Chris Aitken

When a parrot wanted to connect with a distant friend, a touchscreen showed a selection of other birds available online. The parrots learned to activate the screen, designed specially for them, by touching it gently with their tongues rather than pecking aggressively with their beaks. "We had 26 birds involved," said Hirskyj-Douglas. "They would use the system up to three hours a day, with each call lasting up to five minutes." The interactions ranged from preening and playing with toys to loud vocal exchanges. "When we went through the data, we found that most of these parrots had favourite friends," said Hirskyj-Douglas.

Pet parrots which typically live alone (whilst those in the wild live in large flocks) were given the technology to call each other. They would use it for up to three hours a day, and developed favourite friends 💔
on.ft.com/3K05vhS

Experimentation and thinking at the level of a program of experiments
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/05/e...

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At last! 🎉 After years in the making, my paper with Manuel Fernandez & @marcogn.bsky.social is out as an IZA Discussion Paper.

We ask: Can better streets boost property tax compliance? 🚧💰 If so, why?

We answer this with an RCT in Mexico + a model of tax compliance.

docs.iza.org/dp18082.pdf

(Z’X)^{-1}Z’Y

Waterstones opens 10 new stores a year as younger adults embrace reading Bookshop chain says people are keen to escape their screens and says rise in sales is partly down to BookTok Times may be tough on the high street but the bookseller Waterstones is enjoying strong sales as younger adults embrace reading as an escape from their screens and as online competition eases. “People have come back to reading and buying books in bookshops as we have made a place which is an enjoyable and effective way to buy books,” says James Daunt, the CEO of the British retailer, which has 320 UK bookshops and owns the Foyles, Hatchards and Blackwell’s names, and whose parent group also owns Barnes & Noble, the US’s largest bookstore chain. Continue reading...

Waterstones opens 10 new stores a year as younger adults embrace reading

Tech pioneer Stephanie Shirley: ‘I need to make the life that was saved worth saving’ The ‘venture philanthropist’ on her journey from child refugee to billion-dollar businesswoman — and why Britain must do more for those fleeing war today

Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley has died aged 91. She is the subject of I think, one of the best ever FT lunches, which you can read here (registration or subscription required, will post a first 300 clicks free link in the replies):

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Important things to consider before we outsource the research and writing process to machine proxies

YouTube video by NPR This is the only prototype of the MingKwai typewriter

I've been hearing about & seen still photos of the recently rediscovered Chinese typewriter created by Lin Yutang, so cool to see this video report by @emilyzfeng.bsky.social featuring @tsmullaney.bsky.social (who, literally, wrote the book on the Chinese Typewriter) www.youtube.com/shorts/oaIlb...

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

1. Goals that good descriptive *questions* pursue:

🟣 must seeks to describe theoretically relevant objects

🟣 may seek to reveal facts in need of explanation

🟣 may seek to evaluate a theory's face validity or completeness

Good description is invariably deeply cognizant of theory.

"I'm going to govern in econometrics" is a winning campaign slogan for the ages.

Five books by Romain Gary, Rabindrath Tagore, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein and Arthur Schnitzler, in stylish red-on-white text-based designs. Format is small (A-format) paperbacks.

Five by Cesar Aira, Chester Himes, Gerard de Nerval, Audrey Lorde and Mary Shelley

Five by Maryse Condé, Nikolai Leskov, June Jordan, Willa Cather and Emilia Pardo

Say hello to the Penguin Archive. 90 short books being published next month for Penguin’s 90th anniversary—fifteen of which are shown here. £5.99 each, with designs reminiscent of the old Great Ideas series. (Though sadly these aren’t debossed.)

How restaurant hype happens: a tale told through booking data [FREE TO READ] What mattered most for these five buzzy restaurants — critics, influencers or awards?

For this weekend’s mag @claradoodle.bsky.social did something I have always dreamt of: she got restaurants to show us their booking data and how it’s effected by various forms of publicity. What matters more, TopJaw or an FT review? 😬 … with lovely interactive charts on.ft.com/4iE7PYj

Interesting new paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09907

improves on both rdrobust and rdhonest!

Quite compelling... 1/n

Bat safety barrier will cost £100m, says HS2 chairman - BBC News Sir Jon Thompson tells a conference there is "no evidence high-speed trains interfere with bats".

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but it might be interesting:

“Sir Jon Thompson told a rail industry conference the [£100m] bat protection structure in Buckinghamshire was needed to appease Natural England, as bats are legally protected in the UK.”

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It’s a tough problem. We learn and make progress, so the body of knowledge one needs to master to reach the frontier expands & morphs. That naturally reduces the value of reading original texts. But the original expression of an idea can be illuminating, even to simply see what was retained from it.

Not in a meaningful sense, no. Most of his core ideas have been distilled and refined through subsequent work. The version that graduate students now see is more formal and more precise. In general, economics places very little emphasis on original texts.

How to dismantle the UK’s regulatory Tower of Babel Labour’s erratic, piecemeal approach will not deliver lasting change

I’m getting really fed up of these abstract attacks on ‘regulation’ - why is Andy Haldane advocating the Doge approach for UK - blanket halving the number of regulators and their budgets? on.ft.com/416pqlx 1/2

NHS England » NHS productivity update Agenda item: 5 (Public session) Report by: Julian Kelly, Chief Financial Officer / Deputy Chief Executive Officer Paper type: For information

NHS England productivity update

The good: according to NHS estimates, hospital productivity is growing by 2.4% year-on-year

The bad: productivity is still 8% below pre-pandemic levels

The remarkable: spending on agency staff has fallen by 36% year-on-year

www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nh...

The worst aspect of this problem is that Word totally refuses to change its dictionary when instructed to do so. It’s like it is taunting me. All I want to do is spell things correctly.

One of the most irritating and brutal manifestations of soft power has to be Microsoft’s insistence that all English language speakers use US English.

‘He’s one of the best’: the economist shaping Rachel Reeves’s growth plans John Van Reenen believes he can help Labour solve the ‘peculiar British problem’ of chronically weak productivity

New from me, on Rachel Reeves's influential chief economic adviser John Van Reenen, and some of the ideas behind Labour's approach to growth: www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Exposure to air pollution in England, 2003–23 | Institute for Fiscal Studies We set out how air pollution (PM2.5) has changed across England and explore inequalities by ethnicity, income deprivation, region and age.

Our IFS report on air pollution is out! Good news first: air pollution (PM2.5) has HALVED in England since 2003, with a big drop during Covid. There's no rebound post Covid, somewhat puzzlingly. We use DEFRA data, monitoring station data shows the same thing. (1/7)
ifs.org.uk/publications...

Want to do a funded, joint Oxford-CMA PhD on market power?

Howard Smith (Oxford) and the CMA Microeconomics Unit are looking for promising candidates interested in doing research on the topic of "Beyond markups: understanding changes to competition, concentration, and market power".

#EconSky

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Happy to share that my and @cconlon.bsky.social's micro BLP paper was just accepted at the Journal of Econometrics! jeffgortmaker.com/files/Incorp...

It's our 2nd tied to our PyBLP software, so here's a thread on surprising (to me) benefits of combining methods research with open source work. 1/6

BREAKING: The Assisted Dying Bill passes second reading.

YES - 330
NO - 275

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Popularity of token money is ⬆️ to allocate class seats, food donations, holiday homes, …

My #JMP asks

1️⃣Does price-setting with tokens work as in normal markets?
2️⃣Can token money have advantages even when using real money is possible?

Surprising answers: NO, YES!

#EconJobMarket #EconSky

Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community I did not expect this! > [...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places ("FSQ OS Places"). This base layer …

Foursquare just open sourced their 100 million place point of interest dataset! Some notes on poking around with it using DuckDB (it's Parquet files on S3) simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/...

Graph showing poverty levels including child poverty reaching 36%

Shocking news. 36% of UK children are living in poverty according to the latest Social Metrics Commission research (I am one of the Commissioners)
www.theguardian.com/society/2024...