Economics & Marginalia: April 9th, 2021

Hi all,

First off, an apology: I completely forgot about the Easter weekend and hence failed to warn you all that I’d be skipping an edition of the links. Not deluding myself that more than three of you noticed, but just in case your Saturday morning cornflakes lacked that economisticky savour, you have my apologies. Secondly, in the name of all that is holy and good, how amazing was the Gonzaga-UCLA game? March Madness rarely lives up to the hype so spectacularly, and Jalen Suggs may never have a greater moment in his life (which is kind of depressing, but let’s gloss over that). Despite mainly empty arenas, the whole thing rather emphasises what a fiction the idea that college basketball is an amateur pursuit, rather than the massive moneyspinner it clearly is, as Eric Posner points out here. And though it’s a bit of a handbrake turn for this intro, I’ve just heard the news that DMX has passed away; I don’t think I attended a single party in my 20s that didn’t feature X on the soundtrack. Another icon – one who once rapped through a jaw that was literally wired shut – gone.

1. I’m going to start with an older link that I somehow missed at the time: a colleague recently sent me this magnificent long read on the problems of social science, a detailed and careful investigation of the various issues that plague the reliability and stability of findings from published social science research. It is absolutely rammed with beautiful data visualisations but more generally carries a sobering message: the problems that bedevil social science are present everywhere, in all fields (though some more than others, and economics comes out relatively well) and in even the highest-ranking journals; you cannot rely on reputation to save you the hard work of actually reading and assessing research quality (indeed more cited works are not systematically more likely replicate) and it is not particularly getting better over time. There are solutions proposed, some radical, but a big part of this has to be that this conversation – about how research is very difficult and can only be understood together with theory, and in the context of other work – has to be had everywhere where research is used, not just in the blogs of a few prickly statisticians.
2. Via David McKenzie’s brilliant weekly links, I was always going to feature an article that compares global development and convergence to Mario Kart, a system where it was extremely easy to help the worst-off players progress by giving them better tools than the best-off. Unlike Mario Kart, however, losing carries a greater cost than just the controller I’d throw across the room as a stroppy pre-teen. Also from David: a super summary of his recent work on that perennial question whenever someone implements a management intervention: “why don’t firms just pay for this advice and implement it themselves if it’s so profitable?”. David doesn’t have the answer per se, but this work does suggest that information, and better knowledge of the market for providers is not the constraint.
3. I grew up in an extremely polluted city, that has slowly improved over time, to the extent that blue skies no longer prompt frenzied phone calls among friends. It turns out that the downsides of this pollution were not just a general sense of ickiness and disinclination to go to the beach, but more profound: there may be substantial misallocation of labour driven by the desire of workers to avoid pollution. Gaurav Khanna and co-authors write their research exploring this in China up on VoxEU.
4. I don’t really watch football (that’s real football, the kind you play almost exclusively with your feet, unless you’re Thierry Henry and qualification for a major tournament is at stake) anymore. I eventually got tired of the endless playacting and the relentless accumulation of talent that the richest clubs pursued. But this piece from FiveThirtyEight caught my attention from the angle of another of my interests: sports analytics. It argues that the recent trend for trying to focus on taking shots as close to the goal as possible has been mistaken: long distance shots may be low-percentage options, but when scoring opportunities of any kind are sufficiently rare and the variance in time-to-next-shot is high, they should nevertheless be taken. Given that this provides me with the opportunity to link to this video of Jimmy Floyd Hasslebaink having a welly from all sorts of distances, I’m on board.  
5. Tim Harford on innovations that take decades to be recognised for their brilliance. Tempting as it is to extrapolate from his examples, he wisely points out that most things that fizzle out on landing stay fizzled.
6. A personality quiz I can get behind: using answers from the IGM Experts Panel, this quiz allows you to test your opinions and discover which renowned economist your views most resemble. I was deeply disappointed that mine didn’t come back as Albert Hirschman, but given that his death some years ago precludes him from being part of the panel, this was perhaps not surprising.  
7. And lastly, because clearly it is a very serious question that deserves expert attention, The Ringer enlist two Dartmouth professors to discuss who would really win a fight between Godzilla and King Kong. If ever there was a time Michael Gove was correct, it is today: I have had enough of experts. Their conclusion that Kong would win is clearly insane. Godzilla breathes lightning. Clearly, it’s not just social science that is broken.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R