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rchung.bsky.social
Anti-social social scientist with low amusement threshold. When you do theoretical mathematical demography it's good to have a Plan B so I ride a bike.
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This is both astonishing and completely understandable. It's also appalling and maddening.

i want a covid booster tbh

“Using data from Germany, we find that long-term industrial decline is associated with increased support for left-wing, but not right-wing, populist parties…we find increased support for right-wing populism in places where manufacturing levels are historically high & industrial decline is looming”

Let’s not fall for the “lump of labour” fallacy. During the Depression, banning married women from work didn’t reduce unemployment; it deepened inequality. Gendered job cuts didn’t fix the economy; they worsened conditions for the most economically vulnerable families. (1/4)🧵

"Oaxaca-Blinder meets Kitagawa" is something I've been thinking of writing about for a while, but even better to read it from one of the original characters: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

This is a lie

Shorter Trump Administration: "Stop her before she op-eds again!"

Well, without an ankle monitor, what is to stop her from co-authoring another op-ed? 

Once again, Reform voters are not like other people in the UK.

Tech bros (and others) who don't understand govt think that because it's slow, it must be inefficient. Govt is slow because it has to: 1) be stable; and 2) consider all of us. Lightning fast is exciting but trades nuance and special cases for speed.

what is fascinating to me is the number of people whose “knowledge” of government appears to just be an accumulation of cliches and stereotypes + an inchoate sense that if something is big and costly then it must necessarily be “wasteful”

Deadline approaching: Friday this week at noon UK! Apply and/or share widely!

"Some people say I shouldn't have signed that non-disparagement clause to get early retirement but I happily signed it in order to leave more quickly."

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming We're finally on our own This summer I hear the drumming Four dead in Ohio 4 May 1970

My favorite workshop presenter on his second slide: “I know how to present to economists. You get to ask your question; I get to shut it down.”

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences? This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

‘Kennedy told reporters that there were "many, many good ways to treat measles and doctors need to know that and to know those methods.’ One problem; there is no treatment for measles. Signed, a doctor who’s been forced to deal with measles because of this stupid fraud.

I just saw a plaintive post from a small business socked with a huge tariff bill. The post started off, "We don't get involved in politics" as if that meant politics wouldn't get involved in them. They probably thought politics doesn't matter cuz both sides were equally bad.

Real GDP decreased 0.3% in 1Q2025. Real GDP increased 2.4% in 4Q2024. www.bea.gov/news/2025/gr...

Vance's Easter visit to Rome clogged its streets with a 40-vehicle entourage. He also demanded the Coliseum be closed so he and his family could tour it alone. Tourists who properly booked slots in advance got screwed. He's apparently the first to make that demand. Then he didn't bother to show up.

"His wife tried to calm him down and blamed the Italians."

Shorter Hegseth: "If Signal is good enough to hide my affairs from my wife and my employer, it's surely secure enough to keep classified operations from foreign spies."

A great two weeks at UCLA! Come join us!

RAND's Postdoctoral Program in the Study of Aging is recruiting fellows! This program provides an opportunity for junior scholars in demographic and aging research to sharpen their research skills at @rand.org. Application deadline is May 23. Learn more: www.rand.org/well-being/s...

Hegseth promised he'd bring "warrior culture" to the Department of Defense, which is why he had a makeup room installed at the Pentagon. His spokesperson denied it, saying that it "didn't have a lighted mirror; and besides, he doesn't use it for make up, it's a room he uses to make out."

In the first week of my undergrad class we derive the stationary population equation: b = 1/e0. In a stationary population, as life expectancy increases, the birth rate decreases.

Gov. Tim Walz State Address: "We have university students shoved into unmarked vans and fathers being tossed into Salvadorian gulags without a hint of due process. If you say you love freedom, but you don't believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn't freedom, it's privilege."

A couple of days ago I gave a guest lecture on an Introduction to Bayesian Demography. The materials are here if people are interested! Includes a few examples using R and Stan: mjalexander.github.io/bayesian-dem...

A weird local story got a lot weirder. www.berkeleyside.org/2025/04/22/r...

Looks like Hegseth is on the way out. Who's the next least appropriate choice for Secretary of Defense?