If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.

And on this kind of garbage hang the fates of nations

"Using the quasi-random timing of Navratri—a major Hindu festival worshipping goddesses—I find that girls born shortly after the festival receive ~6% more birth vaccinations than girls born just before." josuedjossou.github.io/navratri-paper.pdf (stumbled across this, intrigued, haven't read it)

Endless Column, by Constantin Brâncuși, 1938, 📸 by @stephenmally

Meanwhile, a Crossover Episode.

If you're at the ASSA mtgs and are interested in gender gaps in the labor market, please join this session Monday 8 am. To draw out the links between the papers, there will be one discussant, a nice idea suggested by @profnoto.bsky.social; Camille Landais is generously playing this role.

Reviewing how much power do women have in their households in developing countries and why household power matters, from @seema.bsky.social and Alessandra Voena www.nber.org/papers/w34605

This should not be shrugged aside. They have stopped with the fake 22 million illegal immigrants things and are flat out saying we want to deport 10's of millions of citizens and legal residents from "third world countries" Basically they are advocating removing 1/3 of the population on a gov site.

pound for pound this might be the funniest thing ever written

New NBER working paper with Alessandra Voena on women's power in the household in LMICs. I'd never found a review article on this topic that met my needs as a PhD class reading, so we sought to fill this gap. NBER : www.nber.org/papers/w34605 Ungated: seemajayachandran.com/womens_power_JEL.pdf

“Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/o...

Tariff offset tax

Brilliant little online tool: Spin the globe and see what your life would have been like had you gotten a different draw in the place-of-birth lottery h/t @leightjessica.bsky.social on LinkedIn

Laquan McDonald

Now do one for PhD advising

The Govt of India is dismantling the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and that's a real shame.

They booked a bunch of 14 year old models to come to a Mar A Lago party, told them to dress sexy and tried to ply them with alcohol.

We need better ways to tell computers and humans apart Article: The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

May her memory be a blessing. Here are some obits for Kate Ho. www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025...

Beware natural scientists doing social science You wouldn't trust an economist doing physics or chemistry or astronomy. So don't trust the reverse

Virginia Heffernan wrote this shortly after the 2016 election and it still holds true

I am still really mad that LLMs have co-opted — and hence ruined — the em-dash.

Nonprofits celebrate big grants, but @seema.bsky.social asks: how much new good did this funding create, & how much simply shifted between capable orgs?🤔 Her new blog shows how this type of counterfactual thinking can strengthen impact across the sector: https://go.cgdev.org/4oSvqXn

Our affiliate, Seema Jayachandran, argues in this blog post that, when fundraising, nonprofits shouldn't just care about how much they raise. They should value new funds they attract to the cause more than competitive grants they win that would have otherwise gone to an equally capable peer.

Don’t look away. sahanjournal.com/immigration/...

I wrote the tweet below after I had lunch with @daveevansphd.bsky.social, shared a random thought with him, and he said, "That's so obvious in hindsight." That was enough of an endorsement for me to write it up. www.cgdev.org/blog/case-co...

I argue in this piece that the nonprofit sector should be thinking more about the counterfactual when assessing fundraising success: winning a $2M competitive bid over capable peers advances the cause less than convincing someone to donate $1M they'd have spent on a yacht.

I need you to listen to and share this story - of how Trump is preparing to abandon Ukraine in exchange for Russian money for his billionaire friends. It could be the greatest corruption of American foreign policy in our history. Russia gets Ukraine. Trump's friends get rich.

Professor Seema Jayachandran (@seema_econ) recently joined the Vox Dev Economics podcast with co-author Alessandra Voena to discuss their new new review paper, "Women’s Power in the Household." Listen: https://bit.ly/448YAdt

Grumpy opinion: Too many young development economists are working on behavioral econ questions that are unimportant for development. The topics are amenable to small experiments that can nail mechanisms and demonstrate smarts via a clever design. The profession over-rewards those attributes.

Always grateful to @voxdev.bsky.social for the opportunity to disseminate research to a wider audience. Alessandra Voena and I discuss women's power and agency at home -- why it matters and which policies can increase it -- in their latest podcast.

GivePoorly

Hegseth’s reference to “this nation’s Christian faith” at the end is notable. America is NOT a Christian nation, just for the record. It’s a nation in which everyone is free to worship however they want.

He’s painted himself into a corner. He’s become ludicrous enough that continuing to move rightward is his only way to remain relevant, which I assume is the main objective.

For Harvard and for Economics, the problem in the Summers/Epstein exchanges isn't Epstein, it's Summers./1

this thread is unbelievable

"Whether another comeback is possible for Mr. Summers and others connected to Mr. Epstein is unclear." What's unclear seems narrower to me: The Free Press or Substack.

Thank you, student journalists at @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social

Elsevier has a 38% profit margin, and the other journal publishers aren't far behind.

A memory imprinted on me from 25 years ago is Claudia Goldin (well on her way to a Nobel Prize) saying her salutation in cold emails to faculty is "Dear Prof. X". Maybe that's overkill, but I truly don't get the mindset of undergrads I've never met emailing "Dear Seema." Weakly dominated strategy.

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

Larry Summers subtweet?

not enough regrets, Larry

I hope OpenAI is drafting its press release about dumping Summers from its board of directors

TIL that if you search for a font on Google, the search results are shown in that font. (Probably only works for classic fonts.)

Two-thirds of Democrats say their own party makes them feel frustrated. By far the most commonly cited reason is that the party is not pushing back hard enough against Trump. www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...

These Tureen tests are getting crazy