Isma Muñoz

Look around. The case for more, not less, liberal arts education remains stronger than ever.

Also reminds me of one of the best pieces of advice I ever got re. teaching. As a new lecturer I was frustrated about students being late to class. A friend suggested I CHOOSE to believe that late students had done their very best to be there on time, and been prevented from doing so. [cont]

Political cartoonists are not fuckin’ around this week. (thread)

1. Pat Bagley

Texas A&M Bans Plato - Daily Nous Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That's a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy a...

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato."

surreal times

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing.

You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics.

That is all.

Photo shows the title page for an academic paper titled "Driving Inclusion: The Effect of Improved Transportation for People with Disabilities" by Melissa Gentry. The abstract is as follows: People with disabilities face substantial barriers to economic and social participation. I explore the extent to which these barriers are overcome by the availability of reliable and flexible transportation, which may serve as ``reliability insurance'' in case other modes of transit fail. Leveraging the roll-out of Uber, I use a stacked difference-in-differences approach to show that the availability of reliable and flexible transportation leads to improvements in social and economic participation through increased marriage rates and labor force participation, and reduced reliance on public assistance. The reduction in public assistance outweighs expected rideshare costs, lending support to the recent push towards public-private partnerships in the transportation space.

I am excited to announce I am on the #EconJobMarket this year! 🎉 My research explores economic barriers for people with disabilities at the intersection of labor, public, and health economics.

My #EconJMP examines how reliable transportation transforms outcomes for this population. 🧵1/6

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US

This view is wrong

A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

📢 New dataset for researchers!
The new European Parenting Leave Policies (EPLP) Dataset tracks parenting leave regulations over five decades! It provides harmonised data on maternity, co-parent, paid parental, and job-protected leave across 21 countries from 1970 to 2024.
🔗 eplp-dataset.org

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Screenshot of the title and abstract of the article. the title is Streaming Platforms, Filter Bubbles, and Cultural Inequalities. How Online Services Increase Consumption Diversity. The abstract reads: Do digital technologies affect diversity in cultural tastes? Digital sociologists have warned of “filter bubbles,” whereas sociologists of culture have shown that diversity in consumption is valued as a marker of upper-middle-class status. We estimate the effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption using a matching technique applied to 2018 survey data from France. We find a statistically significant positive effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption as well as on cosmopolitanism, on three domains, music, movies, and TV shows. The magnitude of this effect is much higher for TV shows. The study brings new evidence against the filter bubble thesis; it shows that platforms do reinforce cultural inequalities by increasing the social gap in consumption diversity. It further suggests that the effect of technology on cultural consumption might mainly operate through its impact on cultural markets rather than changes in cultural experience.

Main figure of the article. Difference in number of genres consumed, liked, and disliked between streaming users and non-users. Streaming users consume more genres than non-users after controlling for confounders. The difference is small for music (0.1 sd), moderate for movies (0.2 sd), and high for TV shows (0.46 sd). However, differences in number of genres liked or disliked are small or not significant. SMD before (light) and after (dark) adjustment through matching, with error bars indicating 95 percent confidence interva

Do streaming platforms trap us in cultural filter bubbles? We like to think so but the evidence says otherwise. In a new paper @abelaussant.bsky.social and I find the use of streaming platform to be associated with an increase in consumption diversity. sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

Abstract for "The truly isolated: Spatial isolation of advantage in the United States" by Shannon Rieger, Angela Li, and Patrick Sharkey, published at Urban Studies

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse.

👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

On elite college admission inequity: Kids from the top 1% are twice as likely to get into Ivy-Plus colleges as middle-class peers with same scores, a gap absent at public flagships. Advantage comes from legacy status, non-academic credentials, athletic recruitment (none predict post-college success)

see this vacancy to work with me on educational inequalities in Europe. We have extended the deadline by 1 week, now Dec 1st, 2025. #job #postdoc #vacancy #pleaseshare

<em>Population and Development Review</em> | Population Council Journal | Wiley Online Library In many modern populations, grandparents are increasingly becoming the primary caregivers of their grandchildren. This phenomenon has renewed interest in the role that grandparents play in within-fam...

Why do associations between grandparents & child health vary [Africa]?: "implication is that net flows of support from grandparents to children diminish as societies undergo demographic & epidemiological transitions, weakening the positive association between grandparent coresidence & child health"

Japanese people being silly.

Oh my

🔹 Why it matters: These findings add nuance to how we think about the education–health gradient. Social context shapes how, when, and why education protects (or doesn’t protect) health. Understanding these dynamics helps refine theories of fundamental causes and informs public health strategies

The Population Education Transition Curve: Education Gradients Across Population Exposure to New Health Risks AbstractThe salutary effect of formal education on health-risk behaviors and mortality is extensively documented: ceteris paribus, greater educational attainment leads to healthier lives and longevity...

🔹 This shift mirrors a broader pattern, the Population Education Transition curve: Across other health risks, the most educated adopt first (and face higher risk), then lead the shift toward healthier behaviors once high-quality information becomes available. More on this: doi.org/10.1007/s135...

🔹 Gender dynamics played a key role in early transmission dynamics: Consistent with earlier studies, more educated men were often the first to contract and introduce HIV into sexual networks shaped by concurrency and mobility, helping explain early positive gradients.

🔹 Over time, the gradient reversed: Younger cohorts show negative gradients, consistent with education’s more protective role as prevention knowledge and public health campaigns became more widely available

Key takeaways:

🔹 Early in the epidemic: Older cohorts show strong positive education–HIV gradients (likely tied to urban migration, mobility, sexual networks, and limited access to reliable prevention information)

Revisiting the education-HIV gradient in Africa: Cohort variation analysis of a temporal shift and speculation on causes This study examines the changing relationship between education and HIV in Africa over time. While a negative relationship between education and morbi…

New article out in Social Science & Medicine (with David Baker): “Revisiting the education–HIV gradient in Africa: Cohort variation analysis of a temporal shift and speculation on causes.”

Our analysis of DHS data from eight African countries reveals a temporal shift in the educationHIV gradient 👇

Screenshot of working paper: The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣

"The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct"
Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu

Mapping the global digital gender divide: new study reveals stark inequalities in internet and mobile access A research team comprised of current and alumni members of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) has published a major new study in PNAS revealing where and to what extent women remain ...

New study on global digital gender gaps 🧔‍♂️👩📱🌐:

It finds that in low- and middle-income countries

- women are 9% less likely to use the 🌐
- 8% less likely to own a 📱 than men

( ~320 million fewer women 🌐 and ~190 million fewer women with 📱)

www.demography.ox.ac.uk/news/mapping...

The thing to understand about this is that this catastrophe in the UK has redounded to the political benefit of the very same people and political movement that pushed for it! Extremely perverse.

👋 I'm Danielle, and I'm on the #econjobmarket this year!

Let's start with a student describing her segregated school:

"The school felt temporary. Built like a warehouse with aluminum siding . . . I had a slipshod education"

The twist? The student is white, and her school is private.

A JMP 🧵 -->

Back to teaching after a while, and I’d almost forgotten how common it is to overprepare. Once questions start rolling and discussion flows, the class just flies. Finding that balance is hard!

GESIS Workshop Foundations and Advances in Difference-in-Differences 03 to 04 February 2026 | Online Jan Marcus (Freie Universität Berlin)

If Difference-in-Differences has been on your “to-learn” list, now is your chance to dig in. Our #GESISworkshop with @janmarcus.de takes you from DiD basics to advanced topics like triple differences, synthetic control, and modern estimators — all in R and Stata.

➡️ t1p.de/dif_in_dif_26

Absolutely!

Interesting analysis!

PS. This type of work will not be possible 5 years from now unless we save the DHS now.