Chris Hanretty

Excellent news that the Carer's Allowance cliff edge – which can leave carers thousands of pounds worse off when they earn more – is being scrapped. It was the first proposal in @arguablymag.bsky.social's feature on 10 ideas for a radical Budget. www.arguably.uk/p/10-ideas-f...

Are you a Labour MP (or office staff for same)? Have you been contacted by GB News & asked about my estimates of how (2024) constituencies voted in the EU referendum? Please remember: that was 10 years ago. Some people die, some turn eighteen—& most importantly, some change their mind!

Absolutely brilliant piece. A must read.

The whole world no longer smells like cigarettes.

<semihumorous> Agree with the critical AI review of the "AI dominates human peer review" paper? That's check and mate for the machines! </semihumorous>

A serious weakness in this paper by King and Worthington: The judges for the AI peer reviews are *not* experts in the field. They are former journal editors but no claim is made to substantive expertise in the reviewed papers. AI-generated reviews sound good *if you don't know the substance well.*

It's not often I see a business and think "I could make you a lot of money with some Python scripts", but seriously, a site that sells AC adapters that doesn't allow you to filter by voltage or current? Jokers...

Gary King just dropped a study showing that AI peer reviews now dominate human peer reviews on every metric they tested. gking.harvard.edu/peerless/

sigmund? sigmund it's your cousin marvin... marvin freud... you know the thing you've been talking about where there's some libidinal force inside us that seeks egoic shattering even unto death... well you're not gonna believe this but I'm looking at the news and im thinking, call it the death drive

I keep hearing people saying the data shows the cost of living crisis is a myth. A lot of this from the US admittedly where economic growth is stronger. But there is plenty of evidence the economy for most people is bad and has been for a long time now. Here’s some UK data

I found this really helpful, and it crystallizes some of my own thoughts

Delighted that our SI at @pspolisci.bsky.social is now out. House forecasts unanimously predict Democrat victory while those for Senate point to a tight contest. Further info in below thread + see here for the SI introduction: doi.org/10.1017/S104... @cambup-polsci.cambridge.org @apsa.bsky.social

I decided that if my kid had to do "tummy time", I would do a plank alongside. Neither of us had a good morning.

Only part of the analysis, but "FT reader survey reveals high earners are upset about tax" is not exactly earth shattering

It shouldn’t bother me so much, but when people use ‘one bad apple’ they never complete the thought ‘spoils the whole barrel’. In other words it typically doesn’t mean what is intended, but it’s the unintended, correct, meaning that is typically true, in sweet revenge for linguistic purists.

🔥 New open access article in the Journal of European Social Policy! I review 60 years of research on partisan government in social and labour market policy reform, covering 266 macro-comparative studies and conduct a meta-analysis of 489 estimates from 85 studies. doi.org/10.1177/0958...

Strong <election that cracked an autarchy> vibes

When Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens begins playing “Old Corn Liquor,” a traditional Black American folk tune, acclaimed Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man recognizes similarities to Chinese pentatonic music and spontaneously joins in. The joy on their faces says it all.

“The federal legal apparatus is working to strip the citizenship of a member of Congress and then deport her, because she’s from an ethnic group the president and his top aide despises,” is open executive-branch authoritarianism with no parallel in US history

Is British politics uniquely short-termist? Voters seem to think so. @philipjcowley.bsky.social @karlpike.bsky.social and I just released @mileendinstitute.bsky.social polling on political short/long-termism across Europe. The UK stands out from its neighbours. www.qmul.ac.uk/mei/research...

This is really important measurement work, showing how measures can agree on which countries are more corrupt without agreeing (much) on whether corruption in a country is worse now than it was before -- *and* proposing a fix

Great to see Danielle Young's research on SRM wargaming getting the attention it deserves

University big wigs almost everywhere in complete denial about this. (Except QM, obvs, where SLT universally excellent, top class, etc).

Very proud of this piece with @tommasopavone.bsky.social, now out at JOP, where we use the empirical setting of Slovakia - an eroding democracy with a recent experience of backsliding - to gauge the potential of the past to affect present-day attitudes: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Aside from anything else, it's just terrible writing. (If you want litotes, you've got to go full Hirohito)

You can inform people (correctly) that refugee pop'n is more female than they think, and they'll accept that, but they don't change their views about refugees impact on crime or the economy

For anyone looking for an up-to-date example of the base rate fallacy … 🤦‍♂️

Is it time to sell all the shares in my ISA and buy gilts with the proceeds? Asking for me.

Latest PollBase is out, with all the British voting intention polls since the 1930s

Surprisingly, one source of literary inspiration for Forrest Gump turns out to be Doris Lessing, in her 1973 The Summer Before The Dark

🚨Job alert! 🚨 Come work with us on the British Election Study! We are looking for a postdoc to join the new BES team: 5 year contract, starting in Jan 2027. Happy to chat if you've got any questions. Applications close 12 Nov, for details see: jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

How did Europeans react to Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs? New registered report (forthcoming, JEPS): a UESD design using a Eurobarometer survey in the field when the tariffs hit. US favorability fell 2.9 pts No change in EU attachment No shift in support for retaliation or rules-based trade

So, is the next Italian election going to be fought under a different electoral system now that Meloni has managed to see her proposed reform approved by Parliament? Possibly.

New WP with brilliant co-author @jacobnyrup.bsky.social! Which governments are most representative? We match the backgrounds of tens of thousands of cabinet ministers to population data in 136 countries (1991-2021) and measure the representation gap on gender, age, education, class and geography.

One of the OpenAI maths preprints dumped hours ago could be relevant for political scientists: it claims to allow uniform sampling of matrices with arbitrary integer row and column sums - useful for ecological inference github.com/openai/math/...

New political compass just dropped.

Going to see Bill Callahan tonight; excited to stare into the mirror of my middle age

This is superb work by @jimdickinson.bsky.social unpacking the OECD's statistics Why isn't this being done in the Department for Education, so that the Secretary of State has the right information? wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/...

Devolution! No autonomy! Only devolution!

In this weekend’s newsletter: while others debate whether Man City should be stripped of their trophies or relegated to League Two, I argue that what happens to the club’s directors and auditors is just as important - perhaps even more so.