Nick Irons

U.S. COVID-19 school closure was not cost-effective, but other measures were. New preprint w/ @AdrianRaftery1 arxiv.org/abs/2411.12016

Perhaps the greatest failure of the economics profession has been our inability to sell the idea that we should tax "bads" like congestion and pollution. One reason building is so expensive is that we have so many regulations instead of just prices.

Our paper, “Optimal pandemic control strategies ...” …cglobalpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11… w @NicholasJIrons, just published in @BMC_GPH.Takeaway: U.S. COVID-19 school closures were not cost-effective, but other measures were. medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-c…

I'm deeply saddened to share that Donald Shoup passed away last night. He was the ideal academic—curious, methodical, and concerned with turning ideas into real-world change. TAing his parking course has one of the greatest honors of my life. Rest in peace, Shoup Dogg.

I wrote the cover story of the February issue of The Atlantic. It builds on a lot of reporting I did throughout 2024, and I'm really proud of it. It’s called: THE ANTI-SOCIAL CENTURY The thesis: Rising solitude is the most important social fact in American life today. The historic amounts of time that Americans spend alone and in their homes is reshaping the consumer economy—from dining to entertainment to delivery—warping our politics, alienating us from the realities of our neighbors and villages, and changing our very personalities. Here are the basic facts: 1. In the last few years, in-person socialization has declined, for every demographic group, to its lowest point on record 2. The typical American is now alone more than in any period where we have decent data, going back to at least 1965 3. Americans now spend an extra 99 minutes in their homes compared to 2003—a trend that crept up slowly before the pandemic, before exploding and remaining at a seriously elevated level. As Princeton’s Patrick Sharkey wrote in a 2024 paper, the homebound trend isn't just about remote work. Homebound life has “risen for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities” from eating to praying. 4. America's social depression is far-reaching. The share of adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50%. I don’t think these trends are simple. In many cases, they’re not even simply bad. (Ordering delivery: totally fine! Eating more meals alone, year after year after year: not so great!) But to see these trends—and their effects on American society—more clearly, I thought this phenomenon needed an anchoring, a naming, a media artifact for people to talk about, even if only to point out that I’m wrong. So, I wrote this.

@ThomasEWoods Lockdown decision-making was challenging. Perhaps we can make room for nuance in our reflections on the pandemic. x.com/NicholasJIrons…

The nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be the director of the National Institutes of Health is the single greatest case of poetic justice in my lifetime. Jay, who holds both an MD as well as a PhD in economics, is a professor at Stanford University. During the COVID years he had to endure the slings and arrows of mental and moral midgets who were unfit to shine his shoes. He correctly spoke out against the useless and evil lockdown policy as well as much of the rest of the madness. Now that it's obvious that none of those things did any good, and simply destroyed millions of lives for no good reason, some people are trying to pretend they never supported any of it. But we remember the truth, and how those people behaved toward decent people and brilliant scientists like Jay. Jay was smeared by Francis Collins, who was director of the very institution Jay will now direct, as a "fringe epidemiologist" because he correctly insisted that lockdowns were no part of any pandemic policy ever proposed anywhere. Collins has since admitted that his institution had major blind spots during COVID. But Jay wasn't blind. The mild-mannered Jay Bhattacharya, who never sought the spotlight but was forced into it by events, spoke the truth from day one, and for that he has the gratitude of all thinking people everywhere.

@kylamb8 @DrJBhattacharya Lockdown decision-making was challenging. Perhaps we can make room for nuance in our reflections on the pandemic. x.com/NicholasJIrons…

Critics of @DrJBhattacharya are attempting to use his stance against lockdowns against him. We now have ample evidence finding lockdowns were an unmitigated disaster. From a Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis in 2022:

@MartinKulldorff @NIHDirector @DrJBhattacharya @gbdeclaration Lockdown decision-making was challenging. Perhaps we can make room for nuance in our reflections on the pandemic. @DrJBhattacharya @cremieuxrecueil x.com/NicholasJIrons…

In 2020, @NIHDirector Francis Collins called @DrJBhattacharya a "fringe epidemiologist" while calling for a devastating take down of our anti-lockdown @gbdeclaration. After proven right, Jay has now been nominated as the next @NIHDirector. Truth prevails! gbdeclaration.org

Thanks to @NicholasJIrons, our Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Fellow in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning, for a fascinating seminar on why US COVID-19 school closures were not cost-effective, but other measures were buff.ly/3ZeC4hp @LeverhulmeTrust

I'm a PhD student at @UniofOxford and I think I'm living in a fairytale :-) Foxes playing around in the snow at Magdalen College this morning — absolutely magical!

Deer in the Forest

Portrait of Chess Players

Sita

Reminder that the AMA is a cartel to create doctor shortages

Nasturtiums

New paper alert 🚨🚨🚨 Last paper from my PhD is finally out on arxiv arxiv.org/abs/2411.00471 We introduce Dirichlet process mixture of block-g priors and bridge the long-standing gap between g-priors and continuous shrinkage priors with several existing methods as special cases

Huge paper on intergenerational poverty. In the US, children who grow up in poverty are far more likely to remain in poverty as adults, and the key factor that explains our divergence from peer countries is our weak welfare state

In March 2020 as covid-19 struck I was in UK govt. I had expertise in vaccine innovation financing so was quickly brought into policy decisions on UK domestic & international covid-19 vaccine policy. Domestically, the UK made a lot of good calls and we got vaccines early... 🧵

Sacrifices Made to the Nymphs from Daphnis and Chloe #artbots #chagall

New pre-print alert: arxiv.org/abs/2409.11162 When selecting a causal estimand, it’s crucial to balance asking the right question with the feasibility of answering it under realistic assumptions. Ignoring this in clinical trials risks chasing shadows.