Piggybacking on this great Jeff Selingo article with a couple paragraphs from our 2020 book Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn. A "selective" university sounds good until you realize how much human potential it's turning away.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Come be my colleague!

The WTO has named Robert Staiger as its new Chief Economist. Here is my @trade--talks.bsky.social podcast conversation in 2023 with Bob where he shared his thoughts about the WTO.

You know things are rough when the AAUP's advice on how to use social media is just "set all your accounts to private."

Goodness, I can't stand dot plots.

It's academic job market season. I’ve written a reflection with some potentially helpful tips: jaeyk.github.io/essays/job_m...

When health insurance plans voluntarily cover a service that they would otherwise not have to cover, you can pretty much bet that they know the service saves health, lives... and, of course, money.

When health insurance plans voluntarily cover a service that they would otherwise not have to cover, you can pretty much bet that they know the service saves health, lives... and, of course, money.

Now accepting applications for the PhD program in Health Policy and Administration at Penn State. We have specialty tracks in health economics, population health, and health care management and organization plus a dual title PhD program in HPA and Demography. #WeAre hhd.psu.edu/hpa/graduate....

Hey #Nebraska time to help defend the essential role of statistics in research and education #UNL #stats #education

Closing a Department of Statistics, in this day and age, is incredible and shortsighted. Please, read below. I encourage everyone from all over the world to submit their feedback here apc.unl.edu/fall-2025-bu...

The proposed cuts at Nebraska remind me of those in WV. A small, right-leaning state degrowthing its flagship university by eliminating departments and faculty through an administrative lead process that doesn’t engage in shared governance that could stop it.

Now accepting applications for the PhD program in Health Policy and Administration at Penn State. We have specialty tracks in health economics, population health, and health care management and organization plus a dual title PhD program in HPA and Demography. #WeAre hhd.psu.edu/hpa/graduate....

Does anyone want to be formal demography reading buddies? I have a bunch of areas I’m trying to read up on and I feel like I’d get it faster if I had someone to explain results to and ask questions of.

One of the great educators, scholars, and mentors of my field has left us. I was fortunate to know him and learn from him. Our world was a better place and I will miss him very much.

A review of published cost-effectiveness studies in the Tufts-CEVR CEA registry suggests CMS drug price negotiation has room to improve the population health impact of high-cost drugs. #HEOR #healtheconomics

In this just published paper in Value in Health led by Feng Xie and colleagues, we reviewed the published cost-effectiveness evidence for the 15 drugs selected for IPAY 2027 Medicare negotiations. @djvanness.bsky.social @ankurfactorial.bsky.social www.valueinhealthjournal.com/article/S109...

Vanderbilt Biostatistics professor Frank Harrell @f2harrell.bsky.social is presenting a hybrid seminar on Wednesday 9/17 at 1:30 pm Central that is open to all: "Goal-Driven Flexible Bayesian Design" #ClinicalTrials www.vanderbilt.edu/biostatistic... Photo: Erin O. Smith/VUMC

We're on the cusp of a global debt crisis. To see that, don't look at 30-year yields, which get pulled down by falling short-term yields. Look at 10y20y forward yields (red) that strip out short-term yields. Those are up everywhere and at alarming levels in places like Japan, the UK and France...

A major issue with the pundit-sphere is that reasonable takes are unlikely to drive traffic / capture attention, so people searching for attention / clicks instinctively avoid those positions and work themselves into a lather at people who do old those positions.

In August, nominal wage growth ticked down to 3.7% while #inflation continued to rise up 0.6 percentage points since April and hitting 2.9% last month. Taken together, real wage growth has continued to fall. Real wage growth is now at 0.7% over the year, cut in half over the last 3 months. #EconSky

Detroit News republished a piece I wrote about democratic threats in America www.detroitnews.com/story/opinio...

Sooo.... what you're saying is that we don't need a rate cut, then?

"Pretext" is on the short list for word of the year. Up there with "credulity."

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

In addition to all the other red flags, the student confronting the professor mirrors the bottom-up policing of elites by revolutionary cadres during Mao's Cultural Revolution. We're well into that now with Trump II, and as the article points out, the cadres never stop at low-hanging fruit.

I hope that some institution snaps up the removed dean and department chair - people with that level of integrity are exactly what we need in higher education. Hats off to them.

🏆 Awardee Spotlight: Yang! 🏆 📊 Research Focus: Value of Information Yang was a 2025 Lusted Prize Winner and feels truly welcomed and encouraged by the SMDM community! 🙌

Novo, Lilly obesity meds 'highly cost-effective' but sure to strain payer budgets: ICER report www.fiercehealthcare.com/pharma/novo-...

Looks AMAZING James! Wow what a resource! @jamesbland.bsky.social

A key take-away from this episode is that the actions of the university and politicians will encourage more hidden camera traps and a instill a culture of fear among instructors and other students (who presumably did not give consent to being recorded).

Today’s preliminary benchmark announcement from BLS reveals that job growth between March 2024 and March 2025 was half as fast as when it was first reported based on survey data. Read what @benzipperer.org and I wrote about those revisions and what they mean: www.epi.org/blog/todays-... #EconSky

📚 In summer 2023, my book Causal Analysis was published with @mitpress.bsky.social. Just two years later😉 I’m very happy to share that the lecture slides are now freely available in both PDF and LaTeX (as zip files), along with the datasets and R/Python code: 👉 www.unifr.ch/appecon/en/r...

"Independent rural hospitals are increasingly joining what are called clinically integrated networks, collaborative groups that allow them to avoid selling out to larger health systems while sharing resources to save money and improve patient care."

If *your department head and your dean* can be removed for supporting your colleague in teaching in their area of expertise, then you have no academic freedom. In a functional sense, you don't work at a university at all.

This so chilling. Watch the video to see McCarthyism in action. We should be embarrassed that politicians have led young people to this moment. (Also, Texas A&M needs to revisit its civics education, watch the video, and you'll see what I mean.)

You need to read these two articles together. www.insidehighered.com/news/student...

My latest for MSNBC: CMS is adding new prior authorization requirements for traditional Medicare, implemented with AI. Prior auth is a key vehicle for coverage denials that then drive administrative burdens of appealing, which seniors are less well equipped to navigate. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

For my forthcoming book, I interviewed countless patients caught in the middle between their insurer and their hospital -- whether due to miscommunication, ins or billing errors, or other factors that led to immense patient burden to rectify in order to access care and avoid hits to credit reports.

Not only is today the first day of meteorological fall 🍁🍂🌻 it's also the first of five dates this month whose YY.MM.DD components are all perfect squares: 25.09.01 25.09.04 25.09.09 25.09.16 25.09.25

Welcome to BlueSky, Blythe!

The Penn State Department of Statistics hosted the 2025 Rao Prize Conference on May 20 to recognize leading contributors to the statistics field. Among the honorees were Trevor Hastie and Martin Wainwright. Details: magazine.amstat.org/...

Here's a recommendation for all my English-speaking followers: Go check out the electric trucker on YouTube. In his videos, Tobias takes us with him on his trips with battery-electric trucks all over europe. This is nice and encouraging entertainment, but at the same time also very informative:

@deanbaker13.bsky.social @ceprdc.bsky.social interviews historian William P. Jones (who literally “wrote the book”) about today’s 62nd anniversary of the March on Washington. cepr.net/mostly-econo...

An interesting sentiment; bringing more critical thinking, analysis, and interdisciplinary work across all courses is crucial to develop and empower students in the age of AI.

I am alive thanks to the benefits of SSRIs and SNRIs. They are not the cause of mass shootings or other violence. And we know this because we are far from the only country in which these medications are prescribed, yet we are the outlier with respect to these acts of violence.

"The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/h...