Musings of a wannabe social scientist @eugenerants-blog - Tumblr Blog

“In the company of [John] Muir, who saw the work of God in every stone and waterfall and his glory all around, [William] Keith injected … spirituality and scientific truthfulness to nature into his art.”

oupacademic

- Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, by Mark Stoll

Image: Yosemite Valley, by William Keith. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

A Markov-switching multifractal inter-trade duration model, with application to US equities

win.

Link here

“Anti-poverty strategy” offers sustained benefit

A massive collaboration between all the right names in development economics showing that reducing the stress of poverty has a positive reinforcement effect on boosting people out of poverty (paper here)

Which would have been a really positive read, except that with the snafu with Science, and knowing the poor quality of data in development economics (not a fault of the researchers, in case this claim comes back to bite me. it is just what it is - conducting field research is hard), how much do you trust the results?

On another note, why is it that doing more economics and knowing more economics is making me increasingly depressed with the field as a profession?

The perils of non-peer reviewed material

“many journalists are not equipped to distinguish good science from shoddy science”

no shit.

The NYT finds more time to criticize strong centralized governments

So of course, every article about strong central governments have to bring in lee kuan yew as their lead exemplar of a cunning dictator, while failing to put in proper context that every other country cited there has been stuck in a quagmire of their own making, whereas singapore has stayed relatively above that cesspit of corruption dictatorship usually brings.

anyways, here’s the article.

“Durham County causes low income mobility”

So says Raj Chetty.

or at least, so says the NYT in today’s paper

Intuitively, is this surprising tho?

Raj’s paper was like 5000 pages long, so i really didn’t want to read it in depth, but from what i see, it boils down to the undergrad metrics method of exploiting justifiably exogenous variations in choice of migration and using that as some type of instrument to extract the partial equilibrium effects of moving into that county on their income mobility. Again, I REALLY didn’t read the paper for more than 5 minutes, so, don’t quote me on this. However, what the paper essentially finds is that there is positive correlation between low income mobility and wealthier counties, given an exogenous shock that moves a person across counties.

So why is this surprising to the NYT? Wealthier counties have infrastructure and living expenses that correlate strongly with the wealth of their residents (in other words, it is just more expensive to live in a county that has richer people). If you were exogenously sorted into a rich county (and you are poor), by construction, you will suffer from this negative sorting. Does it mean that the outcome is pareto inefficient? Probably not; life just gave you a shitty as hell lemon!

Maybe I just need to read the 100 page tome to actually find out why this is surprising / economically inefficient.

#popular economics #causality

The cynicism of the 1%

Believing in economics only where it benefits them

Also, why make this issue more complicated than it is? If this is about “fundamental rights to water”, why not set a “fundamental baseline” for survival (think historical regressions, for instance, and take the intercept as the baseline). Then charge the hell out of anything above it? Or if the 1% asshole in this article really wants to feed his elm tree, why not suggest to him that they will just raise taxes, since piped water provision isn't exactly free? Or ask him to source for water himself?

Come on, the top ag econ schools are in california. No one has a solution? really?

I have a confession to make: I think behavioral economics is over-rated. Recently, Nobelist Robert Shiller called on economists to incorporate more psychology into their work. While there are certainly things economists can learn from psychology and other disciplines to enrich their understanding of the economy, this approach is not a revolution in economics. Often...

Boredom

Paid to sit around.

To think;

And to do nothing.

Morning NYT reads

“The rich sleep less”

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“Mr. Hamermesh has an economic theory about why the relationship between income and sleep appears to be so tight: The more you can earn, the more worthwhile it may seem to sacrifice sleep for work”

Yeah, it’s called the RBC theory, published like 50000000 years ago...

Diversity in everything else but where it matters

but at least many are trying to change

The classic conflation of PE and GE effects

“Why college is so expensive”

aka, why lawyers are not economists.

"A Forbidden Relationship, From the Other Side of the World”

Poignant essay in the New York Times about the difficulty (maybe impossibility?) of spanning across social, class and ethnic boundaries in love, ending off with a resonating declaration of “So what? At least I lived”.

#essays

Zingales@!

so much truth http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/luigi.zingales/papers/research/My_Losing_Battle_Leviathan.pdf

Public speaking 101

Practice

In this brave new world we live in...

Breast milk farming turning into a reality

Noah Smith posts non-krugmanesque piece.

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Musings of a wannabe social scientist