The CSAE Blog

Hi all,

The last time I watched Toby Roland-Jones play cricket, he took a hat trick with the final ball of Middlesex’s County season to win them the Championship against Yorkshire. His partner was screaming her head off in support a few rows in front of me, and I blame her (rather than the prosecco, beer and associated libations) for my splitting headache the next day. Anyway, it seems like he has something of a golden arm, and is currently bowling with an economy of under 2 and a wicket-taking average of less than 5 in Test cricket (n=less than 1). Regression to the mean be damned.

1. I’ve been trying to talk people out of technopessimism for ages, but I’m still getting regular invitations to discuss the prospects of robots rendering us all unemployed and miserable. I will eat my hat if we enter a period of widespread unemployment and lower living standards because we’ve gotten so productive that we no longer need to employ people to do tasks robots can do . Tim Harford is getting in on the act too: he points out that the introduction ATMs and weaving machines preceded increased employment of bank tellers and textile workers for the simple reason that the increased productivity allowed people to specialise more efficiently and the reduced costs increased demand. It’s logical, which I increasingly learn is not the same as ‘widely obvious’.
2. I’m much less sceptical about the value of proper, strong economic analysis of humanitarian disasters and responses, but sentences like “Cost-benefit analysis or recent advances in behavioural economics can help make sense of suicide attacks triggered by emotions such as resentment, or of non-kin altruism by medical aid workers risking their lives to address the 2014 Ebola epidemics in West Africa” help make clear why other disciplines can regard economists as arrogant interlopers. Economists can make a contribution, surely, but to imply that these things are largely a mystery seems… pretty out-of-touch. I imagine the anthropologists are sharpening their pitchforks already.
3. I found this really thought provoking, and difficult to summarise: Dietz Vollrath thinks about Malthus, again, and looks at the potential effects of the relationship between population density and agricultural productivity on incentives for development. It requires a little maths and patience but the implications are interesting. It might go nowhere, but is worth thinking about.
4. David McKenzie on a nice study that, at a basic level, proves that competition really does work, and market size matters for firms. Those things sound obvious, but a lot of what development actors do seems to ignore them, with the result that we implement reforms or training in contexts where competitive pressures don’t result in rewards accruing to firms that improve, or where the size of the market is too small to take advantage of improvements.
5. When John Sutton talks about how to reform institutions, listen.
6. Gender links, hopeful and horrible. Hopeful: training can help overcome the biases women themselves may have against taking certain kinds of job. Horrible: the percentage of murdered women in the US who were killed by their partners. I’ve been trying to work out what to say about that, but my first reaction still seems the best: that’s pretty f**ked up, if you’ll pardon the language.
7. There’s no way I’m going to leave it on that note, so let me share with you my favourite discoveries of the week: first, Zion Williamson, a 16 year old high-school kid made of 105kg of muscle and barely disguised contempt for humanity. It is deeply unfair that he is allowed to do these things to normal 16 year old children. There was a point in that video where Zion seemed to trample on a small piece of chalk. I watched it again and it turned out to be one of the opposing players. Seriously, he reminds me of this. And secondly, a man’s romantic gesture (n=200) backfires horribly.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Since the third test of the England – South Africa test has yet to start, and the NBA Summer League has already finished, I’m struggling for an interesting intro to this week’s links (this reflects my general struggle in conversation: how to interact with people when there’s no cricket or basketball to talk about, especially when economics is cordoned off for separate discussion). My normal strategy in a social situation would be to find the bar, but I think that might be against the Civil Service code. So straight into the links this week:

1. It’s no secret that GDP doesn’t measure everything that matters for human well-being, and it’s also pretty well known that measuring productivity in an economy is incredibly difficult. Most economists more or less ignore both of these facts most of the time, but this excellent piece by Adair Turner has a go at working through the implications, or at least one set of them. He points out that many of the things that do most to improve human happiness these days don’t show up in GDP, but lots of zero-sum activities (like chasing criminals who don’t produce anything new but steal what has already been produced) do. He suggests that this is increasingly becoming the case in developed countries (an important qualification) and GDP and productivity could become irrelevant as indicators of well-being.
2. Of course, we could always automate policing or defence, and since everyone seems to be bricking themselves at the prospect of being replaced by machines, maybe that’s coming? I don’t buy these visions of mass robot-induced indolence and neither do Acemoglu and Restrepo on VoxDev, who point out that not only have previous robot-terrors failed to come to fruition, there are good economic reasons to suggest that their influence on workers will be restrained. And secondly, another recent paper shows that once you examine automation risk at the task-level, the number of jobs genuinely at risk from the new wave of robots is much smaller than previously estimated. Related, this brilliant feature on 538 looks at how algorithms and AI processes that learn based on information mediated in some way by humans can be as biased as humans.
3. The best thing about Michael Clemens’ research is that even though he has a clear opinion on the value of migration (and its moral worth), he never lets this cloud the objectivity of the research he presents on it. Clemens and Hunt look at the literature on the effects of refugees on ‘native’ employment and wages, and where the data shows no effect, they make that case; but in the study where they think the data really does show a small negative effect (refugees in France, in 1962) they make that case too. Over at CGD, Clemens also shows how promises to slash legal migration will be a lose-lose proposition for the US. Of course, Trump might not care, so long as he can relax the rules for long enough for his resorts to hire foreign workers – right in the middle of ‘Made in America’ week. Related: Vox on how the Gulf crisis is likely to have severe effects on its (numerous) migrant workers.
4. I read this a few weeks ago, but it just popped up again on my RSS feed, and it deserves to be read by as many people as possible. Tim Harford goes nuts and gets angry at just about everyone in sight after Grenfell, pointing out what a complete shambles UK housing policy is.
5. Psychology and economics have had a fruitful relationship ever since Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman politely pointed out that rational choice theory is a very bad description of human behaviour. It was (and remains) an easy discipline to listen to for economists, because it’s based in large part on individual choice and behaviours and economics typically models representative units (individuals or firms). Disciplines that place more weight on social constructs and the relationship between individuals and these groups are a harder sell, as Andrew Gelman starts to discuss here.
6. Two things: I’m amazed the NHS was spending money on homeopathy in the first place (they’re stopping, thankfully). And I am really not amazed that the head of the British Homeopathic Institute is called Cristal. Related: apparently, surgery has a pretty powerful placebo effect.
7. And finally, though I can’t go for the booze in my job, Nate Silver and co did so in the name of science and data journalism, looking for the perfect margarita using a k-means clustering algorithm. Even I’m not that much of a geek.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I love summer. It means barbecues and sunglasses; Summer League and Lonzo Ball throwing some absurd dimes; but most of all it means there’s Test cricket in England. Right now, Quinton de Kock is absolutely hammering the English bowling, someone’s just compared him to Lara on the Grauniad, and South Africa are 140-2. And we have four more days of ebbs, flows, cover drives and Jimmy Anderson being mouthy and annoying to look forward to. I love summer.

1. With that uncharacteristically cheery start out of the way, shall we get our Grinch on? This tweet is extraordinary, and justifies the anger that the North of England feels about the way public decision making has left it behind. Spending per head on infrastructure, which reaches GBP2,600 per head in London, is just FIVE QUID A HEAD in the North East. It’s not just neglect at work here, but also the vagaries of economic decision making, as this excellent blog explains. If a region starts with higher income per head than others, then any growth-enhancing investments will maximise national returns (measured in average incomes) if it focuses on that region. This has implications for anyone who does CBAs. Income maximisation is not the same as utility maximisation, and the economists’ answer that people can and should move isn’t enough.
2. While we’re being angry, though – has anyone seen Martin Wolf this angry before? He is not optimistic in the least.
3. Not entirely unrelated: VoxDEV summarise research on the impact of greater openness to trade on domestic firms. What they find won’t surprise you: firms nearer the ‘best practice’ frontier for their industry thrive, while those further back tend to suffer. This is competition working, and it’s why producing tradables is such a good mechanism for increasing productivity – good firms expand and bad ones die. Two implications leap at me: first, that opening too much to trade when you have few firms producing tradables well is a problem; second, that closing off to trade increases the scope for bad firms with high costs and poor products to proliferate.
4. This week in lacking self-awareness: In quick succession Vox ran an article on telling whether a chart was wilfully misleading you; and then ran a chart wilfully misleading readers about the size of a stock market dip by manipulating the time series shown.
5. This one hurts. You know that famous study that Daniel Kahnemann cites about how parole judges get much meaner and deny parole to almost everyone right before lunch? I’ve used it to convince interview panel chairs to keep us well stocked with snacks during assessments. Well, it turns out it that the study has some pretty serious problems – not least the fact that the size of the effect is so enormous you’d expect that virtually all human activity basically ceases right before lunch and dinner. (Alright, it does for me, but that might be a local effect).
6. Anyone ever tried to dismiss aid as ‘a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries’ to you? Branko got annoyed at that one, so he demolished it. I imagine something like this happening while he was working on Stata for this.
7. Okay, de Kock was just caught for 65, but to cheer us all up The Mighty Ducks are 25 today, and here’s a photo of Emilio Estevez being barely any taller than those kids.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

There is a tidy narrative that gets trotted out whenever a major cricket nation appoints a new captain. The story is that the player thrives early on, enjoying the responsibility and the positive spillovers from their need to be ever-so-slightly more aware of the match situation, the state of the pitch and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their batting partners and opposing bowlers. Over time, the drudgery of captaincy begins to wear them down – they make a few bad decisions and get disproportionate criticism, or Kevin Pietersen calls them a bad word, and their batting average declines. I think there’s a simpler explanation: Captains are typically batsmen. They get appointed when they’re on a good run and benefit from the halo effect: because they’re scoring runs well, they must be a good captain. Over time, their batting regresses to the mean and the halo effect works in reverse. Can anyone better with Statsguru than I am check this out? Anyway, halo effect or no, Joe Root just scored 190 in his first innings as captain, I’m predicting South Africa will fold like an accordion.

1. So I need to think about this one a bit more. People use the term ‘brain dump’ as a mild pejorative, but when your brain is like Dietrich Vollrath’s it more like a rain shower of gold (and you better hope you have a pocket in your stitched-up pants). Dietz looks at recent research which suggests that once one accounts for unobservable individual characteristics, there is no productivity difference between urban and rural areas. We need to be careful here: this does not mean that urban areas aren’t more productive, but that if you drop a random rural person into an urban context they don’t become magically more productive – the gap in productivity is explained by their education and ‘talent’. I feel like this is worth taking very seriously, but we need to exhaust the alternative explanations, first. There’s a lot of good research that suggests that there is something special about urban centres, too. So who to trust?
2. A great long read from The Atlantic about how Chinese investors in American factories are getting on. We’ve had speakers at DFID who look at the culture clash between Chinese managers and owners and workers in Africa, too – there are real issues here relating to norms around work and worker behaviour. It’s interesting to note that the experience of Japanese-owned factories suggests that simply engaging with the workforce on more equal terms can increase productivity. It would be amazing to see if that effect is driven by actual improvements in production processes or simply through labour relations.
3. I recently gave a presentation in which I suggested that so far, Trump’s bark has been worse than his bite on international trade. This VoxEU piece has a different take: Trump’s bark is his bite – his rhetoric may actually have caused some G20 members to alter their trade practices already. Also from VoxEU – data suggests that long term development might be less about being good at growing and more about being good at not collapsing.
4. 538 asking the questions that matter: everyone knows that they will invite opprobrium by eating well-done steaks, but how many Americans really do order them rare?
5. This reminded me a of Simon Singh’s lovely book Fermat’s Last Theorem. A profile of the mathematician June Huh, a star in the field who never really thought he had much talent and whose success seems to draw heavily on his willingness to jump between specialisations.
6. Lastly, great news for American basketball fans: basketball magician Milos Teodosic is finally joining the NBA, and is likely to make a famous player near you look very silly indeed in the near future.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

There are times when humiliation brings with it a gentle chuckle, like when I asked a colleague why his door was closed, and he asked me to read the sign on it (it said ‘Fire door. Keep shut.’, as I discovered as I read it out loud). And then there are time when it feels like someone has reached down your throat, torn out your soul and turned it into an scarf, like when Zimbabwe canter to the highest chase ever against you (in Galle, no less) winning with a hammered six in the 48^th over. Meanwhile, our most accomplished cricketer is scoring centuries for fun at Surrey, sailing into retirement after a summer of six centuries in 11 innings. Please excuse me for a moment while I smack my head against the wall.

1. “When the goat survived, this served as proof that the protection worked.” Last year, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra spoke to DFID about data collection. It was wildly entertaining – everything he had data on (witchcraft!) and every method he used (spies!) was totally unexpected, but as strange as the topics felt, there was something practical and important to learn from every example. I was reminded of this when reading this summary of his new paper with Nathan Nunn. The quote above comes from it, as does this: “The liberation of the village began one evening in 2012, when an elder of the village had a dream [which] … taught him how to use supernatural forces to bulletproof the young men in the village.” As crazy as it sounds, Raul and Nathan collected data on these spells and their effects on the rate at which young men defended their villages from militias. And it’s not nearly as esoteric as it sounds – their findings have potentially profound implications for how we understand individual and group decision making and what constitutes ‘optimal’. Brilliant.
2. Censuses are hugely political, something we don’t really think about until  someone points it out. The Economist does so for Nigeria here, explaining why many parts of the country have made sport of overestimating how many people lived there. But that doesn’t mean that Nigeria’s population is overestimated: some recent aerial surveys suggested it might be underestimated. In short: no-one has a clue, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
3. Recently, a friend unearthed an e-mail from about 10 years ago in which I asserted strongly that Jose Antonio Reyes was far better equipped to succeed in football than Cristiano Fancypants Ronaldo as I called him. Changing your mind is very often a sign that your thinking is improving, but it also comes attached with a social stigma that is hard to shake; and it’s hard to do given the biases we’re so prone to. So I loved this Planet Money episode dedicated to examples of people who have changed their minds about important things (transcript). We need to destigmatise this. Wrong and stubborn is the worst of all worlds.
4. FiveThirtyEight continues to be the only media outlet that is able to combine data, proper analysis and human interest. This time it looks at healthcare in the ‘black belt’ of rural, poverty-stricken America.
5. I’m from Hong Kong, and constantly annoyed when libertarians cite it as proof that ‘the smaller the state, the better’. This VoxEU analysis of Hong Kong’s actual economic model is brilliant – and makes the point that around 70 years of policy consistency is probably as important as any of the individual policies themselves.
6. Get the popcorn: Lant Pritchett looks at the latest research on migration and the policy implications of it in this magisterial two-parter for CGD. The material is largely familiar, but I really urge you to read it. In the first part, he absolutely eviscerates Borjas’ paper finding severe negative effects on the wages of a small group of native workers (“the [sample size]… was two— … literally two people in the way that you and me, dear reader, make up two people”). In  the second part he considers how policy makers should respond. There is so much clear thinking and communication here. Just read it.
7. I think everyone knows that popcorn reference above is to Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, right? For the uninitiated, Vox ranks the best reaction gifs ever – MJ wins (of course). Though a new contender has now emerged: noted egomaniac LaVar Ball, intent on stealing the limelight from his incredibly gifted son.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

You know the downside of spending a week in Thailand eating the ocean short of prawns and a week in Sri Lanka developing a section of midriff devoted entirely to rice and curry? (There is no downside, obviously, but I have to say something now). It’s coming back to 1600 articles in your RSS feed, several hundred e-mails and a meeting calendar that qualifies as a cruel and unusual punishment. The links probably miss some brilliant stuff– apologies. I confess to not actually reading all 1600 and instead doing actual work.

Quickly, though: Last time, I asked for the economic ideas that we should shred, and I got some glorious answers. Some of them are properly brave – Coase theorem into the bin, anyone? And should we junk the idea that education is a prerequisite for economic convergence? Someone guessed my own pet hate (Gary Becker), but my favourite answer came from Thom A who proposed the late William Baumol’s theory of contestable markets in industrial organisation, introduced in a hilarious AEA paper which casts him as the Luke Skywalker of an intrepid band of economic rebels.

1.       I made some strong predictions in private about the outcome of the recent General Election, and these turned out to be spectacularly wrong,  so wrong that I wrote a navel-gazing e-mail about the mistakes and biases my predictions had fallen prey to. I almost certainly would have avoided that e-mail if I’d just read the 538 coverage of the elections, which came out only after I went on leave. Nate Silver’s piece on the range of likely outcomes and what the polls really say was magisterial and addresses the major biases I suffered from. His analysis was spot on, and he – almost uniquely – was able to say that the result wasn’t much of a surprise. Related: Nate also thinks that Trump might be behind recent political trends in Europe.

2.       A lot of good stuff on migration came out while I was away. Most excitingly, Michael Clemens did a piece for Vox summarising stuff I’ve already linked, but dropping the bombshell that he’s about to publish a book called The Walls of Nations. If I come round to your place and you don’t own this book, we’re done. Also from CGD, how migration to the US drove India’s tech boom, while 538 cover new research on the possible economic benefits of refugees. And lastly, a great piece on what distinguishes those who leave from those who stay. It’s packed with interesting ideas, so much so that I want to see the original research…

3.       A wide ranging interview with Dani Rodrik, covering the usual bases: globalization, trade and internationalism, and what the limits on these should be. It had never occurred to me that Rodrik is an optimist in pessimistic clothing. Consider this quote: “If national economies were run properly, they could generate full employment, they could generate satisfactory social bargains and good distributive outcomes; and they could generate an open and healthy world economy as well.” That’s a bold claim.

4.       Gabriel Zucman and co look at tax evasion in Scandinavia using the Panama Papers and Wikileaks – most people seem to mainly pay what they owe, but the super-rich are masters of avoiding this: up to 30% of their taxes are avoided. Also on inequality – how do Americans and Europeans think about inequality and their ability to overcome it? Despite Raj Chetty taking it out back and delivering a thorough thrashing to it, apparently the American Dream lives on. Emphasis on ‘dream’.

5.       Dan Rogger on the different kinds of civil servants who staff bureaucracies in developing countries. Engaging, interesting and a hugely under-studied topic.

6.       Need a reading list on gender? (The answer is yes, by the way). This one is really good, covering wage gaps, participation in roles of power, incentives to collaborate and more. Recommended. And equally useful – a stopwatch that measures the relative time women and men spend talking in meetings. I’m more than happy to report results back next week if you use this. Just send me a screenshot of the final score and the number of men and women in the meeting.

7.       LeBron lost, yes, but I’m going to quote D’Angelo Barksdale to you: “the King stay the King“. He averaged a triple-double in the finals, in which he appeared seventh straight year. As The Ringer noted, nothing changes for him: if he wins the championship again, people will ask if he was better than Jordan. And if he never does, they will still ask themselves the same question. That’s his only competition now, that ghost. Also, he did this in the NBA finals. It was disrespectful to the Warriors, his teammates, gravity and my credulity. Anyway, Pakistan won the Champions Trophy in the most Pakistan way possible – completely unexpectedly and punctuated by moments of utter genius. You can’t have it all, and at least we got that.

 There’s heaps more in my RSS feed, but my patience has worn thin – it’ll have to wait till next week.

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

 I’m going on leave tomorrow and won’t be back to my regular linking until the tail end of June, so I’m afraid this one is going to have to last you for a while, though the next will undoubtedly be about 25 links long to report on all of the drama I miss while I’m away. It also means that today’s links are totally threadbare and barely coherent, because let’s be honest – I’ve mentally checked out already. I may be in a grey suit in Whitehall in body, but in spirit I’m knee-deep in Thai street food and enjoying an ice-cold beer at the Rajadamnerrn.

1.       Let’s start with the important stuff: the NBA finals start tonight. You have to have the Warriors as favourites (indeed the betting odds on them are prohibitive) – how do you beat a team with four of the best nine or ten players in the world on it? Yet part of me quails at the idea of betting against LeBron. Last year, he was so good that you had to invent new adjectives for it: he was thumpfunkalous. In a way, though, it doesn’t matter. His influence has gone well beyond basketball now: he’s probably the most political sporting superstar since Ali (how many sports press conferences include a discussion of Emmett Till’s open casket?) and – here’s the economics – he creates jobs by his sheer presence. Maybe this is the answer to recessions: deploy LBJ.

2.       The dust has not yet settled on the ‘Romer vs. “And”’ superfight (And is ahead on points, but Romer has forced it into significant concessions). The Economist reports on the numbers behind the brouhaha; and Tim Harford suggests Dr. Seuss is a substantially better style guide than the typical World Bank report. My final take: muddled and incomprehensible writing is more often than not the product of a muddled and incomprehensible idea. Trying to tackle the problem with a style guide is the literary equivalent of attempting to polish a turd. A good WB paper (think the typical Markus Goldstein or David Evans publication) is normally the product of good ideas and good research. Focus on the ideas and then refer to The King’s English if you still feel you need to improve the writing.

3.       Speaking of English, don’t be afraid of long words. It’s the short ones that trip up contestants of those slightly odd Spelling Bees that have turned into a cultural phenomenon in the States.

4.       Is Liberal Democracy (apparently it’s a proper noun now) on the retreat? Has it ever truly been in the ascendant? Branko puts the case forward that capitalism has always been characterised by crises and the apparent retreat from globalisation that many fear characterises the new world we live in is simply the latest of these.

5.       I’m not going to leave you on this one, as it’s pretty depressing, but Duncan Green on an excellent response to his new book: “Most bad things are amazingly durable.  Take racial inequality in the US – we might as well admit it is constitutional to offload X percent of the population indefinitely, so long as you do it in the right way.   “Doing it right” changes, but the inequality does not.”

6.       Lastly, something to keep you all occupied until I’m back: VoxEU ran a blog considering what economic ideas we should all just quietly forget about and pretend never happened. I like this idea – I’d happily shove one particular Nobel winner’s work down this black hole, given the chance. But I’m going to open it up – send me your best example of an economic theory that keeps hanging on for dear life despite clearly being wrong an I’ll report back on the best suggestions when I’m back.

 Have a great couple of weeks, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 It’s been an eventful week, to say the least, but one of my favourite things about the UK is how resilient it is – an appalling attack and increased security all around and people quickly settle back into their old routines: the tube keeps running, continuing to tell us that the train that will eventually huff up to the platform in about a quarter of an hour is  “two minutes away”; six people still stand around the one empty seat on the carriage because they’re too polite to take it and too shy to ask others to; twitter trolls still pop up spouting hate at every opportunity; and despite a day off, the links still go out.

 1.       I’m going to tread lightly with the first link. After all, Robert Shiller is a Nobel-winning economist of incredibly high standing across the profession and I, not to put too fine a point on it, am not. However, when I see an article with the title ‘The economy is stagnant because people fear for the future’, arguing that people aren’t spending because they have vague fears about robots eventually taking their jobs and exacerbating inequality, my sceptical face gets an airing (no, that’s not me). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say he’s wrong. People have been scared of machines taking their jobs since the first sharp stone was discovered. And, if they are worried about the future it might have more to do with the fact that the future prospects of most economies are pretty uncertain at the moment, which wouldn’t be the case if we were all about to hire Alex Murphy as our personal bodyguards. Poorly thought out techno-pessimism really winds me up.

2.       Of course, Americans might be uncertain about the future because a budget has been presented to Congress that can best be described as a ‘hot bag of crazy’. It cuts taxes to the bone while maintaining a great deal of spending, but claims it is deficit-neutral because is assumes US growth will be 3% for the foreseeable future. 538 lay out the problems with this assumption, but to put it simply: it’s the equivalent of me going to a bodybuilding competition and predicting I’ll win because I’ve assumed a six-pack, huge biceps and good teeth. The problem is US productivity has gone stagnant, so growth isn’t likely to swing upwards any time soon (so much for the robots). NPR report on the lack of evidence for the march of the robots here (transcript).

3.       You’ve all been reading this for long enough that I don’t have to sell a Michael Clemens blog on migration, but this one is particularly good for economists, as it gets right into the data on the Mariel boatlift, and explains why Borjas’ recent paper arguing that it reduced wages is wrong. Just in case you need more evidence, David Roodman, one of the most careful researchers in the world, also digs into the data and agrees with Michael.

4.       This rendered me speechless for a while. Paul Romer causes a stir at the Bank with what some might term a tyrannical approach to the English language – so much of a stir that he may have been ‘moved sideways’. I like parsimony in writing (well, excepting the links, which is my opportunity to drone on to a captive audience), but this does seem a little extreme. Romer’s side of it, with the not-at-all-hysterical title ‘Paul Romer slaughters kittens’ is here. As an aside, measuring the frequency of the use of the word ‘and’ is only a good indicator of wooliness as long as people don’t know it’s being used as an indicator. And and and and and and and and and and and and. And.

5.       A nice summary by Duncan Green of a new research programme into state authority in fragile places, which he will be part of. Looks fascinating.

6.       Is three weeks in a row of Lant Pritchett too much? Obviously not, even though a lot of this has come up in previous links. This is Lant on Russ Roberts’ EconoTalk podcast talking kinky chickens, development and the role of aid and what’s wrong with how we think about poverty (hint: a lot). It’s been recommended to me as a good thing to listen to while doing the ironing.

7.       And lastly, it’s been a pretty stressful week, so I think we all deserve a few photos of hamsters on the run and meerkats doing calisthenics.

 Have a great weekend, everyone! I’m on leave from Friday next week, so I’ll send the links out on Thursday night and that’s your lot till mid-June.

 R

Hi all,

I used to open these emails with asides about the cricket and weather (quiet, and terrible today), but recently it just seems to be obituaries and rants. 2016’s Final Destination-like run through my favourite musicians has apparently extended into 2017. There was a point (and not too long ago) when I owned virtually every song Chris Cornell appeared on, from the mega-hits to the relatively obscure. Of the 25 most listened-to songs on my iPod, two are from his side projects – both among my favourite songs. Here’s a lovely tribute on NPR. Depression sucks.

1.       I want to cheer up immediately, so I’m going to mock some research now. In a candidate for the Stating the Bleeding Obvious Hall of Fame, researchers have spent actual money surveying students to ask them if they like prefer ‘agreeable, open and reliable’ lecturers to those who are ‘disagreeable, closed-off and unreliable’. Incredibly, they’ve discovered that students express a preference for professors whom they can talk to, who aren’t assholes and who don’t randomly miss lectures and fail to mark work. Bravo guys. I look forward to the follow up study, in which they ask people if they would prefer to be kicked hard in the nether regions or given a cash grant.

2.       I love Excel so much I want to make a version of Jerry Maguire in which the Renee Zellweger character tearfully tells a spreadsheet (played by Bryan Cranston) “You had me at =COLLAR($B$12,C3/D3,$B$13)”. So when I discovered that Planet Money did a show about the creation and use of Excel (transcript), I did a small dance of joy and read it gleefully. Spreadsheets used to be done by hand. Imagine that! Their invention has completely revolutionised our ability to ask speculative questions of data – not always a good thing, mind. Apparently, there is an annual Excel Geek-Off in which the best Excel programmers in the world compete to build models. DFID should send Nick Lea and frame the golden keyboard he inevitably wins.

3.       This is one of the best things I’ve read all week – a VoxEU summary of superb research that takes the insight Nick Bloom had in Firming Up Inequality, that most inequality growth has been between firms, and not within them (i.e. inequality has grown more based on who you work for than on your position in the hierarchy) and investigates how this relates to productivity, and which firms are driving the effect. It’s superb all the way through and has substantial policy implications. Related, and also from VoxEU, Branko Milanovic on how we should tackle inequality if Picketty is right and it’s primarily because returns to capital are greater than returns to labour.

4.       Another superb Lant Pritchett piece, this time about how China used just the right mix of prescription and freedom for its bureaucrats and officials to empower them to find ways of achieving rapid growth – and with it poverty reduction.

5.       A couple of weeks ago I made an attempt at explaining William Baumol’s cost disease theory. Dietrich Vollrath does the same here, much better than I did. The key point he makes is this: “Baumol’s cost disease is a result of incredible affluence.” If you’re lucky enough to have an engine of growth that pushes up the pay for the thing that most other people do, count your blessings. This is exactly what is missing in most poor countries, but I don’t think anyone would rather live in Somalia than the US just because a haircut might be cheaper.

6.       Messing with markets leads to odd arbitrage opportunities and weird outcomes, like a petrochemicals company buying a talking cat app for about a billion dollars. I feel like that sentence would fail the Turing test, and yet I really am human (I think).

7.       Lastly, I do think the Warriors are going to win, because four of the 15 best players in the world are on their team, but never count out LeBron. The man is a human cheat code.

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m still on a high after Martin Wolf’s talk at DFID yesterday. As Nick said, how do we top that – exhume Keynes? It’s only slightly dampened by the fact that just two weeks after I celebrated his longevity Misbah ul-Huq, 103, has finally retired. Worse, his old mucker Younis Khan has gone with him – one of the greatest  batsmen of all time, and almost indisputably the most underrated. So, on to the links (and by the way, if you work for DFID and want to know more about trade, Huw Lewis has started to put together a similar collection of bits and pieces on the topic every week – e-mail him for inclusion).

 1.       Most of the people reading this will already know that asking if aid ‘works’ is basically an incoherent question. Works for what? For whom? Yet it doesn’t stop critics blasting out huge headlines, bereft of fact, logic or humanity. Steven Radelet got a little sick of these headlines and decided to write a superb, balanced piece in Bloomberg. He shows that, if by ‘work’ you mean ‘helps extremely poor people have better lives’, the answer is yes, aid works. But he’s modest in his claims: it doesn’t achieve everything (what does?) and it’s not possible have a perfect record with everything we try (who does?).

2.       Planet Money totally outdo themselves with this fantastic show on India’s demonetisation (transcript) – when Modi basically woke up one morning and said “Morning everyone! All your cash is useless. Enjoy the queues at the bank.” and then dropped the mic. It’s fascinating and moving. It covers the genesis of the policy – a crazy, surprising story; and gives a glimpse of the human cost it imposed.

3.       I get the feeling that Lant gets to use the CGD blog differently to everyone else: every once in a while, he pops up with a bit of a rant with a great title. Being able to read Lant’s rants are one of my favourite things about being literate, so I’m glad they let him do it. He writes here about the problems of doing development research that focuses on specific interventions (for example, paying teachers more), rather than starting from the point of developing a plausible and powerful theory about the thing you want to effect (for example, literacy). It reads as a backhand to the RCT movement, but to me it’s most powerful as a (much-needed) reminder that a good theory matters enormously.

4.       Tyler Cowen interviews Garry Kasparov. It is full of fantastic exchanges. Kasparov has had a much more direct interaction with a robot that was out for his job than anyone else, and he is correspondingly thoughtful about the impact of machines on human labour. His optimistic vision is wonderful: “More intelligent machines … will take over more menial aspects of cognition and will elevate our lives towards curiosity, creativity, beauty, joy…”. Also, Kasparov wrote a book with the most Russian title in history. It’s called Winter is Coming and makes Crime and Punishment sound like one of the Mr. Men series.

5.       Doug Gollin came to DFID a few years ago and presented research about ‘consumption cities’ as opposed to ‘production cities’. I know people who don’t fully buy this distinction (I’m a fan), but it’s now showing up in the media. This very interesting piece on Kinshasa makes basically the same argument. Very much related – The Economist on the barriers Africa will have to overcome in order to industrialise effectively. Investment (in the broadest sense – including investing in systems and people) is at the root of all of it.

6.       I’m not sure I can summarise this, but I encourage people interested in gender and economic development to read it: a status-check of how India’s economic growth patterns have translated (or not) into improvements in gender equality. It’s full of interesting description, though I think it’s lacking in a good set of theories to explain its findings.

7.       Lastly, because there hasn’t been enough frivolity this week – a Chinese music video about reducing the costs of trade, sung by children. And yes, it’s every bit as crazy as it sounds.

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R