Follow-up on the Chronicle post

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

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"

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

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

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

Woodward on Gore

Ouch!

Via instapundit.

Richard Florida on city size and sports success

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

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

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

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

Hat tip: Laura Kawano

Busy buzzwords

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?

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

Humorous airline quotes

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business Week has some fun with simple time series correlations.

Advances in transportation safety

Via Arthur Robson on Facebook.

Thought for the day

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

Should the IMF guide your choice of alcoholic beverages?

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

Holiday giving

The perfect gift for the person who has everything.

Hat tip: Lisa Gribowski

Theater: Ain't Misbehavin' at Performance Netwok

It is actually something of a misnomer to call Performance Network's production of Ain't Misbehavin' theater as it is really a concert with the performers wearing period costumes and performing on a period set.

Unlike many musicals, which frustrate me because there is not enough plot to chew on, Ain't Misbehavin' dispenses with the pretense of a plot entirely. It turns out I like that better. It is more honest somehow.

The performers are top notch and the songs range from the serious to the hilarious. Some of them, indeed, were politically incorrect enough that you could feel the Ann Arbor audience cringe a bit, but it is good for them to be confronted with other views. And some of them, like the songs about missing nylons during World War 2, about prohibition, and about pot, provide nice history lessons.

And there are other reviews too, if you don't believe me.

In short, we both enjoyed it a lot. Highly recommended.

Movie: Hugo

Hugo is a sheer delight!  It is visually rich, the acting is good, and you get an interesting dose of film history. The lyrical NYT review expands on these themes.

Even Sasha Baron Cohen, whose Borat is probably my least favorite movie of the last decade, adds excellence to the film as the evil (in an officious, bureaucratic sort of way) station inspector.

This is the best movie for kids I have seen in many a year (though, of course, until we had one, a kid that is, I hadn't been to many in a few decades either). Our kid, at 4.4 years, fidgeted only a little in over two hours.

Definitely recommended.

Life in the halls of power

In yet another illustration of the power of compensating differences, staff in the office of Congressman Rick Larsen, from the 2nd District in Washington State illustrate why Congressional staff jobs do not pay very much: you get to drink all the time and watch Nirvana videos!

And, of course, this provides yet another opportunity to fondly remember the follies of an earlier Congressional staff member who also struggled to keep herself busy: Jessica Cutler.

Hat tip: Soon-to-be Congressman Dan Marcin, who apparently is already planning how to staff his office.

Addendum: no happy ending here ... the aides were fired after the story broke.

Development economics / applied econometrics humor

There's a whole bunch of this sort of thing at this blog. All of it features, for some reason, actor Ryan Gosling.

Hat tip: Reason Foundation president David Nott, on Facebook.

Addendum: It turns out that there is also a biostatistics version.

Additional hat tip: Julia Kong

Multicollinearity

A former student from my graduate applied econometrics course came by my office yesterday to talk about multicollinearity, which is the name for the situation where one estimates an econometric model of some sort and two or more of the independent variables are intercorrelated enough to make it hard to estimate their separate effects.

The example I use in my undergraduate course - the topic does not come up in my graduate course - is a regression of earnings on two measures of college quality, namely mean SAT score of the entering class and expenditures per student as well as a long list of characteristics of the individual measured prior to the time of their starting college. The two college characteristics are relatively highly correlated, but far from perfectly correlated. The result is that one can estimate the effects of one conditional on the other, but the estimates are not as precise as one might want in samples of reasonable size. This hints at why the late econometrician Art Goldberger at Wisconsin jokingly called multicollinearity micronumerosity instead.

The interesting thing about our conversation is that the student, who is not in the economics program, and his committee members, also not in economics, were very worried about the potential effect of multicollinearity not just on their estimates but on the matrix inversion underlying the estimator they were using. So we talked about condition numbers and such like, things that in applied econometrics essentially never get talked about. The conversation was interesting because it illustrated the extent to which applied literatures in different fields (or even sub-fields within, say, economics) can wander off and become preoccupied with issues that other fields largely ignore.

Thinking more about this, along with a follow-up email exchange, led to this post and this other post on multi-collinearity at David Giles' blog. both are worth a look if you are into such things.

Whither the drive-in movie theater?

The BBC on the threat of technological change, specifically the conversion to digital projection, to the remaining drive-in theaters in the US.

Of course, the vast majority of those in existence at the height of their popularity are already gone.

The editor's day off

Hat tip: Arthur Robson on Facebook

A Bieber Christmas

The Biebster has recorded a Christmas album that includes this bit of holiday hip-hop:



Some thoughts:

1. Has his career already jumped the shark?
2. Is this just a futile attempt to increase the probability that some of his songs will be played after he reaches puberty?
3. Why not change the name to "Little Haircut Boy"?
4. Santa: this is not on my list. It is not on my daughter's list either, no matter what she may have said. You just misunderstood.

Hat tip: soon-to-be-congresscritter Dan Marcin

Book: Barbarians to Angels by Peter Wells

Barbarians to Angels is a mostly successful attempt by anthropologist Peter Wells to rehabilitate the Dark Ages, the period between about the years 400 and 800 after the fall of Rome and before the rise of later civilizations.

I liked the book (and, indeed, wished it had been longer). The things I found most interesting were learning about the development during this period of areas such as Denmark that had never been under Roman sway and the focus on material rather written evidence. Indeed, Wells sets up a juxtaposition between historians, who rely mainly on the very limited (and perhaps not unbiased) textual evidence from the period, and archaelogists, who rely on the material evidence that has survived the intervening years.

My one complaint is that Wells occasionally drifts into a sort of relativism in which he argues that there is no objective difference between, say, a Roman temple and a wooden hut. Besides being silly, if one took that line of argument seriously then there is really no point to writing the book, as under a thorough-going relativist view, the Dark Ages require no rehabilitation.

Still, recommended if you are into this sort of thing. I blame Peter Dolton, who took me to Hadrian's Wall when I visited him in Newcastle, for the fact that I am.

Publication tree

Too bad the nice folks at the New York Times do not understand that economists often use medical journals as outlets for papers with sexy topics but weak identification.

I got this from someone on Facebook - maybe Pierre Leget?

What s/he said

Some gendered academic humor from News of Ann Arbor.

Statistics professor salaries ...

... from the American Statistical Association.

These are closer to economics salaries than I recall them being in the past. As with economists, there is a lot of demand for statisticians (at least certain types of them, again like economists) in the private and government sectors, which keeps the salaries up.

Dawgfather

Gregg Bell on former Washington football coach Don James and his memories of Husky stadium.

More on security theater

Wired reports on a critique of the TSA by a former security adviser to Delta airlines.

Scary and frustrating reading but, on the plus side, should World War 1 break out again, we are ready with our Maginot Line.

A nation of twits?

The Daily Mail reports that the U.S. National Archives plans to retain every public tweet ever sent on Twitter.

So, watch what you say ...

Hat tip: Charlie Brown, who also suggested the title of the post.

WIA is wonderful, or not

Actually, WIA - the Workforce Investment Act - appears to be wonderful only if you do not understand that the performance measures that the government uses for quantitative monitoring of the program have nothing to say about whether or not the program adds value.

Some people called FutureWork Systems, who I think make their money providing services to local WIA programs, have produced a web site, called the WIA dashboard, the neatly summarizes the performance measures. For example, if you click through, you will learn that WIA provided services to about 2.75 million people in the last four quarters for which data are available. At the bottom of the table, the site claims that this is the number of people who "benefit from" the program, but in fact this is wrong on two counts. First, some of the people who benefit from the program are not counted, such as the people who run businesses like FutureWork Systems.

More importantly, providing services is not the same as producing a benefit. The statistics in the table are all about inputs and outcomes, and not at all about impacts, which must be measured relative to the counterfactual of what would have happened to the service recipient had he or she not participated in the program. The data from earlier experimental (i.e. wannabe participants were randomly assigned to the offer of participation or not) evaluations of similar programs make clear that outcome levels and impacts are very different indeed. At the extreme, the predecessor to WIA, the Job Training Partnership Act, was estimated to reduce the average earnings of its male out-of-school youth participants relative to the counterfactual.

The site will also tell you that about 900,000 adult and dislocated worker participants were "placed" in employment. Of course, if you click on the definition at the bottom, you will learn that "placed" here does not really mean placed, it just means that they somehow found a job. In many cases, that job will have nothing to do with whatever services they received from WIA.

Sadly, one must conclude that the people at FutureWorks are either clueless about the difference between outcome levels and impacts relative to a counterfactual, or they know the difference, but are deliberately trying to mislead the innocents who happen to find their website. In either case, shame on them.

And you know, just as an aside, this topic is so important that someone ought to write a book about it.

Hat tip: Carolyn Heinrich, who forwarded an email about the site from someone misleadingly called "Geoff Smith". That email begins with "WIA Matters! Let's show 'em our impact".  Too bad they have no impacts to show.

Modern ruin: mini-golf edition

Is there anything sadder than an abandoned miniature golf course?

This one is actually in Sweden, which one might of thought would have some sort of preservation mechanism for these important cultural institutions.

Ann Arbor's dumbest criminals

A man walked into the TCF Bank at 125 Briarwood Circle about 10 this morning and demanded money, Ann Arbor police Sgt. Pat Hughes said. A teller gave him an undisclosed amount of money, and he left the bank on foot, Hughes said. Reports indicated the man got on an AATA bus headed for Ypsilanti, Hughes said.

The suspect, a 30-year-old man from Ypsilanti, got off the bus in the area of Hawkins and Franklin Streets and was arrested by Ypsilanti Police Department officers, Hughes said. The money the man had taken from the bank was recovered at the scene, Hughes said.

Full story here. How does one get past thinking "and then I'll make my getaway on the bus" without breaking into gales of laughter and giving up on the whole idea?

Hat tip: Charlie Brown, who noted that perhaps he should have stolen a bike first.

Italy, where anyone can be minister of agriculture

A comedy of errors ensues as Italy assembles a new government.

Special bonus Canadian content!

Hat tip: Charlie Brown, who suggests that a similar model may explain how some of our friends ended up becoming associate deans.

Lost in translation: alcohol edition

Via Arthur Robson on Facebook, who adds "the pleasure was mine".

Elect an economist to Congress

Michigan economics grad student Daniel Marcin takes on 12th District incumbent (since before I was born) John Dingleberry.

I wish him well. I even agree with most of his positions, though he should be clearer that the post office loses its legal monopoly under his proposed scheme. Oh, and carbon taxes good, CAFE standards bad. But he knows that.

Plus, and this is pure bonus goodness, Dan did his undergraduate work at Maryland, so corrupt old lefty Dingell had just better Fear the Turtle.

Junior job talk skit

A skit about junior job talks from the Wisconsin economics winter party. Actually, my senior job talk there was a lot like this too.

Good stuff, and good preparation for our students on the market.

Movie: The Descendants

A.O. Scott at the New York Times liked "The Descendants" better than I did, but I still liked it very much. We are in agreement about the very strong supporting cast. The writing is also exemplary, as is the cinematography. I found George Clooney just a bit less compelling here than in Up In the Air, and I could have done without the vaguely political land development subplot. But, overall, a fine mix of comedy and drama.

Recommended.

An enviable sentence

This is the best sentence I read all day:

The business school is the place on campus where only the library books are unemployed.

I will not credit the colleague whose email contained it and must surely note that I like it not because of any concerns about Michigan's business (or busyness, as yet another colleague would have it) school, which has very fine students and faculty, but rather just because it is so clever with language.

Snyder on Michigan workforce development

Michigan governor Rick Snyder offers his thoughts and proposals for redesigning Michigan's workforce development system. The workforce development system is a catch-all term for the various employment and training programs financed under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) along with the lower end of the state higher education system (i.e the community colleges and the directional schools) and various other bits. Annarbor.com has a summary and a link to the underlying document.

My read is that Snyder's proposal is a bit of a mixed bag. It is not clear, for example, what value there is to having the state run its own on-line site to match employers and workers when there already are some very good ones out there, such as monster.com. Providing labor market information can be useful if it is done well; similarly the "career investment calculator" will be good or awful depending on the details of implementation. The evidence base for self-employment assistance for the unemployed is a mixed bag, but you can find some support for it. I do very much like his idea of allowing in more skilled immigrants. And so on and so on.

Evidence, huh?

From Brookings, a call for using actual evaluation evidence to make budget decisions.

The awe-inspiring non-seriousness of the current US policy formation among members of both the red and blue teams is well illustrated by the fact that such a piece has to be written.

How do these people look themselves in the mirror? It truly is beyond me. The only possible legitimate justification for taking money by force from people (that would be taxes) and spending it on social programs (other than straight transfers) can be that it is being spent on programs that have credibly been shown to pass serious cost-benefit tests. What percentage of US social pending meets this test? One? Less than one?

Sigh.

Finding the secret nuclear bunker

Hat tip: Arthur Robson on Facebook

Technological progress: urinal sport division

The Daily Mail reports on a new video game that one (at least male ones) can play at the urinal.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

An excellent statistical Dilbert

I am not sure how to make this smaller, but if you click on it you will see the whole thing.

Hat tip: Laura Kawano

Slick Rick out at UCLA

Rick Neuheisel fired at UCLA, but allowed to coach the team this Friday when Oregon rolls over them in the Pac-12 championship game.

Addendum: the Seattle Times report on Neuheisel's firing, which also includes a brief discussion of Dennis Erickson's firing at Arizona State.

Unintended consequences and cultural propagation

The Toronto Star on the lingering cultural effects of the decade-long US presence in Iraq.

A particularly good bit:

Sporting baggy soldiers’ camouflage pants, high-top sneakers and a back-turned “N.Y.” baseball cap, the chubby 22-year-old was showing off his breakdancing moves on a sunny afternoon in a Baghdad park.

A $ sign was shaved into his closely cropped hair.

 “While others might stop being rappers after the Americans leave, I will go on (rapping) till I reach N.Y.,” said Mohammed, who teaches at a primary school.

His forearm bore a tattoo of dice above the words “gang star.” That was the tattooist’s mistake, he said; it was supposed to say “gangsta.”

I am really glad the Iraqis kicked us out. It will save us money and it is time for them to run their own affairs, for good or ill.

Hat tip: Yerema Gribowski

DSK in the Financial Times

The "DSK was set up" theory has made it to the FT and the NYRB. My Euro-knowledgeable friends who suggested it to me at the very beginning are looking pretty clever.

More broadly, what is interesting in this piece beyond the DSK case are: (1) just how much information is available from things like hotel electronic key records and cameras at restaurants and (2) that a major French politician would dine at McCormick and Schmick's while in New York. What was he thinking?

A eulogy for Borders on the Huffington Post

Well said, particularly the bit about Borders being Ann Arbor's friendly neighborhood bookstore.

Barnes and Noble has been trying to lure me in with discounts - they purchased the Border's Rewards email list of course - but as yet without success.

Is yoga satanic?

So says Father Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican's chief exorcist.  He does not much like Harry Potter either, nor nightclubs:

My advice to young people would be to watch out for nightclubs because the path is always the same: alcohol, sex, drugs and Satanic sects.

And who knew that there is an International Association of Exorcists? What do they do at their conventions? Where do they hold them? Is there a room of vendors selling books and training videos?

We live in a world of diverse preferences, information sets and leisure time activities, indeed.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Washington 38, Pullman Agricultural College and Liquor Store 21

It was a bit closer than the score suggests, and the defense still needs some work, but a fine offensive performance and a great win over the Cougars.

Washington gets seven regular season wins in Sarkisian's third year, after six in the second year and five in the first year. All good.

Addendum: Seattle Times game story here, plus columns by Steve Kelley and Jerry Brewer. And was the Apple Cup the last game for Cougar head coach Paul Wulff?

Michigan 40, Ohio 34

At last! A great game and a great victory for Michigan.

I attribute it all to the fact that, like yours truly, Michigan coach Brady Hoke does not like long-sleeved shirts.

Ann Arbor will be hopping tonight ...

Addendum: annarbor.com coverage here.

There is always something to be thankful for ...

Hat tip: Gustavo Bobonis on Facebook

Notes among the famous

A missive from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol, concerning cover art.

Thanksgiving

A belated happy American Thanksgiving to my friends and colleagues, as well as those I do not know in person, who take the time to look at this blog.

All of us have much to be grateful for indeed.

Movie: J. Edgar

I liked this movie a lot. Directed by Clint Eastwood, it avoids the easy path of simply hammering on Hoover for being a power-mad politico (which he most certainly was) and instead focuses on him more as a person, and on the interaction between the personal Hoover and the public Hoover. The relationship between Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson is handled with particular facility, both in the way that it provides an excellent historical lesson regarding how much things have changed in a short space of time, and in  the way it serves to humanize Hoover.

NYT reviewer Manohla Dargis, whose reviews I usually like less than A.O. Scott's, gets this one exactly right. I especially liked the ending:

Instead, Mr. Eastwood explores the inner life of a lonely man whose fortress was also his stage. From there, surrounded by a few trusted souls, he played out a fiction in which he was as heroic as a James Cagney G-man (despite a life with a mother Norman Bates would recognize), but finally as weak, compromised and human as those whose lives he helped crush.

Recommended.

Pithy abstracts

This is excellent - a model of compactness and clarity.

John Scalzi on Klout

I had not actually heard of Klout before reading this piece by John Scalzi about his decision not to have Klout.  I joined and my Klout score yesterday when I did so was 26. Today it is 25. I don't think my Klout score includes whatever influence this humble blog might have, which would surely increase it by at least one.

You can add your own analogy between Klout and the U.S. News and World Report college rankings here.

Michigan 45, Nebraska 17 [sic]

Michigan managed to do something it had not done all season (largely due to a schedule thick with weak opponents): defeat a good team.  And it did so in style, cleaning the clock of Nebraska 45-17. On this day at least, the Cornhuskers were as out of place athletically in the Big-10 [sic] as they are academically on all days.

Rich Rodriguez to Arizona

Arizona has hired former Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez to replace fired coach Mike Stoops.

I think this is a good hire for them for two reasons. First of all, Michigan's success this year owes much to Rodriguez' work at Michigan the past few years. These are his players winning all these games. Second, Rodriguez never really quite seemed to get how Michigan was different from West Virginia both academically and athletically. That will be less of an issue at Arizona.

Oregon State 38, Washington 21

The first real disappointment of the year for Washington fans. Washington's four other losses were all to teams that were clearly, at this point, stronger, namely Nebraska, Stanford, Oregon and USC. This was the first loss to a team that was clearly weaker than the Huskies, and could have been beaten even with newbie Nick Montana at quarterback in place of Keith Price.

Much will be forgiven, of course, if they can beat Washington State this Saturday at 7:30 Eastern at Centurylink field.

Travel losses

A fine rant about losing things at hotels and on airplanes from the Economist's Gulliver blog. My luck has been better here than the writer's, in that I have actually gotten a couple of things back that were left at hotels, but the odds are still low.

Thought question for the day

Should the president of the NBER send out letters of recommendation for specific students to NBER email lists? If so, can I, as an NBER member, do the same?

Both strike me as bad ideas but I received such a letter today.

Addendum: Seems that the NBER actually agrees with me, as I just received the following email:

Please trash the earlier e-mail sent to you re letter of recommendation. It was an e-mail glitch.  Thanks.

I like it when things work out correctly.

In which we learn just how far the Hammer will go to sell some books

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Ugly People Prejudice
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Excellent!  The scenes of Dan Hamermesh (the "Hammer") walking around campus with the interviewer rating the students are priceless (but hopefully not legally actionable).

Buy the book here.

Hat tips (in temporal order): Jon Lanning, Ken Troske and Isaac Sorkin

Ruins: Wonderland

 
Ruins of a never-completed Chinese version of Disneyland, outside Beijing. Related Atlantic article, from which the video is taken, here.

Kevin Murphy on the NBA labor dispute

An informative and interesting interview with Chicago economist Kevin Murphy, who is consulting to the players' side in the current labor dispute.

I do have to disagree with one bit, though:

[Murphy] is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, he's been commuting to the labor talks in New York and, with all due respect to NBA commissioner David Stern, union director Billy Hunter and the others hashing out the league's finances and future, he truly might be the smartest guy in the room.

Might be?  Might be? Think again, nba.com interviewer. That should just be "is".

I did not interact with Kevin much during my graduate student days - he was not yet co-teaching one of the first year micro courses with Gary Becker - but there were several times at the labor seminar when it was clear from his first couple of questions that Kevin had not so much as looked at the abstract, but by 45 minutes in, he knew the paper better than the speaker.

Hat tip: someone .... where did that email go?

Becky Blank ...

... continues to move up the food chain in the Obama administration. More economists in administrations of any color is pretty much an unalloyed good, and Becky is a very fine empirical economist.

Stewart on Corzine

Greg Mankiw recommends this very funny take-down of financial executive turned politician turned financial executive John Corzine by the Daily Show's John Stewart.

Evaluating exercise

My good friend Herr Prof. Dr. Michael Lechner has begun a research agenda on the economics of sports. You can find a summary of his paper evaluating the "treatment" of youthful exercise here. The paper is co-authored with Christina Felfe and Andreas Steinmayr.

I have always liked Michael's work in part because he is always very careful to justify, in terms of the economics and institutions of the particular context, the identification strategies he uses. This paper is no exception.

I am also interested and pleased to see Michael moving into the labor economics side of the economics of sports. I think his presence will create a lot of positive spillovers in terms of the applied econometrics of the field, thereby raising the average quality of the research it produces.

I think this is also a natural move in the sense that the literature on the evaluation of employment and training programs, in which both Michael and I have been quite active, has reached a fairly mature point, so that most contributions are reasonably marginal.

This move also comports with Michael's personal interest in fitness, an interest he shares with his assistant professors and graduate students. If you visit St. Gallen, they will tell you entertaining stories, when Michael is not nearby, about group retreats held on top of hills that must be climbed on foot and so on. When I last visited, I got to play soccer with Michael and his boys,which was great fun, though expect it was great fun in part because he had coached them to go easy on me.

John Scalzi on Penn State, with further comments from me

John Scalzi, whom I remember from my graduate student days at Chicago when he was writing for the Chicago Maroon, has a pointed and spot-on take on Penn State athletics.

I will say that once the senior administration at Penn State caught up with what was going on, they have been following the book exactly, most likely because they hired expensive and sharp organizational disaster consultants who are telling them what to do. The key to handling  these things right is, to the greatest extent possible, to take the full hit right away, so that things do not drag out and the "healing" begins almost immediately. And, indeed, if you look on Yahoo you can find stories from sports writers about the healing beginning already, just a few days after the big hit of firing coach Joe Paterno and the less big hit of firing whomever it was who was president of the university. Look as well for quick, out-of-court settlements to avoid drawn out court battles that would generate lots of bad publicity.

Indeed, even the game yesterday went exactly how the administration would have wanted it: a prayer session (separation of church and state, anyone?) before the opening kickoff with players from both teams had the desired effect on the ESPN announcers and then the Penn State football team came close to winning, thus demonstrating the players' devotion to the school and program, but  did not actually win, which would have been a bit offensive given all that has happened. The university administration could not have scripted it better. It will be interesting as well to see how soon the university feels comfortable putting Paterno back in fund-raising mode.

Sometimes stereotypes have some foundation in fact

World leaders act out national stereotypes at the G-20 meetings in Toronto:

The Canadian: self-absorbed and disconnected from reality
The American: businesslike, unwilling to be distracted
The French and the Italian: "Look at that a**!"

Hat tip on picture and text: Laura Hartmann (and several others, all on Facebook).

Oregon (boo, hiss) 34, Washington 17

As expected, the quacking felons defeated Washington 34-17 in the final game at Husky Stadium prior to its $250 million makeover, which begins tomorrow.

The good news: the UW defense played a lot better than it has earlier in the year. And Oregon did not win by more than 20 this time (as it has the past seven times in a row). That's all progress. The bad news: the offense was off its game a bit, with many more interceptions and sacks than usual. Still, it was much better than either the Nebraska or Stanford games, as UW was in the game well into the second half.

Excellent historical photos of Husky Stadium here; the earliest ones serve as a reminder that college football was a big deal even 90 years ago.

Next week: the University of Spoiled Children (USC) in the coliseum in LA at 3:45 Eastern on FX.

Cambridge lack of contact with reality disorder

This is a couple of days old, but still amazing.  From the Harvard Crimson:

A small group of Harvard students and employees staged an “Occupy Speakout” at noon on Tuesday to express their solidarity with the “National Day of Action.” ...

“Mic Check! We are the 99 percent across the country!” the group chanted.

Can there really be students at Harvard so clueless as to not realize that they practically define the "one percent"?

Iowa 24, Michigan 16

While I have argued for several weeks that I thought Michigan was being over-rated by poll voters, I did think that they would beat Iowa. They did not.

The ESPN announcers blamed it on too little Denard Robinson - I think they would have had him run every play - but that strategy only works until he gets injured, as Washington learned when Jake Locker was run every play a couple of years ago. So I am with the coaches on this one. I was surprised, in contrast, by the number of dropped passes. Annarbor.com coverage here.

It does not get any easier for Michigan after this, with Illinois, Ohio State and Nebraska in the next three weeks, though the fact that the last two are in the Big House, which will help.

Odd comments

Today at the Ford School reception at the Association for Public Policy and Management meetings, someone thanked me for writing a tenure letter for a junior person in their department and then added that my letter was the most "entertaining" tenure letter they had received on the case. I am not sure what this means.

Expedition to College Park

I like to revisit the haunts of my past self. Today I revisited the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland for the first time since I left there a bit over six years ago. The proximate purpose of my visit was to attend the labor/public finance/development seminar, which featured Flavio Cunha, and to visit my student Jessica Goldberg, who started at Maryland this fall.

Some thoughts on my visit:

1. The cracks in the walls from the earthquake a few months ago add character to old Tydings Hall but are worrisome nonetheless.

2. There was not a single person at the seminar today who was at Maryland when I left six years ago. That is a lot of turnover.

3. Of the seven professors at the seminar (including the speaker), three were Heckman students and two were students of Heckman students. Too much Heckman? Never!

4. The new chairs in the thoroughly reconstituted seminar room are much less comfortable than the ugly green swivel chairs in the old, darkly paneled seminar room.

Excellence in policing in NYC

This is pretty appalling. In a well-ordered world, the officer involved would already be unemployed.

I am sure, unfortunately, that we are not in well-ordered world.

College or not?

I was rather taken aback by this awful Brookings piece on the choice of whether or not to go to college.

My major concerns:

The discussion gives no hint that the labor market payoff to college may differ between the average student and the marginal student. Absent credit constraints and assuming full information, the marginal student is presently indifferent between the two choices. We are not in a full information, no credit constraint world but it is still quite likely that many if not most of those presently not attending college are making the correct choice (and some of those who are attending are making the incorrect one).

There is no mention of the fact that the earnings payoff to college depends a lot on what you study.

There is no mention of the fact that the earnings payoff to college depends on what college you attend.

While the piece mentions that finishing college is very important, it does not highlight the dismal completion rates of those who seek a four year degree but start at a two-year college or a mediocre four-year college. These student often end up with non-trivial debt but little earnings impact.

Unconditional earnings effects are presented with only a brief and dismissive mention of the importance of non-random selection into college. In fact, conditioning on "ability" as measured by tests scores reduces the earnings effect of college non-trivially.

More minor concerns:

No mention is made of the uncertainty implicit in estimates of earnings effects that rely on a synthetic cohort assumption. That is, it is assumed that old people today are a good proxy for what young people to day will earn if they do or do not get a college degree.

It is not correct to simply ignore the room and board costs of college. Yes, young people have to eat and live somewhere, but the private costs of both may be much lower at home.

In thinking about risk, it is important to remember that the nature of the riskiness associated with the college non-college choice is somewhat unusual. It is well known that earnings risk is lower for college graduates, in part because they are much likely to be unemployed. At the same time, credit constrained students can pile up a lot of debt in college and thus experience a long period of negative net worth that people who do not go to college are spared. So there is an asymmetry of sorts here.

Standard errors?

I recognize that the piece is trying to reach a popular audience, but I think that even a popular audience needs to hear about many of these issues.

In sum: ugh. And Michael Greenstone is a very smart guy. So I blame the other author, whom I do not know.

Via Brian McCall

Economists and politicians

A fine rant from Larry Kotlikoff.

The tricky part, of course, is what to do about it. You don't really want politicians to not have economists around. That would just make things worse. One hopes that the threat of professional ridicule, which is essentially the tonic that Kotlikoff is administering, serves to moderate politically motivated shading by economists who advise candidates.

Of course, as Kotlikoff notes, the government's usual models for projecting the effects of tax reforms are nothing to be very happy about either.

Life at UC Berkeley

Building Coordinators
PLEASE DISSEMINATE THIS INFORMATION TO YOUR BUILDING STAFF

We have heard there will be a "JOIN THE OCCUPY OAKLAND STRIKE - UC BERKELEY WALKOUT" Wednesday, November 2, 2011. At this point we do not know how this proposed WALKOUT may be implemented but it is being advertised as a Classroom walkout at 11AM, followed by a march to Oakland, and returning to Sproul Plaza at 5PM. These actions may cause some disruptions by small groups of individuals to the everyday routine, including erroneous "fire alarm" pulls or there may be other associated activities around the campus, including potential marches through campus buildings and "sit-ins". While it is unknown where and when these actions may take place, these activities may present some unique challenges for the campus as the majority of our facilities are open to the public. Although we do not expect any malicious activities, its possible your building may be marched through or even have minor disruptions, so it is best to be a little more vigilant for those who may be roaming our halls.

For those building that have been the target of "erroneous" fire alarm pulls in the past, it may be worthwhile to have an "extra" presence in the hallways and by exits.

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****************************************************************************

Please remind your building occupants of the following procedures should marchers enter your building:

If marchers enter your building, let them. Try to carry on business as usual. If the noise becomes too great, or the crowd too large, feel free to close and lock your office doors - this is a departmental decision. Do not close your buildings unless the Police advise you to.

As a reminder, in the past, some of these activities have included repeated fire alarm pulls. If a building fire alarm sounds, follow your normal procedures and evacuate the building. Do not re-enter until given the "all clear" by a Campus official. We are working with the Campus Fire Marshal's office to address these types of situations and if your facility is involved we will be contacting you.

As always, if you have questions please feel free to contact the UC Police department at XXX-XXXX or call via cell phone to XXX-XXXX.

****************************************************************************
****************************************************************************

From an informational perspective, if you observe any unusual gatherings or activities in your building/facility; if you observe any suspicious activities or if you experience actual disruptions to classrooms or administrative routines, call UCPD (911 or Cell phone XXX-XXXX) and we will provide the appropriate support.

We will be utilizing the BC email as a conduit for campus-wide specific information we need to disseminate, so please check your email regularly.

Thank you,

Office of Emergency Preparedness & Homeland Security Sproul Hall, Rm. 17 Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone:(510) XXX-XXXX
Fax: (510) XXX-XXXX
URL: oep.berkeley.edu

Tricky exam questions

A brain-teaser from the folks at Cheap Talk.

Washington 42, Arizona 31

I stayed up until two in the morning watching this one - it started at 7:30 PM pacific time - and was well rewarded for my troubles. The game was tense and hard-fought by both sides. Arizona is a lot better - or maybe just Nick Foles is a lot better - than you would expect for a team that just fired its head coach three weeks ago. In the end, Washington running back Chris Polk had a stellar night, and the defense played better, and Washington pulled it out. Seattle times coverage here.

Eight games into the season, Washington is 6-2 and already bowl eligible. If they continue to beat the teams they are supposed to beat and lose to the teams they are supposed to lose to, they will end the regular season 8-4, which is solidly within the support of what Don James achieved back in the modern golden age of Husky football.

This week: UW goes to Eugene to play the quackers, again at 10:30 PM eastern time.

Michigan 36, Purdue 14

I was expecting this one to be closer than it was, having watched Purdue beat Illinois the week before. Michigan played well, and what is more important, managed to get a lot of points without putting the entire burden of the offense on Denard Robinson.  Annarbor.com coverage here.

Next week Michigan is at Iowa at noon on ESPN.

AI and the iphone

Ann Althouse reports on her empirical investigation.

Pomo humor

Hat tip: Sue Gindlin Weidman

Mara Berman Lederman seminar at Michigan

Mara Berman Lederman is at Michigan this Friday. Mara was one of the two or three strongest honors undergraduates I interacted with during my seven years at Western Ontario (where she was known among the faculty as "magnificent Mara"). Sadly, I will miss her talk as I am at a conference on Friday. But local economist readers should think about going. The topic sounds fun and she is very bright.

Here are the details:

BE SEMINAR

Friday, October 28, 2011

12-1:30 pm

Room: E1540

Presenter:  Mara Lederman, University of Toronto

Topic:   Quality Disclosure and Gaming: Do Employee Incentives Matter?

Abstract 

We investigate gaming of a public disclosure program and, in particular, whether gaming depends on the incentives provided to the employees who are most likely to carry out the gaming. We do this in the context of the government-mandated disclosure of airline on-time performance. While this program collects data on the actual minutes of delay incurred on each flight, it ranks airlines based only on the fraction of their flights that arrive 15 or more minutes late. This creates incentives for airlines to game the program by reducing delays on specifically those flights they expect to arrive with about 15 minutes of delay. In addition, several airlines have introduced employee incentive programs based explicitly on the airline’s performance in the government program. Our empirical analysis finds no evidence of gaming by airlines without incentive programs or with incentive programs with targets that are unrealistically hard to achieve.
On the other hand, we find strong evidence of gaming by airlines that implemented incentive programs with targets that could be – and were - achieved. Specifically, we find that their flights that are predicted to arrive with about 15 minutes of delay have significantly shorter taxi-in times and are significantly more likely to arrive exactly one minute sooner than predicted. Our findings highlight that gaming of a disclosure program will not only depend on the design of the program but will also depend on if and how the measured quality dimensions can be manipulated and whether those who are in a position to manipulate them have incentives to do so.

Paper here.

NASA misbehavior

NASA roughs up the elderly wife of the late astronaut Neil Armstrong.

I thought they were trying to get their budget increased, not their agency closed. How tone deaf can you possibly be? Jeez.

Addendum: alert readers Dan and Lones correctly pointed out that I read the reason article too quickly (or, perhaps more to the point, when I was not sufficiently awake). It was not Neil Armstrong's widow, but rather the widow of a co-worker of his. I am not sure that makes it better.

William Niskanen, RIP

A nice blog post from reason provides further links.

Niskanen also generated one of the main theories of bureaucratic behavior, namely budget maximization. It doesn't explain everything, but it does surely account of a chunk of the variation.

Gaddafi's end

Some gruesome photos and video of the nearly dead, and newly dead, Libyan dictator.

Truly, nothing is private any more.

Book: Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh

I was in the mood for some science fiction, have always been a fan (not sure why, if I had a therapist maybe I'd know) of post-apocalypse fiction and so I read Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh, which I picked from the bones of the Borders in Burlington, Vermont on a trip this summer.

It is very much science fiction. The main character, a likable, nerdy sort of guy who does not do that well with women and does not think very deeply about anything ever, will be familiar from many other science fiction stories by many different authors. The characters are pretty one-dimensional. There are more coincidences than Dickens at his best (or is that his worst?). The briefly appearing economist character does not quite ring true. And for a story set in Savannah, Georgia, the near total absence of Christians is a bit jarring. One might imagine they would have things to say as civilization collapses.

But one does not read science fiction for character or writing, one reads it for ideas, and there are some ideas here that are interesting enough. Ever since visiting the Roman baths in Bath I have been thinking on and off about what it would be like to live at a time when civilization was moving backwards rather than forwards. What would it have been like for those left behind to watch as the Roman pulled out of Britain? That is the sort of reality that McIntosh wants to capture in his book, though in the context of the 21st century American south. In particular, I liked the idea of arrogant and politically motivated scientists trying to hasten the crash and thus the renewal. I also liked McIntosh's portrayal of the gradual collapse of normative social order and of legitimate political authority.

So, overall, okay, maybe even good, but not great. I found a bunch of more positive reviews online, such as this one, and the Amazon comments do a pretty good job of capturing both the strengths and weaknesses of the book.

Recommended for those who like post-apocalyptic fiction.

Movie: Love Crime

This is great French fun (though I sometimes think the French themselves would view this as a documentary on business practices in large firms). And the sets - both the offices and homes - are gorgeous. The heroine, in particular, picked up her design sensibilities from Mickey Rourke in 9.5 weeks.

A.O. Scott is back on key with this review, and captures the movie perfectly.

Great naughty fun .... recommended.

Advice for economics doctoral students

This short piece summarizes just about everything one needs to know when making the transition from research consumer to research producer at the end of the second year of an economics doctoral program.

Movie: The Ides of March

I enjoyed this movie, but not quite as much as I expected to.

Regular readers know that I have become a fan of New York Times movie reviewer A.O. Scott, who seems to me both insightful and on target most of the time. He - I just checked, he is indeed a he - goes off target only when lefty politics come up, and then his NYT blinders come out. This review is no exception, as he writes:

Morris [the movie's fictional new class democrat dream candidate played by George Clooney, who claims that his religion is the constitution but whose every policy proposal is unconstitutional on any reasonable reading of that much-abused document], locked in a battle for the nomination with a colorless (and barely seen) Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell), is a bit of a cipher, or perhaps a symbol. He stands for an ideal of political charisma that the film, directed by Mr. Clooney and based on the play “Farragut North” by Beau Willimon, sets out to tarnish. And yet it seems doubtful, after more than a decade of scandal, acrimony and bare-knuckled media brawling, that this noble fantasy exists anywhere but in the minds of writers and actors who look back fondly on the glorious make-believe administrations of Henry Fonda and Martin Sheen.

In fact, what I think is stunning about the American political scene is just how much of the electorate, including much of the chattering classes, still does fall in love with the politician of the moment, whether red or blue, despite all of the evidence that suggests the idiocy of doing so. One needs only refer back to 2008, and the hordes of aggressively naive and idealistic Obama supporters, to realize the falsity of Scott's empirical claim. Yes, many of those folks now feel hungover and regretful of their one-campaign stand, shocked to discover that their one-time hero is actually a Chicago politician (who could have known?), who really didn't mean that stuff about peace and transparency and chilling out the drug war and all the rest. I read the movie as reflecting this sort of still-raw disillusion with Obama, which is a very different reading than Scott's.

In any case, recommended, if only for some excellent acting, and a healthy does of realism about American politics.

Mankiw on what should be done

A wise column from Greg Mankiw on the present big picture policy impasse in the US.

I would only add that we already know the answer to the rhetorical question that ends his column, and we know it from a fifth country, Ireland, where the previously happy-go-lucky culture disappeared in a blaze of labor supply when marginal tax rates were reduced.

How college football fans think about Europe

ESPN sums up the long-standing confusion between the US and Europe in just a few seconds.

Stanford 65, Washington 21

Stanford is really, really good team. Washington is just a good team, and maybe not that good on defense, though they have looked better on other days. And Stanford ran the score up a bit, presumably as an offering to the BCS gods. The Seattle Times has the story as well as some griping about the defense.

Next up: Arizona, complete with a new coach, at 10:30 PM Eastern next Saturday.

Michigan had a bye this week and plays Purdue at noon Eastern next Saturday.

Warsh and Bresnahan on Steve Jobs

A fine obituary from Stanford economist Tim Bresnahan, which David Warsh wisely quotes in full.

I was never much of an Apple guy - maybe it was growing up in Seattle, maybe because the early Apple computers seemed too cute and their buyers too smug - but Jobs was clearly a great entrepreneur and will be sorely missed.

Stoops out at Arizona

Somehow I missed the firing of Arizona head football coach Mike Stoops a couple of weeks ago.

Will Slick Rick be next?

How things work in Illinois

This story does a wonderful job of combining corruption and incompetence.

Self-government among the occupiers

Someone at New York magazine has a fine sense of humor indeed.

In point of fact, bureaucratic leftist control freaks of the sort one frequently finds in government agencies, university administrations and foundations really don't have much in common at all with left anarchists who just want to be left alone.

The dangers of discretization

Shouldn't someone who is a medical intern understand the difference between a discrete and continuous variable or, more precisely, understand what happens when one discretizes a continuous variable to create categories?  I think the columnist should get a partial refund from whatever medical school she attended.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown