Duncan Webb
@dunc_webb
Postdoc Economics | @PSEinfo ⇒ @PrincetonEcon ⇒ @NovaSBE | Development economist interested in discrimination, social change, effective altruism
Excited to present my JMP: Silence to Solidarity My job market paper studies whether communication between discriminatory people can lead to large reductions in discrimination 🔗 bit.ly/webbjmp 👇for more
PEPFAR is one of USA's proudest achievements, having saved millions of lives of the world's poorest people at low cost. Pausing this bipartisan jewel to save a rounding error in the budget is depraved. Call your Senator. @SavePEPFARNow #PEPFARSavesBabies pepfarreport.org
Not nothing. Many people who received AIDS drugs via PEPFAR have probably died. More people will die because of the cuts to GAVI. But it previously cost so little to save these lives that letting these people die won’t generate enough savings to show up on the graph.
For all the headlines, nothing changed.
The PEPFAR cut is being removed from the rescissions package, per Sen. Schmitt. Reduces the size of the overall cut by $400 million.
Finally read the @TheLancet article claiming US foreign assistance cuts will lead to 14mill deaths up to 2030 which has garnered much media attention. Its problematic to say the least, X-country regression with mortality on left and US spending per head on right. 1/ 🧵
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
“No children are dying on my watch,” said Rubio. It's blatantly false. Credible estimates count 190K deaths so far. In Kenya, I am documenting for a film devastating impact, including this child's starvation & many deaths directly caused by Rubio’s actions. See my @msnbc clip
Just finished "Abundance" by @ezraklein and Derek Thompson. Fantastic book! I found myself thinking, "I couldn't agree more." Well done! If I may offer one critique...however...
Killing enormous numbers of innocent people to save tiny amounts of money and then immediately spending 8x that on bailouts for their own donors whose businesses they crushed with their unnecessary trade war
New preprint finding that eliminating US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause: - 15.2m deaths from AIDS - 2.2m deaths from TB - 7.9 additional child deaths
Some first thoughts on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill: 1. The reforms taken from the Banner Review are good and should slightly reduce the cost and delay created by judicial review; 2. Reducing the scope for arbitrary behaviour by planning committees is probably sensible,…
Trying to think about the state of the Effective Altruist movement and realizing Elon killing USAID probably overwhelms the total amount of good ever achieved by all EA global health donations. PEPFAR alone is $7B/yr, 10x total EA spending, & all USAID spending is only ~$30B/yr
