Aditya Dasgupta
Read, teach and write about comparative politics, political economy, and social science at UC-Merced: https://aditya-dasgupta.com
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaSir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue
- Interesting argument…( although the title is bothering me — worse than war: the costs of [concept that includes war] )
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaEveryone talks about the "credibility revolution", but I think one of the most valuable shifts in econ over the last decade has been the rise of rigorous descriptive historical work like this in top journals:
Recently accepted by #QJE, “The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890–2006,” by Lyons (@ronanlyons), Shertzer (@econhist-allday), Gray (@econhistoryorbust), and Agorastos: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...
- nobel peace prize never fails
- does seem like an empirical regularity
- Perennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers “We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.” (Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)
- Reposted by Aditya Dasguptaclaude code is fucking insane i know literally NOTHING about Hegel. ZERO. and it just built me a complete system of German idealism
- very cool
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaSocial science has been solved: Write 1600 lines of instructions to Claude Code to generate a publishable paper based exclusively on silicon samples. Econ Nobel Prize here I come.
- unbearable stupidity
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaThere is growing interest in HPE about social conflict in the run-up to the French Revolution. In a new article at Data & Corpus, I describe the Jean Nicolas Database, a database of 8,516 rebellions in France (1661-1789) 👉Article: doi.org/10.46298/dc.... 👉Database: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/... 🧵1/6
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- had a chance to visit the Indian agricultural research institute (IARI) fields yesterday — where many of the crops grown in India are/were developed, including the varieties responsible for the green revolution
- India’s rural employment guarantee program, one of the world’s biggest safety nets — and possibly the most studied program in the history of development economics? — is at serious risk of being repealed: indianexpress.com/article/indi...
- Reposted by Aditya Dasgupta📣📣📣 GREAT, time-sensitive opportunity for senior/mid-career scholars to join us in Madrid at UC3M´s social sciences department (UC3M-ATRAE Program 2026) on an attractive pay+research funds package 📣📣📣 This does NOT happen everyday. THREAD below if this is of interest 1/n
- Fascinating. Linking two other important works on US regional culture: books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&... (Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America) and onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... (Frontier culture: The roots and persistence of “rugged individualism” in the United States)
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaExcited to post the latest version of my JMP: The female labor supply constraints of spousal jealousy bit.ly/4nn9apn I use two field experiments to study the role of spousal jealousy in constraining married women’s employment. More below 👇:
- I agree with this — survey experiments represent a different intellectual lineage from usage of natural experiments to overcome real-world endogeneity (credibility revolution). That said, I think collective confusion that randomization=credible has given survey experiments too much epistemic status
- A blog post giving a more thorough take on survey experiments and the credibility revolution: cyrussamii.com?p=4168
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- This is about to radicalize me against the credibility revolution
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- the case for slower, better/more careful research papers in poli sci gets another data point in its favor
- incredible that we can turn correcting coding errors into litigation about the process in which we are allowed to transmit this information
- Important public good (replications are much needed to help keep the whole enterprise honest but under-supplied)
- Reposted by Aditya Dasgupta💡 How does moving to opportunity reshape political behavior? 🗞️ In our new BJPolS paper, @thmskrr.bsky.social and I show that residential relocations that increase access to opportunity foster political integration and shift political preferences to the left. 👉 tinyurl.com/46utjj65
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaMany have asked for the LLM Survey paper. The release was bungled a bit by PNAS, but it is live now: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaIreland winning goal and end of match with Irish commentary
- Happy to learn I received the Michael Wallerstein prize in political economy for this article on the political consequences of technological change in agriculture in the US: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- Do architecture and urban planning affect political behavior? Happy to share a paper that @tesaliarizzo.bsky.social and I have coming out at the APSR which uses computer vision to investigate how the built environment shapes inequalities in civic participation in Mexico: osf.io/preprints/so.... 🧵1/5
- Do the physical characteristics of the polling places to which citizens are assigned affect voter turnout? We use a convolutional neural network applied imagery of every polling place in Mexico to show that building imagery is highly predictive of turnout, over and above standard predictors 2/5
- lol, also technically human extinction ought to be quite good for gdp per capita
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaPaths to Power (PtP) is out in @bjpols.bsky.social! It is a database with data on cabinet members' social profile globally from 1966-2021. This is a great team effort with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social, @inalkristiansen.bsky.social. But many more helped us along the way 🙏 A short 🧵
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaMy response to the NYT’s “moderate to win” argument: The data shows the strategy is tapped out. Being seen as moderate by voters doesn’t boost votes, replacing every progressive with moderates would net 0 seats, and the graveyard of defeated D incumbents if full of moderates, not progressives.
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaVery happy to be able to share the polling-level dataset on Indian Parliamentary Elections 2009, 2014, 2019 that we have been working on for more than a decade. Both the data and the data descriptor are open access: rdcu.be/eujHH @statsvitenskap.bsky.social @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaMy book w/@profsorelle.bsky.social will be out in January! These ideas have brewed since I interned at Queens Legal Services 20 years ago. The book is for anyone who cares about people, justice, power & democracy. Much more to share more in the coming months! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
- Came across a cool paper on how false beliefs are sustained in equilibrium. In Murcia, prayers for rain appear to work - because they are timed to occur when rain is increasingly likely. Praying for rain globally is only found where rainfall is predictable with time: www.nber.org/papers/w31411
- This book is relevant to thinking about the present constitutional moment in the US. Constitutional and federal mythology aside, the US has always had some elements of extreme political centralization in the hands of the presidency that go back to a desire to create an electoral monarchy
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaI will be engaging a conversation with @daliyang.bsky.social, @vicshih.bsky.social, @tompepinsky.com and Martin Dimitrov on my new book at the #APSA2025 Author Meets Critics panel on 9/14, 10:00 to 11:30am PDT. Come join us if you are still around. www.cambridge.org/core/books/d...
- Reposted by Aditya DasguptaIncredible parallels in this Berinsky & @gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...
- Come check out our panel on Bureaucratic Performance in the Developing World at APSA (Thu, September 11, 12:00 to 1:30pm PDT in East Meeting Level, East 12. I'll be presenting some new work on how farmers and officials in India learned to game satellite-based environmental enforcement.....
- I wasn’t familiar with this terminology but the “missing intercept” problem seems like a good way to think about partial vs general equilibrium effects and why the latter isn’t just about adding up the former: voxdev.org/topic/method...
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- The thing about industrial policy is that it doesn’t seem to work very well unless you have a highly professionalized and relatively politically autonomous bureaucracy (think MITI in Japan vs license raj in India) that implements it. I think that’s the fundamental problem in the US spanning party
- Teaching a new class on technology and politics this fall — which tries to think about contemporary tech governance issues via the historical experience of past technological revolutions (IR, atom bomb, printing press, automobile, etc) Sharing the syllabus in case it is of interest..!
- I’m starting to think everyone needs a basic primer in what machine learning is, just like they need to know algebra/the basics of calculus. It’s just as accessible and I think important for critical thinking about the tools everyone will increasingly be using, including government
