250,000+ hand-coded student photos reveal how religious veiling in Indonesia evolved alongside changing economic opportunities for women and social norms. New paper by Shofia www.restud.com/why-veil-rel... #REStud #EconSky

"AI writing is good for documents that will never be read carefully. Or read at all. AI writing is good at bureaucratic argumentation. I mean this as a compliment, in a genuine sense. ...Think here of reports that are never truly read in the sense of being thought through carefully."

John Gallagher@johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 4w ago

AI writing orbits around the point. meresophistry.substack.com/p/seeking-hu...

"The methodological constraints in economics have provided stronger guardrails against ideologically motivated reasoning... [In sociology] a study [is more likely to be] judged according to whether it reaches the desired conclusion."

Rob Sica@robsica.bsky.social · last mo.

🔪"Whenever scientific inquiry is treated as part of a conflict waged against opposing political coalitions, truth is often the first victim."

Thanks both! Looks like useful work @p-hunermund.com. If I understand your point right, we do discuss it briefly as 'selection into identification' and characterize it as a collider problem.

Interesting how the projected fall is now much larger than modellers were saying when the policy was first announced. I suspect they were just looking at the economic fundamentals and not the psychology of price growth expectations in this market.

Greg Jericho@grogsgamut.bsky.social · last mo.

That the projected house price fall are not huge in the grand scheme of things does not mean the cutting CGT tax has not had a big impact. By my calculations the next 2 years (if ANZ's projections come true) will see a record improvement in affordability www.theguardian.com/business/gro...

The title is a little pointed, but I am very serious here. Academics, medical researchers, and other organisations should not collect data on birth sex. It is rarely relevant, and it almost always leads to privacy violations for transgender people. Please share. I would like people to read this one.

Separating sex and gender is statistical malpractice – Notes from a data witch

Statisticians and academics in Australia should ignore the terrible advice of most LGBTIQA+ organisations and read this post instead. The 2020 ABS standard is almost never the correct way to collect d...

blog.djnavarro.net

"bureaucrats versus complainants; offensive versus defensive cybersecurity; these are all examples of technology driven arms races. Once an arms race has begun, strategic uncertainty means that it may be difficult to prevent escalation, even if it ends up making everyone worse off."

Henry Farrell@himself.bsky.social · last mo.

The Abelard Snazz feedback loop www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-downsi...

New on the Social Policy Blog: “Carefully Capacitating? Rethinking Activation for Lone Mothers in Ireland" by Joe Whelan and Fiona Dukelow. socialpolicyblog.co.uk/2026/07/24/carefully-capacitating-rethinking-activation-for-lone-mothers-in-ireland/

Rethinking Activation for Lone Mothers in Ireland

New research examines how activation policies affect lone mothers in Ireland, revealing tensions between support and constraint in everyday life.

socialpolicyblog.co.uk

Google is turning the screws. The only way I can now see my past searches in maps (on Pixel 8 pro) is if I turn on "Personalised Recommendations in Search Services". That is, saving all my activity across different Google sites and services, and allowing Google to use this to target ads to me.

"The same wage suppression that drives China’s success in trade across all factor intensities is also a steady transfer of income from Chinese households to Chinese companies and the Chinese state."

Michael Pettis@michaelpettis.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Good piece by Yasheng Huang, who makes the same point that I often do: China's massive trade surplus reflects competitive (or absolute) advantage, not comparative advantage, and this is based mainly on its relatively low labor share of output. yashenghuang.substack.com/p/china-as-a...

🚨🚨🚨🚨 This is my latest story—a piece I have worked on and off for more than SIX MONTHS!!! Let me take a deep breath and explain to you why I am obsessed with this one (1/N) (1/5)

EconReporter@econreporter.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The curious case of why UK and Canada CPI use grocery scanner data but the US can’t A deep dive on why the US's—the world's most important economy—inflation statistics enhancement progress has surprisingly... https://en.econreporter.com/58106/why-uk-canada-cpi-use-grocery-scanner-data-us-cant/

Early bird registration for the Australian Social Policy Conference closes soon (30 June). See you there. @aspaofficial.bsky.social

Well deserved!

Shelly Lundberg@shellyjlundberg.bsky.social · 3mo ago

On the other site:

"I think [stock] market valuations are crazy, and don’t treat them as reflecting reality... On this view, electricity use for LLMs will remain modest." @johnquiggin.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/johnquig...

AI electricity use: a lot or a little

TL;DR. The hyperscalers expect massive growth, but the electricity needed to meet current demand could be supplied.by a handful of power stations

open.substack.com

"In fact, driving lessons would probably do more to improve many people’s job prospects than large parts of the employment services system. At least a driver’s licence is something employers actually ask for."

Greg Jericho@grogsgamut.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“What are Australia's jobs programs really for? The answer may be that employment was never the point.” By @maiyazize.bsky.social thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

Brilliant! (In all senses).

Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

This paper finds that economists whose job market papers report (marginally) statistically significant results are more likely to secure academic jobs. Hiring committees prefer statistical significance; this creates incentives for researchers to p-hack.

Have you seen MATILDA (matilda.fss.uu.nl)? Which stands for Measurement, Analysis & Theory for Intensive Longitudinal Data. MATILDA is a website with educational articles that help researchers align theory, measurement, and analysis when studying processes using intensive longitudinal data.

🫠

Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage since 2009, but 30 states have raised their own. New work from @arindube.bsky.social finds these state increases raised pay in restaurants and other low-wage sectors, with no detectable effect on jobs

"Some economists and tax experts have urged a broader abolition of stamp duty, describing it as inefficient and a brake on mobility." I would say, just about every economist who has looked at this. Replacing with a land tax ticks all the boxes (except how to change). www.afr.com/property/res...

ACT abolishes stamp duty for first home buyers

It’s the latest move by the territory government in its 20-year tax reform transition program to phase out stamp duty in favour of higher rates and land taxes.

afr.com

Super informative and valuable post from Arin Dube on what we can learn about the employment effects of minimum wages from state minimum hikes over the past dozen years. arindube.substack.com/p/a-minimum-...

A Minimum Wage Natural Experiment Has Been Running for Over a Decade

When 30 States Raised Minimum Wages, What Happened to Pay and Jobs?

arindube.substack.com

www.nber.org/papers/w35277 "First, just-obese patients receive less diagnostic effort than almost-obese patients. Second, a physician-validated LLM identifies at the cutoff a rise in stigmatizing language in clinical notes"

Everything feels the same. And AI won't help. Over and over, researchers put AI image generators in a feedback loop. All starting with a different prompt. What did they do? They converged on the same 12 generic image themes. They called it "visual elevator music." www.not-ship.com/nothing-new/

Nothing new here: Another sequel, another lighthouse

Movies, music, everything feels the same. It's not your imagination.

not-ship.com

the Australian policy establishment who have been smoking tax evangelists for decades - no tax rate was ever high enough - have to hang their heads in shame

Greg Jericho@grogsgamut.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Some absolutely brutal figures from the ABS on tobacco consumption - figures that really should have those arguing that the higher excise is working to really have a long think...

"Frontier technologies often generate... a systematic tilt toward technologies with large private gains in the mean and underpriced social costs in the tail." www.andrewleigh.com/speech_the_e...

Swedish wage inequality is very low. And has stayed low.

Arin Dube@arindube.bsky.social · 4mo ago

A deep dive into living standards and inequality comparing Sweden and US, focusing on redistribution vs predistribution, and a bonus on use of price indices and PPP and what difference it makes! Link: next post

"of the 1.4 million recipients of CRA in December 2025, more than 240,000 recipients (17.3%) were paying more than half their income in rent" @peterwhiteford.bsky.social www.austaxpolicy.com/budget-forum...

Budget Forum 2026: To reduce housing stress, rent assistance needs to be increased - Austaxpolicy: The Tax and Transfer Policy Blog

Rental stress is rising for low-income Australians. Increasing Commonwealth Rent Assistance could help ease housing pressures and improve affordability.

austaxpolicy.com

Me reading the abstract: Well, 'coding error' is a bit strong, isn't it, they just disagreed on some variable coding. Me getting to p. 3: Oh, OOOHHH, OH NO!!!!

Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 4mo ago

Remember that recent paper claiming to show that "ideological bias" determined the results obtained by immigration policy research teams? A careful, open-code reanalysis by @kauspurg.bsky.social & Josef Brüderl finds that the result arises from a coding error. —> doi.org/10.31222/osf...

Qin Gao argues that the U.S. and China may have more in common than many assume, especially when it comes to poverty and social welfare policy. @stone-lis.bsky.social 🎥 Watch this clip from The Great Global Transformation and the full discussion on YouTube. youtu.be/xr1zscNHeYI?...