Matt Johnson

The "math gap" narrative is a convenient ego boost for economists, but it’s really a debate about what you’re willing to sacrifice for a clean equation. Economics often achieves "precise causal relationships" by stripping away the exact social context that makes behavior meaningful. If you have to simplify a human system until it looks like a closed-circuit physics problem, you haven't "solved" the mystery—you’ve just modeled the 10% of it that is mathematically tractable. This is a fundamental disciplinary tradeoff reflected in recruitment. While top Econ PhD programs now prioritize math backgrounds over social intuition, Sociology often moves in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this means Sociology programs frequently admit students who have little motivation to engage with math or stats at all. In the real world, "endogeneity" isn't a statistical bug to be "cleaned" with a proxy; it’s the engine of society. Using a simpler map doesn’t make you a better navigator; it just means you’re ignoring the mountains because they don’t fit into your grid.

Trump administration saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life. If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, EPA is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter something; they explicitly do not care about your kid.

The quiet, apolitical majority of professors must be so bummed. First wokeness infected the institutions where they worked and they lost the ability to speak freely about many subjects, and now they're collateral damage in air strikes by the Republicans.