ECONJEFF

Charles Murray quiz

2012-01-31T20:59:00.004-05:00

There is an interesting quiz in Charles Murray's (of Losing Ground fame, for older readers) new book Coming Apart that address 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 Burg 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.

2012-01-31T20:36:00.001-05:00

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 ...

2012-01-31T10:27:00.001-05:00

... 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.

Charlie Brown: media trendsetter

2012-01-30T18:11:00.001-05:00

From the Guardian: the Daily Mail (!!!) surpasses the New York Times as the number one online news source.

Mail's Online's editor, Martin Clarke, puts it down to ever-improving US traffic, and says: "We just do news that people want to read."

In an interview with the BuzzFeed website, he talks about the paper's middle-class roots and its "Fleet Street heritage" being the source of its "entertaining, engaging way with clear, concise, straightforward copy and lots of good pictures."

Read the whole thing to learn about the Times' unhappy responses.

Via: instapundit

Buckeye humor

2012-01-29T22:03:00.001-05:00

Q. How do you get an Ohio State graduate off your porch?

A. Pay him for the pizza.

It is amazing what you can learn while standing in line and wearing your U of M hat.

CNN experts

2012-01-29T14:56:00.002-05:00

As I type this, CNN's chosen higher education expert is speaking in front of a bookcase full of Reader's Digest condensed books.

Oh dear.

Culinary adventures

2012-01-25T09:26:00.002-05:00

Meatloaf cupcakes ... click through to the picture and the recipe, if you dare.

Hat tip: Lisa Gribowski

Orwell in Spain

2012-01-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

Some background on Placa de George Orwell. You should read the book too, especially if you are planning a visit to wonderful Barcelona.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

This post is dedicated to over-zealous corporate IT staff who ban this blog. Surprisingly, not an empty set.

Bacon, chocolate and Zingerman's

2012-01-22T12:41:00.001-05:00

Some interesting food history from the New Yorker.

Clothing police

2012-01-22T12:27:00.000-05:00

Some dingbat politician in Louisiana wants to ban the wearing of pajamas in public.

Williams told the Shreveport Times he was moved to push for an ordinance after an incident at a local Walmart in which he and others were offended by a customer clad in pajamas.

"I saw a group of young men wearing pajama pants and house shoes," he said, according to the Times. "At the part where there should have been underwear," his private parts were showing through the fabric.

Williams [told] the Times that “pajamas are designed to be worn in the bedroom at night."

“If you can't (wear pajamas) at the boardwalk or courthouse, why are you going to do it in a restaurant or in public? Today it's pajamas," Williams said. "Tomorrow it's underwear. Where does it stop?"

In contrast, I want to ban the politicians from speaking in public.

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Bonus: the Wall Street Journal on pajamas as a fashion trend.

Economist on taxes

2012-01-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

Some wise words (as usual) on taxes from the Economist.

One can more or less summarize the Economist's position as: why don't you idiots read the public finance literature?

Indeed.

Addendum: But wealth is still a stock and income is still a flow. Incomes taxes affect those with high incomes, some of whom are rich and some of whom are not. The Economist really ought to get this right; the rhetorical use of rich to mean high income by those on the left is designed to mislead.

Beer in history

2012-01-22T11:15:00.003-05:00

This is very funny and works on several levels:

1. There is actually a bunch of more-or-less true stuff about beer.
2. It is a fantastic parody of the History Channel and other similar media.
3. It is fun to learn about professors who study beer - one is a "fermentation scientist".

Long, but entertaining throughout.

Hat tip: Mark

Decisions to make in Fargo.

2012-01-21T11:41:00.001-05:00

Hot times in cold North Dakota.

Fargo? Legendary?

The end result of the entire episode is to make the state tourism board look silly.

Recommendation irritation

2012-01-21T08:50:00.001-05:00

Recommendation letters for graduate school are,. on the whole, a giant waste of time and energy. The vast majority of letters I write are for students about whom I have no information other than what is on their transcript other than their rank in my class, which I dutifully report, along with information about the textbook and teaching style, as well as some boilerplate about how hard the class is and how only keeners select into it.

The waste of time associated with such letters is accentuated when the application form is non-standard, so that rather than simply taking a letter that can be written, converted to PDF, and then uploaded at multiple schools, the school being applied to wants individualized responses to its own particular questions, and then to top it all off, designs the software so that you cannot simply cut and paste your pre-written letter, or bits of it, into the response areas.

The worst offender I have run into this year is Cornell's MBA program. For their troubles, or rather for the troubles they just caused me, they got a little lecture in one of their response areas about negative externalities and wasting people's time.

On the endogeneity of wage = marginal product

2012-01-20T15:28:00.001-05:00

Why I love America ..

2012-01-19T18:59:00.002-05:00

Mealtime prayers for pagan families from the "kitchen witch", whose description reads:

I am a (occasionally doting) wife, a damn proud momma of two adorable and brilliant children, a veteran of the United States Navy, part-time steampunk hausfrau, beach addict, (American) Civil War reenactor and Victorian natural history aficionado, a canoeing fanatic, returned student and semi-erratic blogger.

What a country! I do love heterogeneity and I do love people who follow their own path.

Urban prairies and local public goods

2012-01-19T14:08:00.000-05:00

From Atlantic cities, some amazing photos of areas close to downtown St. Louis that are gradually returning to nature in the decades following slum clearance. Detroit has plenty of similar areas; they are testament to the power of local public goods, or the lack thereof, to affect the incidence and character of economic development.

For local readers, driving across the border between Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park on Jefferson Avenue illustrates this point dramatically. There is literally an instant transformation from a not awful but pretty run down part of Detroit to pretty nice homes and businesses. When I have driven by, there has often been a Grosse Pointe Park police cruiser parked just on the Grosse Pointe Park side of the boundary to drive home the point about the change in the nature of public goods provision.

More on interesting ways to pay for college

2012-01-19T14:00:00.000-05:00

The Jackson (Michigan) News runs a story about undergraduates on the web site seekingarrangement.com (probably not a good idea at work) which acts as a broker between buyers and sellers on the medium-term paid relationship services market, informally known as the sugar babies market. This market lies somewhere between paid escorts who charge by the hour or day and particularly mercenary marriages.

The Jackson News story basically riffs on this press release from Seeking Arrangements, but adds in the obligatory scary remarks from local law enforcement (playing double duty here as moral scolds) and local college administrators who note the legal cover provided to their institutions by their email address use regulations, which presumably most students never read.

As with yesterday's Dare Dorm TV story, note the implicit mutually beneficial exchange between the Jackson News, which gets to excite its readers with stories of wild coeds, and the Seeking Arrangements folks, who get free advertising for the site.

A couple other fun bits: (1) the guy who runs the website has an MBA from MIT. I am not really surprised given the clever marketing strategy; and (2) very conservative Hillsdale College has 11 sugar babies signed up on the site with their hillsdale.edu email addresses. I guess the free market message is working.

Hat tip: Actually, I found this on my own via the daily update email from annarbor.com but Dan Marcin also emailed me to alert me regarding the article, perhaps in the hope that a hat tip would help him to capture the votes of sugar babies as well as sugar mommies and daddies in his bid to unseat ancient local Congressman John Dingell.

Hilton in China and for China

2012-01-19T13:40:00.001-05:00

An interview with a Hilton executive about their plans in China and their plans regarding catering to Chinese travelers in their hotels in other countries.

I liked this bit: "Our strategic perspective is that a brand is a promise consistently delivered".

China is indeed a big market in everything. It is hard to recall that, when I was in high school, the number of people leaving mainland China was approximately zero. In addition to their big increase in income, the mainland Chinese have had a big increase in freedom as well. Let's hope there is more to come.

APPAM elections

2012-01-18T10:20:00.001-05:00

At least for the next year or two, the Association for Public Policy and Management will be run by my friends.

Congrats (I think) to Paul, Jens, Marcy, Sue, and Jane.

Dorm porn

2012-01-18T08:38:00.001-05:00

Detroit's Channel 4 local news ("the Defender") reports on the shocking fact that students sometimes make videos of themselves engaged in sexual activity in their dorm rooms. And, worse yet, they send their videos to the nice folks at daredorm.com (NSFW!) in exchange for lots of money.

Can you imagine? Students having sex in the dorms? Video cameras? The internet? Money? What is the world coming to? Surely the end times are near!

Some thoughts.

1. Someone at the UM public relations office scored a great big coup in getting the UM's message to Dare Dorm broadcast for free on the local news.

2. The nice folks at Channel 4 provided a lot of free advertising to the Dare Dormers.

3. Note the use of students (presumably carefully selected for their negative views) to provide the illusion that Channel 4 is engaged in reporting rather than running an anti-sex editorial. Could they really not find a single student with something positive to say about getting lots of money for doing very little work?

4. So let's see. Suppose that you can get $10K for a video. At typical local wages for undergrads, that means putting in, say, two or three hours of time rather than 1000. Those 1000 hours could be spent, say, studying. They might allow an aspiring student to take harder classes or complete a harder major than he or she otherwise would. Is that necessarily a bad tradeoff?

5. In the age of facebook and surveillance cameras does anyone really think that one video on Dare Dorm is going to ruin someone's life, as suggested by the undergraduates interviewed for the story? How exactly will someone's children find their parents' Dare Dorm video from among the zillions of porn videos on the internet?

6. Note to Channel 4: there are lots of important things to report on in the Detroit metro area. This is not one of them.

Canadian coffee

2012-01-17T16:51:00.000-05:00

Tim Horton's raises the stakes in the cross-border caffination competition.

Via Marit Rahavi on Facebook

Ford School joint doctoral programs

2012-01-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Happy 10th Anniversary to the Ford School joint doctoral program!

Many of the students whose dissertation committees I have served on during my time at Michigan have been in the joint program. My sense is that they enjoy and benefit from it, and not just because of the nicer offices.

And Mary Corcoran is just a gem.

On Washington football's new defensive staff

2012-01-17T11:48:00.002-05:00

A number of articles:

Former defensive coordinator (during the golden age) and head coach Jim Lambright on the problems with the Husky defense.

Steve Sarkisian on how hard it was to fire Nick Holt.

Jerry Brewer on Justin Wilcox, the new defensive coordinator.

Background on Justin Wilcox from Bob Condotta.

On Keith Hayward, the new defensive backs coach.

Addendum: one last coaching hire, lured away from Cal.

Prostitutes for Paul

2012-01-17T10:57:00.004-05:00

The Daily Mail covers Ron Paul's endorsement by the working girls of Nevada's Bunny Ranch.

One good bit:

Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, told CNN: ‘If a client comes into the Bunny Ranch and says ''I'm pimpin' for Paul,'' they’re gonna have a real good time.’

Several of his girls, who were sitting next to him in their underwear, added: ‘Yeah!’

Mr Hof admitted that he had thought about supporting Newt Gingrich ‘because he's a cheater - and we like cheaters', a reference to the fact Gingrich cheated on his second wife.

But you should click through to look at the picture.

Ironic, in a way, that prostitutes would support the only candidate who is not himself a prostitute.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

French credit rating .... sacre bleu!

2012-01-17T10:51:00.001-05:00

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Cochrane on DeLong on freedom

2012-01-16T21:03:00.001-05:00

A memorable, and completely on target, rant from "little Johnny Cochrane" as we called him in the skit show.

Freedom really is the best thing.

SNL on Tebow

2012-01-16T20:22:00.001-05:00

In honor of the Patriots' drubbing of the Broncos this weekend, it seems appropriate to revisit Saturday Night Live's take on the Bronco's saintly quarterback Tim Tebow.

I got into a Facebook debate a couple of weeks ago with some friends of a friend (always a dangerous business) about Tebow's public displays of piety. I defended the position that they are more about self-righteousness than anything else. Said position proved to be unpopular.

Addendum: the Jimmy Fallon piece linked to in the comments is at least as funny as the SNL piece.

Social media and the reformation

2012-01-16T19:51:00.000-05:00

Some interesting historical parallels from the Economist.

Newt on Romney

2012-01-16T15:03:00.001-05:00

I think Newt has lost his mind.

Note to Newt: it is good to speak more than one language.

Perhaps Romney can package his French as "speaking in tongues" to increase his appeal to the evangelical set?

Via Bo Honore on Facebook

Economics of communion wafers

2012-01-16T14:56:00.001-05:00

A quite interesting piece on the history and current workings of the communion wafer industry.

The authors tries to pack more deep meaning into the narrative than it can really sustain. The truck driver carrying the corporate wafers may actually, on any given day, be a lot more spiritual than the nuns whose product competes with the corporate wafers, who may well be pissed off about cloister politics or distracted by their aging feet.

Perhaps there is a follow-on piece lamenting the fact that nearly all bibles are now printed on printing presses by industrial printers rather than being hand-copied by Irish monks? Think of all the jobs!

Via MR (I think)

Dan Drezner and the NYT

2012-01-16T14:52:00.002-05:00

Dan's experience is one example, and far from the worst, that I have heard or read about. Taken together, they make me very suspicious of reporters.

Usually what happens is that I get an email or voice mail from a reporter and then I fret about whether or not to respond until their deadline has passed, then I send an email apologizing for my slow reply. Probably this is not optimal.

I did have a nice, and informative, exchange with an Atlantic reporter a couple of months ago following my apologetic email. Somehow the fact that I am an Atlantic subscriber and reader made me trust him more, though it is not clear why it should.

Fraternity humor

2012-01-16T14:40:00.002-05:00

This is wonderful!

NB: I had to click on the picture to make it larger in order to see the letters.

Applied econometrics bleg

2012-01-15T15:41:00.002-05:00

I am looking for published (including working papers) discussions of the use of propensity score matching and/or inverse propensity weighting in conjunction with sampling weights.

I am aware of the Zanutto (2006) Journal of Data Science paper as well as an informal discussion in my old report, with Juao Pedro Azevedo and Peter Dolton, on the evaluation of the New Deal for Lone Parents prepared for the UK Department for Work and Pensions, but not much else.

Here is a free idea for someone looking to get a zillion cites: update psmatch2 to incorporate weights, then write a paper for Stata Journal about it. Oh, and thank me for the idea.

Illustrating the importance of multiple comparisons corrections ...

2012-01-15T15:30:00.002-05:00

... with a dead fish.

For readers not up on the latest in applied statistics, the multiple comparisons problem arises when a researcher performs a large number of statistical tests, say 100, using some conventional p-value cutoff for "statistical significance." With 100 tests and the traditional cutoff of 0.05, we would expect five statistically significant findings out of 100 tests even in a world in which the null hypothesis of no effect is true in all 100 cases. These five findings would then be reported in the New York Times and all heck would break loose. Multiple comparisons corrections adjust the statistical procedure to reduce the number of false positive findings and thereby to make the New York Times less interesting but more accurate.

Hat tip: Brian Kovak

The amazing success of university administrators

2012-01-15T11:33:00.001-05:00

My esteemed colleague Charlie Brown suggest celebrating the approximate 20th anniversary of this wonderful short rant about university administrators from his former Maryland economics colleague (who had left by the time I got there) Barbara Bergmann.

The only thing missing, perhaps, is anything about the pernicious role of lawyers in the rise of the university administrative caste.

An economist for president?

2012-01-15T09:35:00.002-05:00

Larry Kotlikoff of the Boston University economics department is running for president.

We could do a lot worse. Actually, we will do a lot worse. That's one economist prediction that is sure to come true.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Larry Katz on journals

2012-01-14T13:34:00.001-05:00

Development Impact provides a really useful interview with Larry Katz, long-time editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. For non-economist readers, the QJE is one of the magical "top five" general journals in economics that play a big role (too big, in my view) in determining who does and does not get tenure in good economics departments.

The interview is interesting throughout. Were I ever to be an editor again, something I do not plan on at the moment, I think I would implement Larry's scheme of sending out many requests for referee reports for a given paper, reading each report as it comes in, and then deciding as soon as the verdict is clear. This scheme does two things. First, it reduces average response times, which is nice for the author, however things turn out. Second, it gives referees who care a lot about a particular paper more weight, as they are more likely to get their report in quickly. Certainly the times when I have managed to get a report in before Larry decided based on the views of others were times when I really cared about the paper in one direction or another.

UM in the past

2012-01-14T12:34:00.004-05:00

Annarbor.com gets nostalgic and pulls out some gems from their photo archive showing UM scenes in 1912.

Electoral oddities

2012-01-14T12:25:00.000-05:00

I bet this does not happen very often: Ron Paul came in second not only in the New Hampshire republican primary, but in the democratic primary as well.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

New age fun

2012-01-14T09:15:00.002-05:00

It will surprise no one that this all rings very true in Ann Arbor, that little bit of the west coast that somehow got lost in Michigan.

Hat tip: Susan Major

World Book Encyclopedia

2012-01-13T17:26:00.000-05:00

We arrived early for the information session in the library of Emerson School, where we hope to send our daughter, so I got to spend a few minutes of quality time looking at the 2011 World Book Encyclopedia.

After I got over my shock that dead tree encyclopedias are still produced (albeit with many more color pictures and graphics than the very serious Britannica my parents owned), I decided to check out their coverage of Nobel economists. I had time to look up five: Becker, Friedman, Heckman, Krugman and Samuelson. Of these, only two had entries: Friedman and Samuelson. I would have thought that winning a Nobel prize in anything would be a ticket to an encyclopedia entry, but apparently the World Book committee is more selective than the Nobel committee.

They are not that selective though. In the place where the Heckman entry should have been there was an entry of multiple paragraphs for Margaret Heckler (you should click through just for the hair style), who was a cabinet member (for Health and Human Services) in the Reagan administration. Call me crazy, but is Heckler really more important than Heckman, or Becker or Krugman? Really? Bizarre.

Advances in employment discrimination law

2012-01-13T17:10:00.002-05:00

A northeastern Pennsylvania woman is suing a South Jersey-based maker of frozen treats and other snack foods, claiming that she was wrongfully fired because she wore a prosthetic penis to work.

Pauline Davis, 45, wore the device to the J&J Snack Foods plant in Moosic, Lackawanna County, while she contemplated a gender change, according to a federal civil-rights complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Scranton. She confided in several co-workers about the device, and someone told management, according to the complaint.

She subsequently was fired from her job as a packer/line inspector. Her termination, she claims, was discriminatory because a male co-worker who wore female clothing and prostheses and took hormone treatments was not fired nor disciplined.

The people at J&J snack foods seem to be having a lot more fun than one might normally expect at such a firm. Full story - there is not much more - here.

Via: reason.

WSJ on Romney at Bain

2012-01-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal dug around a bit to find enough data to say something about how well Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney did during his time at Bain.

Some quick thoughts:

1. This article reminded me of the reaction a group of us had to reading the famous early sociology book Suicide by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim knew he wanted to estimate a multiple regression, with suicide rates as the dependent variable, but because of when he was writing he did not know how, so he tried to approximate the multiple regression with a large number of pairwise correlations between suicide and various predictors of suicide. The Wall Street Journal author is in a slightly different position. I think the knowledge is there, but the data are lacking. What you really want to do here is to compare Bain's performance to that of other similar firms, holding constant things like the state of the firms when Bain invests in them and broader economic conditions such as the business cycle. The WSJ, like Durkheim, tries to get at this by sort of conditioning on each right-hand side variable in turn in its discussion.

2. I think the WSJ's decision to measure outcomes a fixed amount of time after Bain's initial investment is defensible as a way of avoiding the endogenous timing associated with measuring outcomes when Bain's investment ends. Though both are interesting and worth looking at.

3. One hates to harsh on the buzz, but firms have a legal and fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize their return on investment. They do not have an obligation, legal, fiduciary or even moral, to maximize the employment of the businesses they operate in the short run. One can debate this situation, but I think that even if one is a strong redistributionist, there is a good case to be made for what is popularly known as the Danish system of "flexicurity" in which firms face low hiring and firing costs and the social insurance and active labor market systems aim to reduce variation in consumption among workers over time (who can, of course, also accumulate precautionary savings to the same end).

4. Gingrich and Perry manage to position themselves as both ignorant and hypocritical. The are hypocritical because they are usually in the business of defending markets and are ignorant because the market-bashing positions they take in going after Romney's time at Bain reflect a deep misunderstanding of how economic growth happens. They should both be assigned some days off from campaigning and given a copy of Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy to read.

Literary humor

2012-01-12T09:40:00.003-05:00

Via Lones Smith on Facebook

RuPaul != Ron Paul

2012-01-12T09:16:00.003-05:00

I doubt anyone is really confusing RuPaul and Ron Paul, but good for RuPaul for using the opportunity to get some free publicity.

And it is fun to imagine a candidate who was a comvex combination of the two: Run Paul!

Movie: the Adventures of Tintin

2012-01-12T09:13:00.000-05:00

Our child care provider for last night cancelled and so "date night" became "family movie night". As a result, we saw Tintin rather than some counterfactual movie aimed at older ages.

But that was not so bad. I was not really familiar with Tintin at any level. I had seen the character around but did not know the history and had never read it. My sense from the NYT review is that having read the books made it a bit harder to like the movie, which is my usual experience in other cases.

For our purposes, it was very good fun and, contra the NYT reviewer, a love interest was not really missed, and would have very much changed the character of the movie. And, yes, the drunkard captain Haddock is portrayed in a more positive light than would be approved of by modern-day public health scolds, but this is art, not a documentary, so people ought to chill out about it. It is also a movie based on books written in a different time, and so ought, in my view, to be true to that time.

My 4.5-year-old daughter was engaged throughout (probably the result of the non-stop pace that the NYT reviewer complains about) which is extra impressive given that the movie runs more than two hours in length.

The one error in the movie, which is set somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s, was having one of the characters use the term "third world". That term came along decades later. I thought big-budget movies like this one had people on staff to check that sort of thing.

Recommended if you have a kid and marginally recommended otherwise.

Two cheers for cheerleading?

2012-01-12T07:31:00.001-05:00

"The Feminist Case for the NCAA's Recognition ofCompetitive Cheer as an Emerging Sport for Women" Free Download BostonCollege Law Review, Vol. 52, p. 439, 2011 Western New England University Schoolof Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-1

ERIN BUZUVIS, Western New England University School ofLaw

Email: ebuzuvis@yahoo.com

This Article examines whether a university can countopportunities in competitive cheer to demonstrate compliance with Title IX. Afederal court in Connecticut recently considered this question for the firsttime. Although it held that the sport as it currently exists is notsufficiently similar to other varsity sports to qualify for Title IXcompliance, the decision has mobilized two separate governing bodies to proposemore organized and competitive versions of competitive cheer as possible NCAAemerging sports. This Article argues that these proposals would satisfyregulators and the courts. It then discusses how competitive cheer haspotential to improve Title IX compliance, in a way that would benefit women?ssports generally, by expanding the definition of sport to include those thatare women-driven and by reclaiming as sport an activity - cheer - that wasinitially deployed to separate women from athleticism. In light of thesereasons, as well as the burgeoning interest in competitive cheer at the collegeand high school levels, the Article concludes that the NCAA should promote thegrowth of competitive cheer by endorsing it as an emerging sport for women.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back in the day or, more precisely, back at Totem Junior High School, yours truly "lettered" in chess. I have to say that I was quite sympathetic to the thoughts that were surely going through the heads of the real jocks on the day of the letter-awarding ceremony, which is that the chess team should not have been involved in any way, shape or form. I am guessing that the NCAA does not (despite the endorsement of Totem Junior High) view women's chess as qualifying under title IX or we would observe many such teams, given how cheap it is to field a chess team.

More broadly though, there are interesting questions here about what does, and what should, define a sport for the purposes of Title IX. One possible criterion would be caloric: my guess is that cheerleading burns substantially more calories than, say, golf, which is, I assume, an "official" sport. Or you could use whether or not there are professionals who make money to define sports, in which case cheerleading would qualify but swimming would not. Or you could ask whether having participated in a particular sport in high school or college has a measurable effect in a wage equation. I bet cheerleading passes that test as well. There is so much for the lawyers to do here, and perhaps some for the economists as well.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

When education fads go wrong

2012-01-10T11:38:00.001-05:00

A math teacher in Georgia does not quite get it right when incorporating the slavery unit into the math problems.

Hat tip: Dann Millimet

Modern christmas

2012-01-09T08:36:00.000-05:00

Belated, but still funny.

Hat tip: someone on Facebook.

Will you still need me ...

2012-01-08T17:12:00.003-05:00

... when I'm 64? A fine meditation on turning 64 from my colleague, and UM dean of libraries, and generally one of the coolest people in the economics department, Paul Courant.

An excellent commercial

2012-01-06T08:22:00.002-05:00

Marginally not safe for work (at particularly prudish workplaces) due to language.

Educational performance management in the UK

2012-01-06T08:16:00.001-05:00

Economists delight in cataloging the many and varied ways in which local government employees, whether in the schools or in job training programs, respond to performance incentives by gaming the system. Under poorly designed performance management systems, it will be easier for workers to improve their measured performance by gaming the system than to improve their actual performance.

The Daily Mail reports on just these sorts of shenanigans in schools in the UK. Schools there are subject to periodic inspections by something called Ofsted. One highlight:

In one example, a teacher described how he was worried about taking three of the worst classes in his ‘hell hole’ school during an inspection.

But, the day before, the deputy headteacher arrived and reeled off the names of more than a dozen of the most challenging pupils from the ‘worst’ three classes.

He told the teacher: ‘None of these little **** will be in tomorrow, you have my word.’

The teacher asked how he could be sure as the pupils had ‘excellent’ attendance records and the senior teacher showed him an ‘inch-thick wad of £20 notes’.

You can find more on this theme (and much else) in my Fiscal Studies paper (with Alistair Muriel) on educational performance management.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Why I am not a republican #9374937

2012-01-06T08:01:00.001-05:00

Dear Lord, please save us from the scourge of Rick Santorum who embodies everything that is bad about the Republican party. Amen.

Movie: The Artist

2012-01-05T07:26:00.001-05:00

We had some trepidation about seeing "The Artist" - it is (sort of) a silent film - but were won over by the very high - 97 - rating at rotten tomatoes. It turned out that the critics were quite right. The film is a delight, visually, historically and due to the beautiful music that (largely) replaces the spoken word.

To quote A.O. Scott's fine NYT review:

All of this suggests a feast for antiquarian film geeks. It certainly is, and Mr. Hazanavicius’s skill in replicating some of the visual effects of early cinema is impressive. But he evokes the glamour and strangeness of silent movies without entirely capturing the full range of their power. His film is less a faithful reproduction than a tasteful updating, like a reconstituted classic roadster with a GPS device and a hybrid engine.

Recommended.

The Fashionable Professor

2012-01-05T07:16:00.004-05:00

It has been a matter of some discussion in my household whether I should teach my undergraduate econometrics course in polo shirts or in button-down shirts. In order to shed some additional empirical light on the issue, I decided to gather some input from the students, and so added a question on the issue to my end-of-semester feedback form. The results from that exercise are:

Button down: 7
Polo: 16
Other: 13
Not voting: 34 (in almost all cases because no feedback form at all was turned in)

The polo total includes three or four votes for "whatever is most comfortable". Among the other suggests were Hawaiian shirts (someone misses Lones Smith), a tuxedo, a tuxedo t-shirt and, from one misguided soul, showing up naked.

Bottom line: next fall I will wear more polo shirts.

Facebook and natural selection

2012-01-05T07:02:00.002-05:00

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

The significance of significance testing

2012-01-05T07:00:00.003-05:00

Gelman, Andrew and Hal Stern. 2006. "The Difference Between `Significant' and `Not Significant' is not Itself Statistically Significant." American Statistician 60(4): 328-331.

It is common to summarize statistical comparisons by declarations of statistical signiﬁcance or insigniﬁcance. Here we discuss one problem with such declarations, namely that changes in statistical signiﬁcance are often not themselves statistically signiﬁcant. By this, we are not merely making the commonplace observation that any particular threshold is arbitrary—for example, only a small change is required to move an estimate from a 5.1% signiﬁcance level to 4.9%, thus moving it into statistical signiﬁcance. Rather, we are pointing out that even large changes in signiﬁcance levels can correspond to small, nonsigniﬁcant changes in the underlying quantities.

The error we describe is conceptually different from other oftcited problems—that statistical signiﬁcance is not the same as practical importance, that dichotomization into signiﬁcant and nonsigniﬁcant results encourages the dismissal of observed differences in favor of the usually less interesting null hypothesis of no difference, and that any particular threshold for declaring signiﬁcance is arbitrary. We are troubled by all of these concerns and do not intend to minimize their importance. Rather, our goal is to bring attention to this additional error of interpretation. We illustrate with a theoretical example and two applied examples.The ubiquity of this statistical error leads us to suggest that students and practitioners be made more aware that the difference between “signiﬁcant” and “not signiﬁcant” is not itself statistically signiﬁcant.

This article is a few years old but I just ran across it. It is a quick read, and yet one more illustration of the many conundrums that arise when one takes classical statistics too literally. I am still working on a way that I am really happy with to teach undergraduates to have a sophisticated understanding of classical significance tests.

Atheist humor

2012-01-04T17:37:00.003-05:00

New defensive staff at Washington

2012-01-04T09:00:00.003-05:00

Washington has already moved to replace Nick Holt and some of the assistants who are departing with him. The speed of the move suggests to me that the decision to let Nick go was made long before the Alamo Bowl.

Sugar Bowl: Michigan 23, Virginia Tech 20 (OT)

2012-01-04T08:59:00.002-05:00

Michigan was just good enough, and Virginia Tech made just enough mistakes, for Michigan to pull out a win in overtime in a game that Virginia Tech dominated much of the time. Well done!

A fitting end to a surprisingly positive season.

John Cochrane blogging

2012-01-03T10:45:00.001-05:00

University of Chicago Booth School macroeconomist John Cochrane is now blogging, which is very cool.

I took John's first-year macro course in the economics department (where he was before moving to Booth) my first quarter of graduate school back in the Fall of 1985. It was an excellent class; John did a really good job of putting each paper that we covered in context and also arranging them in a way so that the entire class told a coherent story.

I also learned from poking around on John's site, that his wife, Beth Fama (the "Fama's daughter" as we called her in one of our better skits) is now writing young adult fiction. Beth was a fellow student in John's class in the Fall of 1985, though as I recall she was getting her doctorate in what was then the Graduate School of Business rather than in economics.

Book: Life in Year One by Scott Korb

2012-01-03T10:14:00.006-05:00

Korb, Scott. 2010. Life In Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine. NY: Riverhead Books.

Another book snatched from Borders with a going-out-of-business discount, Life in Year One by Scott Korb provides a short summary of what is known in the scholarly literature about daily life around the time we started counting years up rather than down. The style is sort of wannabe Bill Bryson, but Korb tries too hard with the jokes and is much less thorough with the literature relative to Bryson.

Bottom line: While the book is by no means awful, I am sure there are better books on this topic, and I wish I had read one of them instead.

Randomization at work

2012-01-03T09:34:00.001-05:00

The story of a firm that used random assignment to study the effects of allowing telecommuting on worker outcomes such as productivity and absenteeism.

My sense is that firms do remarkably little of this sort of thing, though I have heard stories of catalog merchants randomly assigning prices across catalogs as a way of estimating their demand curves. And, of course, direct mailers of other sorts do a lot of experimentation with their mailings.

I think part of the reason that firms do not do this as much as they might is that business schools tend not to teach econometrics in a way that would encourage students to think this way. Put differently, my sense is, first of all, that most MBA programs do not require much in the way of statistics or econometrics to begin with and, second of all, that what they do require is often not taught in a way to emphasize the identification of causal effects.

Hat tip: Sue Dynarski on google+

Development economics humor

2012-01-03T09:28:00.003-05:00

Chris Blattman quotes a very funny parody of over-achieving development wannabes.

Political labels

2012-01-03T09:26:00.001-05:00

Will Wilkinson, guest-blogging at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, explains why he does not call himself a bleeding heart libertarian. Will seems a bit more stirred up than usual, but it is interesting reading. I find the term "liberaltarian" awkward, but I really like "neo-classical liberal", which I had not heard before. I may roll with that one.

Book: The Book of Vice by Peter Sagal

2012-01-02T13:47:00.001-05:00

Sagal, Peter. 2007. The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them). HarperCollins.

I got this book for some pretty modest amount of money during the final days of Borders, which is good as I did not like really like it very much. The author runs some sort of show on NPR that I had not heard of, and writes essays as well. This book is a collection of reworked pieces originally published separately on topics such as swinging, strip clubs, pornography, lying and gambling. The striking thing about most of the essays is that Sagal has remarkably little empathy for the people who enjoy the activity under discussion. I can see going to a swing party and not participating, but going to a swing party and being bored strikes me as a signal of a remarkable lack of curiosity. Swing parties (one might imagine) could be fascinating on many levels, from their seeming defiance of evolutionary biology to the sorting of people with people to the selection into being there at all. How could you be bored? And yet he is. Sagal seems similarly puzzled by gamblers and by those who frequent strip clubs. Again, the lack of imagination and empathy, at least for me, was the main takeaway. On a different note, in the chapter on porn, Sagal learns that (surprise!) porn actors are real people with real lives. And, hey, did you know that Nina Hartley is really smart? Maybe some people didn't but this chapter struck me as pretty old news.

Bottom line: while this is not a bad book, and while it will give you a chuckle or two, you can likely find better ways to spend your reading time.

History of UNIX

2012-01-02T13:32:00.001-05:00

A short, but very interesting history of the UNIX operating system from the IEEE Spectrum. There was lots here that I did not know, including where the UNIX name came from and why it began life as an open-source endeavor.

Hat tip (oddly, given the number of union typists and other clerks displaced by computers): portside.org.

Addendum: link added.

Movie: Young Adult

2012-01-02T13:29:00.000-05:00

Young Adult proved a most excellent start to the 2012 movie watching year.

It is delightfully mean and wonderfully egalitarian in thumbing its nose at convention. Yes, the main character is horrible, and the viewer smiles at her humiliations. But the people in the small town she escapes from are really boring and small, just as she thinks they are, so while they can teach her a lesson or two about letting go of the past, they cannot do more than that. My favorite line comes when the main character is talking to her mother about her failed first marriage. Her mother still has a wedding picture up and the main character wants her to take it down. Her mother says something to the effect that "but the wedding wasn't a failure; remember the tiramisu?" That sort of thing could make anyone want to run away to Minneapolis.

A.O. Scott's positive NYT review here.

Highly recommended.

Quantitative easing ...

2012-01-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

... explained in Australian.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Movie: Sherlock Holmes

2012-01-01T21:06:00.003-05:00

We saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie when we were in Toronto for the holidays.

I liked it more than you might think from reading the NYT review, but it is definitely not as good as the first one. To be more precise, the writing does not live up to the sets, costumes and special effects. It has the feel of a movie that was written by one committee and then re-written by another committee. This one won't kill the franchise, but the next one needs to be better.

There is also some truth to this jab by A.O. Scott:

The real point of the movie is the bantering byplay between Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) punctuated by punches, explosions and action sequences as bloated and pretentious as a 10-minute drum solo on a live album by a second-rate art-rock band from the ’70s.

Mildly recommended for mindless entertainment.

Mathematical dance moves

2012-01-01T13:35:00.002-05:00

Hat tip: someone on Facebook

Deltalina

2012-01-01T09:06:00.003-05:00

I only realized recently that I am not the only one who likes watching the Delta safety videos featuring flight attendant Katherine Lee, who goes by Deltalina on the internet. I do not, of course, actually listen to the safety instructions in the video. I just watch, mostly for the finger wag. I was surprised to learn that Katherine is an actual Delta flight attendant; I had assumed she was an actress hired solely to make the video, which I suppose is praise of a sort.

Delta needs to spend a few dollars now, and make another one with new jokes.

Protein and brain development

2012-01-01T08:51:00.003-05:00

The Globe and Mail reports on a (very) long-term followup of a study from the 1970s that looked at the effects of protein on the brain development of children in Guatemala.

Missing from the newspaper report:

1. Information about the design of the study. Was it a randomized trial? One imagines so, but the article never actually says so.

2. Information about differential non-response by treatment status. The article, to its credit, does note the overall follow-up response rate of 0.60 but says nothing about whether that differed by treatment status, which is key.

3. A smell test. The reported effect on wages (what about non-workers?) is huge at 46 percent. Is this really plausible given the other evidence in the literature and/or what is known about the underlying biology?

4. A link to the article in the Lancet.

Replicating this and trying out various econometric methods for dealing with the non-response - e.g. the "Lee bounds" - would be a good second or third-year paper for some aspiring gradual student.

Hat tips: Dan and Susan Black

Changes in UW football

2012-01-01T08:44:00.000-05:00

Well, that was quick! Nick Holt and most of the rest of the defensive staff are out the door just days after Washington's poor defensive showing in the Alamo Bowl.

Follow-up on the Chronicle post

2011-12-31T16:08:00.005-05:00

My post the other day mocking the really dopey piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about heterodox economics made it very rapidly onto my top 10 all time hits list, which surprised me a bit.

It turns out that much of the traffic was generated by this thread at econjobmarketrumors. Contrary to the second poster on that thread, I did not start the thread. I have actually only ever actively promoted two of my posts: one was my 10 most influential books list, which I emailed Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution about and the other was my post on matching methods for causal inference, which I emailed Chris Blattman about. Both of those posts, as it turns out, are also on my top 10 all time hits list. Somehow active promotion seems like being a bit too involved in the blog.

I also wanted to add one other thing, which I should have included in the original post. Much of the discussion of heterodox economics in the popular media proceeds as if the entirety of economics consisted of the part of macroeconomics that studies the business cycle. This is very misleading. Most economists are not macroeconomists and many macroeconomists study issues other than the business cycle, such as growth, consumption or savings. Some clever soul ought to write about how heterodox economists deal with the rest of the subject, and the clever souls who write pieces like the one at the Chronicle ought not to mislead their readers about the division of tasks within economics.

Ron Paul newsletters

2011-12-31T15:33:00.001-05:00

Steve Horwitz at Bleeding Heart Libertarians offers some thoughtful views on the Ron Paul newsletters, views with which I largely agree.

Interview with "Awful Library Books"

2011-12-31T14:55:00.000-05:00

Ruth, a blogger at Artifact Collector, interviews Holly Hibner, one of the two bloggers behind Awful Library Books, which is on my blog roll.

As much as I love books, I would make a bad librarian, because I would never want to get rid of anything.

Vaclav Havel, RIP

2011-12-31T14:50:00.002-05:00

I am late on this, but it is no less heartfelt for that. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe will likely be the great world-historical event of my lifetime, and Havel was one of the most inspiring figures of that event.

The Economist provides a very nice history, and Reason's Matt Welch reports from his funeral in Prague.

The Verizon guy

2011-12-30T20:34:00.003-05:00

The Atlantic provides some background on the Verizon guy, and on how being the Verizon guy changed his life.

Woodward on Gore

2011-12-30T18:39:00.002-05:00

Ouch!

Via instapundit.

Richard Florida on city size and sports success

2011-12-30T17:35:00.001-05:00

This piece at Atlantic Cities was less inspiring than I had hoped based on the title.

Florida spends the first part of the piece explaining why it is good to have denominators when looking at wins - i.e. to take account of the number of teams and how long they have been in the city. Indeed, but it seems like even for the Atlantic audience this point could be made in a sentence or two.

The second part makes the case for path dependence. I am sympathetic here, but there is not actually a lot of evidence, just some assertions and quotations.

What I would have liked to hear more about is how this relationship is affected when leagues actively attempt to undermine it via revenue sharing. Also, I was hoping to hear about how the number of teams matters relative to city size. Part of why Green Bay may be so successful at football is that the fan base, as well as the local government and local business, put all their energy into it, as they have no other major league teams. An implication here, that could be empirically tested, is that e.g. the Seahawks should do better now that the Sonics are gone (and the arrival of the Seahawks back when I was in high school should have led the Sonics to do worse). Similarly, the basketball, baseball and hockey teams in LA should do better in years when there are no pro football teams.

I would have thought, too, that there would be a scholarly literature that Florida could draw on when discussing these issues.

Movie: Another Earth

2011-12-30T11:01:00.002-05:00

I missed Another Earth when it came through the Michigan Theater but got to watch it on the plane on the way back from Denmark as a result of being upgraded to the front.

The bottom line is that Another Earth is one my favorite movies of the year: a tense psychological drama with a topping of science fiction and a most excellent ending. I also like the underlying premise: that we are all one bad shock away from very different lives.

The NYT liked it too.

Highly recommended.

Alamo Bowl: Baylor 67, Washington 56

2011-12-30T10:13:00.002-05:00

The Alamo Bowl was certainly fun to watch in the way that Arena football is fun to watch: lots and lots of offense.

The Seattle Times entitles its description of the game "Huskies Score 56 Points But Still Can't Beat Baylor", which sums up the downside of all that offense: the Husky defense did not play well at all. Baylor is no better than Oregon on offense and yet they managed to hold Oregon to 34 points. It is true that they suffered from the loss of one of its starting linebackers in the middle of the first half, but still. It will be interesting to see what steps coach Sarkisian takes in the off-season to deal with the defense, which has been the weak side of the ball pretty much all season. Will Nick Holt survive?

Still, Baylor's defense is bad too, and Keith Price put on quite an offensive show. It was great for him to get a chance to show off in front of a national TV audience. He looked as good Baylor's Heisman Trophy award winning quarterback for most of the game. And Washington was in it until the very end. Change one or two plays, particularly the Chris Polk fumble in the red zone in the third quarter, and the game goes the other way.

This season went by quickly indeed, and was not quite as successful as I had hoped, but the derivative is still positive. The Huskies are good now, but not great. Hopefully next year they can make some progress toward the next level.

Bloomberg on correlation and causation

2011-12-28T20:08:00.003-05:00

These things are so easy and so much fun, yet the point is so important.

Hat tip: Laura Kawano

Busy buzzwords

2011-12-28T20:07:00.001-05:00

The Daily Mail reports on a study of the most over-used words on LinkedIn.

It is a sad testament to something that my first reaction when I see "LinkedIn" is to wonder what the natural log is doing in the name of a social networking site.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Our religious founders?

2011-12-27T09:10:00.002-05:00

A fine meditation from the Economist on the religious views of America's founding fathers.

It is really important to remember when thinking about this is that the founders were reacting to the sins, as it were, of an established church. Thus, their concerns were quite different than the culture war concerns that motivate the discussion today.

More broadly, the great thing about history is how well it upsets commonly held notions in the present.

On math

2011-12-26T12:45:00.000-05:00

Humorous airline quotes

2011-12-23T13:09:00.000-05:00

From the Economist's Gulliver blog, a list of funny quotations by airline CEOs.

My favorite:

You f**ing academic eggheads! You don't know s**t. You can't deregulate this industry. You're going to wreck it. You don't know a goddamn thing!

That was Robert Crandall, boss of American Airlines, to an unnamed Senate lawyer in 1971.

You know, economists live for that kind of reaction.

The behavior of crowds

2011-12-23T13:05:00.000-05:00

An interesting piece from the Economist summarizes recent research on the behavior of crowds.

One of my more vivid memories from my youth concerns our family visit to Disneyland on July 4, 1968. We got trapped near the Matterhorn in a crowd that was too thick to move. My parents sort of formed an enclosure around me to keep me from getting crushed. It really scared my dad, and he was not prone to departures from calm. After that we went to Disneyland when it was less busy.

Doonesbury on final exams (and foreign policy)

2011-12-23T10:15:00.003-05:00

The comic is here. The last panel is priceless.

I would argue, though, that US entry into WW1 was a bigger disaster than the (never actually declared) war in Iraq, as it indirectly led to both the rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

On modern art

2011-12-22T08:24:00.001-05:00

I have decided that I have a U-shaped affection for modern art. I like it if it is serious about making a point and I like it if it is completely up front about the fact that the artist laughed all the way to the bank after selling the piece. I do not like modern art that pretends to be serious but is not.

See if you can figure out which category this art fits into. For those keen to see it in person, it is on display at the modern art museum in Aarhus, Denmark, just around the corner from the very nice Radisson, which I am happy to recommend should you happen to visit.

Ron Paul

2011-12-22T08:06:00.001-05:00

We are in the midst of another surge in Ron Paul excitement and notoriety. If you had offered me a large bet that Ron Paul would one day be in serious danger of winning the Iowa caucuses back in 1988 (or 1989?) when he spoke to our libertarian group at the University of Chicago, I would have happily taken the negative side of that bet and counted myself lucky to have run into a fool willing to take the other side.

What is going on? Two things I think. The first is bad times. Bad times push people to consider options outside the norm. You can see that on the left with the amount of interest in, and support for, the occupy movement, and on the right with the tea party and now with Ron Paul. Second, both the red team and the blue have no other really different candidates on offer. Mitt Romney is what you find if you look up "generic Republican" in the dictionary. Obama lacks the skills to pretend to be a populist. He just isn't one. And, moreover, many of the things that the blue team complained about during Obama's campaign have now been rendered bi-partisan via the actions of his administration: needless wars, gross violations of civil liberties, bailouts of well-connected corporations, huge expansions of the transfer system in a time of large budget deficits, and all the rest. That makes it harder (impossible) for Obama to appear anti-establishment or, indeed, to seem very different from Bush II.

So I think in an important sense it is not so much about Ron Paul as about the large vacuum in issue space left open by the two parties. Ron Paul fills that vaccuum and does so in a compelling way and in a way that appeals to populists of both left and right, as well as to anti-war leftists and the noble remnant of Americans who actually care about civil liberties. The fact that Paul is quite visibly not an intellectual helps too. He is not, at least based on our short interaction back in the 1980s and on his public output of speeches and books, the brightest bulb in the box. But he is sincere - his voting record matches his speeches, which is something only five or 10 congress-critters can credibly claim. And he is taking positions no one else is taking but that are pretty popular with large minorities of the voting public.

This is going to be an interesting election year, though I suspect we end up with Obama and Romney.

Oh, and just for the record, Paul and I disagree on lots of things, most notably abortion and the Fed.

In the meantime, some interesting bits about Ron Paul that I enjoyed:

1. Praise from the Nation (!) via portside.org. I think the Nation writer is right on target in explaining the fears of the Republican establishment.

2. Praise from Nick Gillespie at Reason.

3. An interesting piece from Yahoo! News on Paul's interactions with (suspicious) conservative Christians. Why do people care so much about what others do in their bedrooms?

4. A Ron Paul television ad. Try to imagine such an ad in Europe or Canada.

5. Left anarchist Gary Chartier at Bleeding Heart Libertarians on Ron Paul.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-21T11:58:00.002-05:00

Nick Gillespie at reason provides a better obituary than I could hope to write.

Would that there were more like Hitchens on a left now awash with the incoherent socialism of sentiment and the petty oppressions of do-gooder paternalism.

Roland Fryer and the DC public schools

2011-12-21T11:49:00.002-05:00

Fryer leaves a policy evaluation research venture because the DC schools and their associated teacher labor cartel will not do random assignment.

And, what is not unrelated to the fact that very few policies get evaluated in any sort of serious way, the Washington Post columnist (and, by implication, his editor as well) shows that he does not understand the difference between random assignment and random sampling:

What ultimately sank the venture was Fryer’s interest in randomly assigning some teachers into “treatment” and “control” groups. Random assignment is considered one of the strongest research designs because it ensures that the sample selected represents the characteristics of the entire group under study.

Sigh. We do indeed have a great deal of work to do.

Chronicle of not knowing what you are talking about

2011-12-21T07:48:00.003-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published an astoundingly ignorant and confused piece about the state of modern economics.

To begin, note that the article avoids asking a very important question: what are the optimal boundaries of academic disciplines? This question would seem to be of interest to readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education but is not even touched on by the article. Unlike some other social sciences - sociology and political science come immediately to mind - economics as a discipline does not spend a great deal of time engaged in long-running internal debates about methodology. Instead, because mainstream economics (which means well over 90 percent of the profession - and probably more than 95 or even 99 percent) shares a single, but broad and flexible, empirical and theoretical methodology, it can devote its attention to advancing the state of knowledge rather than to methodological in-fighting. I think a strong case could be made that the lack of internal methodological strife has been an important contributor to the relative success of economics as a discipline in recent decades.

On a separate, but not unrelated, point, does it really make sense for economists to try and become second-rate sociologists or psychologists? Or does it make sense for economics to teach economics, and leave the sociology to the sociologists and the psychology to the psychologists? This is not to say that economists should not pay attention to what is going on elsewhere in the social science, but rather to say that there is value in specialization. Moreover, students are free (and, indeed, in most universities, required) to take courses in a variety of disciplines. Surely it is optimal for them to get their sociology from the sociologists rather than from the economists? This is another important and interesting issue that is completely missed by the author of the Chronicle piece.

The article then provides some real howlers:

Critics call this ideology "free-market fundamentalism," and it rests on certain core tenets: The market is the most efficient way to allocate resources; people generally make rational decisions when buying goods and services; and government regulations are to be minimized because they risk undermining purer market forces and can lead to corruption.

Embraced by presidential administrations from both political parties, this view of economics is most often associated with prestigious academic departments in the Ivy League, at Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. But it has devolved into dogma, critics say.

Critics want an alternative vision—or visions—of the discipline to be more widely accepted. "We need an economics that aims to secure long-run human well-being, not an economics preoccupied with maximizing short-run output and profits," reads the mission statement of a new group, called Econ4, which was started at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in September.

I must have missed all those administrations that embraced a "free market ideology". Last I looked, the government just keeps getting bigger, politically connected businesses keep getting their subsidies, politicians kept arguing for, and acting on, the view that demand curves don't slope down and so on. Oh, and just in case the author of the Chronicle piece is unaware, it may be helpful to note here that subsidies to politically connected businesses are not a neoliberal or a classical liberal sort of enterprise.

And where is this economics that is "preoccupied with maximizing short-run output and profits"? I have somehow missed that entire part of the discipline despite spending 31 years as a student and teacher of economics. How about all those life-cycle models one finds in labor economics? What about all those models in macro that emphasize expectations of future events? What about the whole debate in the economics of climate change on what the appropriate discount rate should be? In what sense are these types of models and sorts of discussions, which dominate large parts of the discipline, about the short run? It is not surprising that the undergrads in Econ4 do not know about the literature, and cannot distinguish between model assumptions designed to describe behavior in a positive sense and the normative goals underlying intellectual inquiry in economics, but shouldn't someone who writes about economics for the Chronicle of Higher Education know at least something about the literature and shouldn't such a person be able to manage basic distinctions between normative and positive?

And what about this idea that "free market fundamentalism" is primarily associated with top-ranked departments? That is simply a bizarre notion and the author, rightfully given that it is incorrect, does not offer any evidence for it. So then why make the claim? Shouldn't someone writing about economics for the Chronicle know even a teeny, tiny bit about how the academic side of the profession works?

And then there is the math:

Part of the problem is that they have embraced mathematics too fervently, according to one view. This embrace has bolstered the prestige of the discipline, making it appear more intellectually rigorous and academically selective. But it has also made economics more abstract and divorced from the illogical or inconsistent ways that people, and large groups of people, can behave.

This simple statement covers a multitude of misunderstandings. First, the point of formalism (of which the use of mathematics is but one manifestation) is to make sure that what is being said is logically consistent and to make sure that what is being said is correctly transmitted from writer to reader. These are noble and reasonable goals, ones that should be embraced by sensible people of all viewpoints. Sometimes, to be sure, economists formalize more than is required and such excess formalism is rightly criticized. But formalism per se should be uncontroversial in any discipline that purports to advance knowledge.

A second implicit claim is that economics does not pay attention to behavior that would be "irrational" in the sense that economists use that term in a world of full information and zero information processing costs. In fact, entire sub-fields exist to study the economics of information and the economics of limited information processing costs. The latter goes by the (unfortunate and misleading) name of behavioral economics. The rapid rise of behavioral economics is testament to the ability of economics to creatively respond to weaknesses in existing models that have been highlighted by compelling empirical evidence obtained using econometric methods. Its existence as a popular sub-field, whose influence is felt throughout the discipline, contradicts the claims of intellectual rigidity made by the critics cited in the article.

Finally, there is this claim:

"The problem is that their view of how to think like an economist is extremely narrow to the point of being cut off from some of the major questions affecting society," Mr. Epstein said. "In the end it is a form of indoctrination."

This broader claim is easily dismissed by simply checking the table of contents of any field journal in a field not concerned with tool building, which is to say any field other than high theory or theoretical econometrics. For example, consider the table of contents of the Winter 2011 issue of the Journal of Human Resources, one of the two leading journals in labor economics. The articles address topics such as racial differences (the first three papers!), the effects of conditional cash transfers for the poor, school quality and teacher qualifications, pollution, infectious diseases and pensions. Pretty irrelevant stuff there, yep. Sure sounds like a profession full of market fundamentalists bent on indoctrination, yep.

The article ends with a discussion of ethical misbehavior by a small number of economists. Their behavior is rightly condemned, but neither their behavior nor the ethical and organizational issues it raises has anything to do with the point of the article, which is about methodology. Karl Marx was by all accounts a jerk. Hayek, as we learned from David Warsh a couple of weeks ago, was not very nice to his first wife. From the standpoint of economics, so what? What matters from the point of view of a discussion of economic methodology, is the ideas, not the imperfect humans who write about them.

Finally, it is worth noting that one of the leading heterodox views within the discipline (as measured by academic adherents or popular influence), namely Austrian economics, would hardly satisfy the lefty protesters at Harvard or U Mass Amherst. The Austrians drop the math, and much of the applied econometrics as well, from neo-classical economics, but they love markets, and hate government, in a way that would make most neo-classical economists blush, at best. A thoughtful article on heterodox economics would have done more to highlight the critiques of the Austrians and to note that their views and presence in the profession make clear that debates about the role of mathematics or of applied econometrics in economic research are largely orthogonal to concerns about political bias.

In sum, it is hard not to conclude that at least some of the critics cited in this piece (and perhaps its author as well) prefer to tear down economics by citing unrelated ethical lapses or by complaining about the math, or about mysterious asymmetries of power and influence, because they know they cannot win honest and straightforward debates about the substance. That's too bad, as serious intellectual discussion and reflection on these issues could be both illuminating and useful.[I should note that I excuse Folbre and Margolis from this criticism - my sense from what I know of their work beyond the sound bites in this article is that they are serious scholars, though obviously we disagree about many things empirical, political and methodological.]

Shame on the Chronicle for publishing such a thoughtless and uninformed piece of rubbish on these important and interesting issues.

Trend spotting

2011-12-21T06:02:00.001-05:00

Business Week has some fun with simple time series correlations.

Advances in transportation safety

2011-12-21T05:53:00.002-05:00

Via Arthur Robson on Facebook.

Thought for the day

2011-12-19T02:16:00.003-05:00

"An academic discipline as a group of scholarswho had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions." - Mark Nathan Cohen

Should the IMF guide your choice of alcoholic beverages?

2011-12-19T02:15:00.001-05:00

Via Helena Schweiger (one of my students from Maryland, now at the EBRD) on Facebook. The magazine is the EasyJet in-flight magazine.