Tim Hirschel-Burns

I'm Austin Ahlman. Nebraska is my home. This is our fight. You are my people. Let’s take Nebraska back.

In this whole debate I keep thinking about the Malm and Carton quote about how “conservatism or fatalism about society flips into extreme adventurism about nature”

Striking stat in the new Rodrik piece

This from Samantha Power is actually very aligned with my take on what really happened to USAID timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/everyone-is-…

The caption focused on SDRs, but pretty striking how small RMB reserves are too

@TetraspaceWest This is only measuring English wikipedia, so it's probably more balanced for non-english wikipedia (that said, looking at the chart, country income seems a better predictor of coverage than whether it's anglophone)

@TimH_B Does this vary between English and non-English Wikipediæ?

I find Wikipedia such a useful resource, but unfortunately it's a much less useful resource when it comes to the Global South. For example, relative to the size of their populations, there are 44 times more articles discussing France than India

Lots more stats on this and the broader determinants of our attention here timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/youre-ignori…

Thailand is one of the first ag countries to enter a planting season since the Iran war. We went to document the impact of supply shocks to fuel/fertilizer — It was worse than I anticipated. Farmers are leaving huge tracts of land barren bc they can’t afford to plant.

The Trump administration is rolling out a new narrative about its aid program: Aid continues! More effective than ever! Trade over aid! And it's nonsense. Trump and Musk destroyed a program that was saving a life once every 10 seconds on average. This has been Trump's most lethal policy, and now he's doubling down by withholding vaccines from poor countries -- like a $3 vaccine against malaria, and a $4 vaccine against cervical cancer. Some 600,000 will die just from that. "Trade over aid" sounds fine, but what it means in practice is that if Zambia doesn't agree to sell copper and cobalt to American companies, we'll withhold lifesaving aid from Zambian villagers. Here's my column on the hollowness of Trump's attempt to dress up his destruction of humanitarian aid, after a year to assess results: nytimes.com/2026/05/09/opi…

"The problem in the mid-2020s was not electrotech overcapacity, but a lack of coordinated global demand." phenomenalworld.org/analysis/dawn-…

You can read here about Hashim and the other people who would still be alive if the Trump administration had not so callously upended the means of their survival. We know their names thanks to the essential work of journalists like @KristenGelineau timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/the-people-t…

Two-year-old Mohammed Hashim died a year ago today. His family were Rohingya refugees, and they went from 3 meals a day to 1 after US aid cuts. His father, who Hashim begged for food as he grew weak, told the AP Marco Rubio lied when he said no one died due to the funding cuts

This is no way to run a global hegemon

My cousin moved to NYC when I was eleven, and I asked her what Americans think of India. Her response has stuck with me: they don’t think of India at all

This week in @indevmag, @charlesjkenny writes about the second age of mass migration - and how migration can be used to support growth in *both* the sending and receiving country. indevelopmentmag.com/wheres-my-mini…

I wrote about this in the aftermath of the LA fires last year. There is very little guarantee that people will see climate disasters as *climate* disasters lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-worl…

Well this is awkward for the IMF: Because the Trump admin is now justifying tariffs under Section 122, which rests on a balance-of-payments justification, the US is initiating WTO consultations on the tariffs. And per WTO rules, the IMF will have to weigh in with an opinion!

Read my full post for much more on where we do and don't direct our attention timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/youre-ignori…

I looked at how much the New York Times covered different countries in 2025, compared to those countries' populations. The bars for many lower-income countries are functionally invisible—much like their citizens are to readers of The New York Times