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Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Sunday, July 28, 2013
This piece from thinkprogress goes into some depths on the Kennedy School dissertation that led Jason Richwine to get fired from the Heritage Foundation.It includes quotes from several people I know. I can certainly repeat what they and some of the others quoted in the article have said about the quality and seriousness of Richwine's dissertation committee.The author is a bit more surprised than he should be that some dissertations are better than others, even at Harvard, but otherwise does a pretty nice job as a non-specialist dealing with a complicated...
We had to buy a new car last week, something I had managed to avoid since my Western Ontario days. My main memory from that purchase, which was in 1999 (!) was the joy of having the salesperson at the Honda dealership in London, Ontario lie to my face. Fortunately, I had followed the then-current advice about getting other offers via fax, plus I had read Consumer Reports so, though the experience was quite unpleasant, I did not get taken to the cleaners...
1. What Bill Gates reads (short answer: lots of pop social science).2. Someone should tell this reporter at the Seattle Times, and the mayoral candidates she writes about, that treating unconditional earnings differences between subgroups as if they mean something serves only to demonstrate ignorance of the relevant literature.3. Literacy test for voters (not all voters, of course) in Louisiana before the civil rights era. How did the people who wrote and administered such things sleep at night? Or sit through a church service?4. Avoiding...
Saturday, July 27, 2013
The Way, Way Back is a mighty mountain of sugar, but it is charming and well-done sugar.A.O. Scott has a fine review at the NYT; there is no politics in the movie to throw him off. I particularly like this bit: "the older actors provide a vivid omnibus of the varieties of adult awfulness."Recommend...
Consider this teacher in North Carolina, who seeks a raise via moral suasion.If we suppose that her husband makes as much as she does, so that they have a household income of $62,000, that puts them in the 62nd percentile of the US household income distribution and the 96th percentile of the world income distribution, according to this calculator. Even if we suppose that her husband makes only $20,000 per year (2000 hours at $10 per hour), which seems unlikely given positive sorting in the marriage market on education and income, the percentiles...
Thursday, July 25, 2013
I tried very hard to get the nice Boston Globe reporter to talk with my colleague Justin Wolfers instead of me but was ultimately unsuccessful. As a result, I am quoted in her piece on Larry Summer's Feldstein lecture at the NBER Summer Institute yesterday, saying things that were plainly obvious to everyone in the audience.Hat tip: Steve Woodb...
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Ferguson, Craig. 2009. American On Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot. New York: HarperCollins.Craig Ferguson is my favorite (by a fair distance) among the late night hosts. This book is his autobiography. It is pretty up front about his travails with drugs and alcohol and how he overcame them. It is pretty funny too. It also does a nice job of illustrating the combination of hard work, luck, and help from your friends that underlie career success. At the same time, my sense is that Craig understates both his ambition - the...
This piece has some pretty good advice. Some comments on individual items:1. Quotas. There are a good idea, especially for female faculty who often get showered with invitations for things because organizers want diversity (demographic diversity, that is; there are other kinds of diversity, though you might not know it if you spend all your time in academia) on whatever committee or panel or whatever they are organizing. It is important to adjust the quotas to reflect your likes and dislikes and strengths and weaknesses. Do more of what you like...
Monday, July 22, 2013
Performance Gender Gap: Does Competition Matter?Evren Ors, Frédéric Palomino, and Eloïc PeyracheJournal of Labor EconomicsVol. 31, No. 3 (July 2013) (pp. 443-499)Abstract:Using data for students undertaking a series of real-world academic examinations with high future payoffs, we examine whether the differences in these evaluations’ competitive nature generate a performance gender gap. In the univariate setting we find that women’s performance is first-order stochastically dominated by that of men when the competition is higher, whereas the reverse...
Monsters University is what you get when put Monsters Inc and Revenge of the Nerds into a blender. The animation is gorgeous and Billy Crystal is always good fun. And it is always of interest to see how higher education is portrayed in popular culture. And, of course, lessons are learned and we all become better people.The NYT reviewer agrees about the animation but wishes they had made a different movie by putting Brave into the blender instead of Revenge of the Nerds. Well, perhaps.Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours with your kid. If you...
1. Only in Ann Arbor: the saga of the "violin monster" at Art Fair.2. Markets in everything: transgender shoes in Ypsilanti.3. Rotating skyscraper.4. Prof. or hobo? Test your knowledge.5. Will Wilkinson on DC and the living wage. I really like the phrase "moral outsourcing".Hat tip #2 to Charlie Brown, on #3 to Jackie Smith and on #4 to Anne Fitzpatri...
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Ortved, John. 2009. The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. New York: Faber and Faber.I quite like the Simpsons, and this book is a pretty good introduction to various backstories about how the show got going, changes in the animation shop in the early years, the inevitable creative battles and so on. I particularly enjoyed the material about the mechanics of the process of how the show gets created each week.The format consists of rearranged bits of interviews done by the author (or occasionally from published sources) interspersed...
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Champion hypocrite and persecutor of the innocent Eliot Spitzer wants that comptrollers office so badly, and wants those book sales so badly, that he is willing to endure a pretty serious hazing on the Colbert Report.I am not usually a big Colbert fan but the writing on this one soars above his norm. The line about Charlie Rose is my favorite.Via ...
Thursday, July 18, 2013
1. Drunken island monkeys.2. Free speech versus occupational licensing in Kentucky.3. Virginia Postrel on how to save Barnes and Noble. I agree with the diagnosis but am not sure that the cure is fully worked out yet ...4. Expressing your views about the IRS via performance art.5. Markets in everything: Portland's vegan strip club.Hat tip on #1 to Jackie Smith. #4 via instapund...
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
1. The NYT on heterogeneous treatment effects and statistical treatment rules in medicine. The author's knowledge sort of runs out before the end of the article, but it is still pretty interesting.2. Cool old cars in Minnesota. Ann Arbor had its (very) mini version of this last Friday.3. Economics and video games.4. What Amanda Knox reads.5. Don't go driving in Russia.Hat tip on #1 to portside.org. Hat tip on #2 and #5 to Jackie Smi...
The University of Washington, my undergraduate alma mater, has instituted a "diversity" course requirement on top of the regular "distribution" requirements designed to provide some breadth to undergraduate course-taking.I think the key bit in the Seattle Times article is:[Dean] Gregory, though, characterized the final policy as “a very modest curriculum requirement.”“It doesn’t complicate the curriculum,” he said. “We were careful not to do that.”Charlie Brown likes to talk about a mythical software package called "PC Deanspeak" whose function...
Monday, July 15, 2013
The NYT has made the startling discovery that college students sometimes fool around, even when they are not in a relationship, and often after consuming alcohol.Now that's news! Move over National Enquirer!And I am sure that nothing like that ever happened back when I was in college. No sir. Not one bit.Perhaps equally entertaining is the author's attempt to instill in parents an odd combination of fear for their innocent children and regret that their own college lives did not feature as many drunken late night booty calls as some students enjoy...
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Hendel, Ronald. 2013. The Book of Genesis: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.This short (and small) but very rich book details the history of scholarly and popular interpretations of Genesis from pre-Christian times to the present. Broadly speaking, the story has three parts, starting with figural interpretations, both apocalyptic and Platonic, followed by more literal interpretations in the Protestant era, followed by critical literary readings in modern times. An initial chapter sets the context with a history of the text itself....
1. Elevation Burger comes to Ann Arbor, and comes recommended by UM alum Adam Cole.2. How a Fed President spends his time. Narayana was a couple years ahead of me at Chicago, and married one of my friends from my year.3. Cool old photos, some of Detroit.4. Is wine tasting bunk? Your worst suspicions confirmed. I do think I could sort out the wretched stuff they serve in coach on Delta from all other wines.5. RePEc ranks economists by cohort (i.e. by year of doctoral completion). Note that the ranking is only among those economists who have taken...
Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour Restaurant, where I worked back in the days when I was in high school and it was a national chain, returns to Northern California later this month. Working at Farrell's was great fun, and I learned a ton of labor economics (maybe that should be personnel economics) as well, though I did not realize that's what it was at the time.Can Seattle be far behind? There used to be a Farrell's in Ann Arbor too. Fingers crossed ....Main Farrell's site here. More history he...
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Friday, July 12, 2013
1. A success of Britain's National Health Service from the Sun (which source signals correctly that it is moderately NSFW)2, The church of beer, in Denmark of course (and with a video including Canadian content!)3, The American Statistical Sociological (!) Association is taken over by women.4. Substituting capital for labor: steel industry edition.5. Seva moving to Westgate. They should have a downtown branch too - students will never find their way out to their new location.Hat tip on #1 to Lars Skipper (and just how did Lars miss #2?)....
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
1. Rob Mercer on tradition. Why does Canada produce so many good comedians? One suspects it has something to do with living next door to the US.2. Singing anesthesiologists.3. Oliver Sacks on turning 80. Nicely done.4. The effect of too much rain on the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.5. On facebook firings.Hat tip on #1 to Lisa Gribowski, on #2 to Jackie Smith and on #5 to Charlie Brown. #3 is via ...
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Greg explains the bonds that link classical liberal and lefty economists on the occasion of his lefty student, Jason Furman, taking over as chair of the council of economic advisers. The piece is well done though I would have said more about how, at least in DC, economists can easily put aside their usually minor differences about where on the Pareto frontier they would like to end up in favor of the much more challenging task of trying to bring policy within a light-year or two of the Pareto frontier.His piece also reminded me of a story that...
This is a fun political thriller that takes place in an alternate universe in which the FDA, the EPA and the ambulance-chasing shyster lawyers looking to file class-action suits all do not exist, and so must be replaced with over-educated, painfully earnest and happily egalitarian performance artists. It is this alternate world that confuses A.O. Scott, who says something about the "contradictions of capitalism" in his review, which seems odd given that the movie is really all about government failure rather than market failure.In any case, at...
Monday, July 8, 2013
1. Managerial chaos at the (at least formerly) very cool Tabard Inn in DC. I stayed at the Tabard for my job talk at Maryland back in the day.2. A strange story of missing identity from the Seattle Times. I like it that rich guys in Texas who are friends with their congressman can use the social security administration as a free private investigator.3. The science of the slinky, in slow motion.4. Photos of the renovation of the Chicago Theological Seminary as the new home of the economics department.5. The pentametron. Cool.Hat tip on #1 to Austin...
I am reminded of Paul Heyne's emphasis on the point that moral energy is scarce like all other resources, with the implication that it is best to rely on incentives when possible, and to save the moral energy for contexts in which incentives perform poorly. One can think of "pure" communism / communitarianism as an attempt to rely entirely on moral energy for allocation. That moral energy is scarce is then why it fails.Hat tip: Don Hach...
Sunday, July 7, 2013
We saw Kings of Summer at the Michigan Theater last night.I quite liked this movie and so was puzzled by the NYT review, which seems to completely miss the point. Complaining about the realism of the local police in a vaguely magical realist coming of age story is a bit like complaining about all the noisy space explosions in Star Wars or Star Trek. Yeah, sure, but so what?In any case, the movie is a light-hearted bit of fun that does a nice job of capturing the angst of the teen years, particularly the way that even minor parental quirks become...
1. No free speech for Urban Outfitters. One wishes that Urban Outfitters would fight back, but it is easy to see why they do not, given the lack of institutional limits on the bad behavior of state attorney generals.2. Institute for Social Research timeline.3. Anti-GMO and science.4. Real estate agents misbehaving.5. Yet another (!) new bookstore for Ann Arbor.Hat tip on #1 to Scott Wood and on #4 to Charlie Bro...
Saturday, July 6, 2013
The Miami Herald offers a nice report on the dubious employment magic of STEM degrees.The bits at the end are pretty funny. First the president of Florida International University (FIU) says that people should gets liberal arts degrees because it is impossible to predict what sorts of jobs they hold when they finish college. Then the chancellor of the University of Florida system says that the problem is exactly the reverse, that there is not enough central planning and micro-management of degree choices.And, of course, shortages are all about...
1. The third amendment (!) in Henderson Nevada.2. Automated essay grading demystified and (sort of) defended.3. Graduation advice from a small, non-random, but still interesting sample of economists4. NRO on Hoxby and Turner. The interpretation of the Hoekstra paper could be a bit more subtle, but otherwise not too bad.5. The FT on the changing industrial organization of English crick...
Friday, July 5, 2013
Kammen, Michael. 2010. Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.This bit of academic fluff is great fun indeed. I picked it up at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and got through it pretty quickly. While the author goes to some effort to find commonalities and themes, and indeed there are some to be found, most of the pleasure here is just looking at the past through the unusual lens of exhumations and reburials. People in the distant past (and even some people in the not so distant past)...
1. Dilbert does Krugman. Ouch!2. How can police in a college town not be able to distinguish sparkling water from beer?3. No heroes please. One could frame this as a Canada / US thing but I think it is really of a piece with the general zero tolerance / lawsuit avoidance bureaucratic paranoia and butt-covering that is common to schools in both countries.4. Rest area photography from Atlantic Cities.5. The Economist on the prostitution market in the UK (where it is mostly legal): demand is down (due to the recession) and supply is up (due...
Thursday, July 4, 2013
There is substance to the criticisms that A.O. Scott up offers in the NYT. It would indeed be enjoyable to see a movie Star Trek that was like the more thoughtful episodes of the original or second television series. Still, this movie, which no one would call particularly thoughtful, is a lot of fun, and surely ranks above the median among Star Trek movies.More prosaically, my dad the engineer would be pleased that the Enterprise actually has seat belts in this particular universe. He used to complain every time the Enterprise would get hit by...
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
1. Advances in civil liberties in Cleveland.2. Coney Island update. When I was there in the late 1980s, it was notable mainly as an urban ruin. Glad to see that things are looking up.3. One more reason not to look at p*orn at work.4. Benny Hill, Ernie, and the fastest milk cart in the west.5. Slate on what place names mean.Hat tip on #1 to Charlie Brown and on #4 to Peter Dolt...
Cengage has gone bankrupt, and owes Greg $1.6 million.Thought question: what does the negative income shock do to his labor supply?This is likely bad news for Jeff Wooldridge too. His excellent undergraduate text, which I use in my ECON 406 class every fall, is also published by Cengage.Addendum: apparently the bankruptcy is not a problem for Greg.Hat tip: Ken Troske and oth...
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
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