Also a reminder that ‘joined up government’ sometimes means things like the Home Office giving dubious travel data to HMRC, so you just get ‘joined up dysfunction’

Jaw-dropping reporting by Haaretz www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

AI is getting to be as smart as a PhD - the kind of PhD who would fabricate all the data for a research paper on the impact of AI. amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

As I note here, really zero reason to believe Elon is stepping away from anything. This is all a crisis comms campaign. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-...

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

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)

A man named Elias Rodriguez just shot dead two Israeli embassy staffers at a Jewish museum in DC, shouting “free Palestine!” An awful, criminal act that puts Israel back in a victim position. I’ve never seen a just cause attract such a high % of counterproductive “allies.” 🧵

Sigmund Freud’s ‘psychology’ is still getting parents in hot water

Correct take. If it’s good to force people to save for retirement, we don’t need to also compensate with tax breaks. This is true even if we’re only trying to force some people to save (eg because they have present bias)

My god. What an abomination. www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

The ISA landscape is so confused. Exhibit 1: you can keep funds in cash within a stocks and shares ISA. Removing the Cash ISA would just preference one type of institution over another (banks). on.ft.com/4mjY2ZI UK ministers consider cutting tax-free cash Isa allowance

New NBER WP by @kbuzard7.bsky.social @laurakgee.bsky.social and @olgastoddard.bsky.social finds mums are 1.4x more likely than dads to get a callback from schools, despite no request for the skew.

This Labour government’s apparently policy in office is to somehow improve growth/productivity while attempting to force a larger share of the overall workforce into lower value add employment and undermining profit centres. It’s definitively an unconventional approach!

Opinion from the FT's Editorial Board: 'The US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.' www.ft.com/content/f5fd...

A world historical crime, taking place in full view, with the perpetrators so convinced of their impunity that they can brag about genocidal intent, and it’s hard not to agree with their calculation that no one will stop them and no one will be held accountable

We need to replace all compensating variation evaluations with numbers of thumbs. Interpretable like CV, but much less likely to be biased in favour of wealthy people’s preferences.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

How better to celebrate Easter than with a discussion of whether Donald Trump is a Leviathan or Anti-Leviathan? New post from me about whether it makes sense to use theories about dictatorship to understand Trump's kind of chaotic authoritarianism. 1/n benansell.substack.com/p/donald-tru...

This is remarkably close to what we had six days ago. The average tariff rate of most European nations was about 1%.

New post from me about Trump's tariffs and why Harold Macmillan was right - we Brits are truly Greece to America's Rome - because our Brexit-era compulsion to think everything was 'simple' has a Trumpian heir. A short thread. 1/n benansell.substack.com/p/simple

Video obtained by my colleague Farnaz Fassihi shows how the IDF deliberately attacked, over several minutes, a convoy of ambulances and other emergency vehicles in #Gaza. #Israel wrongly claimed that the vehicles drove without emergency signals and headlights. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/w...

Comparisons like this really aren’t meaningful. Do the same for the 1929 crash ($34bn lost peak to trough) to see why. % down is better. This graph says more about market gains in the intervening period than losses in the last few months

This, by @zacgross.bsky.social, is very smart take on how Albo should respond to the Trump tariffs open.substack.com/pub/gross/p/...

Colbert: the art of taxation is like plucking a goose to max feathers and min hissing Trump: I love the sound of hissing in the morning

The formula is a distraction. Reverse engineered to justify Trump's misguided obsession with bilateral trade deficits. The issue to focus on is how the rest of the world should respond now that the US is no longer part of the rules based trading system

The formula isn’t *that* mad - it’s exactly what chatgpt would suggest if you asked it to design a policy to eliminate trade deficits and ignore all other considerations. Terrible policy, but coherent given its single-mindedness

“Assuming that offsetting exchange rate and GE effects are small enough to be ignored…”

🤯 ChatGPT almost certainly responsible for the tariffs on uninhabited Antarctic territories as well

Elon Musk just called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, so it’s worth reiterating: All functional retirement schemes, public or private, pre funded or pay as you go, are claims on future production - there's just no way, at scale, of storing current production for use during retirement

I couldn't agree more! The excessive focus on linearized solutions to HA models is a bit like the old joke about the drunk who is looking for a key under a lamppost because that's where the light is. More discussion of why we need non-linear models and ways forward here benjaminmoll.com/challenge/

🚨 Oprea (2024 AER) argued that prospect theory choice anomalies were not due to risk, but due to complexity-driven mistakes. But this new analysis convinces me that Oprea (2024) is substantially wrong. In my opinion, the paper should be retracted.

Thread for Brexit memorial day I want to highlight 2 big open questions about the economic consequences of Brexit 1. Why did Brexit reduce UK output growth? 2. How bad has the TCA been for UK trade? 1/

I can be as critical as anyone of the government's occasionally muddled message on growth but Look! At! This! Chart!! Anything they've done pales next to this GIGANTIC UNFORCED ERROR COMMITTED IN 2016! (fagpacket maths follows) on.ft.com/4hzyvbJ

New The coming battle between social media and the state Behind the alignment of X and Meta with Trump is a cold business logic — and a position of weakness rather than strength By me, in todays @financialtimes.com www.ft.com/content/917c...

Such an important insight by @davidallengreen.bsky.social in the FT today. Tech companies fear regulation. What better lobbying strategy against foreign governments than to cozy up to the new US administration? They can’t win on their own.

It would be cool if we stopped abbreviating and went back to the original - 'border Caesar', 'drug Caesar'

It’s impossible not to know what’s happening in Gaza. Article by two prominent Israeli economists Motty Perry and Ariel Rubinstein www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024...

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/

There's a strange development happening in the #EconJobMarket this year: av. interview invites per job is *way* down on previous years. Anyone know what could explain this?

New research. How has Brexit affected UK trade? We find TCA reduced goods exports by 6.4%, imports by 3.1% Smaller firms hardest hit. Around 16,400 firms stopped exporting to the EU entirely But larger firms' exports unaffected, contributing to relatively small fall in overall trade 1/

Want to solve heterogeneous-agent models with multiple endogenous state variables, say a multi-asset HANK model? @soroushs.bsky.social and @patricksecon.bsky.social developed a much-improved finite-difference scheme for such problems: github.com/SSabet/Neste... Also here benjaminmoll.com/codes/

The @wsj.com perpetuates the myth that compliance with beneficial reporting requirements in the US is somehow a 'burden' for small businesses Let's be clear: every legitimate small business in America has this information right on hand, they just gave to write it down www.wsj.com/opinion/corp...

Here's a new version of our paper on Australia's pandemic pension withdrawals, our third major revision. This revision brings a new title, a narrative reframing, and a major overhaul of our calibration exercise. 🧵 static1.squarespace.com/static/59b0b...

Thanks for the summary Rachael! One big implication of the paper is that the link between research and policy cannot be taken as given, and needs to be rigorously studied -- this is what I do in my current and future work. Read more here: www.michellerao.com/research #EconJMP #EconSky

McGill is late to the market, but we finally can post our position. We are looking across all fields. McGill econ is a fun department with an active, lively group of colleagues. Apply (or repost).

Pretty striking findings! www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/app/uploads/...

Here’s my job market paper ‘Household Liquidity Policy’, joint with Patrick Moran at the FRB