iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

isitcredible.com is my new website. You will find a public archive of automated reports on journal articles from across the full domain of human knowledge. You can also use it as a private service to get feedback on your own work.

isitcredible.com

Is It Credible?

111

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

If anyone out there knows anything about gene-editing, please DM me. I have some questions about this article that go beyond a problematic pathologist's report. 3/3

000

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

These are the questions I have asked @nature.com in response. And this is the article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 2/3

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

@nature.com just allowed its authors to retrospectively alter a signed and dated pathologist's report after I pointed out that it contained major errors. 1/3

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Given that it is MIT, I am assuming that the brain scan images look like this.

010

Reposted by joseph francis

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 03/06/2025

Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

2645989

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

I believe that there is a lot of peer-reviewed junk floating around out there, some of it highly cited. But it is time to cast down the idols. Let’s go! 20/20

000

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Hence, if you like what I do and can afford it, please make a donation at: paypal.com/donate/?busi.... And if you want to pay me to investigate a study or methodology that you suspect is problematic, my DMs are open. Even if you can’t pay me, I would still be interested! 19/20

paypal.com

Donate to Joseph Francis

Help support Joseph Francis by donating or sharing with your friends.

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

For my sins, then, I am here on my hill in Wales, an “independent scholar.” The University of Birmingham has been kind enough to give me an institutional affiliation, but it does not provide any funding. 18/20

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Why so quick? Because I have a bad attitude: I’m critical, aggressive, don’t respect my superiors, etc. This meant that I realized early on that I was ill-suited to academia, where disobedience is not often rewarded. 17/20

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

In the case of ADH (2015), people have been reading and citing it for a decade, accepting it because it had been published in a top journal, etc. Nonetheless, I first looked at on Saturday afternoon, and it took me about 24 hours to see the problem. 16/20

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

And, finally, I explain how junk articles persist: the incentives that researchers face to use trendy new methods; the dysfunctional peer-review system that rubber stamps them as truth; the journals that are unwilling to retract articles even when they are shown to be junk. 15/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Indeed, I argue, the “Synthetic Control Method” is so flimsy that economists do not even need to be aware that they have p-hacked their research design. It can happen by default because everything is left to subjective choice. 14/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

In a second new paper, I then use the case of a recent paper in the Journal of Political Economy to show how the method that ADH use has such researcher degrees of freedom that it is wide open to abuse. github.com/joefrancis50... 13/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

ADH then justify this choice by saying that it did not affect their identification strategy, but––worryingly––do not seem to be aware that it has implications for their causal inference strategy. 12/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

The risk is that ADH have excluded countries that, like West Germany, did poorly in the 1990s, thereby ensuring that West Germany’s poor performance would seem significant compared to the comparators they had selected. 11/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Furthermore, I do not think the problems in ADH (2015) stop with data handling. This footnote is a major red flag, in my opinion. It suggests that they may have cherry-picked their donor pool to suit their hypothesis. 10/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

The p-value calculated from the permutation test goes up from 0.059 to 0.118. I do not believe ADH’s results would have been published if they had used the correct variable of interest. As such, their article probably ought to be retracted (cc. @retractionwatch.com‬). 9/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

I have also replicated ADH (2015) using real GDP per capita data from the World Bank and the German national accounts. Otherwise, the data are the same as in the original. And the results aren’t great. 8/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

In the paper, I demonstrate this by comparing their data to the current OECD data, but really you can see it just by looking at their chart above. It’s obvious that West Germany’s real GDP per capita could not have grown at 8% per year from 1860 to 1990. 7/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

ADH (2015) shows how dysfunctional the current system is. As I detail in the first of two new papers, they made a simple data-handling error. Rather than use real GDP per capita, they accidentally used nominal GDP per capita: github.com/joefrancis50.... 6/20

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Yet peer review is broken. It only encourages conformity and reinforces hierarchy, as well as wasting everyone’s time. www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-a... 5/20

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Why did no one notice? I fear that it is because scholars are not encouraged to look for such mistakes. Peer review is supposed to be the arbiter of truth. If something is published in a top journal, it must be right. The dominant epistemology assumes that peer review works. 4/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

In other words, people have been reading and citing ADH (2015) for a decade without, it seems, anyone stopping to think “Oh wait, West Germany’s real GDP per capita probably didn’t grow by 8% per year from 1960 to 1990. That would be a miracle.” 3/20

110

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

To put this in perspective: - ADH (2015) was written by Ivy League professors. - It was published in the prestigious American Journal of Political Science. - It has 1,504 citations on Web of Science and 3,415 on Google Scholar. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... 2/20

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2015) is where the replication crisis comes to economics and political science. Simply put, this chart is impossible. It implies that West Germany’s real GDP per capita grew by almost 8% per year from 1960 to 1990. But it clearly didn’t… 1/20

185

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

p.s. In response to popular demand, here is the distribution of the white population in North and South by wealth brackets.

010

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

The paper is here: raw.githubusercontent.com/joefrancis50.... And it is the fifth in a series of papers, which you can find linked here: bsky.app/profile/joef.... All feedback is very welcome. 12/12

171

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

And for the quants, there is even a little spatial regression discontinuity design (RDD). The paper has something for everyone, in other words. 11/12

160

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

I also revisit the work of Martin Robison Delany, an abolitionist who also argued that white Southerners had done well out of slavery. 10/12

160

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

In the paper, I also venture into intellectual history to explain how the myth of white Southern poverty before the Civil War became so entrenched. I discuss figures such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Hinton Rowan Helper. 9/12

140

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

Crucially, that higher rate of investment also benefitted non-slaveholding white Southerners, not least because they monopolized the better jobs that came with growth. 8/12

130

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

I argue that this was because the enslaved were kept at a subsistence standard of living while being forced to work as much as possible, as if they were capital goods. Their forced savings then made possible a higher rate of investment. 7/12

130

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

My paper therefore fits well with Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s analysis of how Virginians were motivated to fight to defend their material interests. I show that white Southerners were correct to believe that they had benefited from slavery. 6/12

140

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

White Southerners were generally doing well out of a social order based on slavery. And that is why they fought to defend it once Abraham Lincoln was elected at the end of 1860. 5/12

130

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

The median white Southern household was also doing well, despite the region’s greater inequality. Widespread poverty was largely confined to Appalachia, where slavery was less prevalent. 4/12

131

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

In this case study, I look at the wealth reported by white Americans to the census takers in 1860. On average, white Southerners were prosperous. They were far wealthier than their counterparts in the North. 3/12

131

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

The paper tests my broader hypothesis that American racism has proved so persistent because it has historically allowed one group to get ahead at the expense of another. 2/12

161

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

“Why the South Fought” is my latest paper on American economic history. In it, I argue that white Southerners defended slavery because they had benefited from it. The idea that a mass of “poor whites” had been impoverished by slavery is a myth. 1/12

13512

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

(Although, iirc, the same speechwriter included the joke about BoJo’s dad also being a toolmaker, so I kind of forgave them.)

020

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Yeah, I remember thinking at the time: “Landes must have been assigned in some speechwriter’s course while studying PPE at Oxford.” It was not a good omen.

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Logging out. Back to the manuscript.

020

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

The sad thing about historians being economically illiterate is that they either have to ignore what economic historians say or accept it on faith.

010

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Public Service Announcement: Avoid Harvard University Press www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

010

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Don’t forget the schisms between the two Cambridge Popes.

0181

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Just when you think the UK can’t get any shitter, it signs a trade deal with the US. Never overestimate us, world!

010

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Still, I’m going to enjoy having access to plastic beef.

100

joseph francis @joefrancis.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

“In lab experiments, insulting lowballs get rejected!” Only because there aren’t enough UKs in lab experiments.

110