David Baqaee

Economist at UCLA

[David Baqaee @DBaqaee]

@alz_zyd_ There’s no such thing as “social welfare”

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

Humans have deep-rooted desires for status.

These are best accommodated in diversified small human communities, where everyone can be the expert at their thing.

Social media makes us unhappy, because our community becomes the world, and to a first approximation, we are all peasants.

We are uglier than the people on Instagram, our families are doing worse than the families on Facebook, on Twitter we are nobody.

So we use the weapons of the weak, we ridicule those with power and try to tear down their reputations, we participate in cathartic expressions of moral superiority. But it is a weak balm for the psychological pain of being low status in a human community.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

Asking for robustness in ref reports wastes everyone's time and DOES NOT WORK.

Authors selectively respond to requests, interpret things differently, and still have many degrees of freedom. This is a stupid dance.

Robustness checks are only useful if done by 3rd parties. 2/

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

I broke down crying on live CBS television. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. Because it was the 4th time that I sat in a courtroom watching actual assassins, convicted murderers sent by the Islamic Republic to kill me, face charges on American soil.

You’d think that feels like winning. Unfortunately , it doesn’t. Because all I could think about was them. The same killers back home in Iran, The innocent people facing the exact same murderers, the same regime, the same orders, the same hands, with no courtroom. No lawyer. No protection. Just a rope at dawn and a family forbidden from crying at their grave.

In America, they get arrested. In Iran, the same murderers are hanging my protesters killing women and children.

I survived. I am supposed to feel grateful. But how do you feel grateful when the same machine that came for you is still running, and your family back home are still dying?

This is called survivor guilt. And it doesn’t leave me…..
💔

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

And again, and again, and again, the market proves to be more flexible and adaptable than the engineers, extrapolating, with their calculators expect. When prices change, behaviour changes. Believe in substitution, in elasticity, in human ingenuity, that is, in the market, and you will get a closer approximation than all doom-mongers. For this of course, a market must exist (e.g., does not apply to the fertility collapse).

[Johannes Boehm @johannesmboehm]

@ben_golub One can still dream...

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

Seniors are already the wealthiest age group in America. Washington spends 6x as much on seniors as people under 25. So state and local govts moving in the same direction is totally absurd. Empty pandering to win a primary.

[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.

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

Fun fact: NYC spends over $42,000 per student each year—roughly 4x the average in-state tuition at a public college. Yet only about 28% of the city’s 4th graders read proficiently.

And people like Zohran Mamdani want you to believe Jeff Bezos is the one failing the public.

[Marc Goldwein @MarcGoldwein]

Dang -- yields keep rising. They are more than half a percent above projections. If that continues, we'll be almost $2 trillion deeper in debt after a decade.

[Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @lugaricano]

Countries get the cabinets they pay for. Singapore pays its Foreign Minister about S$1.1m, around US$800,000. The salary is benchmarked to 60% of the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners. That is why you can get Vivian Balakrishnan, former eye surgeon and hospital chief executive, implementing @karpathy's external brain idea (link below). The speech shows deep understanding of AI and fills one with confidence about Singapore's future.

The UK Foreign Secretary earns roughly £165,000: the MP salary plus a ministerial salary of about £67,000. The ministerial part is frozen since the crisis and is down by roughly a third in real terms since 2010. This is what a junior Magic Circle lawyer earns.

Spain pays its ministers around €85,000. So you do not get a surgeon who has run hospitals. You get a party loyalist who has never run anything.

[David Baqaee @DBaqaee]

@lugaricano @johnjhorton The last living legend.

[Ashvin Gandhi @ashdgandhi]

I'm a former Harvard PhD student. Based on my experience, current social science students probably make a bit over $250k + healthcare over 5 years, with just 784 hours of required TA work. That's almost $320/hour for the "work" and the rest is classes and your own research.

[SONIA @S0N_IA_]

este ha sido el progreso de la IA en los últimos 3 años 👀

[fedaykin reepicheep @mauddweeb]

“And if a computer can grade a task, it can do that task.”

Hey guys, @TIME says P=NP. Time to pack it up.

[John Horton @johnjhorton]

Sourpuss economist at a seminar "Perhaps she wrote the song to cash in on the Jolene-naming boom that was about to happen anyway..."

[Ben Golub @ben_golub]

Really excited about this research preview

[New York Post @nypost]

Iranian dad fatally beaten for using Starlink during web blackout; karate champ executed over protest https://t.co/jw16uFzIzF

[Streets For All @streetsforall]

Something about LA just doesn't add up.

Cost to do curb ramps per corner:
Beverly Hills - $10,000
Caltrans - $15,000
City of LA - $50,000+

Why does basic infrastructure cost so much more in LA compared to surrounding cities or even our state transportation agency!?

[Andrés Neumeyer @andyneumeyer]

These students are exceptional. Rather than serving as RAs in predoc programs, they produce independent research in the second (and often third) year of their master’s. They also complete a demanding PhD-level core in micro, macro, and metrics. The best of these papers rival second-year PhD work and strongly signal their research potential. A 30 year track record confirms this.

[Iran International English @IranIntl_En]

Hesam Alaeddin, a 40-year-old man detained in Tehran over his alleged use of Starlink satellite internet equipment to bypass the digital blackout, died after being severely beaten by government agents, a source familiar with the matter told Iran International.

Alaeddin was violently arrested and, after dozens of days, his family was told to collect his body, the source said.

He had gone to a hospital to follow up on the condition of his brother, Hamid Alaeddin, who had been shot during protests. Some of Hesam Alaeddin’s electronic devices were seized there.

A week later, when he went to retrieve the devices and follow up on the matter, he was arrested and taken to his home for questioning and a search, according to the source.

He was severely beaten at his home with various objects and died there, but authorities concealed his death and treated him as if he were still a living detainee.

Hesam Alaeddin was a relative of Ahmad Alaeddin, one of the owners of Tehran’s famous Alaeddin shopping center.

@elonmusk @Starlink