Mutlu Yuksel

Middle age reader, academic economist. Likes learning, discussing, and hiking!

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

How bad was life before modern science, technology, and economic growth? Awful.

The example I will use in class this Wednesday is Henry Clay (1777-1852). He was one of the most powerful men of his time in the U.S., not just among the elite but among the elite of the elite: Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, Senator, and three-time presidential candidate. He was also rich and a large slaveholder. The U.S. was among the richest countries in the world (perhaps only behind Great Britain) and among the most technologically advanced. And we are not talking about the early Middle Ages, but about the first half of the 19th century.

Given the constraints of his time, he had nearly everything within reach.

Clay and his wife, Lucretia (both in the photograph), had eleven children: six daughters and five sons. He buried all six daughters. By 1835, all were dead: two as infants, two as children, two as young mothers. He also buried a son in a war his father had opposed. Another son, Theodore, fractured his skull as a child, but since nobody could treat him, he spent decades in an asylum in Lexington.

Think about this for a second: seven children dead and one handicapped out of eleven, in the first half of the 19th century, among the elite of the elite, in one of the richest and most advanced places on the planet.

And I was angry yesterday because my cell phone coverage in Toddington (England) was poor.

[Economic History Society @EcHistSoc]

More than twenty interviews with some of the leading figures in economic history in the last century are now available to watch on our website & YouTube channel.

Interview with Professor Eric Hobsbawm:
https://t.co/u6RXgpvwiC
https://t.co/41znEPQTUj

[Omkar @omkarships]

Interviewer : where do you see yourself in 5 years ?

Me :

[Alexandre Galvão Patriota @agpatriota]

Bom dia!

Uma antiga piada matemática:

Aluno: O que é demonstração por contradição?

Professor: Acho que você sabe.

Aluno: Se eu soubesse, não estaria perguntando. Como estou perguntando, segue que eu não sei.

Professor: Pois é, como eu disse, você sabe!

Vi a primeira vez em:
Colin Foster, “Making Sense of Proof by Contradiction”, Mathematics in School, November 2022

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

What happens when you double teacher salaries?

- You get more satisfied teachers
- You do not get greater teacher effort
- You do not get better student outcomes

[Zhuoran Yang @zhuoran_yang]

I transformed hand-written notes from the other two courses I've taught into web lecture notes.

Intro to optimization: https://t.co/cZVz7J3LMU
Advanced optimization: https://t.co/1tjpuxmq7g

AI-generated figures still need careful human review — titles overlapping plots, perpendicular lines that aren't actually perpendicular, etc. But Claude can finally get things right after a few trials.

And it can simple interactive demos on webpages, e.g., comparing convergence of first-order methods on Beale Function.

[Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht]

Is price theory dead?

Part of @tylercowen's new book argues basically yes. I don't dispute his evidence.

But the broader picture highlights the continued relevance of price theory. Not dead yet https://t.co/KjeaAOSQei

[Hayashi Heikichi @lianda_edu]

Calculators killed hand-computed differential equations.
Computers killed manual mathematical tables.
Gene sequencers killed chromosome-by-chromosome PhD theses. None of the disciplines died — they ascended.

[Cap-EO 👨🏾‍💻 @EOEboh]

Everyone needs a corporate interpreter 😁

[Misha Teplitskiy | Science of Science @MishaTeplitskiy]

Professors today: "Wahh, wahh, my students gave me bad course evaluations and it hurt my feelings 😞😞😞"

Professors in 14th century Paris: "I gave a bad lecture and the students threw stones at me"

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

🚨 JUST IN: A migratory bird just shattered world records — flying 8,425 miles (13,560 km) NON-STOP across the Pacific without landing once.

The bar-tailed godwit doesn’t stop to eat, drink, or sleep during its migration across the Pacific Ocean. Its journey from Alaska to Australia takes roughly 11 days of continuous flight, covering over 13,000 kilometers through storms, headwinds, and open ocean with zero land beneath it the entire time.

Before departure, it does something almost surgical to its own body. It shrinks its digestive organs down to almost nothing, converting the stomach, intestines, and liver into raw fuel. The bird essentially eats its own gut to make room for fat reserves that will power its wings for nearly two weeks straight.

The brain doesn’t fully sleep either. Half of it stays active while the other half rests, alternating in shifts mid-flight at altitude over the open Pacific. The godwit is simultaneously unconscious and navigating with magnetic field sensitivity that no human instrument in the 18th century could replicate.

What makes this genuinely staggering beyond the physical record is the navigational precision involved. The bird leaves Alaska and arrives in New Zealand with accuracy that would embarrass early GPS systems. It reads Earth’s magnetic field, atmospheric pressure gradients, star positions, and potentially quantum-level compass mechanisms inside its eye that literally let it see magnetic field lines overlaid on its visual field.

Evolution spent millions of years building an aerospace navigation system inside a 300 gram animal.

We spend billions engineering machines that do what this bird does on instinct, fat reserves, and half a sleeping brain.
The longest recorded non-stop flight by a commercial aircraft is around 20 hours.

This bird does 11 days.

Without a runway.

[Dina D. Pomeranz 🟣 @DinaPomeranz]

Building 👏 more 👏 housing 👏 reduces 👏 housing 👏 prices 👏

Even when the new housing is more expensive, it lowers the cost of the pre-existing housing, as richer people move out of older housing into the new ones.

[Matt Dancho (Business Science) @mdancho84]

Understanding probability is essential in data science.

In 4 minutes, I'll demolish your confusion.

Let's go!

[Mutlu Yuksel @mutlu_econ]

https://t.co/oYt00Kfzbh

[Baseball's Not Dead @dead_baseball]

97% accuracy rate means 3% false positives. With 1,000,000 tests, you'd have ~30,000 false positives.

Even if you test positive, your odds are still 1/30,000 that you have the disease.

[Mutlu Yuksel @mutlu_econ]

@fesyokantinci @MusaHasta @sophiano25 NASIL? NE ZAMAN?

GS maclari : Ocak 5 Trabzon; 10 Fenerbahce; 13 Fethiyespor ; 17 lig maci Gaziantep.

Fenerbahce maclari : Ocak 6 Samsunspor; 10 Gs; 14 Beyoglu; 18 Lig maci Alanyaspor

[Mutlu Yuksel @mutlu_econ]

@fesyokantinci @MusaHasta @sophiano25 Fenerbahçe, Beşiktaş, Başakşehir'in 2025-2026 sezonu başındaki lig maçları, Avrupa kupası eleme turlarındaki play-off nedeniyle ertelenmiştir. TFF, kulüplerin Avrupa kupalarında gruplara kalma şansını artırmak ve oyuncuların yorgunluk yaşamadan bu kritik maçlara odaklanmasını..

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

A headline from 1986.

[Pessimists Archive @PessimistsArc]

You either die a disruptor, or live long enough to see yourself become an incumbent

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Utah has become the first state to allow AI to renew medical prescriptions with no doctor involved. The company, Doctronic, also secured a malpractice insurance policy for their AI. Their data also shows that their system matches doctors treatment plans 99.2% of the time.