Chris Widman

@ProfEmilyOster @v_theclash @ParentCps This exchange shows there is (some) hope for Twitter

@v_theclash @ParentCps You can see the full dashboard here: statsiq.co1.qualtrics.com/public-dashboa…. Our data is now comprehensive for NY and much of Texas so has (much) more urban representation. In the second tab on mitigation you can see by density in classrooms.

Holy cow, Oster's op-ed declaring schools safe has 200 fully remote schools in the 550 school data set!!! That means, she USED REMOTE SCHOOL DATA TO CONFIRM HER HYPOTHESIS THAT IN-PERSON SCHOOLING WAS SAFE!!! I'm flabbergasted. @ProfEmilyOster really needs to repudiate her study.

@rexsalisbury Who can resist 0.02%?

Covid-19 led to a dramatic surge in deposits. Who benefited most? The Top 15 banks, which is the continuation of a long running trend of the big getting bigger. In particular the nations largest 2 banks (JPM and BofA) picked up the most market share.

@rexsalisbury In many places, the rental market is much thinner than the purchase market.

Homeownership is a a worse investment for many of Americans than they realize. Why? If you aren't maxing out your 401k, because u need $ for a down payment your effective cost of capital is very high.

@ATabarrok Which direction the externalities go makes all the difference in the world!

Fake libertarians whine about masks. Real libertarians assert the right to medical self-defense and demand access to vaccines on a right to try basis.

@ATabarrok @BCAppelbaum Regardless, it’s illustrative of silly reasoning from irrelevant denominators

@BCAppelbaum It's from here. Can't say for sure how credible. shootingrangeindustries.com/killer-instinc…

In World War II it took 45,000 bullets on average to kill one soldier or a bfr of 0.00002222222. Yet, somehow WWII was still a big deal.

@EconTalker I was excited to see it was that long. Typically means a good conversation when they are longer. Doesn’t mean they should all be that long, but don’t cut the good ones short.

This week's EconTalk episode is

@ProfEmilyOster With an LPM, you could even be 110%

I love this regression joke so much.

I listen to nearly every ⁦@EconTalker⁩ episode and this conversation with ⁦@dwaynebetts⁩ is one of the best I’ve ever heard. Do yourself a favour: tune out the meaningless chatter for an hour and get yourself a refreshing dose of humanity econtalk.org/dwayne-betts-o…

@EconTalker What types of problems do the 2 of you agree empirical work is useful for investigating (interested in examples and properties of these problems)?

Interviewing Steven Levitt tomorrow for EconTalk. What should I ask him?

@ramahluwalia @rexsalisbury Today’s price discrimination is tomorrow’s lost customer

@rexsalisbury its an efficient forms of price discrimination and a poor customer experience. It does help customers 'self sort' into willingness to pay. Reality is banks struggle to make deposit accounts profitable without NSF or other nuisance fees, and account maintenance fees are unpopular

My bank charges me $30 for a wire, but refunds the charge if I call in. When asked if they could just stop charging me and save both parities the waste of a call, the answer was no. Banking in the US borders on absurd sometimes...

Our website appears to be down. We are working on it. Sorry for inconvenience. #Debate

@mattyglesias Prediction is Trump holds the nominee until after the election. Trump’s interests != Republican interests.

@mattyglesias Could it have the reverse effect in 2020? Voters whose top worry is the SC have less reason to vote for Trump.

@Noahpinion @EconTalker EconTalk episode?

As I see it, the main steps we need in order to restore Middle Class America are: 1. National health insurance 2. Unionize all the service sector workers and raise their wages 3. Make housing cheap That's really it. Just those three things will do the trick, I'll wager.

The ideal of the Middle Class is to minimize the social status differences that arise from occupations. It means that someone who works all their life in an Amazon warehouse should be able to have *qualitatively* the same type of life as a lawyer or a machine learning engineer.

@paulmromer @DouthatNYT What if he was just wrong or off in his analysis? What is the point in the journalistic integrity remark? Or maybe that is just how to Twitter.

It is strikiing how much of his reputation for journalistic integrity @DouthatNYT was willing to trade away for a chance to claim that Trump’s pandemic response was mediocre. 1/N nytimes.com/2020/09/05/opi…

@ModeledBehavior Any idea of the mix between backlog of filings and new job losses?

It is good these numbers are moving down, but I can't stress enough how crazy of a benchmark that is right now.

Slight improvement in the flows for UI claims today, but nevertheless still at extremely high levels this late into the crisis. NSA initial claims dip below 1m, and continuing claims decline slightly as well.

@EconTalker It was one of my favorites. You should consider consistently doing more flipped EconTalks where you get interviewed.

This was a great conversation.

The true test of whether Harvard admits the smartest kids is how many of them defer. twitter.com/darrenrovell/s…

Our daily update is published. States reported over 57K new cases today — another record day for cases, the third this week. We’re at 721K new tests today, a huge jump and our first day over 700K. There were 635 reported deaths today.

@alloldideas @paulg @ATabarrok @nytimes Unfortunately, it’s all team sports these days