The CSAE Blog

Hi all,

The links are early this week as I’ve just realised I’m going to be away from my computer all day; this also makes them bleary-eyed and probably substantially less coherent than usual. In fact, I briefly thought I might actually still be asleep and dreaming this – the first thing I have bookmarked for the links is a report on England whitewashing Australia in the cricket, and I opened the newspapers to see most people reacting calmly to England losing in the football (well, except the Daily Mail, but it’s known that Mail readers require apoplexy like normal human beings require oxygen, so we’ll quietly ignore them). Anyway, to the links.

1. When Raj Chetty wins the Nobel Prize in Economics, I wonder what the Nobel committee will cite as justification? They will be spoiled for choice. There’s the research on taxation and social insurance; his behavioural work (including one paper, which escapes me for the moment, where he proves the same point about anchoring effects of prices using both observational data and an RCT!); and of course the incredible stuff he’s doing at the Equality of Opportunity project. He summarises his latest research on intergenerational mobility at VoxEU. It’s brilliant, and I cannot recommend it enough. He and his co-authors make novel discoveries about how inequality is transmitted across generations; they communicate these clearly and accessibly in both text and through diagrams; and they start to get towards what we can do about it. This is important economics, in every sense.
2. Not every project is as glamorous as that, though. Ying Feng and co-authors do some heavy lifting to provide more evidence for a proposition that most practicing labour economists in developing countries have pretty much accepted for years, and one I’ve long-advocated in DFID, with success: unemployment is not really a relevant concept in developing countries. The intuition is basically that only the elites can afford to be without any kind of work in developing countries; for almost everyone else it makes sense to take whatever employment for whatever returns they can get, no matter how unproductive. They demonstrate how this pattern is precisely the opposite of what is observed in developed countries.
3. More on the Stanford prison experiment: Vox publish an interview with the original researcher in which he defends its credibility. It’s a pretty awkward conversation, but does a lot to demonstrate both what was wrong with the study and what value it might still have.
4. One thing about the World Cup: it is throwing up rather a lot of good incidental writing. Branko takes a trip down memory lane, remembering every World Cup he can recall, all the way back to 1962. It’s a lovely piece of writing, ending on a note only Branko would make: “Greek Olympics were held continuously for four centuries. Who will win the 2318 World Cup? Will countries compete?” FiveThirtyEight are in on the act, too, confirming what we all suspected – injury time is a complete and total travesty, bearing virtually no relation to the amount of time that actually should be added on the games (sometimes as much as 20 minutes!).
5. One for the non-economists wanting to learn more: Tim Harford lists his unconventional introductions to economics, though he leaves out his own Dear Undercover Economist, an excellent way of understanding how economists approach problems. I would also add Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, about statistics and prediction rather than economics, but invaluable. Related: Planet Money compare Smith and Keynes, and come to the conclusion that they were both right (transcript).
6. And lastly, two pieces that demonstrate convergence of intelligence in the animal kingdom: how people are over-using the exclamation point (this has been a problem for at least ten years, and appears to be getting worse); and crows are apparently even smarter than we thought, and can build things from mental concepts or ideas they have in their heads.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Poor old England. Only they could set a cricket world record and be overshadowed by Egypt vs. Russia or some such thing. It’s an amazing turn-up for the books: England, of all teams, have the most exciting one-day cricket side in the world. Think about that. It’s a sentence that Spike Milligan would have rejected as too outlandish for his nonsense poetry even two years ago. Speaking of the World Cup, though, a friend of mine e-mailed to tell me that I’m all wrong: this is a golden age of British football writing. Is this true? I’ve read precisely one article about football that actually attempts to expand our understanding of the game in the last four years. Is anyone else actually advancing what we know about the sport, or is it the same tired ‘analysis’ of different formations and players, driven by confirmation bias and prejudice?

1. Speaking of prejudice, remember how last week I suggested that the news about the Stanford prison experiment might mean that people aren’t the pits? My goodness did I speak too soon. This last week has left me more bereft of hope in humanity than any in my life so far. Where do we start? We’ve had a policy of, not to put too fine a point on it, doing horrible shit to children in the name of reducing migration. And worse, it’s actually more popular than not among Republicans. Hungary have made it a criminal offense to offer help to some of the most desperate and needy people on the planet. And it appears that anti-terrorism law has been used to deport high-skilled migrants for undertaking legal corrections to self-declared tax records. I am ashamed to be human this week.
2. Meanwhile, what does actual evidence tell us about migration? That violence and appalling economic conditions drive child migration. And that even those coming from places suffering from conflict driven by climate change do not increase conflict at their destination. Lock them up!
3. Keeping on this general theme of the world being full of terrible people, let’s talk about bail hearings in New York City. “Because the assignments are random… we can identify whether defendants are being treated equally regardless of who hears their case. They are not.” Anna Maria Barry-Jester, one of 538’s brilliant data-driven journalists, digs in to how much the bad luck of being heard by one judge rather than another can affect your life. This is not peer-reviewed research and isn’t perfect, but is nevertheless indicative of how good journalism can be with proper attention to rigour and evidence.
4. What’s that? You’d like some peer-reviewed research to feel bad about? Martin Ravallion is here to help. He unveils a novel way of assessing the ‘income floor’ in a society (that level below which incomes are unlikely to be able to fall below for a sustained period), and finds that it has been falling, in the US at least. It appears that they’ve run this analysis for a number of other countries – so keep an eye out.
5. I’ve seen research (proposed and in progress) recently looking at how developing countries can select better teachers through clever contract design. Lee does a little digging and discovers it’s unlikely that there are many substantially better educated people than the ones already selected.
6. Two gender links from the other perspective: 538 on what men think it means to be a man, and Stefan, Kathleen Beegle and Joachim De Weert on the developmental impacts of fathers.
7. Has anything made me feel good about the world this week? Well, Japanese and Senegalese fans apparently clean up after themselves at the World Cup, Kitty Pryde is getting married to Colossus (this one is fictional, btw), and I managed to convince a friend of mine that ‘Albariño’ is a Brazilian footballer. So, slim pickings. Listen to Baloji. That usually cheers me up.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I am not a football fan. I used to watch a lot, and even went to the World Cup in 2010 (though it was only a three-hour plane journey for me back then). But gradually, two forces drove me away from the sport: hysteria and over-exposure. The hysteria was a problem among both fans and journalists: among the former, it was increasingly difficult to have a conversation about the sport that didn’t descend into ‘two legs bad, four legs good’-type parroting. Among journalists it was even worse: a good goal made a player a genius, and a bad performance made a team a disgrace to the nation, when the average was normally true: they were… alright. And overexposure meant that one of the great joys of international football, seeing players you had never heard of run rings around their more famous counterparts has disappeared: there are scouting videos out there of players so young that they resemble ultrasounds. In other words, bah, humbug.

1.       So what do you read about the World Cup if you don’t want to live through the relentless volatility and knee-jerk idiocy of the British football press? One big problem in most football writing is ‘over-identification’,  where pundits over-interpret every piece of information that precedes the final outcome, using them to explain it even when most of them were ‘noise’ that had no causal importance. So, proceed over to 538, where they are running a model-based prediction system for the games, which helps you think about what the underlying mechanisms are, and what is idiosyncratic about each result. If your care more about what makes a country great at football, the Economist ran an excellent deep-dive that goes beyond football: “In Senegal, coaches have to deworm and feed some players before they can train them…”. And if you want good-humoured but unscientific coverage that takes pop culture seriously, read The Ringer.

2.       On to matters that actually are as important as life and death. Markus Goldstein covers the Pam Jakiela/Owen Ozier paper about how ‘gendered’ languages translated into worse outcomes for women that I blogged about for the CSAE conference here, going to much greater depth about the actual size and type of effects they find. The extent to which language shapes culture or is shaped by it (or some complex and probably impossible to specify combination of the two) is always going to shape responses to this research, but it is fascinating and more policy relevant than it first seems.

3.       538 continues to impress me with its science writing, with Maggie Koerth-Baker this week digging in to why nuclear power is dying out in the US. This strikes me as a very bad thing: nuclear power seems pretty safe, and produces new carbon. Win, I would have thought.

4.       Nick Bloom gives a three-minute primer on his research into management interventions in India, focusing on how the intervention both boosted firm performance lastingly and spilled over into other areas of the firm than the one supported initially. He glosses over what for me is the most compelling finding of the paper, though: that other firms that weren’t initially supported neither die out nor learn to implement the good practices themselves. When something as fundamental to the economic world view as the equalising forces of competition has its limits shown, we have a lot of thinking to do.

5.       Speaking of the fundamentals of economic thinking: this RCT by Dean Karlan, Benjamin Roth and Sendhil Mullainathan (what a team!) shows that helping people get out of debt or avoid debt through a one of cash transfer or financial literacy support is a temporary fix: they usually fall back into debt. This isn’t surprising to me: when so much of the economic system doesn’t work, you’d expect small improvements not to snowball because there are so many barriers to that. Problems are more reliable and less constrained than opportunities. So problems win out in the longer run, unless you fix that system.

6.       Cardiff (Garcia!) and Danielle from NPR on the phony war phase of the US vs. everyone trade war. They point out that the big guns haven’t been fired yet, so the real damage hasn’t been done yet (transcript).

7.       This week in bad science: apparently the Stanford prison experiment was juked like hell, and maybe people aren’t just the worst (I can believe the first part, but the second?).

8.       And lastly, at the end of a long one: more writing in memoriam of Anthony Bourdain. I really love the New Yorker piece, in which his evolution towards feminism is charted in particular.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

So I was all set to write an upbeat intro with a little gif of me doing a dance of happiness at how sunny it is (and the fact that my wifi works in the garden), and then I saw the news about Anthony Bourdain. Bah. I remember buying my copy of A Cook’s Tour in 2001 in Oxford and reading about half of it in a single sitting – I enjoyed it much more than the bombast of Kitchen Confidential. Even better was his essay in Medium Raw, My Aim is True. It celebrated the work of one of the many invisible people involved in restaurant cookery, a Dominican prep cook, whose job was just to bone fish. It managed to get across the thrill of just watching someone brilliant at their work, and the focus on simple things that allowed him to achieve that state, while being an advert for Bourdain’s instinctive support for underdogs. Gah. Depression sucks.

1. Have you seen those incredibly cute videos of kids doing the ‘marshmallow test’? The idea is that kids who are better at delaying gratification go on to have much better life outcomes when they get older. Well, IGNORE THE CUTENESS. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU. It turns out that rich kids, who probably bathe in marshmallows anyway, are way better at delaying gratification (not a surprise to anyone who’s read Scarcity, for all its overclaiming) – and it’s that socio-economic advantage, not the ability to delay gratification that explains most of their better life performance. The Atlantic reports.
2. A few people have asked me what I think about Kate Raeworth’s idea of ‘doughnut economics’. I’ve not read the book, so I’ve been cautious in assessing it, but fortunately Branko Milanovic has, and his review confirms my fears. Branko’s review is really about trade-offs – at root, the fundamental subject of economics. Most things can be achieved, if we exert enough effort and spend enough resources on them. What’s interesting, and important for public policy, is the fact that doing these things require sacrifice. So, stop growing? Fine, but either you need coercion (to redistribute as much as we’ll need to) or you need to accept that much of humanity will remain in misery. Keep growing? Sure, but then you need to accept environmental degradation – at whatever rate technology allows for. Anyone on either side pretending that these trade-offs are unimportant or can be glossed over is lying to you.
3. On this very topic, Owen Barder offers some structure for thinking about development-national interest ‘win-wins’. It’s a useful way of thinking about things, and makes clear that there are costs to a lot of this.
4. “I find that a decline of ten homicides in an average municipality of this region caused six fewer children from there to be apprehended at the US border…” Michael Clemens uses a novel dataset and design to generate causal estimates on the effect of reductions in violence on illegal migration, and dings the US Government for wanting to reduce aid in an attempt to curb immigration, arguing that it would be counterproductive. He points out that migration is shaped by policy more than anything else, and those policy choices can make a huge difference.
5. David Evans summarises a paper by Nava Ashraf and co-authors which suggests that teaching girls how to negotiate can have a causal impact on the likelihood that they will attend secondary school, a very cool intervention. They claim that it doesn’t seem to have a cost elsewhere in household spending, but I don’t buy that – it comes from something, even if it’s worth it.
6. 538  on the death toll from the Puerto Rico Hurricane, and how the estimates are constructed and reported. They have some of the best science writers out there right now.
7. Lastly, and for no other reason than I’ve been listening to it all day – The Screaming Eagle of Soul, Charles Bradley being awesome.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

So, in the two weeks since the last links, the news has uncovered a resurrection, multiple (simultaneous) personalities and the biggest brain-freeze in history (if the Cavs lose a close series, I will never forgive JR Smith for wasting this Thanos-level LeBronnery). If it weren’t for the inevitable and reassuring England batting collapse in the first test, I might have thought the universe was warning me about neglecting the links. Still, it meant I got to go to the Farne Isles and watch unsuspecting day trippers get dive-bombed by the Arctic Terns, so it was worth missing a week…

1. He’s not facing stiff competition, but there’s a case to make that among English economists, Andy Haldane is Elvis (by which I mean less that he’s liable to die on the toilet and more that he’s got charisma to spare and can command a room with his voice). Last year, Haldane called for ‘a little more conversation’, arguing that Central Banks need to be more vocal and accessible, explaining their decisions better, and using narratives more effectively to retain credibility.  So I found this quite interesting: A Supreme Court judge and Central Banker from Norway team up to analyse whether the minutes of various central banks and courts satisfy their criteria for openness, clarity and functionality. I’m not sold on their criteria, or that the minutes are the right place to look, but this is part of an important trend: thinking more about communication and the transmission of beliefs and analysis.
2. I don’t need to remind anyone who reads this how much I love Michael Clemens’ work. This blog for CGD about what the revamp of the US farm work visa system should look like is both excellent in itself, but also an example of Michael using his profound academic expertise and knowledge to generate concrete and practicable policy proposals. He’s speaking at DFID in a couple of weeks and it goes without saying that it’s a seminar to block the diary out for.
3. Okay, so the trade wars have begun, the standoff with North Korea is more on-again off-again than [searches for any TV relationship other than Ross and Rachel] Veronica and Logan… so what better time for a primer in the theory of repeated games with Robert Axelrod. And it being Planet Money, it’s a pleasure to listen to/read.
4. Apparently, Starbucks closed all its shops for a half day on Tuesday morning to do ‘diversity training’, an activity that often amounts to little more than someone standing in front of a group full of sullen office-workers finding ways of saying “don’t be racist”. Maggie Koerth-Baker at 538 wonders if they missed all the research that shows this stuff just doesn’t work. What does? Well, we’re not really sure: a VoxEU write-up of Victoire Girard’s research on political quotas and caste discrimination in India finds effects, but ones that do not last beyond the lifetime of the quota.
5. Duncan Green summarises an extreme, but archetypal example of a bad business environment, from research by Esther Marijnen.
6. Two very different pieces on what makes political systems ‘work’. First, Julia Azari from 538 summarises her research on what ‘norms’ actually are, why they’re not always difficult to violate, and the importance of values. Secondly, an amazing experiment from China, in which researchers from Stanford helped some students bypass internet censorship – finding that low demand for uncensored news is just as important as censorship. Presumably, these authors will not be planning any holidays to China after they publish this…
7. Am I just an old man, or does all music sound the same now? The Pudding gets into the numbers, but I’ll be honest, you need to read this just for the Snoop gif – pure genius. Maybe songs in the 60s and 70s were a bit samey. But when they sounded like this, who needs variety?

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

What are the ethics of movie spoilers in the intro to a links round-up? (don’t worry, I’ve avoided them.) I finally saw Avengers: Infinity War on Wednesday and it’s been on my mind, not least because of the use of an odd mix of unreconstructed Malthusianism and a kind of repeated strategic trolley problem to motivate the film: with a little basic economics and a primer on game theory, the whole thing would have lasted about five minutes. Maybe the sequel next year will feature two new superheroes: Empirical Economic History Man (by day, mild-mannered Max Roser) and Strategic Man (a.k.a. Avinash Dixit). As an aside, I rushed out of a great seminar by Esther Duflo to make it to the cinema, the steepest slope from good economics to bad in history?

1. Would you, too, like to be better prepared for the coming of an economically illiterate tyrant? (What do you mean, ‘too late’?) Then a pretty good place to start would be this list of the best books on economics and economic thinking, compiled by Diane Coyle, Tim Harford and others. It’s not exactly the list I would have chosen (which is kind of the point of these lists), but there are some great books selected, including Oliver Williamson. I’m disappointed that there’s no specifically development-focused book there, but lots to learn from nevertheless, and several I haven’t read.
2. Of course, to understand much modern economics, you need to at least have a basic grasp of how statistics are used. My go-to book on this is still The Signal and the Noise, and it’s no surprise that Nate’s website, 538 carries much of the best, most accessible writing about statistics for laypeople – most of it written by Christie Aschwanden. Here, she examines the go-to statistical test used in sports science and shows that it’s poor scientific practice. It boils down to this: statistical tests basically make a trade-off between correctly rejecting ‘wrong’ results and accidentally rejecting ‘correct’ results. You want to do more of the former, but doing so increases the chances of the latter. Bad science plays around with this trade-off, increasing the chances of your result being accepted, but at the cost of increasing the chance that it should really have been rejected.
3. Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur argue that, after accounting for how effectively the Government spends money, taxation in some developing countries is not just regressive, it might be increasing poverty. Get the basic systems Governments fund to work and this effect might change.
4. John Sutton explains the challenge (and payoff) of attracting FDI.
5. And, Dietz on the rest of the Paradox of Mark-ups he introduced last week. I cannot think of a blogging macroeconomist who is both so accessible and challenging at the same time. A learning experience, every time he blogs.
6. So, I hate Duty Free shops. I hate the way airports are structured to corral you through as many as possible, and I hate the idea that my last moments in a country should be concerned with a sort of placeless accumulation of crap. However, Karen Duffin and Robert Smith at Planet Money do something interesting with the idea of duty free: they illustrate the concepts of the race to the bottom and arbitrage by examining the history of the establishment of Duty Free shops and the effect of their spread. (Transcript).
7. Lastly, on books: I tend to use either a bookmark or my memory to hold my place in a book (my current bookmark, a picture of The Thinker bought at the British Museum, is the most pretentious thing I own by a considerable distance). Apparently, I’m doing it wrong – bacon, a handsaw, even a piece of broccoli are all apparently bookmarks returned inside library books. And lastly, Michael Ondjaate’s favourite books to re-read. Amazingly, no sign of Rumpole or Bertie Wooster.

I’m away next Friday, so see you in two weeks! Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

With the basketball on a temporary pause between series (and LeBron James playing so well that people are actually now digging into the numbers to work out on exactly what metrics Jordan was better – the summary seems to be: at his peak, Jordan was better; but taking the whole career, LeBron seems to win), and the weather pretty inoffensive, I’m struggling to think of how best to open the links. There is the cricket: but I’m not an IPL-watcher, and Ireland’s first Test hasn’t started yet. So, cricket and weather, then I’ve exhausted my small talk: I may have hit peak Englishman.

1. Very often, over a standing coffee appointment we had, my colleague Matt would hit one of his pet peeves: that the economic concept that is simultaneously most useful and most abused is opportunity cost. Fortunately, Tim Harford agrees, which is a good indication that the argument is sound. The biggest abuse of opportunity cost that Tim mentions also applies to DFID: we assume that time is costless, when it is actually an incredibly precious commodity. This applies to our interventions, where we too often fail to account for the opportunity cost of poor people’s time (“hey guys! Come to this 3-day training workshop, it’s free!”) and we too often ignore the opportunity cost of our own time (“hey guys! Come to this hour-long meeting that doesn’t have any obvious objective! It’s free!”). Even Matt and I made that mistake: the opportunity cost of ranting about opportunity cost was time spent on other topics where we didn’t already agree.
2. Dietz is back! This is definitely only one for the economists, but he remains the clearest interlocutor of good macroeconomic research out there. In this post, he explains how mark-ups affect general equilibria. Read it and become a better macroeconomist.
3. In an article that was clearly designed to maximise its chances of getting into the links, Jordana Cepelewicz looks into a new model that uses energy budgeting to explain migration – the migration of birds, that is. It’s modelling at its best: the use of a simplified set of behavioural rules to explain (part of) why complicated things happen. I was really struck by this quote: “[For humans] it doesn’t seem rational that birds will travel thousands of kilometres each way… but… [this] taxing journey is energetically favourable”. Actually when I see the extremes that humans will go through to make a better life, it seems the most natural thing in the world.
4. David Evans and Muthoni Ngatia on the long-term effects of an education intervention (spoiler: none). Maybe I’ve misunderstood this (a skim of the underlying paper didn’t clarify either), but is it surprising that a free school uniform today doesn’t affect outcomes after eight years? Surely the kids would outgrow it within a year – why would we expect a one-off reduction in outgoings to have such long-term effects?
5. Eric Posner and Glen Weyl bemoan the death of the economist as grand philosopher, blaming the specialisation of the academy for the paucity of systemic thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In an interpretation that would no doubt irritate them endlessly, perhaps this is simply a case of diminishing marginal returns? The grandest ideas have been had; the biggest impact is now on more modest additions to knowledge. In a way, this ties in with what Lant often argues: what we already know about economies accounts for most of what matters in them – we just need to apply it somehow.
6. This week in ‘research that suggests what seems blindingly obvious’: expanding exports of goods made with labour of a given skill level increases support for free trade among those workers (uses an IV. Usual health warnings apply).
7. Lastly, The Ringer scientifically explores the art of the low-blow. Extremely useful for the manspreading jackasses on the tube at rush hour.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

“Vote early, and vote often” – and in the local council elections you can actually do it. If you’re a student and registered to vote both at your University address and your home address, you can vote in both (though not for a General election). So yesterday I woke up at ridiculous’o’clock, voted in London, then hopped on a bus, spent the day in meetings and presentations and then got to cast my second vote in Oxford just before the polling stations closed. As one of my friends said, “I still get excited that I have the suffrage.” You should, too. (and also, everyone should be extremely excited that LeBron continues to do very LeBron things; and that Shaq’s approach to saving money is to spend $20 regularly, instead of $80 rarely. Yes, it is insane).

1. The bicentenary of Marx’s death has sparked a small flurry of activity, as well as the odd pilgrimage to Highgate Cemetary (where, irony of ironies, you are charged for admission). I really enjoyed this piece by Branko Milanovic, which emphasises just how much chance and events after his death contributed to his fame and influence. It’s always worth emphasising that Marx’s writings varied enormously, with much of the economics genuinely insightful and important, much of the history weakened by the sources he used and his rigid framework, and the social theory largely for the birds.
2. The Economist is running a series on the shortcomings of the economics profession, and turns its gaze on the state of microeconomic research, simultaneously celebrating the rise of the empiricists and bemoaning the fact that there’s still so much variation in what they find. I’m definitely no apologist for the economics profession, but these critiques strike me as fundamentally flawed. The problem is not that economics cannot give us a straight answer about whether minimum wages are good; it’s that we want universalist certainty on things which can never have them. Economics teaches us how to think about these problems and assess trade-offs and risks – not what you should always think, always and everywhere.
3. A friend has pointed out that virtually everything I say can be paraphrased as ‘I think you’ll find it’s a little bit more complicated than that’, and yes, I’m aware it’s literally the title of Ben Goldacre’s book. I’ve been thinking a bit about data and privacy recently, to which that really applies. Maggie Koerth-Baker at 538 wrote a fantastic piece about this recently, pointing out a fundamental regulatory challenge: “all… privacy law and policy is framed around the idea of privacy as a personal choice” but increasingly, data is network based. There may be no answer to this problem.
4. Apparently, I did my undergraduate degree at the same time Dave Donaldson was studying for his physics degree, in the same (pretty small) college. As far as I’m aware, I never once engaged him in conversation, which now seems like something of an error. He won last year’s John Bates Clark award, but given the snail’s pace of academic publishing, only now is Daron Acemoglu’s appreciation of his work
5. “Globalization is arbitrage… constrained by three costs: trade costs, or the cost of moving goods; communication costs, or the cost of moving ideas; and … the cost of moving people.” Richard Baldwin discusses globalization and trade, using a very simple football analogy to explain why it’s simultaneously raising overall human welfare by supporting the poorest, delivering outsize benefits to a few people and eroding the relative position of those who used to be in the middle. Read it.
6. Duncan Green reviews a new book about aid, the best bit being the part which examines its domestic (i.e. in donor countries) political constituency. As an aside, why do people feel obliged to mention Dambisa Moyo every time someone writes about aid? Dead Aid was comfortably the worst use of paper I’ve ever encountered (Matt and I once gave a copy of the book away as a prize, complete with our frustrated scrawls in the margin, annotating every missed point and inanity).
7. Lastly, I started back at work on a very limited basis this week, and one of my colleagues was literally in meetings from 9:30am till 6pm, so this piece from the Guardian on how organisations can minimise meetings feels a good place to end. I note that Barack Obama has copied my preference for the ‘walk and talk’ option, in my case preferably through St. James’s Park, interrupted by birdwatching.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

So, as predicted, the Great British Summer lasted slightly less time than it would take to learn the words to Got My Mind Set On You, and we’re now back in winter, at least in Oxford. Bah. And the playoffs are still completely draining all of my mental energy. After all, who needs sleep when you can watch LeBron do this instead (and you marvel at the fact that his team is so bad that he still might not go through). Thank god I don’t watch the IPL, or I’d be a zombie.

1. Speaking of zombies, no-one seems to be able to kill the idea that the robots are coming to make us all unemployed. The new WDR is on the future of work, and in a fit of transparency the World Bank are uploading a new draft every week (because “I want to read the WDR every week” is apparently a thing that someone at the Bank thinks people are saying). Anyway, Duncan Green takes issue with the draft he read for being too optimistic about robots: he argues that just because they haven’t taken our jobs away in the past doesn’t mean they won’t this time. The problem with this argument is that there’s no evidence that it is different this time. Why would relative prices stop adjusting just because there’s a car without a driver in it? The pace of change may seem daunting, but it seemed pretty damn daunting in the past too: lamplighters must have had visions of the apocalypse when electric lighting was invented, and rightly. Jobs will be destroyed. The question is how fast, and how flexible we are for dealing with it.
2. Related: while we worry far too much about sewbots taking jobs, Adrian Wood suggests we probably worried too little about trade doing the same. He’s not arguing that we need to erect the barriers and press the autarky button. Rather, he suggests that the academic arguments about globalisation in the 1990s fostered a false sense of security among policymakers. The ultimate conclusion that it would have a small effect on employment depended on assumptions about the flexibility of the economy and the labour market, including geographic mobility. If we want to do something sensible to prepare for the rise of the machines, it’s on that side. Luckily [heavy sarcasm voice] geographic mobility of workers is a completely uncontroversial topic, and so is housing.
3. Staying on the general theme, Trump’s response to failure of the US to distribute the gains from globalisation fairly has been to engage in some trade policy button-mashing. I floated the prospect that it might actually work last week, but don’t worry – Rebecca Shimoni Stoil points out that the tariffs are hugely damaging to farmers, who are abandoning him in droves.
4. The last salvo in the cash transfers war, as Berk Özler goes into minute detail (and this is a compliment) on his reading of the Give Directly evaluation, arguing that the large negative spillovers that Justin Sandefur deemed implausible are in the ballpark of previous studies, while the positive effects are not – they are much larger.
5. This is brilliant: Samuel Bowles looks at the link between Marx’s view of how society and the firm are structured and those of Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon and Oliver Hart. I’ve read all four and never considered the links before – it’s a fascinating exercise, and leads Bowles to suggest that most economics is the economics of ‘solved political problems’, but the most interesting work is about open political problems. It’s an unconventional phrasing, but does illuminate some aspects of what differentiates some of the best new research.
6. Planet Money do some digging into recent cases of grand corruption involving Chinese businessmen in Africa, and their links to State-Owned Enterprises and the massive Belt and Road initiative. It’s hard to summarise, but really worth listening to (transcript), even if I question some of the more reaching interpretations they make.
7. Lastly, some glorious randomness: Noah Smith tries to interrogate the economics of rap music lyrics and is stunned to discover it’s capitalist and materialistic. What the heck was he listening to before he discovered that? Did he not know that Miami, DC prefer Versace? And that Meek didn’t, in fact, lease that Rolls Royce? That Rakim was, finally, Paid in Full? Though I suppose he might have been confused by the lax approach to property rights on show.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Welcome to the annual advent of low-productivity Ranil. It occurs during the relatively short coincidence of two events: the British summer bringing glorious sunshine and good cheer, hence reducing my ability to concentrate on my computer during the day (I’m writing these in the garden – thank god for WiFi); and the advent of the NBA Playoffs, severely denting my sleep patterns for fear of missing even 15 seconds of Playoff Lebron or (for the first time ever) Post-season Troll Embiid. I’m on limited sleep and even less patience. But still, on to the links.

1. Was Biggie right after all? Do cash transfers actually cause more damage than they do good? I linked to a piece by Berk Özler last week that looked into the possibility of catastrophic negative spillovers in the recent long-term evaluation of the GD cash transfer programme in Kenya, but Justin Sandefur is here to keep you calm. He points out that the scale of the negative effects are so large as to be implausible, but this does not mean that all is sweetness and light. The findings do suggest that the gains to cash transfers are, while important, limited. They are not a cure-all; and they are not even a cure-something-for-ever. That said, they work for some things, for as long as you use them. If this was a medicine, we’d say it did its job – just so long as we were realistic about what that job is. You don’t take painkillers to cure a broken leg – just to dull the pain. He also cites the excellent Pam Jakiela to point out: “The idea that we want every poor person to run a bigger microenterprise is not entirely innocuous.”
2. Tim Harford, a man who literally wrote a book called Messy about the value of chaos, reckons that Donald Trump’s style of ‘governance’ is way too chaotic to work. I’m still reeling from my confident predictions that Trump could never win either a presidential nomination, nor an election against a sentient human being, so I make no predictions on how this will all play out. I would like Tim to be right, but do we underestimate how much is actually working pretty well? Is his North Korea policy in danger of becoming sensible? Might the tariff threats between the US and China end in a negotiated settlement the US benefits from? We shouldn’t discount all of this altogether.
3. FiveThirtyEight continues to be the best outlet to read about the MeToo movement, and its complexities. Here, Kathryn Casteel and Andrea Jones-Rooy talk about the difficulties our limited vocabulary relating to the different kinds of ‘sextual misconduct/harassment/assault’ generate for action, activism and justice.
4. I used to joke about Alex Tabarrok’s ‘tinfoil hat blogging’, but he’s been making a lot of sense recently (I’ve just checked my head, and I’m not wearing any kind of hat at all). Here he argues that Facebook never took ‘our data’. It co-created it.
5. Dan Rogger writes a round-up of the latest work on governance, institutions and public policy. It’s excellent.
6. Magical economics, part 3 of a continuing series: it turns out that the costs of structural reforms to labour markets are smallest for those countries that need them most.
7. Amazingly, the coolest thing that happened this week was not Justise Winslow and Joel Embiid trading blocks last night. Rather, it was the release of Prince’s hitherto unheard original studio recording of Nothing Compares 2 U, and the incredible accompanying video. Not only is his version predictably amazing, just look at the moves he’s busting – in the studio! Soundtrack for the summer sorted. (The track is only slightly shorter than the British summer, too…).

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R