Rajeev Ramachandran

[박주현 @hermit_hwarang]

Here you go

[Aunindyo Chakravarty @Aunindyo2023]

This assumes that societies will need women to produce children.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Compare these two headlines. You think @nytimes left out those details on accident?

[Angelica 🌐⚛️🇹🇼🇨🇳🇺🇸 @AngelicaOung]

A lot of « Chyna bad » stories gain massive legs because ppl don’t have an accurate model of how China works. They assume it’s all top-down and centralized so that something that happens once in some province must be going on everywhere.

This is in fact highly not true. China cannot be functional without highly autonomous local control with the central government ruling through KPIs and leaving local bureaucrat alone to problem-solve. Some of them inevitably get overly ambitious with gov-tech.

The whack pilot program probably got nixed before it got too far, but of COURSE it’s catnip to the foreign correspondents crowd and then it just get memed til the end of time.

To tell you the truth tho, I like this way of doing gov and treating provinces kind of like sandboxes. It’s kind of analogous to how companies are also given license to just build ahead of legislation. In both cases the deal is the same: you get to experiment, and the central government gets to drop the ban hammer on you at any time of things get out of hand.

If you enjoy the Hefei model or cosplaying bureaucrats on Douyin, you have to put up with a few duds like the facial recognition toilet paper dispenser.

[Nicholas Gruen @NGruen1]

Proving, if it needed to be proven, that you can sometimes do something pretty silly and get a surprising result.

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

The US has benefited in similar ways from the competition between the fifty states. We understand very well how this works. The question for Americans is why this precise mechanism went from being a source of dynamism to a massive rent-seeking boondoggle.

[Kevin A. Bryan @Afinetheorem]

As many note, these are quite outrageous. This from Darity, MacLean and Camara (*very* well known researchers in their area!) is so misleading I would fail a student who tried this on a term paper. #7 on my eight rule catechism for trust in universities: https://t.co/asUT7zMNFl

[Tim Hopper @tdhopper]

⚠️Brooks' central thesis:

"I ʙᴇʟɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ʜᴀʀᴅ ᴘᴀʀᴛ ᴏғ ʙᴜɪʟᴅɪɴɢ sᴏғᴛᴡᴀʀᴇ to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation."

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

Thailand has one of the lowest total fertility rates (TFR) in the world. In 2025, the TFR was 0.87, and the preliminary numbers for the first months of 2026 are even lower. The rate is so low that deaths have exceeded births since 2021 and now run 34% higher than births.

Thailand’s fertility collapse has always fascinated me. With a flight to a Bank of Thailand conference in Bangkok ahead of me, I spent some time reviewing the data.

Thailand’s TFR fell below replacement in 1991. That is early. It means completed fertility has been below replacement for at least a full generation. In 1991, Thailand was neither rich nor well-educated. Even today, its income per capita (in PPP, the right measure here) is about Mexico’s level, around 28% of the U.S.

The standard theories for East Asian ultra-low fertility, such as a toxic educational arms race or extreme gender inequality, have little bite here. On the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2025, Thailand scored 0.728 and ranked 66th. South Korea scored 0.687 (101st of 146), and Japan 0.666 (118th of 148, last in the G7).

I think Thailand is the clearest example of modernity without high income, and that combination is a recipe for demographic collapse.

To illustrate this point: if Thailand’s TFR remained at its current level for 200 years, the population would decline from 65.8 million in 2025 to 1.51 million in 2225. While this is a hypothetical scenario used to make the argument, not a forecast, it gives a sense of the magnitude of the population change involved unless TFR increases at some point. This is not about closing a few maternity wards or fixing Social Security, but about winding down an entire country.

Does anyone have a better theory? I don’t have enough information on Thai demographics, and I am happy to update my view.

Two caveats. First, I use Thailand’s official data from the National Statistical Office. The UN WPP data (and the databases built on it, such as the World Bank’s) are, as always, way off. Second, the official statistics may undercount births somewhat. Even if they do, the picture changes little.

[Workshops4Gaza @Workshops4Gaza]

“You’re living in a time of extremism, of revolution, when there’s got to be a change. A better world has to be built and the only way it’s gonna be built is with extreme methods. And I for one will join in with anyone, as long as you want to change this miserable condition.”

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

“U.S. may soon designate UNRWA as a foreign terrorist organization.”

Proscribing an aid organisation is going to set an unbelievably horrific precedent.

Israel’s influence over the US is insane

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

I have said exactly this before and still believe it to be true

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

The US has quietly deployed 82nd Airborne paratroopers to Israel, per deployment order leaked to me.

The deployment is tied to new US-Israel joint contingency plans for seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran.
https://t.co/HU5yWUCpCN

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

Wow! I am blown away.

"The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage....Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44."

Staggering. The next question is WHY?

My guess is permanent access to social media and dating apps (mainly women) and greater access to pornography (men.) Plus maybe messaging apps leading to less in person socialisation? But this is important.

@philippilk

[David Polansky @polanskydj]

Seeing as Quinn Slobodian's book Hayek's Bastards is back in the news (awards, etc.), here is what I wrote when I reviewed it last year:

[Asim Ali @AsimAli6]

Absence of real land reforms has been India's original sin. As Carl Schmitt wrote, all political order is founded on distribution of land. China brutally redistributed land by 1953. Nehru was begging Congress CMs (& UC dominated Cong units) to allow land reforms in late 1950s 👇

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

Orientalist gibberish. Iranian statecraft could not be more rational if it tried. The same can hardly be said of the aggressors.

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

American journalists once made up a fictitious "Palestinian PLO leader" in Lebanon out of thin air, called him "Abu Rashid", & turned him into "the most quoted PLO commander in the entire middle east", b/c they couldn't/didn't want to interview real PLO leaders

Philip Caputo revealed this 3 decades later

Imagine how many "Abu Rashids" are widely quoted in mainstream media today!

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

Agree with Bertrand and Tooze. Beneficial public outcomes often require temporarily sustained overcapacity to reduce prices while new systems are established. Neoclassical market worshippers' bonkers claim of 'price-driven equilibrium' shows why it's the enemy of public purpose.

[Loong of the east @loong_of]

To this day, China’s *Gaokao* (National College Entrance Examination) system remains one of the few in the world characterized by absolute fairness and impartiality, serving as the primary pathway for most people to achieve upward social mobility.

No Chinese billionaire or political official can secure special treatment in this exam to gain admission to elite institutions like Tsinghua University or Peking University.

In contrast, politicians and the wealthy in the United States can gain entry to top-tier universities through means such as substantial donations (a quintessential form of privilege, typically ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars), legacy preferences (where an applicant's chances of admission rise significantly if their parents are alumni—especially those who have donated heavily to the school), recruitment as elite athletes in expensive sports (such as equestrianism, fencing, golf, and sailing), and connections facilitated by elite private boarding schools.