Hi all,

Just in time to distract you from eyeing up the Dettol, the Links arrive. Can we take a moment to discuss this, please? Despite that particular advice going directly into the Dunning-Krueger Effect Hall of Fame, and followers of it likely putting themselves in immediate contention for a Darwin Award, it was, stunningly not the dumbest thing I heard this week. Nope: that was the plan to ban immigration in response to a disease that is being transmitted locally, and with exceptions in no way correlated to likelihood of carrying the disease. At times like this, words fail me, and I turn to gifs. This is will do. Anyway – just in case you can catch dumb by reading about it, here’s the best of the internet’s economics and general geekery this week as an antidote (and some pretty intense basketball nostalgia prompted by The Last Dance).

1. Tim Harford had a fantastic long read at the FT, looking at why Governments (and individuals) fail to prepare for disasters. This all touches on the kind of research I do, how our decision-making processes are prone to different kinds of failure, and it’s a great, rounded and engaging take on the topic. He talks about behavioural biases, of course, but a lot of this is driven by the reward structures we face and the accountability we face. We get credit for mending things that break, not for taking care of them in the first place; we find it easy to spend on the visible current problem, even if it’s small, rather than the potential big problem, even if it could be apocalyptic. For those who don’t have time to read the whole thing, his Planet Money interview was excellent, too (transcript).
2. I’m going to try and keep a lid on Coronatalk today (I will likely fail). In that vein, I really liked Markus Goldstein’s blog on Esther Duflo and co.’s suggestions to keep Pre-Analysis Plans proportionate and light touch in economics. One of the reasons I really like Markus’s writing is that he often grounds it in his own experiences and tells us something about who he is as a researcher, a great service as most of us can learn a thing or two (or three or four) from him. Related: Cyrus Samii has a different take on PAPs.
3. Apropos that immigration ban: as if you need any confirmation, it doesn’t really seem to have much to do with Coronavirus at all. And another great FiveThirtyEight explainer, this time on how to read Coronavirus graphs. It’s important: there are so many, with so many subtly but importantly different characteristics, and many of the people I speak to seem to treat them all the same.
4. This week in giving my priors a good shoeing: a VoxEU piece on how the demand for restrictive employment regulation seems to be really high among people who are likely to lose out from it in developing countries. I can think of a couple of good reasons for this: it might be that people overestimate their likelihood of getting a ‘good’ job and therefore are in favour of good jobs being protected, or it might be that they simply don’t think about these relationships the same way economists do – for them, their labour market status is a lived experience, rather than an analytical problem, and when asked a question about making anyone’s labour market experience better, they agree. Still, this bears a lot more thinking about.
5. A bit more Coronacoverage: more from CGD’s super education coverage, this time looking at when schools should reopen. And Heather Marquette has a pair of very good blogs about how to respond in developing countries. Part 1 sets out the framework and part 2 on what the response should be. I really liked this line: “in every crisis there are chances to make better decisions, to ‘do things that you didn’t think you could do before’”
6. This is fascinating: research by Benjamin Enke and Thomas Graeber shows that when people are confronted by difficult calculations relating to uncertainty, they can default to thinking about them in 50/50 terms – even if the correct assessment of the uncertainties is very different. It’s a clever piece of research with implications for a number of behavioural economics findings. I’m pretty sure it has around a 50/50 chance of being right.
7. Lastly, are you watching The Last Dance? For people of my generation, this is a massive nostalgia trip. It’s fun even for non-basketball fans – my wife enjoyed it and she couldn’t spell Giannis Antetokounmpo if she tried. It also sent me down a rabbit hole on youtube, watching the old basketball videos I had in the early ‘90s. Back then the NBA used to release music videos with basketball highlights on VHS, and I must have watched my copy of NBA Jam Session about 100 times. The NBA was really into subtle racial stereotyping back then: they gave Mark Price a highlights package, but set it to the whitest song in history (I am, of course, referring to Black Gold by Soul Asylum). There was some pretty good songs, too: Eric B and Rakim show up for a song about defence. Listen to that on a loop, and ignore the Dettol.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R