Michael Greig

DFW Channel 4 is streaming it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/px6gDIn9b2Y?si=Te3wwJizUj1SR6Zx

The rise of the aggrieved middle-aged tech billionaire convinced that the deck was ever stacked against them, good luck & societal support played no role in their success, and convinced that they deserve more money, power, & attention explains a lot of today

The Trump admin is a circus filled w/ clowns & Trump as ringleader always trying to divert attention from a failing part of the show to the next. We can’t let him distract us from the admin’s failures in TX https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/climate/fema-missed-calls-texas-floods.html?smid=url-share

A 4-day stay in the cardiac unit of a hospital (I'm fine) left me with 2 observations. The ability of cardiac nurses to explain things, calm worries, & manage large caseloads is just amazing. It is inexcusable that hospitals don't blare "Shock the Monkey" prior to any electrical cardioversion.

Just when I thought that I had started to wrap my head around just how stupid, self-defeating, and malicious the Trump tariffs are this excellent piece from @cullenhendrix.bsky.social underscores just how much worse they really are www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

Maybe I'm just cynical, but this Trump & Vance performance looked calculated to box Zelensky into a corner as the barrier to peace. Allows the admin to justify an opening toward Russia, isolating Ukraine, and kicking the problem to the Europeans.

Of course not. The problem is that he effectively got jumped by the VP and Prez in a press conference. If he had simply sat there & nodded, I'm doubtful that helps his support anywhere he needs it. My sense is that his response, once Vance opened his mouth, was the least bad of a set of bad options

I have a lot of respect for your work, but I struggle to see how Zelensky had any alternative here. Allowing Trump & Vance to spew lies with no response kills Zelensky @ home, makes bargaining with Putin harder, undermines European support, and in the end does little to bolster his cause with Trump

We (the original researchers, not the poster) develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence – including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles – indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our US index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt-ceiling dispute and other major battles over fiscal policy. Using firm-level data, we find that policy uncertainty is associated with greater stock price volatility and reduced investment and employment in policy-sensitive sectors like defense, healthcare, finance and infrastructure construction. At the macro level, innovations in policy uncertainty foreshadow declines in investment, output, and employment in the United States and, in a panel VAR setting, for 12 major economies. Extending our US index back to 1900, EPU rose dramatically in the 1930s (from late 1931) and has drifted upwards since the 1960s. The index for January 2025 reached its highest point of any time since the mid 1990s, when the primary index begins. It's higher than during the worst months of the pandemic, when global trade and economic activity slowed abruptly, causing a massive global recession. Greater policy uncertainty, or the degree to which markets and expert forecasters disagree about the likely trajectory of the economy, is known to delay investment and hiring (Bernanke 1983), reductions in spending by households and firms, and constrained credit, with more adverse effects for developing countries. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index measures the degree to which businesses, investors, and economic forecasters are uncertain about government policies related to fiscal and monetary policy, trade policy, and regulation. Link for data: https://www.policyuncertainty.com/.

There you have it. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (www.policyuncertainty.com) just hit an all-time high, surpassing its previous high from May 2020 - the teeth of the #COVID pandemic.

Consequences: worse investment climate, higher risk premia, (likely) higher interest rates...

France floated sending troops to Greenland, foreign minister says Jean-Noël Barrot notes that sending European troops to Greenland is not an option right now.

1 week in & the president has (1) seized budget authority from Congress, (2) pardoned violent insurrectionists, and (3) made territorial demands on an ally where the U.S. already has a military base, resulting in another ally offering troops in defense. Not great www.politico.eu/article/fran...

My two Great Pyrenees at daycamp with their pal, Jeanie. I guess you can say that they’re engaged in “Pyr review”.

As folks think about the stories about the Trumpification of the US military, here's my piece on the consequences www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

a group of football players wearing helmets that say florida on them ALT: a group of football players wearing helmets that say florida on them

After the last two weeks, definitely needed that Gator win today.

What makes this particularly aggravating in this case is that, even without all that unnecessary work, this was a really good paper doing novel things with really interesting findings. The fear of R2 forced these authors to spend time that they shouldn’t have had to.

For untenured faculty & graduate students, it is a huge waste of time. Time that they don’t have & could be channeled into more productive things.

The very fact that authors increasingly feel the need to head off reviewer gripes with an enormous amount of auxiliary analyses says a lot about how unproductive peer-review has become.

Having just reviewed a 30-page paper with a 70-page appendix of supplementary analyses, I feel like we really need to talk about how broken our political science peer-review process is for authors.