Bitsy Perlman

🧵 New paper out OA in @jamahealthforum.com with @rourkeobrien.bsky.social, Lizzie Bair, @dremmazang.bsky.social, @atheendar.bsky.social. Open Access: doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2026.3857 Does rising local wealth inequality track with working-age mortality? Here’s what we found 👇

Federal records show DOGE's role in initiating grant terminations across the National Science Foundation and indicate that the White House also flagged awards to cut. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rg9... Read more by @madialder.bsky.social: fedscoop.com/records-show...

Our statement on @jasonfurman.bsky.social's new website Econvitals. This is a conversation we need to have as a profession @laurarosner.bsky.social @courtneyshupert.bsky.social @nabe-econ.bsky.social @claudia-sahm.bsky.social @erikamcentarfer.bsky.social @aaronsojourner.org @conorsen.bsky.social

If you're in DC, I'm going to be a part of an awesome nerdy census convo tomorrow at Georgetown with Bob Groves and Amy O'Hara. Come join us!! events.georgetown.edu/digital-ethi...

A few weeks ago, the arXiv put a cap on new submissions: no more than 2 submissions per author per month. That was a response specifically to the AI slopocalypse. But might slowing down science do more to solve bad science incentives? (Think less publish or perish, more excel or exit.) 🧪

LLMs, asked to "peer" review 200 papers published this year in top science and medicine journals, either rejected or recommended major revisions 76% of the time. Telling the LLMs the paper was a revision paper made them much more generous. arxiv.org/abs/2610.31414

Grateful that there's still enough life in the Internet left that we get something as incredible and delightful as this pudding.cool/2026/10/kevi...

The A.I. boom needs chips, steel, electrical power and ... paint. So much paint. That's good news for PPG, the company that makes it. Great story from @emmymrtin.bsky.social on how the A.I. buildout is affecting even the unlikeliest corners of the economy. 🎁🔗: www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/t...

In 1934, we added a gender-neutral pronoun for a single third person. ‘Thon’ was short for “that one.” It didn’t catch on.

NEW: @copafs.bsky.social joins 19 other groups in calling for the Census Bureau's parent agency, the Commerce Department, to restore language banning political interference to its scientific integrity policy, which, as NPR first reported, Trump officials revised in August copafs.org/wp-content/u...

Public and private funding also do different things: private funders want to appropriate the created intellectual property, whereas public funders want to create public IP alexxihe.github.io/qje.pdf (Also it is very clear that researchers can't replace the funds when they lose public funding)

Nationalized and polarized two-party politics + federalism = bad governance If we want elections to incentivize actually good governance in blue states, we need parties to compete, and that requires reforms like fusion voting and multimember districts for the state legislature and city councils

let 👏 me 👏 build 👏 a freestanding north end spite house 👏 in 👏 my 👏 somerville backyard

FWIW, the first industrial revolution was ~0.6% growth There were years between 1980 and 2010 when China cracked 10% We know what 10% looks like — it's cities popping up out of nowhere, it's rice framing to high tech production in 30 years

The AEA Committee on the Job Market has posted a webinar on the job market for Ph.D. economists, which includes data on the # of job listings from JOE, data on outcomes from the job candidate surveys, and advice. Good luck to all of this year's job candidates! www.aeaweb.org/joe/communic...

A clip from my convo with @michaeldgreen.phd at our STAT summit today about having to remove terms from NIH grants👇

🧪 Nearly 30% of US STEM PhD dissertation abstracts in 2026 contained AI-generated text, up from 1.7% in 2023. An NBER working paper of 226k graduates found those using AI were 17% less likely to stay in academia. #PhDSky #AcademicSky

On Wednesday, Democratic Sen. @wyden.senate.gov of Oregon cited NPR's reporting in a letter asking Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to explain why the Census Bureau’s parent agency removed a ban on political interference from its scientific integrity policy www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

Tell me about it ! in the mean time (Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD) US vs China vs Europe (www.nature.com/articles/d41...)

Takeaway: Automation shapes the next generation’s investment in education, partly because it helps them adapt and persist in sectors undergoing rapid technological change.

🚜 New working paper: “Wheels of Change: Agricultural Automation and Human Capital in the 20th Century” Q: How does the next generation adapt to automation? A thread 🧵

Ahead of the 2024 election, @andykroll.bsky.social got his hands on some secret tapes of Trump's budget director, Russell Vought. One thing Vought said hit Kroll like a ton of bricks: that he wanted to put government workers “in trauma.” Listen to this episode: https://propub.li/4yO4q11

Research from @kspoon.bsky.social & ... "“People don’t want to be in a workplace if they feel disrespected, if they feel like their work isn’t valued, if they feel like they’re not seen,” she notes. “And I do think that in many, many academic workplaces, that is the experience that women have.”"

I propose a modern corollary: the alibi of tabs. <1% chance that I'll go back and check a closed tab, but the possibility that I could allows me to close the gargantuan window with 80 miniscule tab icons without fretting. This is good and I am at peace. Pic related: I am apparently at 30k in OneTab

Many people think of discrimination as the product of individual prejudice. But systemic discrimination can persist even without intentionally discriminatory actors. Our @nber.org paper explores what randomized evaluations can teach us about broader forms of racial inequality.

On the microeconomic foundations of macro stabilisation: The Hall-Woodford prize in historical perspective beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2026/10/12/o...

The only reporting of Phase 2 I’ve seen was buried in a Stars and Stripes story: “Troops will . . begin transitioning to the next phase. Though few details were shared, the next step includes transitioning into neighborhoods such as Anacostia and Trinidad.” www.stripes.com/theaters/us/... 10/

Super excited to see this article in print in the APSR: 📚 “Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: Evidence from England’s National Health Service” - with the brilliant @zachdickson.bsky.social @catherinedevries.bsky.social @simonecremaschi.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...

So this review unearthed a strange tale - the famous result everyone in developmental psychology has heard of and probably learned from a textbook in undergrad...but that just did not happen. Let me know your thoughts!

This famous, foundational result is a myth - a false narrative constructed in the subsequent literature and projected back, wrongly, onto the original study. Quite how this happened is beyond the scope of our review - we are currently looking into this in a follow-up study of citation contexts.

Today, Robert E. Hall was awarded the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This is from a statement he released after the announcement:

NEW: The Census Bureau says it plans to release new one-year estimates from the American Community Survey on Oct. 29. The release was delayed after the Trump administration’s banning of a data privacy protection technique that the bureau used for decades www.census.gov/newsroom/pre...

Pure grifter, bad person. Yeah it's absolutely possible and probably pretty easy to make money by pushing skewed, sensationalized, AI-generated slop and call it news. But it's highly corrosive, actively bad for society, and I get the feeling he knows that. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/10/b...

Remember, when it comes to complex techno-social systems like the railways: "It's all path dependency" "It always has been"

NEW @crisesnotes.bsky.social PIECE: I give my take on the new "Nobel" prize winners. What it means, why they won and why I hope that this award for a "counterrevolution" is a death rattle. www.crisesnotes.com/on-the-ersat...

A Federal Rule about the Decennial Census would eliminate race/ethnicity questions, alter the timing for ?s on people's usual residence, restrict use of some disclosure avoidance rules, and prohibit questions on sexual orientation (not asked now). Comment here: www.regulations.gov/commenton/US...

Congratulations to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford on winning the @nobelprize.org in Economic Sciences. In our 2014 interview with Woodford, he spoke about Fed mandates, effective forward guidance, and cognitive limits in human decision making. Read the interview here: bit.ly/4s2akcn

BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” #NobelPrize

*public option. Key point: the private sector can oppose public sector capacity in different ways. Private govt contractors oppose internal public capacity to build products. Other companies see public services as competition for their products, as the private tax prep industry did for Direct File.

The advent of rapid, easy dissemination of misinformation in shortform newsletters and periodicals in the 1640s and 1650s was "a realm of chronic epistemological insecurity." Reminds me of something but I can't quite put my finger on it. www.jstor.org/stable/40279...

Where are the official responses from our professional organizations to the gutting of social science at the NSF?

Trump continues to target Fed Gov. Cook, now launching "a committee of inquiry" into the accusations the president and allies have made about her as part of bid to fire the central banker, notes "the hearing shall be closed to the public but shall be transcribed."

I reanalyzed the CDC data behind the LGB “free fall” headline. It rests on a change in bisexual identification among one grade, in one wave, of one survey. Gay or lesbian identification did not change significantly. Calling it a "free fall" is sensational and just gives bad actors talking points.

Some pictures of Minnesota being lovely for no reason

Following similar moves with H1-B visas, the Trump administration yesterday proposed a $100k charge to OPT, which allows STEM students to work in the US after graduation. Immigration policy experts say this would effectively destroy OPT, which is the largest pipeline of scientific talent to the US.

Some pictures of Minnesota being lovely for no reason