Jonathan Libgober (same handle on other places)

The School of Computing at UT Austin will be hiring aggressively, aiming for 50 new tenure-track faculty over the next 5 years, and many instructional (professional-track) faculty. Job ads are posted for all 3 departments:

Strongly recommend applying: I spent one week back in 2022 at the lab and it changed my life!

Why do firms exist? The organization-science classics of the 1990s gave an answer that we, economists, have barely explored: firms are not just about economizing on transaction costs, but about building and diffusing knowledge — and firms know more than they can tell. AI is making many of these ideas newly relevant. And there is an opportunity to bring them into economics, with formal models and empirical discipline. This was the theme of Session 6 of our @UCBerkeley PhD reading group. We discussed Kogut & Zander's "Knowledge of the Firm, Combinative Capabilities, and the Replication of Technology" (1992), Nonaka's "A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation" (1994), and March's "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning" (1991).

Too many races to understand how things are going. Is there somewhere I can go tonight to just look up my continuation value?

For years, the Israel haters have insisted that the reason they obsess over Israel is not that they're antisemitic -- it's not that they have a weird obsession with the Jews. No, it's U.S. aid. "We're paying for the genocide!" was the platitude, one that twisted the meaning of "genocide" into oblivion and never bothered to ask what, exactly, the United States gets in return for its investment. On top of that, the Israel haters have made it clear they have a special animus for Benjamin Netanyahu. New York City's mayor, for example, told us he'd have him arrested if the prime minister stepped foot in the city. So, presumably, the end of U.S. aid to Israel and Israel's recent election (throwing into doubt Bibi's premiership) should lead to a rethinking about the Jewish state. Perhaps now there can be a new omnicause, a new "intersectional villain," as Haviv Rettig Gur has put it. Of course, that won't happen. The Jewish state -- and we should call Israel the Jewish state, because that is, after all, why we talk about it so much -- will remain the redoubt and purveyor of all that is evil. At least, to those who hate Jews. This is a hate that is remarkably resilient, virus-like, always morphing into new iterations and pseudo-arguments, always camouflaging itself. Soon, there will be a new pseudo-argument. We will be given a new rationalization for hating Israel -- *a* reason but not *the* reason. The Jew haters are loathe to admit that they simply hate Jews, that they are a cliché, that they are doing what countless losers, ideologues, opportunists and sociopaths have done since time immemorial. But that doesn't mean they're right. Beware the next pseudo-argument.

I’m on the 2026–27 economics job market, studying how clean energy policy can get the level of investment right, and still leave unrealized benefits by getting the location wrong. 1/5 #EconJobMarket #EnergyEconomics #EnvironmentalEconomics #AppliedMicroeconomics #CleanEnergy