Hello from beautiful [checks notes] Newark Airport. Someday I hope to write one of these link lists from my really quite nice sofa in my really quite nice house.
Reminder: In Development has an open call for pitches!
Relatedly, David Nash has put together a list of hits-based giving opportunities in global health, and In Development is included. If you are a donor interested in meta-level global health, I’d love to chat!
Here is a lovely list of many good things that happened this year.
Economists love causal inference (72.6% of empirical articles in a flagship journal employ methods designed to isolate a causal effect). Political scientists also love causal inference (60.7% of similar articles employ methods designed to isolate a causal effect). Sociologists… do not. Fewer than 10% of the articles in sociology’s flagship journal are designed to find causality.
Coefficient Giving’s Abundance and Growth team has a new Substack (The Abundance and Growth Blog), and have posted an intro post laying out their assumptions and motivations.
Rwanda changed the language of instruction in all its schools to English. Unfortunately, Rwandan teachers are not generally native speakers of English, so this perhaps predictably decreased literacy and schooling levels.
Alex Nowrasteh imagines an alternate American past with more liberal immigration laws. He frames this as a libertarian vision, but I don’t think libertarianism is the only philosophy that would lead you to support more immigration.1
The Institute for Progress has a list of concrete suggestions to accelerate American science.
A new paper in the QJE argues that the minimum wage does destroy firms - but it tends to destroy low-productivity firms.
Claude will tell a child that Santa is real. ChatGPT will tell them Santa is a lie.
For a start, I am… not a libertarian. At all.