Steven Durlauf
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durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf
@durlauf.bsky.social
3K followers 790 following 250 posts

Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, Director, Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, University of Chicago

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Steven Neil Durlauf is an American economist and social scientist. He is currently Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor and the inaugural Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Durlauf was previously the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As of 2021, is also a Part Time Professor at the New Economic School. .. more

Economics 66%
Sociology 10%
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durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
7/As for suggestions that this is virtual signalling, an example of cancel culture, my answer is simple. Virtuous conduct matters. Faculty/administrators help define the norms of their institutions. Attitudes and characters affect manifest in their decisions and interactions. Institutions must act.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
6/Botstein's actions trivialized the sexual exploitation of women, and is unacceptable, period. Fundraising needs are a risible excuse.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
5/As for Leon Botstein, he should resign or be removed. It is unacceptable for him to have continued a relationship with Epstein after his first conviction, assuming the best case scenario that Botstein was ignorant of Epstein's misdeeds prior to then.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
4/Consequences do not necessarily require termination. My own view is that University honors, such as named chairs, directorships of research labs/centers should not be held by those engages in post 2008 relationships with Epstein.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
3/Obviously, mention in the files does not mean consequences are warranted per se and schools should be clear on this. Individuals holding a meeting to seek money before Epstein's first conviction are completely different from Lawrence Summers, David Gelertner, etc.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
2/It is essential that faculty are not only represented, but have the authority to determine consequences for misconduct. Any such body must be completely transparent and explain how consequences were determined to be appropriate. And yes, at least half of the decisionmakers must be women.

Reposted by Kevin O’Rourke, Sascha O. Becker, Martha Bailey , and 2 more

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 2d
1/Universities need to systematically address the findings in the Epstein files. In my opinion, every university in which current or past faculty, administrators, trustees appear in the files, should establish formal bodies to review and assess.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/u...
A $50,000 Watch and Friendly Notes: One College Leader’s Ties to Epstein
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Evan Roberts

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 4d
Tweet of the evening.
sgehlbach.bsky.social Scott Gehlbach @sgehlbach.bsky.social · 5d
Your regular reminder that Lemma 1 in Fudenberg and Levine just says that there is a finite number of times you can be surprised, not that that number need be anything close to “small.”
Trump wanted Dulles Airport and Penn Station named after him as condition of releasing rail tunnel funds
Funding for the Gateway Project has been held up since October.
www.politico.com

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
And of course Clinton followed George H. W. Bush in failing to provide a Marshall Plan for Russia. Might Russia's political evolution taken a different path? To assign probabilities to this meaningless, but the effort should have been made.

Madness.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
The moment to try arrived in 1991. Frankly, I largely blame Bill Clinton. The United States, during his presidency, was so comparatively powerful that it could have spearheaded warhead reductions that were an order of magnitude greater than in fact occurred.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
As important as the arms control treaties were, they did not go far enough. George Kennan, the doyen of Cold War thinkers, early on recognized that abolition was the appropriate long run American goal as early as 1982 in

The Nuclear Delusion

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
The lesson of Jervis, IMO is that arms control should focus on strategic stability. Creating a Golden Dome would do the opposite by exacerbating risks by making second strike capabilities uncertain, as do tactical nuclear weapons, lowering nuclear thresholds and can create cycles of escalation.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
The general point is that there no reason to have confidence that a new nuclear arms race will meet the conditions under to have confidence in a stable deterrence regime emerging.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
However, such a claim cannot address presupposes types of rationality and cannot address accidents, the presence of ambiguity rather than uncertainty in crises, etc.

Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion

is very persuasive on the limits to rationality.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
One might argue, of course that mutual assured destruction is stabilizing. Robert Jervis is, among international relations writers, perhaps the most persuasive (I have read) on this possibility in his two great books

The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy

The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
Further, repeated risks of accidental nuclear war that occurred in the course of the Cold War are documented in

Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War

Scott Sagan, The Limits to Safety

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
I regard Kennedy and Khrushchev as criminally irresponsible in their conduct during the crisis, even if they stepped back from the brink, but that is a separate matter.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
Misinformation, imperfections in command and control structures, the capacity of escalation to run out of control due to ambiguity aversion/worst case scenario thinking, give the lie to any interpretation of the resolution of the crisis as a triumph of rational calculation by the various actors.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
The danger for the planet is incalculable. Cold War lessons have been forgotten. One set derives from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Two recent histories

Martin Sherwin, Standing at Armageddon

Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly

make clear how much luck was required to avoid an all out nuclear exchange.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 5d
The end of this final nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia augurs a return to a new nuclear arms race that not only involves the new military superpower China, but may well include countries that can no long rely on the American nuclear umbrella, rising military powers, notably India.

Reposted by Steven N. Durlauf, Evan Roberts

sgehlbach.bsky.social
Scott Gehlbach @sgehlbach.bsky.social · 5d
Your regular reminder that Lemma 1 in Fudenberg and Levine just says that there is a finite number of times you can be surprised, not that that number need be anything close to “small.”
Trump wanted Dulles Airport and Penn Station named after him as condition of releasing rail tunnel funds
Funding for the Gateway Project has been held up since October.
www.politico.com

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 6d
And in case you did not know, harness races are notoriously easy to fix.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 6d
Thanks!

Reposted by Steven N. Durlauf

npr.org
NPR @npr.org · 6d
Experts warn the expiration of a long-standing nuclear arms control treaty between the two superpowers could mark the start of a new nuclear rivalry. n.pr/4qZGDHJ
For the first time in decades, the U.S. and Russia have no limits on nuclear weapons
Experts warn the expiration of a long-standing nuclear arms control treaty between the two superpowers could mark the start of a new nuclear rivalry.
n.pr

Reposted by Steven N. Durlauf, Kris Inwood

ucstonecenter.bsky.social
UChicago | Stone Center on Wealth Inequality & Mobility @ucstonecenter.bsky.social · 8d
We rarely think of economics as scandalous, but maybe we should. Sam Bowles, in conversation with @durlauf.bsky.social & Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, argues that a core assumption in the field impedes moral reasoning about wealth redistribution. Watch "Why Economic Inequalities Endure"→ bit.ly/3Yj4F3B

Reposted by Steven N. Durlauf

ucstonecenter.bsky.social
UChicago | Stone Center on Wealth Inequality & Mobility @ucstonecenter.bsky.social · 14d
Last month, the Stone Center convened social scientists, statisticians, and philosophers for our conference, "Integrating Normative Considerations into Inequality Measurement." Together, we examined how ideas of fairness, opportunity, and reward shape the way we measure disparity and discrimination.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 14d
Sven Beckert, Jon Levy (the guest in the last Inequality Podcast), and historians of capitalism more generally, have produced a complex vision of capitalism as an historical and historically contingent process that is profoundly different from how economists think.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 14d
I also suspect that most economists do not think of slavery as part of capitalism, i.e. the commodification of humans is different from commodification of labor per se. More generally, economists will equate capitalism with market while Sven's characterization includes much more.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 14d
Personally I do not concur with the Sven's discussion of the marginal revolution in economic theory, and I have very different assessment of the merits of Hayek, Polanyi, and Sraffa from what appears in the book. But these strike me as a third-order criticisms.

durlauf.bsky.social
Steven Durlauf @durlauf.bsky.social · 14d
My impression from social media is that a number of economists have been critical of the book. One reason is that some of the book's discussions of economics/economists are contestable.