Economics & Marginalia: July 2, 2021

Hi all,

Can I start by being a grinch? Every few years, England win a football match and the whole country loses its marbles: mass outbreaks of hugging– in England, no less, a country where the aversion to voluntary physical contact with strangers is so great that only something as virulent as Coronavirus can spread easily – and singing, politicians engaging in some of the most cringe-worthy ‘fandom’ imaginable, and an outbreak of St George’s Crosses in the most unexpected places. It’s even worse when the opponent is Germany, a rivalry keenly felt by English fans if not Germans ones. On seeing the videos, I’ve rarely been happier to be sequestered temporarily in the middle of nowhere, with no access to the sport at all. It’s saved me the acute embarrassment of watching Sri Lanka fold like origami at the hands of the Curran brothers, or the agony of watching Giannis’s knee ruin the playoffs.

1. It’s an aside in this marvellous essay about how India without British rule might have developed, but it’s no surprise to me to read that Amartya Sen was educated at the school Rabindranath Tagore established. You can see the parallels without squinting. Like Tagore, Sen is a masterful polymath and brilliant writer of prose (though I’m not aware that he’s dabbled in poetry or songwriting as Tagore did so brilliantly); and both thought deeply about colonialism, nationalism and globalism. Sen’s essay is brilliant: he covers India’s need for a more constructive globalism without glossing over it’s already deeply established global connections. At heart, though, it’s a thoughtful consideration of the ultimate difficulty of history: the construction of useful counterfactuals. Sen has transcended economics, and it’s always a pleasure to read him, even when disagreeing. Read the whole thing, and then buy his memoir. It will be worth your time.
2. When I did my undergraduate degree in Oxford, starting in 1999, coming from Hong Kong, I could not believe how monocultural it was. I believe that in my entire college there was one other person of South Asian descent by the time I reached my second year. The FT has a long read on how the grip of the private schools on Oxbridge admissions is declining, which doesn’t always entirely translate into diversity by socio-economic status. It has got much better, though – at least in BSG I’m always astounded at how diverse – and brilliant – the student body is each year.
3. Reading about the replication rates of research is like watching an Evil Dead movie. You know someone’s going to catch a chainsaw to the torso every few minutes, but it’s still shocking just how gory it is. We talked about this on episode 2 of Paper Round, and now I’ve discovered this listing by Gavin Leech of reversals in Psychology research. It’s very nice: he summarises the original finding that doesn’t replicate and gives a brief summary of the replications that show it up, and possible explanations. Good news, given how closely glued I’ve been to my computer this month: “Lots of screen-time is not strongly associated with low wellbeing; it explains about as much of teen sadness as eating potatoes, 0.35%.” Also: Xavier Gane, Jessica Goldberg and Dean Yang on why one of their own experiments failed to scale. Your regular reminder: an RCT is just one part of the research we need to make national policy. The causal pathway is long, and often most of it is not studied in the experiment.
4. Did you know that the US once had near-universal, heavily-subsidised childcare? Planet Money has the story of its brief shining moment. I wish this episode was longer. I’m fascinated by how incredibly crap childcare provision is, and the economic costs this imposes on us all (transcript).
5. Very neat: Tim Harford discusses groupthink, and how it arises from our inclination to associate with like-minded people; and then Daron Acemoglu and co-authors show how social media networks tend towards homophily (basically, an association with like-minded people) and that this facilitates the spread of misinformation. Diverse groups tend to slow and kill that spread. I’m very pleased that my own friendship group is cognitively diverse: my closest friends include an ardent libertarian, a businessperson of eclectic political views and cricket fanatic who has never voted in his life; meanwhile, that twitter political test that was doing the rounds a few months ago pegged me, as Paul Atherton put it, slightly to the left of Trotsky. And, sort of related: Katrin Schmelz and Sam Bowled on how public policy shapes preferences and beliefs. How our personal and moral lives interact with our economic and public lives is hugely understudied.
6. Maybe my favourite thing about this Lant Pritchett interview, which reads like a greatest hits of his blogs, speeches and papers over the years, is the incredible gift for analogy and storytelling he has. He has a neat simile for nearly everything he thinks, and it makes his work incredibly memorable.
7. Are you watching Loki (and Owen Wilson therein)? If not, why not? I am a complete sucker for Marvel content (it’s all my brain has the energy for at the end of the week these days) but I would have watched Loki even back in the days when my heuristic for ‘is this a good movie’ was ‘Does Jean-Paul Belmondo stare into the middle-distance in a fourteen minute uninterrupted shot before looking at his shoe and lighting a cigarette’. It’s funny, interesting and engaging. And Richard E. Grant is in it, wearing Lycra. I assure you, through all the viewings of Withnail that every Brit is contractually obliged to complete before departing their 30s, I never once stopped to think that what my life was missing was Richard E. Grant wearing Lycra. You live and learn; or in the case of Loki: die, repeatedly, and learn, sometimes.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R