Adam Kapor

3. I wanted to brag—to mention that the problem was harder and our solution more clever than it might appear—but I wasn’t sure how to bring it up in a way that seems natural until now

we like continuity a lot. The other possibility is there is a president like in Poland, and the premier is called “speaker of the house”

we would call the premier “President”

I did not like the implication that you don’t have to learn Bayes rule

The other outcome that I've seen - when there are so many As students at the very top can't distinguish themselves through their classwork. Going really deep on a class and writing a truly superb paper won't change grade --> increased incentive to distinguish through extra curriculars.

I think he believes in lying for instrumental reasons. For example, he is not stupid enough to think Charlie Kirk “practiced politics the right way.” Most likely, he thought it would be useful for other people to think so. As such, you can’t take his words as indicating what he thinks.

Relatedly, RDD studies of exam schools don’t tell us whether exam schools are good

Nash-in-Nash bargaining implies the existence of Rubinstein-in-Rubinstein bargaining:

the parties exchange alternating offers that must be confirmed via email

Industrial Organization is almost entirely game-theory-based and other subfields of economics other than game theory itself 😊are not. It is sometimes a point of contention

good point; I think price theory fits better than high-theory GE.

I had in mind applied questions. to study a particular topic, eg deforestation of the rain forest or workers‘ declining income share, I can write a game-theoretic model or I can write a price-theoretic one with one or two “frictions”

General equilibrium? Old-school Chicago price theory?

how do you know

And also in the textbook version with quadratic travel cost, it’s optimal for the stores to go to the extremes :)

I think filling the top ranks of our education system with people who got there in part by abusing a system designed to help disabled people will select morally deficient people for leadership positions in our society and is worth taking steps to avoid bsky.app/profile/padr...

ok so now I understand why Shaheen and gang were so desperate to end the shutdown

If they cave, it reinforces my sense that the real problem with the democrats is not “wokeness,” but the fact that they don’t stand for anything and are willing to fight for nothing.

It’s worse than being useless; it is collaboration.

Q: How many applied microeconomists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Exploiting a unique natural experiment in which the Earth’s orbit and rotation induce plausibly exogenous variation across time and place in the availability of a close substitute to light bulbs, we find

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Just a gentle reminder to look on my works at your earliest convenience. Thanks!!

I used to be nonplussed when people did this but now I’m nonplussed

Job market candidate: “Other papers have found high labor-market returns to studying economics, but no one has looked at subfields. My JMP estimates the returns to microeconomic theory.”

Interviewer: “Do you look at mechanisms?”

(With the caveat that I don’t know anything and am making this up) You can’t judge a policy on purely consequentialist grounds; the motivating purpose is morally relevant, and the framing gets at motivation?

I guess it’s fine for a journalist to be strategic in choosing what to write about. But “noble lies” involve moral arrogance and are wrong for this reason

He’s Steve Levitt’s coauthor

Ah, we teach undergrads the quadratic cost version that gets maximum differentiation in equilibrium. This is what I thought the “hotelling model” was until now.

Wait what is the incoherence in Hotelling?

I choose to read it literally. She owned several boats, and before she moved to DC she burned them.

Perhaps people would have asked “how did you afford the boats?”

This is very interesting; it’s new this year?

You found the magic fixed effect that only soaks up the bad variation?

Anyway good thing this situation remained hypothetical

I used to joke that computer science would also catch a lot of “critique” if there were “computer scientists” on cable TV and in government, many of whom were merely undergrad CS majors with business careers, arguing that “the algorithm is efficient” therefore efforts to improve things won’t work