Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 2, 2023: interesting tweets
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Best of #econtwitter - Week of April 2, 2023: interesting tweets
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Interesting discussions
Reliably amazes me:
Leontief's economics -- about how shocks propagate through the network of firms and industries trading -- is completely outside Ph.D. economists' canon.
This is both a symptom and a cause of economics losing good physics intuition.
Old-person thread
1/
I would humbly submit that all economists should have some feeling for what happens when you perturb d in
x = Ax + d.
And core micro and macro faculty could give it to them with very powerful economic motivation, but typically do not.
6/
The one-of-a-kind collection of crowdsourced wisdom, the "Thriving in Economics" e-book series is now live!
You can "purchase" each of the three books in pdf format in exchange for a $25 donation here: ai4good.org/shop/ (click on each book to see more info).
Teaching/syllabus tip: the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics has some rigorous but also accessible entries on a wide range of topics e.g., @AndreyFradkin 's piece on digital marketplace is great
Not an April fools joke:
we should make an annual award for open source coding contributions to the profession. I can think of several extremely worthy winners already.
@instrumenthull can you get ReStat to sponsor ;-)
REStud Tours, initiated in 1989, have since embodied REStud’s tradition of promoting original studies by young economists.
Here are the selected speakers for 2023 and summaries of their promising JMPs.
1/8
🧵
Interesting data (US)
NEW: I’m not sure people fully appreciate how dire the US life expectancy / mortality situation has got.
My column: enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/75e5e3d…
And some utterly damning charts.
1) at *every* point on the income distribution, Americans live shorter lives than the English.
^lots of good graphs in this thread, worth the click. Relatedly:
^commentary, commentary, commentary
Did you see that extremely viral @WSJ chart showing traditional values falling off a cliff?
Here's why it's probably wrong:
AI
University communications on ChatGPT are missing the point completely
Focused entirely on the narrow question of whether it’s “cheating,” how to grade, how to convince students not to use it
It’s tool everyone will use the rest of their career. We might as well train them how
^interesting discussion thread
A way GPT-4 changed my teaching:
In an advanced undergrad elective, I used to grade based on problem sets only. This required obfuscating famous exercises to make cheating via Google harder.
AI can often undo obfuscation, so I don't bother and give an exam.
1/
The funniest beneficiary of the AI boom must be the tiny island Anguilla? Napkin math, but .ai domains is something like ~25% of their GDP at this point.
@bernhardsson It was already a success story back in 2020 and paid for the combined salaries of all the primary schools in the country. They could soon implement UBI at this rate… nytimes.com/2020/02/04/bus…
^Henry George/Glen Weyl laser eyes
ChatPDF is an AI-powered app that will make reading journal articles easier and faster.
Simply upload a PDF and start asking it questions.
It's like ChatGPT, but for research papers.
Here's how to use it:
@Jabaluck I don’t have a formal decision procedure, but humans have been making decisions on the basis of informal deliberation and judgment for a long time, and it is an empirical claim that in various domains substituting formal procedures would lead to better results.
^comment part of long discussion re: AI safety
Tenure/promotion to full
Two somewhat related questions:
1) how important do you think it is to have outside offers when you go up for tenure?
2) why is it that there’s no clear way to signal out to market when you’re going up? (Beyond just emailing folks in a bilateral way)
Besides a higher salary, is there any tangible benefit to being a full versus associate professor (with tenure) if you're not interested in university administration? Seems like it's mostly costs.
While I extremely mixed feelings about the tenure system at Harvard, one thing that I do like is that all tenured profs have the full professor rank. Not clear that the divisions within the tenured group really make much sense (other than for bureaucratic payroll reasons)
Tatyana Deryugina 🇺🇦 @TDeryugina
Public goods
I'm teaching a new grad applied metrics course this spring; inspired by @paulgp, I've decided to post slides here
First, Ch. 1-3: a review of regression basics and discussions of design- & model-based ID
dropbox.com/s/8gx1oj69vz9n…
dropbox.com/s/z55anktz4anh…
dropbox.com/s/8jnlcjshek8v…
After a long and unsuccessful search for a statistical inference and regression textbook at the right level for our PhD students, I finally decided to write up my lecture notes as a book.
The book is publicly available if you are interested:
mattblackwell.github.io/gov2002-book/
