Economics & Marginalia: February 11, 2022

Hi all,

The only deadlines I love are trade deadlines, and NBA trade deadlines above all. The stories that emerge are truly wild: players being barricaded into their homes and begged to sign contract extensions while a team owner is literally driving around his neighbourhood trying to find his house; players so openly praying to be traded they tweet “I don’t want to be here”, and pretend they were referring to their barbershop. Take Ben Simmons, who has spent the last six months showing us what Seinfeld would have been like if George Costanza was a 6-foot-10 Australian with a chiselled physique. He was so upset that his manager criticised him that he started showing up for work only to stand in the background and mark his attendance without ever participating in any of the team drills or practices. Think for a minute about the superhuman levels of pettiness that must run through your veins to do this: he SHOWED UP, EVERY DAY. And did nothing. It wasn’t to get paid: he accumulated $19 million in fines for non-participation. It was solely to register his annoyance. Every day. And at the end of it, Bizarro-George got what he always wanted and a trade to team willing to pay him millions and put him in contention for a title. If there’s a moral to this story, I’m pretty sure it only applies to gajillionaires. And speaking of gajillionaires:

1. Just in case you missed it, woman-of-the-people, Kirsty Allsopp (daughter of a Lord, no less), recently suggested that young people struggling to buy their first house could simply cut down on the Starbucks and Netflix and save up the money they need for a mortgage deposit. In a sign that she may be out of her depth in her job (where she hosts a TV show about the property market), she apparently failed to realise that it would take roughly 50 years of saving to accumulate the average deposit size required in the UK, even if house prices stopped increasing today. But there’s something deeper going on here: Sarah Manavis suggests there is a kind of bias at work, whereby older people assume that the things that young people do for fun must be luxuries, and hence expensive. I think there’s something to it, but propose an complementary explanation. For those of us who grew up at a time when streaming a movie would have been impossible, or ruinously expensive in time and money terms on a dial-up internet connection, we associate these technological advances with expense. But that’s the miracle of economic growth and technological change. Some of us remember that Netflix used to be an online service which you could request a DVD that would then be mailed to you, physically. If I had it, you didn’t. Today Netflix movies are non-rivalrous, because we can all download them at the same time. It’s far cheaper to watch a movie now than it ever has been, and those of us who don’t take it for granted just can’t quite compute that.
2. And speaking of how prices evolve, and how difficult it can be to keep track of them, Tim Harford covers Jack Monroe’s campaign to develop a cost-of-living index that directly measures the prices that matter most to the poorest. Harford suggests that it’s shocking that this data doesn’t already exist; my colleague Euan Ritchie pointed out that the ONS did once provide it, but that it was just not widely used enough to maintain. Statistics that aren’t used die a lonely death, and it says a great deal about us which ones this is true of.
3. I have been thinking a great deal about scaling recently, as I mentioned last week when I linked to a piece about John List’s new book. But it would be completely remiss of me not to link to another review of both The Voltage Effect and The Scale-Up Effect that he edited, by my colleague David Evans. He has an incredible talent for summarising complex ideas: read it. Similarly: John Holbein’s social science round-up.
4. This is one of the best papers I have read for a very long time: Tanveet Suri and Christopher Udry on agricultural technology in Africa. My favourite sentence: “In short, the lack of productive new agricultural technologies ready to be adopted in Africa is no mystery; it’s the result of low levels of agricultural research and development investment in the past.”
5. Economics has a gender problem, part 23,291,489,171 of a continuing series: Markus Eberhardt, Giovanni Facchini and Valeria Rueda use machine learning to examine a huge treasure trove of letters of recommendation for candidates for jobs as junior professors in economics; what they discover is a systematic bias in the language used, with women being much more likely to be described using words associated with sheer effort and hard work, rather than brilliance and ability than their male peers. The graphs have a *lot* going on in them, but at least that depressing message is clear.
6. I am currently reading Anne Phillips’s brilliant Unconditional Equals, a book which is changing the way I think about equality; in a happy coincidence Branko’s substack has a fantastic piece about how conceptions of equality, even from within a fairly narrow band of the political spectrum, can vary enormously. It’s not long, but it will make you think about what the basis for equality should be long after you finish reading it (this is also true of Phillips’s book, by the way).
7. I am a fiend for crosswords: I used to do one every morning and even used to go back through back issues of them when I had time (which, now that I have a small child, feels like a distant memory). This fantastic Kotaku piece about the NYT crossword and its contested politics is catnip for all of us language geeks. I enjoy a wordle, and have an active, pitched battle with my wife over who has a better score each day, but there is no satisfaction like finishing the Grauniad quick in 15 minutes (a rare occasion for me, I might add, unlike the maniacs who complete it within minutes of it being posted each midnight and then show up in the comments section).

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R