Best of #econtwitter - Week of January 1, 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.
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
Morten N. Støstad@MortenStostad
Do people become conservative with age? An update with 21 countries and 546,013 individuals.
The fascinating plot comes from @jburnmurdoch, based on the UK and US, and shows;
1. People become more right-wing with age.
2. Millennials are different.
But is this true everywhere?
10:51 AM · Dec 31, 2022
738 Reposts · 3.45K Likes
Morten N. Støstad@MortenStostad
Headline: We really do tend to grow more conservative as we age.
Across the West, the shift accounts for ~10 percentage points over the lifetime.
But there are differences across the generations. Millennials have trended in the opposite direction (!) so far.
10:51 AM · Dec 31, 2022
65 Reposts · 349 Likes
^“But it is not true everywhere. Mainland Europe is quite different, for example.”
Zachary Lipton@zacharylipton
Help me out causality twitter: What is the very best example in all of medicine of an average treatment effect (ATE) estimate inferred *from observational data* that anyone reasonable confidently believes is even close to correct?
6:24 AM · Dec 27, 2022
15 Reposts · 125 Likes
^now do econ
Poli Sci Bitches@poliscibitches
Lots of discourse on non-academic careers for PhDs. Want to hear about the downsides?
🧵 👇🏻
1:44 AM · Dec 30, 2022
102 Reposts · 751 Likes
Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻@andreamatranga
@KwekuOA It should just be a standard easy thing to know "what happened to the last 30 people this dept hired on TT?"
6:03 PM · Dec 30, 2022
7 Likes
CaltechEconTheory@CaltechEconThry
These are the stats for econ tenure track outcomes at Caltech since 2015:
- Denied tenure: 1
- Left Caltech: 2
- Tenured: 5
Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 @andreamatranga
@KwekuOA It should just be a standard easy thing to know "what happened to the last 30 people this dept hired on TT?"
11:30 PM · Dec 30, 2022
4 Reposts · 46 Likes
Anup Malani@anup_malani
You are being too kind. 5 years to publication means journals are massively reducing TFP of economists.
Some economist should measure the welfare effect of peer review. My prior is it is positive if time to pub were 6 mo., but very negative at eg 5 years. https://t.co/LQbl3qfReZ
James Graham @J_Meanwell
Great to see this *finally* in print (https://t.co/uneKUDyiOd).
But I’m coming to appreciate how much of a long game we’re playing in econ.
First draft: 2018. Submission: May 2020. R&R: Dec 2020. Acceptance: Sep 2021. Published: Jan 2023.
4:43 PM · Dec 31, 2022
1 Repost · 18 Likes
Gabriel@gp_mihalache
Abolish journal volumes and issues. Assign DOI and treat acceptance as rating of the paper. Forget about reformatting the draft to match journal style. Progress.
8:07 PM · Dec 31, 2022
7 Reposts · 113 Likes
Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, Ph.D@KwekuOA
Job market tip:
“Don’t act like a grad student.”
What I mean is, don’t be asking for approval. Nobody wants to think about why you fit there. Decide you fit and tell them why. Act more like you’re already in the role you want. Sound like you already work there.
5:02 PM · Dec 26, 2022
61 Reposts · 912 Likes
Public goods
Alasdair Rae@undertheraedar
Fairly new set of global roads data from Microsoft: 47.8 million km of roads for a huge chunk of the world (note format is tsv)
"The data is freely available for download and use under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)."
#opendata
github.com/microsoft/Road…
11:14 AM · Dec 28, 2022
223 Reposts · 1.1K Likes
James Bailey@1ArmedEconomist
I'm starting a page to highlight examples of easier-to-use versions of normally hard-to-use government datasets:
economistwritingeveryday.com
Most Improved Data
6:16 PM · Dec 29, 2022
6 Reposts · 16 Likes
Xavier Marquez@marquezxavier
Another use for ChatGPT: correcting OCR errors in historical texts. The quality is quite good
5:54 AM · Dec 27, 2022
152 Reposts · 1.06K Likes
Andreas Peichl@APeichl
Accessing U.S. data for research just got easier
New online portal streamlines requests for massive data sets at 16 federal agencies
science.org
Accessing U.S. data for research just got easier
9:12 AM · Dec 31, 2022
117 Reposts · 492 Likes
“What’s your favorite…”
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer@4misceldah
What are your favorite papers in social economics and finance that you read this year?
Self-nominations encouraged!
Please RT. I’ll compile a list.
Ht @alexoimas
7:50 PM · Dec 29, 2022
10 Reposts · 32 Likes
Alex Imas@alexoimas
What are your favorite behavioral and experimental economics papers that you read this year?
Self-nominations are encouraged!
Plz RT. I’ll compile a list.
5:00 PM · Dec 28, 2022
85 Reposts · 257 Likes
Fin
Noah Williams@Bellmanequation
Started reading PhD applications & was reminded of my uncle. In college, he asked a professor for a recommendation letter for grad school, who agreed after a class.
This was the letter in full (revealed later by someone at a school he applied to):
"I do not know this person."
5:57 PM · Dec 29, 2022
25 Reposts · 529 Likes
Khoa Vu@KhoaVuUmn
A few of my favorite memes in 2022:
Khoa Vu @KhoaVuUmn
https://t.co/4OchvQMrlC
6:50 PM · Jan 1, 2023
110 Reposts · 1.25K Likes
Jeffrey Smith@econjeffsmith
@AllbriteAllday Bob Lucas at orientation day: The great thing about working on Thanksgiving and Christmas is that nobody calls.
4:26 PM · Dec 26, 2022