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Latest — 05 Mar 2025

The Puzzling Political Economy of Free Money

"[T]he share of unspent money under the MPLAD scheme at the end of the tenure of the current Lok Sabha nearly doubled to 16 per cent compared to 8.7 per cent in the 16th Lok Sabha (2014-19)." The Business Standard p.s. You can read the

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Results May Vary

Economics papers are reproducible but not very robust

Coding At a Distance

Senior professors have long lived the future of coding. Professors ask. Underlings code. Professors critique the output, e.g., "I prefer statistical significance stars for the betas but not the constant term." Underlings revise the code. The cycle continues. Something similar can play out at companies. Now, thanks

No Comparative Advantage

The case for free trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage. For example, Indians “pay” for Snapchat (and, let’s say, allow it to repatriate the profits) because Americans are better at building it, and Indians are better at producing something else. The example doesn’t land. Indians

Diabetes as a Dummy Variable

“Adults with diabetes are nearly twice as likely to have heart disease or stroke as adults without diabetes.” NIH These alarming numbers are used to justify more pre-emptive testing, e.g., Calcium score for the heart, more aggressive use of statin therapy, etc., among diabetics. The analyses that underlie the

What do we learn from bestseller regressions?

In The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers learn about the attributes of bestsellers by regressing whether or not a book is a bestseller on features of the book’s text. They find that topics like “human closeness” are prognostic of a book’s success. So is the author’s ability

Reading Readers' Needs

With Gaurav Gandhi The books people pick to learn from often fail them. All too often, the book has intimidating jargon, or the examples are irrelevant to the reader, or there is too much duplication. Or the content is just wrong. Readers make poor choices about books because finding a

Building Together, Separately: Challenges of Software Development

With Atul Dhingra Microservices, Macroproblems A single page on Doordash can make upward of 1000 gRPC calls (see the interview). For many engineers, upward of a thousand network calls nicely illustrate the chaos and inefficiency unleashed by microservices. Engineers implicitly diff 1000+ gRPC calls with the orders of magnitude fewer

Unbiased Hiring

When hiring for technical positions, people often use high-precision heuristics conditional on relevance to decide who to interview. Otherwise, the interviewing burden would be too much. The advent of GPT makes use of high-precision heuristics yet more important as interviewing and resumes are less trustworthy now. The heuristics people often

Less Known Facts About Muslims in India

There are two main concerns about Indian Muslims. First, many fear that Indian Muslims are greatly behind other groups. The second, deeper concern relates to Muslim women. Many fear sex gaps to be much larger among Muslims than other groups. Let’s look at the facts. 1. Education: The literacy