Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 30m

Yes I don’t know if there is any serious study on the causal impact of smartphones on literacy (very tricky to estimate), but I especially liked the bit on how you need writing to make complex arguments and oral arguments are emotional.

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 5h

Author of the blog post — @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 5h

Thanks for sharing @alexh.bsky.social

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 5h

“We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.”

1 3

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 5h

A fascinating blog post on the generational loss of reading & its consequences for human knowledge & society —

🔗 open.substack.com/pub/jmarriot...

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

open.substack.com

2 1 5

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

econmaett @econmaett.github.io · 1d

Note to self: when saving a blog post to @zotero.org, saving the webpage to @archive.org is useful.

Particularly for blogs that don't render nicely to PDF or that may be discontinued in the near future.
#rstats #stats

1 2 19

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Jörg Ankel-Peters @jrgptrs.bsky.social · 1d

Thought about scientific consensus recently? We have a new DP @i4replication.bsky.social that probes into the famous replication debate between Acemoglu, Johnson & Robinson (AJR) and Albouy - and how experts assess this debate. We find that they disagree. 1/8 www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

4 11 27

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 1d

Very interesting approach!

2

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Erin Sherman 🌱 65n Chesapeake rolling coastal plain @wearegonnafindout.bsky.social · 3d

Who's doing rigorous analysis on the effects of data centers on economic, health, energy, and climate outcomes? #econsky #energysky #climatesky

8 20 51

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 8d

Important thread for people using causal inference methods in applied work

Paul Hünermund @p-hunermund.com · 8d

And, therefore, there can also not be hierarchy of methods, because it depends on the specific case whether the assumptions are fulfilled.

Chelsea Parlett @chelseaparlett.bsky.social · 9d

It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions

6

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 9d

That is a very interesting short paper, and it reflect the mixed experience I’ve had and many academics around me have had with LLMs.
Fully agree with @mjamurphy.bsky.social here ; perhaps we’re all better off sticking to open source that the web of Bernard-Lee was made to be

Mike Murphy @mjamurphy.bsky.social · 9d

It's hard for me to reconcile "OpenAI is worth a half trillion dollars" and "OpenAI's state-of-the-art model does marginally better than open-source on high-value tasks" #EconSky

Vidgen et al. "The AI Productivity Index"

Link: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25721

arxiv.org

7

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 10d

The best post I’ve seen on Bluesky in a very long time! Brilliant idea and brilliant accounts out there !

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 11d

What's your favorite Bluesky account that primarily posts about something other than current events/politics?

2 13

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 11d

Fascinating piece on the very unique influence if the tech industry on the school system

Sgitr @dumbster.bsky.social · 13d

“Learn to code” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/p...

Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow.

www.nytimes.com

4

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 17d

S’truth

Olivier Simard-Casanova @o.simardcasanova.net · 18d

The “I did my own research” crowd in a nutshell

Effin' Birds @effinbirds.com · 18d

2

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 17d

If ever anybody believed Trump’s claims at the UN here is a short article debunking each lie.

www.euronews.com/green/2025/0...

Trump tells UN climate change is the 'greatest con job ever'

Trump called renewable sources of energy like wind power a “joke" and blasted the UN's climate efforts.

www.euronews.com

4

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 21d

My experience in Paris has been that you can enter the metro, but then you arrive at a station that says “accessible” and you discover that the elevator is broken 😬
Or you wait at the bus stop for while until you discover that it’s been temp moved (god knows where exactly) because of road works 🙈

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 22d

😅🤦‍♀️

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 22d

And let’s not forget people who struggle moving around — elderly, disabled, or simply moms with prams. It’s great to plan the city for most people not to use cars, but it’s even better if we allow those who need it to use cars (self driving or not, that seems pretty irrelevant to me)

4 4

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 24d

Ou les émissions politiques où on met Zucman en face de citoyens lambda ou de chefs d’entreprise qui se pensent économistes 😬

2

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 29d

This is why one should follow the dictionary account

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · Sep 12

‘Booty’ and ‘butt’ are synonyms.

‘Call’ and ‘dial’ are synonyms.

But, a ‘booty call’ and a ‘butt dial’ are VERY different things.

6 53

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 11

Just spent two very inspiring days at the Summer School on Networks organized by my friend and coauthor @yveszenou.bsky.social at Monash Uni. Great lectures by Matt Jackson (Stanford), Sanjeev Goyal (Cambridge) and Yves — I learned so much! Thanks Yves!!!

www.monash.edu/business/eve...

Network Economics Conference and Summer School 2025

www.monash.edu

1 2

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · Sep 6

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

www.theatlantic.com

230 9.8K 12K

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Nick Huntington-Klein @nickchk.com · Sep 5

New The Effect materials today: introductions to basic coding and data manipulation in R, Stata, and Python. Get the wheels turning on using these languages with data with these intro pages and exercises:
nickchk.com/Coding%20and...
nickchk.com/Coding%20and...
nickchk.com/Coding%20and...

Introduction to Working with Data: R Version

nickchk.com

1 16 46

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 3

Incredible!!!

Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · Sep 3

We usually rely on GDP, trade, or wages to study the past. This amazing paper flips the script.

It analyzes 630,000 paintings (1400-2000) to extract emotions and shows how art tracks living standards, wars, inequality, and even climate shocks.

(How is this economics? Everything is economics!)

1 6

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Paul Gribble 🇨🇦 @gribblelab.org · Sep 3

academia is a v. strange mix of “we expect you to behave like an employee” (forms, webinars, insanely bad admin software, etc) but also “go fund your entire research operation yourself including paper towels for the sink in the lunchroom we don’t have the budget for that”. #academicsky

1 4 28