Jorgen Harris

@microsamonomics @ALPWillen @KatrineLoken @PetterLundborg This is incredibly interesting!!

🚨 What happens when you take a bunch of human capital out of a local economy? Is brain drain a real thing & what are the consequences? In a new paper, we shed light on this in the context of highly developed economies: Sweden and Norway. @ALPWillen @KatrineLoken @PetterLundborg

@Noahpinion People are almost always nice to me too. Maybe people just really love economists?

This is just wild. In my life, almost everyone has been nice to me. Coworkers, friends of friends, people I meet at parties. Sometimes I just walk up and join people's picnics in the park and they give me beer and snacks. How can people's lives be so different??

@korenmiklos @Econ_4_Everyone I'd rather get a bullet pointed list of sentence fragments that actually convey the referee's thoughts than full sentences/paragraphs that are a machine's attempts to reword those thoughts. If a gen AI can understand your bullets the author of the paper can as well, imo

@Econ_4_Everyone It depends what AI was used for. Converting a bullet pointed list of otherwise good ideas to full sentences seems acceptable to me. “Write a referee report about this paper” does not.

On a study that I am editing at the JPE, I have just received what I can confidently conclude is a report created by GenAI. Would love to hear the views of the research community on how to handle.

@paulnovosad I'm not ideologically inclined to this, but a simple read of your evidence is that nobel-level talent is fairly common, but nobel-level cultivation is costly. If so, this might be an argument for elitism--some people need elite opportunities from an early age to do great work.

@paulnovosad Improving conditions "in the mines" up to, say, those at the 50th percentile would do very little to produce nobels, and equalizing life circumstances so everyone got what the 50th or even the 75th percentile got would reduce nobels considerably.

What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too? And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates. A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N

@omni_american @steveplotnicki There also tend to be "multiple equilibria" here, so whether we use a new communication tech depends on the usefulness of the tech but also on happenstance of who made crucial decisions when.

@omni_american @steveplotnicki E.g., email is more useful to me if you use it and vice versa. There's still an aggregation of individual choices, bc whether email becomes widely used depends on individual choices to use it or not. But those choices might not be efficient or optimal by any particular criteria.

I don't buy the idea that we're "consumers" who make "choices" and create "demand." Case in point, technology. Don't let my seeming naturalness on X fool you—I was coerced into all this shit. I was furious in the late '90s when I had to break down and get an email address, and all that goes with it, like a computer. I railed against it at the time: "My life was already complete before email! I wanted for nothing! I live in a real world, not an e-world!" To no avail. The powers that be were not interested in communicating with me except through email, and since the powers that be gate-kept all the good shit that I *did* want, like jobs and admission to grad school, I had no choice. I was railroaded into exercising my "consumer choice" in the "free market," on pain of ostracism from society. Today, to live as a true Luddite would be a work of exquisite sophistication. It would require far more innovation than hopping on the automatic system-update bandwagon does. The world simply will not have intercourse with us unless it's through a smartphone or laptop. Hotels, concerts, boarding passes, your grocery store member discount, movies and music, your family and friends, directions to the best tacos in Los Feliz, your phone bill...none of it is accessible but through greasy fingerprint-smudged Gorilla Glass. The tide of obligatory technological acquisitions and upgrades carries us along. It's easiest to relax and enjoy the ride Big Tech has provided for us, rather than think about whether we really want or need to spend thousands of dollars a year on superfluous software updates and revolutionary new hardware designs. Is there an economic theory that takes account of the non-optional nature of so much of our economic activity? We get a choice of Android or OS. But apart from that, we only exercise true freedom around the margins, as when we choose whether to buy bubble gum or not. Everything else is compulsory.

@SandyDarity Thank you so much!!

Very pleased to see my work with Mary Lopez published today in the Journal of Economic Education, presenting a strategy to broaden discussion of discrimination in introductory economics: tandfonline.com/eprint/XUATMTG…

@Jess_Hoel @SandyDarity @TrevonDLogan Thank you so much Jess! Let me know how it goes!!

@JorgenHarris @SandyDarity @TrevonDLogan Oh yay! I LOVED your presentation of this material and I’m super glad to see it written up and published well! I will use this in my classes. Thank you Jorgen!

We really appreciate @Jess_Hoel for letting me test this material out on her students, and @SandyDarity, @TrevonDLogan and others for great feedback and support!

When we've tried this curriculum with our students, we've gotten some really good discussions. If any of you think you might want to try out these lectures, don't hesitate to reach out! we'd also love to feature examples on our website: sites.google.com/view/teachings…