Hi all,
It’s the end of an era. Kobe Bryant, basketball savant or ball-hogger extraordinaire depending on your viewpoint, has retired. It’s appropriate that a player so obsessed with his own statistics should have had such an effect on the way in which basketball is analysed, but I’ll leave that to the last link, below. For now, let’s just remember this and accept that only a ball hog of epic proportions is capable of such excitement. I may have to turn in my economist card, but some things are more important than efficiency (that last link makes me grin from ear to ear). So some token economics before we get to Kobe-by-statistics. [As an aside, it’s also the start of a horrifying era, as James Cameron has announced, in what is presumably not a late and vicious April Fool’s, that he will make four sequels to Avatar. Four. Seriously, four. 4. My only consolation is that my discount rate is sky-high, and the negative effects of the third and fourth films aren’t tipping me into a suicidal mood].
1. This week in things that should be a far bigger deal than they are (also in this category, William Fiennes’s The Snow Geese, Beat Takeshi’s latest movie Ryuzo and his Seven Henchmen, and everything that Nick Bloom does): Tyler Cowen picks up some of the coverage of Nigeria’s economy. “Factories are closing because they can’t find dollars to import parts. Supermarkets are struggling to keep shelves stocked. Power plants have virtually stopped producing electricity because they can’t pay for maintenance… Nigerians abroad are stuck with ATM cards they can’t use because the central bank has limited withdrawals outside the country.” This is one to keep an eye on. They may manage their way out with nary a scratch, but it would be an escape worthy of Steve McQueen.
2. When I lived in Zanzibar, there was a shopfront upon which the announcement “Mr Credit is dead. Living only his son, Mr CASH!” was emblazoned. I loved that. We’re getting to a stage where international development might need a version of this slogan. First Dave Evans suggests that cash is might be a pretty good counterfactual for most development programmes (always ask “should we just give cash instead?”) I agree with that, depending on what the programme is trying to do. It escalates though. Give Directly, in a move that makes me queasy, is attempting a massive pilot of a basic income in Kenya – without, it seems from a glance, much input from the Kenyan government. Berk Ozler suggests ways of improving the evaluations here, very thoughtful. But it strikes me that we lack even flimsy theoretical justifications for using cash as a substitute for deep institutional development; and while few us take it as such, it seems like some do. And if GD are doing this around the Kenyan government, there might be some ‘do no harm’ questions they need to ask themselves.
3. There’s loads of interesting stuff in this Tim Harford article looking at how the framing of choice can affect our decision-making. But the sentence I cannot get over is this: “Starbucks offers about 100,000 drink combinations — millions, once the syrups are taken into account.” I mean, seriously – millions of drinks and they all taste like a sock steeped in hot water and then shot with a cannon full of sugar? HOW?!
4. A colleague sent this to me today, with the qualification ‘far be it for us to cast stones, but…’: the NYT on the lack of concrete language in World Bank reports. Choice quote: “[The study] found a sharp decline in factual precision, replaced by what the researchers call management discourse, a bureaucratic gobbledygook whose meaning is hard to decipher.” I agree. To combat the issue, I suggest we take this offline, so we can take a deep dive into the issues and facilitate a systemic mapping of the low-hanging fruit adjacent to our vector of possibilities.
5. Nice, thoughtful Berk piece on the apparently rising trend of Peter Singer-type experiments to induce altruism by teachers with a ropey grasp of moral philosophy. I wonder what Michael Sandel would make of this? It’s a gussied up version of those guilt-tripping Oxfam ‘killer stats’ like “every year we spend more on ice cream than on preventing malaria” [sound of head thumping the table].
6. In a modern equivalent of being shamed into helping people, I always find it a bit weird that we have try to prove that helping migrants or refugees or women achieve economic equality is good for the rest of us. It almost certainly is, but is that really the point? Related, a nice photo essay about migrant workers from the Graun.
7. That’s quite enough of that rubbish. Let’s get back to the Mamba. 538 points out that the wave of advanced stats that rejected Kobe’s claims of greatness were… well… not really all that advanced. As they improved, they became more likely to capture the specific benefits that Kobe brings that other players just can’t. Does it make him the new Jordan? Of course not, but he was still pretty damn good. We tend to underestimate the great ones while they’re playing – the number of people who somehow forget that LeBron James is a cyborg from outer space at MVP voting time completely amazes me – but the numbers stack up for Kobe. So in that frame of mind, two more links: first, the Warriors are ridiculous. And second, at the end of the greatest season of shooting in the history of people throwing balls into little hoops, an appreciation of all the hard work that goes into making Steph Curry look effortless.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
R
