Philip N Cohen
@philipncohen.com
Sociologist and demographer, U. of Maryland; SocArXiv director. Latest book: Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists https://cup.columbia.edu/book/citizen-scholar/9780231555418 Website: philipncohen.com Blog: familyinequality.com
I didn't realize how dramatic the effect was of Sweden's "speed premium" policy in the 1980s. It encouraged women to wait longer (to maximize earnings-based parental leave) and space shorter (to lock in pre-birth benefits). This graph also shows why people who monitor CCF have lower blood pressure.
It's possible to live life without inventing generations and then arguing over their names ad infinitum. In that life nothing of value is lost. It's just life, but without this ridiculousness. Try it!
Simon Little 🍁@simonplittle.ca · 23h agoNo. No we are not doing that. www.upworthy.com/what-is-gen-...
LLMs, asked to "peer" review 200 papers published this year in top science and medicine journals, either rejected or recommended major revisions 76% of the time. Telling the LLMs the paper was a revision paper made them much more generous. arxiv.org/abs/2610.31414
Violent crime has fallen 35% since I was in middle school ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
Michael Druker 🇨🇦@mdruker.app · 2d agoSocial media loves talking about how everything is getting worse. But what’s something that you’ve seen get _better_ in your lifetime?
Growing inequality means the Dead got rich playing 200 shows a year at $10 per head and now bands do 20 to shows at $1000 per head. Round numbers
"This technology disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, voters." Also, how come none of these newly disempowered cat ladies want to give us the children we need
CEO of Palantir Says AI Will Seize Power Away From College-Educated Women
Palantir CEO Alex Karp said AI would disrupt "humanities trained" and "Democratic voters" who are largely women.
futurism.com
Of course there are parts of peer review that can be automated - like error checking, references, plagiarism. A report on those could be helpful for reviewers and editors to do the parts AI might be worse at, like assessing interest and writing, and working with authors to make the research better
Jan Kabatek 🇺🇦@jankabatek.com · 3d agoGary King just dropped a study showing that AI peer reviews now dominate human peer reviews on every metric they tested. gking.harvard.edu/peerless/
The collapse of academic history is a part of this trend - if you dig into the original report, "History & Related Fields dropped from a peak of 7,496 [dissertations per year] in 2015 to 3,583 by 2025, a contraction of 52% in a single decade." Which of course mirrors the trend in academic jobs.
Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · 4d agoHumanities dissertations have fallen by 49 percent since 2015, compared with a drop of 4.5 percent in the social sciences, according to a new analysis of nearly 445,000 dissertations in these two fields over 65 years. Explore the data: https://chroni.cl/4yxUZ4S
Not likely Jared will land anyplace with an extradition treaty if there is ever a Democrat attorney general
Tahar 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 🇺🇳 🇪🇺@rochaa.bsky.social · 3d agoThis guy needs to go to jail. He needs to be questioned, under oath, then indicted, then tried, then jailed.
Interesting. Really strongly suggest whoever made that graph just use real age or cohort numbers instead of ridiculous undefined generation labels
Adam Bonica@adambonica.bsky.social · 3d agoOnce mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.
191. In the first 18 months of Trump's 2nd term, immigrations courts have ordered more than 10,000 children removed per month. There are ~300,000 births per month. So those child removals are like cutting the birth rate ~3% (or, ~7x more than births are falling) www.propublica.org/article/unac...
Note: US general fertility fell a little less in 2025 (0.6, 1.1%) than it did in 2024 (0.7, 1.3%). At that rate of declining decline, births per woman will stop falling in 2031. You heard it here first.
Philip N Cohen@philipncohen.com · 4d ago190. Correction: US TFR in 2025: 1.58. Was 1.60 in 2024. Birth rates fell under age 30 and rose above age 30. (Dunno why NCHS reports age specific fertility rates but not TFR.) Births per 1000 women age 15-44 fell **1.1%**, from 53.8 to 53.2. Births fell 0.5%. www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/da...
Turboradikalisierung. Da gibts nix mehr zu deuten. Keine Codes. Nix. Er sagt es einfach ganz offen: Dass er der wirkmächtigsten modernen rechtsextremen Verschwörungsideologie anhängt. Auf die sich viele Rechtsterroristen berufen. Und Staatschefs & Abgeordnete & Medien posten da noch. Wild.
For context, it took 3 years following the end of the Great Recession for SNAP rolls to decline by 7.8%. This is unprecedented. States are trying to reduce error rates (or face billions in penalties due to the One BiG Beautiful Bill) and eligible folks are losing access in the process.
The Washington Sun@washingtonsun.com · 4d agoThe number of people enrolled for federal food assistance has decreased by 13% since Republicans overhauled the program last July, to what one analysis says is the lowest number since 2009.
This text came just in time for our class discussion of rational choice and voting. Flipping the Senate is worth $900 to me, and I estimate the chance that my contribution puts him over the top is 1/100, so $9 it is.
I wrote about men in groups in connection with Jane Doe and the Cornell case. Some of what I discovered in my research shocked even me (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/o...
Opinion | What Makes Men in Groups Behave So Badly? (Gift Article)
Why do men in groups behave this way?
nytimes.com
They want young people to think parenting can be "meaningful and pleasant" while the entire political right is bankrolled by tech bro nihilists who fantasize about post-apocalyptic eugenicist walled enclaves and escaping Hellscape Earth.
Karen Benjamin Guzzo@karenguzzo.bsky.social · 5d agoNew IFS report on culture and fertility concludes pronatalists must convince young people that their valid concerns are, in fact, no big deal and validates parents' pressuring adult children into having kids. No need to make structural changes; it's all culture, baby.
New IFS report on culture and fertility concludes pronatalists must convince young people that their valid concerns are, in fact, no big deal and validates parents' pressuring adult children into having kids. No need to make structural changes; it's all culture, baby.
I like this. (Therefore I judge the science to be sound. What can I say, my brain is a computer made of meat.)
Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be
Large language models can mimic thought and feeling with uncanny skill. But evidence from neuroscience suggests that intelligence alone is not enough for subjective experience.
nature.com
Sociologist Considers Own Behavior Indicative Of Larger Trends theonion.com/sociologist-...
Meredith Rose (from the grave) 👻@mrose.ink · 2y agoWhat is your favorite meme/Onion headline about your profession?
Families in the top 10% spend 13x more on developmental activities than those in the bottom 25%, compared to 3x in 1980. "Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States" now out at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social doi.org/10.15195/v13... 🧵👇
"technically correct but of no use to the research community" is an exploding category. At SocArXiv we designate these as not "engaging with the research literature." It's not about having cites, it's about having cites that actually help identify a need for this paper.
Richard Sever@richardsever.bsky.social · 5d agoWe don't want to penalize AI use but note it is enabling generation of both AI slop and submissions that are technically correct but of no use to the research community. It has always been our policy to decline such 'facile' submissions; they are just easier to generate now (to pad CVs). 4/n
AI services always look better when they're replacing total crap
Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · 5d agoOpinion: A journal editor tested AI-generated peer reviews and found them detailed, constructive — and sometimes bracingly critical. The harder question: not whether AI is perfect, but whether it can outperform the system academics already distrust. https://chroni.cl/4sf8h4J
"U.N.C., long regarded as one of the nation’s top public institutions." Maybe should read, "once regarded..."
U.N.C. Strikes Trump Deal to Keep Federal Funding
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not pay any financial penalties but agreed to abide by the Trump administration’s views on diversity and other matters.
nytimes.com
Don't bullshit a bullshitter (or a sociology professor), Melania
Today for the first time when I played my go-to clip no one in the class had heard of the show (Frasier).
Jamin Speer@jaminspeer.bsky.social · 6d agoWe need a name for that feeling when you get old enough that none of your pop culture references work in class anymore
It's hard not to pair this moral panic with the burgeoning moral panic about adult children not giving their parents the grandchildren those parents feel entitled to. (This is separate from the general moral panic over low birth rates). rcobooth.substack.com/p/on-prospec...
On prospective grandparents
(a tiresome thing from the internet this weekend, and some new stories)
rcobooth.substack.com
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 6d agothere is a piece to be written about this "no contact" as a very specific kind of moral panic about status, intergenerational mobility, and maybe dementia. because it is wild how much this no contact thing riles up older people.
