Hi all,

Well, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, could I? No sooner did I suggest England were on top than… well, watch for yourself. England now place their hopes in Jofra Archer, who has never played test cricket before, though in his defence, he’s basically a Game of Thrones character and has just taken six wickets and scored a century in a warmup match. No doubt the England brains trust are working on a way to comically screw this up, too, but take solace in the hope for as long as it lives and remember – it has sometimes been worse (in that 06/07 series, I remember thinking at one point that Mike Hussey should just change his name by deed poll to Michael Hussey Not Out, because that was all anyone ever called him).

1. “An iPhone, it seems to me, is a bottomless bowl of digital cashews.” Tim Harford has lunch with Richard Thaler and in a moment of fan service worthy of a Marvel movie, places a bowl of nuts in front of him. The joke is this: when Thaler invited some friends (academic economists, all) to dinner, they were eating so many of the cashews left out as a snack that they were destroying their appetite before the main course arrived. He removed the nuts and was thanked – a sequence of events that he credits with the inspiration for behavioural economics because a rational consumer would never benefit from having less choice. It’s a fun read: if you know your behavioural economics, there’s nothing new here, but Thaler takes gleeful aim at politicians on both sides of the pond and the announcements on the tube, all while managing to resist the temptation of the nuts. Related, Tim has an angry and evidence-based rant about the atrocious state of US healthcare.
2. A really cool piece of work by Abi Adams and Alison Andrew is summarised on VoxDev. They use a very clever set of survey instruments and vignettes to elicit information on preferences to understand how education can affect the age of first marriage of young women in India. What they find is that education is seen as a way of improving marriage prospects – but such prospects decline rapidly after the end of formal education. This means that those girls who drop out of school early for any reason are at great risk of early marriage – and there appears to be little intrinsic value attached to education for girls, beyond its marriage benefits. Great research, depressing findings.
3. Planet Money examine the long and strange history of research into twins –  a history that covers some pretty grim episodes in science (transcript). I cannot for the life of me understand why they didn’t interview Arnie and Danny de Vito, though.
4. A good piece in Vox about how software and information might be the next big margin on which we reduce carbon emissions, by carrying out large-scale synchronisation of electricity demand, which is now possible thanks to computing power and the digitisation of the household.
5. Branko reviews Paul Collier’s new book, The Future of Capitalism. It’s the first part of a putative two-parter (the second is yet to be published), and this part focuses on what Branko disagrees with. As with any good review, of course, you need not agree with either the original book or the reviewer, but it does introduce a lot of ideas worth thinking about. There’s one point in particular that struck me, however: how much progress relies on conflict (either latent in the form of a threat or active in the form of protest). Eric Hobsbawm put it thus: ‘the world will not get better on its own’, and I think he’s right.
6. Toni Morrison died this week; I think she would very much have agreed with Hobsbawm’s sentiment. A very good appreciation by Yiyun Li was published in the NYT, and for those (like me) who have not read enough of her work, The Ringer have a handy syllabus of her work. And lastly, because I don’t want to end on a downer, scientists have discovered the remains of a three-foot tall parrot, and they have named it Squawkzilla, because of course it has to be called Squawkzilla.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R