Not helping. What you need is obviously a labor movement.”

The lump of consumption fallacy

Economists think of ourselves as social scientists. It’s other social scientists who seem to think we are STEM, or think that we think of ourselves as STEM. We also do cite other socsci. fields, though fwiw there is a clear asymmetry in feelings of not being cited appropriately.

If I understand correctly, Senate R’s have a trilemma between a) not succeeding in taking away health insurance from the working poor, b) getting rid of the filibuster, or c) letting Trump nuke Article 1 of the constitution and are going to choose c)

An outsider may be forgiven for assuming the British love rules. They hate them in fact. But they also hate each other so it cancels out. Revealed preference only gets one so far..

Anyways consultants are not paid because they possess useful advice. They are hired to stand behind what the buyer wants to do and accept blame / verify good money was paid for it.

A friendly reminder as Nobel season approaches, the Nobel Prizes are not real Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

@robfordmancs.bsky.social argues that the unpopularity of Reform's proposals offer the government an opportunity - but I'd add that they will squander that if they introduce what just looks like a watered-down version of those proposals.

neurodiversity is Good Actually. just want to say that

A policy truly befitting a reality TV politician: Let’s just periodically vote people off the island.

This guy, of all people, is the voice of reason about immigration in UK politics.

Excellent point made in this article - "The government can, at any point, amend the 2010 Equality Act to clarify it. This could be as simple as passing a revised version with a single sentence added stating that its gender definitions include trans people." www.liberalcurrents.com/britains-bat...

One lesson to draw from Brexit is that Theresa May was not rewarded for delivering the most reasonable version of the bad idea she thought the British people wanted.

In knowing we are each of us mad but altogether sound but in doing we are each of us sound but altogether mad (Condorcet, Arrow). Is this how AI can know everything and still not be able to do anything?

"I/we am/are better than this" is fine as an aspirational statement. it is better to have good aspirations than bad ones.

Me, delegating on the basis of what I want to hear: hahaha f yeah yes! Me, experiencing the decisions made by an entity selected on this basis: wtf

RIP to the 4th amendment

The Johnson government did this in the UK in 2021 and it totally worked to detoxify the debate around immigration. People’s single and totally genuine concern about it was finally addressed! /s

Alternatively

It is my sincerest hope that the invention of the LLM will sever our identification of humanity/sentience/intelligence with the ability to produce language. Language is only a shadow of humanity, and even a cardboard cutout can have a shadow.

A non-zero-sum worldview is, in my mind, the core of what it means to be "on the left." You believe that through cooperation & solidarity, we can *all* benefit. Indeed, if you look back through history, you find that non-zero-sum cooperation is the root of pretty much every human advance!

whoa www.axios.com/2025/08/27/d...

Dems should run 2026 on a platform of impeaching Trump, Vance, and the 6 justices who put their names to an opinion he is king. But they need a popular primary for intended House Speaker to pull it off.

Some years back the UK Labour party floated the idea of giving elocution lessons to deprived students to improve their opportunities. This was daft because linguistic differences arise from social divisions they do not cause them.

If you’ve had an inoculation which doesn’t 100% protect you from a disease then it could be in your interest to avoid mixing with others who’ve foregone the inoculation. But it’s not obvious whether isolating yourself will reduce the overall spread of the infection since it’ll just be the most..

Ah yes, that cherished form of civic participation: pogroms.

Ok here’s a question ECON101 is perfectly suited to answer: what happens to the price paid by a consumer when a subsidy is offered on a good with very inelastic supply?

What all UK racists, stretching forwards and back from Powell, don’t get about the US is that slavery also had persistent distortionary effects on White people’s psyche that they share (because they are weird) and are projecting onto the British public.

one thing i think people should ask the court conservatives given this ruling is what, specifically, was wrong with plessy?

someone on Instagram called us based. they're right. we are based at the University of Reading, in England's largest town

Protest in reading tommorow

Fabrication undermines confidence in primary data collection (bad!). p-hacking undermines confidence in frequentism (laudatory)

New paper alert! Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com nature.com/articles/s41... THREAD! 🧵⬇️

Incalculable = when we calculated it, it didn't give us the answer we wanted

Now that Labour have seen off the distraction of immigration they will finally be able to address the public's kitchen table concerns like "why are NHS waiting lists so long" and "what does all my council tax go towards?". Stopping immigration will finally let ministers get a grip of these problems.

“Bullshit Jobs” is an excellent ethnography of the modern British university combined with a less convincing argument that it can be taken as a microcosm of all employment relations. But nor is it reasonable to support the opposite position that UK universities are completely sui generis phenomena.