Hi all,
I begin the links feeling very much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The UK has a new Prime Minister… again. And it comes after a week of chaos… again. Boris Johnson spent the weekend lying (yes… again), this time making claims about the number of backers he had like a teenager listing girlfriends he’s had on holiday. And then he let people down… again (shot, chaser and hangover). And at the end of it all, where are we? Still waiting for a clarity on our fiscal policies, nervously waiting to hear what’s in line for cuts and what’s going to survive, and still counting down until the Home Secretary says something horrific or is sacked (yes, like a rotten piece of tofu, Suella Braverman has resurfaced). Still, it’s not all bad news: in the biggest surprise of the week (well, apart from the Zimbabwe-Pakistan match, but we’ll come back to that), Sunak appointed Andrew Mitchell to be Minister for International Development at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. He’s been away for a while, and returns to a brief very different to the one he left his successor last time, but if righting the ship requires a genuine passion for development and the toughness to have fights for it, you can’t really think of a better appointment if you care about the global poor.
- I often dive right in to the hardcore econ, but by far my favourite thing this week was Planet Money’s show about the music industry, and in particular about a 40-something-year-old song about inflation by a singer called Earnest Jackson. But it’s about more than just inflation and the parallels between today and our more distant economic past, or the Planet Money crew’s attempt to start a music label; it’s also about all the different ways workers can lose or fail to exercise their bargaining power, and how it impacts their lives. There’s also a glorious moment when Earnest finally hears his song on the radio—and the video to match it (transcript). On a faintly similar note, this visualisation of the bassline for Ain’t No Mountain High Enough is incredible.
- This superb VoxDev piece by Sam Asher and co-authors digs into an age-old question in development economics: does agricultural productivity rise, and cause structural transformation, or does the economy change in structure and cause agricultural productivity to rise? They investigate the question using a quite remarkable dataset of Indian canals, and a clever identification strategy (namely that farms below the canal are much more likely to benefit from it than firms above, since water flows downhill). What they find both fits with (some) older theories of economic development and enriches them: it seems to be long-run labour mobility, stimulated by changes in productivity and wages that the canal-building brought about, that drives transformation, as towns near canals grow much faster than those further away. The story seems to be that rising agricultural productivity drew workers into urban spaces near the (more productive) farms. How people move, and where to, is central to economic development, so it’s a good thing we have such notoriously liberal rules on the global movement of people.
- With elections looming in the US, FiveThirtyEight have two good pieces: one on which voters, specifically, the polls seem to be failing to pick up, and another on where their model thinks the polls might be biased. The overall read across their various articles suggests a good return for the Republicans, which will make the next couple of year pretty, pretty interesting.
- I can’t judge the prediction he makes here—that there is a serious chance of World War 3 in the next decade—but I learnt something from almost every paragraph of this fantastic blog by Chris Blattman. The graphics in particular are great and a really neat way of visualizing his ideas.
- The historian of economics, Beatrice Cherrier has a substack, and in this piece, she looks at the current MeToo reckoning in economics, and links it to the historical hierarchies within the economics profession, and in particular the differences in culture between what are recognised as the ‘top tier’ of US economics departments. It’s full of interesting nuggets, and this description of MIT’s approach with graduate students was particularly striking to me: “MIT economists trained their students into writing small tractable toy models versatile enough to be applied to various economic issues. Who was the official advisor mattered little, the supervision was collective and faculty doors always open.” The whole thing is worth reading, both for the asides and for the central argument.
- This comes from before Truss resigned as Prime Minister, but remains worth reading. Tim Harford was quite happy that Truss desperately wanted to kickstart growth in the UK; he just thinks her plans were deeply misguided. I agree. I want a Prime Minister who pursues growth (not single-mindedly, but sensibly); and I’d believe them when I hear them tell us how we need both the public and private sectors to invest (sometimes together, sometime sequentially) in order to achieve it. I’m yet to hear that, sadly.
- Lastly, let me return to that Pakistan-Zimbabwe match. I don’t think I can possibly do this justice, but here’s what happened. Pakistan and Zimbabwe were scheduled to play a match in the Twenty20 World Cup, which Pakistan needed to win in order to progress. Some friendly social media posts were made, and then this cryptic post appeared: “As Zimbabweans we wont forgive you...you once gave us that Fraud Pak Bean instead of Mr Bean Rowan ..we will settle the matter tommorow just pray the rains will save you...#ZIMVSPAK”. What on earth could he possibly be referring to? Well, it appears that there is a Pakistani Mr. Bean Impersonator (he seems quite famous, and has even done adverts with Shahid Afridi). He turns out to have travelled to Harare, where he was given a police guard and a massive rally, under the impression it was Rowan Atkinson coming to visit; and thus, a deep grudge was born. None of this would have really taken off, until the match itself: in an absolute thriller, Zimbabwe defeated Pakistan on the very last ball of the match, prompting wild celebrations and a statement from Mr. Bean (Pakistani version). Never tell me cricket is boring again.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
R
