“Israel is repeating the Gaza playbook in its war on Lebanon: large-scale displacement of civilians, destroying infrastructure, targeting hospitals and healthcare workers, and killing journalists. And the world has become numb to Lebanese loss and suffering” — my comments to @dawnmenaorg.bsky.social

It’s become obvious that the Trump administration gave zero thought to how this war would play out. Even now, though, I don’t think they quite appreciate how locked in they are to a complete and total clusterfuck. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-an...

Dan’s subhead: “Gulf War Three is not going well for the United States”. I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran, so I turn the microphone over to him. Briefly: In the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Tehran has escalation... 1/

NEWS: The Trump administration confirmed it bombed a girl’s school in Iran. It's one of the most devastating military errors in decades. Trump lied about it. Pete Hegseth gutted the office preventing civilian casualties. 175 are dead. Most were kids. Hegseth should be fired.

A few hours after NYT reported that the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing many children, the White House last night posted this video mixing airstrike footage with Top Gun, Iron Man, Gladiator, Halo, Breaking Bad, Star Wars, John Wick, Superman, Transformers and Dragon Ball Z

See here for implantation: bsky.app/profile/dgir...

📢 PSA for #EconSky & #RStats: The GitHub repo for our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper now has example scripts for R! If you're looking to implement LP-DiD in R, these are for you Here: github.com/danielegirar... #Econometrics #CausalInference @arindube.bsky.social

📢 PSA for #EconSky & #RStats: The GitHub repo for our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper now has example scripts for R! If you're looking to implement LP-DiD in R, these are for you Here: github.com/danielegirar... #Econometrics #CausalInference @arindube.bsky.social

About Kevin Warsh paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-bad-heir...

A quick take on Warsh. In terms of ideology and theory, at first glance he looks like a fairly standard pre-2008 'hawk' but he's perhaps closer to 80s monetarism: he thinks inflation is caused by government spending and money printing. 1/n www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

What’s so misguided about the formulation “authoritarianism is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” which I have heard from Ezra Klein and others, it’s that it misses the point: that’s true of authoritarianism *everywhere*.

This is good, addressing people directly, including those who have supported Trump

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

The ICE Seven

NORWAY PM: I HAVE REPEATEDLY CLEARLY EXPLAINED TO TRUMP THAT IT IS AN INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE THAT AWARDS THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Losing my mind at the Dems with their billionaire backers and powerful friends who have come up with the brilliant strategy that the party should adopt the policy positions of the avg MAGA voter — apparently ignoring that independents and swing voters even exist. Is this what $40 million gets you??

Gallego ("moderate" Dem) is going with "ICE needs to be totally torn down" (not "reform and retrain"). This is a pivot point for the country on immigration. You have been seeing this in the data for a while, and now officials are snapping to the public opinion www.gelliottmorris.com/p/ice-is-a-7...

Israel continues its war on healthcare for Palestinians www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/w...

Until recently, much of the evidence on these effects was at the subnational level and within country. I discuss three papers using novel cross-country evidence on the effects of national election outcomes (presidential and parliamentary elections), which are likely more consequential (14/n).

In the second part of the talk, I discuss recent work on the economic effects of elections through two main forces, representation and agency (13/n).

The first is “Partisan Shocks and Financial Markets: Evidence from Close National Elections” (AEJ: Applied) by @dgirardi.bsky.social. Using a cross-country RDD, Girardi finds that left-wing electoral victories cause large short-term decreases in stock market valuation (15/n).

A week ago, I gave the “Recent Developments in the Political Economy of Elections and Democracy” lecture at the 2026 AEA @assameeting.bsky.social ! Video: www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/202... Slides: www.vincentpons.org/recent-devel... Thread with the TL;DR of my talk below.

The immigration doom loop in full swing. Chasing the xenophobes is a doomed strategy both economically *and* politically. (1/3) archive.ph/pyVLg

A new paper by George Borjas—who served this past year in the Trump White House designing some of its anti-immigration policies—claims to display evidence of ideological bias among researchers who study immigration. doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵 Thread—>

A headline for the ages www.politico.eu/article/fran...

The smear campaign against Mustapha Kharbouch -- falsely accused of the Brown shooting and MIT murder by powerful politicians, pundits and plutocrats -- is a prime example of how pervasive racism has become. It's also a story largely ignored by the mainstream media www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Ashamed of this government

Remarkable how little coverage this is getting. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

A brave survivor speaks on the record. Sami al-Saei, 46, used to be a freelance journalist in the occupied West Bank. He was arrested after working with reporters to arrange interviews with armed groups and was detained without being charged for 16 months. bbc.com/news/article...

For more information: github.com/danielegirar... The -lpdid- command implements the Local Projections Difference-in-Differences estimators presented in @arindube.bsky.social , Girardi, Jorda’ & Taylor (2025) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Coauthored with @alexanderbusch.bsky.social

Key new features of LPDID: * New [oneoff] suboption to deal with 'shock' treatments lasting 1 period by construction (eg, hurricanes) * Reweighted estimator w/ covariates (or additional FEs) now *much* faster * Reweighted estimator w/ covariates now compatible with wild bootstrap standard errors

Public Service Announcement: 🚨New updated version (1.0.2) of -lpdid- STATA command now available🚨 Update the command by typing ssc install lpdid, replace directly in STATA Then look at the updated help file help lpdid See below for the key new features...

The International Monetary Fund asked me to review the literature on migration economics to draw lessons for low-income countries. In a new @iza.org paper, I argue that policy for the 21st century must discard four outdated ideas. www.iza.org/publications... 🧵 thread—>

Public Service Announcement: 🚨New updated version (1.0.2) of -lpdid- STATA command now available🚨 Update the command by typing ssc install lpdid, replace directly in STATA Then look at the updated help file help lpdid See below for the key new features...

What the Democrats can learn from the UK Labour Party's complete implosion after moving right on immigration www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-cost-o...

Short version: chasing the hardline party’s voters without any real principles of your own makes you lose your own base and convince fence-sitters to support the hardline party, not you.

Masha Gessen - "The Movie I Was Afraid to See" (gift link below) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/o...

25 years ago today, SCOTUS elected George W Bush president of the United States by blocking completion of a voting canvass in Florida. A subsequent canvass by the Associated Press showed that Bush's rival, Al Gore, had won the race in Florida—and thus the contest for the presidency—by 700 votes.

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

"Migrants who came to the UK on skilled work visas in 2022-23 will make a net contribution of £47bn to the public finances over their lifetime, according to new estimates from the government’s Migration Advisory Committee." Not surprising, but some observations (1/n) www.ft.com/content/10da...

Tighter visa rules will cost UK up to £10.8bn giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

"And tonight in 'Cutting off your nose to spite your face'...."

New Home Office impact assessment finds that cutting skilled and social care visas will cost the UK up to £10 billion with a central estimate of -£5.4 billion. It would be good if this got even a fraction of the coverage devoted to the endless debate about boats, flags and Turkish barber shops

Government has now - belatedly -published the impact assessment for the changes to skilled worker and care worker visas announced in May. Impact is estimated between -£2 billion and £-10 billion (central - £10 billion). assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6937e6...

But the good news is, by doing this, we defeated racism in the UK.

The first school to market itself as AI free is going to corner the market on people interested in actually learning. And I would not be surprised if rich families and the children of people creating this tech were the first movers.

Y'days post: The Budget suggests the Chancellor is thinking too much about short term management and too little about long term legacy mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-... What is doubly annoying about this government's focus on how its actions play with voters is that they are terrible at it

200 leading global artists, writers and actors are calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti. An impressive list here. freemarwan.org/public-figur...

Marwan Barghouti should be released now. As his relatives say, he “represents hope to Palestinians at a time when there are efforts to silence him and make him forgotten.”