Genuinely devastated. The greatest centre back I ever saw play. When he lined up alongside Maldini, Costacurta and Tassotti, you may as well have inked in a 0 on the match report before kick off. A genius and properly tough (his knee surgery to WC final in 94!). www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Franco Baresi, iconic Milan and Italy legend, dies aged 66

Baresi, who captained club and country, was one of the most recognisable players of the ⁠golden era of Italian football in the 1980s and 1990s

theguardian.com

The primary weakness here is that it was only once a month.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · last wk.

Need more time to get work done? Have you thought of FAMT? www.ft.com/content/0291...

An intervention by Michal Kalecki to the UN conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the Benefit of Less Developed Regions in 1963. Amazing how much, even as the characters and methods change beyond recognition, the fundamental issues we argue about remain similar.

Maybe it’s square today.

Ranil Dissanayake@scepticalranil.bsky.social · 2w ago

The ball is round. The game lasts ninety minutes. And everything else is theory.

The ball is round. The game lasts ninety minutes. And everything else is theory.

Nooooooooooo

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3w ago

Sir Garry Sobers, West Indies cricketing great, dies aged 89

Apropos of nothing, do people remember how good peak Rakim was? The third verse here might be the greatest in rap history; the whole song is dense with brilliant, unexpected rhymes and rhythm changes. The difference between 'greatest' and 'great' is sometimes huge. www.youtube.com/watch?v=95gP...

Eric B. & Rakim - Follow The Leader (Official Music Video)

YouTube video by EricBAndRakimVEVO

youtube.com

Showing my five year old the mechanics (and policy implications) of exponential growth and he understood it better than some adults I knew during Covid.

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...

Jane Jacob’s in 1969 in The Economy of Cities. I know it hardly needs restating, but she was a genius. This is still basically it.

Paging Paul Romer.

Amanda Patterson@amandaonwriting.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Perfect response. #booksky #writingsky

LeBron James is the greatest athlete I have ever seen. The only near comparison I can make is Serena. Just so physically superior to everyone else it’s absurd. Add that to their obvious intelligence and it’s not a surprise they were so dominant for so long.

I often wonder how being an economist affects the way I communicate with my family. Today my five year old, in the middle of eating a bowl of noodles, told me “I’m an outlier because I love the rain so much.” So I might need to rein it in a little.

I last (seriously) wrote for Aid Thoughts around 15 years ago. It's kind of amazing, reading back, how I've changed (both how little and how much) since then. I often tell people I manage to write as much and as often as they can--you only get good at it through trial and error. I miss blogging.

Matt Collin@mattcollin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

After years of hand-wringing and fighting with Bluehost's weak Wordpress protection, I finally have resurrected an archived, html version of Aid Thoughts at the original address, with a little help from Claude! aidthoughts.org With original comments and images!

What amazing news. Another great public policy school at a time when we most certainly need to shine a light on public policy and the role of governments worldwide.

Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 5mo ago

Deep breath. I'm honored and excited to join the faculty of America's oldest research university, Johns Hopkins. I'll start this summer as a full professor, one of the founding faculty at the brand-new School of Government and Policy. We're building something unique & important, even historic.

A lesson: no matter how talented, working on the basics matters. True across basically all disciplines.

Yes, everything sucks. But: www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

The Muppet Show: this thrilling return is so great I can’t even count how many times I laughed

Sabrina Carpenter fangirling Miss Piggy, Beaker losing his eyes … yes, Kermit and co are back for a trip down memory lane – and it’s a perfect, saucy joy

theguardian.com

Nothing says Christmas like the Australians traumatising 11 visiting Englishmen over a small wooden urn full of ashes.

Really looking forward to reading this update.

Oliver Hanney@olihanney.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Issue 4 (4!) of our VoxDevLit on Training Entrepreneurs is out now. This update includes interesting new evidence on longer-term impacts and the use of generative AI in training. Everything you need to know on this topic will always be at this link and up to date ⤵️

This is going to bankrupt me

📢 Join our next Active Bystander Training for economists! 🗓️ 18 Nov 2025 | 09:30–11:00 | Online Learn tools for safe, effective intervention & fostering an inclusive profession. 👉 Register: ProgrammesOfficer@res.org.uk 🔗 bit.ly/466tIur #Economics #EDI #EconSky

Tolstoy and his confidante (a lizard). From Gorky’s Fragments from My Diary

What is development economics? I find it more and more difficult to define what development economics actually is. So, for this @voxdev.bsky.social blog, I asked development economists how they define development economics: voxdev.org/topic/what-d...

What is development economics?

I asked development economists for their definitions of development economics.

voxdev.org

This is a crucial point. Still relatively few economists are explicitly trained on this point, and too many econ papers show it.

David Brady@davebrady72.bsky.social · last yr.

Say you’ve got very good causal IDENTIFICATION. Can you say you have causality, can make a causal general claim, and can say what “THE causal effect” is? NO We explain why in new article at Journal of Causal Inference. www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

When thinking about how to get out of this mess we need to keep in mind 'asymmetric causation'. Knowing what caused a problem doesn't tell you how to solve it. The example that brought the point home to me was: If you're run over by a steamroller, the cure is not to have it reverse back over you

A wine that makes you think, @jowolff.bsky.social

This is a truly mad review of Perrow's classic Complex Organizations:

New entrant to the J-Rock song name hall of fame

Cackling