The CSAE Blog

Hi all,

I’ve been suffering from two productivity sinks today, which are killing my attempts to make some sense of the results of a survey I ran last year in the hopes that there’s a paper lurking somewhere inside it (I know, the bar for distracting me today is even lower than usual). Firstly, a blackcap <https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/blackcap/migration/>  has taken up residence in my garden, the first one I’ve seen there. It’s a violent little bugger, too, having a pop at everything else that dares come close. It reminds me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas <https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/pesci-goodfellas1.jpg?quality=100&w=650> . Meanwhile, Sri Lanka are currently 25 for no loss chasing 197 to become the first Asian team to win a series in South Africa, while Kagiso Rabada and Dale Steyn are bowling fireballs like they’re characters on Street Fighter II <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DT3quU5xh0> . My plans to learn how to draw confidence intervals on my bar charts in Stata this morning were looking in tatters before I realised that Emma Riley had already done all the hard work for me on Coders Corner <https://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/coders-corner/coders-corner> , a fantastic resource for the hard-of-Stata like myself.

1. It’s been a while since I’ve opened the links with a proper bit of lunacy (well, apart from my barely-veiled political allusions <https://i.gifer.com/8di.gif> ). But this makes up for the long dry spell: USAID are considering <https://www.devex.com/news/usaid-mulls-proposal-to-train-aid-workers-as-special-forces-94321?fbclid=IwAR3wzNMzQPudSn0–vnXEeyqQ66Ooiu8Yy7P_5hl62EDza12I5cdf0teK30> rolling out a team of development worker – Special Forces hybrids, called RED Teams, trained in both social development and ass-kicking. The idea probably isn’t as cray-cray as it sounds in a headline – or at least I hope it isn’t – but I’ve got some recruitment ideas. There are a couple of people in DFID who definitely fit the bill, and surely Stephen Chan <http://soasspirit.co.uk/features/humans-of-soas-stephen-chan/>  OBE (SOAS political scientist by day, black belt in Karate by night) must be on the list.
2. A few years ago, you couldn’t throw a rock in DFID without hitting someone in the process of saying ‘evidence-based policymaking’, a phrase that used to crack me up. One of my friends used to manage to keep a completely poker face and talk about policy-based evidencemaking regularly, and it was actually pretty rare that anyone would pick it up. Anyway, the most obvious objection to the phrase is that policymaking is never based on just one thing. But Lars Peter Hansen makes a further point: there is no single reading of any evidence <http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2019/article/purely-evidence-based-policy-doesn-t-exist?fbclid=IwAR2HTbrcYJpeW79fDb7XzJNdoK9C1Rr7RKWly9qKl85_bCrw4OC7N6EkPGI> . Even the construction of data requires some theoretical scaffolding, and while that might not always be controversial (though it can be, viz. last week’s ruckus about poverty measurement), the interpretation of what the data means almost always requires some theory too. In a sense this is obvious, and the answer links to Tim Harford’s blog this week <http://timharford.com/2019/02/blue-monday-pseudoscience-should-teach-us-to-be-more-curious/> : that it is not that policy should be evidence-based per se, but that policy should be constructed through the questioning of evidence and competing explanations. It’s not about evidence or no evidence, it’s about good evidence and good interpretation.
3. This one is going to get Nick Lea’s heart racing: Guzman, Ocampo and Stiglitz summarise a new paper on the role of the real exchange rate in economic development <https://voxeu.org/article/real-exchange-rates-economic-development> , and how it can be mobilised as a policy lever for public welfare. They distinguish between tradeables with positive spillovers and those without, and suggest how support can encourage the former without pushing the latter. Worth a read.
4. Why does tipping suck so much? Well, I could just refer you to Mr. Pink <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qV9wVGb38> and the rest of the Reservoir Dogs, but the only slightly-less brilliantly monikered Cardiff Garcia (and Stacey Vanek Smith) bring a bit more economics into <https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/20/696426869/why-americans-can-t-quit-tipping>  it at Planet Money. In a further sign that people are the worst, the discretionary functioning of tipping seems to bring out prejudices: women corresponding to traditional norms of attractiveness (that’s me trying to find a less depressing way of saying ‘thin women with big breasts’) get better tips than others; meanwhile black waiters get tipped less than white ones for the same assessment of service quality. People suck and economics can prove it (transcript <https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=696421086> ).
5. David McKenzie thinks a lot about the process of doing research, so it’s always worth reading his particular brand of introspection. This time, he’s looking at whether development economists tend to focus on their home country more than they should <http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/should-we-worry-about-home-bias-development-research> , and if that might be a problem (it might not be, even if they do: they may think of better questions and better ways of answering them than an outsider might, and especially early-career that might lead them to develop expertise that leads them elsewhere). Related: David, Francisco Campos and Markus Goldstein on the (limited) gains to formalising firms in Malawi <https://voxdev.org/topic/firms-trade/costs-and-benefits-helping-firms-formalise-malawi> . I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to another version of this before, but it’s a good write-up and a very good demonstration that the gains of a policy are often not automatically realised. They may need more help than we think.
6. One of the greatest bits of observational comedy I’ve ever seen has a geeky, put upon software engineer break off in the middle of a conversation while standing at the office printer to spit out the words: “PC Load Letter? What the **** does that mean? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok> ” If you’re too young to remember office printers that would pronounce incomprehensible errors messages every second use, you probably don’t remember Office Space, which is now 20 years old. The Ringer’s oral history of probably the greatest comedy about work <https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/2/19/18228673/office-space-oral-history> in history is a massive nostalgia trip for anyone whose reaction to the name Michael Bolton is “I celebrate the man’s entire catalogue <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BaMx_n2_hM> ”.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

In the normal run of things, scoring a match-sealing century and captaining your team to victory in a Test is pretty much as good as it gets for an England captain, used as they are to painful drubbings overseas, badly punning newspaper headlines calling for them to be sacked and the odd teammate being arrested for some description of drunken idiocy. This week, though, it’s all overshadowed by Joe Root demonstrating a much more important kind of leadership. When an opposing player used a homophobic insult on the pitch, Root, unaware that he was being picked up on a microphone, gave him a very well-worded piece of his mind. This probably all seems very normal for people about ten years younger than me, but if you’re my age you probably remember a time when people routinely used casual intolerance in conversation, and the vast majority of people just accepted it. We didn’t have many examples like this to demonstrate how easy – and helpful – it would be to object. I’m reminded of when Ron Atkinson was sacked after a horrific racist outburst on TV: ITV acted quickly in getting rid of him, but as one of my friends pointed out: “Isn’t it interesting that the microphones didn’t pick up anyone objecting?”. Anyway, this week I’m in the unusual position of being proud of the England cricket team.

1. One of the most impressive talks I’ve ever attended was given by Kaushik Basu in DFID a few years ago, though I didn’t realise quite how much I took from it at first. He’s not a bombastic speaker at all, quiet and measured, and he didn’t have any slides or research to present. What was striking, though, was quite how carefully he understood things. He seemed to really dig into the mechanisms underlying the things he observed or thought to be important and wound up explaining things that ought to have been obvious, but somehow weren’t – a sign of a special thinker. This VoxDev interview has these characteristics: he talks about his new book, The Republic of Beliefs (about the law and economic behaviour), and in just two minutes demonstrates the same clarity of thought and ability to draw out the salient characteristics of a problem that so impressed me back then. It’s rocketed the book up my to-buy list.
2. Is it possible that the very things that lead girls to outperform boys in school contribute to their slower rate of advancement in work? This largely speculative piece in the NYT by a psychologist suggests that girls feel less able to blag their way through life, which results in overworking in school (with resultingly good, if inefficiently achieved, grades) and a sense of under-preparedness later in life with a corresponding anxiety or lack of confidence. As a result, boys who are equally underprepared are more likely to demand promotions, pay rises and responsibility, simply because they don’t let their lack of preparation bother them too much. I have no idea if there’s any merit to this at all (I rather suspect not much), but it’s an interesting idea.
3. I feel a little dirty after linking to psychological speculation, so to make up for it, here’s David Evans summarising a huge body of actual research on gender and development.
4. I was sent this a few weeks ago by a friend, but completely forgot to post it: The Bank of Jamaica have won economics. In a series of reggae videos and brilliantly conceived tweets, they are trying to improve communication to the public, essentially doing what Mark Carney does when he holds his (brilliant, and occasionally darkly hilarious) press conferences. This kind of communication is one of the most important functions of a central bank, since their policy influence depends fundamentally on the public believing what they say and behaving accordingly. Planet Money also pay homage to the Bank of Jamaica – and how MMA teaches us about monopsony, among other things – here (transcript).
5. Speaking of communicating economics clearly, Tim Harford has a story for you. He describes how he reduced his addiction to his phone using behavioural economics.
6. And lastly, I’ve had an idea to deal with climate denialism: have you heard about the Russian town that has been besieged by polar bears? They’re coming into apartments, swarming playgrounds, walking the streets (btw – I have no idea how anyone managed to film this stuff: if I see a polar bear anywhere near my flat, I’m screaming and running the other way). My idea: let’s do a house-swap. Residents of Polarbearhellski and the climate deniers swap places for a few weeks. One way or another, average beliefs about climate change will converge towards the scientific consensus.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

It’s nice to be able to start the links without some reference to sporting humiliation. Granted, this has mainly been because neither England nor Sri Lanka have been playing test cricket this week, but still: I will take what respite I get when I get it. Speaking of respite, do you follow Eric Barker? His blog is full of the worst kind of click-bait titles, the kind of thing that you see in the sponsored adverts at the bottom of bad news website (“You’ll never guess what happened three seconds after this photo was taken!”), but the content is actually very serious: he draws on proper research from across the (social) sciences to draw up actually practical advice about how to make your life better. The titles always overclaim, but these do actually seem like decent ways of making your life better. Actually, another thing that would make my life better is if the couple having the ostentatious PDA at the table next to me tone things down a  bit.

1. Last week, I suggested economists should read more from the theory of the firm, industrial organisation and the economics of contracting. This week, two excellent bits of research reinforce the point. In the first, Arthur Blouin and Rocco Macchiavello look at how dysfunctional contract enforcement can undermine inter-firm relations so badly that the gains from exposure to global markets can be lost. Essentially, they show that firms can exploit poor contract enforcement to renege on deals in the face of unexpected shocks (there are a lot of these in the real world), leading to the adoption of suboptimal inter-firm relationships and industry structure, eroding the gains from trade. Another piece of research, in India, focuses on the slowness of Indian courts, which also makes contract enforcement patchy and unreliable. The upshot is that firms restructure themselves and their input sourcing and trading relationships to protect themselves from risks, but at the cost of being less productive. The economics of firm organisation is a pathway to understanding so much of what’s wrong with an economy: every firm choice tells you something about the environment it has to swim (or sink) in.
2. Another way of becoming a better economist would be to enrol in the University of Houston, and make sure you sign up for every talk and course delivered by Dietrich Vollrath. The third part of his course on the economics of institutions is summarised here, and it is a masterclass in how to be a good economist. Dietz has absolute conceptual clarity, disambiguating the various ideas that coalesce around ‘institutions’, which makes it easy to understand his teaching and the merits and drawbacks of the research. He has paid attention to the empirical detail, so he knows what is right and wrong with the interpretation of the data, and what it can and cannot be used for. And he has a broad enough view to then put the work in its correct context. Seriously, this is how most economics should be written and taught. He also writes so well that I would read his shopping list for literary value.
3. Marginal Revolution’s online university now has a series on inspiring women in economics. I am looking forward to seeing how two dyed-in-the-wool libertarians cover Joan Robinson (who, incidentally, did not become a full Professor until a few years before her retirement, despite her canonical contributions to economic thought).
4. Branko Milanovic takes an extremely fair and even handed view of the controversy between Steven Pinker and Jason Hickel about the long term trend in global poverty. Do read it, but also make sure you read the linked post by Max Roser and Joe Hassel from Our World in Data, a website you should almost certainly be using more than you do.
5. I am almost always driven to fury by academics talking about ‘engaging with policymakers’ like we’re an undifferentiated mass of lemmings (I once sat through a presentation by a poverty scholar who repeatedly said “policymakers don’t care about causality”, turning me ever deeper shades of furious). Markus Goldstein avoids this trap in a nice blog which differentiates between different kinds of policymakers and the kind of interactions researchers are likely to have with them. I would emphasise Markus’s point that the categories are not mutually exclusive, but this is a much better starting point for understanding how to influence policy.
6. This is absolutely one of the coolest bits of research I’ve seen for a while: Eliana La Ferrara and coauthors do an amazing piece of work looking at the effect of implicit biases among schoolteachers on migrant children’s scores. Unsurprisingly, biased teachers tend to penalise migrant kids more than is justified by their actual work. What’s really fantastic, though, is that they find that if you inform these teachers of their own implicit bias scores, that penalty starts to disappear, and migrant kids are more likely to be assessed on merit. The effect seems to be driven by those teachers who don’t explicitly endorse discriminatory views, i.e. the ones who don’t think they’re biased. My erstwhile ex-blogging partner, Matthew Collin sent me another cool piece of work: Mara Revkin uses social media and other sources to map out the tax network set up by ISIS.
7. The best board game I’ve ever played is Pandemic (recommended so regularly by Tim Harford, I bought it for my niece and enjoyed it so much I bought it for myself as well). It turns out it’s not just fun, it’s pretty realistic, as this Planet Money show on disease control demonstrates (transcript).
8. I normally end the links with some happy insanity, but this definitely doesn’t count: on average, American airport security staff found 12 guns a day being taken as hand luggage onto flights there, the vast majority of which were loaded. They ‘credit’ enhanced security features for this number. I blame a completely insane culture of leaving the house strapped like Neo and the worst low-level equilibrium possible.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I’m not a miserable person, honestly. I actually smile quite a lot and find the funny side of most of life (well, about most things – you’d need an electron microscope to find the funny side of the impending political ructions here). Yet these weekly e-mails seem to start far too often with the two grim certainties of life: death and humiliating defeats in the cricket. While England and Sri Lanka compete to demonstrate the greatest lack of spine in sports (for those paying attention, England are currently the more amoebic), we’ve also lost two literary giants in the last couple of days. Diana Athill, editor to some of the greatest novelists of them all (VS Naipaul, Jean Rhys, John Updike) and brilliant author in her own right managed to make her century, while Hugh McIlvaney fell a little short. If you’ve never come across him, I highly recommend spending a few hours scouring the Observer archives for his writing on boxing. It’s filled with little bits of poetry, as when he said of Johnny Owen, the near-mute Welsh bantamweight who died in the ring: ‘It is his tragedy that he found himself articulate in such a dangerous language.’.

1. Economics isn’t a dangerous language (though I have annoyed more than one anthropologist to the brink of physical violence in the past), but it can sometimes induce a kind of mania in researchers. In that vein, let David McKenzie talk you through the dos and don’ts of setting up your own business for the purposes of running a randomised control trial. And in case you think this is a concern for highly funded researchers with the kind of track record that makes Usain Bolt blush, one of the examples he cites is a work in progress from two DPhil students from Stanford, examining how gender profit gaps arise. Related, David apparently read Angus Deaton’s book on the Analysis of Household Surveys several times from cover to cover as a student(if you’ve noted how careful he is with data, this shouldn’t surprise you at all). It’s now been released with a new preface for free online.
2. Research on monopsony isn’t nearly as cool as setting up your own firm, but it’s one of the more important and under-studied aspects of the economy. This excellent VoxEU piece looks at monopsony power by sector and region in the UK to understand when labour has relatively little power compared to the firms that hire them, and what the consequences are. It’s really interesting: within sectors, monopsony varied dramatically by region, with parts of the North faring particularly badly; but even within individual regions, workers can face extremely different power dynamics with their employers depending on the sector they’re in. This has real implications for wages, job stability and precarity. I wish there was more work like this.
3. For economists of a certain vintage, ‘industrial policy’ is a bit like Masterchef – one of those things you know you’re not meant to like, but you secretly have some affection for. Very slowly, and unlike Masterchef (do any of them every begin to look less smug?), it may be being rehabilitated. Dani Rodrik stans hard for it (industrial policy, not Masterchef) over at VoxDev.
4. I briefly toyed with a new year’s resolution to shout ‘FAKE NEWS’ at people more often, but I desisted after a few trial runs ended in unpleasantness. Anyway, a new paper in Science digs into the phenomenon with more panache, and discovers that fake news is actually pretty tightly contained: 0.1% of twitter users shared 80% of fake news, and only 1% of users were exposed to 80% of the fake news. I’ll leave you to judge if the Links are in the 99% or not…
5. Ted Miguel and co. lay the smack down on rural electrification. Their policy conclusion is that it’s not cost effective.
6. Planet Money do a piece on the impact of the China-US trade war on farmers. It’s really great: they talk to a farmer who has been hit hard, and whose community is doing worse – yet still supports Trump’s policies. Transcript here.
7. Lastly, new s**t has come to light (by the way, if I ever write a paper about the effects of providing new information on decision-making, that’s what I’m calling it and none of you are allowed to steal it): Jeff Bridges has tweeted a tantalising 15 second clip that suggests that a sequel to The Big Lebowski might be on the way. The Guardian, however, crush my hopes and dreams by suggesting that it’s just an advert featuring the Dude that’s forthcoming. Well, you know, that’s just, like, their opinion, man.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

The benefit of being away for three weeks (apart, that is, from being somewhere sunny and reasonably even-keeled for a while) is that it gives me ample opportunity to ignore any unpleasant cricketing events that occur during the links hiatus, though try as I might, I haven’t been able to ignore all the other unpleasant events going on, ad infinitum, elsewhere. Returning brings a few downsides, ranging from the near total-absence of warmth and daylight to an RSS feed so over-stuffed with information I’m fairly sure a portion of my brain exploded trying to clear it. My original plan was to do a sort of best-of-2018 round-up to kick off the year, but then I remembered what 2018 was like and realised it was akin to having a list of the best times I ran face-first into a wall. I just home my go-to 2019 gif isn’t this.

1. Planet Money had the right idea, though – their end-of-year bash was an awards show for the lowlights of the year (transcript), ranging from sexist Doritos to Elon Musk’s late-night tweeting habits. Amazingly, they manage to avoid giving awards to any policy makers. I can only assume they were exempt from the competition this year. That provides a nice segue into one of my favourite annual traditions, the 538 ‘What I Got Wrong this Year’ piece, in which their main forecaster looks at what predictions didn’t pan out, and why. On a slightly more cheerful note, they also list their 45 best graphs of the year, with my favourite being the graphical summary of the sexual adventures of Mr. Prospector the horse who begat virtually every horse in this year’s Kentucky Derby. And ending this link on a positive note, the Development Impact crew pick their favourite papers of the year and Pinelopi Goldberg, their Chief Economist, does the same (that they did not extensively cover separately), an excellent starting point for good things you might have missed in 2018.
2. The first half or two-thirds of this interview with Daniel Kahneman is fantastic: because Kahneman is acutely aware that he might be wrong about anything, he’s both extremely precise about what he does know and extremely honest about the limits to the various ideas he’s made his name on. He has begun researching the same kind of questions about organisations that I’m interested in, which is both great and terrifying. The last third goes off the rails a bit as Cowen, who has never met a speculation he wasn’t willing to make, discovers that Kahneman just doesn’t go in for wild connections.
3. There was a late slew of economics on equality to close the year (increasingly, I find the most interesting research in economics is on questions of attitudes and behaviour, both of which are crucial for understanding gendered outcomes). First, Markus summarises Seema Jayachandran’s new paper on changing attitudes towards gender among adolescents (related: at the AEA annual meeting this year, gender was high on the agenda). Then the Economist ran an article on the growth implications of increased equality (I’m not 100% convinced about all of the underlying research, and even less convinced that the way to motivate working on equality is because it makes us richer). And lastly, a VoxEU piece summarising research suggesting that same-race teachers can improve the outcomes of minority students, though it doesn’t really isolate why. They speculate that role model effects are important, but another possibility is that it’s simply the absence of bias against minority students among minority staff.
4. Branko Milanovic summarises the ways in which Marx has helped him better understand the world, and to be a better economist. Like Branko, I think Marx is particularly important when you work on economies that, while private and market-based, aren’t fully capitalist.
5. Dietrich Vollrath is developing a new course on the ‘deep roots’ of economic development, covering institutions, geography, culture and more. The first of a series of posts summarising his teaching is an absolute belter. One of the problems with all of the literature on ‘deep’ development is that when the events you explore happen far in the past, it becomes increasingly difficult to even distinguish geography and institutions or culture even conceptually; and this makes it hard to interpret the results they find. Dietz does a great job of explaining this, and explaining how you still can use this research to understand the world better.
6. Have you come across the Joy of Destruction game? No, it’s not NCAA basketball in the Zion Williamson era, but a lab game in which you can give up some of your own winnings in exchange for decimating another players’. In a finding that will probably not surprise anyone who reads the news these days, joining a group seems to induce a heightened appetite for destruction (and not the good kind), with groups more likely to give up winnings just to harm others.
7. That seems an appropriate way to sally into 2019, if a bit downbeat. Is there anything to look forward to? Well, we’ve got Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Spiderman: Far from Home and the new season of the Punisher, so escapism is definitely on the cards. And just think, this time next year we’ll be watching Mount Zion up against Luka in the battle for the NBA’s future…

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Well, that was an eventful week. Has everyone caught their breath? I continue to alternate between abject terror and resignation. Alonzo Mourning acceptance, every day. Anyway. I’ll be taking a break over Christmas and the new year (which will, of course, involve vast quantities of street food, reading and birdwatching). That means no more links till January 11 or 18, depending on what my brain function is like when I get off the plane, which may be no bad thing: if things get bad enough, the links will probably descend into one long compilation of disaster gifs.

1. This is, apparently, the season for giving (and often for giving novelty gifts that presumably live above ground for about three days before going into a drawer and being forgotten evermore), so it’s a good time to remember than actually, in spite of the fairly broad economic recovery in much of the world since 2008, there are still a huge number of people living in great economic insecurity. Planet Money investigate (transcript) and uncover some pretty shocking statistics from the US, including that more than one-fifth of all Americans expected to miss at least one bill payment in the month of the latest Fed survey, and that a stunning one-third would expect to do so in the case of an unanticipated $400 income shock (for example, needing medical treatment, or a car repair). With signs mounting that the next recession is just around the corner, none of this is good news.
2. Dynastic succession in democratic politics sounds like an oxymoron, but actually, it’s the second and third generations of political leader in a family that tend to be the morons. A fantastic job market paper by Siddharth George from Harvard uses data from India to see what happens when fathers are succeeded by sons or daughters in positions of political power. He finds that, as theory would predict, politicians who think their offspring will also be in power might have a longer time horizon and thus make larger long-term investments, but their children face a moral hazard: because they have a core of voters loyal to the parent who will basically support them whatever they do, they do very little but self-enrich. The net effect is negative, a result that aligns with my priors and provides new and interesting evidence of how politics works.
3. And in related, less surprising news, places where men have worse attitudes towards women tend to carry a ‘gender penalty’ in voting, whereby women are less likely to win votes. Since this is likely to be unrelated to competence, this is again, not good news.
4. Not to make it too much of a pattern, but also to file under ‘not good news’: that dude who claims to have genetically engineered twins in China. How does this happen in a discipline that’s supposed to follow some pretty stringent ethical standards? As FiveThirtyEight point out, there are systems in place to stop rogue scientists, but they don’t always work. The most shocking thing about that article, btw, is the news that one research team wants to use a blast of calcium to make the sun less intense in order to mitigate climate change. This is not a good plan guys! Don’t any of you remember Morpheus? “We know it was us who scorched the sky”, anyone?
5. I loved this: Hope Michelson and others demonstrate that one reason that poor farmers take up products such as fertiliser at what seem like sub-optimal rates is because they form incorrect opinions on the quality of the product, partly driven by media reporting. In news that will surprise no-one who lives in the UK, relentless media negativity can make people question the value of things that turn out to be rather quite good for them after all.
6. Last year, I was given Messy for Christmas, and this year I’m giving a copy to someone else. It’s a great book, and Tim Harford distils some of the key lessons in this fantastic blog about the benefits of a space that isn’t too strictly regimented. Remember that the next time you see me working behind a huge pile of papers, with a dripping tea cradle and two books open. It’s my own personal Building 20.
7. And lastly, because it does no good to end the year with links full of pessimism, let’s remind ourselves that sometimes things do work out better than expected: I have previously linked to Zion Williamson back when he was in high school, looking like a full grown man playing against infants, but against all odds, he’s actually exceeded the hype, and may be the best college player since statistics were collected. While Zion does it by basically being The Thing with a three-stroke, Luka Doncic might become a superstar without a single defined muscle on his body. If basketball can’t cheer you up, how about London trolling the New York Times’ twitter? And if that doesn’t work, here are the best memes of the year (American Chopper wins, obviously).

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Before we start, a quick PSA: I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting the links out the last couple of weeks, due to a laptop upgrade (even with the extra stress in getting the links done, it’s definitely an upgrade), so please let me know if you’ve not been getting all of the e-mails. I’m aware that sending an e-mail to check if my e-mail is working is getting to Darwin awards levels of stupidity but I’m relying on those who do receive it to hear the complaints of those who don’t and tell them to e-mail me. There are more holes in this theory of change than in Hank Williams’ bucket, but it’ll have to do. And while I’m linking great songs filled with euphemisms for drinking, pour one out for Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, punk superstar and writer of one of the most perfect pop songs since Teenage Kicks, Do Anything.

1. In time-honoured links tradition, we dive straight in to the bad news. A portion of the US yield curve inverted yesterday [cue dramatic music: Dunn-dunn-dunn!] After a wine-fuelled refresher course in the yield curve with a friend last night I can try and explain: investors typically requires extra compensation for holding longer term bonds because they lose the opportunity to make productive investments today. When the yield curve inverts, it means that they do not need such extra compensation, a sign that they think the shorter term investments aren’t going to be profitable – i.e. they expect a recession. As an indicator for a recession, a particular form of this inversion has a 100% hit rate, but luckily we haven’t seen that form inversion quite yet. Planet Money, whose Cardiff Garcia stans hard for the yield curve, dig deeper (transcript).
2. If a recession is coming, try very hard not to enter the job market for the first time during it. Tim Harford lays out the role of luck in career earnings, with one big source of that luck being whether you enter the job market in good times or bad. It shouldn’t matter, but does, because humans are hopeless at computing complicated problems.
3. However, we can learn. Christie Aschwanden, one of my favourite writers on science, has been covering the extended and sometimes acrimonious replication crisis afflicting social psychology since 2015. And she comes with good news: all this pain is doing what it was meant to, and improving the standard of research in the field.
4. When I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, I watch basketball highlights. Branko Milanovic, on the other hand, casually shoots off an erudite blog linking contemporary French politics, the history of violent protest and the fight over who has to suffer for the greening of our economies. He takes off from the Gilets Jaune protests to again remark on the central flaw of Kate Raeworth’s doughnut economics: that in order to comply, rich countries will either need to agree on how to distribute a net halving of our incomes (which is politically impossible) or use technology to dramatically green all our production (which renders it indistinguishable from the techno-optimism that characterises market capitalist approaches). For balance here’s Kate’s latest write-up, and as far as I can see it still cannot address Branko’s point.
5. Lagarde and Ostry on the macroeconomic implications of gender diversity. This is one of the more convincing ways of setting out the macroeconomic effects of better female participation in the workforce (using a model based on complementarities arising from differences in how women and men work, which could be controversial). But still, why do we need economics for this question? Surely gender equality should be pursued for its own merits, and not for the benefits it brings the economy?
6. Michael Clemens and Kate Gough on what we need to do to make a Global Skills Partnership work. In case you need convincing that this is an important thing to do (and you shouldn’t), Perry Bacon, Jr. (whose name manages to simultaneously make me hungry and nostalgic) details all the ways Trump has managed to affect migration without putting a single brick in the wall.
7. Finally, to cheer ourselves up, 538  answer the important questions, like: who would win a fight between an anaconda and a Komodo dragon? Amazingly most actual academics asked got into the spirit of things and gave an answer. And one more bit of musical bliss from Pete Shelley, this time squarely on the punk side.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R