Yann de Mey
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yanndemey.bsky.social
Yann de Mey
@yanndemey.bsky.social
770 followers 860 following 520 posts
Associate Professor in Agricultural Business Economics @WUR, working on agricultural risk analysis, risk management and resilience | @AgEconMeet | 🇧🇪 living in 🇳🇱 | Feminist
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yanndemey.bsky.social
We are hiring at the Assistant Professor level! The position is open to anyone with a quantitative agri-business research and teaching profile. Feel free to reach out if you have questions 🙏
www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/a...
Assistant Professor Economic Modelling of Farms and Firms in Food Supply Chains
Do you want to support economic decision making and sustainable transitions in food supply chains? Do you have a passion for teaching empirical modelling of farms and firms in food supply chains? Then...
www.wur.nl
January 21, 2026 at 9:14 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Another banger by Paolo Crosetto, Pablo Gómez Barreiro, and Mark Austin Hanson! While special issues with guest editors are not a problem in themselves, journals that build a business model around then invites people to start gaming the system...
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 29d
We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n
January 19, 2026 at 1:23 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Very grateful to have received this ERAE Reviewer certificate. But I am passing this on to @khoavuumn.bsky.social in recognition of his unique commitment to our profession. Should have been his in the first place.
January 16, 2026 at 1:27 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
And now a podcast segment is out on the Food for Europe podcast frol the EU: podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/f...
December 29, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
david-schindler.de
Utrecht University abolishes its English language bachelor's program in economics and replaces it with a Dutch one.

They told staff (~30% international) the week before Christmas. Layoffs seem likely now. Unwarranted lobotomy is the only word I can find for it...

dub.uu.nl/en/news/econ...
Economics programme in shock after sudden cancellation of English-taught track
The Bachelor's programme in Economics & Business Economics will only be offered in Dutch from 2029 onwards, the Executive Board announced on Tuesday. The news came as a complete surprise to the econom...
dub.uu.nl
December 21, 2025 at 9:08 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
The renewed farmers’ protests today highlight the persistence of European agricultural policy tensions. Condemning the associated violence and destructive actions is necessary. At the same time, preventing its recurrence requires understanding why farmers mobilize in the first place.
December 18, 2025 at 3:12 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
It was amazing to take part in the 🌽 EU Agri-Food Days 🧑‍🌾 at the European Commission as a panelist in the policy session on "Building a resilient agri-food sector".
December 17, 2025 at 9:38 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
andrew.heiss.phd
Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code. In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle. This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything. You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.
December 9, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
robertfinger.bsky.social
New paper in Nature Communications🥳

Our paper ’Expected effects of a global transformation of agricultural pest management’ led by Niklas Möhring is now online

Open Access www.nature.com/articles/s41...
December 9, 2025 at 5:42 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Always cool to see these kinds of Wrapped-style summaries. I particularly like the Emoji overview as well 😀
December 3, 2025 at 8:52 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
michaelcralph.bsky.social
I talk with my Research Methods students about publishing during the semester... and I was had a difficult time explaining why I personally avoid Frontiers similar to MDPI.

I will have less difficulty this coming year.

From: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Scatterplot of word use gap
November 1, 2025 at 4:49 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Experience Wageningen University & Research from anywhere in the world! Join our Virtual Open Day to watch programme presentations, chat live with students and advisers, and get an inside look at real student life in Wageningen.

📅 4 December 2025
🌍 15:00 - 21:00 CET
💻online
November 26, 2025 at 8:13 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
End of year reading by David Spiegelhalter and @lionelpage.bsky.social. Very much looking forward to digging in!
November 26, 2025 at 6:04 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
You're kidnapped. The characters from the last show you watched are coming to rescue you:
November 26, 2025 at 6:27 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Sometimes, you have to fire shots as a reviewer
#EconSky 📈📉
November 21, 2025 at 9:14 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
zachweinersmith.bsky.social
Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/stats-3
#smbc
November 18, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
joshmccrain.bsky.social
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
kunkakom.bsky.social
The billions of research funds channeled into the pockets of Elsevier and other commercial publisher in return for very little actual value is one of academia's big inefficiencies that will eventually be replaced by more attractive Community-run alternatives
November 14, 2025 at 9:55 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
2025 Gorilla update 👋🦍: One student found the gorilla this time around (see details in thread below). BUT, I have an AI-related update that is too good not to share ... #EconSky 📉📈
October 30, 2025 at 1:51 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
I concur that it is super insightful! I expect much more work leveraging these kinds of approaches in the future, there is a lot of untapped potential by exploring text data (which was tedious in the past)
robertfinger.bsky.social Robert Finger @robertfinger.bsky.social · Oct 30
Outstanding EAAE (European Association of Agricultural Economists) Masterclass by Christian Stetter on 'AI for Text Analysis in Agricultural Economics' 👏

Details on Christian's research scholar.google.com/citations?us..., and on the EAAE: eaae.org
October 30, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
andrewkostrub.bsky.social
Updating my LEGO White House
October 23, 2025 at 2:51 AM
Reposted by Yann de Mey
gwagner.com
As far as high-profile academics moving out of Trump's America goes, it doesn't get more high-profile than this.

🇺🇸 → 🇨🇭
econ.uzh.ch Department of Economics @Universität Zürich 🇨🇭 @econ.uzh.ch · Oct 10
We are thrilled to welcome Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee as the new Lemann Foundation Professors to our department, beginning in the summer of 2026.
October 10, 2025 at 10:45 AM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Exiting moment for any economist: when your kids learn about money in school 😁 #econsky
October 9, 2025 at 5:20 PM
yanndemey.bsky.social
Had the privilege to catch Refused on their goodbye tour yesterday. What a blast! It’s rare to see a band with such energy, style blending, and political and audience engagement 11/10 #RefusedAreReallyFckingDead
October 8, 2025 at 6:02 AM