jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

These communities should be welcoming new neighbors, rather than wasting money in court to fight overdue zoning reforms. #mapoli commonwealthbeacon.org/courts/mbta-...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

EXTREMELY BAD NEWS for economic research, per former BLS Commissioner @ericagroshen.bsky.social on LinkedIn. BLS is suspending access to its restricted data "for the forseeable future." Applies to projects through the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers & onsite projects with BLS. #EconSky

submitted 2 days ago • 32 comments

This is 10-12 tenure-track assistant professors’ salaries at many places. A whole academic program’s worth of money, pissed away, In Times of Austerity, on rent-a-cops going after students who dared speak. Nobody behind this should have a career.

submitted 2 days ago • 10 comments

"The Healey administration will auction seven parcels of state-owned land this fall with a goal of redeveloping it into housing" Only a few of these are in high demand and low supply locations in MA, but this is a good start #mapoli www.wbur.org/news/2025/06...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

So the recession already started, huh?

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

New: A DOGE staffer developed an AI tool to review Veterans Affairs contracts. But there was a slight hitch. It hallucinated the size of those deals. For example, it concluded that more than a thousand contracts were each worth $34M, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

submitted 2 days ago • 86 comments

Woke up to find an email informing me that our paper (me and @timurnatkhov.bsky.social ) on Russian Serfdom was accepted by the Review of Economic Studies! Link to paper: www.andreamatranga.net/uploads/1/5/...

submitted 3 days ago • 7 comments

Oh no! Not the expiration of my complimentary access to a random tool I've never heard of or used that Elsevier pretends to spend money on to justify their parasitic existence and my free referee labor. Whatever will I do?

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Overheard a fellow millennial dad trying to explain paper checks to his ~6 year old daughter (they were walking to a mailbox to send one). Peak generational comedy.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

TIL: The Massachusetts millionaires' tax is automatically adjusted for inflation, but the Massachusetts minimum wage is not. Cool. #mapoli

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

this story is just a great illustration of NIMBY nihilism. at core, these people have no vision for anything. they simply oppose change for the sake of opposition. (i also think there is an element of death denial here — if i can prevent all physical changes i can deny the reality of my mortality)

submitted 4 days ago • 127 comments

Cutting NIH or NSF funding sounds abstract. Seeing what research is actually being cut makes it real. Kudos to @nytimes.com for this piece: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, we’re still trying to implement a FAR more modest transit oriented development bill that was passed by our legislature in January of 2021. Our only production bill since was ADUs. The lack of any sense of urgency will be Massachusetts demise.

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

"Ken Griffey's grotesquely swollen jaw" gets the baby to laugh every time

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Lol just heard the NPR story about the DOGE guy who lost his job when he said he was surprised at how hard it was to find inefficiencies in the federal govt because he came from Silicon Valley where companies always have lots of people sitting around doing nothing

submitted 6 days ago • 54 comments

Recent working paper from @tianyiwang.bsky.social and my former student Huiren Tan shows negative career effects of the Hollywood blacklist and macro reductions in film plot progressivity drive.google.com/file/d/1JETw...

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

I asked Gemini to read and referee a paper of mine. Mostly just word salad and pablum, but Gemini did compliment me on my JEL codes: "the JEL codes are appropriate for the subject matter."

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

But this poll was taken before anyone read David Bell's Times op-ed

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

This is hilarious, but mostly it makes me dream about what an Orsillo and Remy BlueChew ad on NESN in the old days would have been like

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

This is kind of hilarious. Cambridge's excellent new "six stories everywhere" zoning might have inadvertently eliminated the city's ability to use zoning to hem in religious and nonprofit educational orgs

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

We have a new WP out that looks at school masking during the COVID pandemic. Using the removal of CDC school masking guidance as an exogenous shock to district and state policies & data on district masking nationwide, we find mandate removals contributed to at least 9% of US COVID deaths in 2022.

submitted 8 days ago • 11 comments

Duplo doesn't need to make sounds. Wtaf?

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Watch out bosses, the 5 year old has turned his attention to labor organizing

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Woah if true: Century-old anti-Irish Yankee ideas aren't the best way to set policy in the Commonwealth? What's next? Questioning anti density zoning rules written to keep immigrants and African Americans out of Massachusetts suburbs? #mapoli

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Wild that some members of the Massachusetts State House of Representatives aren't aware that their constituents are also represented by mayors, city councilors, etc #mapoli www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/22/m...

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Traffic-pocalypse is coming to Newton this weekend. "[M]odels project that it could lead to miles-long backups of 'two to three hours in some cases.'" Cool. www.wbur.org/news/2025/05...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

If this is even remotely accurate, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have killed more people in several months than the Iraq war killed in a decade

submitted 9 days ago • 140 comments

"Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication." prospect.org/power/2025-0...

submitted 9 days ago • 188 comments

“.. these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

submitted 9 days ago • 214 comments