Joshua Gans
@joshgans
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Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Chief Economist of Creative Destruction Lab
Toronto, Ontario
Joined November 2008
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I think we have discovered that universal public education was probably more about the childcare than about the education.
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US: we will spend $6 billion on a Wall and nothing on AI today.
China: we will spend $6 billion on AI. We built a Wall in medieval times.
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Who is this person thinking he can just talk to people like adults?
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Just discovered this fantastic webpage that gives every possible teaching graph for economics that you would ever want all manipulable on the web. Fantastic.
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Esther Duflo is the youngest Nobel laureate in economics. She is 46.
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I see that the advisors are having a great impact.
THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS. I WON THE ELECTION, GOT 71,000,000 LEGAL VOTES. BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE. NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WERE SENT TO PEOPLE WHO NEVER ASKED FOR THEM!
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My daughter asked what Milgrom and Wilson did to win the Nobel prize. I decided to see if I could explain it using the 1,000 most common words.
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OK time to weigh in on the Gigi Foster COVID-19 view for Australia. I'll do this as academics should but to forecast I am disappointed she took these views to the media without research backup. [1/n]
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Today in “I can’t believe this is still a Covid indicator”
@drewtoothpaste
Here's a plot of the "no smell" complaints for the top three Yankee Candles on Amazon.
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To the media in Australia: unless you think the government should force everyone out to work and restaurants, it is dangerous to weaken the effectiveness of the lockdown by giving equal weight to views on business as usual. Stop it. [11/11]
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Michael Kremer has to be the most genuinely nicest person in economics. He is a true outlier. He has never played the academic game. He is remarkably free of status concerns. Only pursued what he thought was right. Inspirational. So happy for him today.
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Netflix put up its price and its quantity fell. Why this is a shock is beyond me.
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Back in 2017 we organised our first Econ of AI conference and we invited Bob Solow. Here was his wonderful reply that I feel OK sharing with you all today.
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Given that we have stuck almost everyone in households for a month, surely we only have to test one member if each household to release them. And we can do that going forward. Should cut tests by a third.
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In the early 90s economists thought that MBA courses could include this. Those were the days.
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Donna Strickland, who just won a Nobel prize for Physics, is an Associate Professor! Do we think she might finally get promoted to full?
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Another job destroyed by automation.
It was 1930 in East London.
Mrs. M. Smith earned 6 pence a week using a pea shooter to shoot dried peas at the windows of sleeping workers.
Called a knocker-uppers her sole job was to wake people up during an era when alarm clocks were expensive and not very reliable.
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How to disqualify yourself from an MBA program if you’re Paul Milgrom.
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This page of AI for Economists with prompts and resources from Jesse Lastunen is gold.
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I remember Prime Day when it was all about traditions and family and not so commercial as it is today.
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I can’t believe no one has connected the microchip shortage with the vaccine production.
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The Future of Work is alot of people doing studies about the Future of Work.
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My daughter just solved the COVID: “test everyone for Covid with a fake test and tell them they are all positive and they have to isolate for 2 weeks.” It is genius.
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I got a message from Chicago Booth on Linked In seeing if I want to do an MBA. They say my profile fits their criteria.
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I wonder if hyperloop is going to beat out self-driving cars to reshape transport.
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I've noticed that the journalists/opinion writers who have migrated to Substack are writing better pieces than they have in years. They are up in terms of length, reading age-level and complexity of arguments. 1/4
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Holy crap. This news report is out of another world.
“NO MORE THAN MERE SECONDS” of exposure in 10-60 centimeters where one man triggers several
#DeltaVariant
infections with brief “fleeting” contact. Thousands of shoppers at NSW🇦🇺 mass tested. Delta called “near & present danger”.
HT
@lizziepearl
.
#COVID19
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VCs: 99% of academic scholarship isn't significant
Also VCs: Only 1% of our companies succeed with significant returns
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What we have learned from epidemiology: much news that seems good is actually bad news. Some examples:
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David Brooks is right. Anti-Trumpers are losing. Should pay more attention to
@zingales
on the left and
@ScottAdamsSays
on the right.
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@colbertlateshow
@StephenAtHome
#LoveYourPetDay
#LSSC
DD has a quizzical look and thinks everyday should be love your pets day.
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This might change a lot.
amazing paper. 40-60% of population that have NOT had SARS-CoV-2 already have activated T Cells to the virus! likely due to cross-reactivity w/ other "common cold coronaviruses". may explain large % having easy time clearing virus and/or mild/no symptoms.
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We just received the very sad news that my colleague here at Rotman, Will Mitchell passed away last night. This is quite a shock. He was a generous colleague and dedicated scholar. He will be deeply missed.
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A question for
#econtwitter
: So we shut down the economic and caused a depression. How can we evaluate whether that was the right decision including whether the epidemiological models were useful/accurate enough to make that call?
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This is a breakthrough analysis.
Imagine testing everyone for COVID, every day.
Sure it’d be expensive—but we’d diagnose infections in real time, and keep everyone else safe.
We think we have a way to make this possible… at <$5/person/day.
A thread on our new working paper:
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I have been asked over the last few days about
@tylercowen
and have seen many negative things expressed on this site, including in replies to my criticism of his EJMR research take. So let me try and balance the ship here.
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Pre-print site for my book, Economics in the Age of COVID-19, soon to be published by MIT Press. Comments most welcome!
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This thread illustrates the difference in reaction between economists and other people.
Other people: “Oh no!!! AI is going to cause massive amounts of blackmail.”
Economists: “Well, I guess it will be impossible to blackmail anyone with pictures now.”
I got banned from Midjourney AI for generating realistic images of politicians cheating on their wives for a series called “AI will revolutionize the blackmail industry”
A couple thoughts on AI images from someone who’s good at making fake stuff 🧵
Trump cheating on his wife:
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I have written an entire book about prediction. I don’t know shit.
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But we already know what the data says. The data says that people don't want to die. The data says that people don't care about keeping the economy going. The data says that when faced with a pandemic people will adjust their behaviour. [8/n]
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Precaution means we should lockdown because we *know* that will save lives as opposed to the more speculative assessment on what 'going about our business' will do. So Gigi should bring data to the case as that is an academic duty when advocating in public. [7/n]
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Sweden is quite the puzzle. Their current doubling is 12 days. Basically, like other countries with lockdowns.
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It’s unusual to see
@tylercowen
post about something when he hasn’t tried to investigate what a paper is really about. He misrepresents the work and calls for a retraction of work by untenured faculty. Instead he should retract the post.
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Yale’s Mitsuru Igami shows hat every AI game advanced was a previously known method in econometrics. Including Alpha Go
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In other words, you can lament the 'economic loss' and its consequences as much as you want, but people are going to choose. And the last time I looked there was no 'market failure' argument to force people out to work when they don't want to. [9/n]
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I have had it with this rapid fire misinformation.
@ShengwuLi
and I just wrote the first paper on the economics of NFTs. Don't miss the great investment opportunity to bid for its
#NFT
.
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Here is a thread about the current Twitter chaos. I think the right starting point to understand this is that a week or so ago, Twitter went from distributed, passive ownership to private ownership. 1/n
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It seems to me that blood donations that come with a test for COVID-19 antibodies would be quite popular.
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This weekend someone in my household is going to need to cut my hair. I am suggesting that they use a cubic model for smoothing purposes.
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In just over a year, both a Savage Axiom and Gauss-Markov condition have been found unnecessary. We haven't seen this type of simplification since Milgrom and co ripped through comparative static analysis in the early 1990s.
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If it is Trump versus Bernie, the latter is actually going to be the wealthier candidate.
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Lots has been said about the accurate science in Don’t Look Up but, on economics, there is no way that comet should be valued at current market prices for rare earth minerals.
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Your daily reminder that single parenting is hard and that left-wing politics has traditionally been focused on helping single parents for this reason. Showing that having two parents is a privilege is the basis of all those historical left-wing policies.
As a researcher who has been studying the economics of families and kids’ well-being for 20+ years,
I am here to tell you that you can’t just write off the two-parent privilege as “Republican propaganda.”
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Want a lesson in not taking into account externalities? Look at Cornell’s decision to send students home.
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I mean. I really like it. Economists defer to revealed preference, and my behaviour demonstrates that I like being on Twitter. I am on Twitter all day. Not Facebook. Not Instagram. Not Snapchat. Not TikTok. Not LinkedIn. Twitter. I am here and ready to identify as the Twit I am.2
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If you want to make the argument that herd immunity is superior to lockdown in terms of lives saved as Gigi does, there is ample international variation to test that hypothesis. You could examine the data and make your case. The reason the onus is on you is because of precaution.
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I have a question: what happens if the Republicans nominate 3 people to the Supreme Court?
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It took Giuliani just two weeks to do something more embarrassing than the Borat movie. That is some impressive work.
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Make no mistake, economists overwhelmingly believe we can pause/freeze the economy to deal with this. The cost only seems high but it is mostly redistribution to ensure we start again properly.
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My daughter took it upon herself the shovel the entire block this morning.
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Alesina raised the piece & said, "you know I read that article and you get money, then worry about a tax here, an investment there, an opportunity cost blah blah. It is exhausting. When I get $1,000 I say woo hoo [raising hands], $1,000 I didn't have before and I am very happy."
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New paper announcement: “The Economics of Augmented and Virtual Reality” with
@abhishekn
It is a 0.9 version as we have a model yet to add but we wanted to get it out before any Apple announcement. Here are the big take-a-ways.
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Why? You may ask. Simple. It is like hanging out with a bunch of people. I choose the people. And I like hearing their chatter. Is it earth-shattering? Is it deep and profound? Rarely. Is it funny? Often. 3/n
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OK let's use some real game theory to work out what will happen on the US Speaker vote. Here goes. First, consider a situation where they keep voting the same way again and again. Eventually some/all die. Now work backwards using age distribution and there is a clear outcome.
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I have now had a chance to read the Judd/Heckman correspondence. I did so wearing my hat as an 'expert' in the economics publishing process. Listen up kids, this is a window into what's going on here. 1/n
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Trying to explain to Canadians that Shane Warne dying is the equivalent to 1.5 billion people that Wayne Gretzky dying would be to 36 million and they don’t believe me.
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Second waves although Israel is a whole other ballpark. Most second waves are at a slower rate of growth than the first. But not Israel. It is as if they don’t know Covid-19 exists
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It is profoundly upsetting to hear — as has been spelled out today on Twitter — just how many women do not feel safe in academic economics. Surfacing this and reminding those of us who do not experience this directly is the key but first step to doing something about it.
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EMJR has deleted their archives from the Wayback Machine. It was there last week when I was using it to work out the origins of some things but it is gone now. This is what people do when they are proud of their work.
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OK, this is somewhat amazing to me, given the last three years of expert advice on testing. Look at what ChatGPT said! It gets it 100% correct. cc
@michaelmina_lab
@EricTopol
@zeynep
@ATabarrok
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Well, what do you know? It's 2023 and I just accepted a theory paper for Management Science written in Microsoft Word.
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There are two ways out of the COVID mess: immunity or suppression. Suppression, done properly, is the least damaging to both health and the economy. Many countries have done this including South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, Iceland, .... [2/n]
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You find out that asymptomatic people do not spread the virus -- this is bad news because it means that the observed number of cases were the result of pre-symptomatic cases which means that testing at a constant rate is less likely to pick them up and be effective.
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Some friendly advice for those students likely to present their job market paper over Zoom.
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Coase goes to war
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense just published a promotional video offering each Russian pilot a reward if they defect to
#Ukraine
with their aircraft.
USD 1 million per aircraft and USD 500,000 per helicopter.
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When you become a Canadian citizen they give you free access to all parks, museums and cultural attractions for a year plus a cheap train ticket to explore the country.
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Still no Andrew Yang?
New McNaughton Painting - "Democrats Playing Poker"
"No matter how much the Democrats lie, cheat, and steal for the presidency... they cannot take down President Trump." - Jon McNaughton
For a list of details:
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You find out the fatality rate is lower than previously thought -- this is bad news because it means that the same number of deaths was caused by a much higher number of infections. Thus, the virus outbreak is much larger and will be harder to contain.
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