Yale University vows to 'geolocate' most EJMR users [PART 1]

So this is how free speech & anonymity die; with self-proclaimed "liberal" professors furiously circlejerking over the rise of an Orwellian surveillance state

UPDATE: Here is part 2.

Yale University vows to 'geolocate' most EJMR users [PART 2]

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This could easily be the biggest econ scandal of 2023.

This is already the biggest econ scandal since Alice Wu.

In roughly one week from today, when NYT/WaPo/WSJ/Bloomberg butcher this, remember that Karlstack™ covered it first, and covered it better.

In fact, I may have, uh, covered this a little too comprehensively— the main reason this article is so long (8,000 words) is that I quote 40 professors, and 42 anonymous ones. Some readers will criticize this heavy reliance on other people's words, but, I disagree. The econ profession is at war! It is important for independent media to give a platform to the voices in that war — especially since we already know that NYT/WaPo/WSJ/Bloomberg will ignore, marginalize, and demonize them, frankly because NYT/WaPo/WSJ/Bloomberg are owned and operated by people who vehemently hate free speech.

As per the poll I ran last week, though, 27% of my readers have a PhD and 19% are economists, so this article is really for them.

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This saga began 1 month ago when Floridan Ederer, a professor at the Yale School of Management, tweeted out an abstract — yes, it’s just an abstract, the full paper will be revealed at the NBER summer conference on July 20th.

DATE: July 20th @ 4:30pm EST

LOCATION Royal Sonesta Hotel and streamed live on YouTube

3 Yale professors: Florian Ederer (left), Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (center), Kyle Jensen (right)

It is worth reading the abstract in detail, since this is all we have to go on.

Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an anonymous online forum and clearinghouse for information about the academic job market for economists. It also includes speech that is considered abusive, defamatory, racist, mysognistic, or otherwise “toxic”. Using computational methods new to economics, we geolocate the majority of EJMR posts and show that posting on the platform is wide-spread in academia : 10% of posts originate from universities including all top-ranked universities in the United States. A substantial number of posts also come from government agencies, companies, and non-profit organizations employing economists. The aggrregate rate of posting on EJMR roughly doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. rate tripled. Whereas posting activity from most countries returned to pre-pandemic levels in the following years, activity from the United States remains substantially elevated. We characterize variation in the text of EJMR posts — particularly speech — across sub-forums, geographies, institutions, and contributors. Based on this variation and user interactions on the site, we construct a set of archetypes and highlight differences among the site’s contributers. We further investigate the dissemenation of information of the site using job market postings as a case study. We build a measure of proximity to identify local inside information about the academic job market for economists and to examine the credibility and accuracy of information circulating on EJMR.

It sounds like they intend to doxx (“geolocate”) anyone who has ever used econjobrumors.com (EJMR), a site where most academic economists visit, or have visited, but nobody admits to visiting. EJMR is basically like 4chan, but for economists.

This is not just a paper presentation. It is the beginning of a movement. Prominent journalists will cover the event. Demand notices are being prepared. A campaign to name and shame will commence at 5:30 on Thursday. You should be putting your affairs in order. I'm ded serious. IPs are not officially PII. There is no legal barrier to releasing the data.

— Anonymous economist

Allow me to share the actions I took in response to this situation. I sought advice from two lawyers, each specializing in different areas. One lawyer specializes in privacy and social media, while the other focuses on university matters. Both lawyers provided me with guidance regarding the potential outcomes. According to their advice, if any of my posts are identified, I have the option to pursue legal action against the researchers (although their financial situation may impact the outcome), as well as against Yale and my own university. I am hopeful that identification will occur, as it may result in monetary compensation. In fact, I have been informed that I could potentially receive up to 1 million in compensation from Yale. However, it appears that the NBER may not be subject to legal action according to their assessment.

— Anonymous economist

Employment lawyers are going to have a field day with these data if they are made public.

— Ed Van Wesep, Professor of Finance University of Colorado Boulder

The authors are being purposely cryptic/provocative on twitter.

On one hand, Florian assures us that “Nothing I do is a threat to anyone”…

…on the other hand, he takes pleasure in betting that he can “identify individual poster/accounts”.

Upon seeing the abstract, Twitter exploded.

Economics ran out of pressing issues to solve?

— Isabela Mares, Professor at Yale University

EJMR is very bad on net so it's good for the world if people think, "Maybe I shouldn't trash talk about person X because it would be bad for me were my identity revealed."

— Jasan Abaluck, Professor at Yale

This is going to be interesting (and embarrassing for some)...

— Justin Wolfers, professor at University of Michigan

I hope we can doxx the shit out of EJMR bros who said Indians smell like curry!

— TV Ninan, PhD student in Economics at University of Washington, Seattle

Locate and shame all those who defame.

— Charles Crabtree, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth

Paper 2 is going to be economist video preferences on PornHub by department

— Chris Blattman, Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago

Please Florian I beg you, do not reveal the balance of my bank account and the movies I watch on my TV.

— Anonymous economist

I’m waiting for the EJMR follow-up paper: To provide a baseline against which to compare EJMR posts, we used a shotgun mic to secretly record conversations between faculty at Top 10 departments that took place in a public setting...

— Kevin R. James, economist at London School of Economics

My take is that EJMR is what happens when people don't go to therapy

—Heather Sarsons, associate professor at the Vancouver School of Economics

Hope to get identified for my posts. I stand behind them. Especially the last few ones. My success is not dependent on whether you like me. I will succeed with or without you.

— Anonymous economist

I love it. The difference between EJMR and Econ Twitter highlights what it means to have accountability for shit you say.

— Arindrajit Dube, economist at UMass Amherst

This paper is not useful, in terms of economic policy, to working class folks, but it is important in unmasking a cultural issue within the academy. The anonymity of EJMR mostly emboldens the gross cruelty of cowards.

— Mark G. Sheppard, a fellow with the Stone Center of Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago

I love it. EJMR & all its posters really need to be cancelled.

— Ellie Murray, assistant professor Boston University School of Public Health

It says a lot more about the NBER, that they think this is among the most important economic research being done by any economists anywhere in the world.

— Anonymous economist

To any rational outsider, the fact that this makes it onto a premier economics conferencesuggests that economists don’t have anything important to say about the economy.

— Anonymous economist

The reaction to this paper is very unusual. Some people think it is a hoax or part of an experiment or activism. There seems to be a blurring of lines here between research and other things, at least in perceptions. This is not characteristic of straightforward research … I think it is a real paper. But the reaction is unsettling, including that the trust among economists has been compromised to the extent that people think this might be part of an experiment and that people think it might be directed at other non-research goals.

Itai Sher, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

If they have location + post content presumably they can … identify some unique users

— Jenifer Doleac, former economics professor

This reminds me of black mirror season 3 episode 6, ‘hated in the nation’; very cool!

— Yue Wu, PhD candidate in Finance at The London School of Economics and Political Science

There needs to be a Black Mirror episode about this. Incidentally, season 6 was just released. First episode is about violating privacy.

— Anonymous Economist

I'm not fully following what's happening with EJMR, but how about we just run every post through ChatGPT and ask it to clean it up? Problem solved!

— Tatyana Deryugina, Associate Professor in the Department of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In the future, nobody will post anything without wearing a ChatGPT condom to ensure their speech is approved. You write your thought into ChatGPT and it converts the message into something harmless for consumption by the masses.

— Anonymous economist

It's funny, if someone identified all the ejmr posts and uploaded a huge data file with them to 4chan, I would be supportive— it's like the medicine fits the crime.

— Paul Novosad, associate professor of economics at Dartmouth Colleg

This is awful. I don’t understand how economics as a field tolerates the existence of [EJMR] … EJMR is an anonymous cesspool providing a stage for the worst of the field. It should be long gone.

— César A. Hidalgo, director of the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute of the University of Toulous

·Deanonymization Represents the Functional End of Free Speech This is their goal. Anyone who doesn’t see that is a fool. They want you to stop expressing contrary opinions. They can’t yet make that illegal, so they attack anonymized forums. The Ederers of the world are monsters, plain and simple.

— Anonymous economist

Is this research compliant with data protection regulations?

— Marcin Wroński, assistant professor at theWarsaw School of Economics

Not sure there's been a more divisive economics paper than the EJMR paper in a while. Either people really like it or they really hate it. Nothing in between.

— Nshakira Rukundo, Senior Researcher at the RWI Essen

I refrain from criticizing the existence of ejmr (even though they've been absolutely and unfairly vicious to my students) because, sitting where I am, I can see that access to information is very unequally distributed in the profession. Twitter helps but doesn't fully fix it. Now, if you somehow could imagine better people that behave better when anonymous, the world would be better but alas that's not the world we live in

— Wojtek Kopczuk, professor of economics at Columbia University

How is this “economics”

— Gabriel Mihalache, Assistant Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University

Why is NBER even covering this crap. That is the clearest evidence yet that the US government is just trying to find yet another way to suppress free speech and control people.

— Anonymous economist

What is ultimately the epistemological goal of this research? Incentivizing suicide for Twitter clout. That's the epistemological goal. Remember that these people want you dead.

— Anonymous economist

I, for one, look forward to making awkward eye contact with my EJMR haters at future conferences

— Analisa Packham, Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Vanderbilt University

I'm no fan of EJMR, but this kind of makes me uncomfortable.

— Ben Grodeck, postdoctoral researcher at The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology

Honestly the thing I found EJMR useful for was updates when I was on the market.

— Josh Merfeld, associate professor at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management

It is still weird how many academics appear to have read Foucault as a how-to manual.

— David Polansky, political scientist

I think maybe those of you saying “the problem is EJMR provides useful information we just can’t forgo!” don’t realise that *if* true that means you are getting an advantage on your female and nonwhite colleagues who can’t access that information without massive psychic cost

— Rachael Meagre, Assistant Professorship at the London School of Economics

Wonder how hard it would be to hack EJMR. Move over Ashley Madison.

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

— Eric Verhoogen, Economics Professor at Columbia University

The anonymity of EJMR is toxic to the whole profession. Women and minorities get the brunt, but any person or school discussed on there is demeaned. I don’t really see a solution to the lies, attacks and innuendo except naming and shaming the people who run the sites.

— Chris Blattman, Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago

The sexism, racism, and nastiness of EJMR is awful. There is also a *massive* asymmetric info & hidden curriculum issue in academia including in academic economics, and a lot of people go to EJMR for that reason.

— Anna Stansbury, Assistant Professor at MIT Sloan

My EJMR story relates to the ADB YPP 2023 thread. I personally found the threads on WBG & ADB YPP really helpful. But one member (very likely a guy) who had applied to ADB, upon being rejected said and I quote “who wants to live in Manila anyway”. Anonymity does make you mean.

— Anish Tiwari, Ph.D.

My guess is they do some type of machine learning text analysis. Roughly speaking, if x% of posts that mention an institution have the word Yale, they would infer that x% of posters are from Yale and x% of toxic content is from Yale. As far as toxic content by contributor, their algorithm can probably infer that one wacky poster is obsessed with B B C. That all seems more likely than them hackking everyone’s IP.

— Anonymous economist

My best guess is they got IP address data from cookies and match to the ASN allocation file. Universities, nonprofits, government orgs own IP addresses. People who post from within networks how they identify posters. IP geolocation too fuzzy.

— Harry Oppenheimer, postdoc at UC Institute on Global Conflict & Cooperation

Nobody will get doxxed. Legally and ethically too risky. I doubt they have anything but google trends type data.

— Anonymous economist

Folks who think this is impossible, you’re quite mistaken. The list of computational approaches novel to economists is long, and fast-growing.

— Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, Ph.D, CEO & Chief Scientist, Machine Learning X Doing

This whole thing has made me paranoid to do anything online.

— Anonymous economist

Anyone who thinks FE can doxx anyone should learn about the internet. Not even FBI can identify individuals with IP unless court gives warrant (which happens in very very very special cases, like child trafficking). And, some guy who couldn’t even get a job in the economics department is supposed to have the technology to do this? C’mon people. It’s obviously a nothingburger.

FE can barely write complete sentences. Like most of his Twitter, this stuff is just BS. I also can bet a lot of the panic bros here basically FEs RAs writing stuff via VPNs, so that they can enginner whatever conclusion he wants for his paper.

— Anonymous economist

I have mixed feelings about this. I despise EJMR, but there were some interesting discussions in the thread about the ethical underpinning of trying to locate and identify these people

— Pietro Birol, associate professor of economics at University of Bologna

the existence of a supposedly professional forum where users shield their identity and engage in hate speech is pure nonsense to me!

— Alessandra Mores, PhD Candidate

Renowned economists in two months be like: actually all my ejmr posts were part of a failed experiment

— Peter Hull, Professor of Economics at Brown University

i'm a math bro who once had some involvement with this type of work for the US government, and it's very difficult to get an actual post-by-post IP list without a court order. an aggregated list of IPs from ads is useless since most ad viewers don't post.

— Anonymous economist

What's distressing to many, at least to the people I talk to, is how the profession seems so happy with this semi-legal vigilante justice initiatives. It's much bigger than this absurd website. Even if this particular incident turns out to be a prank, the norms are shifting in a very perverse direction.

— Anonymous economist

It is truly depressing. A profession that should embrace freedom has become a nest of vipers defending backward left-wing ideas. I hope Trump wins and puts an end to all this toxic leftism

— Anonymous economist

and in a surprise to literally no one, the negative consequences of yesterday's EJMR fiasco are being borne exclusively by *checks notes* grad students, junior scholars, people of color, and other marginalized folks.

— Kaitlyn Sims, Asst Prof @UofDenver

I think most HRMs who hate this place do so because it points out all the corruption and clubbiness in the profession. That's the kind of truth they cannot forgive.

— Anonymous economist

EJRM is one of the only places left with an ounce of free speech remaining. Attacking this place is the real toxicity.

— Anonymous economist

We all know that there are many in the profession with very bad attitudes about free speech, but to see just how widespread the cruelty and desire to punish those who disagree with you actually is, well that's just depressing AF.

Make note of who celebrated this. And avoid them as much as possible.

— Anonymous economist

The amount of “ejmr is a cesspool, but I benefited from it so we should tolerate it” I’ve seen this week… If the process of getting a job in academia is so broken and gate-kept that it’s most useful secrets are held on a message board full of bigotry and misogyny, we’re lost.

— Todd Yarbrough, Director of the Economics Program at Pace Univ

Let's work to make economics a more welcoming and inclusive place. EJMR does not reflect that and we should hold the toxic folks accountable.

— Prachi Jain, Associate Professor of Economics

Ejmr is toxic, but I guess it just reveals the symptoms of the many problems we have. Ejmr is not the cause. I am afraid, one emjr is down, many ejmr will stand up.

— Charlotte Zhan, Assistant Professor Aucklan dUni

EJMR comes down to two sources: (1) internet provides anonymity at zero cost. (2) the econ job market is (uniquely in academia) highly centralized which provides incentives for a centralized platform about it.

— Rafael R. Guthmann, assistant economics professor at UAH

What I've learned so far is: 1) If you hate EJMR, it's because of your privilege 2) If you don't hate EJMR, it's because of your privilege I'm pretty sure all of us on econtwitter have privilege (of course with some variance). Not sure about the causality of 1 or 2, though. What I've learned so far is: 1) If you hate EJMR, it's because of your privilege 2) If you don't hate EJMR, it's because of your privilege I'm pretty sure all of us on econtwitter have privilege (of course with some variance). Not sure about the causality of 1 or 2, though.

My best guess is if you hate EJMR, it's probably because you or someone close to you had a truly awful experience with it. And if you don't hate it, it's probably because you got some useful piece of info there that was more valuable than any bad experience you had was costly.

— Brad Shapiro, Marketing Professor at Chicago Booth

Universities possess significant wealth too! It's entirely feasible for us to initiate a lawsuit against institutions such as Yale. We can even take legal action against our own institutions if they probe into who has posted from their offices, especially if they scrutinize one professor disproportionately - a clear case of discrimination. Numerous opportunities lie ahead for us to take legal action and potentially secure substantial monetary compensation.

— Anonymous economist

There are only two possibilities: Ederer is lying, or has made a breakthrough that exceeds the achievements of the top 0.001% computer scientists. Given his persona, I’d say the chances of the former are 100%

— Anonymous economist

There are guys from autoratic countries who have posted criticism of their regimes on EJMR. Ederer is happy to out them, or hang the threat of outing them over their heads for months. And for what? Petty revenge and twitter fame. Genuine psychopath.

Once he publishes the method governments around the world will be able to unmask anonymous posters on many different forums. This will help autocratic and censorious regimes everywhere.

— Anonymous economist

No 4chan user has ever been outed (take it from me). To be sure, moot, who worked at Google, is probably more competent at cybersecurity than Kirk, but if the posters on that notorious site have stayed safely anonymous after run-ins with the FBI, the RCMP, the Church of Scientology, et al., then I doubt a few economists have discovered a vulnerability that will allow them to generally unmask the userbase of EJMR.

— Anonymous economist

It's pitiful to observe. Man, this people are literally threatening to doxx thousands. What about those who have disclosed, say, intimate problems on this website? What about those closeted gheys from backward countries? You don't get to play with thousands of people's private lives like this and then play the moral highground card.

— Anonymous economist

If they could identify posters on an anonymous forum, they would be the next billionaires by selling that technology to Putin and Zuckerberg. Won't need to present some little áss paper at some obscure áss conference.

— Anonymous economist

A warning to Florian Ederer and friends: It looks like you potentially used third-party tracking cookie data to spy on fellow economists' browsing history. Even if you claim to be doing this with good intentions, and this is achievable using what is effectively third-party spyware, you have crossed a serious ethical line.

There is no principled stopping point. Perhaps you're just looking at EJMR visits, but what is to stop me from purchasing this data and identifying all of your darkest secrets? It's equally possible, and I'm sure I could justify it ("to prevent abuse, it is important that economists are not interested in bad thing X").

If you use this to target individuals, or intentionally make them targetable by others (by sharing public data), there will be serious consequences for your careers and reputation.

— Anonymous economist

One comment that stood out to me was Dr. Christakis, the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, who was harassed by his own students for protecting free speech and now he is openly calling for doxxing of anonymous free speech.

I also enjoyed the reaction of Shengwu Li, a Harvard economics professor.

BREAKING: HBS professor placed on "administrative leave" following bombshell investigation into fake data

Wow, a Singaporean who doesn’t value free speech?

His royal lineage is full of fascists. I guess he's a fascist too.

Literally the most privileged Harvard professor — the silver-spoon grandson of the former prime minister of Singapore — Shengwu loves the smell of his own farts more than any economist alive. Case in point, when Daniel Ellsberg (PBUH) died last month, Shengwu, humble as ever, has the audacity to compare himself to an actual political hero:

Thankfully Shengwu gets bitchslapped back to reality in the comments sections by another guy who actually knows what he is talking about re: Singapore:

My point is that our “elites” are clowns. Everyone involved in today’s story is supposedly an “adult economist” at “top universities” but they act like highschool girls — the entire profession, all of academia, has a petty, highschool, mean-girl vibe to it… these esteemed, chaired professors may just as well be gossiping in the cafeteria about who-gave-who a handjob at recess.

“It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive—because we have to.”

― John Williams, Stoner

One person went too far and doxxed Florian’s house in retaliation.

I inboxed this anonymous account to ask them if this was really Florian’s house, and they replied simply, “AFAIK”.

I blacked it out:

Along the same lines is Dr. Akhil Rao, Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, who wants to murder (?) EJMR posters:

clown

I emailed Rao to inquire what [REDACTED] stands for, but did not receive a response.

Another EJMR hater is Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer, who tweeted out his defence of Lisa Cook last year:

https://paulromer.net/lisa-cook/

I replied to his tweet with a link to EJMR that proves his data wrong, saying simply “Discuss.” As one can see from the following article, his Ph.D. student and current FED member Lisa Cook does not understand fractions:

https://www.takimag.com/article/half-cooked-data/

Paul Romer was unable to debate this anonymous science, so he spazzes out and ignores the data (which he can’t defend) and decrees: “there is no such thing as anonymous science.”

“No such thing as anonymous science”?

Tell that to these 5 scientists, as per ChatGPT:

In a community that values truth and intellectual integrity, Romer would immediately lose all credibility after that, but instead many economists *praised* Romer for this anti-anonymous stance.

EJMR is a pretty tame website, honestly, especially compared to Twitter; Twitter is not only worse than ENR on an absolute basis, it is worse on a per-capita basis. Twitter is not moderated at all, while EJMR is heavily moderated.

It's funny that people calling for the end of EJMR do so on Twitter. If you just look at the bad posts, Twitter is infinitely worse in all dimensions.

— Eric Rasmussen, retired Professor at Indiana University Bloomington

Any honest person can see that Twitter is orders of magnitudes more vile than EJMR in every dimension: sexism, racism, bigotry, doxxing, xenophobia, religious intolerance, swear words, hate speech, gore, porn, smut, anti-semitism, drugs, child abuse, and child porn.

Speaking of child abuse… one of the most popular “leaders” of #EconTwitter, Kurt Mitman, is a convicted child rapist. True story. This was one of the first articles I wrote when I got on Substack 2 years ago:

Here are two more blogs about it:

• Professor Kurt Mitman: His History of Child Sodomy Rape

• The Surprising Tolerance People Have for Child Sodomy Rape in Professor Mitman’s Case: “Boys Will Be Boys.”

Mitman is Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies — one of the “top 5” economics journals in the world, where a single publication can guarantee tenure at most good schools for most professors. If you want to publish in this top 5, you have to pretend to be his friend on Twitter.

Society has graciously given Mitman a second chance at life after he raped a kid, and he has capitalized on it to become one of the major figures in the profession. As an EJMR comment points out: “In any international institution, any government, any private company he would not be chosen for such high profiled position. Period. That tells something about the economics profession.”

If I were him, I would keep my head down.

Instead… well…

The point I am driving at here is that leftists are hypocrites of the highest order with no principles. These people are backwards, sick freaks.

If Mitman was a conservative male who raped a young girl, every voice on #EconTwitter would be calling for his head on a daily basis; there would be mass boycotts and histrionic petitions; twitter shrews would be coming out of the woodwork claiming they feel unsafe around him; they would never, ever, shut up about it how this conservative white male raped a young girl; and they would never, ever, in a million years allow him to be a a gatekeeper at a top 5 journal.

But because KM is a leftist gay male, it is okay?

Everything is permissible if you’re a leftist.

Nothing is permissible if you’re not.

How many EJMR visits are equivalent to raping a child?

Why is one sin more forgiveable than the other?

What kind of weak man would let his speech be muzzled/censored, even a little bit, by a literal gay child rapist? Don’t give these people an inch.

And yet, the #EconTwitterMafia, a cabal of hilariously corrupt and inept neoliberal wonks and child-rapist apologists, constantly tries to deplatform EJMR from the internet. Every few years, a new white woman from EconTwitter declares jihad on EJMR. In 2017, it was the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, who collected a petition with over 1,000+ signatures against EJMR.

One of the signatories is Maya "footnote 7" Rossin-Slater, an associate professor at Stanford University.

She wants to deplatform EJMR because EJMR exposes her as being hilariously corrupt, in a 291+ pages of discussion about New "Family Ruptures" AER / NBER is rip-off of obscure paper. Seriously, go read all 291 pages in that link, and see for yourself what the profession really thinks of Maya.

Of course not, only did she sign that petition in 2017, she also cheers on Florian’s efforts today in 2023:

EJMR exposed her as a fraud, so she vindictively spends the next decade campaigning to deplatform EJMR. See how that works?

This is a common theme you will see emerge throughout this series — EJMR catches someone being blatantly corrupt and/or incompetent, then this person blames EJMR for being “dangerous for democracy” or “racist” or “sexist” something.

That wasn’t the first petition, nor will it be the last.

From 2019-2021, one woman created about a dozen petitions and open letters against EJMR, emailing them to Ben Bernanke, lol:

oh hey Paul

In 2022, it was time for Doleac’s jihad:

In 2023, following in the footsteps of Sahm and Doleac — and notable only a week after Florian published his abstract (did they coordinate their timing?) — it was time for the jihad of Anya Samek, an associate professor of Economics and Strategy at the Rady School of Management at UCSD.

Normally I would do a deep dive into this petition.. but who cares? It’s pointless. Even though 700+ people signed it, they have no power. First of all, that is only about 3% of AEA members. Doesn’t seem like too many economists support her petition.

Second, the same petition with 1000+ signatories failed in 2017. This one is not different in any material way, I don’t see why it would succeed.

Third of all, AEA won’t & can’t do anything — they are already going bankrupt, lol, they don’t have the funds to hire a lawyer, and have already sunk untold hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting EJMR to no avail. They even cloned EJMR a couple of years ago, making a moderated version called “Econspark”, which nobody used, and immediately became defunct, because it turns out nobody wants to be moderated by a hall monitor.

What was Econ Spark?

I think its worth it repeating the stories here so everyone can be reminded.

AEA was getting increasingly annoyed with the fact that EJMR was poking at their dishonest and unfair activities so first Card (who after that became AEA president) and his goons got an innocent undergrad girl to write a hit piece on EJMR to try and discredit us. The paper claimed to prove that economists posting on this forum were evil ra5ist, woman hating, xenophobes, anarchists, scum of the earth, etc. but all it showed was that EJMR is an online forum where anyone can post anonymously and some weirdos sometimes post stupid stuff on here and mods can't always delete everything if it goes unreported. The analysis was incredibly bad and the statistics did not support in any way most of their conclusions (much like T is still currently saying he won the elections and keeps on tweeting about it thinking that his tweets will somehow magically change the numbers) and there were even weird things like when she claimed that we discriminated by using words like pregnant and BB ("baby") in association with women and words like keen for men (when in reality BB is BB Lacroix a famous fake name used in a prank, pregnant was many times referenced by several bad econ papers with terrible methodology and questions and conclusions published in the AER even though the had no connection to economics and that happened to be written by women and keen is used here to referencce Steven Keen who we regularly mention as a crowd funding econ scam artist). Sorry, not sorry, for all the grammar violations.

So the AEA pretended that they were righteous champions of economics and used their mighty sword of justice (which is more of a corrupt rotted out wooden stick) to create THE ULTIMATE official forum for economists and it would be modded and have this and that and official participation from well known faculty (i.e. they were going to amplify the publicity for people in the corrupt club running the AEA and likely "quiet down" everyone else). That was the genesis of econspark and they used quite a big amount of resources to set it up (its no wonder that the last budget meeting at that ASSA showed the AEA budget was deeeeeeeeeep in the red). Obviously it didn't become the voice of econ. In fact most of the econ spark cheerleaders (secondary figures, not the main AEA bosses that wanted to control things) instead figured out that econtwitter already gave them the public venue they wanted and they could reach the general public easily and uncensored (much to the chagrin of the AEA).

So we are at this point where econtwitter is what everyone knows what it is while EJMR exists and is the unofficial channel for worldwide economists to figure out what's going on in the profession, like what is the next corrupt thing done by the AEA and the corrupt clubby members that are in charge of the AEA (obviously we do much more than just that)..... all while econspark silently chugged along to the tune Tony Igy's Astronomia.

Fast forward some weeks and we start getting questions about Fryer's behavior. Unconfirmed stuff so around here we mostly just listen and tell the women involved to get authorities and journalists involved and make this public because it sounded shady and if it wasn't a fake story then things had to be done to protect future women. A few months later and that scandal was on the cusp of erupting as we learnt more and more stuff and official investigations started so it was a ripe story for online forums. We here did our thing like we always do. Econspark... well econspark mods went around deleting the stories and questions people were making about Fryer's inappropriate behavior towards women and we caught them bright ruby red handed doing it and had screenshots showing the AEA trying to hide the Fryer story (a member of the corrupt club running the AEA). Obviously then top AEA top members popped up saying it was a mistake and an innocent misunderstanding and nobody was trying to conceal the story in the hopes that we were born yesterday and were not weary of the AEA's corrupt ways. Who would have ever thought that a bunch of corrupt leaders of a major organization would use their media outlets to try and control information dissemination. That's just ludicrous.

Is econspark dead? It can be whatever it wants but it will never be the official or unofficial voice of worldwide economists and the corrupt leaders of the AEA will never be able to use it as a tool to hide their sins or to implement their corrupt agenda on worldwide economists.

— Anonymous

Every few years, the AEA cabal tries to shut down EJMR, and every few years, their efforts fail, for one simple reason: they have no legal standing. EJMR is a private website. Why would the AEA think they have any power over it? These people are idiots. Take, for example, Anya’s tenuous grasp of the law, where she explains that she will “subpeona the site for IPs”:

An actual paralegal, Kathryn Tewson, hilariously shows up in her replies, to school her, revealing that Anya is making up fake excuse for not answering question. Anya is so dishonest and incompetent, it is just sad.

This petition is truly a warning sign that economics is running out of interesting research ideas. Instead of working on things to benefit society we have senior people going on uninformed and unscientific raiding parties. Further, if they get their way we would end up in a worse off place than before.

Keynes said we'd be dentists. I fear he underestimated how low we would go.

— Anonymous

People like Anya and Maya and Claudia and Doleac hate EJMR because it exposes their profession as fraudulent and corrupt. Here are 25 academic scandals that EJMR has exposed, which, of course, the EconTwitter ignored and/or swept under the rug.

Anya and Maya and Claudia and Doleac tweet A LOT.

Why don’t they tweet about any of these?

1. Schiraldi (LSE) and Seiler (Stanford) false coauthors of AER publication

2. Why is Andrei Shleifer not banished from the profession?

3. A new marketing / consumer research scandal on sight?

4. Matray and Boissel (AER 2022) retracted!

5. HRM Covid research DESTROYED by grad students

6. The Berkeley JMP useless research multiplier

7. The finance academic has become a snake oil industry full of fraudsters

8. This year's finance star's job market paper

9. Leah Boustan doesn't know undergrad math

10. HRMs steal another idea from LRMs

11. Corrupt French academics paid by Uber, Inc.

12. JF paper withdrawn for omitted citation!!!

13. Scandals at the CUHK

14. Harvard memo: Asian overachievement is hilarious and should be mocked

15. WK Li from SMU plagiarized a JMP – BEST SCANDAL of the year

16. "Will the real specification please stand up?" discredits accounting paper

17. List of SFS/RFS Scandals

18. JFE report

19. Adriano A. Rampini, S. Viswanathan, and Guillaume Vuillemey

20. So who has tweeted about the Fryer issue?

21. What happened with MH Kellogg at FRA conference?

22. There is a civil war brewing in the world of mathematics

23. HRM strategy for publishing in RFS

24. Marco Di Maggio and the collapse of Terra

25. JF article is retracted

I want to draw your one specific thread, which tells the straightforward story of a pair of professors at Yale plagiarizing a paper.

• Forthcoming JF by Yale profs is a rip-off of LRM paper

One of the plagiarists in that thread is named Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham.

Hmmmm….. Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham…… where have I heard that name before?

What is the most surprising about all of this is why PGP, who cares about getting tenure would be involved. Nobody takes FE seriously, and he’s going to be public enemy #1 now. But PGP, given his recent plagiarism event should have stayed low and just done good work. Instead he’s getting involved in drama. What a terribly poor judgement.

— Anonymous economist

Are you seeing how the Econtwitter mafia operates?

Maya was exposed by EJMR, so she arranges multiple petitions to shut down the site.

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham is exposed by EJMR, so he writes a paper doxxing all of their users.

Of course, Florian has his reasons, too.

• Why did Florian Ederer fail tenure?

UPDATE: This week, Florian Ederer changed his Twitter bio from Yale to Boston University

Getting denied for tenure really sucks. FE has an impressive research agenda, and he had reason to believe he had a real shot at tenure at Yale. Which would have guaranteed him a really solid income and a place of reasonable prominence in academia for the rest of his career. But it didn't work out. If you don't have some sympathy for him feeling unhappy/angry/bitter at the situation, you have a heart of stone.

— Anonymous economist

This guy wrote a post recently how he was treated unfairly with choosing letters at tenure review. No florian. The reason you got denied tenure is that you’re a mediocre economist, but also an extraordinarily insufferable person.

— Anonymous economist

Florian is a wack job threatening to dox thousands of mostly innocent people. Come on bro. 99.99% of us had nothing to do with denying you tenure and we’re mostly good people. I even supported your case until now.

— Anonymous economist

Funny thing is he spent the last few years working on this instead of an actual finance paper that could have helped save his tenure case, lol.

— Anonymous economist

FE is precisely the kind of miscreant that should be banished from academia. careerist, woke, little weasel with aboslutely clownish research agenda.

— Anonymous economist

Florian Ederer will be public enemy number 1 after this

— Anonymous economist

A lot of people will not want to work with or hire the guy after this. Aside from a small vocal minority who make a lot of noise, most people will find this violation of privacy uncomfortable, even if they don't use EJMR

— Anonymous economist

These guys have spent scarce time and resources as assistant professors to write a terrible "paper" about an internet forum no one really cares. They are so weak they need to pretend they are doing research in order to go after their enemies.

— Anonymous economist

Let me get this straight about Ederer. He gets a hard time on EJMR because he's viewed as a showboat who wants to be the center of attention and prefers dumb stunts to serious, low-key research. And then he proves himself to be... literally exactly that, by posting a hoax paper that was designed to blow up Twitter and EJMR.

— Anonymous economist

If he doesn’t get tenure at Yale maybe he can get a position working for the communist party of China

— Anonymous economist

I am pretty sure that the only outcome of this will be that Florian destroys his reputation and nobody ever trusts or works with him again.

Geolocate it son.

— Anonymous economist

I'm a theorist and can't speak for the quality of FE's non-theory work, but his theory work is really mediocre stuff. Certainly, he should be at a much worse place if his non-theory work is of a similar caliber.

— Anonymous economist

In 2020, Florian proudly tweeted that he doesn’t receive any outside funding “from big tech companies”, and that if he did, “it would probably bias my work.”

In 2021, he applied for, and received, outside funding from big tech companies.

Who funds Equitable Growth?

For starters, one of their main funders is the Ford Foundation, who I have written about extensively:

Whistleblower emails reveal partisan rot at Ford Foundation, that gets "nonpartisan" tax perks

Ford Foundation Shuts Down Fellowship Program

Equitable Growth’s other main funder, though, is “Open Philanthropy”, whose funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovit, founders of Facebook and Asana, lol.

To recap: in 2020, Florian proudly tweeted that he doesn’t receive any outside funding “from big tech companies”, and that if he did, “it would probably bias my work,” then in 2021 he is showered in Facebook-buxxx and promptly pivots his career towards becoming an anti-free-speech activist. Odd case!

Looking Forward: Part 2 & 3 of this series

Florian et. co will be presenting this paper in TWO DAYS FROM NOW:

DATE: July 20th @ 4:30pm EST

LOCATION: Royal Sonesta Hotel and streamed on YouTube

In Part 2, I will report on their big reveal.

I am not sure what I will write, it depends on what the paper says.

Something else I might write about (in part 3?) is Yale’s institutional review board (IRB). I suspect the authors may have presented their research with a focus on its potential to discourage hateful and discriminatory posts. Given the 'woke' reputation of Yale's IRB, this might have worked in their favor, and led to the granting of approval.

If you hold concerns about the implications of this study on freedom of speech, I encourage you to reach out to Yale's IRB via email:

• HRPP@yale.edu

Or email the 3 authors of the study directly:

• florian.ederer@gmail.com

• kyle.jensen@yale.edu

• paul.goldsmith-pinkham@yale.edu

I emailed a full draft of this article to these 3 professors, to offer them the last word.

I did not receive a response.