An email from Martin Peterson to university administrators.

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

It was great to have you, Laura!

Enjoy this huskie + basketball french toile wallpaper) from a great visit @uconn.bsky.social including pizza with @davidesimon.bsky.social @danielavidart.bsky.social @remylevin.bsky.social and a visit to the Dairy Bar with @deliafurtado.bsky.social, bonus was seeing @nataliemillar.bsky.social

Nothing like waking up to find out your colleagues have a WP out that makes you rethink the interpretation of one of your papers! We show that weaker work norms increase the likelihood of going on DI when times are tough, but worth thinking about where those norms come from:

Forgot to tag EconSky: 📈📉

Full paper here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/65r3g...

🦶New version of our WP “Nobody Wants to Work Anymore”🦶w/ @danielavidart.bsky.social

Headline: a major contributor to the 50-year decline in U.S. male labor force participation is changes in men's beliefs about returns to work, shaped by lifetime experiences of aggregate male labor markets.

So once they identified today's Nobel prize recipients, they couldn't quite track them down.

Whatever you're doing, STOP RIGHT THIS SECOND and watch a sperm whale gulp down a squid, I promise you will not regret it

Papers can still be viable.

bsky.app/profile/remy...

They are literally canceling culture

That’s what TAs are for.

Could be. Effective ad in that case.

Maybe? I guess if they’re written in google docs? Never used the tool, but it seems promising.

Just give me the grade I know I deserve YouTube video by Study with J

Ok, this is actually dope. First real solution I’ve seen to ensuring human writing in the age of LLMs.

Maybe the college essay isn’t dead after all?

youtube.com/shorts/AhA1l...

Hassett prepping lies for confirmation hearing.

Could not agree more with this piece

Opinion | Stop Acting Like This Is Normal

Excellent piece by Ezra Klein: if Dems really believe that Trump is creating an authoritarian government they should not continue to fund it. The shutdown is their only leverage right now to draw attention to what is happening and maybe force change.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/o...

Many studies claim a steady decline of cognitive ability with age, starting from as earlier as one’s twenties.

But this research is flawed, argues Aaron Dymarskiy—more accurate research finds it does not peak until at least age 60:

buff.ly/SiVx5ve

The biggest analytical weakness of Americans in trying to understand the current moment is that their powers of analogy begin and end with US history. The idea that something qualitatively different might be arising simply doesn’t occur to them.

We usually rely on GDP, trade, or wages to study the past. This amazing paper flips the script.

It analyzes 630,000 paintings (1400-2000) to extract emotions and shows how art tracks living standards, wars, inequality, and even climate shocks.

(How is this economics? Everything is economics!)

About this Florida vaccine story:

When they were little - 1 yr and 3 1/2 - my two older boys, who’d had all their shots, got whooping cough.

We asked their pediatrician what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been vaccinated.

“Oh, they’d have died.”

Interesting thought. The big challenge there is that we don’t have the underlying farm-level data in almost any setting (except our Kansas analysis), so it would be challenging to test. But it’s an intriguing question!

Take a look at section 7, the wave-by-wave distributions & maps are there. Also highly concentrated.

I don’t have a strong prior about how gradually preferences vary in space. But I agree it’s a good idea to look at the estimation noise & make an educated attempt at smoothing based on it.

+ a MUCH smaller share of the population works in ag, so the population you can actually measure with the method shrinks dramatically.

In principal we could extend the estimates forward, but the more appropriate settings to apply this to are developing countries in the past or in the present day.

It’s less about the data per se (it’s actually improving over time), and more about the plausibility of using the parsimonious structural model to infer risk preferences from it. Starting with the new deal, the linkage b/w crop prices/yields and actual revenue becomes attenuated. 1/2

Good thoughts. The link with migration is very much on deck for future analyses.

(Section 4 on the historical setting addresses this question in depth)

That’s fair. I do know >90% of the distribution is within 2SDs of the mean. And I strongly suspect that the outliers are not only in the high-noise counties. But it’s an empirical question that we should look into, and we might be able to improve the estimates that way.