Ben Ho

Rising mistrust in economists and what to do.

Great story @amandaaronczyk.bsky.social @planetmoney.bsky.social, featuring interviews with @dianeswonk.bsky.social @nickbloom.bsky.social @hoben.bsky.social & me.

#EconSky #NumbersDay

www.npr.org/2025/08/01/1...

I'm relieved/surprised it didn't lump economists in with the physicists/mathematicians/etc of thinking they know more about evolution than biologists do.

lol who did this

for those in my feed for the #mechanicalkeyboard content, my latest fave: split key corne that fits in my pockets.

ordered last two pcbs/cases from aliexpress the day the China tariff fell... cause who knows when Chinese imports will be cut off again.

the article also mentions immigration (composition changes) and the end of no child left behind. was always curious there hasn't been more diff in diff on no child left behind. Justine Hastings had one very early on. has there been good work on that?

When home heating is less affordable, more people die each winter. That's what our analysis found for a period when LIHEAP was in place. Without LIHEAP, the effect would presumably much larger.

Ungated copy of the study here: bit.ly/2JrJfxR

it is used in the psych literature. I see it in the apology papers in psych.

it comes from biology so arguably psychology is closer to the origins of signaling than econ.

one suggested I read more biology after seeing one of my signaling papers. (I still think our signaling lit is better though)

I never got into their show.

They did my commencement address at MIT in 1999 as former MIT alums. It was memorable?

They had a 📈 showing happiness and smarts. With rocks being most happy and mit students being least. So aim to be dumb as a rock.

Bill Clinton was the year before.

a woman sits at a desk using a laptop with ring the bell written on the bottom ALT: a woman sits at a desk using a laptop with ring the bell written on the bottom

#TeachEcon

This semester, I thought I’d share a bit about what I do in my microeconomics lectures. I’m not particularly active on LinkedIn, but I started posting about my teaching because I’m quite frustrated with how economics is often perceived at business schools. (1/n)

Yes but some caveats from a parent of a 7 and 9 year old with tons of them.

Kid age out of the around 5-6.
They are incredibly expensive.
Knock offs are much cheaper and work but like knock off Legos are somewhat less satisfying.

Are you interested in U.S. legislative history? Newly-available complete dataset on all persons serving as legislators in the 50 state houses between 1900 and 2016: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

Climate Change A Factor In Unprecedented LA Fires

New UCLA rapid attribution study: “Climate change may be linked to roughly a quarter of the extreme fuel moisture deficit when the fires began.
The fires would still have been extreme without climate change, but probably somewhat smaller and less intense.”

sustainablela.ucla.edu/2025lawildfi...

New randomized, controlled trial by the World Bank of students using GPT-4 as a tutor in Nigeria. Six weeks of after-school AI tutoring = 2 years of typical learning gains, outperforming 80% of other educational interventions.

And it helped all students, especially girls who were initially behind.

I often auction off a $20 bill but do a two pay auction where the top two bidders pay. But when debriefing after I often get the "I want to win" reasoning.

I tell students to use that for running experiments as well. The desire to win often outweighs monetary incentives.

I'm looking for nonfiction books to read.

Loved:
- (Auto)buographies of Kandel, Oliver Sacks, Oppenheimer, Miles Davis, Feynman, Philip Glass
- "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhoades

Don't say "The Power Broker":) I'm on my umpteenth attempt.

What are your favorites?

A really amazing biography "the price of altruism"

About George Price who helped found evolutionary game theory.

He invented equations for altruism with maynard-smith but mostly was a jerk in person.

Published papers in Science about psychic powers.

He lived in Poughkeepsie and uws!

This chart titled "The world has passed 'peak child'" shows the historical and projected population of three age groups: young people under 25 years, young people under 15 years, and children under 5 years. Data spans from 1950 to 2100, based on UN estimates and projections. The blue line represents the population under 25 years, showing steady growth until around 2050 when it starts to slightly decline. The red line represents those under 15 years, peaking around 2020, and then gradually declining after that point. The green line shows children under 5 years, which has largely plateaued since the 1990s and is projected to decrease over time. The chart indicates that the global number of children has reached its peak, and a long-term decline in younger populations is expected.

The world has passed “peak child”

This is what gpt thinks.

Scientists developed the first climate models in the late 1960s (for which the Nobel Prize in physics was recently awarded!).

How have these models held up against what happened in the real world after they were published? Surprisingly well, it turns out:

If you are an academic, it can be instructive to work on a paper with AI. Pretend you are working with a grad student & see what happens.

Generally o1 is best for well-defined heavy intellectual tasks, Gemini for synthesizing lots of text, and Claude for writing & theorizing. This varies by field.

Another selling point for Fahrenheit. Which was designed around the fact that human body temperature was exactly 3x water freezing temperature and that 96 had so many divisors making thermometers easier to mark.

bsky.app/profile/hobe...

Who would have won the 'Simon-Ehrlich bet' over different decades — and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity?

The new Our World in Data article by my colleague Hannah Ritchie.

ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlic...

Xkcd makes a compelling case for F.

Also the history of how F was designed around human body temperature highlights it's usefulness.

Why economists need to review the preregistration!* This is a hot mess; hard to believe it's in the QJE datacolada.org/122

* docs.google.com/document/d/1...

As a kid the expectation was coffee was something that cost like 15 cents. It was a big cultural shift for the better I think that Starbucks invented the modern 3rd place.

Still there were historical coffee houses. Wall St began as a coffee house where people traded stocks. Wonder what happened...

We need more research on social media effects on elites, activists, and other subgroups per our recent Nature review www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well this was intuitive...

Kenneth Arrow’s Last Theorem: Why do the most patient individuals dictate environmental policy in the long run? Let’s explore this fascinating result about efficiency and time preferences. 🧵 www.mechanism-design.org/arch/v009-1/...

Oh sure by failure I just mean one of many problems including additionality but also permanence and leakage. If you read the contracts offset issuers/originators are aware of all of these, estimate their size and discount them from the total value of offsets awarded.

Essentially yes. The offset seller has private information about the amount of additionality. The offset issuer/regulator only gets a noisy signal about additionally. The issuers set the discount but need to account for adverse selection. Actual contracts do work this way, but may have misestimated.