Melanie Friedrichs

Let me explain what just happened 👇 5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil. 5 minutes… These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch. There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made. Someone in that room picked up a phone. And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars. American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it. This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions. This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight. You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question. Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that. The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…

Peer review was supposed to be science’s quality filter, but somewhere along the way it started acting more like a bouncer who only lets in the regulars. It’s slow, it tends to favor established labs and familiar names, and it gets uncomfortable around anything too unconventional. Papers loaded with mountains of data tend to cruise through, while bold ideas that actually challenge the consensus get stuck in limbo or turned away at the door. The irony is that where a paper gets published almost never determines its real worth. What actually matters is what the scientific community does with it afterward, whether people cite it, argue with it, build on it, or use it to blow up a long-held assumption. That’s where the value lives, not in the journal’s logo. A major survey a few years back found that roughly 70% of researchers think the current system is fundamentally broken, and it’s not hard to see why. Publicly funded research hides behind paywalls, editors chase whatever topic is hot that month, and the whole incentive structure pushes toward safe bets over genuinely risky and potentially important work. Science has always been complicated and deeply human and full of ego and inertia, but the conversation is shifting.

@GautiEggertsson Definitely a big disruption!

@mfriedri It’s very hard to predict, I agree. There is also the element these days that people’s attention span is limited. So that gives temptation to rely on artificial sorting mechanism like school rank etc. But however things shake out, strikes me as a big disruption.

AI is a game changer for economic research. We will look back and think: before and after. The junior job market used to place enormous value on technical skills — and rightly so. We wanted to pass on the latest research methods to new PhD students. But the cost of mastering frontier solution techniques has dropped dramatically. I now find myself replicating papers and experimenting with frontier methods in an evening or a few days using Claude Code. That would have taken weeks before — which in practice meant I wouldn’t have done it at all. So what does the new equilibrium look like? Some are pessimistic: ChatGPT can write PhD dissertations, they say. Maybe. But those dissertations won’t push the frontier or generate excitement. I take the other side of that bet. We are in the business of figuring out how the world works and generating new knowledge. There is plenty we don’t understand, and no shortage of questions to answer. AI just accelerates the process. The returns on conceptual thinking and original ideas are now relatively higher compared to the technical grunt work of debugging code and cleaning datasets. I think this is a great development. My guess is it will also erode the monopoly that top US schools — and a handful of others — have long enjoyed. Part of that monopoly rested on access to knowledge that didn’t travel easily. Person-to-person transmission has always been far more efficient than learning from books or published papers — which are outdated by the time they appear, given publication lags. Now knowledge transmission is nearly instantaneous. I find myself using techniques I understood in principle but could never justify the time to implement, because other methods were simply faster. That’s no longer true. The same goes for big data work. One question keeps nagging me though: how should this change how we teach?

It’s important that you understand what happened last night. Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a candidate who, by all accounts, is on track in the polls to flip Texas blue. In response, Trump’s FCC reportedly threatened CBS if the interview aired. CBS caved and pulled the segment, citing “financial reasons.” In modern American history, no president has been more hostile to free speech than Donald Trump. But censorship always backfires. Here’s the full segment Trump didn’t want you to see.

This article should come with a blood pressure warning nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opi…

I impeached Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, those were my articles of impeachment that passed in the House of Representatives. I unapologetically believe in border security and deporting criminal illegal aliens and I support law enforcement. However, I also unapologetically support the 2nd amendment. Legally carrying a firearm is not the same as brandishing a firearm. I support American’s 1st and 4th amendment rights. There is nothing wrong with legally peacefully protesting and videoing. MAGA, consider it like this. We lost our minds when we watched Biden’s FBI track down and aggressively carry out home invasions and arrest on peaceful J6’ers who walked in the Capitol through open doors. Imaging if one of our MAGA independent journalists or even just a MAGA supporter stood in the street outside a J6’ers house while Biden’s FBI carried out a law enforcement operation, home invasion, and arrest. Then Biden’s FBI goes to the MAGA guy videoing it all and shoves a woman with him to the ground and sprays them with bear spray then throws the MAGA guy to the ground as MAGA guy was trying to help the woman off the ground. Then Biden’s FBI beats MAGA guy on the ground, disarms MAGA guy, and then shoots him dead. What would have been our reaction? Both sides need to take off their political blinders. You are all being incited into civil war, yet none of it solves any of the real problems that we all face, and tragically people are dying.

@RexDouglass @Noahpinion Love it

Finally getting around to writing this piece. Teaser trailer here...

47 million rental units in the US, of which 14 million are single-family rentals. If you define ‘institutional’ as owning 1,000+ homes, they are 3.4% of the 14 million. If your threshold for ‘institutional’ is 100+ homes, it’s 7.2% ownership of all single-family rentals.

@patrick__eff @mattyglesias True and a bit annoying but people care enough about the intellectual history of neoliberalism for this to be the reason

@mattyglesias Ezra is trying to repackage neoliberalism as "Abundance" this *new* progressive thing.

@mattyglesias I think his Ta-Nehisi Coates podcast sums it up nicely. Compromise is messy, it doesn’t feel good

@weakinstrument Highly amusing although perhaps not entirely off base to use the ERP as a proxy for academic -> policy influence

I know this paper's findings are correct because I can assure you that every single Biden CEA junior staffer that was there in 2023 is still feeling the physical and mental effects of meticulously fact-checking 742 individual citations multiple times over.

I am already seeing some of you say this is about AI and y'all...come on.

In every movie I’ve watched lately, the main problem was a weak script. You’d think good writing would be the cheap input and before spending millions you’d write better. An economic puzzle

If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it's not even close. nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/…

In the last few years we've seen: - The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer - The Storming of the Capitol and pipe bombs left at the RNC and DNC - The break-in to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and the brutal on Paul Pelosi - Multiple assassination attempts against Trump - The assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shooting of on State Senator John Hoffman and his wife - Luigi Mangione's assassination of Brian Thompson - The assassination of Charlie Kirk Political violence is contagious. It is spreading. It is not confined to one side or belief system. It should terrify us all. The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that.

@ProfPieters Well put!

I've seen several economists discussing the EJ Antoni nomination centering his PhD institution, number of pub, or citation count. This is disappointing, as several of these posters are well aware of econ's elitist, clubby nature where those signals are used *despite* someone's skills or qualifications. Someone without a PhD who has worked in the guts of BLS surveys for years may be far more qualified than someone with a PhD from Harvard and dozens of top-5 publications, and thousands of citations! There is plenty of grossly wrong analysis in his past X posts. Those are completely sufficient evidence to make your point.

The Trump Administration has cancelled the research grant of America's foremost mathematician, in case you had any lingering doubt as to whether or not they were committed to actually advancing science.

@EricLevitz This is the type of messy, Twitter drama I really miss. More please.

1) Unbelievably sleazy behavior here. Stoller has no substantive response to Derek's actual arguments (eg "How can concentration explain the housing crisis if 49 of 50 US homebuilding markets aren't concentrated?"), so he baselessly accuses of Thompson of "unethical" conduct...