Burke O'Brien

TOP OF THE MORNING

Hopefully soon I can go a full day without typing "help reshape"

@_AlvinChristian thank u for the new desk decor

@ne0liberal I co-wrote this piece on airline competition you might be interested in reading aei.org/economics/stro…

@ne0liberal @phoxie58

The "Sink the Jones Act" sticker is now on our store neoliberalproject.org/store/sink-the…

@phoxie58 That would have been too obvious! This is the shadowy (((deepstate))) we're talking about here!

I’m still waiting for an explanation of how the trump-Biden election could have been tampered with in a massive conspiracy but all the other elections around the country USING THE SAME BALLOTS were totally fine (w/ Rs gaining). The whole thing is insane.

🚨 NEW report from John Papay, Nate Schwartz, @kate_donohue, and @obrien_burke on Staffing Schools Before Students Arrive: Filling Teacher Vacancies in @pvdschools annenberg.brown.edu/educators/staf…

This paper is totally crazy: nber.org/papers/w27799 Originally they intended to test the impact of parateachers in Guinea Bissau a la this paper (alexeble.com/s/Eble-et-al-P…) in The Gambia, but the people they trained held out for way higher wages and sued them(!). After winning...

@AlecStapp Could this be because other drugs (opioids) are more deadly, and you don't observe longer-term societal harms?

The social costs of alcohol are higher than any other drug. And yet, it's the least regulated or socially censored.

We're opening the wrong schools. Elementary education is both social and foundational, whereas more mature college students are better equipped to switch to online learning. But colleges are reopening while many schools are remote. nytimes.com/2020/08/03/bus…

@phoxie58 What would you have left to complain about???

Hopefully, we can “waive” goodbye to the #JonesAct tomorrow.

Why might economists disagree about the case for a wealth tax? 1. Philosophical disagreement about value of redistribution 2. Different views about the best tax base 3. Extent of worry about the difficulty of assessing the tax 4. Diff guesses about likely tax avoidance

ABSTRACT The effect of Y on X is real. METHOD Questionable proxies for Y and X. RESULTS Fancy stuff involving tables, covariates. DISCUSSION Limitations: this study cannot in principle prove that Y affects X. CONCLUSION Totally does tho.

The United States is currently experiencing an uptick in bird-on-human attacks nym.ag/2jQaMNm

An Effective Altruist approach to the climate crisis: Which actions are most likely to avert a disaster (as opposed to providing a warm glow, signaling our virtue, etc.)? Answer: Public R&D in clean energy. Important article in Vox: vox.com/energy-and-env… via @voxdotcom

I sorta don't like the statement that "Twitter is not real life". It *is* real life, just a biased sample of real life where Democrats are younger, whiter, much more left-wing, and much more politically engaged than the overall universe of Democrats. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

A lot of people who defend the idea of "supply and demand" in labor markets seem not to understand the supply-and-demand model at all. Instead they seem to use "supply and demand" as a shorthand for "government intervention is bad" or "low-paid workers just aren't worth much".

But apparently they're still likely to confuse correlation and causation.

March Madness, but year-round for the next two years. Ht @jkarsh

Gritty is a worker