James Feigenbaum

Now I know it was worth it catching the typo in amenities the first three times I tried to write it

Must be amenities like this that explain the insanely high housing costs in the Boston area, not a lack of housing supply

My information consumption is 3/4 papers I have to referee and 1/4 papers my referees make me read. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, at least until tenure

N.H. Senate approves toll hike for out-of-state drivers Lawmakers say that more revenue is needed to fund infrastructure improvements, but Gov. Kelly Ayotte is opposing the bill.

New Hampshire is trying to toll **us**? But I want to toll them

www.boston.com/news/local-n...

I'm not skilled enough to have an opinion on that. I could never get feather to work on the NBER server (couldn't get arrow and parquet to work either until recently) so I was still using csvs and data.table until like a few months ago

I'm just gonna say it: Booker's proposal to end income taxes below $75k is idiotic. We've just crippled our state capacity and your response is a tax cut? Come on man

I honestly don't know what any of this means, but I do know that with duckdb and duckplyr reading huge data is fast and painless. And the parquets save so tiny

Private Equity’s Transformation of American Medicine — Implications for Health Equity | NEJM Private equity firms have gained increasing control of U.S. health care infrastructure. Along with other potential consequences, this growth threatens to undermine progress in health equity.

Our work in NEJM www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Claude Code and I wrote a very sharp looking cli (doi2pdf) that works approximately 1/20 times from my desktop at work. Including failing on several of my own papers...

So you ported it to typst?

When the vibe is acute political instability, social fragmentation, and looming fascism, choose cb2

An "AI Assistance Disclosure Generator"? But how do I disclose that I used AI to generate my disclosure?

Shout out to the NIMBY neighbors who managed to kill the original proposal because they felt their aesthetic prejudices, and access to street parking, were more important than having affordable housing. Hope they enjoy the resulting even-taller building!

Economists have solved this problem by being awkward af and slightly unfriendly with everyone

We live a block away from Newton North. Based on the quality of driving around the high school, the fines from red light cameras and school bus cameras could fund a nice chunk of our schools budget.

And no money down!

School bus cameras will get first test in Chicopee Gov. Maura Healey signed a bill in January 2025 allowing cities and towns to install monitoring technology on school buses to record vehicles that fail to stop when required, like when a bus is stoppe...

The timeline for a state that "cares" about protecting kids taking school buses from idiots in cars

Jan 2025: Gov. Healey signed a bill allowing cities and towns to install bus cameras

Feb 2026: Chicopee is the first town to deploy

www.wbur.org/news/2026/02...

Mayor Jake Wilson plans to tackle Somerville's housing crisis. Will it work? More density, new zoning, and fresh investment in affordable and social housing top of Wilson's priorities.

I guess there's something for NIMBYs who don't understand counterfactuals in there too www.boston.com/news/local-n...

NIMBYs who don't understand that housing markets are regional: "sEe, BuIlDiNg HoUsInG dOeSn’T wOrK"

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

Would love to see how different chatgpt makes the graph if you prompt with "make it for an econ journal" vs poli sci vs sociology vs etc... Which discipline gets more stata default aesthetics

Perfect. Graph makes me think we're safe a few more weeks from these things taking all of our jobs

Did chatGPT decide to use labels on the points rather than just using country codes as the points?

Congratulations DHS Secretary Stephen miller on continuing to be DHS Secretary

Blood *lead* levels? Just aggregate data at those race x age cuts? Sampson and Winters have a few review chapters that might point the right direction?

@billingsecon.bsky.social thoughts?

Consistently, in survey after survey, housing availability and affordability is THE number one issue facing Massachusetts voters.

A ‘status quo’ approach to housing from any elected official, of any political party, should be considered malpractice today.

Journopoclypse! Yeah, na. I don't think so

Good post by @joshgans.bsky.social on why the scientific publishing system will not collapse from the rise of AI-supported research. open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga...

Love and hate:

"The use of those AI tools will be expected and the level of analysis will be something quite different from our eeking out of little burrows to find nuggets of identification."

Devil's advocate: it makes refereeing at top5s both easier and harder. Easy to reject because something isn't totally new because some other previous top5 already exhausted the topic. Harder because it is a lot of appendix reading...

The fact that anyone got arrested and convicted of anything (irl or in movies) before the 1970s is astonishing. I know, the past is another country and all, but just wild