Aditya Dasgupta

New draft of a paper I'm excited about, "Hidden Fires: Real versus Measured Performance in Bureaucracies" is up. Sharing here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rujds...

Drop by my talk this Thursday if you happen to be in Mexico City..!

This is a broken market, and an essential read from @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

ai function-intensive code + tidyverse notation + ggplot notation is a special kind of hell to parse

what’s the wealth of nations: economics equivalent for political science? IMO it’s Hobbes’ Leviathan

My personal theory is that AI is going to create so much noise in so many domains that we are going to return to a world in which the only source of signal is going to be personal/patronage networks

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

nothing better than smart, science-based public policy

🚨Come work with us! 🚨 We're hiring a postdoc for Stanford's AI for Public Benefit Lab (ai4pb.stanford.edu), in partnership with @stanfordhai.bsky.social Open to PhDs from psych, poli sci, sociology, CS, econ, HCI, data science, etc. Please share! Position: postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

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

Interesting: www.nber.org/papers/w35720

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

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

“Coast”, Rufino Tamayo, 1973

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

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

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

This seems to me to get it exactly right and obviously applies beyond mathematics: solving a problem is not the same as developing conceptual understanding and insight, and might even come at the expense of it.

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

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%...

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

An interesting read: www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/8/...

An important study (but check the study itself for the exact numbers, the NYT’s writeup seems mildly inaccurate): www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/u... www.bmj.com/content/394/...

Forthcoming in the AER: "Difference-in-Differences with a Continuous Treatment" by Brantly Callaway, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, and Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna.

A good essay (but I think it does under-state the extent of true automation in technological history): www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-...

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

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

worth reading..!

Pretty cool! (In anticipation of inevitable complaint that “we knew this” it’s good to bring data and research design to important ideas)

A pretty good guide to the future, I suspect

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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

Take a look at these fantastic photographs of Indian life by Raghu Rai. He has died aged 83 www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

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

The special issue of @cpsjournal.bsky.social “Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies”, co-edited by myself and Isabela Mares, was just published. The issue includes 8 articles, many of which set new research agendas. A🧵w/overview 1/10 journals.sagepub.com/toc/CPS/curr...

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

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

NASA’s Artemis II Reveals the Basin in Full For the very first time, the mysterious Orientale Basin has been fully photographed. Thanks to Artemis II, humanity now sees the Moon in unprecedented detail, reminding us of the endless wonders beyond Earth. 🛰️

many things about us politics that made no sense to me made a little more sense after reading this essay: patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-g...

A really impressive field experiment

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

Reminded today that the term "developing democracy" is a weird vestige of modernization theory -- it elides level of economic development and democracy, but as the US demonstrates, you can be rich and have a very dysfunctional democracy. Very important to keep the two things conceptually separate

I’d say I do find bluesky less useful than (the old) twitter — I used to get tons of working papers and research on that feed but for some reason that’s not the case for me here despite mostly following academics. Not sure if it’s the algorithm or something else….

Interesting aspects of having a campus on a natural reserve

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.