Economists call it identification. Sociologists call it mechanism. Everyone else calls it "wait, why should I believe this?"

LMU Munich’s International Stone Center is hiring a Junior Research Group Leader in Wealth Inequality Research. Open to scholars in sociology, economics and related fields.

Like I don’t think one needs ecological systems theory (whatever the actual theory, which is never really spelled out beyond “different stuff matters”) to make a claim along the lines of “both family and school may influence child development.”

one of the nice things about meeting people in the complexity science orbit is that they don’t like ”linear reality”. unfortunately, the alternative is normally “here’s Coleman’s boat. anyway …”

I always called it ceremonial citation but 'ritual throat-clearing' works too

In the 2000s, good PhD programmes taught to come up with as many explanations for a correlation in the data as possible. Nowadays, you get away with naming as many holes in someone elses identification strategy as possible. The two are related, but the outcome is completely different.

Research is the process of turning a simple question into seventeen reasons you cannot answer it

On a personal level, I feel honored that I've met Carson. On a different personal level, I'm glad that the Nobel is celebrating someone shy, peculiar, intense. May all the weird/funny/creative/dark/introverted people of the world live long and prosper.

The most dangerous sentence in research is "while we're at it, we could also..."

1/12 Personality predicts earnings and wealth. But does it cause them? That is hard to answer: personality is correlated with family background and much else. In our new working paper, we use the randomness of genetic inheritance to get closer to a causal answer.