Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 11, 2022: 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.
A slightly different format this week (also, gmail may cut off the email, and you would need to open in the browser to see all tweets). Feedback, as always, is welcome.
Interesting discussions
Ben Golub 🇺🇦@ben_golub
a brilliant researcher told me once that if he could hypothetically ask 5 colleagues about his few best (famous) papers as if they were ideas in development, then 2 of them would say they were lame and not worth doing, and maybe 1 or 2 would be enthusiastic.
noam chompers @NoamChompers
Just one guy’s opinion but I think it’s advisable to accept with equanimity that some people will find your work boring
2:12 AM · Dec 11, 2022
21 Reposts · 243 Likes
Ben Golub 🇺🇦@ben_golub
generally it's not great to allow people to be veto players over one's creativity based on vague taste.
what matters is that some non-tiny group likes your ideas a LOT.
the majority will always shrug at any early idea. they'll respect it if it succeeds, and maybe not even then
2:15 AM · Dec 11, 2022
4 Reposts · 83 Likes
Gauti Eggertsson 🇺🇦@GautiEggertsson
@ben_golub Sign of a truly good contribution is that first it is considered stupid, then confusing and not well tought out, and probably wrong, and the finally just so totally obvious that people wonder why anybody even bothering sketching out. Its like three stages of denial.
4:35 AM · Dec 11, 2022
3 Reposts · 48 Likes
Rebecca Diamond@rebeccardiamond
What a small world! This is Andrea Ghez, 2020 Physics Nobel Laureate, who I met at one of the Nobel receptions, to celebrate my dad. Turns out we both had the same, very inspiring (female) chemistry teacher in high school. Role models matter!
9:16 AM · Dec 10, 2022
31 Reposts · 488 Likes
John Cochrane@JohnHCochrane
It's interesting that journals are still in the business of making pictures of books, not really good screen readable formats. Why not pictures of papyrus rolls or inscribed marble?
Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok
Pet peeve: When you print an article from the journal's website nowadays you often get the cramped version equivalent to the printed journal size. You have to download the PDF to get the larger version that uses more of the space on 8.5 x 11 paper. e.g. same page. https://t.co/25KARDWafN
9:13 PM · Dec 11, 2022
1 Repost · 12 Likes
Eli Dourado@elidourado
Some charts from a recent talk I gave, enjoy!
Here is TFP growth since 1947. Your income would be ~2x as high today if this hadn’t stagnated.
7:14 PM · Dec 7, 2022
101 Reposts · 470 Likes
^great graphs
Eli Dourado@elidourado
This one is nuanced, not claiming it’s monocausal.
But if we kept up drug R&D effectiveness at 1961 levels (the year before Congress changed drug approval requirements) we’d have 20k additional new drugs based on how much R&D spending PhRMA companies did.
7:18 PM · Dec 7, 2022
5 Reposts · 73 Likes
Job market discussion
Allison Luedtke 🇺🇦@LuedtkeAllison
Thread 🧵 of common interview questions at teaching-focused/ Liberal Arts College jobs in Econ:
Please add others you think of!
1/?
9:56 PM · Dec 8, 2022
17 Reposts · 80 Likes
Rustam Jamilov@RustamJamilov
It is economics job market season. People are writing ``advice threads'' to candidates. For what it's worth, here is my grumpy two cents:
1. Be kind to your advisors, staff, admin. Job market candidates are annoying. You are annoying. Remember that and be patient and nice.
12:04 PM · Dec 7, 2022
16 Reposts · 149 Likes
Public goods
Michael Clemens@m_clem
Remarkable, open-access and geocoded data on the full universe of 3.1 million resettled refugees in the United States, 1975–2018
By @DreherAxel, @LanglotzSarah, @matzatecon, @ParsonsEcon and @mayda_anna —>
refugeeresettlementdata.com
Refugee Resettlement Data
3:13 PM · Dec 6, 2022
34 Reposts · 138 Likes
SMA 🏴☠️@generic_void
I found an online webpage book covering tutorials for all sorts of econometrics and every single tutorial includes an econometrics meme. I’m at peace.
8:07 PM · Dec 9, 2022
9 Reposts · 209 Likes
More on ChatGPT
(see also: last week)
Paul Novosad@paulnovosad
If ChatGPT makes student work impossible to evaluate — great!
We can quit the equilibrium where professors need to measure student quality and we can just focus on teaching those who want to learn.
6:18 PM · Dec 9, 2022
18 Reposts · 171 Likes
^interesting discussion in the replies
David Holtz | @dholtz@zirk.us on mastodon@daveholtz
trying to get some help from #chatgpt designing my mba syllabus for next semester. some of the readings don't exist (yet), but so far so good. first, chatgpt gave me a very bare bones reading list...
8:21 PM · Dec 8, 2022
1 Repost · 17 Likes
Jeffrey Ely@Jeffely
12:32 AM · Dec 11, 2022
23 Reposts · 152 Likes
^prisoner’s dilemma. “that kinda sucks right?”