Alexander Berger Profile
Alexander Berger

@albrgr

12,000
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Enjoys a good applied micro paper. CEO of @open_phil . Views my own, tweets self-destruct every once in a while.

San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2011
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
It has come to my attention that some people assume I read the papers I retweet. Let me be clear: that is slander. I have an actual job. If I don’t screenshot from the full text of the paper, I probably didn’t read it. Also, I provide no warranties. That concludes this broadcast.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Wow the South Korean population pyramid is insane (>3x as many 50 year olds as 1 year olds): h/t @brightertmrrw
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
5 years
Yet another insane paper on air pollution: 1 Volkswagen cheating diesel per 1,000 cars (which is about the average) increases total car exhaust by 10%(!), causes 1.9% increase in low birth weight babies. Effects much bigger than previous studies.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Oof
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
4 years
This paper is totally crazy: Originally they intended to test the impact of parateachers in Guinea Bissau a la this paper () in The Gambia, but the people they trained held out for way higher wages and sued them(!). After winning...
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
5 years
Really cool paper finding that $500 grants from George Soros in 1992 led a bunch of Russian scientists to stay in science after the collapse of the USSR, netting an average of ~5 publications per scientist over next couple decades:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
7 years
This paper is nuts: Just changing the payment schedule for food stamps cut grocery store theft by 32%
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
I've been waiting for someone to write this paper: (new econ Nobel!) David Card, @rothstein_jesse and Moises Yi use admin data to better estimate big productivity gains from moving to higher-wage metros. But housing costs more than offset average gains :(
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
4 days
It’s kind of wild to me that, as of two weeks ago, there are now 3 large cluster randomized trials across five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa showing that giving every kid antibiotics reduces child mortality by ~14% and I don’t see anyone talking about it!
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
It’s hilarious to me that the world’s biggest companies, hiring the best minds of my generation to think about how to make people click on ads, in a data-rich environment where everything is observed, can’t get non-experimental causal inference to work:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
This paper on the impact of private equity purchases of nursing homes on patient mortality finds incredibly large harmful effects
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
16 days
YIMBYs have been taking victory laps this week on the back of some great speeches at the DNC. @open_phil has been the movement's biggest funder for most of the past decade, and I’m super proud of the progress. But we’re still very early in this fight: 1/
@JerusalemDemsas
Jerusalem
18 days
Just a few years ago, if you’d asked the leading political scientists & thought leaders whether YIMBY ideas would be advanced by a figure like Obama on a national stage, they’d have laughed you. Clear evidence for the power of (correct) ideas.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
7 years
Another pretty compelling paper on the impact of lead on crime, in Sweden this time:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Insanely in-depth, sober, and ultimately kinda delightful dissection of how @Columbia systematically gamed the US News college rankings to get to #2 :
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
I still can't get over the fact that people adding lead to tumeric to make it more yellow is one of the biggest causes of lead poisoning in the world: Just sounds so... evil?
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Kinda crazy paper finding that even the Cultural Revolution didn't come close to eliminating the lasting impact of historical socioeconomic status in China:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Good paper finding that an air quality warning system in South Korea massively passed a cost-benefit test just based on day-of healthcare costs, not to mention any actual health or longer term benefits:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
A couple of newish papers on the impact of US strengthening of air pollution regulations in 2003-05, finding that doing so reduced dementia and elderly mortality:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
8 months
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
8 years
This is crazy: manipulation of Swedish middle school tests leads to ~20% more income at 23
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
9 months
Huh wow
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@restatjournal
The Review of Economics and Statistics (REStat)
9 months
The rise of tea drinking in England had a significant impact on mortality during the Industrial Revolution. In the November 2023 issue, by Francisca M. Antman.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Today’s publication day for @willmacaskill 's excellent new book What We Owe The Future! I learned a lot from the book and highly recommend it. I also thought it didn’t resolve some of my key questions about longtermism. Long thread on both parts:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Some work news
@open_phil
Open Philanthropy
3 years
We’re excited to announce that Open Philanthropy co-founder @albrgr has been promoted to co-CEO! Alexander leads our work on causes focused on maximizing verifiable impact within our lifetimes, which we're now referring to as Global Health and Wellbeing.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
10 days
Interesting result finding that you basically can’t measure the statistical effects of policy differences across US states unless they have huge effects: 50 states just aren’t enough.
@aweisstweets
Amanda Weiss
10 days
🚨 Job Market Paper alert! "How Much Should We Trust Modern Difference-in-Differences Estimates?" at I assess the fit between modern DID-style estimators and real-world data features, and point to approaches for improving inference. Quick thread ⬇️
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Really appreciated this essay from @michael_nielsen on effective altruism and why he's not sold: Here's a long navel-gazing thread with my reactions:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
11 days
Seeing Like A State is a brilliant book IMO, but it’s wild that anyone reads it as more than one side of an obvious dialectic. It’s ironically so uninterested in the complexity (and benefits) of the systems it critiques.
@mattyglesias
Matthew Yglesias
11 days
I really enjoyed Seeing Like A State, but Paul Seabright's critical review of it is also very good.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Great @JerusalemDemsas piece on the moral bankruptcy of overpopulation worries:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Very cool paper! uses placement of LDS missionaries to study formation of immigration policy views
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
This image showing how many high-impact education interventions have plummeting impacts as they scale is super interesting and depressing:
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@leecrawfurd
Lee Crawfurd
2 years
So we turned this thread into a report chapter. This figure shows: 3 ed programs with steeply diminishing effects as they scale (early-grade reading programs, home visits, & teacher coaching) 2 that seem much more consistent (longer hours & meals)
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
24 days
Seems like a strong argument for @robinhanson conditional prediction markets on firing CEOs:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
8 months
Cool research from our grantees at @RANDCorporation finding that current LLMs don't outperform google at planning bioweapons attacks
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
8 days
Recently a 60ish guy traveling alone on a flight asked me if I could “do something” about the screaming baby I was urgently trying to calm down… ?????
@bendreyfuss
Ben Dreyfuss
8 days
There is this baby sobbing hysterically in the row behind me on this flight and everyone around us is glaring at the mom but, like, it’s not her fault. What’s she supposed to do? Chloroform it? Put some AirPods in, dipshit, and get over it.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Super interesting paper finding that the US extending patent protection to plants in 1985 led to a surge in new crop development and increased (especially large) farm profits and land values
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
I find this @mattyglesias take compelling: The overall covid response makes me worried about something like "decadence" - as a society we've built so many processes that mostly work, but no longer seem capable of reform when they stop doing so.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
6 years
Another paper finding big negative externalities from pollution: Methods on this one are crazy - they got *the universe of credit and debit card transactions in China* to measure healthcare spending.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Prompted by a discussion with @michael_nielsen : how is the LHC not an absolute disaster? Imagining a bunch of scientists governing by committee trying to build the ~most complex machine ever, seems like it should have been impossible. But it ~works. What can I read about how?
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
5 years
Yet *another* crazy paper on the adverse impacts of air pollution, this time on crime: Coverage in @TheEconomist :
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
10 days
I’m still mad about this. The results of that paper matter to me, it affects some decisions @open_phil (on the margin, but still). If economics as a discipline wants people to listen to evidence, it needs to hold up its side of the bargain and update or retract major errors.
@albrgr
Alexander Berger
11 days
I think economics journals need to do more retractions or have a lower bar for accepting comments. I have no idea if @michael_wiebe is right here, but claim of devastating coding error in main results of an AER paper should not linger unanswered publicly for 6 months.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
4 years
What this ultimately shows is pretty basic: there are places where kids are in school and just not learning to read or even recognize numbers, and that's an in principle fixable problem for ~$425/kid/year.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
26 days
I'm enjoying @NateSilver538 's new book! Couple passages I highlighted:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
7 years
This paper is an unbelievable tour de force:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Today in "professionals overestimate the treatment effects of everything" news
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Crazy stat: aging into legal driving age increases *total mortality risk* for teenagers by 15%
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@AEAjournals
AEA Journals
3 years
Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "Teenage Driving, Mortality, and Risky Behaviors" by Jason Huh and Julian Reif.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Brilliant and ultimately beautiful @ezraklein essay on the moral shortsightedness of climate antinatalism and benefits of a political vision of abundance:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
8 months
I found this surprisingly high: "25% of [Giving Pledge] signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted. 4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison"
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
1 year
Prompted by this, our science team funded a replication, pub'd in 2021, using Veterans Health Administration data. It found that people with HSV were *less* likely to develop dementia & people who took antivirals accounted for most of the association:
@cremieuxrecueil
Crémieux
1 year
Herpes is terrible, but did you know it might also be making people demented? Studies of the effects of antivirals support this contention and show that we may be able to greatly reduce dementia rates with existing drugs. Check out this Taiwanese result.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Kinda sad paper implying that a lot of NIMBYism in housing supply restrictions comes from not being able to use local taxes to exclusively subsidize local public schools:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Always crazy realizing how big NASA was during the Apollo era:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
This is an IMO super impressive job market paper, working with tons of Social Security and Medicare data to find that ~randomly getting $100 more of SS reduces medicare spending by $38: Also see mortality decrease(!) tho I can't figure cost per life saved
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
11 days
I think economics journals need to do more retractions or have a lower bar for accepting comments. I have no idea if @michael_wiebe is right here, but claim of devastating coding error in main results of an AER paper should not linger unanswered publicly for 6 months.
@michael_wiebe
Michael Wiebe
8 months
🚨Replication alert🚨 I reanalyze Moretti (2021), which tests for the effect of tech cluster size on innovation. I find that the event study and instrumental variable estimates—necessary for a causal interpretation—are caused by coding errors. #EconTwitter 1/
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
6 years
Cool paper finds that Americans massively underestimate their relative position in the global income distribution and give more to foreign charities when given more accurate info:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
I'm excited about this! Today @open_phil is launching a $150 million regranting competition, aimed at finding the 1-5 highest-impact funders we can and just adding to their work:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Not to go all Bad Art Friend, but just realized that today it my 10 year anniversary of donating a kidney. It's not how I'd phrase all of it today, but I still think this argument mostly holds up: One of the better things I've ever done, would recommend
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Meta-analysis of lead/crime lit finds pub bias but thinks there’s real effect
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
4 years
Yet another crazy air pollution result
@jenniferdoleac
Jennifer Doleac
4 years
Nanna Fukushima JMP: "The UK Clean Air Act, Black Smoke, and Infant Mortality" Website:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
6 years
Yet another paper finding pollution has surprisingly big negative health effects: I'd be interested in some kind of synthesis effort, taking all the different sources of pollution variation and outcomes people have looked at and crossing them.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
4 years
Not a shocker, but state laws to increase the age for tobacco purchases from 18 to 21 did work to cut smoking amongst 18-20 year olds. The federal version of this that passed in 2019 was one of the biggest pieces of sleeper legislation I can remember.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
It feels under-appreciated to me that 3 of last 6 US presidential elections have been decided by less than 1pp: IMO very surprising! Even in a race polling at ~50/50, I think you'd expect more variance just from polling error. Any theories? Just chance?
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Interesting paper finding that air pollution reduces performance in chess, particularly under time pressure:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
7 months
People should really put "in the US" in these abstracts
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@restatjournal
The Review of Economics and Statistics (REStat)
7 months
Authors find that intergenerational mobility declined sharply around 1980 when inequality rose sharply. Just Accepted new paper by JJonathan Davis, @jonmvdavis ; Bhashkar Mazumder, @BhashMazumder .
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 months
Very cool paper corroborating the rest of the literature finding that air pollution and lead pollution are both very bad:
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@ctaylor463
Charles Taylor
2 months
tomorrow @xinmingd is presenting our new paper on air pollution and aviation, using overhead aircraft routes as a source of exogenous variation to investigate pollution impacts globally @nberpubs
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Another great @ezraklein essay on the abundance agenda and how procedural obsessions prevent faster progress:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
5 years
Interesting paper on better welfare measures beyond GDP, including lifespan, leisure, and inequality (h/t @Ishan_Nath ): Still ends up correlated .98 with GDP per capita though :)
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
6 years
Finally got around to reading this RCT on the impact of quitting Facebook from Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. It is *really* good: The 5 page intro gives a remarkable summary of the results.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Three more recent NBER working papers finding negative impacts of particulate pollution: (ship emissions in US increase infant mortality) (pollution in china reduces fertility) (US coal reduces test scores)
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
I hadn't re-read this paper in a while, it's an absolute banger: NIH grants lead to ~just as many patents on diseases that aren't what they were focused on as what they were.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
11 months
Open Phil is giving $300M to GiveWell's recommendations over the next 3 years, bringing total to date to >$1B and returning to 2020 annual level. Our post explaining the decision (joint w/ @EmilyOehlsen ): @GiveWell 's post:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Super interesting paper I hadn't seen before on how the US massively restricting (overwhelmingly low-skill) immigration in the 1920s reduced(!) patenting in the most affected cities and industries:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
People died of heat in Japan because of energy conservation measures after their nuclear plans were shut down
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@AEAjournals
AEA Journals
2 years
Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Energy Saving May Kill: Evidence from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident" by Guojun He and Takanao Tanaka.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Where's the best list of important technicalish things that should have (at least maybe) been done differently with Covid? Thinking of: -Rapid tests -HCTs -Fractional dosing trials -More SOLIDARITY type trials -Massive $ in vaccine prod infra a la Kremer et al Surely many others
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
11 months
Phenomenal essay on the experience of donating a kidney (hilarious, painful, and in characteristic @slatestarcodex fashion, an outstanding review of the evidence):
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
Very cool paper from @thesamasher @alicampion13 Gollin @paulnovosad finding that canals in India increase agricultural production and rural population while sectoral transformation operates through geographic mobility:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
3 years
Impressive meta-analysis of the impact of cash transfers on subjective wellbeing from @HappierLivesIns : If my math is right, effect on life satisfaction per $ doubling is very close to what you'd read off this old @BetseyStevenson @JustinWolfers chart:
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
2 years
I realize not the intended point here, but what happened between 2002 and 2012 that cut child car crash deaths in half?
@eeshani_kandpal
Eeshani Kandpal
2 years
Guns are the leading cause of death for American children. Car crashes come second. Source: Goldstick, Cunningham, and Carter. NEJM, May 19 2022.
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@albrgr
Alexander Berger
16 days
I think YIMBY now is best described by the Churchill quote: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." We still need folks to be getting involved, this is still nascent!
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