Join us at UCT for our 2-day December Workshop co-hosted with ERSA, discussing frontier research in applied economics for developing countries! 2 keynotes: Taryn Dinkelman & Joseph Kaboski. 12 presenters from 7 international & 4 local universities, & PhD student panels.

Last day to submit! Get your papers in!

Really excellent short interview on ABC about the SA Expropriation Act and claims of "white genocide" with Prof. Ruth Hall (@ruthhallplaas.bsky.social), acting director of South Africa's leading agrarian studies research unit, @plaasuwc.bsky.social. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6__b...

Notable how vast majority of SA knows this Afrikaner ethnic persecution/refugee thing is such obvious bullshit--literally made-up--that it's not even worth engaging with. You can't refute baldfaced fantasy with facts etc. But wonder if it makes reality less clear to rest of world

Spoke with first prospective South African PhD student today who was planning on doing his PhD in the US, but now feels he cannot commit to something so long in such an unpredictable & potentially oppressive environment. There will be more.

I know the right wing media finds it all very difficult so, in an attempt to be helpful, this is what an actual interference with free speech looks like.

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

Speaking truth to power. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Like, seriously???

Reading this appalling story, I don't see how anyone can in good conscience send their kids to Columbia -- not even as a political statement, but from a basic "will they take care of my kid?" standpoint...

📢 SALDRU is proud to host the "South Africa at 30 Years of Democracy" conference at UCT! 🇿🇦🎉 A deep dive into our progress since 1994 & pathways for the future. 📅 Funded by AFD and the EU Commission, supported by the Presidency, Treasury ZA & NPC. #SA30 #Democracy #Research

Hello, Bluesky #EconSky! We're the Southern Africa Labour & Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at UCT, dedicated to challenging inequalities through policy-relevant academic research. We are one of the leading Labour & Development #Economics units on the continent. Explore our work: saldru.uct.ac.za

The Wuhan lab is STILL doing unsafe research that could trigger a pandemic AND getting prestigious pubs as incentive.😫 To fix this for the future, we have to admit we were deliberately misled on the possibility of a lab leak in the past. Horrid but true. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/o...

"Aligned to" is a way of saying that they have no proof that he provided anything that could be legally construed as material support to Hamas, or showed allegiance to Hamas in any way, but he said some things they decided are vaguely in alignment with Hamas and they're imprisoning him for it.

UPDATE — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now commented on the Trump admin’s detaining & attempted green card revocation of a Columbia Gaza encampment student negotiator: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Chotiner + Will Shoki combo as excellent as one would expect. Seriously, if you’re not a South African and only read one article about the Trump/Musk demands vs the reality of SA today, this is the piece. And an excellent discussion for SAns too! www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

A good piece. This the flipside of Trump's maximalism, based on completely fabricated "facts" -- he actually makes it impossible for countries to comply, even if they wanted to. www.news24.com/fin24/opinio...

So obvious that it feels absurd to even engage with this, but some statistics re the extreme economic position of white South Africans, in one of the most unequal countries in the world:

Also, as someone who worked a bit with real asylum seekers in the US. If white Afrikaners wanna know real persecution? Go try navigate that dehumanising & punitive system. Even if treated preferentially, that will be far worse discrimination than Afrikaners ever experience in SA.

That Trump executive order re South Africa is absolutely insane. Just straight up deluded racist myth. So unmoored from reality that it would be impossible for SA to “remedy” these accusations even if we were inclined to do so.

The Race and Stratification Working Group at NBER will have its annual meeting on Friday, April 4, 2025! Dania Francis, Vicki Bogan, Ellora Derenoncourt and I are organizing the program. Submit your paper before the December 19, 2024 deadline! conference.nber.org/confsubmit/b...

Come attend the 2024 SALDRU December Workshop! 12-13 December, School of Economics, U of Cape Town. We've got a great list of speakers, and v pleased the keynote will be Dennis Egger (@eggerdennis.bsky.social) presenting "Slack & Economic Development". All welcome! RSVP: forms.gle/cwdPjw7iEjqa...

More devastating reporting from Kimon on Stilfontein and the workings of these zama zama (illegal mining) operations groundup.org.za/article/trap...

Investigation into social grant fraud is a flop SASSA investigation into SRD grant application system fails to answer crucial questions Read groundup.org.za/article/inve... by Nathan Geffen

Two postdoc opportunities on industrial policy at Columbia: 1. Center for Political Economy's Firms & Industrial Policy Idea Lab: cwp.submittable.com/submit/30347... Deadine: Dec 2. 2. Initiative for Policy Dialogue: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Official deadline today (11/25)! Please spread word.

This is fast becoming the most boring & repetitive “debate” on this platform. So let me offer my two cents too 🤓 Yes, this will place will be incredibly boring if it’s mainly just politically-obsessed US liberals & progressives #onHere But hopefully that makeup will change as X keeps collapsing :)

Kimon de Greef, Ihsaan Haffejee and Kimberly Mutandiro have been at Stilfontein reporting on the trapped zama zamas. Here Kimon describes the illegal mining situation (Ihsaan's pics mostly) groundup.org.za/article/stil... Here Kimon describes the rescue operation: groundup.org.za/article/scen...

Part 2, more on current situation. Be warned, very grim. Seems to me that cause of immediate crisis is indeed the police blockade. It means 100s of people need to come up in a short window, or starve. But their existing systems can only handle a few people per day. groundup.org.za/article/scen...

Are there any unexpected downsides to using your own website URL as the domain for your handle here? E.g. perhaps some kind of indexing thing for the external tools like Clearsky etc? cc @thieflord.dev

Despite a massive head start, BlueSky has now overtaken Threads in the US 👇

Stilfontein’s dangerous and desperate illegal mining industry: Zama zamas search for gold in a vast and unmapped underground network of tunnels Read groundup.org.za/article/stil... by Kimon de Greef

Finally, in-depth reporting on what is actually happening in Stilfontein. Excellent piece, providing context & an explanation of what's happening now. First in a series. Not surprising it comes from Kimon de Greef & Ihsaan Haffejee, via @groundupnews.bsky.social groundup.org.za/article/stil...

Damn I picked a good year to start following the NFL properly 😎 #Steelers

The only thing better than beating England is letting England think they might have a chance of winning and then beating England. 🇿🇦

📢We're #hiring 3 #postdoc researcher roles at the CSAE. 🔷@oxfordecondept.bsky.social w/ Dennis Egger 🔷CSAE w/ Stefan Dercon 🔷WWHGE @blavatnikschool.bsky.social w/ Noam Angrist ⏰Deadline: 15 January 2025 ℹ️ Apply: www.csae.ox.ac.uk/vacancies #researchopportunity #researchjobs

Just found it for someone else lol - starter packs really have been a game changer! blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack...

A few days ago I saw a webpage which collected ~all (?) starter packs across Bluesky and then let you search them by name... but can't find it now. Anybody have the link?

No

Learning some surprising things about some of you while browsing your “following” list as I rebuild my network here 😏

Operation Vala Umgodi, a joint effort by police and the army to combat illegal mining in South Africa, appears to have a new motto: By any means necessary. In the most recent escalation by the task team, this meant starvation and dehydration.

I’d be happy to pay a small fee but 2 minimal conditions for an ecosystem which has a paid tier: 1) paying a fee is not mandatory for all users 2) paying members do not get any kind of algorithmic/conversation boost Not interested in a network which excludes/marginalises people who can’t/won’t pay.

I thought someone would have made it already but they hadn't done so.... go.bsky.app/SmQgVK4

Do you want to visit sunny summer Cape Town? Are you doing innovative Economics research? Present at the SALDRU December Workshop! While first full workshop will start next year, we are also holding an ad-hoc version this year, *12-13 December 2024*. Details: www.saldru.uct.ac.za/2024/10/03/s...

Just the beginning of how the broken census is going to have terrible real-world consequences www.news24.com/fin24/econom...

No 😭 www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times...

Gauteng Department of Health. An unceasing deluge of scarcely believable dysfunction & abdication of duty. Life Esidimeni, Babita Deokaran, NGOs building boreholes, pregnant women on the floor, Nozuko Mkabayi, attacks on whistleblowers, unspent cancer billions. Killing people.

Remarkable—and damning—that this needs to be explained to a political party with supposed national aspirations in *South Africa*, but it seems it does. Excellent as per usual from Mondli Makhanya. www.news24.com/citypress/vo...

I thought this was a really excellent piece on the SA elections & GNU and what the fundamental political economy fracture is in SA right now. Really worth reading in full. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pat...

Wtaf. Is the DA so bereft of marginally competent people that they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for clowns like this? Way to show you are a serious party of government. www.news24.com/citypress/ne...