Matthew K. Ribar

Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.

Democracy Works: The dismantling of USAID and the death of government oversight Former NASA and USAID Inspector General Paul Martin joins us to recount the chaotic end to his decades-long career in public service and discuss the role that oversight plays in American democracy.

The unraveling of USAID was deliberate. Paul Martin sounded an alarm about nearly half a billion dollars in food aid, and he lost his post for it. That choice weakened the country’s own safeguards and its standing overseas. A government committed to democratic practice protects its overseers.

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts Brooke Nichols has launched online tracking tools that capture estimated increases in mortality and disease spread for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases as a result of the near-total...

By this time next week, the estimated deaths due to the illegal destruction of USAID and the shuttering of its aid efforts will breach 400,000.

More than 260,000 will be children.

Source: www.bu.edu/sph/news/art...

Also worth remembering the host of violence prevention programs in northern Nigeria that USAID was funding

Excellent turnout amidst crummy weather here in St Louis!

Thanks Will! I have also gotten the reasonable question "what does this paper do that Honig (2017,2022) doesn't?" Glad I've convinced you.

It's going up to $40 billion.

USAID's budget last year was $28 billion.

Banner image featuring the hashtag #OpenAccess on a green background above the text 'American Political Science Review' on a blue background.

#OpenAccess from @apsrjournal.bsky.social -

Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in Sub-Saharan Africa - https://cup.org/46qHNnT

- @mattkribar.bsky.social

#FirstView

Pierre, a cat, lays upside down.

Big thanks to my supportive advisors, the various groups who funded this research, my wife, and one particularly fussy editor:

The field survey in Cote d’Ivoire process-traces three intermediate steps: (1) strong chiefs lead to more titles because Ivorian chiefs have an incentive to facilitate rather than impede; (2) chiefs capture land management and exclude the local out-group; and (3) chiefs benefit from this capture.

But households aren’t the only actors here; traditional chiefs either facilitate titling (if the state devolved land governance, meaning that chiefs can capture these institutions) or impede it (if titling remains centralized).

First, if farmland isn’t valuable enough (or if there are limited returns to the kind of agricultural investment that titling facilitates, like fertilizing land or planting trees), then households won’t bother to title.

Back to the question, I marshal 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries from both the DHS and LSMS programs, along with a geospatial strategy to measure land values and a field survey in Cote d’Ivoire.

Control over land tenure can also act as a reservoir of authority for traditional elites—meaning that property rights are a crucial arena in which to test when traditional elites complement or substitute for the state.

First: why should you care about land titling? Some recent Nobel prizes suggest that good institutions are a necessary condition for economic development. Where the agricultural sector still employs many households, secure land tenure is the ‘institution’ that counts.

This figure shows the fraction of land-owning households who possess a formal land title for at least one parcel across 22 African countries. Data are from the Demographic and Health Surveys as well as the Living Standards Measurement Surveys.

Abundant research says formalizing land ownership is good for households, and land titles are available on-demand through much of Africa. But the below figure shows both low take-up overall and high amounts of variation within states. What gives?

I’m thrilled that my job market paper, “Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in sub-Saharan Africa,” is hot off the press and open-access at @apsrjournal.bsky.social. A quick thread featuring more than you ever wanted to know about land tenure.

We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

This looks really interesting!

Rubio said no children died? Add that to the pile of lies. At least Musk admitted “he gave zero fucks.”

And all this? For a bunch of AI-generated hallucinations and outright lies about “corruption” at USAID.

By the way, in the initial wave of AI-powered program cuts, Lewin, Rubio, and Musk pinballed between cutting production contracts, then restoring production while cutting shipping, then cutting shipping while restoring production, etc.

Starting production takes time, arranging shipping takes time, the shipping itself takes time. That was true before they fired everybody and its even more true now.

This means food goes undelivered. Delays pile up. Much of the world’s supply of ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) is made in either Lubbock, TX or Rhode Island, far from where it is used.

But Rubio, Musk, and Jeremy Lewin fired single person at USAID who knew how this process works. There are a handful of contracts officers (high-level) and program assistants (entry level) left, but none of the core staff who do the work (i.e. save lives).

A $45 Treatment Can Save a Starving Child. US Aid Cuts Have Frozen the Supply

This article highlights the fundamental lie behind Rubio’s claim that humanitarian aid is still flowing. Have grants been signed? A couple (massive cuts to humanitarian food). Has money been obligated? It’s starting to trickle. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/h...

Look, I hate to get all 1938 here, but this is exactly the same concession that Hitler made over Czechoslovakia.

Do Moderates Do Better? Uncovering Bias in Split Ticket’s WAR Scores

We took a close look at Split Ticket's WAR metric, which has become influential in Democratic circles for suggesting moderates significantly outperform progressives.

Our finding: The metric contains systematic biases that overstate the advantage of moderation. A corrected model shows no advantage.🧵

E.J. Antoni has more insurrections to his name than published papers