William Radaic

econ phd student at berkeley

[William Radaic @cmmnknowledge]

Life update: I’m beyond excited to start my PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley this Fall! I am grateful to have had many wonderful people who contributed to my journey until here.
Here’s a thread of thanks:

[Luke Heeney @heeney_luke]

New contender for most badass abstract in economics.

[Ivan Werning @IvanWerning]

Excited to FINALLY release toughest+most rewarding paper I've worked on...

….we attack a 150 year old Walras question that's gone unanswered, not for lack of trying (Hicks, Samuelson, Arrow; our chances?😱)...

Q: Is the market equilibrium stable or unstable?¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🧵

[William Radaic @cmmnknowledge]

@captgouda24 rabin would write in his first set of lecture slides something like:
“ways to introduce behavioral economics on your research: 1. Don’t!”

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students:

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics”

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

[Dean Karlan @deankarlan]

New working paper with @AmolRaswan and Chris Udry: "The Sisyphean Pursuit of Evidence for Poverty Traps."

A central idea in development economics is that poverty can trap people. We went looking for the cleanest evidence. Here's what we found – and didn't.

[William Radaic @cmmnknowledge]

@lucamlouzada simplesmente lendário

[luca @lucamlouzada]

My first NBER Working Paper is out! We study a district-wide phone ban in Rio de Janeiro middle schools and find that it led to improvements in learning.

https://t.co/ncw2qRdwhM

[John (main) @johnonmain]

The SF microclimates hard at work

[Nicholas Decker @captgouda24]

Cable plans are offered in bundles. What would happen if all channels had to be offered individually? We would think that consumer welfare would rise, as consumers no longer pay for channels they don't want -- but actually, all of the gains go to the producers. Let's see why. 1/

[Kevin A. Bryan @Afinetheorem]

I agree folks are doing this; I disagree that it will be the long-run eqlm. The cost of writing software has fallen, but has done so *for the big SAAS companies also*. Security, integrations, personalization: all will be comparative advantages for the big.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

An Econ PhD student at the 20th ranked program who is working on stuff they are passionate about will have a better job market than one at MIT who's been doing nothing but phd-app-maxxing since undergrad.

People get confused by this because they don't observe *how* successful people came about their insane knowledge bases. It wasn't by relentlessly grinding away at stuff because they had to.

They look at Scott Kominers and say "if i grind and learn as much math as he did, i will be successful." You can't! *You* can't learn as much math as Kominers because he gets energized by configuration results for type ii lattices. You will burn out if you try to do it this way.

You cannot, through grind alone, learn more about the economics of cities than Glaeser, or about how to maximize a value function than Acemoglu.

Research careers are long. Most people give up and stop working on research (graph is share of elite PhD graduates with at least one publication in year X after graduation).

If you're starting a PhD, you're presumably doing it to have a successful 40-year research career. The number one factor in whether that happens is not which program you get into, it's whether you find a research angle that energizes you enough to push through the endless barriers an academic career throws in your path.

This is why a lot of the received wisdom around PhD applications is wrong. If you're 100% consumed by the predoc rat race already, it's going to be a long, hard road ahead.

Obv you still have to do admissions, you should study a lot for the GRE, sigh it seems like taking real analysis is probably worth it.

But spending time on the things that energize you about economics is a no-brainer, whether it's policy, or blogging, or whatever, you gotta do the things that light your fire and make you want to be on this road.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

I hate this advice.

Jesus, don’t give up on your intellectual passions before you even start.

Do what lights your fire, you’re going to need a lot of it to get through.

[Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs]

I've possibly never experienced more consumer surplus than the ~20/month LLM plans

[William Radaic @cmmnknowledge]

ano de eleição nunca decepciona

[YIMBYLAND @YIMBYLAND]

Incredible news out of California.

Turns out you can literally just build housing and rents will stabilize or even come down!

[Leo Saenger @saengerleo]

Wrote some reflections on TFing in the Age of Claude Code, vibe-research in economics, and what might come next

[Soumitra Shukla @soumitrashukla9]

I think I’ve noticed this about academia. The true greats are always involved and, at least to me, have been super polite. A lot of people characterize academia as full of arrogant people that are hard to talk to. But that has not been my experience, and I wonder if it’s sour grapes.

[William Radaic @cmmnknowledge]

@ahall_research @soumitrashukla9 ..except that a vibe-coded app is likely to have many more vulnerabilities than a commercial solution

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

Waymo's issue is that we see every minor problem it causes but never see what would've happened if a human driver were there instead

[William Radaic @cmmnknowledge]

@captgouda24 try the burrito and quesadilla, both great (much better than Jefes)