Professor Dr Richard S.J. Tol FREcon MAE

the rediscovery of language families

email to me: Our disabled son has CP and bladder spasms so urologist is recommending Botox treatments and we read your article and are concerned about the presence of mRNA in the Botox. Is mRNA in all brands? How can we know if it is in there? Is there a safe brand you recommend? He has to have this so what do we do? Thanks

my reply: personally, i'd recommend you follow the advice of your doctor. but what do i know, i'm just a random person you emailed. I have no more formal education around botox than the author Naomi Wolf, whose advice I assume you were actually seeking. but since you emailed me, my suggestion is that you listen to your kid's urologist, who is a trained medical professional, rather than seeking out medical advice from someone with an english degree and a history of making significant errors in her research. best of luck!

a specific skill I've developed over the past ~20 years is crafting responses to emails sent to me, but intended for that other Naomi Wolf

"We need cheap energy so we should invest in expensive forms of energy" is a surprisingly common position at the moment.

Letter of the day (in the Times)

The Fiscal and Monetary Linkage between Stock Returns and Inflation Contrary to economic theory and common sense, stock returns are negatively related to both expected and unexpected inflation. We argue that this puzzling empirical phenomenon does not indicate causal...

yeah, no

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Totalitarian power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Hannah Arendt

if you add the mercantilist approach to international trade (plus the love of bling and the wigs), 17th century France may be more apt

Autocracy, Incorporated How does an autocrat affect the business world? As Leviathan thrashes his bulk and churns the seas, how many adventurers’ ships do his waves swamp and founder? And how might the folks interes…

Feels relevant:
daelnorwood.com/2025/06/27/a...

Donald Trump is basically reinventing the 16th century state. Businesses buy licences from him to do stuff

In fairness that’s how President Trump thinks tariffs work too.

or economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology ...

Do econ journos recall Jean-Baptiste Colbert?

And so it begins. We are gutting the flow of new cutting edge researchers.

Wolff: This is a key issue right now in the way the White House is looking at the Epstein scandal.

The fear is that Ghislaine Maxwell can tie Donald Trump to the details of what Trump and Epstein called the P*ssy Committee.

The Committee consisted of their efforts to get girls for Prince Andrew.

E.J. Antoni, being pushed by MAGA for head of BLS

…got his PhD in 2020

…has no publications other than his dissertation

…which has 1 citation

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-administration-considers-longtime-critic-to-lead-bureau-of-labor-statistics

U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China

the art of the shakedown

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/t...

It's blimming awesome that AMPPS is a PCI RR -friendly journal. @pci-regreports.bsky.social The peer reviews for this paper were impressively rigorous and constructive; one of the reviewers even suggested code for an improved analysis. I'd love to see more journals become PCI RR friendly.

“sudden and unprovoked attack”

They were tracking it in a pack, with guns

Buffalo is innocent

sorry to hear that

(I uploaded a PDF for GPT-5 to summarize. Rather than read the document, it just read the title of the document and wrote a summary based on what it thought the article would be about.)

usually if you ask experts why an empire fell they’ll say it’s nuanced and multifaceted, so i think it’s kind of cool that with America future historians will get to just say like “oh they took the idiot train to moronsville”

Who made this? 😂

Multiple times this year I’ve had coffee with fellow immigrants who grew up in corrupt third world countries and the shared sentiment has been that Americans don’t understand how bad things are going to get.

If you find me guilty of this theft, your honour, the resulting jail sentence will ruin my holiday plans, so you can't.

Indeed.

What seems to have been happening here is that in order to get the fair to middling improvements in output, it has become necessary to throw much more compute at every query, at a rate which has increased faster than the learning curve for the tokens themselves. That ... ain't good.

Trump has gone from "I will sanction Putin" to "I will meet Putin and lift sanctions" in about 72 hours.

IRS, White House clashed over immigrants’ data before tax chief was ousted The Trump administration’s move to push out IRS Commissioner Billy Long came after the agency said it couldn’t release some information on taxpayers suspected of being here illegally.

🚨 WaPo EXCLUSIVE

Hours before Trump removed Billy Long as IRS commissioner, his agency clashed with the White House over sharing immigrants’ tax data.

that's ChatGPT's idea of 7 rows and 2 columns ...

Candace Owens may be on to something

Perfectly fine claim to make EXCEPT my paper is not about forecasts, early warning systems, or mortality. It's about temperature shocks and per-capita income in the US. And the year and DOI of the cited paper is wrong too. Classic GenAI hallucination.