iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Interesting paper on bureaucratic corruption in Singapore: www.nber.org/papers/w35756 (very comparable to the main form of bureaucratic corruption in India)

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

nothing better than smart, science-based public policy

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Pretty wild (how a bunch of of LLM agents broke out of their sandbox environment to execute code on the internet): swarmtraces.org

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Brief mention of our paper on bureaucrat assignments as instruments of regulatory corruption in India in the FT: www.ft.com/content/ba07...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

“Coast”, Rufino Tamayo, 1973

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

In light of this: www.politico.com/news/2026/09... — a good paper on the strategy around an off switch for potentially dangerous AI: arxiv.org/abs/1611.08219

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

A simple explanation for why a huge productivity enhancing technology might be viewed more skeptically by American than by Chinese society

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

An admirable effort here to document war crimes using satellite imagery: forensic-architecture.org/investigatio...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

i can’t think of a book I’d less like to read

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I learned of this absolutely wild law today, while looking into research on using satellite imagery to detect war crimes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Periodic reminder that the US is deep into the rent-seeking/"decline" stage of political/technological/economic development: finance.yahoo.com/technology/a...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

just clicking through the same link you sent me. I more or less concur with the following:

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

In next set of results, we show politicians leverage this to control bureaucrats/extract rents by posting them close to home and threatening transfers if they don't comply -- especially in jurisdictions with high corruption potential (measured with satellite data on flow of land transactions) 3/3

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

In our first set of results, we use a novel cross-referenced design to estimate bureaucrats' preferences over posts, including measures of preference intensity. Posts matter quite a bit -- with a 1-SD improvement in proximity to hometown worth a large fraction of official salary 2/3

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

New (well, finally published) paper out at AJPS on "Bureaucrat Assignments as Instruments of Political Control": doi.org/10.1111/ajps... . We estimate Indian land officials' preferences over geographical posts and test a "matching market" model of how politicians use assignments to extract rents 1/3

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

architecturally speaking, the biblioteca vasconcelos in Mexico City has to be one of the top-5 libraries in the world..

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

A pretty good guide to the future, I suspect

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I take from this that US public opinion is generally incredibly pro-war

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Cool day of book discussions happening at MPSA, if you're looking for something to attend on Friday:

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

I did make a mental note to self that if / when I publish my book I want a retro cover like this. see also:

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Reminds me of this paper: www.jstor.org/stable/21183...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

I came prepared to be annoyed but it’s not an unreasonable report: president.yale.edu/sites/defaul...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

This would have been useful to for anyone who imagined that a bombing campaign would result the spontaneous collapse of the Iranian regime to read

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Interesting aspects of having a campus on a natural reserve

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

had a chance to visit the Indian agricultural research institute (IARI) fields yesterday — where many of the crops grown in India are/were developed, including the varieties responsible for the green revolution

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Finally, we use a causal discovery framework and the quasi-random assignment of voters to polling places to provide evidence that these are not just correlates but that at least some elements of the built environment have a plausibly causal effect on voter turnout 4/5

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

We use explainable AI tools to identify exactly what features visible in imagery seem to improve turnout: green space, tree cover, official locations, and spacious/breezy buildings -- possibly because they mitigate voting barriers like heat, insecurity, and social distancing fears 3/5

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Do the physical characteristics of the polling places to which citizens are assigned affect voter turnout? We use a convolutional neural network applied imagery of every polling place in Mexico to show that building imagery is highly predictive of turnout, over and above standard predictors 2/5

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Came across a cool paper on how false beliefs are sustained in equilibrium. In Murcia, prayers for rain appear to work - because they are timed to occur when rain is increasingly likely. Praying for rain globally is only found where rainfall is predictable with time: www.nber.org/papers/w31411

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

This book is relevant to thinking about the present constitutional moment in the US. Constitutional and federal mythology aside, the US has always had some elements of extreme political centralization in the hands of the presidency that go back to a desire to create an electoral monarchy

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Come check out our panel on Bureaucratic Performance in the Developing World at APSA (Thu, September 11, 12:00 to 1:30pm PDT in East Meeting Level, East 12. I'll be presenting some new work on how farmers and officials in India learned to game satellite-based environmental enforcement.....

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Teaching a new class on technology and politics this fall — which tries to think about contemporary tech governance issues via the historical experience of past technological revolutions (IR, atom bomb, printing press, automobile, etc) Sharing the syllabus in case it is of interest..!

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

In a polarized climate, nothing the president does is a bridge too far for co-partisans. Worth reading this article: muse.jhu.edu/article/729166

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

A great review essay from Avinash Dixit on why government should not / cannot be run like a business: www.edegan.com/pdfs/Dixit%2...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Re-reading this classic, its central thesis — bureaucracies gain autonomy from politicians on the basis of their popularity/reputation — does not seem to hold up very well in the current era. Agencies with stellar reputations (Post Office, NASA, NIH, etc) have been carved up just the same?

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

A really great paper on market power providing evidence that competition between agricultural middle-men results in better prices for farmers. The setting is rural India, but the principle is of course generally relevant: pages.jh.edu/schatt20/pap...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

if Kafka's "The Trial" were written today, it would take the form of mandatory corporate trainings 😤

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

A recent paper for reference: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

interesting claim that political centralization (in ancient Egypt) wasn’t driven by centralized irrigation as often thought by social scientists (Wittfogel hypothesis also revived by recent empirical work). I do think we lean toward ecological determinism because it makes for clean identification..

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Been doing some archival research on the English civil war — amusing to come across what looks like a bored secretary’s doodle from 1645? From the order book of the “committee on plundered ministers” (which evicted ministers suspected of royalist sympathies) so may be some kind of religious hat…

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

This is precisely why scholars argue that Africa’s political development was different (due to land abundance/population scarcity). See two great books below:

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Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Perhaps he is referring to the insane diagrams that everyone has to suffer though in comparative politics seminars. If so, he’s not wrong:

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