James Traina

You can't scale your way to data from counterfactuals that haven't happened. Nice piece. My read on what it does and doesn't show:

Just had a faculty meeting at INSEAD about the impact of AI on management education and how we should respond. Every serious business school is having the AI conversation right now. 1/

@SafFooty @BrianCAlbrecht o

@EconTraina @BrianCAlbrecht typical coward

It’s incredible Dwarkesh can keep finding these obscure academics

@SafFooty @BrianCAlbrecht Tao

@EconTraina @BrianCAlbrecht Why would you say Terence Tao isn't an academic?

I got a little bored of reading Rudin using Gemini, so I decided to try AI-reading something more fun: this beautiful paper by Yang^2. Unfortunately, while beautiful, it is also really hard (wtf is a coupling???), so I will need a lot of AI help

@SafFooty @BrianCAlbrecht Terence Tao isn't

@EconTraina @BrianCAlbrecht Than what is he?

@BasilHalperin yes

I have an old (3+ years) blog post *rough draft* on "AI Alignment as a Principal-Agent Problem" Thoughts welcome on whether this idea is worth polishing up / developing further... docs.google.com/document/d/1A9…

By now, I have published a fair number of papers, and one more acceptance would have close to zero marginal impact on anything that matters professionally. But getting my survey on “Deep Learning for Solving Models” accepted into the Journal of Economic Literature made me genuinely happy, for reasons that have nothing to do with my CV. I had the misfortune of studying my undergraduate degree in economics at a quite awful institution. Two professors, David Taguas and Alfredo Arahuetes, were outstanding, and I owe them a great deal. The rest were well below any reasonable professional level, and some violated the basic standards of ethical conduct. They had no business teaching economics at any level, let alone at a university that charged tuition and claimed to prepare students for professional life. I had to work out most of my education on my own. The surveys published in the Journal of Economic Literature were how I did it. I spent hours in the library’s reading room going through one survey after another on topics I had never been properly taught. Some helped more than others, but collectively they gave me a solid enough foundation that, when I arrived at Minnesota for my PhD, I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that I was ahead of nearly all the other first-year students, including some who held master’s degrees, despite the fact that I had finished my undergraduate degree just six weeks before. I owe the Journal of Economic Literature a debt I will never be able to repay. Publishing a survey there is the closest I can come to trying. So, the thought that some student somewhere, working on her own in a library or on a laptop, might find my survey useful gives me tremendous satisfaction. But there is a broader point worth making. Even in the world of AI, the profession has an important mission in making educational material widely available. Textbooks, surveys, teaching slides, these are public goods in the economist’s sense: high social value, insufficient private incentive to produce. This is also why I post all my slides and teaching material online: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/deepl… We do not reward these activities nearly enough, and their supply is well below what any reasonable social planner would choose. I do not have a good proposal for changing this, and I would welcome suggestions. What I do find heartbreaking is that many of the great economists of the past couple of generations never wrote textbooks on their areas of expertise. I do not mean this as criticism. All of them maximize, and perhaps they all suffer from the same bias I suffer from: the belief that one can always do it next year. But I often think about the hours of pure intellectual pleasure I would have had reading “Time Series Econometrics: An Advanced Textbook” by Chris Sims or “Methods in Structural Estimation” by Pat Bajari. Those books do not exist. They should.

We are back to the phase of the AI news cycle where people are underestimating how jagged the AI ability frontier is, as well as how much they still depend on expert human decision-making or guidance at key points in order to function well. Still far from "doing all jobs," today.

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

I spend way too much time on social media debunking "economic slop" promulgated by lawyers pretending to be economists, so I built Show Me the Model: a tool that uses AI to check whether the economic reasoning in an essay actually holds up. showmethemodel.io Give it a URL or paste some plain text, and the tool flags hidden assumptions, internal inconsistencies, and other problem areas, and tells you how a real economist would think through the issue. Right now, it has 4 "personas:" macro, trade, IO/price theory, and labor. The tool first figures out which persona is right for the job, and then uses a parallelized prompt scaffold specific to that persona to process the source text. Here are some example outputs based on some essays that triggered me hard: Citrini Research's viral essay on how AI could trigger a self-reinforcing financial crisis rivaling the GFC: showmethemodel.io/#/results/2ez3… American Compass on the harms of trade deficits: showmethemodel.io/#/results/kOvt… @oren_cass on why Built-to-Rent should be banned: showmethemodel.io/#/results/OXjr… American Compass on the "China Shock:" showmethemodel.io/#/results/dJM7… @michaelxpettis on why China's trade surplus reduces global output: showmethemodel.io/#/results/C8OT… Try it yourself at showmethemodel.io. You'll need to bring your own API key (OpenAI or Anthropic), and a typical analysis costs $0.50–$1.50. It's super preliminary and will probably break on you. I'd love feedback about both the functionality as well as the quality of the output.

@sharatganapati Yeah! Jury is still out on how democratizing CC will be, but...

Imagine being able to still hire *multiple* RAs after an 80% budget cut. Well, I no longer have an NSF. I’m mostly using Claude now. I had it verify and clean up my JPE replication package. Last time it took an RA a week.

@jbsteinberg I think your settings are s.t. you have to follow someone for them to DM you, but I'm happy to work through GitHub, I can start by simplifying + documenting

@EconTraina It's incredibly messy, it should probably be cleaned up first. DM me if you have something specific in mind.

@jbsteinberg Open to contributors?

@EconTraina github.com/joesteinberg/s… Somewhat ironically given the project motivation, the code is 100% claude-generated slop. Repo is incredibly dirty, use at your own risk/horror.

@mioana Congratulations!!

🎉I'll be promoted to full professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice, effective July 2026! Grateful for of the many people who've helped and challenged me along the way. Now off to work on #AI and its impact on the economy, society, & policy!

@PeterMcCrory Congrats! Curious about the publication model. The range runs from MSR (economists as faculty) to Amazon (by share, mostly internal). Will the team have protected time for top-journal work, or is that a side benefit? (Unclear what's best given AI is disrupting publishing!!)

We currently have four open roles on the team: - Research Engineer (job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs…) - Research Economist (job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs…) - Transformative AI Research Economist (job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs…) - Research Operations (job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs…) 6/6

I want to share a bit more about my vision for the Economic Research team at Anthropic in the coming years. This is a forward-looking vision. Some pieces we’ve yet to develop. Aspects of this work will surely change. Consider joining the effort. 1/6 #heading=h.j1ij8p6h22u5" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">docs.google.com/document/d/1OM…

@brettrey3 @_revoluzia_ ((it's the answer because it's good practice for AI fluency!!))

@brettrey3 @_revoluzia_ This is the answer. (Claude Code can set this up for you in 10 min)

I did my first ever peer review a few weeks ago and the journal said that I wasn’t supposed to upload the manuscript in a generative AI tool. Seems like a bad policy when AI tools are already better at catching certain errors than human reviewers!