Bob Lalonde reviews the recent Upjohn book, edited by Doug Besharov and Phoebe Cottingham, on the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) (journal access required). The book grew out of a mini-conference held to inform the Europeans of the lessons they could learn from the US experience with active labor market programs.The review has wise words about the difficulties of non-experimental evaluation of active labor market programs like WIA, about the lack of policy response to evaluation results, and about performance management. I particularly...
Monday, August 27, 2012
ParaNorman is a fine bit of fluff with some good humor - I quite enjoyed Courtney, the airhead older sister - and a nice message - be nice to people who are different - though not one that is subtly delivered. As the NYT reviewer notes, the animation is beautiful and fun as well.Recommended if you have ki...
The Daily Mail reports that it is a big week for "Lisa Ann", the "adult entertainer" who looks like Sarah Palin.Contra Lisa Ann, it is not clear to me that voting for someone because they are hot is worse than voting for them because they promise to take things from other people and give them to you. Hat tip: Charlie Brown[Text updated to reflect the fact that the FT and the Daily Mail are not the sa...
Sunday, August 26, 2012
The FT surveys the growth of corporate wellness programs that include aspects of "mindfulness", pop Buddhism, yoga and other spiritual tricks for daily living.I am sympathetic to the idea that periods of quiet and reflection can improve one's life, but the supposed "scientific" evidence cited in the article is pretty miserable.The first bit consists of participant evaluations:The company has even begun research into its efficacy, and the early results are striking. After one of Marturano’s seven-week courses, 83 per cent of participants said they...
Megan McArdle tells about going to the reunion of her MBA class at Chicago Booth.I liked this bit, about her time at Merrill Lynch:"... I was not a good fit with Merrill's very conservative culture. I felt as if I'd decided to intern with a mathematically gifted baboon tribe, and I'm sure they were just as puzzled by me."Probably I like it because it was from Merrill that I learned not to have a brok...
Saturday, August 25, 2012
1. Waiting for Ditka. Iron Mike's great year was my first year of gradual school.2. Social scientists ignore religion at their peril.3. That flushing sound is your tax dollars going down the toilet at Bongz and Thongz, closely preceded by the K2.4. FT interview with Rufus Wainwright.5. An optimistic view of the robot apocalypse.Hat tip on #5 to Jess Goldbe...
Tyler says:The United States circa 2012 is one of the most productive economies of all time, arguably the most productive if you take into account size and diversification (rules out Norway, etc.). Internationally speaking, in the richest and most productive global economy of all time, which is our most competitive sector?Hollywood? Maybe, but it could well be higher education. Students from all over the world want to go to U.S. higher education. If we had nicer immigration authorities, this advantage would be all the more...
Thursday, August 23, 2012
1. The dull life of an investment banker.2. A gift for your friends from Kansas.3. Michele Bachmann's God at the American Sociological Association meetings.4. American Sociological Association versus Gencon5. The aura of logical distortion from Ph.D. comics.Hat tip on #1 to Charlie Brown and on #5 to Jessica Goldberg; #4 is via orgtheory.n...
Smart words from Larry Kotlikoff on why economists should not be in the business of endorsing presidential candidates. He does undermine his own point a bit later in the piece by making political statements (with which I agree, though that is not the point) about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.Full disclosure: I was offered the opportunity to sign the "Economists for Romney" statement and declined.Via Lones Smith (no relation other than that we went to gradual school together and used to be colleagues at Michigan) on Faceb...
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Shanks, Hershel, ed. 1993. Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reader from the Biblical Archaeology Review. New York: Random House / Vintage.I bought Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls at the bookshop at Masada in Israel when I was there for a conference in April. It was one of a handful of serious books in the midst of mountains of cookbooks and other tourist fare. As the name suggests, it is a collection of articles from a journal called the Biblical Archaeology Review on topics related to the dead sea scrolls.The essays range widely....
My macro/happiness colleague Mile Kimball has been blogging for a while now, and I have been slow to take notice. The blog, entitled "Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal" is now on the blog roll to the right.The two most recent post highlight an amusing piece on taxes by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame in the Wall Street Journal and a "review" of Miles' blog from his undergraduate EC 10 lecturer at Harvard. The latter includes some personal background about Mil...
Monday, August 20, 2012
Bowen, William, Matthew Chingos and Michael McPherson. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.This is an important and useful book. The authors have used their stature within the higher education world to obtain truly remarkable data on students at state flagship universities as well as in several entire state college systems. They have used the data to study issues related to degree completion, motivated by generally low degree completion rates among US undergraduates. The authors clearly understand that the...
The NYT describes how advances in robotic technology are transforming manufacturing and distribution.The article is chock full of interesting tidbits, including spillovers from data storage algorithms and video games to robotics. It is also one more reminder about the real-world importance of capital-labor substitution.The NYT can't seem to decide if the robots are cool or ominous, and so settles for going back and forth between the two views. I guess that is "objective" journalism.Hat tip: portside.org ...
Sunday, August 19, 2012
1. The goose man.2. When the mistress of the dead boss sues the company that fired her after he died. Good stuff.3. Why I am not a Republican #7890503845.4. Term of the day; redshirt5. This looks like fun: pay to drive over a car with a tank.Hat tip on #1 to Jackie Smith, on #2 to Charlie Brown, on #3 to Ken Troske, on #4 to Dan Drezner and on #5 to Fox Ne...
Dan is in good form here discussing common maladies in political science dissertation prospectuses.Awkward dissertation proposals tend to take a somewhat different form in economics, at least in my experience. Usually the student has fallen in love not with some particular author but with some particular insight that, while it might make a great second or third contribution to a paper, is not really able to sustain a paper all by its lonesome, or, if it is, that paper will end up in an obscure journal, rather than in (at worst) a top field...
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Gary Becker and Jim Heckman write in the Wall Street Journal in support of subsidies to economic research, with reactions from Tyler Cowen and from John Cochrane. My reaction is pretty close to John Cochrane's, though I would add a few things:First, we should do some research on the effects of subsidies to economic research. What matters for the policy question at hand is not that NSF or NIH funded research that was useful, but the responsiveness of the quantity of such useful research to the volume of subsidies. If the hiring, promotion and tenure...
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
The Daily Mail describes what can be learned from the reading habits of those reading 50 Shades of Grey as an ebook.Good stuff, and you don't really need to be an expert to predict correctly that data like these will shape how mass audience books get written.The caption on the picture of "Alex" is pretty funny too.Hat tip: Charlie Br...
Monday, August 13, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The FT ponders religion among the tech crowd. I particularly liked this bit:Taken together, all these points illustrate the most widespread expression of religious values in the Valley – what English-Lueck calls a “cheerful mash-up of religions”. The Valley’s steady flow of immigrants has brought a diverse collection of religions to the area, with Eastern religions, especially Zen Buddhism, receiving a particularly warm welcome. The practice-based, disciplined nature and the lack of a deity appeal to the intellectual side of engineers, and...
I like these a lot.I would say that #1 is the most important.#5 is too strong, as it implies assigning everyone else an equal weight of zero. No one has absolute authority, but some people are more worth listening to on particular topics than others. I would amend #8 to note that one can, in many contexts, dissent without being a jerk, and that dissenting without being a jerk is sometimes more effecti...
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Thursday, August 9, 2012
The Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (literally, institute for the future of labor but officially translated as Institute for the Study of Labor), informally known as eye-zee-eh (for Americans) or eye-zed-eh (for Canadians and Brits) or eat-zah (rhymes with pizza, for Germans) has awarded their annual prize in labor economics to Richard Blundell of UCL.This prize is very well deserved. Congratulations Richa...
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Total Recall did not do very well with the critics - A.O. Scott trashes it at the NYT and it received just 30/100 at rotten tomatoes - and justifiably so. The acting is mediocre, there is surprisingly little heat, and the plot is incoherent and ridiculous. But the special effects are very, very cool. I particularly liked the urban landscapes/skyscapes in both London and "the colony" but the "drop" through the earth from one to the other is pretty cool too.So, this is recommended only if you are willing to sit through a 120 minute movie just for...
UM graduate student Congressional candidate Dan Marcin did not win in yesterday's Michigan primary but he did get over 20 percent of the vote (the site lists all the R's and then all of the D's - the Congressional races are on top within party). That's about twice what I was expecting and pretty remarkable given the difference in expenditures, name recognition and free media coverage.So, congrats to D...
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Useful tips from orgtheory.net.I find that the most important thing is breaking up big projects into little pieces, and doing so "in advance" so that when I sit down to work I have a set of modest sized bites to choose from.I still write in binges though, despite having tried many times to get into the equilibrium of writing for a couple of hours every d...
Monday, August 6, 2012
Short video summaries of a debate between economists Abhijit Banerjee and Angus Deaton on the merits and demerits of randomized control trials in development economics.I think they're both right. When done well, experiments can provide compelling evidence that completely shuts down policy debates so that everyone can move on and work on other things, as with the US Department of Education's experimental evaluation of abstinence-only sex education curricula.At the same time, Deaton is quite right that experiments can be executed well or poorly,...
Some thoughts on how foreigners see America based on a heavily selected sample, but still of interest.I would agree that the flags are creepy at times and the portions are too big.The miracle of the traffic is stronger away from the northeast and the beltway. I had friends in college from the east coast who marveled at the level of social capital on display on Seattle highwa...
Sunday, August 5, 2012
1. Do you really need more reasons not to marry a divorce lawyer?2. A fine rant about Mayor Bloomberg's empirically baseless call for police strikes over gun control.3. Amish population boom.4. Mick and Angolina? And so many more. The Daily Mail provides the graphic details.5. Mocking the press reaction to the Aurora shootings.Hat tip on #1 and #4 to Charlie Bro...
The dry season (which in my world stretches from the Super Bowl to the first college game) is nearing its end. Practice starts at the University of Washington tomorrow, and the NFL pre-season starts tonight. In that spirit, some pre-season questions about the Huskies from the Seattle Times and and, from the same source, an update on the broadcasting career of former UW quarterback Brock Hua...
Saturday, August 4, 2012
It turns out that BDSM mega-seller 50 Shades of Grey originated as fan fiction! Who knew?Lots of interesting history and some discussion, too shallow for my taste but still substantive, of the legal issues in going from unpaid fan fiction to a giant book contract.I do think the author overstates the case in terms of the demise of gatekeepers. Ayn Rand and Richard Bach, as well as numberless other writers of self-help, romance, and western books sold lots of books back in the pre-internet days, all without approval, and sometimes with active disapproval,...
Collins, Paul. 2005. The Trouble with Tom. London, Bloomsbury.I purchased The Trouble with Tom in a bookstore in York, England, when I was there for a conference, for just four pounds. It is a wonderful crazy book about American revolutionary figure Tom Paine, his life, various free-thinkers and radicals he interacted with, as well as the strange tail of his remains. I can't summarize it better than to say that my primary thought while reading it was: "John DiNardo would really like this."Recommended.Note: the link is to the US edition, rather...
Friday, August 3, 2012
Ehrman, Bart. 2011. Forged. NY: HarperOne.Forged is another of Ehrman's fascinating books that, among other things, translate the academic historical literature on issues related to religion into readable form for the intelligent non-specialist. It is also another stage, as the introduction makes clear, in Ehrman's personal journey away from the conservative evangelical views on Christian history and theology of his youth.Ehrman lays out the evidence regarding the authorship of various new testament books. In some cases, pretty much all scholars...
A different name for the zombie neighborhoods considered in this Atlantic Cities piece by Richard Florida would be neighborhoods in which houses have negative prices.I agree with Florida that bulldozing the houses is not a solution except in the sense that covering a skin condition with makeup is a solution. I disagree with him about community activism being the primary solution. Surely it can't hurt, but these neighborhoods are not rich with educated people who can write grant applications or with the sort of people who can lead major organizational...
We Your Sister's Sister last night at the State Theater in Ann Arbor.Two bits of A.O. Scott's review (which ends rather suddenly as though he ran out of time before his deadline, capture the spirit):You could call “Your Sister’s Sister” a group portrait of youthful solipsists in an era of economic contraction and social malaise, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Self-absorption is not the subject; it is the paint.And:Unfortunately the easygoing mood does not last. The film’s late swerves into melodrama and the neighboring region of farce feel panicky...
Thursday, August 2, 2012
... of Michigan hiring Justin and Betsey.A note to the Chronicle writer (and shouldn't they get this stuff right?): Justin and Betsey have done many wonderful things but they were not the first people to notice that the American divorce rate has been falling for decades. Saying so is a good way to piss off the entire field of demography thou...
Seems to me that the Olympics has it all wrong when it disqualifies badminton players for optimizing relative to the problem that has been handed to them. To my mind, when agents do things you do not want them to do but are optimizing relative to the mechanism they face, the fault lies with the mechanism designer, not the agents.That's true in badminton just as it is in job training, when local offices of the Workforce Investment Act cream-skim the best among their applicants because their performance is judged based on post-program employment...
This is a real shame on several dimensions. First of all, who the hell cares? Second, why are the police wasting resources sending officers into adult theaters? Are there no unsolved murders, rapes, robberies, burglaries, frauds, or assaults in LA? Really? Are the police really all the way down the "to do" list into the zone of shutting down unregistered lemonade stands and hanging out at the adult cinema? Methinks the LA police need a budget cut and some new manageme...
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
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