Economics & Marginalia: March 19, 2021

The digital CSAE Conference kicked off this week, and will involve sessions online all the way through next Friday – and it’s free! If you haven’t already registered, you can still do so here, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly. It’s my favourite economics conference, with scholars from around the world presenting, and a strong contingent of researchers based in Africa. It’s huge fun in person, where the marginal discussions and chance meetings with old and new friends make it almost like a party, but the digital format makes up for it by ending the parallel sessions that led to agonised choices over which papers to see. It’s one of the few conferences that this 8-year old’s sketch doesn’t accurately depict, and one of the only online meetings that won’t have you looking wistfully at Zoom escaper. Do it!

1. Of course the big highlight of the week was the much-delayed, much-anticipated release of Episode 2 of Paper Round: Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge. In it, Matt and I discuss Elizabeth Linos and Stefano DellaVigna’s paper From RCT to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units. Where else are you going to have nudges explained in terms of Bugs Bunny and a condom-dispensing machine, or statistical power by auditions for a Pixar film? And we go deep in this episode. I have something approaching a crisis of conscience about the state of the academe, Matt explains why he worries about the brittleness of nudges, and we discuss when human behaviour needs a shove. I also reveal that I haven’t seen Inception and Matt very nearly terminates our friendship on the spot. Transcript here. If you do listen (and do!), feel free to shower us with praise by reviewing us on your platform of choice. If you hate it, feel free to omit this step.

2. During the podcast and in the throes of existential angst, I quote Andrew Gelman, something I often do in times of crisis. Andrew makes the point the ‘identification + significance does not equal a discovery’. What he is saying, in the language of economics, is that just because your study has a clever design and your results have three stars next to them in your Stata output, it doesn’t mean that you’ve found the truth. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is something he describes as the Garden of Forking Paths. Now this isn’t a Muppet Movie reference, but an allusion to the many choices that a researcher has to make in their analysis; it means that the researcher’s published paper represents only one possible way of looking at the data. Recently he pointed out that even being very careful and only taking one look at the data in writing your paper is not enough to eliminate the problem: it has to be the same look at the data you would have taken regardless of what data you actually wind up collecting. Science- even more difficult than it first appears.

3. Gyude Moore and Vij Ramachandran state the really inconvenient truth: that if ODA bans all fossil fuel production, we condemn many African states to energy poverty for the foreseeable future. They propose an elegant solution: to provide an exemption based on energy use and emissions per capita. I know some have suggested that because Africa has limited energy infrastructure, the priority should be to build one that is purely green and enable green growth into the future. As Gyude has pointed out elsewhere, this sounds good in practice, but as far as he’s aware, no African state has volunteered for this experiment.

4. This week has been sullied by the spate of racist attack on people of Asian descent in the US (and UK), and 538 point out the long history of such behaviour during crises in the US. People are appalling.

5. This is one of the best things I saw all week, and made me feel very seen: an essay on structured procrastination (via Matt), the process by which one procrastinates by doing various other productive activities that are not at the top of the to-do list, but various other useful and interesting things. Almost all of my most interesting projects are best understood as part of a process of structured procrastination. You’re reading one right now. I do the reading for the links when I almost always have something else to do, as well; and I started writing them as an excuse not to write responses to Ministerial correspondence when I was in DFID. Well worth a read.

6. Combining two of my core interests, food and economics, this episode of Planet Money investigates the Brexit fallout through comestibles produced or consumed in the UK. It’s not the best news: my wine is a little more expensive, but I may be able to get more of those delicious little Cornish prawns that used to be like gold dust in this country... (transcript).

7. Long-time readers will know I am an absolute sucker for anyone taking trashy pop culture and putting a sheen of respectability on it by comparing it to classical literature (much like I try and make my addled analysis a bit more weighty with allusions to Isaiah Berlin and the like). So LitHub had me at hello when they compared Wanda Maximoff to Hester Prynne, and had me at goodbye with this last line: what is a witch, if not a woman persevering? And if that isn’t enough for you, map lovers can ogle these linguistic maps, tracking etymologies around the world. Apparently, in some countries, Kermit the Frog is Gustavo La Rana, and it is outrageous. And finally, the best twitter thread of the week is in: Charles Kenny ranking the top ten plagues in history, as recompense for our copies of The Plague Cycle being delayed.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R