Stephen Vaisey 🇺🇦

Join us. www.tse-fr.eu/iast-researc...

What if AI could do more of your data analysis? See if "AI Tools for Data Analysis: From Chatbots to Coworkers," taught by Boris Nikolaev, is for you with his new interactive webpage.

I'm a big fan of envelope budgeting but my preferred app's servers are down (PHP). In 90 minutes, while answering email, I vibe coded a full replacement that works on my phone and computer and syncs via Google Sheets: github.com/vaiseys/envelopes

Families in the top 10% spend 13x more on developmental activities than those in the bottom 25%, compared to 3x in 1980. "Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States" now out at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social doi.org/10.15195/v13... 🧵👇

Using the new 2026 data (supplemental poverty), here's my update. Bringing every poor family w/ children in the US up to the poverty line would cost just $67.4 billion. We can do that with a 0.88% tax on incomes over (poverty line + $46,556). Here is the tax required per family, by income:

Have we abandoned #TWFE too quickly?😮 New in #Sociological #Methodology w/ @aksoyundan.bsky.social We compare TWFE event studies vs dynamic #DID estimators. Results suggest a more nuanced picture than "never use TWFE" and clarify when different estimators perform well 👇 🔗 doi.org/10.1177/0081...

Taking the plunge with Positron. RStudio uninstalled. Here we go...

Happy to share a new working paper: "Machine Learning Models Trained on a Longitudinal Survey Dataset Poorly Predict Hundreds of Life Outcomes" arxiv.org/abs/2610.17115 You can hear Emily Cantrell present it Thursday Oct 15 at Oxford: metrics-and-models.github.io (online participation possible)

Hi all! I'm looking for people to try out my new collaborative writing platform. Think: Overleaf or GDocs for Mkdown LaTeX HTML Typst Quarto Free, open source, and full-featured. Many editors, chat, comments, track changes, history, AI, mobile, templates, etc Would ❤️ any feedback! librepaper.org

a new job market paper! using surveys from 10.4 million college students over 40 years, I study the role of ideology in career aspirations. I show that ideology structures what careers people want, a pattern much stronger among high-income students. see here: tkeskinturk.github.io/aspirations.pdf

The real DiD was the friends we made along the way.

peter hull comparing TWFE and modern DIDs & it seems TWFE is OK. people will go "YOU SEE IT DIDN'T MATTER AFTER ALL" but regardless of whether TWFE is ultimately useful or not that all DiD chaos was a net good because it clarified the estimand. tinyurl.com/twfevsdid

BTW this means no funding for GSS, ANES, or PSID. GSS 2026 is in the field now, but then it looks like that's it. Devastating for social science.

it is almost time for the annual *Well Actually It's Not A Real Nobel Prize, Alfred Nobel Never Talked About Economics* discourse.

Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵

a new paper forthcoming in British Journal of Political Science! we use a novel choice task to estimate values in the Schwartz Value Space and study how these values structure political preferences among kids, one of their parents, and a U.S. sample. read: tkeskinturk.github.io/values-politics.pdf

I love how flexible academia is. You can work any 12 hours of the day you want!

So happy to see (finally) this truly excellent paper in print!

Years ago I wrote that it was a mistake to entrust colleges with sexual assault enforcement

Come and join us @sriucl.bsky.social We’re looking for an Assistant Professor in Quantitative Social Science with a research agenda on the environment and/or climate change, and expertise in causal inference. See full details and apply 👉🏼 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Universal training data. Universal dividend.

Sub your scholarly topic for Ted's, and the observation stays the same. GenAI models are the new mass media, whether we like or not. You cannot "should" people out of using them. You might be able to convince them to go beyond. But the first question is if experts w know what non-experts are told.

Models like Talkie-1930 sound like voices from the past. If they could reliably speak from specified historical vantage points, researchers might also use them to simulate the past. But how reliable are they? Today we release a benchmark answering that question for English contexts 1831-1930.

UNC Sociology is hiring! 🐏 We're looking for someone at assistant or associate level in ANY area, willing to teach in our dept's Management & Society program (i.e. courses on organizations, work and occupations, economic sociology, social psychology, non-profits, work and family, AI and work, etc).

Published! In my new article, I apply the bounding analysis of age, period, and cohort effects to test whether the rise and fall of poetry and prose in Russian literature can be explained by cohort replacement. Out in @culturalanalytics.bsky.social: culturalanalytics.org/article/id/1...

the funniest part of the *heterodox* debacle was indeed the fact that the ones preaching rigor do their preaching with the least rigor imaginable.

New episode (1308), with Dr. Stephen Vaisey (@stephenvaisey.com). We talk about the #Sociology of morality and political beliefs. #Biology #Science YouTube: youtu.be/E3NWGvbOt8w Podcast: bit.ly/4hdJMjg

Period measures of fertility, like TFR, are less stable than cohort measures and are currently overstating fertility decline. New paper out on The Long-Term Trends in Cohort Fertility: Global, Regional and National Estimates and Projections for Cohorts Born in 1935–2055 doi.org/10.1111/padr...

Causal inference is the art of knowing exactly why your estimate isn't causal

A psychology journal has retracted a seminal 2002 paper on deadlines and procrastination coauthored by behavioral scientist Dan Ariely of Duke University just days after a team of sleuths published analyses of the original study data, finding it had been tampered with.

To the extent that political discussion appears in the classroom, the modal experience is liberal students slightly disappointed that their professors won't endorse their views explicitly.

Self-inflicted head wound

More suspicion of tampered/fabricated data in a paper published by Dan Ariely, who incidentally still has his job at Duke.

The struggle of every quant social scientist 💯😖

With {ggcube}, I can finally make versions of Kruschke's 3D plots. It only took 8 years... Here's a couple previews:

Demographic facts I expect my #sociology students to know, 2026 edition. Rationale and sources: familyinequality.wordpress.com/2026/08/24/d...

The way things are going with AI, it's probably a smart move for ambitious students to work on their penmanship.

I understand that funding bodies want to go all in on AI as the shiny new innovation thing. But if all the grants start going to AI at the expense of everything else then the research sector is going to end up looking like a farm with dozens of threshers hacking away in a field with no wheat.

📣 We are hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in sociology at Davidson College! Could this be your dream job? I'm open to chatting about teaching at a liberal arts college and this position. Just message or email me : ) careercenter.asanet.org/job/1311603/...

Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...

#Sociology has been in the news a lot lately. A new piece just dropped in @wsj.com, featuring some comments from me. Per usual, they only used a few sentences from the hour+ conversation. Let me to expand a bit below. tldr: my answer to the titular question is an emphatic "no"🧵

If Odysseus had spent less time on forever wars in Troy and more time on issues affecting white working-class citizens of Ithaca, then maybe Penelope's suitors wouldn't have tried to kill him.

How you react to this interview might be the best Rorschach test for social science faculty ever devised.

Interesting read for sociologists given how sociologists vary in whether anthropology is to be seen as a role model or cautionary tale.

www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...