Economics & Marginalia: June 25, 2021

Hi all,

Cricket, eh? The World Test Championship lost basically two days to rain, a further few hours to Chewie Pujara scoring a combined 23 runs off 134 balls and it was still the most exciting sporting event of the year. New Zealand were brilliant (and so, at times, were India) and well worth the victory. A country whose entire population (around five million) is smaller than any reasonable estimate of the number of people who play some kind of competitive or recreational cricket in India alone are champions of the premier form of the game. It’s even more remarkable when you consider they should probably be champions in the one-day format, too. It almost makes up for a LeBron-less conference finals (though Trae Young, as much as I instinctively dislike him, is a pretty good compensation too).

1. One of the best things I read all week was Justin Sandefur laying the absolute smack down on the World Bank in Nature. I know what you’re thinking – he’s already killed the Doing Business survey, has he no mercy? But it’s for a good cause. He argues that the Bank’s failure to find resources to bankroll covid vaccinations across the world is a colossal failure of leadership. It’s hard to argue with him. I think the best argument against them doing so would be because scarce grants should be spent on something else, but it seems a weak counterpoint: surely, exceptionally, they can find ways of making their resources go further? Relative to the much trickier challenge of inventing vaccines, finding a way to fund their roll out should have been the easy part.

2. One of the nice things about writing this email every week is that I get to sit down and put my thoughts down in some sort of order, without interruption. You know who doesn’t get that privilege? Basically anyone who presents a piece of economics to an academic seminar audience, ever – and especially women. In Episode 4 of Paper Round, Matt and I are joined by the brilliant Kate Orkin to discuss this wonderful paper by Pascaline Dupas and co-authors, on how women face additional disadvantages in the already difficult and combative world of econ seminars, and what the broader effects of this might be, as well as how it might be addressed (transcript). It was a lot of fun – all three of us have been in train wreck seminars, as well as ones that have been constructive, helpful and challenging. There’s so much that’s good about the scrutiny that economics puts new work under; we need to keep that while reforming the rest.

3. A really nice piece from 538 on how the left-right scale in US politics has been thrown out of whack by attitudes towards Donald Trump. People seen as supportive of him are rated as more right-wing even if they are objectively to the left of some of those who oppose him.

4. This is absolutely superb: Tim Harford embarks on a jazz riff of an article, starting with an Excel error at Public Health England last year, swerving into the creation of double-entry bookkeeping, before taking in solos on naming conventions in genetics, the eradication of smallpox and returning to the PHE Excel disaster to tie the piece together. The article is about two things: how data is neglected and mistreated, even when it’s the key to solving global problems (as it so often is); and how using the wrong tools or approach to solving data problems is a recipe for disaster. I happen to like Excel a lot. For what it was designed for, it is superb; and unlike many tools, it can do a lot of things it wasn’t designed for when used with care. So this isn’t a joke at Excel’s expense, or the set up to a punchline of “and that’s when I started using R”. Instead, read it for the respect with which the use of simple data and simple strategies for corralling it is given. And on the subject of data: Jean Dreze and Anmol Somanchi on India’s statistical bedrock, biased towards the better off, and thus understating problems.

5. Stephen Chan’s obituary of Kenneth Kaunda is also very good, and a good primer on Zambian politics for those who aren’t familiar with it.

6. One of the things I find most frustrating about the bifurcation of migrants into ‘high’ and ‘low’ skilled for the purposes of policy – as most high income countries do – is that it’s an absurdly static way of thinking about the labour market. Even if some people are innately ‘high’ or ‘low’ skilled (of which more in a moment), increasing the supply of ‘low-skilled’ workers changes the universe of what is possible for all the rest of the workers in the economy. They may, for example, make it possible to pay for services that free up labour or recreation time among other workers, with knock on effects for productivity or utility. Zuzana Cepla and Helen Dempster have many more bones to pick with the distinction.

7. I’ve spent all week writing, morning, night and day – except for the odd hour on Zoom – so I haven’t had time to catch up on episode 3 of Loki yet; that’s my Friday treat, my son’s sleep cycle allowing. It did make me reflect on my process for writing, though: even when I was feeling completely uninspired, I stuck with it, to get some words down that in some way reflected what I was trying to say – as the cliché goes, you cannot edit a blank page. So I was very happy to see Octavia Butler’s writing advice on LitHub reinforcing this. All of the advice is good, but I particularly live by the final piece: read, keep writing, and forget talent – everyone can get better at it. And on the subject of great writers, The Ringer’s list of Jay-Z’s 100 best songs is the best kind of wrong – the kind that sends you to youtube to listen and marvel again.

Have a great weekend, everyone!