Detroit Fact of the Day
Right now, the population of New York City is 36.8% foreign born. In comparison, Detroit is only 5.1% That’s Adam Ozimek with a plan to save Detroit: stop telling people who want to live in Detroit...
View ArticleWhat do we know about huge increases in the minimum wage?
On the basis of historical experience, not very much: Increases of $3 to a total of $10.25 would merely be unprecedented in the modern era [emphasis added]. Increases of $8.75 would be several...
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Will Raghuram Rajan become the Indian Mario Draghi?
Carola Binder is saying that he certainly won’t be India’s Paul Volcker, in a thoughtful post that includes the following: In 2008, [Raghu Rajan] wrote “A Hundred Small Steps,” a report on financial...
View ArticleNative Danes have benefited from large numbers of non-European immigrants
They got new, more complex jobs, at new firms, in the services sector, and got higher wages (irrespective of education level), and there was no change in the risk of being unemployed: Using a database...
View ArticleSentences Worth Reading
1. “The total quantity of explosives dropped is estimated to have been equal to 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.” 2. “The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.” …since...
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Things I Have Seen in India #5: Rakhi
Wednesday was Rakhi (“Bond”), the short name for Raksha Bandhan (“Bond of Protection”), the Hindu festival for sisters and brothers. Think of it as “Sisters & Brothers Day.” Traditionally there is...
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Animal spirits in the Baby Boomer generation
Two weeks ago (did the Shutdown-Debt-Ceiling-Pocalypse really end just last week..?) I sent my dad something like the following graph (this one has since been updated), showing that a four-week...
View ArticleYet Another RCT Finds That Unconditional Cash Transfers Reduce Poverty
And that seems to be true whether you define “poverty” in terms of income, assets, food security, or psychological well-being: Households who received transfers experienced on average a 33 percent...
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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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 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...
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 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 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 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 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 ArticleAssorted Links
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 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...
View ArticleAssorted Links
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,...
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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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