Steven Bosworth

Remember when Larry Summers made the lazy inference that fewer women in science means they must be less able? @mardelgiu.bsky.social and I wrote a paper exploring the consequences of this lazy inference for occupational segregation which we term the "Larry effect:" www.iza.org/publications...

New trade theory stays winning

Wojak meme. Top sceptical wojak looks at text reading “gender: these clusters of correlated attributes are a social construct.” bottom grinning wojak looks at text reading “psychiatry: these clusters of correlated attributes are hard truths written onto your brain. trust science!”

Hoagieus corpus

Imagine you time travel back to 1847 and you find the left response to industrialization is a) machines will never be as good as human weavers or b) we need to copyright loom patterns or c) it’s a speculative bubble.

You’d say “Y’all. Not helping. What you need is obviously a labor movement.”

The lump of consumption fallacy

And yet we are very effective public communicators! This whole tiff seems to have started because a newspaper journo wasn’t really aware of the literature the economist in question was contributing to, but got the gist of it through her book.

My hunch is that other social sciences don’t want us participating in their discussions because they think we are talking behind their back in a foreign language (math).

Economists think of ourselves as social scientists. It’s other social scientists who seem to think we are STEM, or think that we think of ourselves as STEM. We also do cite other socsci. fields, though fwiw there is a clear asymmetry in feelings of not being cited appropriately.

Your research services office will be enthusiastic about the generous overheads 🥁

“in a just world, my oppressor would wear the same chains as me”

If I understand correctly, Senate R’s have a trilemma between a) not succeeding in taking away health insurance from the working poor, b) getting rid of the filibuster, or c) letting Trump nuke Article 1 of the constitution and are going to choose c)

Properly understood, neoliberalism is expressing The Good Life as an optimization problem that the state cannot possibly solve because it lacks private information about your preferences.

Does it count if the word describes everything I do or may in the future dislike and does not describe things I like?

An outsider may be forgiven for assuming the British love rules. They hate them in fact. But they also hate each other so it cancels out. Revealed preference only gets one so far..

Anyways consultants are not paid because they possess useful advice. They are hired to stand behind what the buyer wants to do and accept blame / verify good money was paid for it.

Weirdly lamentable that ai won’t after all be destroying jobs in the consulting industry.

JSM learning about incels: “and they can’t just wait wait for their one true love’s husband to die? Pathetic.”

How do you know this much about me??

Bajorans: cause celebre of the galactic woke, internally a lot of shit to work through (v. Irish-coded)

Zionists will go on and on to diaspora Jews about how our safety hinges on the survival of a Jewish state when the reverse is much closer to being true.

“..next week we are delighted to welcome to our seminar series..”

The U.S. health care system, leading the way.

Discipline is for sissies, apparently.

Begging Kier Starmer to extend the same consideration to all the Mexican nationals being kicked out of the US 🙏

The Boriswave HK exiles have demanded (and supplied) better, more tactfully named restaurants.

A friendly reminder as Nobel season approaches, the Nobel Prizes are not real Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

y pushing for such a hardline policy, Reform may have over-reached and handed a powerful weapon to their political opponents, who can attack a potential Farage government as a clear and present danger to the rights and security hundreds of thousands of decent hard-working migrant families, including friends, neighbours and workmates. After years of making the running on immigration, Farage may this week have handed the initiative back to his opponents.

@robfordmancs.bsky.social argues that the unpopularity of Reform's proposals offer the government an opportunity - but I'd add that they will squander that if they introduce what just looks like a watered-down version of those proposals.

This is also basically Chuck Schumer’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Listening Heads