Krugman is, of course, right about this. BUT, note that universities can do a lot to revitalize declining and rural regions.

1/Here is a thread about climate change that's going to make a lot of people mad.

Basically, America, on its own, has a LOT power to stop climate change than almost anyone admits.

2/China now emits far more CO2 than the U.S. It emits almost as much as Europe and the U.S. combined.

3/In fact, even this huge disparity dramatically understates the degree to which China is in the driver's seat of climate change.

China, being still much poorer than us, has much more room to grow its economy. Hence, the emissions gap will only grow larger.

4/This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact: The battle to halt climate change will be won or lost in China.

America's power - and thus, the power of American politicians, activists, businesses, etc. - to save the planet from climate catastrophe is very marginal.

5/This is just a fact. But it's an uncomfortable one for a people like Americans who are used to thinking that the world lives or dies at their command.

Thus, I see many Americans desperately trying to preserve the illusion of control with respect to climate change.

1/OK, I should really write another thread about university-centric regional development, because I think people often make some (very understandable) mistakes when thinking about this issue.

2/The biggest myth, I think, is that universities help regions by educating locals as undergraduates.

Skeptics of universities say: "But most of the people who graduate end up leaving."

3/In fact, most of what a university does for a regional economy is NOT about educating local kids.

Educating local kids is good for the nation, but doesn't help a region much.

The way a university helps a region is through

4/Undergraduates usually leave town after graduation.

But university RESEARCH pulls in OTHER smart people from other regions, and they stay there.

Here's a paper showing that this is the main way universities increase a region's human capital:

5/Research also pulls in business investment.

Companies want to partner with university labs, so they can commercialize the technologies the labs produce. So they invest in the labs, and sometimes they even put their offices in the town.

Very interesting new report about how America's economic geography has changed since the great recession: https://t.co/l3YE4WzgKx

Short version: Places with lots of skilled workers are doing great, other places aren't. But more people are moving to the former, which is good.

And here are cool interactive maps to go along with the

Report is via @LettieriDC, who is doing great work on struggling places.

A bit of good news: People are moving from economically bad places to economically good places, though probably too slowly.

Rural America continues to languish.

1/Today in @bopinion, I discuss why America has been producing too many PhDs in recent years, and what we need to do to solve the

2/First of all, many people don't realize just how many PhDs we produce! More than almost any other rich country.

3/And we've kept ramping this number up and up.

4/But the problem begins when PhDs start looking for (usually academic) jobs.

5/The U.S. built a ton of universities and then we stopped.

Professors have tenure.

That means there are just going to be fewer new tenure-track jobs than before. Everyone in academia already knows this well.

I'm teaching a class on race and after reading bell hooks we've moved on to @JohnHMcWhorter. Fact: liberals/progressives generally will never critique the poor moral choices of disadvantaged blacks and tend to blame black morality on "white racism." https://t.co/GEvSKupDox via

Meanwhile conservatives, generally, struggle to confess that Jim Crow was a (Christian) conservative movement. This is why we can't make any progress in 2020. The idea that black people *and* white people *both* have zero moral culpability on our past or present is fiction.

It's not "racist" for a white male to say black men in urban areas commit more crimes in their own neighborhoods and, therefore, are more likely to have contact with police. And it's false that men who commit violent crime & property crime are only doing so because of poverty.

Yes, evangelical Christians, in Jesus name, supported and defended Jim Crow, resisted integration, and struggle with white nationalism as an idol in 2020. Absolutely! Many of their pastors are cowards for never addressing or aiding and abetting it.

Yes, there are cultural patterns in disadvantaged black communities that are not derivative of white racism but emerge from the fact that black men & women, just like white men & women, chose, on purpose, actions that lack virtue & wisdom. Why? B/c all humans are morally flawed.

1/14 How do e-cigarettes (ECs) affect cigarette smoking among youth? My new paper with @FloeFoxon simulates each scenario and finds out which one best matches actual trends... https://t.co/dBB7kcnTls @jgitchell @mikepesko @SwitchFinder @jkelovuori @TobPolicy @Clive_Bates

2/14 First, let's talk about why this question is so difficult to answer: COUNTERFACTUALS. We can't know the alternate-reality answers, like which smokers would have never started in a world without ECs, and which nonsmokers would now be smoking without ECs as an option.

3/14 So, the best we can do is use fancy/sophisticated methodologies to estimate what would have happened to youth smoking rates in the absence of ECs. In our case, simulation modeling

4/14 First, we look at the declining smoking trends *that were already happening* before ECs came (~2010), and project them into the present. This is our BASE-CASE SCENARIO about what smoking trends would be if ECs were never invented. Actual trends were LOWER than this base-case

5/14 Side note about terminology: We use the term “catalyst” instead of “gateway,” because “catalyst” is more precise about the claim we are modeling (that ECs are used first, and then causally lead to smoking). Whereas "gateway" can include other mechanisms like renormalization.

Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.

Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.

So it's entirely reasonable that absent any other intervention, we should expect to hit ~30% vaccinated by the end of March.

In the 90s I was a host on a talk radio station in LA, the same that aired Rush. I was president of LA NOW, & the liberal wkend host when he visited the station. He was so vilified by my then-crowd, I expected a monster. Instead, I met a remarkable, kind and encouraging man... 1/

He was gregarious & generous when we met. He shook my hand & I was shocked that he was nice & genuinely curious about my radio work and activism. I realized I was going to have a fascinating conversation 2/

There were many events during this time as a radio talk show host that changed me. It was my first job in the medium starting in 1993. My meeting Rush & our conversations made me realize the left had been lying to me about many things... 3/

Rush was not a monster, he wasn’t evil, he did not mean people harm, he wasn’t a bigot, or any of the other smears lobbed against him by my leftist associates. I liked him very much, and while we disagreed on many things (then) he was nothing has he had been painted 4/

In my conversations with him, we talked about the issues and despite the disagreements, he also took time to give me advice about hosting, style, connecting w the audience, etc. He encouraged me and gave me advice that made a huge difference in my career… 5/