Economics & Marginalia: June 10, 2022

Hi all,

The summer transforms England. It changes from a grey, drizzly, mildly depressing place with profoundly depressing politics to being a bright, happy, bustling land of diverse communities enjoying public spaces, though still with profoundly depressing politics. And the summer brings another radical change: the football (that’s soccer to my American readers) grinds to a halt and we’re treated to a sporting upgrade as the attention turns to test cricket (that’s unintelligible to my American readers). And test cricket is probably the most English of all past times: it involves oscillating from euphoria (we won the first test!) to despair (we won the toss and New Zealand are 300/4 and counting, gah); we obsessively stare at the weather report to see when the rain is coming; we start drinking at an inappropriately early hour; and even though we invented it, we’re nowhere near the best at it anymore. If you want to understand England, start with the cricket.

1. The best thing I read this week was Michael Nielsen’s long, thoughtful, erudite criticism of Effective Altruism, the moral philosophy that argues for us to adopt an approach to life that relies on evidence and logic to establish how to achieve the most good for others over time, and to apply that understanding to our own lives. It’s superb on a number of levels: it is a really carefully argued and intelligent critique, identifying specific issues with the EA framework and how it is applied in practice. But beyond that it’s also a great illustration of how best to approach such an act of criticism. Nielsen hasn’t drawn his sword against an imaginary version of EA, a caricature of its worst faults. He instead spends a good part of the piece establishing what is good, remarkable and novel about EA, before addressing his arguments to the strongest version of what it is. He also openly acknowledges where he is unsure or admits weakness to his critique. He says, towards the end “I've strongly criticized EA in these notes. But I haven't provided a clearly and forcefully articulated alternative.” I’m not so sure this is a real flaw. I think a lot of the philosopher Jonathan Wolff’s argument that need not have a fully specified conception of what right is to recognise wrong (in his case, writing about inequality). These critiques articulate some of my own feelings about with the movement, but equally don’t dispel my sense that it is important, both intellectually and in practice.  I also liked Alexander Berger’s reaction thread.

2. Policy around land use and housing in most of the US and UK is so laughably bad that I struggle to articulate the amount of economic damage it’s doing to us. Alex Tabarrok had a nice discussion of a new paper showing how—largely due to housing costs—low productivity workers are ceasing to move to high productivity places. This is a slow-burn disaster for growth and more directly for liveability and vibrancy in our most productive places. It’s very worth reading: he points out that though the college-attendance premium is still high, a large portion of it has been captured by landowners, a point that had never occurred to me before, but is now gnawing at my soul as I sign a new rental agreement.

3. Also very good: Stuart Ritchie argues that science is political; but it should be constantly striving to be less so, rather than leaning in and embracing the inevitability of political intrusion into scientific inquiry. I agree with most (maybe even all) of this; but it strikes me that the questions we ask must come from somewhere, and to the extent that our values are political, then there is a political original sin in science that can’t be minimized, but should instead be transparent. I think what needs to stay resolutely apolitical is the scientific method, how we answer the questions we ask. Related: Tim Harford has a superb piece in the FT about what it means to ‘learn how to think’ about evidence, facts and the world. He argues that it is—in large part—about our moral character and virtues as it is about technical skills and understanding. It’s hard to disagree, but equally hard to know how to change them at scale.

4. Two perspectives on global supply chains from Project Syndicate: Diane Coyle and Raghu Rajan. Both are well worth reading.

5. There is a strong tendency in development to welcome technological solutions to development problems by focusing on the best they can do, rather than the full range of ways they can be applied. This piece by Valentina Brailovskaya, Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson looks at digital credit, and finds that, on the whole, gains have been limited and predatory pricing may be prevalent. Related: David McKenzie on a metanalysis of financial literacy interventions: come for the findings, stay for his superb discussion of how meta-analyses should report their results.

6. Development econ podcast alert: Owen Barder revives Development Drums to interview Stefan Dercon about Gambling on Development.

7. I have a very, very soft spot for detective shows, and the best of them all is Columbo, mainly because every episode (bar two, both based on stories by Ed McBain) is structured like an economics paper: they tell you whodunnit right at the beginning and then get to the fun bit of demonstrating how he proves it. This is all a very tangential way of introducing what must be the best use of Dall-E Mini, the pint-sized AI programme that generates images based on any verbal prompt you enter: to imagine what Lieutenant Columbo would look like as a character in every iconic video game you can think of. I’m quite partial to Columbo as a Street Fighter character myself. On which note: my wife and I have run out of good detective shows to watch. We’ve exhausted the complete Columbo, Poirot, Marple and we’ve seen 5/6 seasons of Shetland, as well as the Killing (in which Sarah Lund just arrests everyone in turn until she gets to the killer). What’s the best not-too-dark one we’re missing? Recommendations gratefully received.

Have a great weekend, everyone!