Just found out about Milton Friedman’s Thermostat analogy. Very good explanation of an important concept. I think
@causalinf
has a similar analogy with a sailboat staying on course in the face of wind in the Mixtape.
I'm in Harvard's Intermediate Microecon course this semester and it turns out formers TAs for the course wrote a textbook to accompany the course. They included a list of Twitter accounts under "Misc economics references". Y'all may recognize some of the names.
As someone who has recently been through Harvard Extension School and is currently in a Harvard masters program I'll comment on the topic.
First, yes, HES is not what people think of when they hear "I went to Harvard". What they think of is the 4% admission rate to... 1/
On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. Turns out this Carnivore Aurelius account is actually run by a woman who goes by caetae on instagram. Interesting to see how easy it is to become appealing to western men: just talk about traditional lifestyle being better. 1/
A while back I made an Intro to Data Analysis with Python code notebook that can be run in any internet browser through
@GoogleColab
. Could be an easy intro to anyone who has ever wondered what data analysis in Python might look like.
A 168 in the GRE Quant section is no longer above 90th percentile. Most Econ PhD programs say that to be competitive the quant score should be above 90th percentile. Does anyone know how Econ PhD Adcoms are responding to these percentile changes, if at all?
#EconTwitter
Came across this post on LinkedIn discussing a PhD student’s experience at UCSD struggling to make ends meet. It’s certainly something I’ve talked about before;
#PhD
stipends don’t cover expenses in a number of places. Is family money or debt the only answer?
#AcademicChatter
Hi all. I'm headed to Harvard for their Data Science masters this fall and I'd like to get a part-time RA or TA position while I'm there (up to 20 hrs/week). Does anyone know of any Harvard profs or orgs looking for a part-timer? I'd greatly appreciate the help!
Huge deal. The policy is literally a poach of H-1B holders per announcement. This directly targets folks from China and India on the US PR backlog in US. This follows UK HPI visa in explicitly targeting US skilled talent.
BREAKING: 🇨🇦 Canada creates a path to permanent residency for all H-1B visa holders in the United States.
Canada is eating our lunch. This is bad news for America. We need to expand high-skilled immigration or our economy will suffer.
Harvard College, or the 12% admit rate to HBS, the ~2% admit rate to PhD programs, and perhaps the 6% to my masters program. Importantly, they aren't necessarily thinking about the coursework specifically, but about the exclusive selection process to enter the program. 2/
The HES cost for the same grad credit course is ~$3.2K. HES is doing an incredible job by affording ppl the opportunity to get high quality instruction at a more affordable price, part-time, often from anywhere in the world. I cannot emphasize how amazing that is. 8/
@damiendamien
Thanks for the suggestion! Been looking into it. They seem to have been prioritizing folks with a Provincial Nomination for the last couple years though so I think I'd need to find a way to get one, probably from Ontario.
But these aren't people off the streets, they are often folks with PhDs in these areas themselves, or expertise from working in the subject area they are teaching and the quality of the courses from non-faculty is usually very good.
I have nothing but praise for HES. 6/
@jmhorp
To be fair, the text doesn’t specify that it’s 0.08% and 0.37% so they may be assuming it’s 8% and 37%. If anything, they should be taking biology.
Not everyone can put a pause on their lives and go back to school full-time, nor can everyone afford the full Harvard tuition fees. You can see very clearly the difference in price for the exact same course. Harvard graduate school pricing is about $8K per course I believe. 7/
instruction. I'll specifically call out a few folks who I know do this consistently,
@boazbaraktcs
, Adam Hesterberg, Pavlos Protopapas, and Paul Bamberg (although he since passed on the HES courses to someone else nowadays).
A lot of the courses are taught by non-faculty. 5/
It's true that HES does not have any of these barriers, you simply pay for a course and you're in it. Even the degree programs, while they have an application process, it seems to be more of registration process than a selection process, conditional on satisfying the entry... 3/
requirements, e.g. B or higher on pre-admission courses.
Some of the extension school courses are Harvard faculty courses that the teaching faculty have elected to make available through HES so that ppl outside the admissions barrier can have access to high quality... 4/
Now for the slightly more critical takes. HES is not "Harvard" in the sense that it doesn't have the elitist connotations associated with "Harvard". If you're the type of person who judges others based on whether they went to the right school and have the right aristocratic...11/
The Boston University annual Econ PhD stipend is $23,922. MIT's living wage calculator says for Boston the typical annual single Adult living expense is $34,824. I don't have family wealth, so it looks like I'm not applying to BU. Want to increase diversity in Econ? Solve this.
the on-campus programs are subject to and the full catalog of Harvard faculty is not available to HES students, and for better or worse, these things matter in various ways.
I think HES alums and students should proudly say they are graduates or students of HES. 20/20
An opinion likely unpopular with profs: this is a totally reasonable request. One of the most enjoyable parts of the end of one term is the anticipation of all the great classes one can take in the next term. Planning ahead to balance one's schedule and potentially... 1/
Question for Econ/stats ppl: why does a log transform of right skewed positive data, so the data is more normal, work better as a target variable with OLS than the untransformed data? e.g. income data cc:
@causalinf
@instrumenthull
@Jabaluck
@DogmaticPrior
@paulgp
During my undergrad I did not get much statistics training and as I got into econ research I recognized that I should have more of it. As a full-time research assistant I was able to take courses through the extension school to increase my statistics training and apply it... 9/
NS makes a good point here on the theory front. If immigration reduced wages or oversupplied labor, then that argument should mean our increasing population in the developed world (until recently) should have been dropping wages. Clearly that wasn't the case.
pedigree then HES will never be Harvard to you. HES seems to understand this need to separate the main branding of the selective programs from the Extension School programs by offering only one type of degree, a degree in "Extension Studies" with a concentration in the field. 12/
I do think that trying to advertise an HES degree falsely as conflating it with, for example, the on-campus full time MS/MA/MBA degree is wrong. That reeks of a bad intent and a bit of insecurity. Getting an HES degree isn't something to be ashamed of, it's something to be... 18/
Not really. Quick lesson: idiosyncratic risk vs systemic risk. Idiosyncratic risk is the risk that any single bank will fail, e.g. SVB. Notice that JPMC, BoA etc are still good. Systemic risk is at a system level e.g. Great Financial Crisis. 1/
It’s absolutely stupid that if you have $2.5M the government insures $250k of your money if you keep it at one bank, but insures all of it if you keep it at ten banks
This blew up way more than expected and I am absolutely floored by all the support! Apologies to folks who sent DMs for the delay, I'm working my way through responding to everyone so please bear with me a bit. Thanks to everyone who retweeted and liked as well!
Aggregated the main parts of my knowledge of, and musings about, the pre-doc market into one place. Still to do: a discussion about equity and diversity.
I have finally learned the full theory for instrumental variables and two stage least squares, and I understand now why everyone is obsessed with rainfall.
Finding something orthogonal to everything but the variable of interest is hard.
Hey all. I'm looking for summer 2024 internships but mostly seeing listings for undergrads or limited to US residents so I'm having trouble finding good options. Would anyone be able to help with ideas or leads for a profile like mine? Open to US and int'nal. Please let me know!
E.g. Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies: Concentration Data Science. Note, that's not Master of Arts, or Master of Science, it's a specific HES degree title.
This raises an important distinction in my mind which is about what the value of university is. 13/
What’s also interesting is the rise of social media as a job. It’s been happening a lot where many social media accounts and stars are no longer individual creator driven but rather backed by some corporate entity as a product in that portfolio. Another in fitness is V Shred. 2/
Finally finished the MIT MicroMasters in Statistics and Data Science through the
@edXOnline
platform. Great set of courses for getting familiar with probability and statistics theory at the grad level. I think this program should be the standard for online course quality.
I'm taking "Real Analysis, Convexity, and Optimization" through Harvard's Extension School this semester and in the first lecture the prof says that the course used to be called "Convexity and Optimization w/ Applications" but Econ grad adcoms want to see a course with ... 1/
This blew up way more than expected and I am absolutely floored by all the support! Apologies to folks who sent DMs for the delay, I'm working my way through responding to everyone so please bear with me a bit. Thanks to everyone who retweeted and liked as well!
to research real-time. I even integrated my research focus into the final project for one of the courses. I have no doubt that part of the reason I did reasonably well in my last set of masters applications was because of the access to these courses through HES. 10/
proud of; it's a lot of time, effort, discipline, and intellectual input. It's an investment in developing skills and knowledge, and no one should be shamed as learning from "knock-off Harvard".
That said, it does not carry the benefits of the selection process that... 19/
And I don't think it should try to be. It's doing what I think it's meant to do which is to help democratize access to high quality instruction for ppl who are not able to commit to a full-time program but still want to pursue advancement through education. 17/
There have been TikTok accounts that have actors play the role of the account owner. These actors produce scripted content and even have crossovers with other scripted accounts. Social media has the brand of “real person” so it is concerning that corporations leverage this… 3/
We think folks from selective colleges are more capable because they made it through these selection criteria; "Harvard degree" is in some sense at least as valuable in a discussion of something as "field of study" is. Maybe there is some truth to that. A paper by Barbara... 15/
Biasi and Song Ma of Yale did show that higher ranked (i.e. more selective) schools have curricula that are closer to the innovation happening in the field than lower ranked schools. That said, HES isn't the "Harvard" that ppl generally think of, i.e. the selection barrier. 16/
The McKinsey person trying to paint herself as a working class American has been the funniest part of the SVB story for me. She uses very specific language, e.g. "my husband works in manufacturing", instead of "my husband is a senior director in the manufacturing industry".
@AW_Baker
@EigenGender
Notice here what OP says. Developing writing skills is important for developing and communicating original ideas. An LLM can’t currently produce new ideas as far as I know (that’s singularity level) so it is still important to train students to do this.
If you really focus on and grade based on original analysis and ideas, you can probably distinguish a A-student from a LLM pretty reliably. But it's going to be very hard to grade in a way to distinguishes B-students or C-students from LLMs.
Good on SL for setting expectations but I also want to comment a bit. If research is all about being comfortable with uncertainty, we have an adverse selection problem. I went through undergrad with this “comfort with uncertainty, just try things out” mentality and it hurt me. 1/
In the past, I've had students call my problem sets "emotionally trying". (These are for 2nd-year PhD game theory.) This year I'm going to explain myself and set clearer expectations.
Hot take
Econ programs should put a similar weight on the Writing portion of the GRE as they do on the Quant portion. Being able to pick apart an argument clearly and communicate a position clearly are very valuable in Econ grads.
On the one hand we have the programs with an adcom barrier and on the other we have access to some of the same courses without an adcom barrier. We feel very differently about these two things. I think a big part of the college system is the filtering criteria... 14/
@PradyuPrasad
If I had to guess I’d say it’s because WTP is very high for drugs and PE firms have bought out companies like this then proceeded to slowly raise the prices back to high profitability. Cuban is in an interesting position because he likely won’t sell and doesn’t need profitability
@_alice_evans
I found this as the definition of patriarchy but I can't seem to connect this definition to your tweet. Can you help me understand the connection between this data and the definition? It might be that the definite I found is incorrect.
I’ve been thinking about why the US is defacto the place where almost all “general economics research” is based on. Specifically, we seem to think of Econ research using US data as the standard and other countries are plagued with “does this generalize” (to US). Why is this?🧵
@ben_golub
The cost of such a person would not be their salary, but the lost revenue from the lack of click-bait titling such a person would proceed to enact.
perception to influence the public in ways that the public does not understand; specifically, thinking it is a real person. It also makes it somewhat difficult for the public to hold some power over bad actors as the corporation isn’t so easily cancelable. 4/4
I’m leaving my job (and the US) at the end of June and looking to try my hand at building out more regular blog content and expanding into a podcast. What are your favorite Econ/educational podcasts and why do you like them? What do you think you’d like more of or is missing?
Update to this, I went around some of the top 20 schools' admissions websites and quite a number of them aren't accepting GRE scores anymore. Not sure if that's just a covid policy that will eventually go away or if it is here to stay.
@steventberry
@joseazar
Brief thoughts:
No company should be given "grants". Distorts expectations about risky events and discourages companies taking responsibility which spirals. Also, hugely regressive as shareholders are wealthy, tax payers majority are not. 1/4
I remember taking and then dropping my first grad Real Analysis class at Caltech after not understanding almost any of the material. I had to try again because it was a major requirement but I ended up with a B-. My second attempt at grad Real Analysis has gone much better.
This is an interesting outcome from the HireSkills movement. In concept hiring skills is correct; skills do a job, not having gone to college. Self-taught also conceptually fine but two things about it: (1) How do we assess the quality of a self-taught person... 1/
@KhoaVuUmn
I thought it was just me that had this thought. Seeing a tweet that someone "gave up tenure" but are currently tenured at a top 10-15, I was very confused.
@OriginalJumperD
@yitgordon
@yfreemark
The idea is that people will be less likely to purchase heavy vehicles to avoid the fee. I think it should be higher, say $1000 at least.
Hot take
The reason so many elites are into EA is because it resolves them of the burden of having to trade off societal benefit and making $ by providing the rationale that “I’m benefiting society BY making $”, instead of doing societally good things at cost of lower net worth.
@emmbeliever
You really buying this
@stevecook
? The twitter feed of the woman who died
@Ashli_Babbitt
is clearly pro-Trump. If this is all antifa, why was she storming the building? If Trump wasn’t endorsing this, why didn’t he say something sooner? Is this not “trial by combat”?