New GC-CUNY Stone Center Working Paper by Max Longmuir. "Overall, this study highlights the critical interaction between financial wealth, investment behavior, and inequality dynamics." 👇👇👇

I wrote this some time ago - with all of us knowing this day would come, and Rob, of course, fighting like the bloody-minded bastard he was to the very end. He irrevocably changed my life - and how our country saw itself. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/j...

At our next Inequalities Seminar, we are joined by Markus Jäntti 💡 He explores the welfare implications of both inter- and intragenerational mobility and, once family incomes are introduced, assortative mating. 🎟️ Attend in-person: buff.ly/5rtmc94 💻 Attend online: buff.ly/cCavMly

"... the standard monopsony model does not provide a full, realistic account of the labor market." #EconSky www.nber.org/papers/w34699

if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...

New Substack post: The wage compression that persisted. arindube.substack.com/p/the-wage-c...

Jonas Radl and colleagues show that is actually the case based on a large experiment of 5th graders in two different counties. Moreover, they demonstrate the role of incentives and how incentives have different effects depending on social background ground. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Still at the beach in Australia...

AI might not take our manual jobs. But can our ageing bodies handle it? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/o...

New job at Cambridge! Professorship of Public Policy www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/profess...

Males get more free time. (The hours add up to over 24, because it restricts to those who participate in the activity. But the gender gap persists when averaged over all). www.abs.gov.au/statistics/p... #ABS

I try to avoid linking to Substacks but this essay is FASCINATING

"parallel trends in the log of an outcome variable precludes parallel trends in levels. The paper closes with an examination of a valiant recent attempt to wriggle out of this troubling functional-form constraint" Looking forward to reading.

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

"We show that, in finite samples, first-differencing and novel rolling estimators can offer researchers a practical alternative to the fixed effects estimator"

One observation about this interesting new paper on the credibility revolution in political science journal articles is that all (?) of its interesting findings are correlational, not causal osf.io/preprints/so...

New from my phd student @joshgoddard98.bsky.social: he shows, using many election and panel studies across the advanced democracies, that housing status has replaced occupational class as a key predictor of voting. Class voting is now about assets, not income www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

One in 20 Australian Indigenous adult men are in jail. (original source: www.abs.gov.au/statistics/p...)

Though causality runs in both directions - "Taken together, these results point to a simple but important insight: the entry period into the [Australian] NDIS is a time when caring responsibilities increase, not fall. " e61.in/navigating-t...

The Economist makes a good point in warning that, at some point, high may be too high, and that we should look beyond the effects on employment. But, I don’t think there is (yet) any consensus that we reached the maximum as they seem to imply in their piece.

Lawrence Eppard thinks he was wrong about poverty. I think he was right in the first place. Discussion on The Temple of Sociology substack. templeofsociology.substack.com/p/absolute-v...

This is terrifying. "[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them." ... "We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" [email protected]

How to not sound like a LLM - and write something interesting.

Exposure to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit during childhood improves mother's health and socioeconomic status at the time of first birth as well as leading to improved infant health outcomes, from Janet Currie and Jessica Van Parys www.nber.org/papers/w34464

e61 have a report arguing for a broadening of the Australian GST tax base. However, looking at variation across expenditure levels is misleading because of 'shopping variability'. People with high expenditures tend to be those who have just purchased consumer durables. e61.in/are-gst-exem...

Gough raised unemployment benefits to their highest level relative to poverty - then Fraser (and his treasurer John Howard) fucked it up as soon as they could. Hawke/Keating repaired some of the damage... then Howard fucked it up for good thepoint.com.au/opinions/251...

This is the kind of outcome the National Electricity Market, combined with smart meters and retail competition, was supposed to deliver. Instead, the government has had to impose it. Yet another patch on a failed system #auspol

"People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites... Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing." josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-f...

I'll be talking about Australian poverty trends tomorrow:

This doesn't necessarily mean that older people are less happy. For the average person, they have less life satisfaction as they age. But the most unhappy ones die off - leaving the 'happy' ones behind.

At some point people need to learn that the poverty rate is mostly about the safety net or lack thereof and not the economy. The economy was doing historically well, real wages rising for the first time in decades, etc. And poverty rose because pandemic safety policies expired.

Unfinished business: 50 years after Henderson (14 October 2025). Online panel discussion on the trajectory of Australian poverty and policy since Henderson's landmark report. Panellists: Cassandra Goldie, Bruce Bradbury, Kay Cook, Jeremy Poxon www.eventbrite.com.au/e/unfinished...

More evidence, on top of Baby's First Years experiment, that cash alone in early childhood does not improve children's early developmental trajectory. In contrast, there is strong evidence that policies that improve children's care experiences do improve their early development & adult outcomes.

"it is horribly bad news for the products of our education system. In order to be productive with AI, they need to obtain skills and experience that appear to come from learning by doing, except that they may not have the opportunities to ‘do.’ Second, wage dispersion is going to increase further"

Crisis in Indonesia: "This is not yet about Prabowo. ... for the time being, this movement has been directed at the parliamentarians and the police."

Paul Krugman's substack series on Inequality is now all up on the Stone Center website: stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/tag/people-p... (originally on his substack: paulkrugman.substack.com)

Exactly. There was tendency in policy research to think that longitudinal data would solve all our causal questions. I think (hope?) we are well past this now.

"the Australian government [should] establish an open, transparent and rigorous process to develop an official poverty measurement framework as soon as possible." Our paper in the latest issue of the Australian Economic Review onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678462...

Looks like #IZA will continue under the umbrella of the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). Great news

Record low welfare receipt-amongst working-age Australians = 'generation of slackers' www.aph.gov.au/About_Parlia...

"Until we have the resources to properly feed and educate all our children, we shouldn’t worry that we are having too few" @johnquiggin.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/johnquig...

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Two new post doc positions studying wealth and poverty at the Stone Center at CUNY (New York). A fantastic opportunity! cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/... cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Australian living cost indices: "Living costs for households whose main source of income is government payments recorded the strongest quarterly rise in living costs". Mainly due to ending of energy rebates. www.abs.gov.au/statistics/e...

Strange article in the Oz claiming DSS incoming gov brief included an 'extraordinary bureaucratic plea to bring welfare under control'. Article focuses on the increase in long-term JobSeeker recipients but suggests this is linked to concerns over spending www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/polit...

UNSW Sydney, Green fellowships: Up to 2 years, for people with very strong research profiles. EOIs are about to close. DM me if you want to come to the Social Policy Research Centre. www.unsw.edu.au/research/gre...

"Fearful of losing control of any scrap of virtue, managers needed to relentless check on every little task."

Wow. Research findings with p-values marginally less than 0.05 attract 60 to 110% higher Altmetric scores than those with p-values marginally above 0.05. p-hacking means more popular attention! p-hacking FTW!