debipriya

Economist, policy leader, advocate for equity. Re-tweets not endorsements. Views/opinions entirely mine.

[debipriya @debipriya]

If only it worked that way… 🤦🏻‍♀️

[Acyn @Acyn]

Miller: The way most welfare works in most states and most places is we take your word for it. If you say your kids are hungry, you are going to get food stamps. We don't check if you even have kids. You will just start getting the checks.

[Katie Bergh @Katie_Bergh]

The Trump Administration didn't "lift" people off SNAP. President Trump signed the deepest cuts to SNAP in history into law last summer & now low-income people are losing the food assistance they need to afford groceries at the fastest rate in decades.

[debipriya @debipriya]

Can’t make this up.

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

Literally arguing for insider trading to offset his concern that Congressional salaries are too low.

[debipriya @debipriya]

Lot of wisdom and concrete recommendations here to deal with AI-job loss-displacement concerns!

[Bharat Ramamurti @BharatRamamurti]

Public concern about AI is rising quickly, yet neither federal nor state governments have done much to address worker concerns. Meanwhile, other countries have plowed ahead. My new piece today looks at a few foreign approaches, which could be instructive for US policymakers. 1/

[debipriya @debipriya]

🤦🏻‍♀️

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Every so often I think about how, in 2022, for $24B we could had "prototype vaccines ready for each of the 26 known viral families that cause human disease" so they can be deployed in 100 days if there was ever a need.

This effort was not funded. https://t.co/TJBuqp69Nn

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

Tomorrow marks the 165th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore's birthday. We remember the poet by sharing one of his most famous poems, "Gitanjali 35".

Stay tuned to learn more about Tagore tomorrow.

[debipriya @debipriya]

So great to see @cbcny join in this fight! Spend smart, invest in New Yorkers, grow the economy!!

[Citizens Budget Commission @cbcny]

1/6

Shout it from the rooftops: CBC is proposing spending new money! increasing Fair Fares to 250% of Fed Poverty Level is $ worth spending. A link to our new report here, and here’s why:

https://t.co/QUVqKN4V9p

[debipriya @debipriya]

Truly good news!

[Mark D. Levine @MarkLevineNYC]

The Indian Point nuclear power plant used to provide 20% of NYC's electricity. When the plant was closed in 2020 the gap was filled mostly with fracked gas.

We are now finally back to 20% of our supply coming from renewable sources. And there's some good news on the horizon (despite Trump's best efforts): a major hydropower transmission line from Quebec is opening by the end of this year, and a large wind farm off L.I. is opening in 2027. This will take us to 47% clean electricity.

Great new report from @UrbanGreen lays out all the progress NYC has made in greening its grid, and how much work we still have left to do: https://t.co/HfYstNfEke

[debipriya @debipriya]

En-shitti-fi-cation encapsulated @doctorow

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Katie Bergh @Katie_Bergh]

ICYMI: The House Appropriations Committee voted 35-25 yesterday to advance a bill that would underfund WIC and cut fruit and vegetable benefits for almost 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, new moms & pregnant women in low-income families.

[debipriya @debipriya]

That’s the way to do it!

[Jon Ossoff @ossoff]

Congress has let drug companies rip off Americans for decades.

Lobbyists, campaign cash, and a system that protects industry profits.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

[debipriya @debipriya]

Prayers do get answered!

[Peter Sterne @petersterne]

HUGE NEWS for editors: the AP has changed its style guide. It's now "healthcare" (not "health care") and "childcare" (not "child care") https://t.co/189NypUkyo

[debipriya @debipriya]

All these years on this hellsite, but this one takes the cake… please don’t waste 16:32 of your life.

[Henry Winkler @hwinkler4real]

Stop TALKING

[debipriya @debipriya]

Criminal says what in fake-deep voice?

[Elizabeth Holmes @ElizabethHolmes]

Delete your search history, delete your bookmarks, delete your reddit, medical records, 12 yr old tumblr, delete everything.

Every photo on the cloud, every message on every platform.

None of it is safe.

It will all become public in the next year
Local storage and compute 📈

[Michael Linden @MichaelSLinden]

The idea that we can replace the income tax with tariffs is not only essentially impossible, but it would also mean a HUGE tax cut for the rich, and a massive tax hike for the poor.

Great piece from @CenterOnBudget:
https://t.co/V7GPvnVq0P

[debipriya @debipriya]

#Affordability: Upgrade energy infrastructure!

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

This bill is the entire American energy debate in one screenshot.

$5.88 to generate the electricity. $44.40 to move it 30 miles. The supply is 12% of the total charge. Delivery is 88%.

This ratio would shock most people, but Eversource customers in New Hampshire have been living it for years. And the gap is widening everywhere. According to the EIA, utility spending on electricity delivery rose 65% from 2010 to 2020 in real dollars, while spending on power production dropped 32% over the same period.

The reason is wild when you see the numbers. 70% of U.S. transmission lines are over 25 years old. 70% of power transformers are past 25 years. 60% of circuit breakers are over 30. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. energy infrastructure a D+ grade. Replacing the whole system would cost an estimated $5 trillion. Capital investment in distribution infrastructure alone hit $50.9 billion in 2023, up 160% from 2003.

And here’s what makes this politically toxic: every technology that promises cheaper energy generation, nuclear, solar, wind, runs into the same wall. The generation gets cheaper. The delivery gets more expensive. New Hampshire has a nuclear plant 30 miles from this guy’s house producing some of the cheapest electricity in the country, and it barely matters because the wires, poles, transformers, and substations between the plant and his outlet are aging, expensive, and regulated by a system that lets utilities earn guaranteed returns on infrastructure investment.

The more they spend on the grid, the more they’re allowed to charge. Utilities earn their profit from the delivery side. Eversource passes through supply costs with zero markup. But delivery? That’s where the regulated rate of return lives. Every pole replaced, every transformer upgraded, every mile of wire buried becomes an asset the utility earns a percentage on for decades.

That’s why this bill looks the way it does. The customer is paying 12 cents to keep a nuclear reactor running and 88 cents to maintain a grid built during the Eisenhower administration.

[sam @sam_d_1995]

yikes. it’s gotten so bad that @NYCComptroller is out here correcting Jack Schlossberg’s NIMBY falsehoods

also can someone tell me why Jack is wearing a tote bag as a scarf?

[debipriya @debipriya]

Make Textbooks Great Again!

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

A beautifully written case for why physical textbooks are so much better for learning than the online distractions that have replaced them.

From Sophie Winkleman and @drdavidajames

https://t.co/Jpmd5tJ9nm

[debipriya @debipriya]

Print. Frame. Hang.

[Gauti Eggertsson 🇺🇦 @GautiEggertsson]

AI is a game changer for economic research. We will look back and think: before and after.

The junior job market used to place enormous value on technical skills — and rightly so. We wanted to pass on the latest research methods to new PhD students. But the cost of mastering frontier solution techniques has dropped dramatically. I now find myself replicating papers and experimenting with frontier methods in an evening or a few days using Claude Code. That would have taken weeks before — which in practice meant I wouldn’t have done it at all.

So what does the new equilibrium look like? Some are pessimistic: ChatGPT can write PhD dissertations, they say. Maybe. But those dissertations won’t push the frontier or generate excitement.

I take the other side of that bet. We are in the business of figuring out how the world works and generating new knowledge. There is plenty we don’t understand, and no shortage of questions to answer. AI just accelerates the process.

The returns on conceptual thinking and original ideas are now relatively higher compared to the technical grunt work of debugging code and cleaning datasets. I think this is a great development.

My guess is it will also erode the monopoly that top US schools — and a handful of others — have long enjoyed. Part of that monopoly rested on access to knowledge that didn’t travel easily. Person-to-person transmission has always been far more efficient than learning from books or published papers — which are outdated by the time they appear, given publication lags.
Now knowledge transmission is nearly instantaneous. I find myself using techniques I understood in principle but could never justify the time to implement, because other methods were simply faster. That’s no longer true. The same goes for big data work.

One question keeps nagging me though: how should this change how we teach?

[debipriya @debipriya]

Much fodder for thought! Tagging @PowherNY @WCreatingChange

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

A big new paper released this week on gender, parenthood, and income complicates some things I thought I knew about the economy

The story I was familiar with from several years ago is that the gender wage gap had stopped narrowing and the economy continued to severely punish working moms.

This paper finds:

1. The gender wage gap shrank by about 33 to 50% in the last two decades—although a male-female gap still very much exists.

2. Work from home has reduced the motherhood penalty, especially in "greedy work" careers with long hours

3. Data now shows that among workers with MBAs, dads earn the most and moms seem to out-earn men without children. (A parent premium! Pictured below)

4. Incomes are converging among men and women with advanced degrees, as researchers see dads working fewer hours and moms working longer hours