Once again, I’ve learned the hard way I gotta be careful talking with rideshare drivers when I go home. I’m from Virginia, and inevitably it comes up I live in CA rn. I want to commiserate, but the conversation always goes south when it becomes clear we ain’t hating on CA for the same reasons…

100% i think Opus 5 is dumber btw

Lavar Edmonds@lavaredmonds.bsky.social · 4w ago

I can't prove it, but I swear they're making Opus dumber to entice me into locking in with Fable permanently. Sorry, can't fool me that easily! You'll just have to settle for getting most of money, not all of it

I’ll complain about California till the end of time, but begrudgingly, after six years here and dozens of times flying all over the world, even I have to concede SFO* might be the smoothest airport in the country

I can't prove it, but I swear they're making Opus dumber to entice me into locking in with Fable permanently. Sorry, can't fool me that easily! You'll just have to settle for getting most of money, not all of it

DHS's Operation Metro Surge hurt Minnesota's leisure and hospitality industry in Jan-Mar 2026, destroying: - 4,600 jobs, - 3.8 million work hours, - $71 million in wages. New analysis by me & @aaronrosenthal.bsky.social @northstarpolicy.org northstarpolicy.org/leisure-and-...

I try not to make a habit of dunking on undergrads — they’re learning! Trying to find themselves — but it’s a kinda funny bit for your only two op-eds to be “Hey, let’s leave the billionaires alone! 🥺” and “Have you considered the Muslim students just have too much money? 🤪”

We get training on how to be good presenters, but not nearly enough on how to be good audience members. Imo, looking engaged and friendly is an important skill to develop!

Update: made it through the talk unscathed — I live to fight another day

Lavar Edmonds@lavaredmonds.bsky.social · 3mo ago

If there’s a God, may they spare me from slipping up during a job talk, inadvertently letting years of watching The Boondocks kick in, and accidentally pronouncing W.E.B. Du Bois like this man (Y’all I swear I know!)

If there’s a God, may they spare me from slipping up during a job talk, inadvertently letting years of watching The Boondocks kick in, and accidentally pronouncing W.E.B. Du Bois like this man (Y’all I swear I know!)

It’d be nice if more professors posted their syllabi/reading lists

Personally I like when the insufferable dweebs who I’ve long disliked for largely petty reasons get dunked on for more substantive critiques, but maybe some just ain’t got the heart of a hater like I do

Not to doom about automation and job destruction (I’m not even a doomer!), but leaving my apartment today and seeing the Latina custodial workers who usually clean the hallways have seemingly been replaced with a vacuum/deep cleaning robot *that speaks Spanish* feels… ominous

Just let the record show: when I mentioned missing the days of EconTwitter, I didn’t mean also the shitty takes Alas, many such cases

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

Here is what I find so interesting. The excellent work of scholars like @lavaredmonds.bsky.social shows that HBCU trained teachers closed gaps, but we’d rather focus on narratives centered on Black cultural deficits such as “role model effects” and this: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Self-Defeating Condescension of an Anti-Racist Education

How an “ideological purity spiral” derailed some of America’s most promising classrooms.

theatlantic.com

Has anyone written about how our fragmented television consumption environment has affected (political) advertising (in the US)? Probably, right? I imagine things have had to change dramatically from even 10 years ago, but curious what that’s looked like behind the scenes

I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the Economics Department at Stockholm University as an Assistant Professor, following a postdoc at Brown University’s Economics Department and Watson School!

I was gonna give macro some credit bc I recently had to dig back in my memory and use some of their tools I'd learned in my own work (it's useful stuff!), but then I just saw an embarrassing number of folks in their feelings about the "credibility revolution," so I'd say we broke even this week

Update: A Nobel laureate said I’m a really good presenter, so that’s on the CV now

Lavar Edmonds@lavaredmonds.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Sure I’m biased, but, just as grad students send a + signal with published work on their CVs, I should be able to flaunt how many times I’ve had my papers rejected. Look at all this resilience I’m building! Pretend it’s 10 years ago and look at this ~grit~. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Aah, I see the (unnecessarily) angriest on here are still the most illiterate. Good equilibrium, very healthy

Lavar Edmonds@lavaredmonds.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Astonishing how load-bearing this tweet continues to be I’m convinced now a frightening share of the anger on this site boils down to the fact that many posters can’t read, and, worse, they don’t know they can’t read

Day 1 of my cross-country voyage for archival work Austin: food has been fantastic, but on a “Terrible layout for interstate driving” scale from 1 to New Jersey, it’s registering at about a 7 — not great!

I think @lavaredmonds.bsky.social is tongue in cheek here, but I honestly love this. Easiest way to screw up as a grad student or especially junior faculty is to not submit any papers.

Lavar Edmonds@lavaredmonds.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Sure I’m biased, but, just as grad students send a + signal with published work on their CVs, I should be able to flaunt how many times I’ve had my papers rejected. Look at all this resilience I’m building! Pretend it’s 10 years ago and look at this ~grit~. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Sure I’m biased, but, just as grad students send a + signal with published work on their CVs, I should be able to flaunt how many times I’ve had my papers rejected. Look at all this resilience I’m building! Pretend it’s 10 years ago and look at this ~grit~. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Today in “I think I might be part of the problem”: Look I’m not saying the sycophantic, weirdly casual voice of ChatGPT is good or not creepy, but sometimes the direct, sometimes stern tone of Claude Code makes me feel like I’m in trouble, and idk about that

There’s no reason for Led Zeppelin to have made music this meandering. At least real jam bands will find an interesting new riff sometime around the 6:00 mark

Econ historians of bluesky! Submit your paper to the SEA econ history sessions, sponsored by Clio and EHA, by March 22: forms.gle/YomRiP8iAUYK... Proposals due: March 22, 2026 Authors notified of acceptance of paper: March 28, 2026 Conf dates: Nov 21-23 #econconf 1/2

A band I liked in college just put out a good single, after nearly a decade of straight garbage. Hopium is back on the menu, boys

Working on campus today and, twice now, I've caught something seemingly darting quickly into the corner under the desk next to mine Maybe it was nothing, just my imagination! Conversely, the building has a mouse in it, and I will momentarily be burning this campus to the ground. Stay tuned

Another week, another cool data product release from LEHD and Census. This week, we released new PSEO data for schools from North Carolina and BYU-Idaho, bringing our total count of institutions to 952. Check out the data here: lehd.ces.census.gov/applications...

I had a similar thought recently, but feared I was approaching “Old man yells at cloud” territory. Glad I’m not alone (Tbf you can usually tell the stuff with non-Black etymology bc it sounds so deeply uncool)