Zach Freitas-Groff 🔸
@zdgroff
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Senior Programme Associate @ https://t.co/3CGHUzWARY. Research Affiliate @UTAustin, PhD @Stanford. Econ; AI; animals; film. Opinions are mine only. 🏳️🌈
London, England
Joined January 2015
📈Job market paper time📉. I’m excited to finally share my job market paper! My JMP studies whether and why policy choices are stubbornly persistent. For example, Oregon has an income tax, but Washington doesn’t—seemingly because of nearly century-old choices. Is this typical?
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Banger quote from @dylanmatt:. "If I were to file effective altruism down to its more core, elemental truth, it’s this: “We should let children die to rebuild a cathedral” is not a principle anyone should be willing to accept."
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Alright, here we go: my cousin @CindySueSci challenged me to the #RenewDemocracy challenge (kicked off by @AVindman). Here's what democracy means to me:
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10 years since I took the 🔸10% Pledge (to donate at least 10% of my income to highly effective charities). Now my husband and I do it together, and it's one of the most joyous parts of our marriage!
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Got my Ph.D. yesterday. Grateful to family, friends, collaborators, and advisors who enabled me to get to this point!. For my next step, I'm excited to be a researcher + grantmaker at Longview Philanthropy and an affiliate @UTAustin's Population Wellbeing Initiative.
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Working paper out!. Does cultured meat make people more open to animal welfare concerns with factory farming? Models of motivated beliefs (or cognitive dissonance) would generally predict yes (substitute = less attachment to meat). We find no!
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Neat. Evidence that legal same-sex marriage decreased enrollment in priestly studies (because fewer gay men avoid coming out):. @RohitTicku @SerorAvner
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Excited to share that I won a second prize in Open Philanthropy's 2023 AI Worldviews contest!.
We just announced the winning entries in our 2023 AI Worldviews contest:.
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If you're not watching Schmigadoon, you either have poor taste or are really depriving yourself.
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Very kind note on Marginal Revolution this morning. "EA-adjacent" 🤔.
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It's plausible we'll have AI with an internal mental life like humans (and many animals) have sometime this century. Not long ago, there was ~nobody working on this. Very glad we now have some people on the case, who also happen to be thoughtful, cautious, and clear writers!
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My work covered by @voxdotcom. @KennyTorrella did an exceptional job with this. When I read press coverage of something I worked on, I expect to find at least one error that makes me cringe. Not one in this article. He captured the cloudy picture well.
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I collect detailed histories of more than 800 policy changes proposed in U.S. state-level referendums. A regression discontinuity design shows that passing a policy increases the chance it is operative 20, 40, or even 100 years later by >40 percentage points.
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In other words, I set out to find out how much more likely a policy is to be operative in a given year if it was passed than if it failed decades earlier (all else equal). Here's what I do (lots of data!) and what I find. 👇. Full paper:
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I strongly recommend this summer program + £5,000 fellowship at @GPIOxford and the Forethought Foundation. (Esp. for econ PhD students interested in effective altruism, risks to humanity, or welfare econ.). Feel free to PM me w/any Qs. #EconTwitter .
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Presented my job-market talk to my nephews. The ten-year-old asked questions of a caliber I'd expect from a top academic department!. (Praise to him, not offense to academics 😉).
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At a high level, though, it means lots of policies are not necessarily what voters would choose today—and this can remain the case for a long time.
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I seem to regularly walk away from EA Global with a feeling of "damn, I didn't get to talk to everyone I'd wanted to" even after talking to dozens of people.
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@CNN Oh please, really CNN? I hope she then spoke with a child killed by a random citizen. Citizens kill a lot of people! #immigrationban.
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Just moved to London. What should I do, and who should I connect with?.
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Submit your papers on the economics of animal welfare to the first-ever such session at Stanford Econ's annual SITE conferences (@SIEPR). See here for details: . #EconTwitter #AnimalWelfare
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Portland's @WhiteOwlSocial replaces all burgers w/ Impossible Burger. h/t @MatthewPrescott :
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BOOM! Psyched for this session at the annual Stanford summer conferences on the economics of animal welfare: (#EconTwitter).
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Thought-provoking paper by Chad Jones on the growth/existential risk tradeoff with AI in AER: Insights, and good citation for economists working on the topic. Surprised how much mileage he gets out of such a simple model.
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Excited to see @NonhumanRights referred to as a civil rights group in this article. That's exactly the anti-speciesist terminology to insist on: #CivilRights #AnimalRights
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Highly recommend pre-ordering @willmacaskill's upcoming book "What We Owe the Future" for a thorough, well-rounded, provocative look at how we can make the world better for all the generations to come:.
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The controversy over red "meat" illustrates why vegans should focus on ethics and not diet. Nutrition science changes; the ethical argument will not (and if for some reason it did, then we should concede the point).
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Very proud of and impressed with the ACE team's work this year. They've made significant improvements to the evaluation process that give me confidence in this year's evals. I'm excited to rely on them for my husband's and my end-of-year giving.
ANNOUNCING OUR 2022 CHARITY RECOMMENDATIONS! 🎉. We've spent several months evaluating #animaladvocacy organizations to identify those that work effectively. This year, we're excited to announce that we have four Top Charities and 11 Standout Charities. 👏
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@HolocaustMuseum So why does your website have a section on genocide that mentions South Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe, none of which are 1940 Germany as far as I know?
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Excited about this paper: "Unusually bad weather on April 22, 1970 is associated with weaker support for the environment 10 to 20 years later, particularly among those who were school aged in 1970.". Would love to see a meta-analysis of this sort of study.
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Profiling @DxEverywhere's revival of #OpenRescue today in the @HuffingtonPost @HuffPostGreen : … #WednesdayWidsom.
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IMO this study supports the college outreach strategy. A large share of the change is cohort turnover. That's intuitive since people form cooking and eating habits when young. And the veg outreach with the best evidence involves college students:
My work covered by @voxdotcom. @KennyTorrella did an exceptional job with this. When I read press coverage of something I worked on, I expect to find at least one error that makes me cringe. Not one in this article. He captured the cloudy picture well.
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The 80,000 Hours interview with Jonathan Birch is chock-full of wild facts. The stories about medical treatment for borderline-conscious patients and babies are just bonkers. And never gave much thought to neural organoids before.
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Effective Altruism Global is a stellar conference! I’m honest when I have a criticism, and I am very impressed. To a better world! #EAGlobal @Effect_Altruism #altruism #evidence
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It's a very difficult year out there for so many. Thought a happy event might bring some cheer—celebrating one year since this man and I took each other as husbands. Here's to a marriage that reliably nourishes, comforts, and invigorates.
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Love in the time of coronavirus:. Me to my husband: "Cutie!" *Kisses him on his head*. My husband to me: "I'm in a meeting.".
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Achievement unlocked. (Achievement = updating my donations for a year, not the actual donating which is easier.)
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The @80000Hours podcast interviewed the always-informative @Lewis_Bollard about factory farming. Give it a listen!
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Putting this together was the equivalent of six months of research. Massive effort by Doug Bernheim @seb_otero, and the indefatigable night owl @NinaBuchmann6. Beyond the "30,000" stat, it's a careful look at COVID spread from large, unmasked events.
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On politics and policy, @CoryBooker is the best candidate in 2020. Here’s why he deserves your support: #2020election #CoryBooker #politics.
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This is also a case when the many journalists and opinion writers (clearly @ezraklein) who covered the issue and laid out the arguments seem to have greatly affected what happened. Evidence that journalism matters.
An actual hero. This is what America First looks like when it’s a lived ethos, rather than a mask for narcissism and ambition.
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That is, there is a real chance Oregon and Washington set themselves on lastingly different paths with their decisions in the 1930s.
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Spot-on, must-read by @ezraklein today: Look forward to more where this comes from, and hoping @JoeBiden , @SecVilsack, @repdavidscott, and @SenStabenow take this up.
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@McDonalds @KirbyJenner - How can you so publicly support a company that supports the worst-imaginable torture? #ImNotLovinIt #NationalSelfieDay #MHQ #McDEmployee #Frylus
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Infuriating move by the Biden admin.
Really bad news: DOJ just filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn CA’s ban on the sale of pork from crated pigs. The Biden Administration is siding with the pork industry in defending one of the most extreme forms of farm animal cruelty.
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Technology adoption differs more across countries than I'd have guessed before moving internationally. E.g., in the UK fancy places have heated racks so towels stay dry and fluffy, which I've never seen in the US, while garbage disposals are very rare.
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Great piece - cage free is not what you think. via @FortuneMagazine @bethkowitt #Vegan #AnimalRights #AnimalWelfare.
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My morning meditation:. "How is it possible that matter gives rise to consciousness? You may never have thought about this, and if you have, you may go years without thinking about it again.". Uh, no, I think about this AT LEAST weekly! Do people really not think about this?.
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Great letter by @FarmForward : do NOT switch from beef to chicken or fish—bad for animals, bad for the planet.
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I've long thought economics was overdue for a #MeToo cascade. It was hard for me not to think there was a serious amount of oppressive behavior unexposed. I'm disturbed at the revelations but glad this is finally coming to light.
There is a ton of stuff happening behind the scenes right now - I'm so grateful to everyone involved! . Ladies in econ, we have momentum. If you have info, please share it. I have a list of journalists who'd love to hear from you. Email/DM me for their contact info.
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Pls RT: As a former #CT resident, I support recognition of the @NonhumanRights of elephants Beulah, Karen, & Minnie. #RumbleForRights.
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It's absurd to think that businesses that kill for a living are "traumatized" by killing a bit early this year.
Farmers to @nytimes: we're traumatized by killing our pigs. Factory farmers in reality: kill all small piglets & all sows when they cease to be productive. Also: maintain awful conditions where, even pre-COVID, 8-28% of pigs don't survive to slaughter (Mehling et al, 2019).
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So maybe the OpenAI safety strategy was to scare the shit out of everyone so we take AI safety seriously?. Nicely done if so. ✔️.
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Very nice to see LGBTQ issues discussed in this edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives! Some interesting things: . -The number of people identifying as gay, bisexual, or trans on surveys is much lower than I think many of my friends would guess. #EconTwitter
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Why is this happening? Returning to the income tax, there are two sorts of explanations we can think of. First, people might get used to the policy (e.g., businesses adapt to the income tax).
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The best purpose of Twitter seems to be verifying that an earthquake was not in my head. #earthquake #BayArea.
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In keeping with this explanation, news rises leading up to a referendum and then starts declining. It looks like people just stop thinking about the policy as much. Other data support this: policies that I manually code as being more observable display less persistence.
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The pattern is remarkably similar for different topics, levels of importance, institutional contexts, time periods, and more. It is also robust to different ways of defining a policy and tweaks to how I define a policy.
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@Noahpinion Perhaps that VC dude exploits the last remaining opportunities for arbitrage so that, with him, the market is efficient.
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Hey #EconTwitter, @MercyForAnimals, an evidence-minded animal advocacy group that's produced many noteworthy undercover investigations and corporate policies around the globe, is looking to hire an economist. Please share with any interested:
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Second, people might just stop thinking about a policy—it becomes less salient. The income tax is an interesting case. Many states adopted the income tax in the 20s and 30s following the first federal income tax. States that did not adopt it then generally don’t have it now.
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Not that many policies get repealed, but a lot of policies are inevitable in the sense that if they fail at first, they pass later on—especially in the first decade/decades. Oregon and Washington actually both had repeated votes over the income tax in the 1920s and 30s.
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Zoos are prisons for animals – no one needs to see a depressed penguin in the flesh #animals #animalsmood
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Please support @JayShooster's campaign. With his unimpeachable moral compass, Jay is the type of person we need more of in politics.
Florida has become the center of right wing extremism in America. I can’t let that happen – that’s why I’m announcing my campaign for State House District 91. RT to help me restore reproductive freedom, prevent gun violence, and defend democracy in our state.
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I find it puzzling how standard it is that companies offer you a lower subscription price if you click a few buttons threatening to cancel a subscription. Seems like a form of price discrimination that shouldn't work because of how easy it is to game, but I guess it does.
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All This 5-Year-Old Wants To Do Is Help Save Street Cats
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@BasilHalperin Add me to the list of (micro)economists who thought, "Shouldn’t we just know, unambiguously, what happened to real wages and incomes over the last few years?".
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Highly recommend the film "EO", about the life of a donkey. When we watched it, Lucas kept pointing out beautiful shots. I did not because every single shot in the film was so damn stunning. There's nothing like this one (though there's a great 1966 French film about a donkey).
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@PeterSinger There's no humane slaughter here or there. There's no humane slaughter anywhere. Not in a box, not with a fox. Not in a house, not with a mouse.
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Given Will (MacAskill)'s recent appearance on The Daily Show, I think it's time to give some thought to other media opportunities. Personally, I think he should consider the next season of RuPaul's Secret Celebrity Drag Race. What should her drag name be? 👇.
"You give away 50% of your income. But shouldn't this be an obligation laid at the feet of the most privileged?". "Oh yeah, billionaires should give 99% or more.".
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@iamcardib $9,996 to @AnimalCharityEv to research the best ways to help nonhuman animals. They've helped steer money to highly-effective places that have improved the lives of hundreds of billions of animals!
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🧵 Over the past six months, I’ve intermittently gathered reference classes/analogies to help us think the likelihood of catastrophe from superhuman Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Here’s a quick summary of what I took away.👇 (1/12).
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Every so often I come across old news/histories of same-sex marriage debates, think about it in the third person, then have the realization that *I* am in one of those things that was such a political lightning rod not too long ago.
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Really glad to see this discussion happening and @jeffrsebo's thoughts on it. Also terrified that we may have to think about this with how uncertain we are.
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Not a good look though also not all that surprising:.
📣We release today a new peer-reviewed study, in which we expose the unprecedented influence of the meat industry on science, public discourse & policy:. "The Dublin Declaration: Gain for the Meat Industry, Loss for Science". After months of investigation, here is what we found🧵
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The data don’t display the patterns I’d expect if this were what is happening. We don’t see voters becoming more supportive of policies after they have been in place for longer. We also don't see heterogeneity where I'd expect to see it.
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There's an opening for Communications Director at @AnimalCharityEv —the right person could have a huge impact here IMO. Expanding ACE's reach (e.g., to "animal lovers") could move millions more to effective charities. Please apply if you're a fit!.
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Sad to lose Dick Gregory, one of the historical figures who genuinely supported animal rights: #Vegan #AnimalRights
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Let's have more pieces like this. Don't treat insects like automata—we don't have much reason to think they are.
I have a new @aeonmag essay on insect welfare (with Jason Schukraft from @RethinkPriors) out today!. In short: Insects might be sentient, and we should treat them with compassion in case they are. Please read, comment, and share if you like!.
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Very impressive organization:.
#econtwitter #econjobs cool job to use econ skills to make a difference! Review academic literature to recommend grants to improve global health and economic development!.
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Papers accepted thru April 1st for The Economics of Animal Welfare at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE), organized by Caroline Hoxby, @MFleurbaey, @LisaKramer, @Treich13, & @JaysonLusk :. #EconTwitter.
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This is important news. Not only is it good for those crabs and lobsters, but it starts a vital conversation about the sentience of suffering of aquatic animals, and the boundaries of who we consider a feeling being.
Great to see 🇬🇧 may follow 🇨🇭 lead and ban boiling crabs + lobsters alive. A positive step toward ending this barbaric practice 🦀
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#AnimalRights is not be a cover for #Islamophobia. If you don't oppose all animal ag, I see your hipocrisy. #Vegan
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I love quotes like this. What else was the farmer planning to do with his pigs?
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