Per Engzell

I know I know. I missed World Book Day. But tell me, how do you dress up as The Critique of Pure Reason? (Critique of Judgement is more or less my everyday attire.)

Laoganma looking at you as if you mildly disappointed her

MFW I see authors resubmit their paper at a different journal without any edits after they have received extensive constructive feedback during peer review.

He has analysed chapter by chapter - sometimes line-by-line, word-by-word, or syllable-by-syllable - Marx's three volumes

The blurb says written by 'the world's leading Marxist economist.' Wouldn't that be... Marx?

This figure shows the percentage of respondents in 35 countries across the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) who rate “hard work” as more important than structural factors for getting ahead in life. Dark blue diamonds (IVS) and dark green circles (ISSP) represent survey year averages. Light blue and light green lines plot the trend in meritocratic beliefs across the five-year cohorts, on the basis of locally weighted least squares regressions on the cohort-country means (light blue diamonds [IVS] and light green circles [ISSP]). IVS data show whether respondents rate hard work (1) or luck and connections (0) as the more important factor for achieving a better life. ISSP data show the share of respondents who rate hard work as more important than “knowing the right people” and “coming from a wealthy family” for getting ahead in life.

The figure shows annualized change scores (subtracting the earliest from the latest value and standardizing by the number of years/cohorts). This figure is only included in the supplementary material.

How has the public belief in meritocracy changed over time? We address this question in our new Data Viz (@sociusjournal.bsky.social) by examining trends in popular beliefs across cohorts and periods in 35 countries, based on two datasets.

🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231261425841

J.M.W. Turner – “Going to School, for Rogers's 'Poems'” and the quantitative landscape of vocational training and education in Britain

New paper alert 🚨 🚨
Education and Skills during the First Industrial Revolution in England
Together with co-authors @sdepleijt.bsky.social and @patrickwallis.bsky.social, we set out to solve one of the most intriguing puzzles of the Industrial Revolution

I see the Discourse is once again surrounding the results of an agree-disagree survey question among a hard-to-reach group in a nonprobability sample

Assistant/Associate Professor in Sociology at University of Cambridge An opportunity for an academic position as a Assistant/Associate Professor in Sociology is available, as advertised on jobs.ac.uk. Apply now and explore other academic job openings.

Exciting news, join us in Cambridge as Caius & Homerton are hiring for yet another Assistant/Associate Prof in Sociology🎉

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQS875/a...

What happens if the explanatory and response variables are sorted independently before regression? Suppose we have data set $(X_i,Y_i)$ with $n$ points. We want to perform a linear regression, but first we sort the $X_i$ values and the $Y_i$ values independently of each other, forming data set $...

For those who haven't yet seen this classic: stats.stackexchange.com/q/185507/2126 (someone whose manager was insisting that they do this ...)

This is population data so taking percentiles shouldn’t be that hard

Honestly even more concerned that there’s a ~0 correlation throughout 80% of the distribution

Your guess is as good as mine

"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

All major typewriters can be used to either commit academic fraud or facilitate junk science, a test of 13 models has found.

Wage returns to human capital resulting from an extra year of primary school: Evidence from Egypt In this paper, we examine the wage returns to an extra year of primary school using a policy reform in Egypt, which reduced compulsory primary schooli…

Policy reforms to *reduce* educational attainment were detrimental for disadvantaged boys, in Egypt. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Is College Really “the” Equalizer? New Evidence Addressing Unobserved Selection Article: Is College Really “the” Equalizer? New Evidence Addressing Unobserved Selection | Sociological Science | Posted March 3, 2026

New paper out in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social!

We revisit the college-as-equalizer debate with heckman-style selection models and find little evidence in favor of college being an equalizer!

@zhenghaowen.bsky.social @professorholm.bsky.social

#sociology

sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

Damn. Another journal jumped the shark, it looks like.

Welp, the BBC got to me. Fill me in on what I need to know about loneliness in the last decade or so

I heard there was a secret code
That purged effects of survey mode
But you don’t really care for bias, do ya

Picture of Felix on flyer advertising his seminar entitled "Random placement but real bias"

We're delighted to have Prof Felix Weinhardt giving the @cepeo-ucl.bsky.social seminar this Thursday!

He'll discuss biases introduced when randomising across schools/regions and what we can do about them!

🕕3-4pm Thur 5th Mar
📍Online or in-person (219, 26 Bedford Way)

Sign up: tinyurl.com/yanfx8j7

Yup, though this was pre llm. I was tempted not to answer just because I didn’t want to do their work for them

Had a similar experience where all the data was already on osf. I wonder how many authors just don’t bother to answer (or email bounces bc job moves, spam filters etc) and are classified as nonreplicable despite the data being out there

Stop anthropomorphizing ants. They're totally fed up with it. They had a meeting. "Eek! People keep anthropomorphizing us! What do we do?" "Derek, what did I tell you? We've got an agenda to work to here. Please raise your point as an AOB." "OK, sorry Judith." "Right, volunteers for the tombola"

Can’t go wrong with a good alliteration

Abstract text of working paper

What do we know - and what should we know - about economic inequality and social mobility in preindustrial societies? This new WP by our Affiliated Scholar @guidoalfani.bsky.social identifies the main gaps that need to be filled in reconstructions of wealth & income distributions.
bit.ly/4l26cWx

💯

Honestly I'm even more intrigued the more I'm learning about it

No shade at all on your paper I just find it a fun fact about Finnish conscription... obviously someone thought it important enough to include!

I wonder how many people claimed they always dreamed of becoming one just to get out of conscription

PS: Claude Code doesn't work in secure computing environments (for now - my only remaining competitive edge)