Michael Magoon

If you want an entirely different view of the world, read my "Manifesto for the Progress-based Perspective": frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-manifesto-…

@TheRickWilson Yeah, forcing out Democratic challengers to Joe Biden worked our real well for you, didn’t it? Donald Trump should give you all an MVP award. How about next time letting all the candidates run and letting the voters choose?

I see that Dean Phillips story is ending about as well as one could expect. Being beaten by Marianne woo woo Williamson is a humiliation of the first political degree.

@0rf This is what Soft Totalitarianism looks like in the 21st Century: frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-dangers-…

RINKEVICH: "We targeted folks based on online behavioral cues, building out personas, based on the type of content they were consuming, what they were searching, the kinds of websites they were visiting so that we could target folks in real-time as they were exposed to that disinformation." /8

EXCLUSIVE: In a newly discovered Zoom recording, the Biden/Harris team reveals how they manipulated voters to think Biden's mental decline was "disinformation". 🧵/1

@ADoricko It is actually more like 15 months. Presidents have far less time to implement their agenda than most people realize: frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/priorities-f…

You should all know that we have a 4 year window to go as hard as fucking imaginable. Deadly serious. Leave it all on the court. It’s a miracle we have another shot at all. Press me to go harder, I will do the same with all of you. Alhamdulilah

@cesifoti I wonder if this kind of technique could be used to get estimates for Economic Complexity data for 18th, 19th and early 20th Century. If so, then this could really increase our knowledge of how nations industrialized.

New PNAS paper. Historical GDP per capita data is scarce, but data on the places of birth, death, and occupations of famous individuals is abundant. In this paper we estimate the historical GDP per capita of hundreds of regions in Europe and North America using a machine learning model that leveraged data on about 500k famous biographies. Our estimates more-or-less quadruple the availability of historical GDP per capita estimates for the last 700 years. So why use biographies to augment historical GDP per capita data? Biographical data contains information about people who might have contributed directly to economic growth, like James Watt, or that were attracted to wealthy places looking for patrons, like Michelangelo. So we--mainly Philipp (@philippmkoch)--used this data to construct hundreds of features describing each European region. Then, we trained a machine learning model to find the features that explained most of the variance in a cross-validation test, where we split regions multiple times into a training set and a test set. On average, the model explained about 90% of the variance in GDP per capita of the regions it had not seen during training. But we wanted to go further, and Philipp really went to town by looking at different ways to validate our estimates. We found our estimates correlate positively with historical measures of wellbeing, church building activity, urbanization, and body height. We also used these measures to reproduce the basic Atlantic trade result of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robison and to explore the economic consequences of the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. But what I personally loved most about this project, other than working with @philippmkoch and @ViktorStojkoski, is that it shows that we can use machine learning methods not only to explore the future, but the past. There is a bright and growing future in the use of machine learning for economic history. Hope you enjoy the paper and the data. You can find links to the paper and a data exploration tool in the first comment.

@cesifoti This looks awesome. This is exactly the kind of data that Progress Studies needs. Thanks so much for doing all the hard work to get this done.

@StatisticUrban Nice map. It would be great to view this by metro area.

Map of home affordability - median house cost divided by median income. One thing is clear - the west has a huge housing affordability problem, rivaled only by southern Florida and the BosWash area.

@cesifoti I just read the entire doc. I have been following your work for many years, and your narrative rings true. For whatever it is worth, I always knew that you were the creative genius in your collaboration. I hope that justice prevails…

Full Story Document dropbox.com/scl/fi/eye27ga…

Eleven years ago, I quit an abusive academic relationship with my former co-author Ricardo Hausmann, presently a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. This abuse has now returned in a new act of plagiarism. Today, I am pushing back. A few months ago, I learned about two new working papers that Hausmann and his team posted at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) [1,2]. The first one claims to introduce a “multidimensional approach” to economic complexity by combining data on trade, patents, and publications, and concludes that these metrics are complementary when explaining economic growth. Yet, this is exactly what my co-authors and I did in a 2023 peer-reviewed journal paper [3] that Hausmann and his co-authors were perfectly aware of (as I document below). Instead of giving proper acknowledgement to our work, however, Hausmann and his team hide it in a footnote on page 18 clouded in a factually incorrect statement. The footnote says that “other studies have developed similar complexity metrics under different names.” That is not true. Our 2023 paper uses the same name as Hausmann et al.’s 2024 “new” working paper, namely, the “Economic Complexity Index (ECI).” Now, it is reasonable to wonder if this is a misunderstanding or oversight. People sometimes forget to cite others for innocent reasons. But there is clear evidence to the contrary in two other working papers published almost simultaneously with the first one. One of them, is another WIPO working paper by his coauthors but without Hausmann [4]. This paper does properly acknowledge the existence of our work in multidimensional economic complexity in the main text: “Following […] Stojkoski et al. (2023).” So, the team clearly knew about the work. The third working paper [2], also at WIPO, includes Hausmann as a first author making a call for the use of multidimensional economic complexity methods in innovation policy. Here, the only example of multidimensional work cited by Hausmann et al. is his own 2024 working paper [1], this time completely ignoring the 2023 peer-reviewed paper he knew about (“In Hausmann et al. (2024), we measure this for each country in different dimensions (e.g., trade and patents).”). Unsurprisingly, I had made a similar call for multidimensional expansion of the field in a paper that was also published after peer-review in 2023 (Hidalgo CA, Research Policy, 2023 [5]) and that had been available as a pre-print for two years. In that paper, I cite our original multidimensional economic complexity contribution and also two other papers that had introduced multidimensional approaches to relatedness, another key concept in the field, which Hausmann does not cite either. In my view, these three documents provide clear evidence of an attempt by Hausmann to misappropriate an idea published by a former co-author while knowing of that work. This, violates Harvard’s honor code [6] which requires the “accurate attribution of sources” and considers “plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own” as a violation of its community standards. In the first working paper [1], he copies the idea while hiding the attribution in a factually incorrect footnote. Simultaneously, he releases a second working paper citing this unpublished work as the only example of prior art [2]. The third paper [4], the one by his co-authors but not him, shows that the team knows about the work and behaves differently when the senior member of the team (Hausmann) is not an author. My co-authors and I were dismayed by Hausmann’s attempt to misappropriate our ideas. Why bother doing original work and getting it past peer-review (which for both of our papers was a lengthy process), if authors with a platform such as Harvard University take your ideas and pass them as their own? But this is not the first time. In 2019, Hausmann and his team announced a “first-of-its-kind” and “unique” feature in their trade data visualization website (“Atlas Online”): the “country profiles.” Yet, my group had supported country profiles in the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) since 2012, several months before Hausmann and I parted ways in 2013 (see full story document for details [7]). The reason that the profiles disappeared in Hausmann’s copy of the Observatory in 2013 was that they were deleted by his team, probably because they did not understand that we had conceived these pages for search engine optimization. In short, the original OEC that I designed with my group and placed in the public domain had country profiles in 2012 and was redesigned in 2015 to make the country and product profiles the main part of the site. Today, OEC.world [8] serves over 100,000 profiles, a design concept we use prominently when constructing other data distribution platforms (e.g. Data USA, Data Mexico, etc). In fact, in 2016 I published a “how to” guide in Scientific American for this kind of work in 2016 [9]. But when Hausmann and his team at Harvard finally built country profiles in 2019, seven years after we did, they claimed a “revolutionary first-of-its-kind” and “unique” feature, in their lab’s own website [10] and in the Harvard Gazette [11] So why share this now? I have three reasons. First, I broke off my relationship with Hausmann in 2013 after several unpleasant experiences, which included having to fight for the authorship rights of junior authors (which Hausmann wanted to exclude from our joint book: The Atlas of Economic Complexity) and being exploited when we were equal partners in a company that I had registered for us to do joint consulting work (see full story document [7]). From there on, I just wanted to forget about him. The tacit deal was that, if he stopped the abuse, I could put this in the past. But Hausmann has repeatedly broken this tacit deal. His 2024 working paper research agenda seems to involve putting forward, without proper acknowledgement, ideas my team and I published after peer-review in 2023 and made available online in 2022. It has been more than a decade. This has to stop. The second reason is that because Hausmann has done this before, I am concerned that if I don’t push back, he will do it again. Right now, my research group and I have a great thing going on. Should we worry that in 2026 Hausmann will try to pass off our 2024 and 2025 papers as his own? The third reason is that this egregious behavior is supported by a power asymmetry that is highly profitable for Hausmann thanks to the Harvard platform. Soon after we split ways in 2013, Hausmann sold this [12] embarrassingly bad economic data visualization website to the Mexican Government as part of a project rumored to be about USD 5,000,000 (paid using an undisclosed and untraceable escrow account (“fideicomiso”)). The online platform was so sloppy that some government officials started to call it “El Mamarracho” (a derogatory term in Spanish for extremely shoddy work). I learned about this in 2019, after a new team entered Mexico’s economic ministry and invited us to build Data Mexico [13], a properly built open data portal integrating dozens of datasets in thousands of profiles for a fraction of the cost of the “Mamarracho.” Hausmann has engaged in commercial endeavors with many governments (e.g. Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Mexico, etc.). So, in my opinion, the target audience for these misappropriated working papers are not other scholars, but the officials who purchase economic development contracts from him and take the word of the Harvard Professor of Practice at face value. This is what makes misappropriating the multidimensional economic complexity idea important. A strong motivation for any consulting work in this space is the fact that trade-based measures of economic complexity explain future economic growth. This was established in a paper Hausmann and I published together in 2009 [14], based on work we did together while I was a PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. But the 2023 multidimensional economic complexity paper made that idea obsolete. On the one hand, it simultaneously considers multiple expressions of complexity (trade, patents, and research), and on the other hand, it looks at multiple outcomes (growth, inequality, and emissions). Giving advice based on the latest developments in the field requires using a multidimensional framework. Finally, I want to say that I have nothing against Hausmann’s co-authors, some of whom I know personally and some of whom I don’t. I understand that they are in a situation in which they may depend financially and professionally on Hausmann. His first attempt to spin my publicizing these facts may be to argue that someone of his caliber does not have the time to look at petty things like footnotes and references (pinning the responsibility on them). I don’t think that’s fair. I also want to say that I do not consider Ricardo’s behavior necessarily representative of Harvard University or of the World Intellectual Property Organization. I have met many people at those organizations and continue to collaborate with some of them. They are outstanding scholars I have decided to go public with this statement after consulting with several senior colleagues and lawyers specialized in disputes in higher education. I am absolutely distraught by having to deal with this situation eleven-years after I quit that abusive relationship. But he needs to cut it out.

@SomebuddyBody frompovertytoprogress.com/product/promot… amazon.com/Promoting-Prog…

Hey @MichaelLMagoon where is your "promoting progress" book available?

@arpitrage @ModeledBehavior @varma_ashwin97 @timobres Very interesting. What part of the census data did this come from? I would love to get the data for other years.

@ModeledBehavior @varma_ashwin97 @timobres The richest city in the whole country at that point!

I think the auto industry is a useful case to look back on. It’s clear lack of competition created cultural problems and rent seeking at the big 3 and unions. Protecting them from global competition wouldn’t have fixed those problems but made them worse.

There are many Substacks that write about progress - an antidote to doomscrolling-induced depression and learned helplessness & the resulting fatalism, cynicism, & sometimes radicalism. open.substack.com/pub/frompovert…

@mattyglesias Yes, that is exactly what it means.

I’m fascinated by how obsessed leftists are with the idea that center-left liberals are secretly die-hard rightwingers — if true doesn’t this mean that leftist politics is even more doomed and hopeless than it seems?

Attention, all skeptics of progress! Are you up for the challenge to debate Progress? Do you know anyone else who is? frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-debate-cha…

@FreeBlckThought That is about the only intelligent thing that she ever said (and she is completely clueless as to why).

"I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color." —Robin DiAngelo

Why we ignore progress open.substack.com/pub/frompovert…

Why isn't the entire world rich? open.substack.com/pub/frompovert…

Why Ideologies Threaten Progress (podcast 1 of 3) open.substack.com/pub/frompovert…

@tonymmorley Thanks for the callout, Tony! You might also be interested in my second book, "Promoting Progress" which is coming out October 1. frompovertytoprogress.com/books/

"Because society primarily comes from self-organizing, experimenting with solutions, and then copying the solutions that work, a centralized government driven by ideology inherently attacks the very foundations of progress." frompovertytoprogress.com/from-poverty-t… @MichaelLMagoon

"Why isn’t everyone in dire poverty, hungry, diseased, illiterate, missing teeth, eking out a subsistence existence in the wilderness, and making do with Stone Age technology? After all, that’s how we started." — From Poverty to Progress, Review @chellivia humanprogress.org/from-poverty-t…

Been focusing on SubStack and YouTube lately, so I have not made many posts. On Substack I have been posting a number of excerpts from both my books. Check them out! frompovertytoprogress.substack.com