iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Elliott Collins

Justin Sandefur @justsand.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Two views of US strikes in Nigeria... FT reporting: They killed nobody. In the wrong state. WaPo editorial: Kudos to Trump for engaging, More, please!

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

No one elevates subtext into text like this guy.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Tooey @sueric.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Sure is beautiful out there right now.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Best one of these I only recently processed was "space shuttle", which comes from textiles.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Michael Bench-Dracula @mikebenchcapon.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Getting negatively polarized into thinking that maybe LLMs can be useful for some stuff sometimes

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

It's fashionable to hate on ML apps these days, but note-taking apps strike me as one of the few unequivocally good uses for LLMs.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

As @michelnivard.bsky.social was quick to point out, this is looking at two groups of people: top early-career and top-later career professionals. Take a moment to introspect before you use those patterns to inform your own career path.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy Eerily good timing. But ... honestly, maybe, idk.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

Common misunderstanding, but economics isn't about how people maximize money or consumption. It's all about how people pursuing seemingly straightforward incentives and preferences will, without fail, make weird and surprising choices.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

I was educated in the RCT-or-nothing tradition, so it took me a while to internalize the fact that that most of the useful knowledge we have wasn't gained via randomized experiment and isn't even the type of fact an experiment can teach you.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Alexander Berger @albrgr.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

I wanted to give an end-of-year shout out to @ourworldindata.org, who we recently gave a three-year, $3m general support grant (short 🧵)

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

I just don't think that anybody understands what humanity is. I think the most common and most intuitive models might just be super wrong.

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Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Mods?! Mods???!

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VoxDev @voxdev.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

🆕 Africa faces a climate-conflict poverty trap. Growth is the best solution. Today on VoxDev, Joel Ferguson, Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel & Solomon Hsiang outline their research on feedback loops between growth and conflict under climate change: voxdev.org/topic/macroe...

voxdev.org

Africa faces a climate-conflict poverty trap. Growth is the best solution.

New projections highlight the feedback loop between lower growth and increased conflict risk in Africa under climate change.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Gabriel Zucman @gabrielzucman.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

This is basically the plot of a Shakespeare play.

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Justin Sandefur @justsand.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

TOP: Household surveys ask women age 15-49 a lot more questions. BOTTOM: So enumerators appear to drop them, non-randomly. Adjusting for this "[calls] into question whether Africa’s fertility transition is as uniquely slow as previously thought." economics.yale.edu/sites/defau...

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 04/12/2025

My old contribution to this discourse:

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Everyone should go subscribe to Justin Sandefur's new blog.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Paddy Carter @paddycarter.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

a similar investment size argument holds for funds, when it comes to BII investment we reach more manufacturers indirectly via funds than we do directly www.bii.co.uk/en/news-insi...

bii.co.uk

Investing for impact in African private equity funds - British International Investment

Firms of different sizes have different needs at different times. Development is stifled when businesses cannot access the capital they...

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Data Bear 🏳️‍🌈 @dataandpolitics.net · 29/11/2025

For this Black Friday, it would mean a lot if you subscribed to my newsletter. I have some good posts lined up and it’s free to subscribe. ❤️ dataandpolitics.net

dataandpolitics.net

Data and Politics

Data and Politics | AI, Tech, Finance, and Political Analysis with Kindness and Snark

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

davidkinney.bsky.social @davidkinney.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

For everyone whose back hurt a little when they woke up this morning, a new strongbad email: m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zhs....

m.youtube.com

Strong Bad Email #210 - Robots

YouTube video by homestarrunnerdotcom

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Eva Vivalt @evavivalt.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

🚨 New working paper! How well do people predict the results of studies? @sdellavi.bsky.social and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Matt Darling @besttrousers.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Have we considered the possibility that the "67" meme is caused by Data sending information out of the time loop in an attempt to stop America from crashing into the USS Bozeman?

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

In the early Facebook days, this was called "Vaguebooking" and it largely fell out of fashion for a while, but Bluesky has really brought it back.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Lora Kolodny @lorak.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

in case you missed it - this feels very relevant in light of the emails between Larry Summers & Jeffrey Epstein. In the emails, Summers is seeking advice on how to seduce a woman he describes as a mentee type. Unknown who she is or where she was working or studying. He was at Harvard.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

I read the news most days, but I still only know what a third of current-event posts on this site are talking about. Everyone seems to have a separate idea of what the main story of the day is.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 17/11/2025

In the last decades, the world has made fantastic progress against extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 *billion* people. 🧵

A stacked area chart showing the total population (split by World Bank region) living in extreme poverty, defined as living below the International Poverty Line of $3 per day. Shown from 1990 to 2025, with World Bank projections from 2026–2040. The data is adjusted for inflation and cost of living differences.

Rapid progress against extreme poverty in recent decades has slowed and is projected to end.

In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 billion people.

The number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.

The data source is Lakner et al (2024), updated using the World Bank PIP (2025). The chart is licensded CC BY to Our World in Data.

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Machine Elvis @oatswizard.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

It rules that $200-$400 of our taxes annually is enough to support SNAP and help our friends and neighbors eat. I don’t want people to starve! We have the resources to prevent that! Every dollar spent on SNAP saves more money elsewhere! It’s obviously good!

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

I still can't imagine what sequence of events lead to people like this being on a first-name basis with this guy. Are there other multimillionaires who moderately famous econometrics guys just casually email with about policy blogs?

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

💯💯 Conspiracy theories so often serve the powerful because they tell you that you can't see it when powerful people do bad things, so that we miss it when those things are done in public.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Bluesky is still like Twitter in that it frequently feels like you've walked into a room where people are dealing with an active crisis that they're too focused to explain and you have to scroll the news to figure out which story they're talking about.

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Sad to see academia abandoning its proud traditions like this.

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Data Bear 🏳️‍🌈 @dataandpolitics.net · 10/11/2025

I would consider myself a centrist Democrat and I am so tired of these feckless, stand-for-nothing centrists.

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

It is genuinely hard for most people to grasp how poor the past was.

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Data Bear 🏳️‍🌈 @dataandpolitics.net · 05/11/2025

NOVA is Spanberger +45.

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Hyperlexic @hyperlexic.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

Oakland built 10,000 units, rents dropped 25%, the value of the new apartment buildings dropped 50%, and some projects went bankrupt (were handed over to the lender, foreclosed, etc). good for tenants!

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Reposted by Elliott Collins

Seema Jayachandran @seema.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

We just spent 6 months to add 1 figure to this paper. Some people said, "Couples aren't prioritizing men's careers. Men just have better earnings opportunities when moving." Earnings effects of moves for couples on the left, singles on the right. Negligible gap between single men and women.

Event study coefficients that show that men's earnings rise more than women's among couples following a cross-commuting zone move (left panels). The pattern is muted or reverses among single men and single women (right panels).

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

this is one of the things where they’re clearly doing it to trigger the libs, but the triggering thing is “the government should be allowed to kill people for no reason”, and if you’re not gonna ‘take the bait’ on that, why even have a politics?

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Elliott Collins @elliottcollins.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

Only the truly wise will understand which minor, passing political news story this is referencing.

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Simon Frankel Pratt @simonpratt.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

I also wrote a book on targeted killings carried out by the US and wow, as Nicholas points out, this is so far outside of any previously settled practice or norm. Absolutely, unambiguously abnormal and well into 'murder' territory by any established convention.

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Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 28/08/2025

To track progress towards ending extreme poverty by 2030, the United Nations relies on the World Bank to estimate the share of people living below a certain threshold, called the International Poverty Line (IPL).

A chart showing how the share of the global population between different poverty lines has changed since 1990. Extreme poverty (defined as being below the International Poverty Line of $3 a day) has decreased from 43% in 1990 to 10% today. Poverty has also decreased at other thresholds. The data source is the World Bank. The chart is licensed CC BY to Our World in Data.

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