Owen Davis

Young Graduates Are Facing an Employment Crisis Slow hiring is especially daunting for those just starting out. “Right now, I’m pretending employment doesn’t exist,” says a recent college graduate.

Thanks to @jdlahart.bsky.social at @wsj.com for chatting with me about the tough job market for youngsters. In the end, a lot of the problem is just a big cyclical one: hiring is weak. That hurts people looking for jobs, who tend to be younger than average.

www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases - Aileen Oeberst, Roland Imhoff, 2023 One of the essential insights from psychological research is that people’s information processing is often biased. By now, a number of different biases have bee...

My experience is a reasonable reference. I make correct assessments of the world. I am good. My group is a reasonable reference. My group is good. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

google trends results showing interest in "nikkei" spiking in the past 24 hours

not all lines going down

that's a good one

My friend tells me the idiom "crossed the Rubicon" is overused. What's are the alternatives?

Great postdoc opportunity here academicjobsonline.org/ajo/program/...

Study the role of worker voice in AI-driven organizational change with the excellent scholars at Cornell's ILR School.

I appreciated speaking with @talsmith.bsky.social for his excellent analysis on the question of data vs sentiment in the U.S. economy www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/b...

Graph showing the % difference in Glassdoor ratings for women compared to men. Employee satisfaction is 3.5% lower for women vs. men in 2024, improving from a peak of 4.8% lower in 2022 and slightly better than a 4.1% gap in 2019

Screenshot of table showing % difference in Glassdoor ratings for women vs. men across workplace factors in 2024. In ascending order: D&I -3.9%, compensation & benefits -3.6%, senior management -3.4%, career opportunities -3%, culture & values -2.6%, work-life balance -2.5%

For Equal Pay Day 2025, we looked at Glassdoor ratings & found women rate their employee satisfaction 3.5% lower than men. While this gap is present in satisfaction w/ compensation & benefits (-3.6%), other factors like senior mgmt (-3.4%) and career opportunities (-3%) also show a gap as well.

I think it's important that AI tools get stress-tested and held to account for bad info. Need to push back on the tendency for people to treat them as magical oracles. But believing the opposite, that most genAI is just constantly wrong, is a real misperception.

If you look at this Paris Marx tweet quoted above and the responses to it, you see a lot of people confidently asserting that generative AI is factually incorrect most of the time. I've found this to be a pretty pervasive belief in certain quarters.

Just heard someone cite this stat as something to the effect of "ChatGPT is wrong 60% of the time" which is wrong and not what the CJR study found. CJR found that AI search tools got *news citations* wrong that often. That's bad, but it's not the same as genAI getting facts wrong generally.

I like this addition to the abundance discourse from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social. It's only natural that things take longer to build over time (how much longer is a different question) backofmind.substack.com/p/cybernetic...

WHAT WE FOUND We found that the bureau does not have effective strategies to address staffing gaps and high vacancies in FR positions. Specifically, the bureau did not: • Meet its staffing goals for ACS, CPS, and NCVS. • Implement a process to track and assess vacancy information from the regions. Without a workforce plan, the bureau lacks a comprehensive strategy to ensure it has the necessary FR staff to help accomplish its mission of providing high-quality data. Unaddressed FR staffing gaps increase the risks of lower response rates on surveys and higher attrition of other field staff, who bear the burden of increased workloads. Developing and implementing a workforce plan for FRs will help the bureau address the issues we identify in this report.

NEW: The Census Bureau hasn't been recruiting and retaining enough interviewers for three key surveys, including the source of the monthly job report, and lacks a plan for building up a field representative staff, the bureau's internal watchdog, Commerce OIG, finds
www.oig.doc.gov/wp-content/O...

McDonald’s Gives Its Restaurants an AI Makeover The fast-food giant’s new initiative uses artificial intelligence to target order accuracy and help restaurants detect equipment issues before they fail.

McDonald's is looking to implement a “generative AI virtual manager” www.wsj.com/articles/mcd...

Last thing. BLS does amazing work to create timely, accurate info about America's working families & employers, a huge public good. They are there for us & we need to show up for them.

If you are a labor researcher or care about employment, follow & join Friends of BLS.
www.friendsofbls.org/join

Really odd trend over time. Falling pre-GFC but rising into 2020, big COVID dip then back up. Are we just resuming a secular post-2010 trend? Have lending standards gradually shifted over time (and not just with biz cycles)?

Call for submissions: Metascience and AI postdoctoral fellowship | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Our mission is to make the world a better place through the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Sloan Foundation announced a program to support postdocs in philosophy, sociology, and metascience who want to understand how AI will affect science.

Pass it along to anyone who might be interested, the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics might be interested in hosting

sloan.org/programs/dig...

Some Schools Rethink “College For All” The idea that every student should aim for a four-year college motivated a bipartisan movement for decades. Now even enthusiastic promoters of the idea are reconsidering it.

40% of students who start college don't finish. Some high schools that once pushed "college for all" are grappling with that reality, and providing teens with more career-focused learning.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/u...

Cool new opportunity @equitablegrowth.bsky.social
#FundSocSci #EconSky #Sociology #PolicySky #EduSky
equitablegrowth.applicantpro.com/jobs/3632377

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Not a good trend. Wonder if this is also showing up in IRS admin data www.wsj.com/personal-fin...

The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Curious what you make of scholarly survey work like this looking at broad usage patterns. This has ~10% of U.S. respondents using genAI tools every day at work as of late 2024. www.nber.org/papers/w32966

List of CDC information that appears to have been taken down so far:
1. CDC Atlas
2. CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System
3. HRSA Target
4. Language removed for LGBT work
5. CDC Social Vulnerability Index

It’s official: all funding requests made on Tuesday by postdocs for their salaries have been unilaterally rejected by NSF.

Parental support for permitting their children "to misrepresent something about their identity … to qualify for additional resources or initiatives (e.g., scholarships, affirmative action).” Goes up with income, but only among those who believe in upward mobility! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Fun Baffler piece about AI advances in HR tech. This is a new one for me
thebaffler.com/outbursts/hi...

Featured in the latest Bulletin on Retirment and Disability: "Health Inequality and Economic Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender"
https://www.nber.org/brd/20244/health-inequality-and-economic-disparities-race-ethnicity-and-gender

Wiki entry for Archer Lerch

They don’t name em like they used to

They discuss some possible mechanisms here, short-staffing among them. They claim their results are consistent with work intensification leading to injuries but I don't think they can say whether that's due to short-staffing or employers trying to get more bang for their buck (so to speak)