SOTU

I gather that the "state of the union" address was last week. As is my habit, I took a pass on sixty minutes of lies, mangled statistics, anecdotes posing as data and patriotic balderdash.

Much more entertaining than this year's SOTU is Matt Welch's uber (how does one get an umlaut on here?) SOTU constructed by taking one sentence from each SOTU starting in 1961 and then cobbling them together. Not only are the speeches empty, they are remarkably stable in their emptiness.

Supplier induced demand

This picture is from outside Northwestern University Hospital in downtown Chicago. It was taken a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago for the American Economic Association meetings.

Learning about the graduate students

I have been reminded a couple of times in recent weeks that one side benefit to writing letters of recommendation for students who are trying to get funding from the university or from outside sources so that they do not have to be teaching assistants is that you learn a lot about what they have been up to - e.g. learning other languages - or about their backgrounds - e.g. founding an NGO as an undergraduate - that they otherwise neglect to tell you.

Given that writing letters of recommendation (and filling out the associated forms that require guessing how much everyone else who is filling out the form is inflating their ratings of their students, so that you inflate by just the right amount to keep the overall ranking consistent with underlying student performance) has no other direct faculty payoff, it is good that it plays this indirect informational role.

Defining macroeconomics

"Macro is micro without micro data."

- A colleague who likely prefers to remain anonymous

Charles Murray quiz

There is an interesting quiz in Charles Murray's (of Losing Ground fame, for older readers) new book Coming Apart that addresses the subject of the cultural disconnect between upper-middle-class Americas and working class and plain-old-middle-class Americans.

My score: on the quiz is 2, with both points coming from movies. And I think of myself as pretty conversant with popular culture by academic standards. Indeed, I still have fond memories of taking one of my graduate school girlfriends (now a successful academic) to Burger King for the first time in her life. Perhaps Murray needs to expand the quiz so that it does a better job of sorting in the tails of the distribution.

Hat tip: Dimitriy Masterov

Travel advice you can use.

From the Atlantic's James Fallows via the Economist Gulliver blog.

My opinion of Fallows has just gone up. Maybe he'll drink to that?

A budding development economist ...

... is suspended from "mid-high school" in Oklahoma for snapping a picture of his sleeping substitute teacher.

Corresponding Esther Duflo development economics paper here (this is an older, ungated version. The paper is listed as forthcoming in the American Economic Review on Esther's CV and is now co-authored with both Rema Henna and Stephen Ryan).

Via: reason.