Sadly.

I’ve reported on homelessness for years and met many, many people who have found themselves in awful situations

Every single one of them had more decency and integrity than this privileged plutocrat

From @theathleticfc.bsky.social: Manchester United players abandoned the club’s plans to wear a jacket in support of the LGBTQ+ community ahead of Sunday’s Premier League match against Everton after defender Noussair Mazraoui refused to join the initiative. nyti.ms/4icfu06

🚨 #EconSky New paper! There's been much advocacy for “open” or “open-weights” AI models. But what are the equilibrium predictions relative to closed AI or a social planner? The econ of AI is new and distinct from other software, so we need new models. That’s where I come in!

Just a reminder that @gmcd.bsky.social and @kylefbutts.bsky.social have made an incredible public good describing how to use data.table and fixest to encourage moving from Stata to R!

stata2r.github.io

President Vladimir Putin of Russia and senior Kremlin officials “intentionally and directly” authorized a program of coerced fostering and adoption of Ukrainian children during the war in Ukraine, according to a new report that provides strong evidence for a war crimes case.

Oh come ON

stanforddaily.com/2024/12/02/j...

NEW: Why do we always think crime is rising, even when it isn’t?

This week I looked at one of the big data mysteries. Britain is 2/3 less violent than the 1990s; thefts were higher pre-lockdown

Why, then, doesn’t it feel like it?

1/8

@thetimes.com

🔗 www.thetimes.com/article/b63d...

Economists love using linear regression to estimate treatment effects — it turns out that there are perils to this method, but also amazing perks

Come with me in this 🧵 if you want to learn about our now-published paper "Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions!"

1/ (Twitter rerun!)

Next Tuesday, 14h CET, Yaron Yehezkel (Tel-Aviv Un.) will present "Competing for Cookies: Platforms’ Business Models in Data Markets with Network Effects" (with S. Markovich)
Discussant: Tat-How Teh (Nanyang Technological Un.)
at the TSE Economics of Platforms seminar.
www.tse-fr.eu/online-semin...

PSA: Grad students can sign up for a GitHub Education account and get free unlimited access to GitHub Co-Pilot. It plugs in directly to RStudio and is extremely handy. #rstats

The website vs app split for Bluesky vs Threads captures the difference in user base and usage patterns beautifully.

Bluesky = knowledge sector workers who have it open all day in a tab next to their emails. “Wait what was I doing again?”

Threads = normies watching recipe videos on the commute.

You only start new projects. You don't finish the current ones. Sorry i don't make the rule.

Here’s a crazy fact for you: Spain and Germany have now seen basically the exact same amount of economic growth post-2008. Would have been unthinkable to people during most of the 2010s. Spain has seen ~10 percentage points more cumulative growth since 2017.

The NFT econ papers are still under review. Will be a few more years until we know from the econ literature.

A few things I've been working on lately:

elmer, elmer.tidyverse.org, is a new package to make it easier to work with LLMs (hosted and local) from #rstats. It includes helps for structured data extraction and tool calling, and an easy way to upload a plot. Joint work with Joe Cheng.