Hi all,

It’s sometimes a struggle to write an intro to the links. Some weeks, cricket and basketball, plus a brief rundown of the birds landing in my garden get me through the first paragraph. Other weeks there’s an incredibly obvious topic to comment on which given my inability to moderate my opinions, , I nevertheless have to ignore for fear of laying waste to the civil service code. Moving to the economics for fear of an ill-chosen comment:

1. It feels appropriate to start with this piece from Duncan Green’s blog, a rant about the short-sightedness and negative impact of the UK’s labyrinthine visa application procedures. Visiting academics from Africa appear to have been particularly hard-hit; and the examples in the blog are only the tip of an iceberg. I recall that one of the people I’ve invited to speak at DFID in the past declined citing the disutility of applying for a visa here (he eventually came while on a trip for which his visa was handled by another organiser).
2. Raj Chetty has clearly touched a nerve. A number of people have sent me or shared this Vox piece on his new economics course in Harvard, Economics 1152, which upends the traditional theory-first approach to teaching economics in favour of an empirically-based course. Introducing students to the complexity of the real world, measurement and rigour early on in their studies can only be a good thing, but I’m not sure I buy the set-up of the piece, which pits the Chetty course as a disruptor and competitor to traditional introductory economics. The issue isn’t that economists learn theory early on, because good theory is necessary to understand empirical results. It’s that they are taught economics in layers that rarely reveal the nuances and complexity that will be introduced in the next layer or by empirical work. As a result the many students who stop after a few basic courses leave with the impression that economics as a discipline has a simple faith in the market, or that it believes that the world moves according to well-defined and understood rules. It’s why ‘economics’ articles in the newspapers written by journalists with a year of econ from a PPE degree are so uniformly terrible.
3. Nor is empirical economics quite the finished product yet, either. Eszter Czibor and co-authors (including John List) argue that experimental economics still has much to do in order to adequality report on the generalisability and applicability of the evidence they produce. I tend to agree. Part of this is really the responsibility of the reader, who needs to be able to think in a detailed way about the theory of change being tested by an RCT, but many papers reporting on the results of an experiment make this difficult.
4. In the run up to the elections in India, VoxDev ran a series of podcasts about what economics is teaching us about politics in India. Lakshmi Iyer talks about the lack of female politicians here (VoxEU write up here), and Abhijeet Banerjee reports on the results of an experiment providing report cards on politicians here.
5. David Evans and Alexis Le Nestour write about the effect of female teachers on girls’ outcomes in school; they appear decidedly mixed. There seems to be a lot going on here, and I’m not sure how meaningful it is to compare evidence across settings so broadly, but this is definitely worth a read.
6. I’ve read speculation recently that Andy Haldane may be next Governor of the Bank of England. They could do much worse: few public intellectuals in the UK are as thoughtful, and few economists as comfortable handling so broad a range of topics. In this Guardian profile, he talks about the role of civil society in the UK and the consequences of its neglect.
7. Lastly, The Ringer have stoked my outrage with this list of the 25 best high school movies of all time. Where the hell is Pretty in Pink? Why the heck is Carrie so low (did anyone who watched that movie as a kid not have nightmares?) At least they give due props to Kid’n’Play and the greatest haircut of all time.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Even after a week in Hong Kong, I still get culture shock returning to the UK. People complaining about crowds here after I’ve been fighting my way through Causeway Bay at rush hour make me feel like Crocodile Dundee; my four pounds at lunchtime now buys me a soggy disgrace of a sandwich instead of this magnificent bowl; and the phrase “it’s really hot today” means wearing a slightly thinner jumper rather than a slow descent into a puddle of human sweat. Still, there are benefits to being back, including writing the links again, my favourite task of the week even when my RSS feed is an avalanche of geekery. Once more unto the breach:

1. Every once in a while, the stars align and my central interests in life collide to form a supernova of incandescent geekery. It happened when Kirk Goldsberry introduced spatial mapping to the analysis of professional basketball and it is happening again now, as a few economists decide to surf the zeitgeist with articles and books about the economics of the Marvel superheroes. Starting gently, Tim Harford investigates whether the Malthusian-with-an-Infinity-Gauntlet, Thanos actually had a point when he wiped out half of humanity in Infinity War. After all, in Endgame [redacted] tells [redacted] about a pod of whales he saw swimming in the Hudson. Was Thanos right? Was Malthus? Lest you succumb to homicidal mania in pursuit of ecological balance, Tim Harford is here to put you right. Thanos is not right (and while I’m at it, the doughnut is just a nice pair of trousers lacking the suspenders of sound analysis). Planet Money dig deeper. Ever wonder why Jessica Jones has a job, and everyone in Luke Cage’s life complains that they need him to make some money? It’s because they’re producing public goods without the benefit of a taxation system to pay for it. Why doesn’t Superman take over the world? If he can instead defend the institutions that do the hard work of governing properly without doing so, why bother? (Transcript).
2. Why do economists love taking on the frivolous in this fashion? I do it a lot myself, and most of my explanation of economics in teaching takes the form of metaphor and similie. David Evans, himself one of the best communicators in economics, summarises a paper that demonstrates that clarity pays off handsomely in influence. I can hear all the non-academics facepalming now (“really? Did we need research to know that incomprehensible gobbledygook is ignored?”) but the message is important for those of us who do any analysis or research. Explain yourself simply and it’s simple to understand.
3. Meanwhile, always resist the other temptation, to pimp up your finding to make it sound much more than it is. The twitter feed @justsaysinmice digs into sensationalist headlines and points out when the findings are based entirely on trials conducted in mice. Economics needs a version of this, for all the partial equilibrium results trumpeted as solutions to problems like unemployment.
4. Really excellent VoxDev video in which Erick Gong shows results that find that people who are given HIV tests and are surprised to discover they are positive are less likely to take due precautions in future sexual activity. He calls this the ‘nothing left to lose’ effect. I call it the ‘people are effing appalling and maybe Thanos was right’ effect.
5. When is a conditional cash transfer unconditional? When there’s an election round the corner. Eliana La Ferrara drops knowledge, covered in the Economist.
6. Rich parents tend to have rich kids. Part of this effect is simply though inheritance, after which the only skill a rich child has to show is the ability not to fritter away a fortune on wine, women and amateur dramatics. Part of the effect, though, is what this research summarises as nurture: having (most likely) well-educated parents and a stable home life, as well as the various connections a rich parent affords you (one would imagine). This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it should make you even more committed to doing something about inequality.
7. Good news for exports geeks: a VoxDev piece digs into the data on the domestic content of Chinese exports and suggests that its extraordinary growth was at least partly due to bucking the global trend in declining domestic content in exported goods. Unfortunately, it’s not so good on how you replicate this.
8. Lastly, it’s playoff times, a magical time of year when the committed witness 4am buzzer beaters from absurd distances by Dame Lillard in a state of fatigued hallucination. But the best story of the playoffs by far is Giannis Antetokounmpo. Giannis lays a strong claim to being the greatest player in the world now and has a good chance of becoming a champion in the next couple of weeks. He is also a refugee, the son of Nigerian refugees to Greece. He was stateless until one month before he finally joined the NBA, still selling sunglasses on a Greek beach to make money, with his asylum application being processed. He’s now a Greek Olympian and a proper feel-good story.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

I’ve spent much of my week knee-deep in a one-million line Excel spreadsheet which has the power to make my laptop spontaneously collapse and fray my patience until the final, tenuous strand that keeps me tethered to my sanity is inches from collapse. Honestly, despite my nine hour struggle to open the spreadsheet for long enough to update some of the data yesterday, I’ve been grateful for it as it distracts me from both the appalling (goings on in Sri Lanka, how many times does internecine violence need to repeat until it is exhausted? And how many times do I need to link this piece from Tim Harford reminding us not to reward terrorists with our terror, hatred or overreactions); and the amazing: I am going to see Endgame on Sunday and basically I’m only half aware of anything I do or say as 50% of my brain is devoted to breathless anticipation. Let’s distract ourselves with economics.

1. A couple of weeks ago, Planet Money ran a fascinating two-parter on one of the odder episodes in economic history: the close association of a group of economists from the University of Chicago (including, briefly, Milton Friedman) and the Pinochet regime in Chile. You need to listen to both parts (transcript 1, transcript 2), as the first alone does not at all reflect the overall balance of the commentary. It’s quite chilling hearing some of the interviewees so neatly divorce the economic strategy they implemented from the horrific brutality and political repression that it bolstered and in turn bolstered it. As Andy Haldane said a couple of years ago, the best economist is the one with dirty shoes, and you get a sense that some of these ones never got so much as a scuff on theirs. (As a bonus, two more from PM: On the introversion earnings penalty, and working out when – rather than whether – minimum wages do harm).
2. Speaking of dirty shoes, I really enjoyed this set of interviews with the enumerators working for IPA. We spend a lot of our time reading research and thinking about poverty but there are fascinating stories everywhere.
3. I first became familiar with Doug Gollin’s work through his very careful paper on the agricultural productivity deficit in developing countries, which demonstrated that the gap between urban and rural productivity wasn’t so bafflingly large as we had previously thought (which was an enormous puzzle for economists, because it implied correspondingly enormous barriers to movement between sectors). His latest working paper with Chris Udry, which I first saw presented a year or two ago does a similarly careful analysis of productivity differentials across farms, again showing they are not quite so bafflingly large as we thought, with a similar implication for the barriers to land trading. The paper is dated December 2018, but for some reason it only now popped up in my RSS.
4. One of my prized possessions is a copy of the 1969 classic, The Peter Principle, which posits that organisations promote people based on their ability in junior jobs, which is at best uncorrelated with their ability to do more senior jobs. We’ve all seen this: someone who is brilliant at being an analyst becoming a bad manager. It was originally written as a joke, and has never really been proven, though. Recent research suggests that there might be something to it, however, though I wouldn’t lean too heavily on these correlations…
5. I envy Dietrich Vollrath’s students. His fifth post in his series on the deep roots of development, which covers geography, institutions, culture and the like and their effect on long run economic outcomes is a masterclass in clarity of thought and expression. I’m very dubious of much of the ‘deep roots’ literature, not because I don’t think there’s any truth to them, but because they tend to overclaim and oversell. I get the sense that this isn’t too far from Dietz’ position.
6. Branko’s musings are equally brilliant: here he looks at the possibility that growth in the global North may be causally bad for the South through its climate effects. Branko is as sceptical as you will probably be of the econometrics here (it’s Barro all over again) but his discussion is fascinating, linking these ideas to the old literature on dependency theory (something my 18 year old self was convinced of and my 37 year old self just facepalmed over; I think the crossing over happened at around 21).
7. There is more and more literature on the longer term impacts of cash transfers and they seem to be converging on a few key points: that in the longer run, many effects diminish; that certain once-and-for-all changes they induce can have long term benefits; and that even if the long term effects are minimal, the short term effects are far from trivial. Berk Ozler summarises.
8. Finally, in a list with plenty to enrage and amuse, the BBC have tried to pick the 100 stories with the greatest global cultural impact. There are some oddities, which is part of what makes this kind of thing so fun: Howl outranks the Ramayana (how many of your were able to discern the story in Howl, irrespective of how iconic the first lines are). And apparently, climate change is starting to hit the Emperor penguins, so apart from the fact that they’re dressed rather ridiculously, those protesters outside have got a point.

Have a great weekend, everyone! I’m off to Hong Kong soon, so no links for the next two weeks.

R

Hi all,

You know, every once in a while my mood just plummets after spending five minutes reading the news and not just for the obvious reasons. I’m very much a big-picture optimist, in the Max Roser camp of taking the long view to realise how much better things are getting. Every once in a while, though, people  behave like such complete s**ts that even a gregarious optimist like me has no response but a massive face palm and an expletive filled rant at the world. Two examples: the NRA campaigning against a domestic violence bill because they think it’s overkill to deny convicted abusers of their guns (not The Onion); and Danny Rose having had all the joy sucked out of being a professional footballer by the sheer level and frequency of the racist abuse he has to endure. Seriously, even if things are getting better, there’s still a lot of selfish, mean-spirited idiocy in the world. It’s incumbent upon all of us to do something against it.

1. At the CSAE conference, Nick Lea said (to spontaneous applause) that the requirement of every paper to be built around a piece of causally robust econometrics was hampering the discipline. Many of the problems that we should care most about may have no prospect of being ‘solved’ by such approaches, he said . He’s not alone. A number of economists I’ve spoken to have expressed similar concerns; one, a recently-retired (and very brilliant) professor, said he thought what young economists are taught now is orthogonal to what they should care about. David Evans takes up the (measured) defence of regression-based economics, arguing that it is our best way of falsifying hypotheses and therefore being scientific about the accumulation of knowledge; he also talks about modelling as an alternative way of structuring econ papers. I rather suspect that the key part of Nick’s complaint was that we start with the constraint to use econometrics as our falsifying procedure. Instead we should start with the selection of the most important question and then pick the best available falsification, even imperfect.
2. Back in the intro, I mentioned the racist abuse Danny Rose is subject to as a football player. In not-unrelated news, research shows that media outlets are far more likely to report a crime if it’s performed by an ‘outsider’ (in this case an immigrant) than a native-born person. We have a moral responsibility to argue for and promote a more thoughtful, evidenced and compassionate approach to migration, as Michael Clemens and Kate Gough do here, even when the messages aren’t the easiest ones to sell.
3. I’ve often said that one of the best things about 538 is how scrupulously it examines its own performance in forecasting and making predictions. This piece by Nate Silver, looking at thousands of forecasts the site have made is fantastic, demonstrating just how important making probabilistic forecasts is.
4. More economic policy should start with David Bowie. When Bowie was in the midst of his career, he wanted to raise a substantial lump sum to invest in future musical ventures. What he did was sell the rights to a fraction of his future royalties for a defined period of time. The idea has now spread to the education sector, where in some countries, you can be fully funded for university education in exchange for a small percentage of your future earnings, subject to a ceiling. Planet Money has the details (transcript). And since it all started with Bowie, Starman.
5. I really liked this VoxEU piece on zombie firms, something that should be a much bigger topic in developing countries than it is. The idea is that these are firms that can’t actually compete on productivity or cost grounds but do not fail and die either, due to some other advantage they have (in the VoxEU case, it comes from the banking system, but it could easily be political connections). The existence of these firms has knock on effects for economy wide productivity which are not all obvious.
6. Branko Milanovic summarises all the fights Francis Fukuyama tried to pick with mainstream economics in his new book, The Origins of Political Order.
7. Speaking of slapdash economics, I found this via MR: almost all studies about the effects of social media use / screen time are based on fundamentally unsound measurement, so very few of those ridiculous ‘ten extra minutes on facebook makes you 20% more likely to run into a wall’ headlines actually are as rubbish as they sound.
8. Lastly, I’m not really sure how to treat the news that Skillrex can protect you from Malaria: do we now propose prescribing anti-malarials and Wild for the Night on repeat? And if A$AP Rocky is too violent and ridiculous for you, try this: I’ve been listening to 70s soul classics all week, and my goodness they don’t make them like they used to. Stevie Wonder plays Sesame Street and make it feel like Montreux; Marvin Gaye hits on an entire room at once on Soul Train; and David Ruffin sounds like he’s having an exorcism during the chorus of Rainy Night in Georgia.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

Normally as the calendar turns towards Spring, the intros to the links become easier and easier to write: I make some comment about the first rays of sunshine (I took an hour-long walk over my lunch break today and remembered what it was like not to be constricted by a woollen python around my neck to prevent pneumonia), the birds in my garden (today extending to a Jay and a number of duelling Robins) and some comment about the incipient NBA playoffs.  But it’s become harder and harder not to mention the big blue furry monster, tied up as it is (at least in one scenario) with the full turn of the seasons in early April. And that’s not the only sign of change: LeBron will not be in the playoffs this year, after eight consecutive trips to the final, no less; and we’ve lost yet another musical hero. Scott Walker was deeply odd, deeply visionary and wrote one of my favourite pop songs of all time. I’ll try make the rest of the links less depressing, but make no promises.

1. Actually, let’s double down on depressing for a moment, shall we? Planet Money ran a pair of shows (transcript 1, 2) this week about Venezuela, interviewing an economist in Caracas (affiliated with the opposition, it should be noted). The numbers coming out of there are mind-boggling, but also mind-numbing: how do you even think about 10 million per cent inflation? A rate so high that as soon as you change your money into Bolivars (if you’re lucky enough to be paid in dollars), you have to run to the store to avoid prices rising while you shop? Where average weight has fallen by 25 pounds? Even if you think the numbers are juked, even doubled, what’s that – 5 million per cent and 12.5 pounds? I’m reminded again of Matt’s call for the designation of Economic Crimes against Humanity (I’d link it, but it’s being blocked by DFID’s firewall and I don’t want to propagate any viruses. Here’s a related link).
2. Getting more positive: David Evans’s move to the Center for Global Development has not spelled the end for his epic, extraordinary conference reports. Here he summarises what feels like several hundred papers presented at the CSAE Conference in a line or two each. He truly is a phenomenon. He must sweat knowledge.
3. Staying on the geeky side of things, Kathleen Beegle’s post on defining and measuring work should be required reading for all economists of Africa. Knowledge is built on good measurement, but the quality of what we measure in Africa remains substantially below optimal. As an example, depending on how you ask people, measures for productive work among farmers can vary by a factor of four. She explains that the consequences of this depend on what you want to measure, but still. That is remarkable.
4. Going back to CSAE for a moment, one of my favourite papers (from one of my favourite programmes of work) was Dan Rogger’s work with Ravi Somani, looking at the incentives for information acquisition among civil servants in Ethiopia, the implications for their knowledge of the areas they work on, and how you can improve matters. It seems prosaic, but the welfare implications of helping a Government function a little bit better are enormous.
5. My brother-in-law is a historian, and we often discuss China. From both a historical and an economic standpoint it’s completely fascinating: a total basket case just 50 years ago, and now one of the most powerful countries on the planet. We’ve often puzzled over the Cultural Revolution, which is just extraordinary when you think about it: a revolution impelled from the state because its own revolutionary ethos was being diluted. The suffering was extraordinary, and this piece by Alison Booth and Xin Meng demonstrates it has had a lasting impact on trust several generations later. More currently, Wei Xiong points out that the mechanism that has powered China’s recent growth – competition between regional bureaucrats to earn promotion with growth – has also led to the unprecedented stress their financial sector is under.
6. Do we need p-values? Well, I’m definitely not leaving them out of my first paper, but I can absolutely see why researchers are worrying deeply about how we use them, the incentives they set and their unintended consequences.
7. Lastly, I had totally forgotten how awesome 1999 was, but the Ringer is here to remind me, pointing out that both The Matrix and Go were released that year. You know how old these films are? I watched one of them on LASER DISC! Anyway, despite their age, they both induce a giddy excitement when I think about them; I’m in my late thirties and I’m still capable of having an internal argument about whether Neo or Ronna is the cooler character. Neither of these, though, is the best thing to happen this week. No, without a doubt that is this discovery: Tom Hiddleston is in a Chinese advert for vitamin supplements in which he spends every second of every shot VISCERALLY WISHING HE WAS ANYWHERE ELSE. It is the most gloriously awkward thing in history.  And on that happy note…

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R

Hi all,

During the CSAE conference, I heard that Alan Krueger had passed away. My exposure to Krueger was primarily through his seminal paper with David Card on minimum wages – a case study in tackling a big topic carefully (important topics and careful research are two circles of a venn diagram with a smaller overlap than you’d hope). I didn’t know much else about him – just the headlines you’d expect any economist to have picked up. The tributes to him show how much I missed. He was an economist who worked on things that mattered because he wanted to make the world a better place, and furthered that end. He took his own life, which given how hard and competitive life in academia is will prompt some introspection.

1. That sad news apart, CSAE was a lot of fun. I blogged summaries of the first two days here and here. I’ll add one more thought here, one I’m echoing from others I spoke to. In the intro I talked about the venn diagram of great research: an important, interesting question and a good method for finding an answer. The culture of economics is heavily weighted towards the second circle of this venn diagram, and I sometimes wished the presentations and discussions spent more time establishing the first. There’s a distinction between ‘building on a literature’ and ‘asking something important’ that we sometimes gloss over. More thoughts and papers were discussed on twitter: #OxCSAE2019.
2. Extremely cool: The Africapolis website has an incredible data explorer which allows you to map the evolution of urbanisation across Africa.
3. I’ve been trying to avoid Brexit talk in the links as far as possible, and I’m not going to break that habit now – if you want to hear what I really think you can stand anywhere within fifteen feet of me and wait: within 30 minutes I’ll say something unfiltered. However, on a Brexit related note, this piece from the FT on how it has posed uniquely destructive challenges for governance in here is worth reading from the first word to the last. You need to register to read the FT, and you should.
4. While I’m depressing everyone, here’s the NYT on how effed up it is to be woman in the economics profession. “Nearly 100 female economists say a peer or a colleague has sexually assaulted them. Nearly 200 say they were the victim of an attempted assault. And hundreds say they were stalked or touched inappropriately”. If your first response is to quibble with the numbers or the methods, you are getting this wrong. We should be more tolerant of doing too much to make this profession more welcoming than doing too little.
5. More positive gender work: an intervention that improved girls’ outcomes even under the severe stress of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone; and how we can find things that support girls education well among those interventions that weren’t set up to help girls specifically.
6. I love FiveThirtyEight. Maggie Koerth-Baker answers a child’s question about whether scientists study other scientists and uses it to launch a discussion about the psychology (and sometimes herd mentality) of scientists, and the good and bad reasons (and consequences) for them.
7. Jobs and automation came up at CSAE repeatedly: the first day’s plenary was essentially a long warning about shoddy thinking on the topic (Stefan’s best line was “we’ve never been scared of tractors, so why are we so scared of robots?”, and there were something like 9 papers presented that related to some aspect of the labour market. Two good pieces on the Voxes: at VoxEU, David Autor on how automation is affecting the US labour market; and Girum Abebe summarises his work (with various co-authors) in Ethiopia.
8. This whole week has been pretty depressing. Two things have been cheering me up, both of which I’ve linked before. First, watching this video on repeat, I’m increasingly struck by how cool Wendy Melvoin is: how is she dancing like that while playing those guitar lines? It takes a lot to attract attention away from Prince. And secondly, Baloji. Always Baloji.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R