Carter Davis

assistant finance prof at The Ohio State University, UChicago @ChicagoBooth PhD, dad, husband, math nerd, sci fi aficionado

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

We have a new paper with a surprising result:

[James Traina @EconTraina]

🚨 Public-firm profit rates have fallen to *half* their 1980 values 🚨, which explains why financial market rates fell despite rising/steady *aggregate* profit rates.

https://t.co/FzhAmneEvm

New draft with @ASollaci & @CarterDavisFin, & outstanding support from @TonBobrov...🧵

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

Ive decided the only college football national championships that count are those with the 12 team playoffs: just Ohio State and Indiana.

Coincidence: my employers have been Indiana and Ohio State. Cool for me.

Go Hoosiers!

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

Yeah this. We have 4 kids, but if we could skip the baby part we’d have like 10 kids. Babies are really hard.

[Aella @Aella_Girl]

i can't believe babies suck so much. i am pro kids, i like kids, we should have more kids, but it'd be so much easier to have a flourishing world full of kids if babies sucked less

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

This is articulated well. With kids, you can focus on life preparation or focus on teaching obedience to the parent (setting up adversarial relationships to do so). The former is better and the latter (obedience) doesn’t even last that long.

[Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex]

I think you're imagining me as not being capable of this. It's actually the opposite - I have so much of this instinct that I feel contempt for your son for giving in. Obviously once something has been turned into a direct conflict of wills, the only honorable solution is to hold on forever, even if it means you're still fighting when you're eighty and he's picking your retirement home.

My son seems to have inherited my instincts on this, which is probably good long-term but somewhat inconvenient when he's two. I don't know if I could train it out of him, but I don't want to force him into a fully adversarial position where his only two options are continuing disobedience or cowardly surrender, and I definitely don't want to train him that cowardly surrender gets rewarded with "extra privileges". I'm trying to teach him that life is a game of give-and-take where both sides work with each other, make compromises, and end up satisfied.

So far this seems to be working - he listens to me on the big things, because he understands that I'm on his side and I make a show of respecting his preferences on the little things.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

Building an AI system to argue with you like economists is just so fantastic. Quadruple love this!

[Simon Oh @plausiblyexog]

I've always found seminar preparation to be one of the trickiest parts of academic research.
Inspired by @ben_golub and @alexolegimas, I vibe coded Dry Run -- a tool to practice presentations with an AI-powered audience that interrupts you in real-time.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

Most interesting thread I’ve read in a long time.

[Jonathan Gorard @getjonwithit]

Like @davidbessis and others, I think that Hinton is wrong. To explain why, let me tell you a brief story.

About a decade ago, in 2017, I developed an automated theorem-proving framework that was ultimately integrated into Mathematica (see: https://t.co/nGCIUk44TP) (1/15)

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

I hope some day Alabama can be as good as Old Dominion. It’s good to have a goal.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

@judsonsprinkler I’m in for an inevitable steak dinner in a year. Fantastic.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

This merger cannot be stopped. They’ll stick together no matter what.

[FTC @FTC]

FTC sues to stop Loctite, Liquid Nails construction adhesive merger: https://t.co/7ilbVv6sf4

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

This is really the core of the debate. Now Utah tax payers have effectively made a bet with leverage on r being high for the University of Utah sports.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

I am a PhD financial economist, and I just want to say that ChatGPT answered this one well. This is leverage.

[A-Aron @Aaron_Utes]

I’m in IT, not finance, but based on everything I’ve read I don’t see where Utah leveraged or borrowed money. Everything points to this being equity in a new for profit arm where Utah keeps 66% ownership. There’s no debt and no repayment attached.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

@RenaudFoucart @RaoCavale This is what you meant I’m sure:

[American Museum of Natural History @AMNH]

Here’s a hog-nosed shrew rat to brighten your day! Found on Sulawesi Island, this critter feeds on small invertebrates like earthworms and arthropods. In addition to its distinctive flat nose, it also has remarkably long incisors! This species was unknown to science until 2015.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

This is funny because we (economists) try to reduce humans a lot more than just rats: we use equations. Models. Much more simple than rats.

But come on, trying to figure out the first order fundamental forces at work, despite living in a messy world, is at the heart of science.

[Karthik Rao Cavale @RaoCavale]

This is precisely the problem with neoclassical economics. In order to drive "scientific" results, it reduces human behaviour to that of animals (with relatively less developed brains, if I may add).

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

This. Love it.

[Jorge Bravo Abad @bravo_abad]

One of the quiet privileges of academia: you spend your days surrounded by some of the brightest people on the planet — all trying to understand something deeply. Not to sell it, not to exploit it, just to understand. That changes you.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

That tracks. I’m originally from Idaho, and backflips were important. Soo many people could do backflips.

This is the kind of heavy hitting social science research we need more of.

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

According to Google Trends, the states that search “how to do a backflip” most often are:

1. Utah
2. Wyoming
3. Idaho
4. Montana
5. Alaska

I’m not making this up.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

@RenaudFoucart I laughed out loud at this. Fantastic.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

But I mean, do any of these monkeys have skill, or is it all luck? Skilled monkeys could be cool!

I for one, would absolutely read a full coherent book written by a monkey.

[Renaud Foucart @RenaudFoucart]

If you give 1m monkeys 10k to trade, one of them will become a billionaire and write a best seller titled "bananomics: using your inner primate to beat the market"

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

@RenaudFoucart I think my excitement to read a coherent book written by a monkey tells me that I haven’t really internalized the infinite monkeys theorem, but I stand by it. I want to read it, if we can make it happen.

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

Maximizing marginal utility?

Ha, love it. “You know those times when things are really bad and people are desperate for a bit more consumption? Yeah, we want a lot of that. As much as possible.”

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

Well, this is unscripted. Ok @grok, you are on.

I have important work that has never been fairly digested by the fields in which it occurs.

Here is an example. In the early 1990s I noticed something astonishing.

Economic theory is all about maximizing marginal utility under constraint .

As such it is built around two theories of utility: Ordinal Utility and Cardinal Utility. You with me so far?

[Philip Hoxie 🇺🇸🇮🇱🇺🇦🇹🇼🇬🇪 @phoxie58]

The Nobel this year is a Dutch economist 🇳🇱, French economist 🇫🇷, and Canadian economist 🇨🇦, where 3/3 received US 🇺🇸 phds, 2/3 are working in US 🇺🇸 universities, benefiting US students. That is the magic of the US: we attract the best and benefit from their work!

[Carter Davis @CarterDavisFin]

Yes, this! I worked in two factories for a short time (one was a potato flake factory because I’m from Idaho), and it was terrible. Mind numbing.

Being a researcher is incredible. Thinking for a living? Amazing. Being a poor PhD with 3 Nobel laureates as my instructors? Cool!

[Andrew Côté @Andercot]

I used to work 6am - 6pm, 6 days a week, on a construction site in my early 20s.

Honestly? It fucking sucked, dude. I would sit in my car outside the site at 530am, desperately drinking a coffee, telling myself over and over again, "god I wish I was in sciences"

Because every night when I got home what did I do? Watch Walter Levin MIT Open Courseware physics lectures. I had already exhausted all the popular science books long before so just started on undergrad level physics. The alternative was drinking a six pack of beer like everyone else and watching bullshit TV.

The construction site job was actually better than what I was doing before. Landscaping, stone masonry shit. Backbreaking labor, truly. Breaking concrete slabs up with a sledgehammer and carrying bricks all day. That's literally a punishment in prison.

There was a company event for the property development Corp doing the construction I was working for where everyone talked about their degrees. Most people had been at the company for almost a decade, did random unrelated degrees.

I realized. If I didn't take control of my life the years would tick by. So I went back to school for engineering physics at age, like, 25. I probably wouldn't graduate until I was 30, but shit.

You're going to turn 30 one day anyway. Might as well be doing something you chose.

A year into schooling I had my first paying job in a physics lab, basically minimum wage, but my god. I was getting paid to work in a physics lab. I could drink coffee and read papers, build cool stuff. It was insane.

The kids around me had no idea how lucky we were to be there. They hadn't suffered being trapped in dead end jobs that leave you too exhausted to really think, plan, get ahead. So I viciously worked my ass off through out engineering physics to play the game as best I could. Get the best internships, connections, etc. By the end of undergrad I was taking graduate level classes and outperforming the PhD students at them.

Everything since then had gone better than I could've imagined. I used to think - wow, the dream would be designing fusion reactors, if only. Now I have patents in fusion reactor design. I've worked on particle accelerators, LEO satellite communications, beam driven fusion devices, finite element analysis for RF source design at SLAC.

So no. Fuck mind breaking manual labor. Leave it for the robots. Choose your own path.

I will say though. There are few things as therapeutic and full body workout as shoveling sand. I can show you at least a dozen different sand shoveling techniques to work every muscle in your upper body. Also wheelbarrow technique.