omni Burny - Effective Curiosity Most voters are just very authoritarian relative to what exists in elite social circles and what’s happening is that the institutions that were built to suppress those views from being expressed politically have been subverted by technological and demographic change.

This article was so good. Every econ phd student should read, making cities work better is the biggest unsolved problem in development.

One of the least known, most important facts about life in Latin America: most people can turn to police for order & security, but 1 in 6 are also governed by gangs and criminal groups—that’s 77–101 million Latin Americans under some kind of gang rule.

This is part of our India state stories project. India- State and District Evolution Explore how India's districts evolved in the last 75 years through our articles and dashboards . All data and maps free to download. More on district evolution from 1872 to 1941 and district consolidation during

I feel like a substantial amount of creativity comes literally just from knowing a lot of stuff. If you know like, three paintings, history looks like a linear progression from painting 1 to 2 to 3. If you see like 3 million paintings, you have a richer understanding of history

My basis for this is that (IMO) creativity among PhD students in our field is surprisingly predictable. The people with richer life experiences tend to be more creative. I don't think this is psychological, really. I think they just have more material to draw connections from

Kinda wild and sad that Americans bought between 1.2 and 1.5 billion movie tickets every year for 30+ years and realistically speaking, that’s just … never going to happen again?

Paul Novosad India Administrative Atlas 1872-2001 from the 2001 Census had a version going back to 1872. Shivakumar Jolad (ಶಿವಕುಮಾರ್ ಜೋಳದ್) hoping you'd have this in the next version :)

Little late, but worth sharing — The Wall Street Journal covered our study on the impact of access to full-day childcare services in CT w John Eric Humphries Seth Zimmerman The finding that earnings rise and stay higher well beyond the period when kids are in childcare is striking to me, particularly

Holy shit this passage is amazing

Also, strong +1 to this point

“now”

"The world is better understood as misaligned incentives rather than coordinated oppression" What if this was the core thing we taught in Intro Econ instead of how to calculate the stupid deadweight loss triangles

I have my own issues with how limited the terms “‘moderate” and “progressive” are - a discussion for another time. But even after the incredible amount of mental gymnastics that went into this explanation, he still finds that “moderate” candidates do better in competitive races.

It is perfectly appropriate for people to want compensation for hard work. Paywalls are a legitimate, sensible choice for many articles. I think, though, that this article is a good example of how paywalls sometimes impose a serious cost on public debate. This article presents a

we are about to severely damage this treasure for no reason

Twitter sometimes works better than Quora ever did at getting excellent expert answers to interesting questions.

I know this is like May 2025 thinking, but dang AIs submitting pull requests is just so cool.

Some low hanging fruit would be for someone to try some Expected Parrot: Open-source tools for AI research simulations to see how much moderation moves the needle for simulated voters. Don’t think it will “resolve” the debate but would be an interesting point of contrast.

Starts his Substack with a post that takes over the internet. 👑