Great session on stratification at #ASA2026 this morning organised by @ophastings.bsky.social
Pat Hastings
@ophastings.bsky.social
Sociologist at Colorado State University | Parenting, Inequality, Stratification, Econ Soc, Family Demography, Quantitative Methods, Computational Social Science, whatever seems interesting right now… https://ophastings.com
Feeling deprived of academic talks over the summer? This Thursday I'm presenting new work with @zparolin.bsky.social for the Oxford Metrics & Models seminar. Online talk and all are welcome! 2pm Oxford time, 7am Colorado time. Happy to share the MS Teams link with you. metrics-and-models.github.io
When I'm in charge, first-year college orientation will include a session on the unequal childhoods represented in the room with gentle nudges to rethink "merit". I'd include @ophastings.bsky.social research on growing gaps in parental spending on their kids. ghost.edandclass.com/more-unequal...
Even More Unequal Childhoods
If I were in charge, I'd have a session during first-year orientation in which I challenged all the students to ponder this graph of parental investment expenditures per child by income level: In tha...
ghost.edandclass.com
What’s happened to income-group gaps in parental spending on children in the U.S.? For the last 45 years, they just. keep. getting. wider. In a new @socarxiv.bsky.social working paper, I present updated evidence on trends in spending on childcare, education, and extracurricular activities.
This is a soon to be classic graph.
Pat Hastings@ophastings.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhat’s happened to income-group gaps in parental spending on children in the U.S.? For the last 45 years, they just. keep. getting. wider. In a new @socarxiv.bsky.social working paper, I present updated evidence on trends in spending on childcare, education, and extracurricular activities.
The education gradient in childcare time has narrowed but these results suggest that college educated parents have increased $$ investments to help ensure class reproduction
Pat Hastings@ophastings.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhat’s happened to income-group gaps in parental spending on children in the U.S.? For the last 45 years, they just. keep. getting. wider. In a new @socarxiv.bsky.social working paper, I present updated evidence on trends in spending on childcare, education, and extracurricular activities.
Just a crazy graph, wow. "[...] the top decile spent roughly three times as much per child as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than thirteen times as much by 2024."
Pat Hastings@ophastings.bsky.social · 2mo agoWhat’s happened to income-group gaps in parental spending on children in the U.S.? For the last 45 years, they just. keep. getting. wider. In a new @socarxiv.bsky.social working paper, I present updated evidence on trends in spending on childcare, education, and extracurricular activities.
What’s happened to income-group gaps in parental spending on children in the U.S.? For the last 45 years, they just. keep. getting. wider. In a new @socarxiv.bsky.social working paper, I present updated evidence on trends in spending on childcare, education, and extracurricular activities.
I’m going to be really interested to see what the distribution of papers from economists vs sociologists is going to be for this journal. Is there any journal out there right now that has anywhere close to an even mix between the two?
Journal of Stratification Economics@jsecon.bsky.social · 2mo agoJSE's Inaugural Issue- Call for Papers 📢jse.scholasticahq.com
How are coding agents changing how we study the economy, society and politics? New results from a baseline survey with @tomlyttelton.bsky.social and Maxim Massenkoff, about who is using AI coding agents and what they're doing with them.
Ran a marathon on Sunday. If you see me at #PAA2026 this week, and I appear to be moving slowly, this is what's up.
The idea that internal validity comes first and external validity comes after is a misconception—particularly in economics. In reality, research design involves a trade-off between the two, and the goal is to choose an optimal point on the validity frontier. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
The necessity of construct and external validity for deductive causal inference
The Credibility Revolution advances internally valid research designs intended to identify causal effects from quantitative data. The ensuing emphasis on internal validity, however, has enabled a neglect of construct and external validity. We show that ignoring construct and external validity within identification strategies undermines the Credibility Revolution’s own goal of understanding causality deductively. Without assumptions regarding construct validity, one cannot accurately label the cause or outcome. Without assumptions regarding external validity, one cannot label the conditions enabling the cause to have an effect. If any of the assumptions regarding internal, construct, and external validity are missing, the claim is not deductively supported. The critical role of theoretical and substantive knowledge in deductive causal inference is illuminated by making such assumptions explicit. This article critically reviews approaches to identification in causal inference while developing a framework called causal specification . Causal specification augments existing identification strategies to enable and justify deductive, generalized claims about causes and effects. In the process, we review a variety of developments in the philosophy of science and causality and interdisciplinary social science methodology.
degruyterbrill.com
Georgia Tomova@georgiatomova.bsky.social · 4mo agoLate to the conversation, but I'm kind of unbothered by this lack of replication. If the study is not internally valid to begin with, then being able to replicate it only means replicating systematic biases. And something tells me this is likely to be a bigger problem in the literature.
Looking forward to talking tomorrow at UPenn and sharing some new work I’m really excited about! www.pop.upenn.edu/events/2026/...
The rise and fall of instrumental variables and twoway fixed effects. From: arxiv.org/abs/2501.06873
Excited to share that my new book (w/ Xiang Zhou), Causal Mediation Analysis, is now out from CUP. Order at tinyurl.com/3hspt6em with discount code CMA2025. Includes software for Stata and R, available here: causalmedanalysis.github.io. Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen.
Thinking about submitting some inequality-related research to ASA, but not sure what session it should go in? Or feel like it doesn't fit any of the session topics? Perfect! I’m organizing the Open Call session for @asa-ipm.bsky.social. Deadline: Feb 25. (Now back to working on my ASA paper...)
Thinking about submitting some inequality-related research to ASA, but not sure what session it should go in? Or feel like it doesn't fit any of the session topics? Perfect! I’m organizing the Open Call session for @asa-ipm.bsky.social. Deadline: Feb 25. (Now back to working on my ASA paper...)
Please convert your nicely formatted PDF into MS Word to upload into our online system where we will convert it back into a not-so-nicely formatted PDF for our reviewers. Thank you.
Being interdisciplinary mostly means everyone agrees your work is interesting but not for their journal.
I wrote a Substack post about the latest set of academics tied to Epstein: open.substack.com/pub/davebrad...
1. Each Soc Sci discipline thinks they're more scientific than others... 2. ... exception being Anth 3. Soc. think that only Psych is more scientific than them. 4. Poli Sci thinks both Psych and Econ are more scientific 5. Psych has v. high opinion of itself 6. Econ has v. low opinion of others
A quote in USA Today on celebrities and toxic mom groups wasn't where I pictured my research taking me, but it turns out parenting issues really are everywhere.
I have a preprint included in this new Chicago LLM study, so I got the email and took the survey. I don’t think the LLM’s suggested extensions of my study were very good, which is sort of comforting. But fwiw, I think this is a cool project and 100% agree with Laura here:
Laura K. Nelson@lauraknelson.bsky.social · 7mo agoGood thread on the recent IRB debate. The knee-jerk moral panic around anything labelled AI is just really so counterproductive. We are scientists. We can treat this scientifically. (That doesn't mean you have to support, or use AI, or whatever. Perspective is important though.)
open.substack.com/pub/davebrad...
Relative Poverty Has Small Problems with Short-Term Business Cycles, But Absolute Poverty Has Large Problems with Long-Term Economic Development
A prominent critique of relative poverty measures isn’t a very big problem. However, a related concern with absolute poverty measures is a much bigger problem.
open.substack.com
post a picture of your PhD graduation day
Caleb Scoville@calebscoville.bsky.social · 7mo agopost a picture of your PhD graduation day *It was summer 2020, so I had no ceremony. Here is me clearing out my office at UC Berkeley, the emailed "certificate of completion," and the receipt of the "Phinally Done!" lollipop at my new residence in Massachusetts during my first semester at Tufts.
FYI, if you try to measure the strength of civil society (what Hahrie, Milan, and I call civic opportunity in our 2023 Nature Human Behaviour paper), you may want to consider using our org-, county-, and ZIP code-level datasets published in Scientific Data: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Can’t even credit the algorithm. This is just chronological order. 😚🤌
