I am adding “LCT” to my development dictionary
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an...
View ArticleWill New Yorkers soon be walking on 3D-printed infrastructure?
Apparently so: Pilings are the wood or steel columns that hold up the piers that edge the city. … In December, the NYCEDC launched an open call for alternative ways to fix up the pilings, asking the...
View ArticleMiles Kimball on the future of the economics blogosphere
In an essay called “Why I Write,” The economics blogosphere is already vibrant, brimming with intellectual energy. The obvious next phase of its development is for more and more of the most...
View ArticleAssorted Links
1. Mormons on the Internet. “I just want the truth.” 2. North Korea is now on Instagram. 3. “Artsy” is like a gigantic online art gallery. 4. Claims about MOOCs. 5. Building a more humane pigpen…...
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In case you were wondering why young people are leaving evangelical...
. . . Rachel Held Stevens has a very good answer. Or slew of answers, really. I was raised to be a nice Jewish boy, and still consider myself a (squarely secular) nice Jewish boy, but in college and...
View ArticleSurprisingly Not The Onion: The Indian Army vs. Jupiter and Venus
what India thought were Chinese spy drones turned out to be… Jupiter and Venus. Even more embarrassing, the Indian army had spent six months watching and keeping track of the “spy drones”. The...
View ArticleThe Culture that is Pakistan
Meet “The Burka Avenger,” a new animated series that debuts on Pakistani TV next month. The hero is a young girl. She wears the burka not as a sign of oppression, but as a ninja-style costume to keep...
View ArticleExcellent Podcasts
1. This American Life Turns 500 (and strikes much gold). 2. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on the Trayvon Martin case. 3. Michael Lind and Russ Roberts on libertarianism. 4. Interns debate...
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The Price You Pay for a Bottle of Wine Says Almost Nothing About Your Moral...
Neil Irwin thinks that if you spend $41,500 on a bottle of wine, you might just be a “moral monster”: They’re not making any more land in Bordeaux… Which means that instead of being channeled into...
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Things I Have Seen in India #1: The One-Day Driveway
This is going to be a regular feature moving forward. It’s just a line or two of text about something I’ve seen in India, and a photo or two. I have a couple hundred photographs to get through, so...
View ArticleAssorted Links
1. Gary Rubinstein on KIPP. 2. Scott Sumner has finally written a paper about NGDP futures targeting. 3. Police in Louisiana enforcing sodomy laws that aren’t on the books. 4. I am extremely...
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Things I’ve Seen in India #2: Punny Advertising
This is an advertisement for milk, butter, and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (literally “Run Milkha Run”) is a Bollywood movie in theaters across India right now. It’s a sports biopic about...
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How Exactly is Refusing to Buy Health Insurance “Prudent” or “Personally...
Some Republicans are trying to convince Americans that ObamaCare is dysfunctional by… making it dysfunctional. Sarah Kliff (who has been doing an excellent job reporting on the health care law for...
View ArticleWill Raghuram Rajan become the Indian Paul Volker?
Indeed, the most recent real GDP data showed 4.8 percent year-over-real growth, which was considered bad compared to recent trends… …the U.S., British and European central banks have policy rates that...
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Things I Have Seen in India #3: Basketball
It took me about six weeks, but I finally found it: Previously I’d found this: And this: A few observations (and questions): 1. Basketball is popular in China and Turkey, but not very popular in...
View ArticleAssorted Links
1. Shanghai development illustrated. (photos) 2. A jihadist’s guide to web security. 3. The Most Interesting Man in the World is an interesting man. 4. The best new products that people don’t know...
View ArticleSentences to ponder
The most important monetary trend of the past 30 years is the relentless decline in real yields on Treasury bonds, from 7 per cent to roughly zero. We can debate the causes of the decline, but there...
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I Don’t Buy That Leduc-Liu Paper On Uncertainty and Unemployment (and the...
John Taylor likes this paper by Leduc & Liu, which argues that the unemployment rate would be 1.3 percentage points lower right now were it not for policy uncertainty. He writes: The following...
View ArticleExcellent Podcasts
1. The real housewife of Ciudad Juarez. 2. What do economists think of immigration? 3. Japan has a serious nannie shortage. 4. Bill Simmons, Nate Silver, & Malcolm Gladwell on performance...
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Things I’ve Seen in India #4: Blackouts
1. They happen almost every day at work: 2. Occasionally they happen multiple times per day. 3. They almost never last longer than 5 minutes. 4. You’d think they’d be a bit jarring, but I hardly...
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