I prefer to think of economics as a "way of thinking" rather than a set of tools, but both formulations emphasize the breadth and generality of the discipline.
The interviewer is Emily Chiu, ace honors undergraduate and, like yours truly, an afficianado of Harold's Chicken Shack in Hyde Park.
Addendum: link fixed - hopefully I get a kickback from the CEA for sending people to their conference website for a few hours.
What is missing from the write-up is impacts on health outcomes. The other thing that is missing is a cost-benefit analysis.
There are also external validity issues. I don't know about the other two study sites, but Harborview is Seattle is a high end medical center. Things might be different at, say, an urban hospitial serving a lot of Medicaid patients.
More broadly, the study is one more reminder of the astounding backwardness of medical IT.
Silver Linings Playbook was much, much better than I expected given the smarmy title. There is still a big load of sugar at the end, and a perhaps over-sentimentalized vision of working class life, but there is much more than those things as well.
Strong performances by all, especially Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence.
The special issue of the journal Empirical Economics on program evaluation that I co-edited with my friends Bernd Fitzenberger and Michael Lechner is now published.
Thanks again to our many (very patient) authors for all their hard work.
At the same time, it is not illegal to have a sticker of a marijuana leaf on your car, and such a sticker surely does not constitute probable cause for pulling someone over. It is also very illegal for the police to suggest that the people remove the sticker from the car when they have every right to display it, whether it be buckeye or weed. If the poor buckeyes could remember which police department pulled them over, they could probably make some well-deserved money in a lawsuit, while also teaching the locals a lesson or two.
In point of fact, both teams suck at the evidence thing, though there is something to the point that the blue team likes to create evidence and ignore it, while the red team prefers not to create it at all. Probably that has something to do with the usual team affiliation of evidence creators.
3. 24 hour coffee shop now on a trial run on the UM campus. I was shocked to learn that there is nothing else closer than Arborland (a couple of miles away) that was open all night.
I had been meaning to learn more about American literary icon Ralph Waldo Emerson for some time. When we made the choice to send our daughter to the Emerson School in Ann Arbor, I decided it was time to actually read something. What I read was this book by Harvard professor Lawrence Buell.
This is not the ideal first book to read about Emerson to be sure; the reader walks into the middle of a rich, old, academic conversation about Emerson as a literary figure, a religious figure, an historical figure, a social reformer and a philosopher. The book also includes a short biography at the start to set the stage.
I was fascinated throughout, particularly by the bits about Emerson's life on the lecture circuit, which was the TED talks equivalent of the time. Emerson's famous essays are largely based on the lectures he would give in cities and towns around the country. I actually read one of the essays (as directed by Buell at the start of one of the chapters) and found it tough sledding, in part because people just talked and wrote differently at the time when trying to convey complex ideas and in part because, reflecting its origins as a speech, it was more coherent at the paragraph level than as a whole.
Overall, while ex post I wish I had read this book second (or third), it is well worth reading at any point if you have an interest in American intellectual life in the middle of the 19th century.
Lurking in the background is the question that Alex implicitly raises, which is why parents in general are much more freaked out about the safety of their children than they used to be, when in fact their children are far safer than they used to be. Social science should have an answer to this, but so far as I know it does not.
The Atlantic offers up and mis-interprets some descriptive statistics comparing the racial/ethnic composition of the US population with the racial/ethnic composition of the undergraduates at several top US universities, including Michigan.
First off, there is some very basic sloppiness here in that it is never made explicit what age range is covered in the US population numbers nor is it made explicit whether or not the student numbers include graduate students. I will assume that the US numbers include all ages and that the student numbers are only undergraduates.
Second, and more deeply, why does this comparison make any sense at all? Most of those who attend university do so in their late teens and early twenties. A more sensible comparison would thus focus not on the entire US population, but on the US population in the relevant age range. But of course not everyone in the relevant age range meets the admissions criteria for a top undergraduate institution. That is not the fault of the top undergraduate institutions, but rather of the K-12 school system and of parents. Thus, a still more sensible comparison would focus only on those in the US pouplation in the relevant age range with scores on standardized tests that would put them at risk of admission to top colleges. Delving deeper into the details, state schools like Michigan differentially admist in-state students. Thus, for Michigan, the relevant comparison group is a weighted average of the relevant comparison group, with a weight of about 2/3 assigned to Michigan residents and a weight of 1/3 assigned to the remainder of the US (which could itself be reweighted to reflect the fact that Michgian does not draw at random from other states). There is a footnote abuot this issue but the Atlantic is too lazy to incorporate the information into the figures. Finally, Michigan, and most likely some of the other schools as well, sell university educations to foreigners, many of them from China. A comparison that made the point that the Atlantic claims to want to make but does not would take out the foreign students.
I suspect that the Atlantic columnist had a deadline to meet and emitted this disaster to meet it. I give it an F.
I have been meaning for a while to add Rudi Bachmann's biliingual blog "The Lumpy Economist" to the blog roll at the right and have finally gotten to it.
My favorite post, of the sub-sample I have read, is this one.
This photo essay is from the Huffington Post and was linked to by instapundit, and so necessarily represents a shining example of bi-partisan cooperation on matters of national importance.
Nick Gillespie at reason mocks the journalistic defenders of the president's claimed right to order killings of US citizens without limit or oversight.
I will confess that I must have had my "economics blinders" on, because I was quite surprised at the results. But they are sound and I give Susan a lot of credit for pushing on this line of research.
I should note that I do not blog about Michigan flyouts because many of my colleagues hold the erroneous belief that we somehow benefit from trying (and largely failing) to keep them a secret.
Just days after being stripped of her doctorate, the German education minister has been replaced. Rudi Bachmann provides links and some remarks on "title arousal" in Germany.
I do miss having Rudi around, particularly at job talks.
I only disagree one bit, which is that, in my view, the president (of the US, one assumes) should not be involved. He has other things to do. He is not our dad or our boss, contrary to the views of noted constitutional scholar Chris Rock. He is just a manager, with certain assigned duties, and running pro sports leagues is not among them.
Also, I have no particular views about doping per se. I just think that we should make some rules and then enforce them, in preference to the current regime of rampant hypocricy. I have no really strong opinion about whether the best rules are no rules or some rules or an absolute insistence that on mimicing the biomedical environment of 1930. Whatever. But get rid of all the lying.
If this is a love story, it is also a combat picture, in which the principal characters are at war with themselves, each other and the cruelty of the world.
Warning: the review contains some spoilers.
The background class politics, and the tension between order and chaos and how it intersects with social class, are deftly handled and give the viewer even more to think about.
Of course, Chrysler, which makes the Ram trucks featured in the Paul Harvey super bowl ad, itself counts government assistance as a recurring and important part of its business plan. Birds of a feather ...
Highlights: the reporters noble but still unsuccessful attempt to explain local average treatment effects and the indirect criticism of a certain famous co-author of mine.
Can there be any question but that the first Go Daddy ad was the winner?
Biggest losers: the Dodge Ram ad featuring the late populist radio announcer Paul Harvey and his sickly sweet peaen to farmers. I assumed until the very last minute that it would an ad for some agri-business welfare queen like ADM rather than for trucks. And the Budweiser "black crown" ads. It does not actually matter how many black-clad pretty people you you trot out; Bud will just never be cool.
I also liked the Gangnam pistachio ad and the Taco Bell party seniors.
Still, at the end of the day, Clint - locals will know there is a picture of him in my office, courtesy of a postcard sent years ago by one of my best graduate school friends - outshines the smarmy story, making this one recommended by me as well.
You probably have to be nuts to open a bookstore of any sort these days, but doing so in downtown Ann Arbor, which is presently without a general interest new bookstore due to the closing of both Shaman drum and Borders #1, is probably less nuts than opening one in many other places.