Best of #econtwitter - Week of October 16, 2022 [3/4]
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.
This is part three of four.
Interesting discussions
From our AEA committee on the job market, great news for job candidates: it seems that the demand for PhD economists has fully rebounded to pre-COVID levels.
Summary w/ graphs follows... 1/6
#EconTwitter #EconJobMarket
@AEAInformation
@JOE_listings
@AEACSWEP
OK—I’ll bite.
While I agree with some of the points made in this thread—I disagree w/ the overall statement:
“It's hard to conclude that cash transfers have a solid evidence base”
There is certainly more than one way to read the evidence—so here’s my take:
1/n
Heath Henderson @hendersonhl22
Should you do a "pre-doc" (RA job) after undergrad, or should you apply directly for an Econ Ph.D. program after graduating?
I get this question regularly from advisees, students, undergrad RAs, so I'll share my thoughts here, esp. for 🌍,🌏 students with less access to advice.
When I moved to Sweden I had to take 2 semesters of pedagogy classes before they promoted me to full professor. My initial reaction was annoyance until it dawned on me how absurd it is to *not* require that. Now I’m a fan and feel like my teaching improved!
Jaclyn A. Siegel, PhD @jacasiegel
Something that's been lurking in the background of the Law of Iterated Expectations War:
A big breakthrough of 20th c. probability theory was to DEFINE conditional expectation (and conditional probability) as something satisfying a certain property, much stronger than the LIE.
^if your reaction is, ‘what LIE war’, congratulations you have been focused on work instead of on twitter
Listen: you're interested in the average height in the US. This has to be a weighted average of the average height among men and the average height among non-men. That's it. That's the law.
A+ applicant screening
Rick Hornbeck @Rick__Hornbeck
Hot take for #EconTwitter: economics should have more talks structured around a whole research agenda, not a single paper. Recently gave such a talk at Harvard SPH (thanks @maggiemcconnell for invite!) focusing on my IPV work and it was incredibly useful (to me);
I find the citation style that uses numbers throughout the text (Like [57] aka IEEE style) extremely cursed, it forces me to go back and forth to the citations to see what the paper might be. In contrast, I can remember pairs of names and years (Like Ocampo 2016)
^looking at you, computer scientists
I think A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits is the most awesome paper I've been involved in, but it's very long and dense, so I think a lot of people struggle with it. As an experiment, you can watch me read through the paper and give takes!
^included as an interesting approach to online paper presentation
I fell in love with economics in the heyday of the "Econ Blogosphere." It was a fantastic time to discover econ.
In many ways, we are in a renaissance for econ learners.
Here are some of the great econ writers you should be following, plus which article to start with 🧵
^#12 on the list is especially recommended
