More bad news in the replication crisis. Serra-Garcia and Gneezy (2021) find that non-replicable studies are far more likely to be cited than replicable ones, and therefore are more likely to attract substantial public interest. This gives the public a false sense of what academic research actually says on a topic.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/21/eabd1705.full

Despite the left’s assertion that hungry children is the fault of government funding, Weitzman et al. (2008) find that the rate of food insecurity in low income smoking households is double that of low income non smoking ones. In other words, many low income parents have the money to feed their children, but choose not to.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/04/AR2008110401938.html

An overview of recent evidence on taxes and economic growth

https://taxfoundation.org/reviewing-recent-evidence-effect-taxes-economic-growth/

Can we defund NPR already ?

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/27/1000868262/colorado-becomes-first-state-to-ban-legacy-college-admissions

And no, just because wealthy students can pay for test prep doesn’t mean it improves scores in any significant manner (even Slate agrees! https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.amp). And the SAT measures general arithmetic and reading ability, so rich schools center their curricula on the SAT by teaching basic math and reading? What are the poor schools teaching then?

Epic

The fucking mental gymnastics liberals do to explain why black kids can’t get into selective NYC high schools

Glad to see Nicholas Wade writing again.

For those who don’t know, Wade wrote a book called a Troublesome Inheritance where he talked about a biological basis for race. He was “deboonked” by a bunch of left-wing anthropologists

Currie et al. (2019) examine racial disparities in pollution exposure in the U.S. context. They find a significant decrease in exposure for all races since 2000 and the black-white gap has substantially converged as well. This doesn’t mean that all blacks are exposed to higher pollution than whites, as the study also finds much overlap in the distributions.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/card/ManuscriptCurrieVoorheisWalker.pdf

Despite the elites suggesting that the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment is the reason why blacks are more vaccine hesitant, Brandon et al. (2005) finds no increase in blacks’ medical mistrust after learning about it; in fact, most people in the study had never heard about it in the first place.

https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2005/brandon-tuskegee.html

Looks like I’m back on this app

Opened telegram to 200,000k new messages because I haven’t used this since the summer

Halloran et al. (2021) find a massive decline in academic achievement following pandemic school closures. Declines were far less pronounced in schools that had more options for in-person learning during the following school year

https://www.nber.org/papers/w29497

Choi et al. (2021) find that a consequence of the massive job losses blue-collar whites suffered as a result of NAFTA was a large backlash against Clinton and a shift towards Republican Party identification. These findings are similar to other papers I’ve shared (Pierce and Schott 2018; Che, Lu, Pierce et al. 2016).

https://www.iq.harvard.edu/files/harvard-iqss/files/choi-kuziemko-washington-wright_nafta_politics_8dec2020.pdf

Edward O. Wilson, the famous naturalist who wrote Sociobiology, is said to have died today at 92.

In order to withstand the onslaught of his Harvard Biology department colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson taught himself in the mid-1970s how to write like a literary intellectual. He immediately won a Pulitzer Prize for On Human Nature.

E.O. Wilson’s whole life was like that. As Bill & Ted would say: Triumphant.

https://vdare.com/posts/edward-o-wilson-rip

Woman moment
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/202112/surprising-link-between-narcissism-and-belief-in-astrology

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hispanic-voters-in-this-pennsylvania-city-are-shifting-toward-the-gop-both-parties-want-to-know-why-11640687403
Supposedly these trends are setting off “alarm bells” in the Democratic Party. The alarm bells in question…

Joe Biden is getting 60% of the Hispanic vote and not 70, very concerning! And the slight shift towards Republicans seems to be Democrat inaction on e.g. pathway to citizenship rather than Republican action. Just read the quote at the bottom of the graph

Who woulda thought?
https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/intelligence-is-a-stronger-predictor-of-academic-performance-than-self-control-study-finds-62260