The CSAE Blog

Hi all,

2020 is so weird. Normally on a day as hot as this I’d be racing through the links like a drunk running for the urinal, so keen would I be to hit the park with a bottle of something cold and welcoming, but given the latest ONS numbers on prevalence of Covid in the general population I’m going to avoid Clissold Park today. We’re lucky: this will just displace us to the garden, but even that isn’t without risks – it’s the site of a vicious turf war between a British shorthair and a small interloper keen on using the strawberry patch as a potty and destroying what’s left of the vegetable patch. One of the great contradictions of living through the most significant global pandemic in about a century is how parochial it makes our day-to-day concerns: limited to the two or so square miles around us, not even to the next city. Still, there’s always the internet for an insight to the broader world.

1. Of course, sometimes what’s close to home is also what affects the broader world. I promise not to turn the links into the self-promotion weekly, but the loss of DFID has been difficult for all of us who have had – at any point – a deep relationship with the organisation. As outsiders now, Stefan and I have tried to think constructively about the formation of the FCDO, and to chart what a positive vision of the new organisation would be. We’ve written a note, blog and twitter thread thinking about how to chart a positive vision for the new department, making use of all that’s brilliant about DFID and the best of the FCO to make a strategic, impact-focused organisation that really is a force for good in the world. The key point here is that this isn’t a hybrid, it’s not two animals stuck together. It’s a new creature, and the new creature needs a new mind, a new body and a new place in the world. Doing that well is what I’m sure people in both organisations are now turning their skills to. I hope this helps in some small way.
2. Of course, institutional reorganisation is all the rage in the US, too – with the emphasis on rage. For all that those of us following US policing from the comfort of twitter feel outrage, it’s nothing compared to what it must be like for someone who lives it, constantly. Even good statistics can’t give a proper insight into this, but they might help fix it. Unfortunately doing good statistics on policing is extremely difficult; collider bias being a chief culprit. This 538 piece gives a great and clear explanation. Another, equally excellent part of their coverage looks into the very concept of police reform, and argues that the concept may not be coherent: a much deeper reimagining of the institution may be necessary. The idea of defunding the police can be hard to get your head around – but Planet Money have you covered (transcript).
3. On a cheerier note, Martin Wolf’s summer reading list on economics is great: chock full of good new books, and in particular a plug for long-time Links hero Dietz Vollrath’s new book, Fully Grown. A major life goal is to get onto this one day.
4. On the off chance anyone here has the life goal of getting on the links, the two best strategies are to either write a paper analysing Taylor Swift memes and their role in modern life, or write a paper on tariffs that mentions the Smoot-Hawley Act, like this one from VoxEU, since I will take any opportunity at all to link to the greatest piece of pop culture economics of all time*, the econ lesson in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. Anyone? Anyone? The blog is good too, btw.
5. This is one of the best things I’ve read all week: Kaushik Basu on how the pandemic is laying bare the unspoken assumptions of economics, and how our failure to adequately understand the interaction between the economy and social structures, rules and norms that inform behaviour increasingly restricts our ability to understand important problems. I feel the trend in economics, at least among the most interesting thinkers, is increasingly moving into understanding properly the kind of systemic issues Kaushik talks about here.
6. Last week I praised how brilliantly Markus Goldstein explains economics. Of course, I should have pointed out that the entire Development Impact crew have this skill: Florence Kondylis and John Loeser have another brilliant blog here. I really admire their ability to clearly explain technical issues.
7. Finally, some summer fun. I have no idea why The Ringer decided to run a piece that exposes the absolute insanity of the classic 1997 shoot-‘em-up Face/Off by imagining Sean Archer asking a newspaper-style career advice column how to respond when your boss asks you to undergo an experimental face transplantation so you can infiltrate the terrorist underworld, but now that they’ve done it, I realise my life was incomplete until they did so. Ditto their rundown of the 100 greatest Rick Rubin-affiliated albums, which has the correct number 1 (Johnny Cash, obviously) but seriously underrates Toxicity (Chop Suey is still the only song I’ve ever seen make an entire pub headbang). And if Armenian-inflected heavy metal isn’t your jam, here – always – is Baloji.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I’ve only ever cancelled the links just because I was in a foul mood once, on Friday 24 June, 2016 (if you live in the UK, you won’t need google to remember the headlines that day). Today, almost exactly four years later, I was considering doing the same but I’ve thought better of it. I’m not going to go through the five stages of grief here: rather, I’m just going to hold on to two for the next few months: anger and acceptance, simultaneously. The anger is self-explanatory – DFID is a brilliant organisation, one which exemplifies the qualities of a mission-driven bureaucracy where people live the work they do and care deeply about getting it right. It became so because its mission was clearly articulated, inspiring and genuine: working in the department meant arguing with people over what the right thing to do was. During my days at DFID I had many, many conversations with angry, frustrated colleagues, furious because someone else wanted to do what they saw as the wrong thing. These weren’t “someone disagrees with me” conversations, but “we’re going to get this wrong, and that’s completely unacceptable” conversations. An organisation that achieves a culture like that discards it at its peril. It’s the kind of culture that contains within itself a constant drive to improve and learn, to excel. It can’t simply be recreated by putting nice words on the new letterhead; it has to be lived. People self-select into organisations, choosing to work where they both get paid and appreciated and contribute to something that they believe in. That’s the anger. The acceptance, though, is that the change is now coming, and the future has to be something better than simply sewing together DFID and the FCO. What came before was not a political equilibrium, which led to many compromises and fudges. The chance to shape a new organisation into one that both does good and is a political equilibrium can’t be missed. I’ll write something about this next week, but the main point is that the mission driven bureaucrats, on both sides of the merger, still have agency and can use it for good.

1. That was a long intro, and I am still pretty angry, so just to cool off: a man very reluctantly wading into a pond. Watch to see why, it is joy.  
2. As long as I’ve studied or worked in development (which is now more than half my life), agricultural productivity has been something of a puzzle; it’s one of those areas where every advance seems to directly set the seeds for new ones. VoxDev have a nice write up of work that looks at the effect of using multiple survey methods to improve the accuracy of productivity estimates for smallholders; long story short, measurement error is substantial, and can be meaningfully narrowed, with real implications for policy.
3. In a similar vein, Markus Goldstein summarises a new paper by Lucia Diaz-Martin and co-authors on what women’s groups actually achieve on a range of different metrics. What I love about these blogs Markus does is that they basically teach you how to read a paper well: you learn not just about the paper he’s read, but also from what details he picks up, and how he presents the information. There is still a lot we’re learning about how to do development well; and I hope the capacity to keep doing this (and funding this kind of thing) is one that we protect.
4. In non-DFID news, the world out there is still pretty terrible; and on Juneteenth, it seems appropriate to highlight the failings of the economics discipline on race. Ben Casselman has been covering this for the NYT for a while and his latest piece makes for sobering reading, again. Econ is lousy with insider networks and petty exclusionary politics, which makes life doubly hard for those from outside the pre-existing networks, be they race, class, institution or gender-based. And they may be self-perpetuating: a new paper finds big effects from having a paper tweeted by an influential professor. Matt Collin’s twitter thread digs in (and yes, the effect size is only two citations, but for many academics that’s a really big effect!).
5. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that 2020 has completely sucked: between the global pandemic, mass social unrest, imbeciles defending statues of slavers and the pause in the NBA season, you’d imagine all the major economic indicators are doing the statistical equivalent of the scared Bruce Lee gif. But nope: the stock market’s not exactly been chill, but it’s definitely got a lit cigar and a glass of scotch right now. Planet Money run through some of the theories, including the ‘perfect storm of stupid’ theory, which is pretty much my meta-theory for 2020.
6. More from our ‘the whole world sucks’ department: another paper to add to the growing pile of Coronavirus-is-making-gender-inequality-worse research; Anne Case and Angus Deaton on how the Coronavirus is hitting those who most suffered from deaths of despair particularly hard; and a behavioural scientist on how she fell prey to the very biases she studied.
7. One for the stats geeks: I know he’s a bit of a spanner sometimes, but I found this piece by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the uselessness of single-point estimates in a pandemic very good.
8. I’m struggling to find stuff that put me in a good mood this week. I published my first blog at CGD (on how to improve decision-making under extreme uncertainty), which was fun. And I’ve discovered that AI cannot distinguish between a lung infected with coronavirus and a cat – though I suppose this is technically bad news. So to cheer us all up, let’s instead turn to Baloji.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

What a week it’s been. It’s been quite odd to hear public figures complain that protests against symbols and statues associated with racism and oppression are a threat to the learning or protection of history; do they propose the Parthenon marbles be brought back to Athens and replaced? That we demolish all the buildings and religious monuments built over old ones? Part of the story of history is the toppling of old icons. The British Museum houses a head of Augustus, one of the most spectacular objects in the collection. If you look very carefully, you can see sand embedded in the bronze. That sand tells a story: of the Sudanese Queen Candace, blind in one eye, who led her army into Egypt and captured a number of Roman towns and forts, one of which was home to a celebrated statue of the Emperor. She punctuated her campaign by building a temple at Meroe, where under the stairs leading into it she buried the decapitated head of her rival’s statue, so that all who came to celebrate her victory would literally trample him into the dust. That is history. And it would make me extremely happy if a future historian fished from the harbour a waterlogged and rusted bronze of a long-dead slaver and learnt the depth of the contempt with which people in 2020 held those of his ilk.

1. Speaking of blind in one eye, there has been a great deal of scrutiny of race in the economics profession this week. Those of you who have read these links for a while will know that I’ve got a very low opinion of the diversity of the economics profession, and the costs this imposes on our discipline’s ability to speak to matters of great social importance. Two really striking examples of that this week: first, Planet Money cover the extreme difficulties Lisa Cook endured in publishing her paper on the long term behavioural and economic effects of lynchings on black Americans (transcript). Apparently, reviewers considered the topic too niche to have broader significance. Those reviewers need to look around them; violent exclusion is a fact of life in many parts of the world. Secondly, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman points out the scarcity of black academic voices in coverage of issues that disproportionately affect minority groups (often black).
2. I don’t just want to dump on academia all the time (flawed, yes; irredeemable, no), so here’s a great set of comments on a blog by Andrew Gelman, on what the best scientific papers ever written are (read and enjoy the papers, but also be struck by how monocultural the suggestions are – including the one I make next). His criteria are that they should be important, fun to read and thought provoking. My candidate is a largely forgotten paper: Herbert Simon, writing in 1978, about Rationality as a Process. What makes this brilliant? First, it’s a joy to read (it was originally a speech), written clearly, with a few personal touches and clarity of every concept discussed. Second, it both looks right back into the history of economics and recognises the importance of contemporary results (he cites Kahneman and Tversky). And thirdly, the issues he raises are still relevant for economics – indeed Nobels have been won for investigating them.
3. A really good blog by Samik Adhikari from the World Bank about the importance – and neglect – of the effect of Covid-19 on remittances from internal migrants. I know Mushfiq Mobarek is doing (excellent, of course) work on this in Nepal, but the blog is right to highlight that internal migrants are both much more numerous than international migrants and much less apparent in the data.
4. Does migration make people turn inwards, and away from social protection and redistribution? Some studies have suggested that it may do in the short run (indeed, in one of the late Alberto Alesina’s more depressing results, he and co-authors found that even *thinking* about migrants reduced support for redistribution). New work by Paola Giuliano and Marco Tabellini offers some hope, and finds that in the longer term, migrants from places where social protection is more widespread and generous may seed more redistributive beliefs.
5. Dani Rodrik and Stefanie Stantcheva argue that the post-pandemic social contract should be structured around a comprehensive understanding of the full, extended, universe of externalities arising from production, including those embodied by ‘bad’ jobs.
6. NPR had a good week this week – covering the appalling influence of police unions in the US (seriously, how many locally terrible equilibria are there in the US institutional structure: the Second Amendment, tipping, police armed like a murderous Inspector Gadget…?); the history of vaccinations; and the difficulties of predicting the path of the Coronavirus in Africa (which others at CGD have just made a novel contribution to).  
7. Finally, we all need some good news (and it’s not coming from cricket, where Darren Sammy has discovered the casual racism endemic in the subcontinent and – rightly – blown a gasket at his ex-teammates); so let’s instead marvel at the transformation Nikola Jokic has made from adorable manatee to swole giant in skinny jeans – just in time for the playoffs. If that doesn’t cheer you up, The Ringer has you covered, with a deep dive into the iconography of Indiana Jones’ hat. And if it’s still not your bag, do what I’m going to do: spend the evening investigating wine pairings for all the different chicken wings sauces there are.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I’ve been dreading writing the intro to these links all week. How on earth do I come up with something mildly amusing and facetious when all week the news on the front pages, the videos and stories on my twitter and the garbage being spewed by (some) people in positions of authority has been so profoundly depressing – and enraging? I’m not going to pretend I have anything helpful to add to what’s going on in the US, where one-third of people killed by strangers are killed by the police, and where just 6% of white police officers believe changes are needed for black people to have equal rights. Instead, let me repeat something I said about race and recruitment in the UK in a meeting I had while I was still a civil servant. I think most people understand the world in part by using simplified ‘mental models’ as shorthand for complexity. If they think ‘economist’ they have a mental model of what an economist looks like, behaves like, speaks like. Even if these models are only lightly held, they represent a hurdle for those that don’t fit them, and in a world where competition for jobs is fierce, this matters. As an economist, one thing I’ve learnt is that small frictions can have big effects.

1. Economics has more than its fair share of counterintuitive concepts. I recall a friend of mine, one of the smartest people I know, sheepishly admitting that they didn’t understand how the gains from trade worked. I had to reassure him that this was because no-one gets comparative advantage without studying it (damn you, David Ricardo!) One of the best things about Planet Money is how well they explain basic economics for non-economists, and I loved this podcast, in which they answer questions like ‘where does the money go when people stop spending?’ without ever needing to use such arcania as ‘velocity of circulation’ (transcript).
2. On the other hand, sometimes economics really is completely intuitive. Anna Stansbury and Laurence Summers look at the declining share of national income accruing to labour in the US and come to the conclusion that many, many non-economists would have leapt at: it’s because of declining worker bargaining power. The whole piece is worth reading, particularly the conclusion that there is no reason to be fatalistic about the distribution of market income; the policy prescription is fairly obvious.
3. This is a great write-up of a new paper by Emma Riley looking at the effect of using mobile money to provide finance to female entrepreneurs. In previous studies, finance provided to female entrepreneurs has had much less effect on their profitability, but this paper finds substantial effects, in part because disbursing money this way gives women more control over the use of the funds. Related: Emma also has new results (with Mahreen Mahmud) that investigate the effects of Covid lockdowns on incomes and consumption in Uganda. Spoiler: they’ve been bad.
4. There’s absolutely no need to dunk on economics’ track record in forecasting again here: it’s already taken more hits than Cool Hand Luke. But this piece by Branko Milanovic is really good: it breaks down the various kinds of uncertainty that are particularly problematic for attempts to forecast the economic recovery from Covid19. Related: Tim Harford on the asymmetric impacts of the recession and how some sectors and firms may never bounce back, while others will change substantially.
5. As I said last week, I’m not going to use this blog to round-up of all the great CGD writing every week – that job does is done elsewhere. But I really liked this piece by Scott Morris, Clemence Landers and Alysha Gardner, which considers four scenarios for the future composition of IDA allocations. Of their four plausible scenarios three see a substantial increase in the grant component of IDA allocations – a good thing, but one that might require a few gymnastics to finance.
6. More Tim Harford, proposing that you do stuff as early as possible, rather than at the last possible minute. As you have no doubt inferred from the fact that this e-mail is getting to you some time after six pm on a Friday evening, I am most definitely on his side here.
7. This week I have discovered how I’m going to bankrupt myself: it’s called Cameo and it’s the most ridiculous and brilliant thing ever. Ever wanted to send your enemies a demotivational message from The Million Dollar Man, Ted DiBiase? It’s yours for 60 quid! Do you want to append a video of Samir screaming ‘This is a suck!’ to your latest referee report, followed up with a pithy suggestion for a new robustness test? Sold for thirty pounds! Wee-Bey’s realisation gif? Recreated for a cool £50! On the off chance you don’t want to spend your life savings buying videos of Bruce Buffer announcing your entry into your Zoom meetings (a mere £250 a pop), please distract yourself with Jean-Ralphio.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R  

Hi all,

Better late than never: I’ve finally got my machine sufficiently set up to send the links out from its new home! Before we dive into this weeks’ geek-out, a quick note. I could very easily fill the links with CGD content every week, especially during these Covid-relentless times, given the amount of great stuff we’re producing here. I’m going to resist that temptation, and will continue to use this as a platform to fire off rants and indulge whatever niche interests happen to have me that day. Besides, there’s already a way to get access to everything CGD put out: you can subscribe to CGD’s weekly newsletter as well as its COVID-19 work and event invitations at this link.

And now the real introduction, one which in the absence of any new basketball or cricket to tear my hair out over (as Michael said when I joined: CGD does not take institutional positions on cricket, so its lucky I’ve got a ‘views my own’ disclaimer on twitter), defaults to less happy news. This week, economics lost two giants in the field, Oliver Williamson and Alberto Alesina. Williamson in particular is a foundational intellectual influence for me, about one-third of my citations manager database, and his obit in the NYT gives a good indication as to why (and for a bonus, one of my favourite of his papers). Alesina was a political economist (in the way you might say Magic Johnson was a basketball player), and one of the cornerstones of the field, but it’s also striking how many of the tributes to him are about him personally – as a colleague, friend or mentor, as in these reflections at VoxEU.

1. While I’ve got everyone depressed, let me pile it on. Jishnu Das and co-authors have released a working paper with distressing relevance to the Coronapocaplypse: students whose education was interrupted by the devastating 2005 earthquake in Pakistan suffered deep, lasting and inequality-enhancing effects on schooling outcomes. On average, these students were set back by 1.5-2 years of schooling, but the effect seems to be ameliorated among those with more educated mothers; this despite substantial financial assistance to reduce the impact of the earthquake (blog here, full paper here). Stefan Dercon suggests three ways in which policy now can try and avoid this playing out all over again (in many more places) as a result of Covid: keeping learning going wherever possible, investing now in remedial support for later which (Abhijeet Singh approves); and looking now for which models of digital learning can work in resource-constrained settings.
2. If you’ve been following the news out of Hong Kong, you’ll already be in a foul mood this week, as China’s grip over the freedoms nominally enshrined in its Basic Law slowly turns them to dust. This has sparked a few calls for more liberal visa regimes for Hong Kongers, something that I’m obviously in favour of. However, there’s a second strain of thinking here, which has been to essentially argue that *all of Hong Kong* can relocate, which seems to miss something fundamental. The global stock of migrants is tiny: 3% of the human population. Yes, partly because there are all sorts of crazy restrictions that bar people from crossing borders when it would clearly be a win all around. But in large part it’s also because most people don’t want to move; more migration is both obviously a good thing and not enough at the same time. People may be ‘irrationally’ attached to home, but if you care about improving human welfare the answer is to let people move and make it better to stay, both.
3. Trying to pick the mood up a bit (it’s really not that easy, everybody on the internet seemed to be on a massive downer this week), Tim Harford has a great piece on why a strictly policed lockdown may not be necessary at all – because most of us are quite good, most of the time, at not being a d*ckhead. Yes, there may be prominent exceptions testing their eyesight by William Telling their kids, but most of us don’t need a great deal of encouragement to consider the lives of others. Of course, he doesn’t have to be much wrong for disaster to strike.
4. While we’re at least trying to be positive, Planet Money have a good show on three big ideas to fight the virus: one I’ve spoken about a lot, going big on vaccines (as Alex Tabarrok correctly puts it, every stock is a vaccine stock, which also neatly explains why it cannot be left to the market); the second is kind of already happening in the UK, Claudia Sahm’s suggestion that we turn Coronavirus payouts into an automatic stabilizer (actually, the key aspect which we have not adopted, is linking the payments to macroeconomic indicators); and the third is the prospect of quarantining the entire NBA and its support staff to let the league roll again. Clearly, the net welfare gain from not wasting this historically brilliant age-35 season from LeBron James is similar in magnitude to that of a vaccine. Make it happen! (Transcript).
5. Speaking of basketball, the latest in the Hot Hand saga is upon us. A new paper, which as far as I can tell, adjusts for the incredibly subtle statistical bias that ruined previous attempts to quantify it, and… it kills the hot hand again. Dadgummit. Whatever the numbers say, we’ll always have Reggie.
6. Not to end on too much of a downer, but Richard Baldwin suggests that hysteresis effects from Covid may well dramatically slow the economic recovery (he’s not alone). Mention of hysteresis is all the encouragement I need to link to one of my favourite macro papers ever: Dixit on Investment and Hysteresis, 1992.
7. Lastly, rest assured, my new home does not prevent me from fully exploring the web for the marginalia none of us can survive without. My discovery of the week is that John Steinbeck’s dog literally ate his homework once. The twist is that his homework was probably a bit better than yours. It was Of Mice and Men, and he had to rewrite it. Can you imagine his publisher listening to that excuse? Though if this week has taught me anything, some bosses will believe even the most outlandish lies.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

So, these are the last links I’ll send from DFID, before I start at the Center for Global Development next week. I made a spectacularly inarticulate speech at my virtual leaving do on Wednesday, luckily not recorded for posterity; it was really difficult to find the right words to express my appreciation of the last decade or so here. It still is. But I’ll make a brief attempt in this intro. I had an amazing time here for three main reasons: firstly, what we do matters; DFID advisers have influence on what happens in developing countries, what research gets undertaken and how much is spent on matters of fundamental importance for human welfare. Getting it right, or better, is a big deal. Secondly, DFID is full of amazing people: there are so many people here who know things I don’t know and think about them in ways that do not occur to me, and there are many opportunities to learn from each other and to swap ideas. A friend today said he was glad I bang the drum for cognitive diversity, and I’m happy to do so, because I really believe in its value. And thirdly, there are always new problems to tackle. Describing something as a ‘treadmill’ is meant to be an insult, but the challenge to keep learning and keep moving on to new problems made me happy. Not all treadmills are boring.

Thanks to the many of you who have already signed up to receive these from CGD. I won’t be checking this e-mail any more, so if you haven’t done so yet, please e-mail me at rdissanayake@cgdev.org or ranil.dissanayake@bsg.ox.ac.uk (both cc’d). For GDPR reasons, I won’t be taking other e-mail addresses across with me. And now, the links:

1. I wrote a note about being an adviser in DFID this week as well, an one of the things I emphasised was how important it is to keep in touch with the data – keeping track of it, understanding what it really means, and getting to grips with how it’s collected. This is not a nerdy point about numbers, a way to cultivate a technical view of the world. Data matters because it records human experience, and this absolutely brilliant piece from Maggie Koerth illustrates this better than I ever could. She tells the story of a man named Bob Duffy, who died recently. She describes his life, his death (which can be distressing, so please be aware), and his entry into the mortality statistics in the US. She looks at the forms his doctors had to fill out, the decisions they made and the impact this had on how his death was counted – excluded from the count of Covid deaths, despite the likelihood of this being the cause. It is amazing data journalism, and captures perfectly why data matters, and why it matters that we understand its genesis. Related: data is one thing; organising and presenting data another. Andrew Gelman has found the worst Coronagraph of them all, and it will test your faith in humanity.
2. The Economist on Leonard Wantchekon and the African School of Economics he founded, highly recommended. It also dips into his extraordinary life, including his imprisonment and escape; and considers how the questions he asks are shaped by his heritage (he is from Benin).
3. George Akerlof has a habit of doing the kind of economics that fundamentally revises what economics is, the consequence of a mind that seems to home in on extremely big questions. This fantastic interview (and podcast) covers a lot of very important terrain, but particularly focuses on the role of collective identity on the structure and behaviour of economies and economic agents. He talks about the role of teams, groups and the narratives they build in achieving progress, and how economics has failed to adequately capture this. And not just economics, countries. As he says, “… the fundamental problem here is … that the American people have lost the concept that we are a we.” And if you need more eminent economists in conversation, here’s Josh Angrist, laying the smack down on peer effects.
4. People are terrible, French electoral politics edition: A very clever paper looks at French local elections and finds that for right-wing parties, having a woman listed first on the ballot causes them to lose votes (all ballots require one male and one female candidate from each party, listed alphabetically).
5. This week in rainfall instruments for everything: a new paper uses rainfall to investigate adherence to lockdowns, and their effect on the spread of Coronavirus. In 20 years time, when people are still using rainfall as an IV for institutions or something, I foresee seminar participants raising their hands to ask how the dealt with the effect of Coronavirus, which as we all know is also instrumented for by rainfall…
6. This week in dip-my-priors-in-honey-and-feed-them-to-me-on-a-thick-slice-of-cake: a really cool experiment in Pakistan finds that under conditions of weak performance (and the possibility of corruption) greater autonomy, rather than greater oversight, may be the best way of generating improvements, a finding that will not doubt chime with Dans Rogger and Honig, who both have research pointing in this direction.
7. There is so much glorious marginalia this week that I’m not even going to attempt a theme, it all deserves to be CLICKED RIGHT NOW: first, Senator Ben Sasse has given the most hilariously terrible high school graduation speech in history; as bad speeches go, this beats even Michael Jordan’s historically petty hall of fame induction speech. Staying on odd features of American politics, this thread collects the most outrageous facial hair in American political history (only facial hair, Donald Trump’s attempt at the Johnny Bravo look doesn’t qualify). And in sports news (irritating both the anti-cricket and anti-basketball camps at my leaving do), FiveThirtyEight have dipped their toes in the world of cricket, with a piece on the prospect that Coronavirus will force the retirement of India’s greatest captain (it’s actually second greatest, MSD < Ganguly). And since The Last Dance dissed him as ‘Gary Payton’s dunking partner’, a reminder that prime Shawn Kemp was a serious problem.

I may need a week or so to get to grips with CGD IT, so there may not be a links next week, but I will do my best.

Have a great weekend, everyone – and an enormous thanks to everyone in DFID!

R

Hi all,

This week, Jerry Stiller died, 8 short of his century. If you don’t immediately have a mental image (and inimitable voice) in your head, you probably aren’t a Seinfeld fan. He played Frank Costanza, one of the all time great characters on TV, a man made of memes, anger and irrational self-confidence. Fortunately, The Ringer has collected his greatest moments, including the best outtakes I’ve ever seen: Stiller making Elaine burst out laughing time after time with his pitch-perfect delivery of the otherwise mundane line “what the hell does that mean?”.

1. While, like many others, I increasingly find myself completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of writing about Covid and would love nothing more than to ignore it altogether, it just isn’t feasible yet. Luckily, there are still a few really good pieces each week, and I’ll try and space them out through the links. First up, some links on the numbers: a great piece from Unherd explains Simpson’s paradox, which the R-number in England has been nicely demonstrating. Simpson’s paradox arises when we care about a single indicator which operates in two (or more) distinct populations of different sizes. It is possible for the indicator to move in one direction in all of these populations, but in the other direction overall – to great confusion. Secondly, yet another good 538 piece uses modelling to explain how herd immunity is reached under different circumstances, complete with a handy and scary simulator explaining what that means for cases and deaths. And lastly, Phil Price looks into the years of life lost to Coronavirus in the US.
2. There’s been a lot of chatter about how we (eventually) repurpose all of the effort spent on the Covid response to climate change down the road; Tim Harford has a novel take on this. He argues that rather than trying to actively incentivise accelerations, we should remove all the roadblocks that slow down progress. This has a real analogue to the Covid response, too: regulations made for non-emergency situations may need to be temporarily rethought during emergencies, when the relative costs and benefits of slow deliberation and rapid action have shifted.
3. I liked this, a paper looking at the impact of tax audits on the flow of finance to firms in Ecuador. What I like about this is the mechanism: the argument is that by getting audited, firms are (involuntarily) signalling their soundness, and this signal makes them more attractive to banks and lenders. The take-away isn’t that we audit everyone (too costly) or that these firms in particular need support (they’re all big already), but that the mechanism – credible third party signals of long-term sustainability – is valuable elsewhere in the economy if we can find a cheap way of activating it.
4. This week in big ideas: Paul Krugman calls for a permanent fiscal stimulus in the US (possibly overegging it here, but I could definitely be convinced; I have much more sympathy for this take than the ‘more austerity to pay for it’ take); a VoxDev write-up of research suggesting that we measure ‘life-years lost’ in addition to ‘years in poverty’ as a metric for development (less convinced: we have enough bad data, and it largely lines up with headcount poverty); and Penny Goldberg argues that the correct response to the Covid stress on global value chains is to double down and build redundancy in to the system. Third time’s a charm: I am 100% on board with that one.
5. Two more Covid pieces: Bill Maloney and Temel Taskin argue that mobility declines and distancing are only partially accounted for by lockdowns, and that the majority of the effect has been self-imposed by individuals who have decided that they wish to minimise potential exposure to the virus. Eyeballing the data, it looks to me that lockdowns are having a pretty big effect in most places; and they seem to show that this is particularly the case in LICs. And the CGD Education team has a good look at what damage education budgets can expect to suffer as a result of the coming recession.
6. A bit of data nerding – something that every economist should indulge in regularly – from Berk Ozler. He looks at the data about how data was entered into surveys he’s run, and what use it could be to a researcher.
7. So much good distraction material this week: do you want to lose half an hour of your day, immediately? If so, check out This Word Does Not Exist. It’s glorious: a machine learning algorithm that creates, defines and coins a usage for new words. Lest I decipulate, let’s move on to the next link: The Ringer mourns the delayed release of Top Gun: Maverick by ranking every call sign from the original Top Gun (and yes, they massively underrate Merlin, wtf). And best of all, a good way to go to the weekend: LitHub on the origins of Sesame Street as a tool to reduce inequality.

Serenity now, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I normally start these links with chat about the cricket or some other frivolity, but today’s start with a bit of personal news: at the end of the month, after a brilliant near-decade here, I’m leaving DFID to join the Center for Global Development. I’ve had an amazing time working here, and have learnt a huge amount from people all across the organisation. I aim to keep the links going from CGD, though, as writing these has always been both great fun and a really good way of keeping my horizons broad. I learn something every week not just from the reading I do to write these, but also from the attempt to summarise and talk about the things I’m recommending. So if you want to keep receiving these e-mails after I move over to CGD, please reply to this e-mail, or write me at r-dissanayake@dfid.gov.uk to let me know, even with an empty e-mail titled ‘Keep me signed up’. I’m happy to send them to institutional or personal e-mails, so let me know which e-mail address you’d like me to use. There will be 2 more links e-mails after this one, so I’ll keep reminding you till then. And now, to the links.

1. As seems inevitable these days, the links will have a strong flavour of Coronavirus this week (though thankfully, not bleach). And this op-ed by Michael Kremer and co-authors is a good place to start: arguing that given the sheer scale of the costs of the virus and the response to it, there is virtually no possibility of over-spending on actions that might accelerate the widespread availability of a vaccine to those people who most need it. The team have done a lot of work looking at what specific bottlenecks there are to overcome, what specific prices and incentives are needed and make a convincing case; it’s on policymakers and politicians now to listen. Further coverage from Bloomberg here.
2. Last week I gave a training course in how to use academic research evidence in designing development programmes. A lot of the talk focused on how you translate the things that a research paper reports (and omits) into a practical plan. One of my key bits of advice was to follow and read smart people who make a habit of doing careful deep-dives into the literature and can communicate the nuances of research effectively – especially those who do research themselves and thus know what to look for. This piece by David McKenzie on peer learning among small and medium-sized firms is an exemplar par excellence of this: he digs into different approaches, discusses the differences between the intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated estimates, uses his own knowledge to discuss sample sizes and effect sizes… it’s just a masterclass in using research to learn something practical.
3. Tennyson made the case for human interdependence rather beautifully in Ulysses: “I am a part of all that I have met”. Diane Coyle makes the same point with economics in an excellent Project Syndicate column. This is not a weakness. As she says, “Underlying it is the steady shift from an economy in which the classical assumptions of diminishing or constant returns to scale hold true to one in which there are increasing returns to scale almost everywhere.” This is what makes modern life so much easier and more varied than what came before. Related: Tim Harford wants our economy to fall off the wall, but bounce back like Jackie Chan, rather than shatter like Humpty Dumpty. More economics should be expressed in Jackie metaphors.
4. Sticking to Covid for a moment: Emily Oster is one of my favourite economists because she uses her superpowers (high patience for reading research, carefulness to the point of pedantry, and an ability to discuss trade-offs without hysteria) to help the general public and improve their decision making. Expecting Better is a masterclass of economic writing for this reason; she’s now turning her brilliant hand to Covid-19 and deserves a wide audience. Another really good piece on Covid, which has already been misinterpreted by some, is this work by Mushfiq Mobarek and Zachary Barnett-Howell on the distribution of returns to lockdown. Please note, they are not saying that poor lives are worth less; but that in poor countries the gains from lockdowns come at a greater cost in terms of other ways of improving lives.
5. If I’m talking about distributions, Branko Milanovic cannot be far away: and as usual, he has a take completely unlike any other economist. In this lovely digression of a blog, he looks at what Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina tell us about the distribution of income and social mobility in their respective settings. More on inequality: Jonathan Ostry and co-authors suggest that Covid will be greatly inequality enhancing, very plausible; another VoxEU piece looks at the positive impact of pay transparency on the gender pay gap in Denmark; while this one points out the depressingly predictable fact that women are bearing the brunt of lockdown in terms of productivity among economists.
6. I loved this Planet Money piece on the effect of Covid on two different bookstores in Italy (transcript). A while back I speculated on twitter that firms are learning a lot about their capabilities that they would never have reason to learn in normal times; this will lead to many innovations and behaviours that would otherwise note have happened, and many of these will stick. This story is exactly this in action. Related: when Nick Bloom disagrees with you, question your priors: Bloom and co argue that the Covid shock is skewed in a way that is largely unrelated to productivity and the fate of individual businesses may matter much more than I had previously thought.
7. My first month or two on social media has been eye-opening. It seems to me that it’s about 70% banality, 25% half-formed political rantery, 3% reasoned intellectual debate and about 2% hilarious idiocy. A few links in praise of the idiocy: Lockdown Gin and Juice, the Governator’s yoga routine; a toilet dressed up to look like a smoking frog; the Spanish flu as Sharknado; and one of the greatest Fry & Laurie sketches of them all, revived on Twitter.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

If feels odd these days to focus on any specific loss, given how many people are grieving for either someone specific or just for the sheer number of people passing in such a compressed period of time, but I took Irrfan Khan’s death hard, and I was definitely not the only one. It’s not quite like when Prince died, which felt like a constellation being erased from the sky, but as I said on Twitter, a bit more like losing a distant yet much-loved relative. I liked this LiveMint appreciation of his career very much; and I loved re-reading this interview with him (how well-adjusted and reasonable he sounds) but I can’t recommend enough that you simply watch his movies. A lockdown treat, maybe? Just don’t call it Bollywood.

1. The best thing I read all week was another appreciation of person who died too young, but in this case, he died in 1930. Economists will – or should – know Frank Ramsey’s name, but they may not know his story. Last year I taught a seminar class (partly) about The Ramsey Rule, and in my head, Ramsey was an elderly, staid man in glasses with an accountant’s demeanor; nothing could be further from the truth. Frank Ramsey died at 26, having made pioneering breakthroughs in economics, maths and philosophy and becoming part of the Bloomsbury set. This New Yorker profile (on the occasion of a new biography, which I’ll be ordering) is fantastic; this sentence is glorious: “Although Ramsey didn’t bear grudges, the two men had no contact for four years, except for a distinctly cool exchange of letters in 1927 about the logic of ‘=.’”
2. I can imagine Clemence Landers and co clicking publish on this blog and then immediately closing the door and putting up an umbrella to protect themselves, but it’s very good: they argue that debt relief from IDA (the World Bank’s concessional lending arm) would be counterproductive, reducing the flexibility the Bank has to respond to the crisis.
3. Increasingly, I see the possibility that globalisation will be a  victim of the longer-term response to Covid; not in the sense that it will be unwound completely, but more in that there will be some judicious vandalism to its edifice. Charles Kenny went on Planet Money to make the unambiguous case against this (highly recommended, transcript here), pointing out that our ability to fight disease has been immeasurably strengthened by globalisation. He is not alone: this piece by Anna Stellinger and co-authors also makes clear that protecting global value chains is an important component of protecting global health. And Anne Krueger takes solid aim at Trump’s war on public health, not least his attack on its global institutions.
4. Two more Coronavirus links, before I try change the subject: first, FiveThirtyEight’s brilliant Maggie Koerth writes about what we know about the difference in deadliness of the disease by sex; and second, Andrew Gelman on the updated Imperial College model of the disease and its response to policy actions.
5. On a completely different note, Branko Milanovic on how Marx and Ricardo conceptualised inequality. I don’t think nearly enough people spend nearly enough time learning about the history of economic thought, and I really like that Branko will sometimes just take a random topic and expound on it – it is always a learning experience.
6. And finally, in definitive proof that I have too much time on my hands, my latest discovery: a research project which is trying to build a computer that tells jokes. It is TERRIBLE. The jokes are sub-Christmas cracker, and yet completely addictive. For example: What temperature is a son? Boy-ling point. I feel like these jokes are what Aubrey Plaza is thinking about to keep her face this dead on Parks and Rec. And speaking of Parks: this is old, but it bears repeating – Ron Swanson is a model human being.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

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

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

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R