Kim Weeden

Even better, tell them that a favorite pastime of middle schoolers was to look through this book and prank call the phone numbers of people with funny names.

Multiple cohorts of youth from my hometown owe "Richard Flopolotovitch" a sincere apology. Then again, so do his parents.

EPA cancels $280M in Biden-era grants to Alaska communities The agency has created new streams of money to benefit rural Alaska, but affected villages are skeptical it will help.

Here's a story from ADN about the cancellation of the EPA grants, including one to Kipnuk.

www.adn.com/business-eco...

How can any self-respecting journalist write an article on this and NOT mention that the compact allows the federal government to not only withhold but claw back funding from any university whose faculty or students "belittle" conservative -- and only conservative -- ideas?

How did I miss this paper, esp. given the outlet? 😆

Thanks! @mikehoutnyu.bsky.social and I estimated the reliability of all "can't actually change" questions. Parental occupation was more reliable than childhood income, but much less than parental edu. Could be driven by coding (as you mentioned), hard to categorize jobs, career changes, and more!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

In US context, about 2/3 of gender wage gap is associated with family wage gaps.

But, we didn't have longitudinal data, so we could only look at between-group associations. You have a much stronger design!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New article out in @sociusjournal.bsky.social.

It shows how closely linked motherhood penalties 🤰📉 and gender inequalities 👨‍💼💰👩‍💼 are by studying many local labour markets.

Thread 👇

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Alaskans in the indigenous villages generally vote Dem.

Alaska's one and only Democratic House Rep of the last 50 years, Mary Peltola (served May 2023-Jan 2025), is Yup'ik. She's from Bethel, AK, the closest town to where many of these photos taken. Close by AK standards, that is: ≈100 miles away.

Photos coming out of Western AK are devastating.

Hardest hit are indigenous villages off road system, many miles by air from supplies. Most built on river deltas w/ no high ground to which to escape.

Cuts to NASA/NOAA mean worse weather data. Cuts to EPA mean no grants for erosion control. Etc.

Nice to see this paper out!

I'm interested in stability in PAOCC & MAOCC, which are more often used in GSS-based analyses of mobility.

Could see more fluidity b/c of noise introduced in coding verbatim into SOC. OTOH, occ assumed to be less affected by recall, social desirability, privacy biases.

Growing up Different(ly than Last Time We Asked): Social Status and Changing Reports of Childhood Income Rank - Social Indicators Research How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.

The GSS asked the same people about their childhood income rank three different times. 56% changed their answer, even though what was trying to be measured couldn’t change! We dig into this in a new article at @socialindicators.bsky.social. 



doi.org/10.1007/s112...

🧵👇 (1/5)

The temp difference between Tok and the border is striking. IIRC, they are only a few hundred, um, thousand potholes and permafrost heaves apart.

Reader's note: they outsourced reimbursement to Concur

Berkeley Reschedules Coulter, but She Vows to Speak on Original Date (Published 2017)

Echoes of Ann Coulter's talk at Berkeley. She had a date scheduled, Berkeley was concerned about its ability to provide security and offered a different date & venue, Coulter turned it down & parlayed incident into a national platform to whine about being cancelled.

www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/u...

In favored nations, manliness is declining by 1000 percent, by 900, 600, 500, 1200 percent.

Inequality Readers. Generally, My Best Guess IBE, in y.

At the blog, I wrote about two very interesting recent methods articles - Inference to the Best Explanation and External/Construct Validity.

Very thoughtful pushback against the ascendancy of the credibility revolution.

asocial.substack.com/p/inequality...

Hope you enjoy!

Context: Kipnuk, a Yup'ik village near Bering Sea in SW Alaska, was hit with a massive storm and flooding last August, too. Last spring, it won a $20M grant for erosion control.

The GOP's Bugly Bill killed the grant program, which allocated 2.8B to communities hardest hit by climate change.

It's hard to (quickly) find solid stats on the in-person enrollment, but it looks like in person is still <20K. Maybe you found better data?

Per LU web page, total enrollment is 140K.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that Donald Trump’s first appearance in the New York Times was when the Nixon Justice Dept. sued him and his father for refusing to rent apartments to black people.

I riffed on a similar set of ideas here. Tl;dr: the university sector is one of the most competitive, decentralized, and high-choice sectors for "consumers" in the US economy.

In 2016, were your odd numbered lectures at 4 pm on Fridays? 9 am on Mondays?

NEW: @CDCgov hit hard by massive firings that several staff describe to me as a “bloodbath.”
Among those RIFd:
—leadership of the center for immunization and respiratory diseases;
—leadership of global health center
—leadership of the measles outbreak response; 1/4

A friend taught me a similar trick to increase response rates on student evaluations: if the response rate meets my bar (e.g., 75%), everyone gets an extra point or two.

Worked like a charm and students don't complain b/c they know I can't track or reward individual students for returning evals.

As is often the case with RFK Jr, he is making a claim based on a paper in the medical literature. However, he's either not smart enough or not honest enough (or both) to acknowledge that the paper has a weak research design and/or has been debunked.

"It should be an easy decision for college presidents not to stick their institution’s neck into this retroactive push-button guillotine."

And yet, somehow, for 8 of them it isn't.

Informative essay, well worth reading.

Ancient Alaska microbes' thaw helps understanding of climate change feedback loop Using samples gathered from a permafrost tunnel north of Fairbanks, researchers have awakened microbes that were last active as far back as 40,000 years ago.

In Lower 48, "climate change" conjures images of hot summers, fires, storms, & flooding

In interior & northern AK, another effect is clear: permafrost melt. It destroys roads & structures, releases CO2 & methane, & awakens 40,000 year old microbes.

What could go wrong?

HT @shanahstone.bsky.social

Screenshot from Farm Bureau article on farm bankruptcies. It shows farm bankruptcies climbing steadily 2014-2020, falling by half in 2021, & continuing to fall through 2023.

Farm bankruptcies are back in the news, so it's time to pull this chart out again.

Hey look they kept rising during Trump's first term. Then they went way down under Biden.

Now they're up again? So weird. Thanks Farm Bureau for the graphic

Data source: HSLS 2009, a longitudinal data set of a sample of 9th graders in a sample of schools. Students followed from 2009, when HS 9th graders, to 2021. Analysis restricted to (a) students who completed HS and for whom transcript was available, and (b) students who attended any college by 2016.

If highly selective universities, meaning those that admit <=10% of applicants, selected only on HS GPA, 63% of incoming students would be women. Wouldn't change much if considered test scores.

Trump's "compact" would hurt young men, and esp. young white men.

I doubt Linda "A1" McMahon knows this.