The filling station as built art

 

This restored Shell station lives in the bustling metropolis of La Grange, Wisconsin, which I drive through on the way to and from my daughter's summer camp. 

Book: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

O'Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague. Vintage.

Let there be no mistake that this is a novel for English majors! It offers a fictional filling in of the life and times of Shakespeare's son Hamnet.

But I enjoyed it too, and so might you. The writing is beautiful, the characters are full and rich, and the author has done her work, as best I can tell, to understand and accurately describe the historical setting within which the novel takes place. 

Recommended to those who think they might value such a literary enterprise.

Hat tip: Tyler Cowen

Economics Moment of Zen #17

 "We conduct the decennial Census every ten years."

From one of the six (!) annual trainings required to maintain Special Sworn Status at the Census Bureau.

Memorial day

 Thanks to John Mullahy's twitter feed for inspiration.

Book: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Mandel, Emily St. John. 2022. Sea of Tranquility. Knopf.

Wow! Time travel. Plague. A few stragglers from earlier books. A complex, recursive plot. Canadian content. Big philosophical questions. What more could one want?

I was reminded of the Robert Silverberg time travel stories that I read in high school, and the paradoxes that they highlighted. Those paradoxes are here as well, but in the background, with the characters, as usual, in the foreground.   

One subplot concerns a famous female author doing a book tour. It seemed particularly heartfelt, as does the descriptions of lockdown during the book's plague. I have a theory as to why that covers both.

I enjoyed this tremendously. Highly recommended if you like what one might call, and I will call, literary science fiction.

I purchased a "signed" edition from Barnes and Noble when it first came out.

New (published) paper: Some Children Left Behind

Some Children Left Behind: Variation in the Effects of an Educational Intervention

Julie Buhl-Wiggers, Jason Kerwin, Juan Muñoz-Morales, Jeffrey Smith, and Rebecca Thornton

Abstract

We document substantial variation in the effects of a highly-effective literacy program in northern Uganda. The program increases test scores by 1.4 SDs on average, but standard statistical bounds show that the impact standard deviation exceeds 1.0 SD. This implies that the variation in effects across our students is wider than the spread of mean effects across all randomized evaluations of developing country education interventions in the literature. This very effective program does indeed leave some students behind. At the same time, we do not learn much from our analyses that attempt to determine which students benefit more or less from the program. We reject rank preservation, and the weaker assumption of stochastic increasingness leaves wide bounds on quantile-specific average treatment effects. Neither conventional nor machine-learning approaches to estimating systematic heterogeneity capture more than a small fraction of the variation in impacts given our available candidate moderators.

Permanent (gated) link
Temporary (free) link (good until the end of June)

This paper is an intellectual descendant of my job market paper, Heckman, Smith and Clements (1997), and of Djebbari and Smith (2008). It will appear in the special issue of the Journal of Econometrics in honor of Heckman's 75th birthday.

Movie: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Wow! The best movie I have seen in a while (where "a while" includes seeing the best picture winner at the Oscars). Fun, frantic, and conducive to the thinking of big thoughts. 

This review from the Globe and Mail captures my take on the movie pretty well.

Keeping with the Toronto theme, this review from Now magazine highlights the negatives. I agree with them that cutting the least important 10-15 minutes would have made for a stronger movie, but I think I would have retained the hot dog fingers.

Oh, and Jamie Lee Curtis is amazing.

Recommended if you're in the mood for a wild ride.