Assorted links

1. On rumors of a Disney theme park land devoted to the villains.

2. Keynesian economic stimulus - white collar edition.

3. Some Germany humor.

4. The make-or-buy decision for restaurants.

Hat tip on #2 to Scott Wood and on #4 to BK

HCEO video interview with yours truly

This video interview is from last summer, when I was in Hyde Park for the Chicago version of the HCEO summer course. I am pleased with their editing job.

Rating college football stadia

From the Thrillist website comes this "top 25" list of college football stadia (or stadiums if we must).

I have been to four of them:

No. 1. Rose Bowl - for actual Rose Bowls as opposed to UCLA home games. I am fine with its position on top of the list.

No. 3. Husky Stadium - that's where I have season tickets. I might have put it at #2 though I will confess that it I was surprised that it was higher on the list than Notre Dame stadium. I suppose it depends a lot on the relative weights on scenery versus history. They could have found a nicer picture so that you could see the mountains in the distance through the open end.

No. 6 Michigan Stadium a.k.a. the Big House. It is cool to be in a stadium with so many people - the Rose Bowl provides a similar experience in that regard. But damn the seats are uncomfortable: too narrow and no backs.

No. 7 Notre Dame Stadium. I've only been to one game here - thanks Bill! - but it is pretty amazing in terms of the history and football culture. Plus the other fans were remarkably friendly despite their team losing to Michigan at home.

I am sure that multiple visits to No. 12, Camp Randall at Wisconsin, are in my future.

Angus Deaton on John DiNardo

From a recent "Letter from America" column:

Another friend who cared about the underdogs, and sometimes felt himself to be one, was the labor economist John DiNardo, who taught at Michigan and died this summer at the absurdly early age of 56. John had an (occasionally) overwhelming sense of humor, with a deep streak of irreverence that he loved to use to deflate the pomposity and pretensions of sophisticated econometrics. He wrote a memorable paper with Steve Pischke that poked fun at the interpretation of the wage premium for those who worked with computers; they showed that workers who carried pencils, or who worked sitting down, also received the premium. He was also famous for writing three (sometimes apoplectic) reviews of Freakonomics. He worked with Jack Johnston on late editions of the econometrics text that was standard for my generation of British students. When he finished his PhD at Princeton, he taught me that the class prejudice that I thought I had left behind in Britain, was as bad in the US. His affect as an Italian-American working-class guy, smoking when he could, not caring much about niceties of dress, and giving respect only when he thought it was due, told against him on the job market, though he quickly moved up as his work was appreciated.

Hat tip: Steve Hamilton

John Cochrane on tax reform

A brilliant (and grumpy) column from John.

I particularly like this bit:

Economists serve best when they offer thoughts outside the standard left-right partisan divide. Our first function should be always to remind people that marginal tax rates matter to the economy not taxes. 

Our second insight is always to analyze things comprehensively. The Federal income tax is not what counts, the entire wedge between work and consumption matters. Whether the corporate tax is progressive or not does not matter, whether the overall tax code is progressive (plus the overall spending code, and forced cross-subsidy code!) matters.   Don't tax wine over beer to redistribute; tax goods evenly and achieve progressivity through a progressive income (or better, consumption) tax, or spend money on programs to help people whose distress is correlated (imperfectly) with beer drinking.

Economists may feel their moral sentiments about redistribution are really important. But we have little professional reason to argue our feelings are better than anyone else's. What we can argue is, if you'r going to do more or less redistribution, do it efficiently and comprehensively.

And I particularly like the way John keeps his eye on the prize of making the pie bigger.

Thanks to Steve Hamilton for nagging me to read it.

Buy my house

My beautiful house in Ann Arbor is now officially on the market, complete with new carpet, new interior paint job and new deck. Within the past couple of years, it has also gotten a new roof and a complete remodel of the master suite.

Here is the listing on the website of our realtor, Nancy Bishop who, as it turns out, sold us the house back in 2005. We were only the third set of owners.

There were a few years when I was growing up when I thought I would pursue a career in architecture. Even after I abandoned that idea, mainly because I did not think I would be a good enough architect to get to do really fun work, I retained an interest in it and a love of it. For me, living in this house was like living in art. I will miss it.

You can learn more about the architect, David Osler, here. Osler was the son-in-law of Emil Lorch, the first dean of architecture at Michigan. Lorch Hall, the current home of the Michigan economics department, was the original architecture building and is named after Mr. Lorch. We hired David Osler's daughter, Molly Osler, to help us with the remodel of the master suite and with the design of the home we will build next year in Wisconsin. Her website is here.

Some new research on the importance of caseworkers for the unemployed

Amelie Schiprowski:

The Role of Caseworkers in Unemployment Insurance: Evidence from Unplanned Absences

Abstract:
Caseworkers are the main human resource used to provide social services. This paper asks if, and how much, caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss UI caseworkers. I find that individuals who lose an early meeting with their caseworker stay on average 10 days longer in unemployment (5% relative to the mean). Results show large heterogeneity in the economic value of caseworkers: the effect of a foregone meeting doubles for caseworkers in the highest productivity tercile, while it is zero for caseworkers in the lowest tercile. Finally, absences induce negative spillover effects on the performance of present colleagues, who have to cover additional workload.

You can find the paper here.

I have seen this presented a couple of times at conferences and quite like it.

Book: "K Blows Top" by Peter Carlson

Carlson, Peter. 2009. K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khruschev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist. PublicAffairs.

I bought this when I was in Moscow as some light travel reading. The book actually covers three trips: then-Vice President Nixon's trip to Moscow in 1959, Kruschev's grand American tour later in 1959, and Kruschev's subsequent visit to New York in 1960 to speak at the United Nations. The last of these featured the famous shoe-pounding episode. The book has the light and often humorous tone suggested by the title, but indirectly provides some serious history as well. I was reminded how seriously the public used to take the major mainstream media (and by contrast how far they have fallen in public esteem since that time). Indeed, the author makes a good argument that Kruschev's first visit was the first true modern media circus. For those too young to have experienced the cold war first hand, the book provides some sense of how it differs from our current fears.

Recommend if you are interested in the history of the cold war.

Design humor

Women in economics

Rebecca Thornton has a compiled an impressive set of links to research and commentary on women in economics.

On jerks at work

I thought this article had some good advice on dealing with jerky colleagues.

I particularly like this bit:

What if you have to sit near the sleaze?

There are mind tricks to protect your soul — ways for the situation to be less upsetting to you even though you can’t change it. My favorite is a guy at Stanford who pretends that he’s a doctor who studies “a-hole-ism.” When he sees these people in meetings, he pretends that it’s a privilege to be able to see such a rare specimen. It’s a sort of detachment — pretending you’re a doctor, just observing.

and plan to give it a go at my next meeting.

NPR on the economics job market

Planet Money follows my student Julian Hsu around during this past economics job market.

The piece does a nice job of capturing both Julian's personality and the rush of the interviews at the Allied Social Science Association meetings.

I do think they could have worked in some additional substantive information about the market without compromising the relaxed feel of the piece.

Assorted links

1. On Donald Trump's financial acumen.

2. Some useful thoughts on saying "no", one of the very most important skills for professorial success.

3. I really enjoyed this old piece by Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey that marginal revolution linked to a few days ago.

4. Economic Journal Watch on the (quite interesting) history of classical liberalism in China.

5. Dilbert on the economics Nobel.

Hat tip on #1 to the deputy dean and on #5 to Herr Bachmann.

Movie: Battle of the Sexes

This movie was not quite what I expected. In particular, it is much less preachy and much more focused on sexual preference, and much less focused on feminism, than I was imagining. Indeed, as the NYT review hints, the movie manages to make Bobby Riggs out as a sort of warm-hearted American huckster type who plays the "male chauvinist pig" character not because he really believes it but because of the big financial payoff it provides. And I think feminism plays a somewhat reduced role relative to sexual preference both because in retrospect it is so clear the feminist side was destined to win out and because sexual preference is more topical in the present day.

Recommended.

Jerry Pournelle, R.I.P.

Pournelle was one of my favorite science fiction writers during my heavy science fiction reading phase in junior high and high school. I recall reading some of his columns in Byte as well, as my dad had a subscription for many years.

I got different bits out of the NYT obituary and this warm recollection from science fiction writer Sarah Hoyt.

Assorted links

1. The health effects of flying - some of this was new to me.

2. An update on the Seminary Co-op bookstore.

3. Cool abandoned places in Michigan.

4. #administrationfailure at Western Ontario.

Hat tip on #1 to Charlie Brown

On teachers

This Atlantic story does a nice job of illustrating why education is such a mess. The authors prefer their personal study, with a sample size of two and causal effects inferred from introspection and a loose before-after test score comparison, to actual research with sound identification of causal effects.

More broadly, there is a large literature showing that professionals of many sorts systematically overestimate their own knowledge. Scripted lessons can embody the universe of research findings about how to teach particular topics to particular types of students, which will almost always trump (on average) the idiosyncratic views of individual teachers. That does not mean that enthusiasm should play no role but justifying departures from scripted curricula based on teacher morale is very different than justifying them based on direct rather than indirect effects on educational outcomes.

The Atlantic should be embarrassed.

Assorted links

1. Some thoughts on the recent resurgence in independent bookstores. What the article describes is almost exactly what Literati in Ann Arbor has been doing with great success.

2. I enjoyed this little mini-memoir by Howard Bloom at MDRC. It even includes a story about the National JTPA Study that was new to me.

3. The BBC on a London fatberg.

4. I really like the name of this journal - almost as much as the name of this other journal.

On spelling

A fine, and remarkably "fair and balanced" rumination on the meaning of poor spelling in the age of twitter from the NYT.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Some wisdom from Stata

On the sheet "Announcing STATA release 15" that lists its many wonders, it says:

Nonparametric regression
When you know something matters.
But you have no idea how.

To which I say: indeed, but when is that not the case?

Assorted links

1,. A most excellent New Yorker cartoon about conferences.

2. Lord of the Flies: philosophy edition

3. "Iron Maidens" is a clever pun.

4. P.J. O'Rourke on Gaudi

Hat tip on #1 to David Evans, on #2 to Scott Wood and on #3 to some French guy in Oz.

Active labor market program humor

The symbol in the back is the symbol of the agency that provides active labor market programs to the unemployed in Germany. The text translates roughly to "It is no longer enough just to lay eggs."

Hat tip: Bernd Fitzenberger

John DiNardo, R.I.P.

John is someone I respected both intellectually and personally. He will be sorely missed.

Interview with the author of "Ultimate Slime"

In Toronto Life magazine.

I liked this line: "My mom tells me I started the Etsy shop to feed my slime addiction."

Slime is produced at my house as well.

One correction to the editors at Toronto Life: The busyness school at Western is the "Ivey" School, not the "Ivy School".

Hat tip to my M-I-L

Assorted links

1. Advances in acronym science.

2. I liked this pre-election piece on Donald Trump from the Atlantic, which I read only recently.

3. An economist and a sociologist on panhandling.

4. Another old Atlantic piece, this one on pawn shops, that I liked. Same author as above.

Cold war summary statistic

From the DDR Museum in (what used to be East) Berlin. The presentation is interesting because the museum wants to cater to both visitors from the west celebrating victory and visitors from the east who are full of "ostalgie".

The Stasi museum, located in the old Stasi headquarters building, is also well worth a visit.

Buddhist humor

On emails to faculty

I like this useful post from Chris Blattman though it is a bit fussier than necessary.

#1 is very important - I received an email from an undergraduate at Western Ontario back in the day whose email address involved the term "longdong". I think probably that account is best used for other things than emailing your professor.

The other most important ones have to do with wasting people's time. Don't do it!

I am fine with emoticons in moderation and with quotes from either the famous (or the infamous - those are often better). My favorite, from a long time ago, was "It doesn't take all kinds, but we have all kinds."

I also think some of this varies with how well you know your professor. I would treat Blattman's comments as a guide for initial emails, not emails with a faculty member that you know reasonably well.

Via Sue Dynarski

Adam West, R.I.P.

Assorted links

1. The seven-second rule for social gaffes.

2. The amazing things they get up to in Greece.

3.On the evolution of Jim Carrey.

4. Not a wolf pretending to be a man.

Hat tip on #1 to ASAK and on #2 to one of my esteemed colleagues.

Some electric humor

Assorted links

1. On the impending demise of Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct. I think I most enjoyed driving on it late at night.

2. The Atlantic makes Calvin College (where one of my best friends from gradual school teaches) sound a lot more intellectually open than, say, Middlebury or UC-Berkeley.

3. Great innovations of the 1970s: headphones edition.

4. Russell Hardin, R.I.P. Hardin was around at Chicago when I was in graduate school and I had the good fortune to attend a couple of sessions with his students that he held in his home.

Bill Johnson's review of Paying for the Party

Bill Johnson's review of Paying for the Party is now out in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Gated version here.

My earlier thoughts on Paying for the Party here.

Also, the companion book that reports on interviews with the parents of the students from Paying for the Party is now out. It is sole-authored by Laura Hamilton and entitled Parenting to a Degree. I have not read it yet but it is on the stack; Amazon page here.

Nick Gillespie interviews P.J. O'Rourke

Podcast here.

My favorite line is P.J.'s description of Trump:"He's a big government guy for small-minded people."

Dillon and Smith (2017) on the effects of mismatch

A much revised version of my paper with Eleanor Dillon at Arizona State on the consequences of academic match between students and colleges is now available as a CESifo working paper. It is also available on my web page.

The new version expands the analysis to include the NLSY-79 cohort as well as the NLSY-97 cohort, which allows us to compare our estimates of the effects of college quality, student ability, and their interaction between the two cohorts. It also allows us to present very long-run estimates of earnings effects for the earlier cohort. The new version also features a completely re-written literature survey that focuses exclusively on the (small but growing) literature on match.

Comments very welcome!

On the enthusiasm of program operators for research on the effects of the programs they operate

From the Hollister, Kemper and Maynard (1981) National Supported Work Demonstration book, pages 35-36:

     "The central experimental aspect of the research, random assignment of enrollees to experimental (participant) or control groups, was carried to completion without any technical disruption. It is important to note that operators were permitted to interview all those referred prior to random assignment and to eliminate any persons they felt would be too disruptive to their programs. Once they had screened referrals, those remaining were randomly assigned to program participation or to the control group. Although there were not technical problems with this process, the whole procedure was greatly resented by most of the operators, whose negative views were strongly reinforced by the agencies that referred potential enrollees to a site program. These hostile attitudes to random assignment were deeply embedded and yielded not at all to any sort of rational argument. For example, it did not good to point out that there were, in any case, a limited number of positions because, as with any program, there were limited funds or that in most cases of referral to training or employment programs, agencies were rarely able to place anywhere near 100 percent of those referred. My own suspicion is that even tough, in reality, there was no loss of control, since the operators and the agencies had the opportunity to screen referrals, the random assignment requirement reinforced both their feelings that they had lost control as well as their resentment of the process. It was only because of MDRC's adamant refusal to concede on this issue, and its insistence on making it a prerequisite for continued funding at research sites, that the process was carried out successfully over such a long period of time. As far as the research organization could discern, there was very little resentment of the random assignment process on the part of the enrollees themselves Perhaps it will be easier to apply this method in future studies of employment programs since it will be possible to point to the successful implementation of it, on a large scale, in the Supported Work Demonstration.
     The random assignment had to be carried out during the enrollment period for the research sample, which stretched from March 1975 to July 1977, and during those months the site operators continually inquired about how much longer the process had to continue. Their reaction to the notification of the termination of enrollment and random assignment apparently was one of joy and relief"

Assorted links

1. Swedes paying extra taxes.

2. Life imitates Betsy DeVos

3. I quite like this new citation ranking scheme.

4. On the architecture of post-war Berlin in Man in the High Castle. I found Albert Speer's book Inside the Third Reich fascinating when I read it in high school.

Economist personalized license plate

But whose car could it be? A hint: I took the photo outside of this fine establishment.

Assorted links

1. The disabled on Second Life.

2. It turns out that lots of countries want to be second.

3. John Bound, Gaurav Khanna, and Nicholas Morales make it into the Atlantic with their fine new paper on H1-B visas.

4. My paper on the effects of mismatch with Nora Dillon, as well as earlier work with Dan Black and Kermit Daniel, makes it into this amicus brief for the current UT-Austin affirmative action case.

Bob Newhart in rare form

If only ....

Tim Fuerst, R.I.P.

This is sad news indeed.

Tim was generally acknowledged as the nicest person in my year at Chicago.

Movie: John Wick, Chapter 2

John Wick: Chapter 2 is essentially the old video game Castle Wolfenstein with Keanu Reeves as the shooter, with the castle replaced by Roman catacombs and an art museum, and with somewhat different bad guys. Put differently, there really is not much here other than shooting.

While very stylish and pretty, the movie lacks both plot and character development. Ex post, the relatively high rating on Rotten Tomatoes (89 percent among the critics as I write) surprised me. Conditional on genre it is pretty good, but it is not that good. More humor would have helped.

The NYT review is here.

Recommended only if you need a gratuitous violence fix.

Assorted links

1. I enjoyed this reason interview with Food Network celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian

2. The optimal office - a brief literature review from the Atlantic

3. A plug for only children from the NYT. I am one, along with my daughter and my father.

4. On being an East German deep undercover in the US

Hat tip on #3: Lisa Gribowski

On rapid cycle evaluation

CIRE #EvidenceInsight Video Series - Rapid Cycle Evaluation from Mathematica Policy Research on Vimeo.

See Michigan Ph.D. Alex Resch talk about "rapid cycle evaluation", which basically means using administrative data to do very quick program evaluations, often via random assignment or regression discontinuity.

Viewed as an alternative to simplistic performance management based on outcomes, I am all in favor of this. Viewed as a substitute for more serious evaluation efforts I am a bit less enthused. I would say that rapid cycle evaluations complement, rather than substitute for, more ambitious evaluation efforts that aim to look at longer term effects, at mechanisms, and/or at outcomes not available in administrative data.

Movie: Elle

Wow ... intense, violent, surprising, and very French.

The A.O. Scott review captures it well. I particularly like his phrase: "it is both an impeccably Gallic delicacy and a gleeful parody of Frenchness"

Scott also says: "After it’s over, you may find yourself in an argument about just what kind of movie you saw. A nasty, exploitative spectacle of a woman’s victimization, or the celebration of her resistance? A feminist tale of rape and revenge, or an exercise in chic, cynical misogyny?" In fact, I had exactly this discussion after the movie, and the answer really isn't clear.

And the director - something I did not realize until reading the review - did "Robocop" back in the day.

Recommended, but not if you are triggered by sexual violence.

Book: The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography by Donald Lopez

Lopez, Daniel. 2011. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography. Princeton University Press: Lives of the Great Religious Books.

What a fun book! This book tells, with great brevity, the story by which a set of Tibetan manuscripts came to be packaged as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and to make a splash in various circles in the west. This is a fine tale of nutty colonials and wanton cultural appropriation. Plus the author takes the novel tack of highlighting the parallels to another important "found" spiritual document, namely the Book of Mormon. I raced through it and really enjoyed it. Oh, and the author is a faculty member at Michigan.

Recommended for those into such things.

Purchase the book at Amazon
Purchase the book at Barnes and Noble
Purchase the book at the Seminary Coop

So many titles to choose from ...

Some thoughts:

1. How to get 795,000 youtube views.

2. Imagine how proud her parents must be!

3. Is this better or worse than the original Disney song?

4. Children are the future

Hat tip: EJCS

A research agenda on school choice

Mathematica Policy Research is doing a series of blog posts that aims to lay out a research agenda on school choice for the new administration.  This seems like a worthy endeavor and I was generally impressed with the contents of the first two installments. I was particularly impressed that the first part mentions equilibrium effects of school choice, whether charters or vouchers, on traditional government schools. That is a tricky thing to study, but may well be an important part of the overall story.

I do have two quibbles. First, I would emphasize the role of innovation in the design and operation of schools as another potential benefit of school choice, though one that is constrained by the overarching regulation that governs all schools receiving public funds (as well as home schooling to some degree in some places). As best I can tell, the way schools work has changed little since I was attending them, and that was a while ago. There is some electronics around now, and the curriculum emphasizes current enthusiasms, but it all seems familiar in a broad sense. Are there better ways? If there are, could we possibly find them in the current institutional and regulatory environment?  Are there policy changes that would yield more useful innovation?

My second quibble is that the second installment implicitly adopts a binary epistemological stance in which the research world contains two kinds of studies: experiments and non-experiments. In this binary view, experiments are wonderful and non-experiments are kinda sucky, but perhaps better than the opinion of the stranger sitting next to you at the bar, at least on average. What the binary view misses is that experiments have issues, sometimes more, and sometimes less, because randomization does not solve every problem associated with empirical research; rather, it solves just one problem, albeit an important one. For example, the charter school impact studies that rely on admissions lotteries have some issues of interpretation, e.g. with multiple lottery winners, and some issues with external validity, because not all charters run lotteries. The binary view also misses substantial variation in the quality and causal compellingness among non-experimental studies. I know that the Mathematica folks know all this, but I would have liked to see it reflected a bit more in the way that they discussed the existing evidence.

Link to the first installment.

Full disclosure: I sometimes act as a paid consultant to Mathematica about various things (as I also do with several of their competitors).

Assorted links

1. On thoughtful panic.

2. A belated but apposite remark on the passing of Fidel Castro.

3. A nice summary of Eric Chyn's work on public housing. I have been at Michigan for 12 years and had photos taken by three different professional photographers and still do not have a picture as nice as this one of Eric.

4. Super Bowl halftime shows of the past: rocket belt edition.

Hat tip on #4: Charlie Brown

The Reflection Problem

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

A bit of humor on the theme of political concerns which suddenly change every four (or eight) years in January

Michael Lewis: The Undoing Project

Lewis, Michael. 2017. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. W.W. Norton.

The title is a pun, the prose is breezy and fun to read, and the subject is behavioral economics or, more accurately, the collaboration between psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that played a foundational role in the development of behavioral economics. There are bits about other scholars too, like Richard Thaler, but mostly it is the Amos and Danny show. What more could one want? If you are thinking about reading the book to learn more about the academic work that Kahneman and Tversky undertook, you will be disappointed, at least if you want more than the shallowist of substantive introductions. On the other hand, if you already know the academic work and you would like to learn more about their personal stories, including some really interesting bits about work they did for the Israeli military early in their careers (and early in Israel's career), and about their process of team production, you will find much to enjoy.

Buy the book on Amazon.
Buy the book on Barnes and Noble.
Buy the book from the Seminary Coop.

Gentleman's C ....

.... one of my favorite blogs on the blogroll (and yes, I know it desperately needs updating) has reappeared. This post about students and this one about campus electronics provides a worthy example of its timeless wonders.

America First, the Netherlands Second

A most excellent mocking of the Donald (but perhaps a bit edgy for some).

Hat tip: a fine colleague indeed.

New paper on state tuition walls

I have seen this paper presented twice and really like it. It suggests that the welfare losses due to tuition differentials between in-state and out-of-state students are non-trivial. Seems like it is trade barriers like this that the commerce clause was supposed to prevent.

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

The Out-of-State Tuition Distortion

Brian G. Knight, Nathan M. Schiff

NBER Working Paper No. 22996
Issued in December 2016

Public universities in the United States typically charge much higher tuition to non-residents. Perhaps due, at least in part, to these differences in tuition, roughly 75 percent of students nationwide attend in-state institutions. While distinguishing between residents and non-residents is consistent with welfare maximization by state governments, it may lead to economic inefficiencies from a national perspective, with potential welfare gains associated with reducing the gap between in-state and out-of-state tuition. We first formalize this idea in a simple model. While a social planner maximizing national welfare does not distinguish between residents and non-residents, state governments set higher tuition for non-residents. The welfare gains from reducing this tuition gap can be characterized by a sufficient statistic relating out-of-state enrollment to the tuition gap. We then estimate this sufficient statistic via a border discontinuity design using data on the geographic distribution of student residences by institution.

Link to paper at NBER.

My alter ego runs for mayor ...

... of Evanston.

Hat tip: Figlio household or current resident.

Mehr als Lisa und Lena

An article about them from "stylecaster" and a link to their clothing line [!].

You've been missing the 70s, haven't you?

The hair, the glasses, the acetate shirts ....

Charles Bidwell, RIP

Bidwell was around the Harris School at Chicago when I was a grad student. orgtheory.net provides a worthy obituary.

Book: The Worm at the Core by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. 2015. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Penguin.

This book aims to draw big picture conclusions about life, the universe and everything based on a (quite large) literature of lab (mostly) experiments in which individuals primed to think about their own mortality change either their responses to researcher questions or their behavior in a wide variety of substantive domains. The authors had a hand in starting this experimental literature, and they view it as having broad implications for how society deals with quite a number of issues quite far removed from death and its rituals.

I found the case they make in the book provocative (to borrow the word used by the Financial Times reviewer quoted on the cover of the paperback edition that I purchased at my favorite bookshop in Aarhus) but ultimately incomplete for several reasons. First, the book lacks an argument as to why the results from the (mostly) lab experiments on (often) undergrads would generalize to real world behavior by other groups. This is a standard issue with lab experiments done by economists and other social scientists, of course, but it should receive serious mention in a book aimed at the intelligent non-specialist. Second, the authors describe the experiments, and they describe what they see as the big picture implications of them, but they never really provide much evidence regarding what they have in mind as the mediating causal linkages. Third, and finally, the authors do not give a sense of just how much of the variation in real world behavior in particular domains they imagine that "existential terror" (i.e. fear of death ... some truly excellent jargon indeed) explains. In a crude sense, I would like to know their estimate of the partial r-squared of existential terror in the grand regression of life. The reader could easily come away with the view that the authors think it equals one but surely it does not and equally surely that is not their view. But is it 0.01, or 0.1 or 0.01 in some domains and 0.1 in others, or what?

Recommended if you enjoy big picture social science books whose ambition perhaps exceeds their evidence.

NYT mockery

There is a "shooting fish in a barrel" aspect to mocking the NYT but still ...

On meetings

This reminds me of something ... I can't quite put my finger on it.

Hat tip: Lisa Gribowski

Assorted links

1. Life on a submarine.

2. The NYT on where fake news comes from. I think the current media enthusiasm understates the difficulty of separating "fake" from not "fake" in all but the most obvious cases, of which the case in the article is one example.

3. This Atlantic piece channels The Bell Curve on the importance of worrying about Americans of low intelligence but never mentions either the book or Charles Murray. Amazing. Where was the editor on this one?

4. Advances in cultural appropriation: beer yoga

5. On the health effects of diet soft drinks. Whew! It is episodes like this that make me worry just a bit about adding press mentions to the department's annual review form that feeds into the merit pay process.

Calling bullsh*t

What a great idea for a course!

One can imagine a whole series of specialized follow-on courses dealing in depth with academic administration, the editorial pages of major newspapers, beltway advocacy groups, and so on.

If they want to add some local flavor they could do a class on the speech that former University of Washington president William Gerberding delivered at my graduation ceremony back in 1985. It concerned, as I recall, how the Japanese were going to bury us via their clever industrial policy.

Be sure to read the whole thing, even the (hilarious) legal disclaimer.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Dave Barry Year in Review

Dave is in top form this year.