link roundup

Again, it's been a pretty eventful week - on Friday, I spoke at a UN event practioner-scholar event about evidence gaps in conflict research,¹ and then spent this weekend in SF at Progress 2024.

Progress 2024 was great, especially meeting the other Roots of Progress fellows in person. All coherence of my previous posts is largely due to their excellent editing; I really recommend checking out their work.

As for our regularly scheduled links:

• The poorest Americans face extremely high marginal rates - one in four have marginal tax rates >50%. This is… bad.

• There's a new RFP on research related to lead exposure.

• The first sickle cell patient has been cured.

• Aveek Bhattacharya has a new white paper arguing that “sin taxes” (on gambling, alcohol, and tobacco) should be increased in the UK. Aveek’s work has influenced my own thoughts here tremendously; on the margin, reducing alcohol consumption seems to be very good. (Also Aveek is so smart, y’all; it’s very annoying of him to be smarter than me.)

• London has really bad cell phone service. (This is an update for me; I thought it was just because I have Three.)

• Single moms do less housework than married moms. Patriarchy: it's a bitch.

• My friends at CGD education have been officially deemed Woke Scientists.

• When Cubanese officials asked Chinese officials for economic advice, the official Chinese advice was "have you considered being less communist".

• Vinny Armentano carved the scariest Halloween pumpkin:

1. Next substantive piece will be tangentially related to this, making the structural transformation case for investing in peacebuilding