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What I’ve Been Listening To
1. Frank Ocean, channel ORANGE. Almost every track on this album is worth listening to at least once. Easily deserves the praise it’s received. 2. Timber Timbre, Creep On Creepin’ On. Very creepy...
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What News Stories Do Americans Find Interesting?
If someone had asked me which of the following news stories I thought were important, I probably would have put them in almost the exact reverse order: Source
View ArticleFlorida Prosecutes Some Children as Adults For No Particular Reason
Some Floridian prosecutors wake up in the morning and decide to give sixteen-year-olds permanent criminal records; others don’t. Why? I have no idea, and neither does Human Rights Watch: Surely a...
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Are most conservatives really liberals?
Looked at this way, almost 30 percent of Americans are “consistent liberals” — people who call themselves liberals and have liberal politics. Only 15 percent are “consistent conservatives” — people...
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16% of Americans are Uninsured (But So What?)
Source. I can think of at least four ways a pundit could spin this: 1. One could emphasize the precipitous drop from 18% to 15.9% that’s occurred in the last 2 quarters. 2. One could point out that...
View ArticleWhat does it mean if development expenditures don’t correlate with success?
The correlation between spending and good outcomes actually tells you very little about cost-effectiveness or about whether spending “works” at achieving good outcomes. I learned this from an older...
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Violence in the Congo, Before and After Dodd-Frank, in Two Maps
These are from Lauren E. Harrison, by way of Laura Seay. Both pieces are fascinating and easily worth reading in full. It would seem that the story about how cell phones finance war rape is about 90%...
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1. David Roodman reviews Bill Easterly’s *Tyrrany of Experts*. 2. Dogs wearing suicide vests in WW2. (video, no sound) 3. Josh Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing. 4. ACAsignups.net, purportedly the...
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Econometric Fortune Cookie
Possibly the wisest fortune cookie ever: …and definitely clearer than “E[Yi | Di=1] - E[Yi | Di=0] ≠ E[Y1i | D1i=1] - E[Y1i | D0i=1]” and related statements.
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1. Interview with Branko Milanović. ”…global inequality is still extremely high by the standards of any single country. It is, for example, significantly higher than inequality in South Africa,...
View ArticleHow Many People Will the D.C. Minimum Wage Hike Affect?
I see that the EPI applauds the Washington D.C. city council’s decision to raise the minimum wage there from $8.25 to $11.50 over a three-year period and index it to inflation thereafter. ”Low wage...
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1. Greg Mankiw reviews Alan Greenspan’s new book. 2. Did Industrial Revolution Britain have extractive institutions? 3. The foreign aid drawdown in Afghanistan. But does it make sense? Probably...
View ArticleAre RCTs in a bubble?
At a World Bank Symposium on Assessment for Global Learning last week Jishnu Das estimated there are in the neighborhood of 500 evaluations of education interventions underway at a cost of between...
View ArticleWhat some migrants do to get into the U.S.
If you are a woman who undertakes the journey, you will almost certainly be raped, perhaps many times. Maybe this will happen when your are misdirected into an ambush in La Arrocera (near the...
View ArticleWill tax preparers save ObamaCare?
To some extent this is already happening: Tax preparers won’t act as insurance brokers themselves. Instead, they are partnering with commercial online health marketplaces to ease enrollment. For...
View ArticleThe Conservatism of Liberals
Ross Douthat: …liberals’ proudest achievement, the modern welfare state, tends to resist, corrupt and baffle their efforts at comprehensive reform. This was the message of Jonathan Rauch’s book...
View ArticleHans Rosling’s “Magic Washing Machine”
Here is a brilliant short talk (<10 minutes) by Hans Rosling about poverty, development, industrialisation, and education all in one. It’s called “The Magic Washing Machine.” I have no comment,...
View ArticleDrug Prohibition Makes Drugs More Potent
LearnLiberty has a helpful video on this: Stevan Duke and Albert Gross have an excellent discussion of the potency effect in America’s Longest War, and Edward M. Brecher has offered a very thorough...
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Did India’s Child Labor Ban Backfire?
Bharadwaj, Lakdawala, and Li (BLL) say that banning child labor in India led to more children working, for longer hours, and for lower pay: While bans against child labor are a common policy tool,...
View ArticleThe culture that is babies
Thirty-eight percent of children under the age of 2 have used mobile devices, including iPhones, tablets and Kindles, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a survey by Common Sense Media, a...
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