Hi all,
Sorry if the links are a little late getting to you today: I’ve just been decorating the Christmas tree with the little one. The tree is massive: it did not look nearly so big when we selected it, surrounded by many other even bigger trees and what I can only assume were strategically-hired giants working in the garden centre. If the objective was to trick us into buying a bigger tree than we wanted (or that can comfortably fit inside our living room), then it worked. On the plus side, that does mean a lot more decorations going on it. There is something joyous about a child’s absolute disregard for subtlety or elegance in decorative choices—Spidey on one branch, Lightning McQueen on another and more red than you’d find in Wan Chai on a Saturday night in the 1990s. The approach of Christmas (a festive tradition I can take or leave, though I do like the time off to read and the excuse to buy good wine) reminds me to warn you: the Links may stop arriving suddenly, depending on when our comms team downs tools for the year. I think the last one will be on December 20th, but it might also be next week. TBC!
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I was teaching economics for public policy this term, to a very impressive group of students at BSG. They are a great bunch to teach, from whom I learn a lot, because almost all of them have already done deeply impressive things with their lives, and they come from such a diverse range of backgrounds. One of the challenges of the course for me, though, is that relatively few have had any formal economics training, and economics is a foreign language to them. In some ways, quite literally: I began studying economics at age 14, so the language of economics is second-nature to me, but teaching (for example) lawyers or philosophers or activists and using a term like ‘moral hazard’ or referring to ‘perfect information’, or describing someone as a ‘principal’ can lead to confusion. What these terms mean to me are not at all what they mean to an intelligent non-specialist. Planet Money had a good show a while back in which economists explained which economic terms lead to the greatest general confusion, and it’s a very good list, and not just for the discussion of pegging a currency (transcript). My own bugbear, professionally, is comparative advantage: a term commonly used by policymakers, and almost exclusively to mean absolute advantage.
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The Job Market Papers series continues, and continues to unearth gems. I thought this one, by Pascuel Plotkin, was very good: he studies the effect of gig work-platforms (specifically a delivery app in the style of Deliveroo) on labour market outcomes in the restaurant sector in Brazil. What makes this so good is that he manages to not only examine the effect of the platform on existing workers in the restaurant industry (an effect that is mainly negative), he also identifies its effects on workers not already working in the industry, usually poorer informal workers, and finds that the overall welfare effect of the platform is likely positive. It’s a carefully done paper, and while I think its worth thinking about how the effects in a place like Brazil might be rather different to the effects in a place like London, it’s good to have some proper investigation here. And this, by Katherine Theiss is also great: she finds that household surveys undertaken in the evenings appear to undercount incidents of intimate partner violence (likely because of husbands or partners who drink or get drunker in the evening, and the threat they pose). This is one of those things that seems obvious when you read it, but took a lot of work to uncover. I always come away from this series of blogs confident that the profession is in good hands.
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Ken Opalo takes an African perspective on the incoming Trump presidency, and identifies a number of opportunities for African leaders. This is the kind of piece I wish I read more. Very often when you look at the development or Africa implications of some big event in the US or Europe, it’s written from the perspective of a western organization. We may come to rather different conclusions from a different vantage point, as Ken’s piece illustrates. He also closes with some risks. I rather think the second and third are quite likely: there will be some real grifters out to make a fortune in the next few years, and a number will succeed.
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This one is narrowly UK-centric, but rather interesting. Apparently, the Starmer government in the UK has begun to embrace at least one facet of the Boris Johnson (mis)administration: the belief that the civil service is part of the problem that holds the UK back. The first words of this BBC piece are ‘“Dominic Cummings was right”’; and Starmer’s use of Cummings-adjacent language evoking a civil service happy with ‘managed decline’ in his recent speech elicited a sharp response from the civil service union. Here’s the thing: Cummings was often very good at diagnosing problems, and there are of course many problems in the civil service. No organization (or cluster of organizations) made up of half a million people can avoid them. But you need solutions, specifically to the difficulty the civil service has in retaining genuine experts and top-of-the-field expertise, and its relatively deteriorating terms and conditions. When I left university, a civil service job was a plum entry-level post. Not anymore: people talk about the salary and living standards sacrifice they must take for wanting to work in government. Cummings’s solutions were usually slightly mad, and boiled down to ‘let me do things my way’, and it’s not obvious what Starmer’s solution is. There is talk of a ‘complete rewiring of the British state’, under the new Cabinet Secretary, a civil servant of 30 years’ experience. I remain to be convinced.
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Andrew Gelman on strategic sloppiness among academics, a strategy that allows them greater leeway in what they argue by being ‘carelessly’ wrong on details that might otherwise undermine their bigger argument. Very good, including the drive-by on Niall Ferguson.
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Jeremy Lebow and co-authors look anti-migrant sentiment in seven Latin American countries (specifically in relation to Venezuelan migrants), and find that there is no relationship between local exposure to migrants and negative sentiment; usually the relationship runs the other way. They conclude that anti-migrant sentiment is driven primarily by national-level narratives. The media, giving airspace to xenophobes with a megaphone and some snake-oil to sell have a lot to answer for.
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Finally, this Christmas, I’m looking for a game to play with my four-year old. He’s too young for Wingspan, and my wife has vetoed Pandemic, for 2020-trauma reasons, so I need recommendations. He has a good attention span and he’s an eloquent talker (though not much of a reader yet), and can follow the rules of, for example, Tummyache without a problem, though he has a tendency to attempt some unsubtle cheating when he falls behind. What should we try? I love board games, though not quite as much Tim Harford does; his two recent love-letters to the games that he has played through most of his life are lovely (here and here). Which ones go well with very little little ones?
Have a great weekend, everyone!
R
Disclaimer
CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.
