· Causal claims in economics – a website to accompany a new working paper (summarized in this VoxEU column) that used AI to analyze over 44,000 NBER and CEPR working papers to document the increase in causal relationships and to draw out causal graphs showing how papers link relationships across JEL fields – you can look at the graphs for your own papers in those series, as well as see trends in causal methods.
· Dani Rodrik on why we need to think about abundance for workers as well as consumers: “what gives meaning to our lives is not just the fruits of our labor, but also the work itself. When people are asked about well-being and life satisfaction, the work they do ranks at the top, along with contributions to their community and family bonds. For economists, a job provides income but is otherwise a negative – a source of “disutility.” For real people, a job is a source of pride, dignity, and social recognition. The loss of employment typically produces a reduction in individual well-being that is a multiple of the loss of income. The social effects magnify those costs”. See my discussion of Abundance and State Capacity if you missed it here.
· In defense of Machine Learning in Economics – in her substack, Beatriz Gietner discusses how misperceptions about what machine learning does and can do still seem to be held – and answers/retorts to 7 commonly expressed concerns ranging from it being a black box that you can’t explain to concerns about a lack of economic theory and difficulties doing inference.
· $3/day is the new $1/day: in a new working paper, Foster et al. update the global poverty line and poverty numbers based on the 2021 PPP data, updated household consumption data in many countries, and updated national poverty lines in the lowest income countries. “The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa”. See this blogpost also for graphs and other details.
· Conference call: NEUDC 2025 will be held at Tufts on November 8-9. Submissions are due by August 17.
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