Daniel Bergstresser
@dbergstresser
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Finance professor at the Brandeis International Business School.
Brandeis University
Joined February 2009
…when he got out of prison. Blanchard looked at me very seriously and said something like “being all over the news for felonious computer stuff will push his salary way beyond what we can afford.”
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When I was a PhD student at MIT the economics computer manager got a three year prison sentence for secretly using department machines as part of an international software pirating ring. I asked our department chair (Olivier Blanchard) if MIT was likely to hire him back….
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My mom was an academic and her thesis advisor was still at Stanford when I was an undergrad there; I used to go by and chat and get advice from him. My mom only told me after he died that she thought her career had been derailed after she rejected his advances when she was his….
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…student. It’s easy for me to see that people don’t always tell even people very close to them about all of their bad experiences. It’s good to have some humility about the potential incompleteness of one’s awareness.
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I recently heard a speaker at a conference say that developing a common currency in Asia would be much harder than it had been in Europe because the European countries didn’t have the same history of conflict with each other.
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A lot of people seem to be looking for some complicated theory of Elon Musk, but the explanation I’ve heard from insiders that seems to fit the facts best is “He uses a lot of cocaine.”.
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We may end up with one Jeopardy! host in Avignon and one Jeopardy! host in Rome.
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Had “the talk” with my eight-year-old son today about how correlation does not imply causation and about how helpful a rigorous identification strategy or experimental approach can be.
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Not a subtweet, just a note that the Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling was born on this date in 1887. He was the nominal head of a Nazi-directed puppet regime, and in October of 1945 he was shot by a firing squad. His name is now used as an epithet that means “traitor puppet”.
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@dmayzlin No, I think I just said “wow”. I was surprised in the instant she told me, but it was also like a puzzle piece falling into place. Resolved a bunch of things that had been a little mysterious before she told me.
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this belligerent aversion to books and knowledge is getting way out of hand.
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when it went into the MIT library I tucked a $20 bill into it and last I checked that cash was still there.
Describe your dissertation in the most boring way possible. I’ll start:.An analysis of redactions in a government training manual.
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I think that the weirdest thing about the Star Wars movies is probably the total absence of think tanks. All of them - Darth Vader, the Rebels, Palpatine - make claims and take actions without ever once referring to a think tank white paper or analysis of their policies.
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A Solow story that I heard as a grad student: at a conference a professor from SMU came up to Solow and introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Robert Smith, Southern Methodist” to which Solow replied “Robert Solow, northern Jew”.
RIP. Solow taught the first part of the PhD macroeconomics sequence for my cohort at MIT. He had a contagious good cheer and enthusiasm for the topic and for his students.
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Non-Generation X folks to Gen X: “why. are you the way you are?”.Generation X:.
Mom uses a trash can to contain her baby while she crochets in the park, 1969.
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41 days ago.
I'm not suspended from the ceiling above a barrel of acid by a rope that burns a little faster every time I tweet, you concern-trolling ghouls. I've just lost any confidence I had that sharing my thinking on this particular topic continues to be useful, because I called it wrong.
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“I don’t understand why people who play the lottery aren’t more afraid of lightning.” .-Kyle Kinane.
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When Tucker Carlson criticizes US Army generals he is not “beating up on the military”; he is speaking directly to the ambitious white nationalist lower-ranking officers and enlisted soldiers in our military.
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Some personal news. After fifteen years of marriage, my wife has now accepted my Facebook friend request.
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With the death of Queen Elizabeth II my guess is that the most widely-known living human on earth is now very likely Daron Acemoglu.
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It’s crazy that Deion Sanders made millions of dollars a year for playing cornerback on a side of the field that nobody ever threw to.
Trumpist and economic right-wing prince (Heritage, Club for Growth founder, ex WSJ editorial board) Stephen Moore: “You find the Zip codes that don’t have the disease, and you get those things opened up. They should probably have never been shut down. This isn’t rocket science.”.
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One of my favorite professors in graduate school was Mike Piore, who was the only Marxian economics professor at MIT at that time. In his labor economics class he had us read the novel "the Sand Pebbles", set on a US Navy gunboat on the Yangtze River in the 1920s. Piore had. .
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Jamal Khashoggi unavailable for comment.
Whether it’s freedom for the people of Hong Kong, human rights for the Rohingya, all across the world, @realDonaldTrump has understood that it’s important for America to be a true beacon for freedom and liberty and human rights around the globe.
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News reporters often call North Korea “the most secretive nation in the world”, but what I think they actually mean is “the most secretive nation in the world, that we know of”.
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Live your life in such a way that you are never subjected to praise from Viktor Orbán.
Great meeting with @Columbia professor and star economist Jeffrey Sachs. He shares my concerns about the war in 🇺🇦, we must avoid further escalation before it’s too late. Thank you for the visit, Professor!
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My first day as an assistant professor I walked into the building and walked by the office of a more senior faculty member. As I walked by his door, he told me to come in and shut the door behind me. He said “If you f*&k any of our students here we will fire you immediately.”….
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I think that if we didn’t want to be a country that was vulnerable to berserk conspiracy theories then we probably should have made the backs of our dollar bills less weird.
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@kadska @chrislbs @AmandaWorking @dmayzlin Every human being is born into a crime scene of one kind or another, that nobody really totally can explain to them.
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I am really impressed with how quickly our market-based society and economy developed new vaccines for Covid-19 and delivered them to the most important 0.5 percent of the people in our country.
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saving this for next time I teach Hotelling competition
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it’s only Bayesianism if it comes from the Priory of Bayes in Aquintaine, otherwise it’s just sparkling common sense.
The Priory of Bayes in Aquitaine, where the Bayesian statistical movement started.
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Was talking to a mountain rescue guy a few years ago about why so many folks have died on Mount Washington over the years. He said “It isn’t Everest or K2, but it’s a real mountain and it’s close to Tufts.”.
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Today has a mind-bending feel, like finding some previously undiscovered hi-quality photo of the Grassy Knoll and zooming in and seeing JFK shooting JFK.
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What dense 700-page Pulitzer Prize-winning history book should Chris Nolan adapt for film next?.
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When I was a PhD student at MIT the most interesting gossip about the faculty we ever got came when the second-year PhD students sat us first-year PhD students down and described in detail all of the things that we were never allowed to joke about in our end-of-year skit.
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A couple of decades ago, when I was a junior professor at Harvard Business School, the then-dean sat with us at lunch one Monday and seemed very tired. We asked why he was tired and he said that over the weekend he’d had to bail out a bunch of our students….
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I watched soccer yesterday and thought it was really neat and I want to share some thoughts about how the sport could be made more popular with some rule changes, etc (1/43).
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that’s 730.13 papers on the Fahrenheit scale.
The British physicist Lord Kelvin published 661 papers during his career.
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I came to economics after a brief career as a cowboy. My boss asked me to round up his 97 head of cattle and I said to him "ok boss, 100", got fired and the next thing you know I was at MIT.
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…they had been staying at an estate near Martha Stewart’s place and had gotten drunk and decided to “go over and say hi.” Stewart came out with an AR-15 and held them at gunpoint until the police came and took them off to jail for the night. I don’t have any moral to this story.
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No.
I’m working with my CA colleagues to address the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. We must make sure all deposits exceeding the FDIC $250k limit are honored. Banking is about confidence. If depositors lose confidence on the safety of their deposits over 250k then we are in trouble.
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Yesterday my finance students asked me what lessons might already be drawn from the FTX collapse and I think that lesson number 1 so far is that you should not work for a boss who pressures employees to take amphetamines.
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As a person who has lost a pet bear to an accidental cocaine overdose I don’t think that this “Cocaine Bear” film is in good taste at all.
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I think people don’t appreciate the extent to which baseball’s Designated Hitter Rule has killed intimate male friendships.
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Had I been responsible for the marketing approach behind “Trojan” brand condoms, I probably would not have given the brand the same name as a tool that was famously welcomed inside of a city’s gates but then broke open and allowed the little guys inside to take over the city.
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The military origin of the term “no quarter” was a phrase signaling that opponents who attempted to surrender would have their surrender attempt rejected and would instead be killed.
And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.
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@kadska @chrislbs @AmandaWorking @dmayzlin Now understanding the background, I see that how he reacted to me was most consistent with remembering and trying to figure out what I might know, while not giving away anything himself. A unusual gregarious avuncular wariness.
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I’ve gotten tons done today and I think that the secret has been being willing to do things really, really poorly.
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Thinking about today’s economics Nobel Prize news, I’m not 100 percent sure that the polyamory community has really wrestled yet with the implications of the Diamond-Dybvig bank run model for the unraveling dynamics of n>2 and especially massively plural marriages.
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When I was younger my dad said working in any organization would mean sometimes being asked to do stupid or immoral things; he said it’s important not to do these things, and very important to know when to make a big show of not doing them and when to just quietly not do them.
What’s the best advice your Dad has ever given you?.
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maybe you guys should sit this one out.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” This #MLKDay2022 and every day, the #FBI remains dedicated to service and committed to protecting our communities.
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A very large crowd braved the sleet and freezing rain and gathered on Boston Common this evening in order to call for the impeachment of @realDonaldTrump!
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RIP. Solow taught the first part of the PhD macroeconomics sequence for my cohort at MIT. He had a contagious good cheer and enthusiasm for the topic and for his students.
RIP. Bob Solow an absolute giant in Economics, has passed away at age 99. Tremendously influential in the profession and one of the key founders of the MIT Economics department as we live it today. Will be sorely missed.
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Jeffrey Toobin is on CNN talking about things that create an appearance of impropriety.
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@chrislbs @AmandaWorking @dmayzlin She absolutely did not say “you should go to Stanford and work with that guy.” She told me I’d get a better education at a place like Swarthmore or Wooster but I wanted to be warm.
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. I personally saw this first-hand when I worked in a factory that manufactured trash bags. So it's not totally surprising that what might seem to be minor-ish disruptions in labor markets can cause eerie dynamics of shortages throughout the economy. (end).
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I was also briefly swallowed by a humpback whale but I didn’t go around making a huge deal about it.
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Long-distance indoor rowing is an ultra-esoteric sport, but I am still very happy to record the 25th-fastest half-marathon time by an American so far this year. Under a minute off my PR and less than seven minutes off the fastest recorded American at that distance this year.
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Got told this morning that I was too cute to be an economist.
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fwiw economics is a social science.
Sen. Hagerty R-TN questions Dr. Cook's expertise saying it's "more social science than economics." . Cook: I have a PhD in Economics. I specialize in international economics and managing financial crises. I worked w Larry Summers at Treasury and in the WH at CEA.
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Ruth Paine, who helped Lee Harvey Oswald get his job at the Texas School Book Depository, taught a summer course in Russian in 1963 at Dallas' St. Marks School. Her only student was William Hootkins, better known for playing X-wing pilot Jek Porkins in Star Wars. So now you know.
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…and that was New Faculty Orientation at Harvard Business School in the Year of Our Lord 2002.
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*request for help* my niece is taking high school stats and has a project for that class that requires her to collect survey data on Taylor Swift. My sister asked me to share.
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First time I visited NYC was just post-college, arrived on bus, friend took me straight to rooftop party, a bunch of artists. A high guy tried to explain his art to me for 20 minutes. Later that night I heard him say (pointing at me) “That guy is everything I hate about New York”.
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Icarus.
Name an athlete who is usually only remembered for a single, iconic moment.
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gonna go out on a limb and guess that SBF did not run this thread by his lawyers before he sent it out.
1) I'm sorry. That's the biggest thing. I fucked up, and should have done better.
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Today is the anniversary of an ugly day where a tacky celebrity, deciding that they couldn’t get what they wanted by legitimate means, arranged for their demented goons to try to get it by force.
On this day in 1994, US figure skating champion Nancy Kerrigan was attacked by Tonya Harding's bodyguard with a police baton at the US Championships in MI. It was later confirmed he was hired by Harding's ex-husband to strike Kerrigan on her landing knee. #ThrowbackThursday #TBT
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I have a conjecture about which one of President Trump’s attorneys was the first to send him a bill.
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Watch the video. @jason (Jason Calacanis) admits to receiving private benefits from SVB in the context of that bank’s courtship of him as a founder/CEO. This matters for corporate governance because a founder/CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Very crooked.
This explains a lot about those startup company cash balances on checking accounts at SVB:.
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@kearney_melissa What a weird situation. I was thinking of how the scariest risks can be those that you hadn’t even considered before they happen. This seems like an example; the systems that kept our data safe and backed up considered all sorts of possible failures but not the one that occurred.
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Over 500 folks have ever made the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Eleven of them have been women, and three of those eleven women have been Brandeis graduates.
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tfw there’s no bogus caravan story to frighten people about and you’re left with scary-professor stories.
Critical race theory is the greatest threat to western civilization and it’s made its way into the US federal government, the military, and the justice system.
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A friend once ran into an extremely drunk and disconsolate Liam Neeson at a bar; Neeson had just seen the film “Office Space” and he was saying that everything he had done in his career was meaningless next to that film.
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I feel like we don’t spend enough time talking about the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark is supposedly set in 1936 but rocket-propelled anti-tank weapons weren’t produced until 1942.
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A marriage between someone who grew up in household where rules governed Easter-basket-hiding (a matter of good sportsmanship and basic decency, really) and someone who grew up in one of those chaotic households where hiding Easter-baskets was a vicious, no-holds-barred affair.
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If I were an econometrician I would write a paper about flawed instrumental variables approaches and call it “Poison IV”.
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I’m old and strong enough for my age that folks at the gym sometimes ask me “hey old timer how can I stay strong when I’m super-ancient like you”, and I say “ok don’t drink any booze” and they generally look super sad and say something like “ok oh well nevermind”.
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Here is Kenosha sheriff David Beth two years ago endorsing concentration camps for people who are not “an asset to society”
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My sister made a jaguar shark piñata for my birthday but we ended up letting it live, at my age it’s fine to just pull the candy out from the top.
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Wanted to share my mom’s obituary. She died of Alzheimer’s last week. She was really fantastic, you would have adored her! Among other things, she was a great bassoon player.
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@chrislbs @AmandaWorking @dmayzlin She didn’t encourage or strongly discourage me going to Stanford and didn’t encourage or strongly discourage me chatting with her former advisor when I was a student there. I ended up majoring in a different field, so my advisor was in my own major field.
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A while back I wore a tracksuit to teach a few days in a row. A student objected, said it was hard to learn from someone wearing an adidas tracksuit. I asked how much more they’d be willing to pay to take the same course from me, but me in a business suit. They said “not much”.
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RIP Meat Loaf. I met him one time waiting for a flight at DFW; I saw him and walked over and told him how much I loved his work. He said “I am not Meat Loaf.” RIP.
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whispers. "maybe take a look at how police departments that have defined benefit pension plans where post-retirement payments are disproportionately based on gross pay in the very last few years of work allocate overtime to officers who are very close to retirement. ".
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Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW. Announce that all depositors will be safe. Place SVB with a Top 4 bank. Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.
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Hearty congratulations in advance to her on her upcoming appointment as Attorney General of the United States of America.
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A buddy of mine tracked down a copy of the book that Attorney General Barr’s dad Don Barr wrote around the same time that he hired an experience-free Jeff Epstein to teach math to kids. Believe it or not, it’s a sci-fi tale about sex slavery. A book review will be available soon.
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I am in a medium-sized conference room and every person in the room appears to be wearing socks that have been carefully calibrated to demonstrate that the wearer possesses some level of independence of spirit and capacity for whimsy.
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