Aditya Dasgupta

Came across a cool paper on how false beliefs are sustained in equilibrium. In Murcia, prayers for rain appear to work - because they are timed to occur when rain is increasingly likely. Praying for rain globally is only found where rainfall is predictable with time: www.nber.org/papers/w31411

This book is relevant to thinking about the present constitutional moment in the US. Constitutional and federal mythology aside, the US has always had some elements of extreme political centralization in the hands of the presidency that go back to a desire to create an electoral monarchy

Domination and Mobilization Cambridge Core - Asian Studies - Domination and Mobilization

I will be engaging a conversation with @daliyang.bsky.social, @vicshih.bsky.social, @tompepinsky.com and Martin Dimitrov on my new book at the #APSA2025 Author Meets Critics panel on 9/14, 10:00 to 11:30am PDT. Come join us if you are still around.

www.cambridge.org/core/books/d...

Incredible parallels in this Berinsky &
@gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism

gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

Thx for coming!

Come check out our panel on Bureaucratic Performance in the Developing World at APSA (Thu, September 11, 12:00 to 1:30pm PDT in East Meeting Level, East 12. I'll be presenting some new work on how farmers and officials in India learned to game satellite-based environmental enforcement.....

The ‘missing intercept’ problem with going from micro to macro Many applied microeconomics papers conclude with a back-of-the-envelope calculation that scales their cross-sectional estimates to the aggregate level. These types of aggregate estimates are only vali...

I wasn’t familiar with this terminology but the “missing intercept” problem seems like a good way to think about partial vs general equilibrium effects and why the latter isn’t just about adding up the former: voxdev.org/topic/method...

The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media By Eunji Kim, Columbia University and Shawn Patterson Jr., University of Pennsylvania American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump’s unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. 

The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media

The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media By Eunji Kim, Columbia University and Shawn Patterson Jr., University of Pennsylvania American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its…

What a way to kick off the @ucmerced.bsky.social academic year! Political Science and CAPE hosted the inaugural Fall Kick-Off for faculty and students last week, featuring a celebration of Professor Christopher Ojeda's new book The Sad Citizen: How Politics is Depressing and Why It Matters.

The thing about industrial policy is that it doesn’t seem to work very well unless you have a highly professionalized and relatively politically autonomous bureaucracy (think MITI in Japan vs license raj in India) that implements it. I think that’s the fundamental problem in the US spanning party

The rest

Teaching a new class on technology and politics this fall — which tries to think about contemporary tech governance issues via the historical experience of past technological revolutions (IR, atom bomb, printing press, automobile, etc) Sharing the syllabus in case it is of interest..!

I’m starting to think everyone needs a basic primer in what machine learning is, just like they need to know algebra/the basics of calculus. It’s just as accessible and I think important for critical thinking about the tools everyone will increasingly be using, including government

I agree with the idea that LLMs are a very useful technology — but there is a fundamental difference with calculators. Calculators are hard coded with human engineered rules. LLMs like neural networks “learn” rules that are opaque even to their designers, so reliability is a fundamental issue.

In a polarized climate, nothing the president does is a bridge too far for co-partisans. Worth reading this article: muse.jhu.edu/article/729166

"The Value of Clean Water: Experimental Evidence From Rural India"

static1.squarespace.com/static/558ef...

The student newspaper.
This fell. To the student. Newspaper.

Peter Temin has himself written on the history of economic history at MIT here: read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article...

The dominant framework that political scientists have to think about parties is Downsian competition — parties just fluidly adjust to what the electorate demands. In fact, parties are more like clubs, and insiders are more than happy to sink the whole ship if it means they enjoy rents for a while..

A great review essay from Avinash Dixit on why government should not / cannot be run like a business: www.edegan.com/pdfs/Dixit%2...

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Columbia Expels, Suspends Student Protesters The move comes during reports that the institution is nearing a deal with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions in federal funding.

An incredible embarrassment for an educational institution: www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Re-reading this classic, its central thesis — bureaucracies gain autonomy from politicians on the basis of their popularity/reputation — does not seem to hold up very well in the current era. Agencies with stellar reputations (Post Office, NASA, NIH, etc) have been carved up just the same?

I pledge that I will not provide any service to Columbia University. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Columbia. I will not publish with Columbia publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Columbia departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for this week’s shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Columbia repudiates their catastrophic choice.

I wonder if the Columbia leadership realizes (or cares) how much blowback there might be from *within* the academy.

This post, from a Cornell Law professor, is worth reading:

3d.laboratorium.net/2025-07-25-c...

Gaza has reached IPC Phase 5, which is the worst level of food insecurity & is associated with high amounts of death & permanent disability. For people experiencing this level of malnutrition, even if it ended today, many of the consequences (eg personal outcomes like disabilities) are irreversible.

A really great paper on market power providing evidence that competition between agricultural middle-men results in better prices for farmers. The setting is rural India, but the principle is of course generally relevant: pages.jh.edu/schatt20/pap...

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -- a saying surprisingly universal in its relevance to things that organizations/governments do

On Data and Democracy (Mid-Year Roundup): Charting the Assault on American Democracy and A Path Forward A narrative of a democracy in the balance, told through 29 data visualizations.

Been a busy year in the data mines.📊 Just published my mid-year roundup: 29 data visualizations on the state of US democracy, tracking everything from judicial resistance to billionaire influence to why Dems have a mobilization crisis, not a moderation problem.

All charts free to use:

Interesting (also methodologically)

I'd like to believe this. But based on how I've seen markets react to catastrophic institutional erosion recently, I'm not convinced that firing the Fed Chair wouldn't just produce a bit of short term volatility in the stock market before returning to normal/rising ever higher...