Best of #econtwitter - Week of September 24, 2023: paper summaries

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.

Too many papers this week, slow down please

Idiosyncratic favorites

^a lot of nice graphical results in this thread

Hot take: while many overestimate the zero-sumness of the world in some ways, economists wildly underestimate how zero-sum the world is. The fundamental issue is that some things that enter the utility function are rank-dependent, and so must be zero-sum. Think about status! (Although: if the market or other mechanisms create new status dimensions, then the role of zero-sum status competitions can be lessened, at least.) “Markets in almost nothing”/“massively incomplete markets”, as one econ writer once put it.

(None of that diminishes this paper, obviously, which looks very interesting)

Paper summaries

^ “Construct[s] novel subnational measures of patience from Facebook interests using ML algorithms”

^mega tweet with a lot of graphs

^💀 “wildfire activity since 2016 wiped out a remarkable 25% of overall air quality progress from the few previous decades, and over 50% of progress in many western states”

Replications, or not

More paper summaries

^this newsletter is not going to stop highlighting the need for the Asher-Novosad-Rafkin adjustment until everyone is taking it into consideration