Vlad Tarko
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vladtarko.bsky.social
Vlad Tarko
@vladtarko.bsky.social
150 followers 340 following 29 posts
Prof of political economy at University of Arizona. Economic/political institutions, microeconomics and game theory, political/moral philosophy, #rstats My books: https://amzn.to/37TkK5P
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Reposted by Vlad Tarko
On Polycentrism and the New Classical Liberalism. Neoliberalism is dead; Long live Neoliberalism!, pt 1.
open.substack.com/pub/digressi...
with a shout out to @mattzwolinski.bsky.social @vladtarko.bsky.social, @drnickcowen.bsky.social
On Polycentrism and the New Classical Liberalism. Neoliberalism is dead; Long live Neoliberalism!, pt 1.
Fairly or not, neo-liberalism (and its cousin new public management) ended up being associated with monopolistic privatization, the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, Austerity, and Pinochet.
open.substack.com
August 5, 2025 at 11:50 AM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
southerneconj.bsky.social
Andrew Farrant of Dickinson College and @vladtarko.bsky.social of @uarizona.bsky.social invoke a wealth of previously ignored primary source material that sheds significant new light on James M. Buchanan's early 1980s involvement with Chile.
#Chile #Democracy #Dictatorship
Who is to put the bell on the cat? Democracy, dictatorship, and James M. Buchanan's early 1980s involvement with Pinochet's Chile
Although Milton Friedman's mid-1970s involvement with Pinochet's Chile has generated much controversy, the claim that James M. Buchanan was similarly eager to provide Pinochet's military dictatorship...
doi.org
May 29, 2025 at 2:00 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
The #rstats package for the "Approximate Maximum Influence Perturbation" method of assessing the robustness of your results -- finds the smallest number of observations which, if removed, eliminate the coefficient significance or flip its sign. github.com/rgiordan/zam...
GitHub - rgiordan/zaminfluence: Tools in R for computing and using Z-estimator approximate influence functions.
Tools in R for computing and using Z-estimator approximate influence functions. - rgiordan/zaminfluence
github.com
May 13, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
jacobtlevy.bsky.social
New by Gianna Englert in AJPS

Tracing the “true liberalism”: F. A. Hayek as a reader of Tocqueville

doi.org/10.1111/ajps...
American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library
In reaction to diagnoses of a “crisis of liberalism,” scholars are actively engaged in revising our understanding of the tradition's history. This article explores an alternative account of the liber...
doi.org
April 7, 2025 at 6:41 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
New job opening at University of Arizona in Department of Political Economy and Moral Science - the home of the PPEL major. Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, philosophers, political scientists, economists, or legal scholars all eligible to apply.

arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Assistant Professor, PEMS
Teach four courses a year distributed across the PPEL B.A. program, the PPE M.A. program and the university general education program. Such courses ma...
arizona.csod.com
April 3, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
nickchk.com
The second edition of The Effect is now available for preorder! This version has a whole new chapter on Partial Identification, a considerable update on staggered treatment and control variables in DID, and zillions of other little updates throughout. www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...
The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality
The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality, Second edition is about research design, specifically concerning research that uses observational data to make a causal inference. It is s...
www.routledge.com
April 1, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
ourworldindata.org
In the 1980s, economist Julian Simon won his bet with biologist Paul Ehrlich on material prices.

Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich bet over different decades, and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity?
Chart titled "Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich wager in any decade since 1900?" showing price trends for chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon (blue) bet prices would remain stable or fall, while Ehrlich (red) bet prices would rise. Simon won the 1980s wager. For chromium, Ehrlich would have won in the 1920s-40s; for copper, he would have won in the 1950s-70s; for nickel, he would have won in the 1950s-70s; for tin, he would have won in the 1940s-70s; and for tungsten, he would have won in the 1950s-70s. Prices are in 1998 US$ per tonne, adjusted for inflation. Data from the US Geological Survey.
January 6, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
joshgans.bsky.social
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/...
www.mechanism-design.org
December 21, 2024 at 9:18 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
nic221.bsky.social
Here’s one in Tucson. First bird that showed up at our new cam. (Love your writing…)
December 15, 2024 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
arpitrage.bsky.social
One interesting implication here is that structural transformation into services is faster than manufacturing everywhere in the income distribution, even in the range (0-20k income) when manufacturing is still growing

www.ft.com/content/aee5...
December 10, 2024 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
arpitrage.bsky.social
Krugman's best pieces:

• The babysitting co-op
slate.com/business/199...

• On modeling
web.mit.edu/krugman/www/...

• Japan liquidity trap
web.mit.edu/krugman/www/...

• on zoning
www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/o...
archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blog...

• how I work
web.mit.edu/krugman/www/...
THE FALL AND RISE OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
web.mit.edu
December 6, 2024 at 11:31 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
sgehlbach.bsky.social
Ooh, look at this paper in the JEL.

For all you Red Plenty fans.
Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal
(December 2024) - What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? This article addresses these questions ...
www.aeaweb.org
December 5, 2024 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
andrew.heiss.phd
In the GIS part of my #rstats #dataviz class, students ran into issues with limiting maps to Europe (thanks to French Guiana), so I wrote up a little guide to dealing with Natural Earth's map unit hierarchy + how to zoom with coord_sf() datavizf24.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2024-11...
In the GIS part of my #rstats #dataviz class, students ran into issues with limiting data to Europe (thanks to French Guiana), so I wrote up a little guide to Natural Earth's map unit hierarchy + how to zoom with coord_sf() https://datavizf24.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2024-11-18_faqs_weeks-11-12.html#i-tried-to-make-a-map-of-just-europe-and-it-includes-more-than-just-europe The Natural Earth Project uses a hierarchy of country units: Sovereign State > Country > Map unit > Map sub-unit. They have a whole table in the documentation showing where different country-like units appear in this hierarchy Some countries are easy to work with and have the same value for each of the levels of the hierarchy. Others are way more complex. Here are some from the Natural Earth documentation: | Sovereignty | Country | Map unit | Map sub-unit | |:-----------------|:-----------------|:-----------------|:-----------------| | Algeria | Algeria | Algeria | Algeria | | Denmark | Greenland | Greenland | Greenland | | United States of America | United States of America | United States of America | Hawaii | | United States of America | American Samoa | American Samoa | American Samoa | | United States of America | US Minor Outlying Islands | Baker Island | Baker Island | | France | French Southern and Antarctic Lands | French Southern and Antarctic Lands | Bassas da India | | France | France | French Guiana | French Guiana | | Spain | Spain | Spain | Canary Islands | If you want to filter the map data to only include Europe, you can (there's a convenient column named `continent`), but it can lead to unexpected output! If you use the country-level data, French Guiana will show up in Europe (since it's part of France): ```{r} world_shapes_countries |> filter(continent == "Europe", sovereignt != "Russia") |> ggplot() + geom_sf() + labs(title = "Continental Europe avec French Guiana") + coord_sf(crs = st_crs("EPSG:3035")) + theme_void() + theme(plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", hjust = 0.5)) ``` {Map of continental Europe + French Guiana} If you use the map-unit-level data, though, French Guiana has its own row and counts as South America instead of Europe, so the filtered data only shows continental Europe: ```{r} world_shapes_map_units |> filter(continent == "Europe", sovereignt != "Russia") |> ggplot() + geom_sf() + labs(title = "Continental Europe sans French Guiana") + coord_sf(crs = st_crs("EPSG:3035")) + theme_void() + theme(plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", hjust = 0.5)) ``` {Map of continental Europe without French Guiana} Zoomed-in map of continental Europe with parts of North Africa, Turkey, and Russia included
December 5, 2024 at 6:38 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
What are some good studies about why US healthcare is so much more expensive than European systems? I'm guessing restricted supply is part of the story, but far from all.
December 5, 2024 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
erinlscott.bsky.social
Joshua Gans, Scott Stern, and I are thrilled that our new book, Entrepreneurship, Choice and Strategy from W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., is launching into more classrooms this Spring (and your favorite online bookseller in TEN days)! 🎉
December 5, 2024 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
cranberriesfeed.bsky.social
New CRAN package cellularautomata with initial version 0.1.0
#rstats
https://cran.r-project.org/package=cellularautomata
CRAN: Package cellularautomata
https://cran.r-project.org/package=cellularautomata
cran.r-project.org
November 20, 2024 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
daranzolin.bsky.social
And for those piping into View(), run rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("data_viewer_max_columns", 1000L) to display more than 50 columns at once. #rstats
rlbarter.bsky.social Rebecca Barter @rlbarter.bsky.social · Dec 2
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you want to look at all columns of a tibble (which has the somewhat annoying habit of only showing you as many columns as you have space for), just pipe it into print(width = Inf):

df |> print(width = Inf)

#rstats
Printing a data frame (tibble) in the R console, where 3 columns are hidden The output of df |> print(width = Inf) which prints all columns of a data frame (tibble) in the R console
December 2, 2024 at 7:20 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
It's really tempting to start using {tidyplot} instead of {ggplot2}. It doesn't cover all the cases I encounter (especially when two datasets are used for the same plot), but for most plots it's much simpler. #rstats jbengler.github.io/tidyplots/ar...
Visualizing data
jbengler.github.io
December 2, 2024 at 7:43 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
Universal structure of grammar.
December 1, 2024 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
arpitrage.bsky.social
These two papers, taken together, really cause a rethinking of behavioral economies.

Rather than having anomalous risk preferences; it looks like people have complexity aversion to "hard" decisions, especially on valuation, which drives behavioral anomalies. Herbert Simon ftw.
November 27, 2024 at 4:33 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
If you're using #rstats and ggplot, it's easy to have line plots with labels on the right:

- drop the NAs for the variable of interest
- define label variable for only the end
- use ggrepel to make the labels with some nudge_x
- remove legend

Example:
November 26, 2024 at 12:28 AM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
jacobtlevy.bsky.social
New in the APSR by Kirshner and Spinner-Halev
doi.org/10.1017/S000...
Why Political Philosophy Should Be Robust | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
Why Political Philosophy Should Be Robust - Volume 118 Issue 4
doi.org
November 25, 2024 at 2:31 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
Pretty remarkable prediction for 1993. #SEA2024
November 25, 2024 at 7:06 PM
Reposted by Vlad Tarko
josephpolitano.bsky.social
it is funny how much the politicized version of immigration economics discourse is "Immigrants supply labor but do not demand labor, thus lowering wages for Americans. Except in the housing market, where immigrants demand housing without supplying it, thus driving up prices for Americans"
November 25, 2024 at 12:03 PM
vladtarko.bsky.social
This looks great! You can now use Obsidian as a simple #rstats IDE. You can run quarto documents inside Obsidian, get help, and see the environment. michelnivard.github.io/Ridian/
This is idian: – {{< iconify fa6-brands r-project >}}idian
michelnivard.github.io
November 25, 2024 at 12:15 PM