Some Unpleasant Arithmetic
Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “ Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly.
A few weeks back, there was much social media drama about this a paper titled: “ Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter” (2024) by Jingyi Qiu, Yan Chen, Alain Cohn, and Alvin Roth (recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics). The study posted job market papers by economics PhDs, and then assigned prominent economists (who had volunteered) to randomly promote half of them on their profiles(more detail on this paper in a bit).
The “drama” in question was generally: “ it is immoral to throw dice around on the most important aspect of a young economist’s career”, versus “ no it’s not”. This, of course, awakened interest in a broader subject: Randomized Controlled Trials, or RCTs.
