Paul Novosad

@paulnovosad184k followers

econ prof @dartmouth, founder @devdatalab r2: "a morass of disjointed streams of consciousness" 20% satire 🤷

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#	Date	Post	↓ Outlier	Views	Likes	Reposts	Bookmarks
1	Oct 9, '24	What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too? And why should we care? A 🧵 on	151×	3.9M	19k	3.9k	11k
2	Sep 5, '25	How stupid is this? Hyundai is building an $8 billion factory in Georgia, and ICE is imprisoning company staff who are on business trips from South Korea. So much for investing in	110×	2.8M	53k	10k	3k
3	Apr 12, '25	This is fucked up man. We made this country great by welcoming people like this.	90.2×	2.3M	38k	3.4k	2.4k
4	Jun 15, '23	📣 New working paper on residential segregation in India. We’ve been working for 5 years on this. 8 facts about residential segregation in India, from new administrative data. The	61.6×	1.6M	5.8k	2k	2.8k
5	Dec 6, '24	Fascinating paper on where 6000 global elites went to college. Billionaires, CEOs, heads of state, central bankers, etc. In a word: Harvard. Fully 10% of global elites went to Harv	56×	1.4M	7.7k	1.1k	4.8k
6	May 7, '24	Dartmouth's student government held an open "no confidence" vote on the president's handling of campus protests. It passed (no confidence) 13-2 (with 3 abstensions). Then they repe	48.9×	1.3M	2.9k	399	653
7	Nov 4, '25	What happens when online job applicants start using LLMs? It ain't good. 1. Pre-LLM, cover letter quality predicts your work quality, and a good cover gets you a job 2. LLMs wipe o	33.2×	854k	1.6k	323	1k
8	Jul 31, '24	Corporate landlords are pretty good actually. The real terrors are the ones who own 2–3 houses.	27.7×	712k	7.4k	145	385
9	Oct 14, '25	In the 1980s, Nestlé was moving into infant formula markets in low-income countries. With each new market entry, moms switched from breastfeeding to unclean water, and infant morta	23×	592k	1.2k	293	497
10	Nov 2, '24	A new India-China fact (to me): The Chinese state prioritized primary education over secondary/tertiary, while the Indian state did the opposite. Chinese primary enrollment rate pa	20.9×	536k	4.5k	851	1.7k
11	Apr 22, '23	Is there a theoretical basis for being comfortable with charging men more for car insurance? It's statistical discrimination, it's clear why firms do this, and it seems fine with m	20×	515k	1.6k	174	232
12	Dec 16, '22	A 🧵 on our work on US mortality change, just out in AEJ:App, with @thesamasher and @charlierafkin. We ask: how concentrated is the U.S. pre-Covid mortality crisis? Is everyone doi	20×	513k	874	237	272
13	Nov 15, '21	I knew scientists were territorial but this is next level. Remember Katalin Karikó, the unsung hero of mRNA vaccines? Her advisor Robert Suhadolnik tried to have her deported when	19.8×	0	8.3k	2.5k	737
14	Jun 4, '25	Deep meritocracy is fundamentally unstable, because elites can't tolerate their kids losing. They will engage in destructive status competition with each other, and also just direc	17.9×	461k	6.1k	645	2k
15	Jun 1, '23	🤷🤷‍♀️New data: SHRUG 2 is out!! @devdatalab has been working on this for two years, a HUGE update to India’s coolest data platform: 1. Maps of every 2011 town and village, with	17.8×	457k	2.1k	534	1.1k
16	Oct 31, '24	The Latinx polling paper is excellent, but reaches the wrong conclusion. It has almost nothing to do with queerphobia, Latino voters just don’t like being called LatinX. Politician	16.8×	431k	1.7k	164	379
17	Oct 1, '23	I've lately reviewed many papers that feel p-hacked. Some clues: results implausibly large, operate at the wrong unit of observation, too perfect, etc A couple of specific author	14.6×	374k	1.6k	140	389
18	Oct 9, '24	Here's the core idea: If talent is uniformly distributed and opportunity is equal, then Nobelists will come out of the woodwork, from random families & places. If every laureat	13×	335k	1.6k	123	117
19	Jun 8, '23	🚨Please stop calling this brain drain. When there are high overseas returns to education, more people get educated. Think about all the folk working their asses off for this exa	13×	335k	966	153	213
20	Oct 9, '24	Women face a lot of barriers in the sciences, especially in our sample cohorts (~1835–1975). Only 28/735 laureates are women. Female laureates come from more elite backgrounds — su	12.4×	318k	1.1k	136	113
21	Apr 21, '22	I hope the staff at @OpenAI are checking their server logs carefully.	11.7×	0	6.6k	691	438
22	Mar 7, '25	View post on X	11.4×	292k	10k	574	505
23	Nov 2, '24	Live-tweeting @karthik_econ's presentation on state capacity at NEUDC. Simple story of India's economy: - Top 10% drives demand and growth - Next 30-40% in service sector jobs supp	11.3×	291k	1.3k	277	1.3k
24	Oct 3, '23	Re-upping this story about how Katalin Karikó's advisor threatened to have her deported if she moved labs.	10.9×	280k	1.8k	417	101
25	Jan 23, '23	Behavioral econ is cool, but once we admitted people are irrational, it seems wrong to end up with 50x more work on "we must help people with tiny nudges," vs. "Oh shit, firms must	10.1×	260k	1.7k	128	152
26	Jul 3, '23	I've been telling people about this paper for a while, it's sooooo neat. Prayers for rain only "work" in places where the probability of rain is increasing in the length of the dry	9.7×	250k	1.6k	271	508
27	Jul 22, '25	The most essential stabilizing feature of a society is a status hierarchy that young people—especially young men—can reliably climb by following a clear and pro-social set of rules	9.1×	233k	2.6k	115	848
28	Aug 30, '25	AI leaders should spend more energy reckoning with this fact. A generation of kids is losing their best opportunity to learn how to read, write, and think, and they will pay the pr	9.1×	233k	1.4k	184	334
29	Jul 2, '24	What gets you into a top college is being above some moderate competence bar, and then, from like 8th grade or earlier, organizing your life around getting into a top college. Very	8.9×	228k	2.3k	82	276
30	Oct 9, '24	Why we should care: science is arguably the most important force for human progress, maybe by a lot. More discoveries, better lives for all of us. If there’s a kid who could make a	8.3×	214k	3.5k	243	277
31	Nov 11, '25	Econ seminar culture is built on the assumption that the audience knows something that the speaker doesn't, and that the speaker values that information. A very important thing the	8.3×	212k	638	101	369
32	Jul 14, '24	RCT reducing leisure screen time among adults and adolescents to <3 hours per week. Compliance was high — they exchanged smartphones for flip phones. Results: - 45 mins more p	8.3×	212k	1.2k	208	672
33	Oct 9, '24	So how is our society doing at finding and supporting the potential scientists who can improve this precarious existence? Our idea was to look at the childhoods of the Nobel Laurea	7.6×	196k	1k	47	29
34	Jul 30, '25	When corporate landlords like Blackstone enter a suburban neighborhood, rents fall and segregation declines because minority renters can now afford to live there.	7.5×	193k	995	132	337
35	Oct 9, '24	This is work with @thesamasher, @eni_iljazi (PhD student at Wharton) and Catriona Farquharson (predoc at Princeton). You can read the full paper here: 4/N	7.1×	182k	808	55	149
36	Dec 14, '23	I'm just so sad that so many progressives have abandoned the ideal that we shouldn't treat people differently based on their skin color. I'm baffled people are willing to defend th	6.9×	177k	920	50	91
37	Sep 30, '25	@captgouda24 No Nick, no!	6.8×	174k	3.7k	10	17
38	Sep 5, '25	@TalosDreams It's a joint LG / Hyundai plant	6.7×	173k	4.5k	100	83
39	Oct 9, '24	We researched the childhood background of every laureate in the sciences. We excluded Peace and Literature, since those committees sometimes intentionally select people who were bo	6.5×	166k	958	51	41
40	Feb 8, '25	Efficiency = Output over costs. DOGE so far has shown no understanding of efficiency. If you save 5 billion dollars and bring cancer research to a halt, you have not improved effic	6.3×	162k	7.4k	698	248
41	Oct 9, '24	For every laureate, we identified the predicted education and income rank of their fathers. (We found data on 715/739 laureates in the sciences). Looks like we can reject that unif	6.0×	155k	1.1k	107	131
42	Oct 29, '25	Comms job candidate engineers a 4M view tweet about looking for a job. Boss move.	6.0×	154k	880	9	35
43	Oct 9, '24	In economic history, the best measure of a kid’s childhood is often the father’s occupation. It predicts SES, and is often the only thing you can find. Moms occupations are more sp	5.9×	153k	809	52	66
44	Oct 9, '24	The father occupation that is the most common for a Nobel Laureate: business owner! Some large businesses, but also a lot of small ones. Doctors, professors, engineers are also com	5.9×	153k	1.4k	181	253
45	Oct 9, '24	Or Har Gobind Khorana, the child of a village taxation clerk, the only literate family in a little village in Punjab. He made it to Liverpool, Cambridge, and finally Wisconsin, whe	5.7×	146k	1.1k	63	61
46	Apr 12, '25	Her “mistake” was bringing lab materials without proper declaration— requested by her Harvard PI. Arbitrary detention like this is how autocracies operate— it’s also why autocracie	5.4×	139k	3.2k	158	168
47	Oct 9, '24	They are not universally from elite families — take Daniel Tsui, the child of illiterate farmers from Henan China. He somehow made it to Augustana College in Illinois, the Universi	5.1×	132k	1.5k	69	126
48	Nov 2, '24	Striking differences in what kind of bachelors degree people are getting from the Chinese and Indian education systems. India: Humanities, Law and Business dominate, Science and En	5.0×	129k	835	187	167
49	Oct 9, '24	Since we have 125 years of prize data, we can ask whether we have gotten any better at creating access for brilliant people from less elite backgrounds. These graphs show the fathe	4.8×	123k	733	64	55
50	May 21, '25	Well this is just fascinating. Arranged marriage rates plummeting with development, everywhere in the world except South Asia. From Gabriela Rubio's paper, via @_alice_evans	4.8×	122k	768	144	293
51	Oct 9, '24	Only 3% of laureates grew up on farms — like this year’s Medicine winner, Victor Ambros (also from Hanover & Dartmouth, woot woot!). Other notable laureates from farming famili	4.5×	114k	771	54	38
52	Oct 9, '24	The average ed rank of a Nobel laureate father was 95 in 1901, and is 88 today. For the optimists: we’re creating opportunity for twice as many people as we used to! For the pessim	4.2×	108k	1.1k	99	56
53	Aug 13, '25	"The world is better understood as misaligned incentives rather than coordinated oppression" What if this was the core thing we taught in Intro Econ instead of how to calculate the	4.0×	103k	1.2k	102	375
54	Jun 15, '23	Fact 1: India is very segregated. Urban places are about as segregated as rural places, for Scheduled Castes. For Muslims, segregation is worse in cities. The graph shows the Dissi	4.0×	103k	585	176	37
55	Nov 11, '25	A lot of Trump policy can be summarized as identifying prisoners' dilemmas where we have somehow coordinated on a cooperative equilibrium, and switching us over to defect-defect.	4.0×	102k	1.5k	122	144
56	Nov 5, '24	Wild study: 1. Desired # of kids is highly unstable, and goes up as you get older 2. But people think their desires are stable 3. When recalling, you claim it's what you always wan	3.9×	101k	904	128	376
57	Oct 9, '24	By every measure, Nobel laureates born in the United States come from less elite backgrounds than laureates born elsewhere. 17/N	3.9×	101k	960	114	95
58	Oct 19, '22	Wow, quite the story. 👇🏻👇🏻 Founding Arxiv is apparently not good for your academic career. Good evidence that improving how science works is insufficiently incentivized.	3.9×	0	2.1k	334	146
59	Oct 9, '24	Which world region has been the best at nurturing top scientists from ordinary families? We thought it might be Eastern Europe, with its Soviet mass education. But in fact it is th	3.9×	100k	879	105	85
60	Sep 6, '24	RCT introduction of a pollution market in Surat, Gujarat. Pollution fell by 20–30%, and efficiently — gains came from the firms who could cut pollution most effectively. Mortality	3.5×	90k	823	181	259
61	Dec 6, '24	Thank god, I was really worried about the anesthesiologists, I've heard many of them live paycheck-to-paycheck. A lot of people don't seem to be understanding what has happened her	3.1×	79k	957	22	33
62	Oct 24, '25	Incredible cynicism and betrayal of Reagan by his own foundation. If anyone actually clicked through to listen to the real address, they would see he says exactly what the Ontario	3.1×	79k	1.5k	228	33
63	Oct 9, '24	We dug deeper into those U.S. born laureates, by linking their birth places to the Opportunity Atlas. Not surprisingly, we get more laureates from non-elite families in places with	3.0×	78k	614	46	48
64	Oct 9, '24	More surprisingly, we get more laureates in places with more downward mobility. When there is lots of churn, and children from rich families are not guaranteed to be rich, we pro	3.0×	77k	683	69	66
65	Sep 19, '25	LessWrong: 100,000+ long-form posts discussing whether AIs should ever leave air-gapped servers Albania: makes GPT3.5 a government minister	3.0×	77k	1.3k	84	103
66	Jan 6, '22	Our study on excess mortality in India is out: Excess deaths close to 3 million. 1. Far higher than official totals. 2. Implies global COVID death count off by >2 million (and m	3.0×	0	844	477	150
67	May 7, '24	When you hear how many people say or support something, you always have to understand the social dynamics in which these "votes" take place. Many institutional and social structure	3.0×	76k	1.3k	67	43
68	Apr 13, '25	@IvanaKrumi It’s pretty clear you’ve never done PhD level recruiting before.	2.9×	74k	4.6k	29	34
69	Jan 5, '25	Storytelling matters in econ too	2.9×	74k	837	168	537
70	Oct 14, '22	📣📣 New data alert: we @devdatalab are releasing open village and town maps for all of India. Find them at the top link here: We wrote a post with some more details about the maps	2.8×	0	919	251	386
71	Jul 23, '24	My preliminary takeaway from the 3-year cash transfer study: Poverty is a lot more than just not having enough cash. Many factors interact to keep people in a bad equilibrium. Once	2.7×	70k	572	65	251
72	Oct 9, '24	But it's consistent with other theory and evidence that increasing access to opportunity makes a better society for everyone, not just the poor people getting more opportunities. 2	2.7×	68k	734	87	111
73	Oct 9, '24	In the global income distribution, the average Nobel laureate comes from a family at the 94th percentile — implying that 90% of global scientific talent is not achieving its potent	2.7×	68k	630	101	61
74	Oct 9, '24	A couple of ideas: 1. People work harder when their outcomes aren’t guaranteed 2. We get better allocation of talent when there is a lot of economic churn Causation isn’t correlati	2.6×	67k	762	61	84
75	Oct 9, '24	Stephen Jay Gould’s concern is as important today as it was in 1980. Brilliant people, with the potential to make world-changing scientific discoveries, are living and dying in pov	2.5×	65k	874	160	60
76	Oct 9, '24	One last thing. All our work so far is looking only at fathers’ occupations, NOT at birth countries. But the child of a tailor in India has far fewer life opportunities than the ch	2.3×	58k	553	41	20
77	Apr 21, '22	View post on X	2.2×	0	1.4k	88	33
78	Apr 14, '25	The replies to this feel like a psy-op. Americans are divided on immigration, but every reply guy is thrilled to see immigrants suffer, and always the 4chan sass. I don’t believe A	2.1×	55k	601	38	38
79	Nov 15, '21	More on Karikó, all from the excellent so far A Shot To Save The World by @gzuckerman	2.0×	0	1.2k	137	60
80	Jul 31, '24	What we need is the Cheesecake Factory, but for landlords	1.9×	50k	593	3	3
81	Dec 6, '24	To me, this is a pretty clear sign that global leadership is very unmeritocratic. To a first order, going to an elite college is a function of choices made by kids' parents, not th	1.9×	48k	702	106	114
82	Oct 9, '24	We address genetics, bias in prize committees, contributions to society outside of the sciences, among others. I’ll post another thread on some of these in a bit. 28/27	1.8×	47k	615	15	57
83	Apr 13, '25	@MandrakeRa2782 The punishment needs to fit the crime. She had lab materials that they'd repeatedly shipped legally. It's an administrative error. Friend, you don't want to live in	1.8×	46k	1.1k	24	18
84	Mar 27, '25	It's true that left culture became too dominant at universities. If you think abducting people off the streets of Somerville because they wrote op-eds is an appropriate response, t	1.8×	45k	1.3k	92	53
85	May 15, '24	U.S. working hours per year are lower than they have ever been. The thing that is demanding your constant, full attention and dysregulating your nervous system is your iPhone.	1.7×	44k	644	79	54
86	Jul 31, '24	@kaseyklimes 6:1 in favor, based on the replies so far if we can get to n=30, it will be data	1.7×	44k	706	0	3
87	Aug 12, '21	What a graph! High-income parents teach their children independence, low-income parents teach obedience. Source: WVS via Acemoglu Theory: parents teach traits that are optimal for	1.6×	0	682	178	101
88	Nov 18, '22	Reasons you are probably overestimating the probability that Twitter dies: 1. Platforms die when their audience leaves. Twitter audience is bigger than ever. 2. Platforms survive l	1.6×	0	819	127	25
89	Nov 16, '21	What a trajectory	1.4×	0	1k	71	12
90	Oct 5, '22	Good wikipedia nugget about today's nobel winner Carolyn Bertozzi.	1.4×	0	811	117	22
91	Apr 24, '21	We are letting our allies down. Exporting 100% of our AstraZeneca is a no-brainer at this point.	1.4×	0	863	127	4
92	Apr 1, '21	Pfizer is creating hundreds of billions of dollars of social value, and stockholders have earned about a 5% return since Jan 2020.	1.4×	0	858	68	24
93	Mar 21, '25	The critiques of abundance are really really weak.	1.3×	34k	573	20	13
94	Apr 13, '25	@IvanaKrumi Reading how people describe this researcher, she’s someone you come across once every five years, if you’re lucky.	1.3×	33k	1.3k	7	9
95	Jun 24, '25	Mamdani is a young, charismatic flagbearer for some of the worst ideas in American politics. Unfortunately the only way to teach people these ideas are bad will be to eventually el	1.2×	31k	604	40	33
96	Jun 4, '25	Anyway, non-elites don't stand a chance in a pure performance-based merit system, because elite parental investments have such high returns. In practice, we don't get meritocracy a	1.2×	31k	940	45	60
97	Jun 4, '25	A more stable system would have more limited meritocracy to keep downward mobility in check. We keep some competition between elites to get the best people into the most important	1.2×	31k	589	26	30
98	Apr 2, '21	What an utterly idiotic headline.	1.2×	0	815	30	6
99	Aug 3, '22	I like these article highlights — Elsevier showing they can still add value to the publication process.	1.1×	0	647	79	16
100	Jul 22, '25	It is thus much better to have a society where the young have low status and the old high, than a society where one group has high status at all ages, and another is always low. Ev	0.7×	19k	805	17	46

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