Alexander Berger

So excited that @scientificdiscovery.dev will be advising us on clinical trial reform opportunities!

bsky.app/profile/sci...

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on.

Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts.

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~$40b in market cap loss for Novo Nordisk today, which is ~8% of Denmark's total GDP (stocks/flows but still)

TIL that even though the US Clean Power Plan was repealed, US power sector emissions have dropped faster than it targeted (basically bc of faster than anticipated transitions to solar and gas). Bummer to me that these pieces of good news aren't more celebrated!

Nice NYT article on human challenge trials, featuring
@1daysooner.bsky.social's advocacy pivot from COVID challenge trials to other diseases like Hep C, and a cool volunteer's decision to participate in a malaria challenge trial (and donate his comp!)
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/...

Driving a protective allele of the mosquito FREP1 gene to combat malaria Nature - Coupling of a FREP1 variant to a gene-drive system allows the spread of a host malaria resistance allele through the mosquito population.

Great NPR story:
www.npr.org/sections/go...

Full study:
www.nature.com/articles/s4...

We've long supported work to use gene drives to stop the spread of malaria, but many of the approaches are fairly invasive. So great to see this new paper in Nature from a grantee about an approach to drive a *naturally occurring malaria resistance gene* through a mosquito pop!

AI labs’ all-or-nothing race leaves no time to fuss about safety They have ideas about how to restrain wayward models, but worry that doing so will disadvantage them

Article here: www.economist.com/briefing/20...

Cool to see this report get mentioned in a recent article in The Economist
bsky.app/profile/alb...

Interesting paper on the long-run domestic determinants of US political support for foreign aid
conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

In this program in Rajasthan, adding a community health officer added a year of healthy life for ~$15K
patrickagte.github.io/patrickagte...

Pair of interesting job market papers on impacts of improving roads in low-income countries
jeannesorin.github.io/assets/pdf/...
jrosenthalkay.github.io/pdfs/rosent...

Yet another paper finding huge negative mortality results from air pollution. Wild methods on this one from Brazil

Awesome paper finding huge benefits from relaxing zoning constraints in NYC, even once you account for the big costs of redevelopment
vrollet.github.io/files/city_...

Very cool paper about how important social networks are in driving movement
conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

This paper finds that net jobs created by the Opportunity Zones tax break are largely just shifted from adjacent census tracts
conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

Also, Harrison Wheeler is a great name for someone studying the impacts of traffic. Nominative determinism strikes again.

Big estimates of negative externalities from traffic noise in the US
conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

Interesting result about the importance of sewers for the geography of cities arising from the fact that... um... "stuff" rolls downhill
conference.nber.org/conf_papers...

AI-powered skin spectral imaging enables instant sepsis diagnosis and outcome prediction in critically ill patients AI-driven hyperspectral imaging can rapidly and noninvasively diagnose sepsis and predict mortality in critically ill patients.

Instant sepsis diagnosis via skin spectral imaging (palm or finger) and A.I. in a prospective cohort of >480 ICU patients
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In a victory of optimism over experience, another open letter. (You can listen to this one if you prefer.) Also, it's good to exercise Americans' right to petition the government for the redress of grievances.
#science #econsky #academicsky

marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/07/open...

Opinion | Don’t Fire Jerome Powell, Mr. President Whatever the Fed chief’s errors, canning him early would be worse.

Well, the WSJ editorial board can't be any more direct than this:

"Don't Fire Jerome Powell, Mr. President"

www.wsj.com/opinion/jero...

Obama’s blunt message for Democrats: ‘Toughen up’ | CNN Politics Former President Barack Obama issued a call to action for Democrats at a private fundraiser in New Jersey on Friday evening, urging those frustrated by the state of the country under President Donald ...

“I don’t care how much you love working people. They can’t afford a house because all the rules in your state make it prohibitive to build. And zoning prevents multifamily structures because of NIMBY,” [Obama] said. www.cnn.com/2025/07/14/p...

New York City’s Hotel Market Is Envy of the Country Occupancy and hotel revenue are strong, but the market could face challenges from rising labor costs and declining foreign visitors.

What a weird framing! “Limits on entry help incumbent firms” www.wsj.com/real-estate/...

Can an AI model predict perfectly and still have a terrible world model?

What would that even mean?

Our new ICML paper (poster tomorrow!) formalizes these questions.

One result tells the story: A transformer trained on 10M solar systems nails planetary orbits. But it botches gravitational laws 🧵

Instant add to my reading list:

"Estimating public opinion from surveys: the impact of including a “don't know” response option in policy preference questions", new in PSRM

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I think this is a huge deal

The rhetoric around cash transfers seems to conflate two things:

1. The studies powered and designed to detect GE effects have studied cash transfers. They find important positive spillovers.

2. An advantage of cash transfers over other interventions is that they have these positive spillovers.

Developing a method to estimate producers' productivity beliefs in settings where output quantities and input prices are unobservable and using it to evaluate allocative efficiency in the market for science, from Fabio Bertolotti, Kyle R. Myers, and Wei Yang Tham https://www.nber.org/papers/w34000

Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Industrialization in South Korea* Abstract. I study the effect of industrial policies on industrial development by considering an important episode during the East Asian miracle: South Kore

#QJE Aug 2025, #1, “Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Industrialization in South Korea,” by Nathan Lane (@nathanlane.bsky.social): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...