David A. Fleming-Muñoz

😲... sometimes Twitter does bring you good news!

@opinion @johnauthers As simple as this...

Trump’s tariff equation is nonsense, says @johnauthers. Here’s why 🎥

@AlboMP As a dad of three kids, I fully support this plan!

We're making 16 years old the minimum age for social media. Here's why.

@gamonasterioo @AICHIS_2022 Que se devuelva la plata en varios anhos y listo... mientras sea flexible el asunto no deberia ser tan complicada la cosa

Muchos inv. 🇨🇱nos estamos ávidos a contribuir con Chile, incluso sin “deber” Becas Chile (mi caso). ¡Se debe replantear el retorno e incluir opciones que permitan explotar las redes internacionales que tejemos los inv 🇨🇱 en el extranjero, como hemos hecho con @AICHIS_2022 en 🇸🇪!

@arindube Sadly, a good example that many times simulations are worthless...

I ran millions of simulations. Maybe more. This is what I came up with. I could give you randomization inference based MoE and stuff like that. But who cares. Here's my very serious prediction. Good night.

@VeronicaFrisan1 AL CAPONE!! jajaaj, better acronym than LAGRASA

Atención! Manden sus propuestas de investigación sobre finanzas del crimen organizado hasta el 31 de octubre.

@jmwooldridge @elonmusk

@elonmusk Imagine that. A segment of the population with above average intelligence, college degrees, knowledge and curiosity about the world, and able to express themselves well in writing leans heavily Democratic/Independent. What lesson might be learned from that?

Explains why the media is such a propaganda machine for the Democratic Party

Eating less meat is a win-win for our guts and for the planet... it's hard, though, especially when your culture has imposed the 'eat meat everyday' type of habit

@cesifoti It's good to bring these sorts of behaviours to light! Good on you, Cesifoti!

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.

@HORNACEJACKSON @BenSteiner00 Well said; that's why American footballers and baseballers have nothing to do in the realm of sports' greatest...

@BenSteiner00 Incredible feat and performance but greatest ever any sport? How many athletes around the world actively participate in the high jump? Compare that to the 100s of millions that compete in organized sports like football, basketball, etc. Depth of field matters in sports.

🇸🇪Mondo Duplantis breaks his World Record again, going 6.26m. Passing the 6.25m mark he set to win Olympic gold at Paris 2024. I’d rank him as one of the greatest athletes of the current era — maybe ever, in any sport. An electric athlete. twitter.com/katriz__/statu…

@VeronicaFrisan1 Trermenda!! Felicitaciones estimada!

Un honor compartir esta mención con tantas mujeres peruanas talentosas! 💪🏼

😂🤣

Mas claro, imposible...!

@evavivalt Wow! Interesting R and results...

We are happy to release the first results of a RCT of a US program that provided $1,000/month unconditionally for 3 years to 1,000 individuals in the treatment group, with a group of 2,000 people receiving $50/month serving as the control. These are sizable transfers. 1/ 🧵

I cannot agree more with John on this... theconversation.com/achieving-net-…

@jorge_canals El golazo de Maradona no hubiese existido... lo hizo en gran parte por que los Ingleses aun estaban descolocados con la mano! (fue solo 4 minutos despues). Igual ganaba Argentina... Inglaterra siempre ha sido un invento

Polémica...con Var Argentina le gana a Inglaterra el 86?

This is really great to see! Long life to rigorous impact assessments!!

@heeney_luke @SHamiltonian @FinancialReview Sorry for the lasiness (maybe you guys are considering this), but where does all this fit with what Bill Gates is projecting? (youtube.com/watch?v=LbWNXX…) He claims that (his) nuclear power plants will be more secure, efficient and 1/3 cheaper to build... and will even provide JT

My piece with @SHamiltonian in today's @FinancialReview lays bare the economics of the Opposition's nuclear proposal. Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for a financially unviable plan.

@cjwich @florianederer @RDMetcalfe 😂

#EURO2024 starts today. That's bad news for students whose high-stakes tests overlap with the tournament. @RDMetcalfe documents a negative effect of international tournaments (World Cup and EURO) on exam performance. The odds of reaching the achievement benchmark fall by 12%.

New paper!! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@ArielOrtizBobea 😂

Paying for this degree increases GDP