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Vlad Tarko

@vladtarko.bsky.social
172 followers 341 following 29 posts

Prof of political economy at University of Arizona. Economic/political institutions, microeconomics and game theory, political/moral philosophy, #rstats My books: amzn.to/37TkK5P

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Reposted by Vlad Tarko
Digressionsimpressions @nescio13.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
On Polycentrism and the New Classical Liberalism. Neoliberalism is dead; Long live Neoliberalism!, pt 1. open.substack.com/pub/digressi... with a shout out to @mattzwolinski.bsky.social @vladtarko.bsky.social, @drnickcowen.bsky.social
open.substack.com
On Polycentrism and the New Classical Liberalism. Neoliberalism is dead; Long live Neoliberalism!, pt 1.
Fairly or not, neo-liberalism (and its cousin new public management) ended up being associated with monopolistic privatization, the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, Austerity, and Pinochet.
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Southern Economic Journal @southerneconj.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Andrew Farrant of Dickinson College and @vladtarko.bsky.social of @uarizona.bsky.social invoke a wealth of previously ignored primary source material that sheds significant new light on James M. Buchanan's early 1980s involvement with Chile. #Chile #Democracy #Dictatorship
doi.org
Who is to put the bell on the cat? Democracy, dictatorship, and James M. Buchanan's early 1980s involvement with Pinochet's Chile
Although Milton Friedman's mid-1970s involvement with Pinochet's Chile has generated much controversy, the claim that James M. Buchanan was similarly eager to provide Pinochet's military dictatorship...
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
The #rstats package for the "Approximate Maximum Influence Perturbation" method of assessing the robustness of your results -- finds the smallest number of observations which, if removed, eliminate the coefficient significance or flip its sign. github.com/rgiordan/zam...
github.com
GitHub - rgiordan/zaminfluence: Tools in R for computing and using Z-estimator approximate influence functions.
Tools in R for computing and using Z-estimator approximate influence functions. - rgiordan/zaminfluence
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
New by Gianna Englert in AJPS Tracing the “true liberalism”: F. A. Hayek as a reader of Tocqueville doi.org/10.1111/ajps...
doi.org
American Journal of Political Science | MPSA Journal | Wiley Online Library
In reaction to diagnoses of a “crisis of liberalism,” scholars are actively engaged in revising our understanding of the tradition's history. This article explores an alternative account of the liber...
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
New job opening at University of Arizona in Department of Political Economy and Moral Science - the home of the PPEL major. Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, philosophers, political scientists, economists, or legal scholars all eligible to apply. arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
arizona.csod.com
Assistant Professor, PEMS
Teach four courses a year distributed across the PPEL B.A. program, the PPE M.A. program and the university general education program. Such courses ma...
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Nick Huntington-Klein @nickchk.com · 01/04/2025
The second edition of The Effect is now available for preorder! This version has a whole new chapter on Partial Identification, a considerable update on staggered treatment and control variables in DID, and zillions of other little updates throughout. www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...
routledge.com
The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality
The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality, Second edition is about research design, specifically concerning research that uses observational data to make a causal inference. It is s...
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Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 06/01/2025
In the 1980s, economist Julian Simon won his bet with biologist Paul Ehrlich on material prices. Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich bet over different decades, and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity?
Chart titled "Who would have won the Simon-Ehrlich wager in any decade since 1900?" showing price trends for chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon (blue) bet prices would remain stable or fall, while Ehrlich (red) bet prices would rise. Simon won the 1980s wager. For chromium, Ehrlich would have won in the 1920s-40s; for copper, he would have won in the 1950s-70s; for nickel, he would have won in the 1950s-70s; for tin, he would have won in the 1940s-70s; and for tungsten, he would have won in the 1950s-70s. Prices are in 1998 US$ per tonne, adjusted for inflation. Data from the US Geological Survey.
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Joshua Gans @joshgans.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Kenneth Arrow’s Last Theorem: Why do the most patient individuals dictate environmental policy in the long run? Let’s explore this fascinating result about efficiency and time preferences. 🧵 www.mechanism-design.org/arch/v009-1/...
mechanism-design.org
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Here’s one in Tucson. First bird that showed up at our new cam. (Love your writing…)
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Arpit Gupta @arpitrage.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
One interesting implication here is that structural transformation into services is faster than manufacturing everywhere in the income distribution, even in the range (0-20k income) when manufacturing is still growing www.ft.com/content/aee5...
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Arpit Gupta @arpitrage.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Krugman's best pieces: • The babysitting co-op slate.com/business/199... • On modeling web.mit.edu/krugman/www/... • Japan liquidity trap web.mit.edu/krugman/www/... • on zoning www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/o... archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blog... • how I work web.mit.edu/krugman/www/...
web.mit.edu
THE FALL AND RISE OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
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Scott Gehlbach @sgehlbach.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Ooh, look at this paper in the JEL. For all you Red Plenty fans.
aeaweb.org
Soviet Mathematics and Economic Theory in the Past Century: A Historical Reappraisal
(December 2024) - What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? This article addresses these questions ...
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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 05/12/2024
In the GIS part of my #rstats #dataviz class, students ran into issues with limiting maps to Europe (thanks to French Guiana), so I wrote up a little guide to dealing with Natural Earth's map unit hierarchy + how to zoom with coord_sf() datavizf24.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2024-11...
In the GIS part of my #rstats #dataviz class, students ran into issues with limiting data to Europe (thanks to French Guiana), so I wrote up a little guide to Natural Earth's map unit hierarchy + how to zoom with coord_sf() https://datavizf24.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2024-11-18_faqs_weeks-11-12.html#i-tried-to-make-a-map-of-just-europe-and-it-includes-more-than-just-europe

The Natural Earth Project uses a hierarchy of country units: Sovereign State > Country > Map unit > Map sub-unit. They have a whole table in the documentation showing where different country-like units appear in this hierarchy

Some countries are easy to work with and have the same value for each of the levels of the hierarchy. Others are way more complex. Here are some from the Natural Earth documentation:

| Sovereignty | Country | Map unit | Map sub-unit |
|:-----------------|:-----------------|:-----------------|:-----------------|
| Algeria | Algeria | Algeria | Algeria |
| Denmark | Greenland | Greenland | Greenland |
| United States of America | United States of America | United States of America | Hawaii |
| United States of America | American Samoa | American Samoa | American Samoa |
| United States of America | US Minor Outlying Islands | Baker Island | Baker Island |
| France | French Southern and Antarctic Lands | French Southern and Antarctic Lands | Bassas da India |
| France | France | French Guiana | French Guiana |
| Spain | Spain | Spain | Canary Islands |If you want to filter the map data to only include Europe, you can (there's a convenient column named `continent`), but it can lead to unexpected output! If you use the country-level data, French Guiana will show up in Europe (since it's part of France):

```{r}
world_shapes_countries |> 
  filter(continent == "Europe", sovereignt != "Russia") |> 
  ggplot() + 
  geom_sf() +
  labs(title = "Continental Europe avec French Guiana") +
  coord_sf(crs = st_crs("EPSG:3035")) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", hjust = 0.5))
```

{Map of continental Europe + French Guiana}If you use the map-unit-level data, though, French Guiana has its own row and counts as South America instead of Europe, so the filtered data only shows continental Europe:

```{r}
world_shapes_map_units |> 
  filter(continent == "Europe", sovereignt != "Russia") |> 
  ggplot() + 
  geom_sf() +
  labs(title = "Continental Europe sans French Guiana") +
  coord_sf(crs = st_crs("EPSG:3035")) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", hjust = 0.5))
```

{Map of continental Europe without French Guiana}Zoomed-in map of continental Europe with parts of North Africa, Turkey, and Russia included
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
What are some good studies about why US healthcare is so much more expensive than European systems? I'm guessing restricted supply is part of the story, but far from all.
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Erin Scott @erinlscott.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Joshua Gans, Scott Stern, and I are thrilled that our new book, Entrepreneurship, Choice and Strategy from W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., is launching into more classrooms this Spring (and your favorite online bookseller in TEN days)! 🎉
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CRAN Package Updates Bot @cranberriesfeed.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
New CRAN package cellularautomata with initial version 0.1.0 #rstats cran.r-project.org/package=cellular…
cran.r-project.org
CRAN: Package cellularautomata
https://cran.r-project.org/package=cellularautomata
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David Ranzolin @daranzolin.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
And for those piping into View(), run rstudioapi::writeRStudioPreference("data_viewer_max_columns", 1000L) to display more than 50 columns at once. #rstats
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
It's really tempting to start using {tidyplot} instead of {ggplot2}. It doesn't cover all the cases I encounter (especially when two datasets are used for the same plot), but for most plots it's much simpler. #rstats jbengler.github.io/tidyplots/ar...
jbengler.github.io
Visualizing data
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Universal structure of grammar.
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Arpit Gupta @arpitrage.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
These two papers, taken together, really cause a rethinking of behavioral economies. Rather than having anomalous risk preferences; it looks like people have complexity aversion to "hard" decisions, especially on valuation, which drives behavioral anomalies. Herbert Simon ftw.
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
If you're using #rstats and ggplot, it's easy to have line plots with labels on the right: - drop the NAs for the variable of interest - define label variable for only the end - use ggrepel to make the labels with some nudge_x - remove legend Example:
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
New in the APSR by Kirshner and Spinner-Halev doi.org/10.1017/S000...
doi.org
Why Political Philosophy Should Be Robust | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
Why Political Philosophy Should Be Robust - Volume 118 Issue 4
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Pretty remarkable prediction for 1993. #SEA2024
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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
it is funny how much the politicized version of immigration economics discourse is "Immigrants supply labor but do not demand labor, thus lowering wages for Americans. Except in the housing market, where immigrants demand housing without supplying it, thus driving up prices for Americans"
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
This looks great! You can now use Obsidian as a simple #rstats IDE. You can run quarto documents inside Obsidian, get help, and see the environment. michelnivard.github.io/Ridian/
michelnivard.github.io
This is idian: – {{< iconify fa6-brands r-project >}}idian
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Made a #rstats package for creating cellular automata. Has a quick way of generating them (as a matrix) based on the Wolfram rule, plotting them, and generating an animation. cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 29/10/2024
recently i watched seven samurai and enjoyed the reference to poor nutrition causing night blindness. i also noticed how shameful it was for the peasants to be eating millet which of course is now marketed as a health food. the film is also full of game theory. literally something for everyone.
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Those of us who favor diversity as an intrinsic good and/or for Hong-Page epistemic reasons really need to grapple with these kind of results instead of hiding form them.
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Our World in Data just got even better: ourworldindata.org/easier-to-re...
ourworldindata.org
We've made it much easier to reuse our data
An overview of our new features: enhanced data downloads and the Chart Data API.
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I guess you could do a Solow model of death rate vs fertility:
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Vlad Tarko @vladtarko.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Yes. Put graphs in the main text, and drop the math in appendices where you check for generality. Bring conclusions from the math in the main text, but leave the proofs self-contained. This is also easier for reading the math.
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Spencer Schien @mrpecners.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Arizona Population Density Is #rstats a thing on here? This was made with R.
Population density map of Arizona, rendered in 3d with R using the Rayshader package.
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Emil Malta 🇬🇱 @emilmalta.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
🏥 Health expenditure 📉 Trends in demographic health indicators. US is an outlier 🔗 tinyurl.com/39rsdcnu I like the subtle text outline from ggshadowtext #rstats #ggplot2 #dataviz #databs
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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 11/11/2024
This chapter (www.andrewheiss.com/research/cha...) has a good overview of the general phenomenon of closing civic space. Most authoritarian countries—and many democracies—have passed laws and imposed all sorts of practical restrictions on domestic and intl civil society
Graphs showing the increase in NGO laws limiting entry, funding, and advocacy since the 1980s, along with an increase in the de facto civil society regulatory environment
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Trevor Davies @bcfish.bsky.social · 07/11/2024
I am super excited to announce the first release of marquee - supercharged markdown support for #ggplot2 (and #rstats graphics in general) Read all about it here: tidyverse.org/blog/2024/05... and browse the package site at: marquee.r-lib.org
tidyverse.org
marquee 0.1.0 - Tidyverse
The initial release brings markdown awareness to grid and ggplot2 to allow for rich text formatting in R graphics.
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Christoph Scheuch @christophscheuch.bsky.social · 31/10/2024
The origin story of Tidy Finance is now available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7J... A huge thanks to @posit.co for making this talk a fantastic experience from start to finish. I highly recommend submitting a proposal – posit::conf is an amazing community to be part of!
youtube.com
Empowering Reproducible Finance through Tidy Finance with R and Python - posit conf 2024
YouTube video by Posit PBC
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Michel Nivard @michelnivard.bsky.social · 08/11/2024
A video on some of my progress integrating R, and Quarto into Obsidian note taking software, still in alpha/beta! www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMW... #rstats #quarto #obsidian
youtube.com
Ridian: R and Quarto in Obsidian
YouTube video by Michel's Science Speedrun
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