voracious bhakri eater
Tkaronto
Joined December 2019
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aakash solanki retweeted
Some people do not learn from mistakes: the European Commission's new fiscal rules of 2024 use 90 percent debt ratio as an additional rule for guiding debt reduction, while this number was debunked more than 10 years earlier. This is not evidence-based but error-based policy.
A 28-year-old UMass graduate student got a homework assignment to reproduce a famous economics paper, couldn't make the numbers match, and found a spreadsheet mistake in a study that politicians had used to argue for budget cuts.
His name is Thomas Herndon.
In 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, published a short paper called Growth in a Time of Debt. Its headline finding: once a country's public debt goes above 90% of its economy, growth falls off a cliff. In their numbers, average growth for that group was minus 0.1%.
It came out right after the 2008 financial crisis, and it spread fast. In the US, the Paul Ryan budget cited it as its only evidence on what high debt does to growth.
In Europe, an EU commissioner pointed to the research in a speech. In Britain, George Osborne cited the authors by name.
Herndon was a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, taking a class called Econ 753: Applied Econometrics. The big assignment was to pick a well-known paper and replicate it.
He picked this one. He couldn't get the same results.
He asked the authors for their spreadsheet, and they sent it. When he spotted the problem, he called his girlfriend over to make sure he wasn't seeing things.
He wasn't.
> One formula stopped five rows short
> That quietly left out five countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark
> Some available years of data for other countries weren't included
> The way the averages were weighted let a single bad year in one country count as much as decades in another
Herndon and his professors, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, published the critique in April 2013. Fixing the problems, average growth for the high-debt countries came out to 2.2%, not minus 0.1%.
Reinhart and Rogoff publicly admitted the spreadsheet error. They disputed the other criticisms and defended their broader view. Economists still argue about debt and growth today.
But the formula was wrong, and for about three years nobody had publicly caught it.
A student doing homework did.
Most people assume famous research has been checked many times. Often the first person to really check it is someone with nothing to lose and an assignment due.
Have you ever found a mistake in your boss's spreadsheet and kept quiet?
aakash solanki retweeted
Anyone have contact information for Daud Khan (UN staff) and Ejaz Ahmad (journalist) based in Rome?
aakash solanki retweeted
"A PhD student costs the school ~500k" principally because of a set of accounting tricks that universities use to move earmarked research grant money into a general fund, with grad students as a conduit.
PIs experience these as real costs but it is substantially an external imposition by the university rather than a real resource issue.
aakash solanki retweeted
India is waging a war against its own researchers:
In Careers360’s Research Summit, Prof. Ram Gopal Rao, Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani described India’s lack of investment in research beautifully. He said “India’s Higher Education is described as African Budgets, American ambitions, Russian methods, Chinese opacity and Indian Bureaucracy.
In the past decade, we have seen a slide in scientific temper and investments in research.
1. Non-NET fellowship are stuck at ₹8,000 a month since 2012, for 16,270 scholars in 45 central universities.
2. JRF stipend: In 2014, the JRF was Rs.25,000 per month. In 2019, it was revised to Rs.31m000. it is ₹37,000 PM. The hrowth hasn’t even kept pace with inflation and in real terms, it has FALLEN. IISc scholars even went on a hunger strike demanding an increase.
3. Maulana Azad fellowship: where more than 1,400 scholars have had stipends stalled since January 2025.
4. OBC fellowships: lists for three NET cycles in 2024-25 were held back, which the social justice ministry put down to insufficient funds.
5. INSPIRE: fellows have their stipends unpaid for 3 to 9 months. The schemes now under Vigyan Dhara fell 67.5% between 2016 and 2025.
6. KVPY: scrapped in 2022, after nearly two lakh students a year had taken its test.
7. JRF bottleneck: only 5,108 of 7,35,614 candidates (0.7%) got JRF in December 2025. Minister Sukanta Majumdar gave no year-wise data when asked.
8. The University of Hyderabad stopped Rohit Vemula’s ₹25,000 stipend in July 2015, and his last letter said he hadn’t been paid for seven months. He later committed suicide.
9. India’s R&D spending: fell from 0.82% of GDP in 2009-10 to 0.64% in 2020-21. PMRF spending was revised to ₹290 crore, less than half its ₹600 crore outlay.
10. SC fellowships: fell 61%, from 4,841 to 1,872, between 2020-21 and 2022-23.
If India indeed wants to be a Vishwa Guru, India should be investing in research, in creating quality Higher-Ed institutions. We cannot be cutting down on stipends, not paying our researchers, holding back payments, scrapping scholarships, not increasing fellowship amounts even to match inflation and still expect students to choose research.
aakash solanki retweeted
From our FirstView: "When Politics Enters the Waiting Room: Far-Right Electoral Victories Exacerbate Discrimination in Access to Healthcare" by Merlin Schaeffer, @AlessioRomarri, Dina Rosenberg, and Krzysztof Krakowski. buff.ly/uiaTkVa
ALT APSR abstract for “When Politics Enters the Waiting Room: Far-Right Electoral Victories Exacerbate Discrimination in Access to Healthcare,” by Merlin Schaeffer, Alessio Romarri, Dina Rosenberg, and Krzysztof Krakowski, An audit of Italian healthcare offices finds callers with West-African accents faced more scrutiny than native-Italian callers, and this gap widened where far-right mayors narrowly won. Full abstract is available in linked article.
aakash solanki retweeted
*Professional economist ideologically opposed to unionization* I'm just not sure these grad students deserve a union
aakash solanki retweeted
A lot of hot takes about graduate student stipends on this site in the last few days, so I just want to share our paper with @sethbwarner from @Res_Pol from a few years ago.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/ful…
aakash solanki retweeted
I've interviewed a lot of academics in my time, (sciences) and while (I hope!) not uncritically, I have always had a lot of respect for them. But since being exposed to some of the academics working in the field of economics on here, I have completely lost respect for academia.
aakash solanki retweeted
The first paper from my PhD is out. Please find the link to the article: journals.library.brandeis.ed…
aakash solanki retweeted
I am not accepting any new graduate students for the South Asia program of the UW-Madison History Department for the admissions cycle of 2027. If students want to apply, they should wait until the next cycle.
aakash solanki retweeted
In my book (which you can preorder at simonandschuster.com/books/D…) I talk about how OpenAI researchers who worked on gpt-3 said that gpt-3 had already delivered so called “artificial general intelligence.” Allllll the way back in 2020.
We’ve apparently been in the singularity this whole time folks.
aakash solanki retweeted
A Portuguese-era manuscript with 122 Malayalam words captures the speech of ordinary Malayalis and opens a new window into Kerala’s coastal history.
✍️ Somy Solomon
thehindu.com/news/national/k…
aakash solanki retweeted
🚨 Amazing opportunity:
Stony Brook University is hiring in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and for the Director of the Mattoo Center for India Studies.
Applications close November 6, 2026.
Apply: apply.interfolio.com/193344
aakash solanki retweeted
Here, @maliniranga and I show how the paradox of India's free market is nowhere visible than in sanitation, where so-called modernisation rests on a labour regime from an earlier era, conveniently turning caste into a solution to material problem of sanitation. Pdf in comments.
NEW | Contemporary sanitation work seems to have given a new lease of life to older patterns of contract labour rooted in caste-based discrimination, with neoliberalism further diluting contractors’ accountability. @kanthiswaroop and @maliniranga write.
frontline.thehindu.com/socia…
aakash solanki retweeted
Replug: As alumni of two different IITs, Rajesh Golani and I write on how discrimination operated within IITs.
aakash solanki retweeted
Incredible work by the small but mighty @SabarInstitute_ do support their work.
West Bengal offers perhaps the clearest picture of what SIR actually means in practice. Yet the terminology, numbers and outcomes are so complicated that they remain largely inaccessible to ordinary citizens.
Sabar Institute has published a short and accessible factsheet that cuts through this complexity and helps readers understand the scale and implications of the exercise.
This research has been carried out as a crowdfunded public-interest initiative. Collecting, processing and analysing electoral data at this scale requires substantial time, technical infrastructure and human effort. If you find this work useful and believe that independent, accessible research on electoral processes should continue, please consider supporting Sabar Institute through a donation.
Every contribution helps us keep this work independent and publicly accessible.
Link to the factsheet and donation details in the next post.
aakash solanki retweeted
I interviewed for a faculty position at an IIT in 2013. The job talk and meetings with faculty and staff went very well. At the end, the chair asked me, “Shailesh Kumar ke aage Kya?” A seemingly casual question but in India, surnames can reveal caste and…
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