Easy animations in R using anim.plots

After the last two R posts, here's something a bit more useful.

Creating animations in R was hard. Then Yihui Xie wrote the animation package. animation lets you plot individual frames, then record them.

I've been working on a little R package called anim.plots which adds some syntactic sugar to this. It provides a few commands, similar to the standard R graphics, to create animated plots. Here's a quick demo. (The speed is quite slow: this is because I converted the files to animated GIFs. The original animations go reasonably fast.)

library(anim.plots)
anim.plot(1:5, 1:5, col="green") 

To control what gets plotted when, use the times parameter.

x <- rep(1:100/10, 20)
times <- rep(1:20, each=100) # twenty frames with 100 points each
y <- sin(x*times/4)
waves <- anim.plot(x,y,times, type="l", col="orange", lwd=2, speed=2)

You can make incremental animations using the window parameter. Here's a printout of the first 20 plot symbols:

anim.plot(rep(1:10,2), rep(2:1, each=10), window=1:t, pch=1:20, ylim=c(0,3),cex=2, col=1:5, xlab=paste("Plot symbols", 1:20))

The above code also shows how parameters get recycled where appropriate, either to the number of points, or to the number of frames. For more complex parameters, you might have to use a matrix. Here we zoom in on a distribution of points by changing the xlim and ylim parameters.

 x <- rnorm(4000)
 y <- rnorm(4000)
 x <- rep(x, 40)
 y <- rep(y, 40)
 xlims <- 4*2^(-(1:40/10))
 ylims <- xlims <- rbind(xlims, -xlims)
 anim.plot(x, y, times=40, speed=5, xlim=xlims, ylim=ylims,
       col=rgb(0,0,0,.3), pch=19, bg="white")

The window argument is quite powerful. You can use it to create moving plots over time.

## discoveries 1860-1959
xlim <- rbind(1860:1959,1870:1969)
anim.plot(1860:1959, discoveries, times=1:100, xlim=xlim, col="red", xaxp=rbind(xlim, 10), window=t:(t+10), type="h", lwd=8, speed=5)

There's also a formula interface. Here's a plot of some chicks being fed one of four different diets:

data(ChickWeight)
ChickWeight$chn <- as.numeric(as.factor(ChickWeight$Chick)) 

tmp <- anim.plot(weight ~ chn + Time, data=ChickWeight, col=as.numeric(Diet), pch=as.numeric(Diet), speed=3)

Sometimes you need to run extra plotting commands after each frame. You can do this using the replay command:

replay(tmp, after=legend("topleft", legend=paste("Diet", 1:4), pch=1:4, col=1:4))

 You aren't limited to the standard plot function. Here's a histogram with increasingly fine bins:

anim.hist(rep(rnorm(5000), 7), times=rep(1:7, each=5000), breaks=c(5,10,20,50,100,200, 500, 1000))

 And here's how to animate a plot of a mathematical expression:

anim.curve(x^t, times=10:50/10, n=20)

 You can animate contour plots. Here's the map of the Maunga Whau volcano in Auckland, emerging from a sphere. (Well, I had to come up with something!)

data(volcano)
# create a circle:
tmp <- volcano
tmp[] <- 200 - ((row(tmp) - 43)^2 + (col(tmp) - 30)^2)/20
# an animated contour needs a 3D array:
cplot <- array(NA, dim=c(87,61,20))
cplot[,,1] <- tmp
cplot[,,20] <- volcano
# morph the volcano into a circle:
cplot <- apply(cplot, 1:2, function(x) seq(x[1], x[20], length.out=20))
cplot <- aperm(cplot, c(2,3,1))
anim.contour(z=cplot, times=1:20, speed=3, levels=80 + 1:12*10, lty=c(1,2,2))

Finally, here are last week's earthquakes on the world map.

eq = read.table(
     file="http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs7day-M1.txt",
     fill=TRUE, sep=",", header=T)
     eq$time <- as.numeric(strptime(eq$Datetime, "%A, %B %d, %Y %X UTC"))
     eq <- eq[-1,]
library(maps)
map('world')
tmp <- anim.points(Lat ~ Lon + time, data=eq, cex=Magnitude, col=rgb(
       1-Depth/200, 0, Depth/200,.7), pch=19, speed=3600*12, show=FALSE)  
replay(tmp, before=map('world', fill=TRUE, col="wheat"))

 

Code is available at http://github.com/hughjonesd/anim.plots.  If you have devtools installed you can get it with:

install_github("hughjonesd/anim.plots")

Screw UKIP

... and Cameron too!

I'm sick of this anti-European bullshit, and I'm going to stand up against it the only way I know how.

par(bg=rgb(0,51/255,153/255))
symbols(sin(1:12/12*2*pi), cos(1:12/12*2*pi),
  stars=matrix(rep(c(0.52,1,0.52, 0.4)*1/7, 10), nrow=12, ncol=20, byrow=T),  
  fg=rgb(255/255,204/255,0), bg=rgb(255/255,204/255,0), inches=F, axes=F, ann=F, crt=90)

The proportions are guesses - couldn't be bothered to do the math for what is described here. The colours are right though. I had to use a 10 pointed star to make sure the stars were the right way up.

Simulating infections

Here's a little R simulation of fashion/disease infection/group identity in a population. There are two groups, red and white. Individuals move around at random. Sometimes, they change group. Whether they change depends on the number of their neighbours who are from a different group. Also, individuals who have just changed are "infectious" (or, trendsetters). Individuals who have not changed for a long time are not very infectious, and are also easy to infect.

It's fun to play with the parameters. It would also be fun to implement this with real people, as e.g. a mobile app, using real time movement.

##############################################
N <- 500
maxdist <- .1 # distance within which "neighbours" are counted
maxt <- 240   # number of repetitions
delay <- 0    # time delay between reps
step <- FALSE # ask after each step?
speed <- 0.01 # speed indivs move
decay <- 1    # speed decaycols <- c("red", "white", "pink", "yellow") # last two for changers
##############################################
 prop2changeprob <- function(props) {
  props^2
}
infectivity <- function(lifespan) 1/lifespan
dist <- function(ind, oths) sqrt((ind$x-oths$x)^2+(ind$y-oths$y)^2)
par(bg="gray")

inds <- data.frame(x=runif(N), y=runif(N), col=sample(1:2, N, replace=TRUE))
inds$oldx <- inds$x
inds$oldy <- inds$y
inds$lifespan <- 0 # since last change

for (t in 1:(maxt)) {
  inds$lifespan <- inds$lifespan + 1
  propother <- sapply(1:nrow(inds), function(i) {
    i <- inds[i,]
    close <- dist(i, inds) < maxdist
    if (any(close)) {
      wt <- infectivity(inds$lifespan)
      wt[!close] <- 0
      sum(wt * (inds$col!=i$col)) / sum(wt) # weighted by
    } else 0
  })
  change <- runif(N) < prop2changeprob(propother)
  displaycol <- inds$col
  inds$col <- ifelse(change, 3-inds$col, inds$col)
  inds$lifespan[change] <- 0
  displaycol <- ifelse(displaycol==inds$col, displaycol, inds$col+2)
  inds$oldx <- inds$x
  inds$oldy <- inds$y
  inds$x <- inds$x + runif(N, -speed,speed) + decay*(inds$x-inds$oldx)
  inds$y <- inds$y + runif(N, -speed,speed)+ decay*(inds$y-inds$oldy)
  #inds$x <- pmax(0, pmin(1, inds$x)) # square
  #inds$y <- pmax(0, pmin(1, inds$y))
  inds$x <- inds$x %% 1 # torus
  inds$y <- inds$y %% 1
 
  plot(inds$x, inds$y, col=cols[displaycol], pch=19, cex=.7, bg="grey",
    xlim=0:1, ylim=0:1)
  Sys.sleep(delay)
  if (step) {
    rl <- readline()
    if (rl=="q") stop("Quitting")
  }
}

The Scottish referendum, the EU and the old new ideas

Here's a reasonable case for Scottish independence.

Ignore all the anxieties about the transition, the tussles over currency and oil and nuclear submarines: plenty of nations smaller than Scotland do fine, and in the long run Scotland can do too. The Union was great in its day, but that day has passed. The future belongs to the small, nimble, united nation-state, competing in a globalized market; not to the lumbering imperialist conglomerate that was put together to build an empire with armed force.

Reasonable, plausible, but wrong. We are no longer living in the optimistic post-Cold War world where free trade was what mattered. Old conflicts have returned in force. Today nations need military and economic heft. The UK is outdated, in some ways, but because it is too small, not too big.

The bigger unit that we need is, of course, a strong European Union. Could Scotland not play an independent role underneath its protective shield? Unfortunately, the politics is all wrong. A Yes in the referendum is bound to weaken the Tories and the establishment, strengthen the insurgency of UKIP, and increase the chance that the rump state of Britain exits the EU. That exit would be a crippling blow for Europe. The future of Scotland would then look much less certain and safe.

10 ideas about genetic differences between human groups

Nicholas Wade's book, A Troublesome Inheritance, has created huge controversy by claiming that race is real and explains human differences in economic performance. Here is a response from many genetic scientists, which also includes links to comment around the web. I don't wish to jump into that debate, but just to give a set of thoughts about the issue of genetic differences between races. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert biologist, just an interested amateur.)

1. The fundamental truth of biology is that humans are basically the same.

Humans make up a single species, which interbreeds with itself. When two people reproduce, a new viable human is created, with DNA that results from combining their DNA, more or less at random. This is like taking parts from two cars and building a new car with it: you can't mix a Maserati and a Ferrari, only two Maseratis of the same model. So, all humans are basically the same.

That is not to deny that the differences between humans have profound social consequences - for example, in deciding who gets rich and poor - and are therefore of great interest to us. But a Martian biologist would probably find two humans as hard to tell apart as we find two sheep. Our similarities vastly outweigh our differences.

2. Races are statistical facts, not buckets.

This also follows from the "single species" idea. To say that I am Caucasian or you are African does not imply that everything about us differs, or that any single gene we have is certain to differ. People interbreed. "Race", if it means anything genetically, is shorthand for having (probably) had many ancestors from a particular area of the world. This may result in someone possessing a particular allele with more likelihood; but that is a matter of probability, not certainty.

Socially, people often treat race and ethnicity as buckets, and that can become self-fulfilling. But this is a fact about society not biology.

3. Within that interpretation, there are real genetic differences between races.

This is now uncontroversial. For example, people from some parts of the world are more likely to have the allele linked to sicke cell disease than others; partly because the allele helps protect against malaria.

4. There are also differences between races in genes that affect behaviour and/or psychology.

For example, different alleles of the MAOA gene exist in different proportions among different racial groups. The MAOA gene is linked to risk-taking and violence. Here's a rather long summary of recent research.

5. These differences do not necessarily add up to "differences between groups in psychology being caused by genes".

Most geneticists think that any given social behaviour is influenced by many genes - there is no neat 1-1 link. So, a group that possesses more of one allele (say MAOA-2R) could possess less of another, undiscovered gene which pushes them the opposite way.

There are reasons this could be true. For example, suppose that over an evolutionary timespan there has been an optimal level of risktaking, and that risktaking is increased by (alleles of) two genes. It is entirely possible for one group to evolve to have the risk-taking allele at one locus, while another group evolves to have the allele at the other locus. The different genes will then not add up to different behaviour, which is instead kept similar by evolutionary pressure.

6. Or, some group differences in behaviour may have genetic causes. We will find out soon either way.

Nevertheless, there is no general reason to think that intergroup genetic differences will cancel out 100% in this way. On the face of it that seems unlikely - as Cochran and Harpending say in The 10,000 Year Explosion, it's like expecting a coin to land on its edge.

Science is progressing fast in this area, with new statistical methods and databases coming online. Whether genetics matters a lot or a little, the debate can and will be settled by empirical data - which is one reason I am writing this.

7. Genetic differences are multi-dimensional.

Think of genetics and most people think of IQ. IQ is politically salient because it is linked to economic outcomes, and because it threatens to array racial groups on a continuum, with higher IQ being better. But real differences will be more complex than that. Think about MAOA: aggression is bad, right? But risk-taking, for example in entrepreneurship, isn't always bad. If there are differences between groups, we will not be able to order them hierarchically.

8. Genes are not destiny, in the large.

OK, here I am disagreeing with Nicholas Wade's position in the speculative second half of his book. Think about Caucasians versus Asians. In the 19th century, British gunboats were knocking on China's door. In 2014, China is the second power in the world, and pushing for first place. These changes happen too fast for genetics to be a useful explanation.

9. Genes are not destiny, in the small.

Genetic does not mean unchangeable. To take a simple example, many genetic diseases have simple cures. More generally, human choices, including human culture, can make up for - or perhaps sometimes amplify! - genetic differences. (Culture itself, by contrast, can be very hard to change.)

10. Liberal equality does not require us all to be identical.

Why don't we deny the vote to stupid people? We are equal not because we are all the same in every way, but because - as Christianity would put it - we are all possessors of a living soul. Similarly, we have a duty to judge individuals as individuals, and not on the basis of belonging to an ethnic group. Doing the former is usually efficient, since ethnicity is at best a weak predictor of someone's behaviour. It is also morally right.

It may be - I think it is quite likely - that genetic differences will account for many of the differences between people. They may also account for some of the differences between groups. Given the rate at which the science is developing, we would be very unwise not to start thinking about this. I do not want to be too sanguine about its consequences: obviously it would be, in some sense, "bad news" for human equality. At the same time, it is not a cause for liberal despair, or for racism and intergroup contempt to triumph. Whatever differences there are will be probabilistic not deterministic, multidimensional and complex; and morally outweighed by our underlying shared humanity - a truth supported equally by religious tradition, and by modern biology.

Non-shock: OKCupid experiments on humans, like every other big website

See this post from their blog. Of course, if this were an academic experiment (i.e. one with the purported aim of finding socially useful knowledge), it would have been highly unethical - experimenting on thousands of humans! Without their consent!

Clearly, society does not have an ethical problem with experimenting on humans: we let companies do that all the time. Since it is only academic experiments that have to pass stringent ethics committees, it must be that what is prima facie unethical is learning useful things from experiments on humans. We have taken our cue from Genesis:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

This is how all my experiment designs should be

The standard condition consisted of an undergraduate female stationed by a 1964 Ford Mustang (control car) with a flat left-rear tire. An inflated tire was leaned upon the left side of the auto. The girl, the flat tire, and the inflated tire were conspicuous to the passing traffic....

Find out what happens next.

Linkage

From the Iraqi bloggers I have in my bookmark folder. Many are shut down or have fallen silent.
War in Iraq.
Home is all about being the same.

The paedophilia scandal

 

(Back blogging again, just because I feel the need to write something for the non-academic audience, no matter how small!)

There is a furore over paedophilia. Every part of the establishment seems to be under suspicion: the church, all three political parties, the NHS....

Let's think about what happens if, as seems quite likely, many cases are uncovered where paedophiles were protected because they were important people. I fear there will be a serious disproportion between the policy response and the public's response. The policy response will essentially be more safeguards for children, more criminal record checks, more whistleblowing laws. What else could it be? One makes policy to fix problems.

The political consequences, though, would surely be a final, wholesale collapse of trust in the political system. Duck houses on the taxpayer are one thing, but enabling child abuse.... If that happens, the best – best! – outcome I see is that UKIP sweep the board at general election time, bringing Neil Hamilton into office alongside a slew of fishy populist coves. 

But a worse, and just as likely, outcome is: nothing. The duopoly nature of first-past-the-post elections means that no outside party can coordinate the voters to break through. Labour and Conservatives continue to dominate Parliament, with an absolute majority of the electorate not bothering to turn up. Democracy becomes a cynical game of mobilizing the parties' core supporters. There is a vacuum not of power but of authority. Politicians simply lack the credibility to impose change against any group's will. Through the first half of the new century, Britain flies on autopilot.

This foreboding makes me think of Macaulay on Machiavelli:

... condemned to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption.

Nudges enter public consciousness

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/03/31/volt-hunters

Linkage

Interesting perspective on Mariana Mazzucato's book The Entrepreneurial State.

I called it right

Time for some credit-claiming. In 2011 I predicted that immigration would become a live issue in relation to the EU: "there will be increasing pressure to pull up the drawbridges". Yup.

In the interests of balance I should report a couple of verbal predictions that didn't go so well; earlier this year, "don't buy bitcoin until it falls to $20". At the time bitcoin was $100. Sorry, bruv. And, some time in 1996, "this internet thing isn't going to be that important".

To celebrate

To celebrate this week's important Hull news, a special repost:

Interesting ngram

Here's a rather interesting ngram.

Dear literati, please finish Middlemarch

"She was by way of being terrified of him - he was so fearfully clever, and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of Middlemarch in the train and she never knew what happened in the end...."
-- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

"Middlemarch/Still lying triumphantly closed..."
-- Don Paterson imagines his deathbed

Linkage

Dammit.

A financier recalls his time at Lehman. Funny and scathing: '... the part of Wall Street that I worked in was simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors... to the more sophisticated.... Of course, the traders had all sorts of excuses and jargon to deal with this truth. “Oh no,” they would say, “We are important providers of liquidity that create stable financial markets. We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t do it, someone else will.” These are the lies that people tell themselves so that they can buy larger homes.'

A common reaction by those introduced to the Public Choice perspective is: what's the point of ever giving policy advice if you assume all politicians are rogues? Acemoglu and Robinson suggest, however, that politics must be factored into policy advice.

Meritocracy, the experience. Also, postmodernism the experience, and drugs, the experience.

¡Steve Bong salutes Lady Thatcher!

Social science statistics: of muscle cars and macro-level statistics.

AMC Rebel 1970, a typical American muscle car

Trying to think through another worry about social science practice, and in particular how we do macro-level empirics - comparing countries, polities or regions. Warning: I strongly suspect that this will mostly prove that I should read more Barbara Geddes. (And who shouldn't?)

Suppose you were a Chrysler executive in 1970, and were evaluating the potential threat from Japanese cars.

Here is an approach you could take. Divide cars into American-made and Japanese-made. Examine the average performance of each. Find that American cars are superior to Japanese cars. Go to sleep contentedly. Inferior cars will never take over our market.

First generation Toyota Corolla, 1966

This approach is obviously flawed. "American cars" and "Japanese cars" are not natural kinds, like "killer whale" and "grey whale". They refer to the deliberate creations of human intelligence. The average Japanese car of the 1960s was not a useful predictor for the average Japanese car of the 1970s. The best car would probably have been a more useful predictor, because Japanese car industry executives were capable of learning.

Now consider how political scientists evaluate the relative performance of democracies and authoritarian regimes. (Or parliamentary versus presidential regimes, or whatever else.) Assume away all the problems of causal identification, unobserved heterogeneity and so on. Even beside all of this: they are basically taking the same approach as above. They look at the average performance of democracies versus dictatorships in the past. To get a big sample, they might go quite far back - to 1950, or even beyond to the 19th century.

But political regimes are also the products of human learning and intelligence. "Democracy" and "dictatorship" are not natural kinds either. They are systems put in place and altered by people. For example, British democracy of 2013 -- with its legal checks on the executive, its relationship to the EU, its devolved governments in the nations, and its quangos and bureaucrats -- is quite different from British democracy in the 1970s -- with its corporatist structure, industrial policy and so forth. Bluntly, both democratic and non-democratic regimes learn, and are constantly rebuilding themselves over time.

For this reason, average past democratic or authoritarian performance may well not be the quantity of interest. Democrats (dictators) should worry about the best, most successful authoritarian (democratic) regimes. Data from the 1950s are likely to have limited relevance.

Toyota Corolla 2011

What's the counter-Thatchual?

The world needs more Margaret Thatcher policy punditry and by God I will provide it!

My colleague Tom Scotto asked a simple question, that I think has not got enough attention in many of the very thoughtful comments from economists and others: "What's the counterfactual?"

In other words: although it is interesting to consider whether

• it was a mistake not to start a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund for North Sea oil,
• the monetarist policy of the early 1980s made the recession unnecessarily hard,
• supply-side changes weakened the unions and modernized our economy, or
• her European policy was foresighted, or counter-productive,

a more fundamental question is: what would have happened if Margaret Thatcher had not won power?

There are two natural ways to cut this. If Thatcher had not won power in 1979, then Callaghan would have stayed on. Or, you could look at 1983, where a random shock (named Galtieri) kept her in power. I'm too young to remember this stuff, but I'll make some guesses.

Surely the result in 1979 is easy to call. Callaghan was a failure; he would have continued to be a failure. Evidence from the 1979 Labour manifesto shows that these guys planned to continue down the failed path of the 'seventies.

Now we set ourselves the task of bringing inflation down to 5 per cent in three years. It is an ambitious target. We need the assistance of everyone. 

three-way talks between ministers, management and unions to consider the best way forward for our country's economy...

Industrial democracy - giving working men and women a voice in the decisions which affect their jobs - is an idea whose time has come...

Labour will strengthen the Price Commission, giving it greater powers to initiate investigations and reduce prices ....

We reaffirm the policy that we have pursued that wherever we give direct aid to a company out of public funds, we shall reserve the right to take a proportionate share of the ownership of the company....

1983 on the face of it seems just as easy. Labour ran under a manifesto which has been called "the longest suicide note in history", including withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral nuclear disarmament, renationalisation....

But then Labour was not the only game in town. What if the SDP/Liberal alliance had won? Might we then have had a moderate, responsible centre-Left government, making some necessary reforms but without engendering the division and bitterness that Thatcher left?

I doubt it. My feeling is that politics like those of Schroeder, Blair, even Lula were only possible after Thatcher. The centre-Left had to swallow the bitter pill of accepting (some) New Right ideas. Even the 1983 SDP counterfactual would have been something like France at the same period (or now): half-hearted acceptance that you cannot actually get more Left-wing; but no real reforms.

In any case, the main point is: Thatcherism is best evaluated against real alternatives that might have come about, rather than against the analyst's ideal policy.

Encounter with English identity

I was standing out in Camden after an evening in the World's End pub with a couple of old friends, one of whom is Anglo-Indian. A pint-sized chap started trying to interrupt us, presumably so as to give us his hard luck story. Think of Camden at 11pm on Friday night and you will get the picture. We ignored him, he kept on, we rolled our eyes and kept ignoring him.

He must have got angry. He kind of crept up behind my friend and hissed: "At least I'm English." Pause. "Are you?"

We looked at each other and tsked. I turned around and gave him a hard stare, and the little Gollum shrunk back and slunk off into the night.

On the bright side

I guess it is easy to be hysterical about the Maggie Thatcher grave-dancing. Yup, definitely is. Perhaps the numbers provide some perspective. Total sales of Ding-Dong, The Witch Is Dead, according to the official charts, are about 20,000. So, total resources dedicated must be, what, £40,000... probably about what Grantham spends every week on cappucinos. Proof that whatever your politics, nastiness and meanness remain unpopular.

I have downloaded a copy of Duke Dumont's Need U (100%), last week's Number 1. I am convinced that this splendid piece of music will give me numberless hours of unadulterated listening pleasure. I hope you will do the same. (iTunes, Amazon.)

Update: yeah, good for you Ken.

Linkage

Why not more tech startups in Europe?
Death of someone who arguably had a greater impact on human welfare than Margaret Thatcher.
Tyler Cowen offers a speculative interpretation of the European crisis: long-run structural changes are being "time-compressed" by the shock.
Paul Krugman is the blogger of the GFC, confidently slapping down critics on the right. Is Jeffrey Sachs emerging as a worthy opponent?
Thatcher and pop music. (Next: Thatcher and 8 bit computer games. There is a thesis.)
If you missed it the first time... then you won't understand any of it now.

"Speculating on bitcoin is just the latest in a string of online ventures for the Winkelvosses since their involvement with Facebook. They have become venture capitalists and poured investment into a shopping website called Hukkster and an online community for money managers, SumZero."
Hukkster, SumZero... are the Winkelvoss twins actually performance artists? 

Linkage

More about the super-rich buying in London. It may not be that easy to feel sympathy for the "British buyers" who can only afford a paltry $2.25 million for their London houses.
What should the economic objectives of immigration policy be? An interesting debate over at Jonathan Portes' blog.
What Olivier Blanchard, Chief Economist at the IMF, thinks about economics and the crisis.
An interesting firestorm about "psychic harm", started by this article. This relates to the question of how we should deal with nasty preferences (e.g. racism).
Some very funny rude reviews by Roger Ebert.

Poem

I guess it seems as a good day as any to read Tony Harrison's poem V.

A Thatcher round-up

Andrew Sullivan: Thatcher, liberator.
Joe Weisenthal: she was "freakishly" right about the Euro.
Paul Krugman: did Thatcher turn Britain around? (I think the phrase "I don't want to do a slash-and-burn here" counts as a small victory.)
Mark Harrison was a convert.
Nick Crafts crunches the data. (But it ends in 2007... as he mentions, some stuff has happened since then.)
Tim Bale on politics: "no thinking Conservative can be blind to the downsides...".
The BBC obituary does one excellent thing: it quotes the "no such thing as society" speech in full, putting the line in its proper and much-forgotten context.
... aaaand a useful pie chart about the Twitter reaction.

The media and the internet

After the phone hacking scandal and the Leveson enquiry, the mass media, like almost every other institution in Britain, are in deserved disgrace.

But after Mrs Thatcher's death, I feel a bit sorry for them: desperately building a dyke of Quotes From Important People to hold back a storm of decentralized, internet-enabled, direct democratic spite.

Good experimental designs

Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner and Weinstein wrote a great article with the title “Why Does EthnicDiversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” which they turned into a great book Coethnicity. The research they report was a set of experiments in a slum of Kampala in Uganda.

The standard way experimentalists investigate public goods – say, schooling or sanitation – is with, guess what, a public goods game. A public goods game goes like this: there are four of you, and you each have, say, £10. You can each put some or all of your money into a common pot. Money in the pot is multiplied by 1.5 and then shared out equally. Selfish people wouldn't put money in the pot, but if everyone does so, then you all do better. This is a bare bones representation of a public good.  Why do experimenters use this paradigm? Well, it's obvious. We're interested in public goods, and a public goods game is like a miniature public good.

One of the surprising things about HHPW's design is this. They get their subjects to play dictator games (where one person chooses how much to give to another), games where they have to find another person in the slum, and experiments where they must work with other subjects to solve a puzzle. But they never actually implement a public goods game. Instead, they use a set of simple experiments, not in the context of public goods, to investigate specific psychological and social mechanisms that might lead to underprovision of public goods. For example, are people more altruistic to their coethnics? The Dictator Game will tell us. Or, do people find it easier to communicate with coethnics? Try the puzzle-solving activity.

I think this makes HHPW an example of good experimental research design. They have thought hard about the link between experiment and explanandum. Not that public goods games cannot be useful, but we should not just reach in our designs for things that “look like” or “represent” what we are investigating. Instead, the link must always be based in theory.

Very simple thoughts about the politics of crisis

I am not nearly good enough at macroeconomics (and probably not clever enough) to understand the economic crisis itself. Here is how I think about the politics of it.

The world contains a huge variety of human interactions. One simple way to classify them is: some are games of decreasing returns and some are games of increasing returns. Suppose many people can do more or less of something -- say, withdraw more or less money from a bank, or spend more or less time looking for work. In a game of decreasing returns, when other people do more of it, you will gain by doing less. In a game of increasing returns, when others do more, you will gain by doing more too.

Most ordinary economic activities are of decreasing returns. If many other people go into cheesemaking, the price of cheese will go down and you might wish to choose a different career. If Turkey is this year's cool holiday destination, then it's going to be expensive -- why not try Greece? Decreasing returns are self-equilibriating, like one of those toy men you can't push over. There is only one equilibrium, and this makes life cognitively easy. For example, prices will naturally guide you to optimal decisions, and prices will change only a little bit when underlying conditions change.

But there are some activities which are naturally of increasing returns. Starting a revolution, or fighting in a battle, is easier if everyone else is trying to do it simultaneously. If others take their money out of the bank, then you should beat them to it before the bank goes bust. Life in increasing returns land is hard, because there are multiple equilibria. If everyone else is doing it (whatever "it" is), so should you; if not, not. Getting it right takes not just individual effort, but also the ability to coordinate and communicate with your fellow players. That is especially important when one of the equilibria, such as a bank run, is definitely bad.

My explanation of increasing and decreasing returns. Equilibria are yellow blobs. Art is not my strong point.

It is, and should be, a great goal of economic policy to keep us in decreasing returns world as much as possible. But sometimes -- especially given modern banking, but also because intergroup conflict is a perennial possibility -- we will find ourselves in the other, scarier world. Being in that world, as I said, puts a premium on the ability to coordinate -- that is, to work together: to trust our leaders, and to find our fellow players predictable.

In decreasing returns world, nationality and culture don't matter; simpler mechanisms substitute for them. In increasing returns world, nations matter, because they are the central ways humans have of organizing themselves to act collectively. Culture matters because it is the medium by which we can share and harmonize our expectations with others. When we move into this world, suddenly it matters whether we are Germans, Greeks... or Europeans. That is why the dream of a borderless market, without a society behind it, is a utopia.

Linkage

How life sentences work in the UK.
Researchers can now read minds.
A shout out for my colleague Dan Berger's new AER publication. CIA interventions to install friendly dictators were followed by large increases in American exports to that country. (Older ungated version.)
Bedtime stories for macroeconomists. Here is one reason why social science might be hard: people  have Strong Opinions about economics and politics, in a way they do not about, for instance, Higgs bosons or rabbit reproduction.

Linkage

The Thomas Friedman op-ed generator. 
Mr Friedman is much mocked by the internet people, perhaps unfairly. I read his book on the Middle East, from way back, when he was a reporter there, and it was very well-informed and interesting.

Linkage

An interesting discussion among some libertarians.
"... and will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardon him for writing well."
The Economist on climate change.

Cyprus

If I were in Cyprus, why would I put my money in the bank? I can't take it out again (except at 300 EUR/day), I can't send it abroad, and they might decide to nick some of it. So, I think there will be a bank run, slowed only by the limits on withdrawal.

Linkage

An excellent review of 3 books on happiness.

Linkage

An outsider talks about academia.
Tyler Cowen defends economists' cosmopolitanism. 

Knot bothered about causality

The report Knot Yet, on the increasing age of marriage in America, has gathered plenty of media attention.
It's a really important topic, but I can't help be worried that in 2013, we still accept social science that makes no attempt to distinguish causality from correlation. The report rightly contains comments like: "... we cannot rule out the possibility that some of these associations are simply due to the type of young adults who marry in their twenties." Indeed they cannot. But media reports don't bother to mention this, instead throwing around headlines like "Late Marriage and its Consequences", or phoney statements like "Upper-class women reap a large wage premium from delaying marriage", where all we can say is "Upper-class women who delay marriage have higher wages" - or, exactly equivalently, "Upper-class women who have higher wages delay marriage".
Is proper social science really so hard to do on this topic?

Disability benefits in the US.

The rise of disability benefits in the US. Includes a cool graphic.
It seems that just as in the UK, disability has become hidden unemployment. And just as here there are incentives for governments to push this: states pay for unemployment but the federal government pays for disability. In the US there's another group - lawyers:

Live coverage from a genocide trial

https://twitter.com/xeni/guate-genocide-trial

Juan: In the rain there was no way to protect ourselves. If we could we covered ourselves with leaves.

MP: Did you see people die? Juan: Some people who were not able to hide from the bombs died.

His final statement:

No one asks us to tell our story. This is everything I suffered, in the flesh. No one can obligate me to come to tell the story, no one else knows what I lived. Sorry, I didn't finish explaining something. After the massacres, my father died May 25, 1983, they bombed the place and he died.

What they wanted to do was to disappear us but thanks to God the mountains protected us, mother nature saved us. My father died and stayed in the mountains. As indigenous people we have rituals  days to celebrate our dead, but on that day I can’t go to my father because he is in the mountains. I’m not at peace like before, my father does not appear. They were killed and I can’t see them any more. This pain, this sadness, I never forget it. I felt it in the flesh. There is no peace. We lost everything, our land, our animals, our clothes, but no one has replaced it. The government did it, the government is here but don’t do anything. On the contrary, they look down on us. Excuse my expression. The pain will only end when I die.

[He breaks down and Edgar Perez pauses to give him a moment.]

I hate it when that happens

"Oi bruv I've just got claret all over me 'and as well. Cos I dunno... I just got claret all over it."

-- Heard on the Colchester-London train

Linkage

A sidelight on the democratic peace thesis: Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks with Vietnam; LBJ considered it treasonable.
I study group behaviour by looking at how individuals see groups. This Wired story talks about a different level of analysis: emergent behaviour from simple rules.
A long list of cliches that I hadn't realised were cliches, but now know I must avoid.
(Both the last via BoingBoing.)
The USA's oubliette. "In 2009, President Obama ordered that the prison be closed by the end of his first year in office. But the effort to wind it down collapsed as Congress, concerned about their own reelection possibilities some former detainees who were linked to terrorist activities, has imposed an increasingly steep set of obstacles to any additional transfers." This is why we don't let politicians decide who stays in prison.
PLOSOne about us. Political scientists, read and consider. And more about how it works.
Lastly: the meaning of Wivenhoe.

And now for something completely different

If you have kids, my friend has an app for you!

Download the new Bubele mobile app to discover what's near you for your kids and babies: Places for you and them to eat, shop, play, have fun, and spend time.

 

If you have an iPhone or iPad search “Bubele” in the UK app store or follow the link below:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/bubele/id605048686?mt=8

 

If you don't have kids, have some kids! Then download Bubele.

Linkage

Of course, the right kind of immigrants are utterly welcome. This line made me laugh: "In flaming torches behind the happy couple, will you marry me was written, without the usual question mark."

Linkage

How bank execs trouser QE cash, explained by Alphaville.
Yannis Varoufakis sounds a bit like UKIP, but then qualifies it a bit.
And YV on what's actually happening in Greece. Gosh, why can't those whinging Southerners just learn to pay their debts?
Another little immigration story.
Anglo-EU translation guide.
A cute information argument about why your friends never call you.

A negative view of the political economy of the internet

So the story about the knowledge economy is that more and more capital is human capital, which is stored in workers' heads. This has benign political effects: human capital, unlike fixed capital or land, is quite mobile, and intrinsically difficult to expropriate. Therefore, greedy rulers (including tyrannous majorities) cannot tax it to extinction. Rulers then focus on more useful activities, like providing public goods to grow the economy. And perhaps democratization becomes easier because the threat of expropriation by the poor is less.

This logic only seems stronger in the internet era of tiny firms of self-motivated geniuses. And as the internet enables not just hierarchy-free production, but also lightspeed self-organization to produce public goods or influence politics, a utopian future seems to beckon.

Well, maybe.

Here's an alternative thought. What is Google, conceptually? Of course it's very innovative and has lots of smart people. But how does Google make its money, really?

i) a huuuge server farm;
ii) some fairly well-understood algorithms to serve search results and ads, which run on the huuuge server farm;
and
iii) a guy to answer the phones at the huuuge server farm.

Everything else in Google is basically taking money out of that one big money spout. No doubt some of what they do may change the world and keep Google innovating, but the money comes from the spout. Now, to me that sounds completely expropriable. Essentially there is just a big source of rents from network externalities, et cetera, and it is waiting to be fought over. And, guess what, an increasing number of governments have started to levy big "fines" on Google for its "violations" of various vitally important rules.

More generally:

• A lot of the human capital in the internet is embodied in code. 
• There is no reason to think that innovation in code goes on forever. There may just be one best way to do a bubble sort or build a search engine.
• Embodied code is as expropriable as land or machinery.
• The globalized internet economy generates many winner-take-all markets.

These points suggest that in the end, the new economy may look more like North-east Brazil than Northern California.

Immigration policy - how it actually works.

Here's an email from a collaborator and very smart guy. The sort of person we should be encouraging to come to Britain, if we would like to have world class universities. His experience was not exactly encouraging.

Particularly egregious bits are highlighted.

The thing is, I am not pro immigration. I think Britain should have lower immigration (not zero). I'm basically quite communitarian. But what inevitably happens, in the political system we have, is gesture politics where you make some headline number commitment. Then you have to fulfil the commitment. Doing it right would be hard. So instead you do what is easy: you target the most law-abiding, highly visible people because they are the easiest to bully. And then... well, now read on.

Hi David,
Thanks for the support!  Yes, I was detained for a pretty long time, and sent back to [first world country Z], but it was largely due to my own stupidity. Although people still seem a bit horrified when I tell the story, so I must inadvertently tell it in a way that understates my stupidity, so keep that potential bias in mind. Here's the full(ish) story. It's pretty long, sorry.
My initial plan was to go to [country X in Africa] for research, and come back about a week before my visa expired and apply for an extension when I got home (which is what you're supposed to do). As is typical, there were some small issues in hiring a staff in X, which caused delays and so I ended up staying longer than I had initially anticipated. In the end I tried coming back into the country 4 days after my visa expired. I was in X, and didn't have time to really research the visa situation, and thought it's not a big deal, I have a Zian passport, I'm allowed to enter for 6 months with a Zian passport without a visa. I really didn't think much of it, I've entered the country without a visa many, many times before I moved over. So, that was very naive of me.
When I got to immigration I was pretty up front and honest about the situation; I didn't think it was going to be a problem. I told the immigration officer that I was gone on research for a month, I lived in the UK, I was putting finishing touches on my dissertation, and would be visiting for 2 months (I have a conference in Z in May). She asked questions about how much cash I had on me, why my visa was expired, and said I couldn't enter to do school work without a student visa. So, alright, I said, I didn't actually have school work left to do, my dissertation is all but complete, I'm really just visiting for a few months while I tie up some loose ends. She thought that it shouldn't take 2 months to do this, and didn't believe that my dissertation was complete since I was gone on research. I tried to explain that the work I was doing was not for my dissertation. She said oh, so you have a job? I said, no, but I expect to get one, and the work I'm doing now will help my career when I get a job. She did not understand my motivation for doing work that I was getting neither course credit nor money for, and basically called me a liar (said it was "highly implausible") and so they sent me to this room/cell thing in the bowels of Heathrow.

I waited there for a few hours, a new immigration officer came and interviewed me, wrote everything down, I told her the same story, I was here for a few months to tie up loose ends with my living situation, and submit my dissertation, and I was leaving the country in May at the latest. She told me there was no way I was going to enter the country, I was clearly doing school work without a student visa (which is kind of true) and they were going to send me to Nairobi because that was where I came from.
I started making calls using my credit card to let people know what was going on: my girlfriend, parents, etc. I had made several purchases on my way back, in Kigali, Bujumbura, Nairobi, and now London. So of course, while trying to make calls, my card got security blocked. My other card had already been blocked for a few days, I hadn't worried about it because the backup worked, but now the backup was down. So this was pretty bad because now I was being sent to Nairobi which isn't the safest place in the world, and I had absolutely no access to cash, not even enough to get a cab to the Zian embassy when I got to Nairobi. This next bit is the worst part I think: I desperately explained the situation to the immigration officer, literally telling her that people regularly die wandering the streets of Nairobi at night, and she said "not my problem, is it?". That was cold. My stomach sank with the lack of empathy. I was basically begging to go back to Z instead of Nairobi. I was pretty scared to go to Nairobi without any money or access to any money.
There was this guy in the cell with me (there were 7 of us) who clearly sensed my fear/desperation. He was a Libyan guy who seemed to know the immigration laws very well. He was there declaring amnesty, and had been detained for almost 48hrs. He overheard the conversation, and mentioned that his understanding was that the law said that I could go to my home country if there was a flight before the next flight back to my destination port, and I paid my way myself. ... So, I called my parents, and got my dads credit card info, bought the last ticket of the day into Z, all on the secretary's cell, and so they let me come to Z....
 
So, anyway, that's it. I ended up being detained just under 12 hours. I think the worst thing from their end is that they didn't actually ever tell me what my options were under the law. I apparently had the legal right to go back to Z, and despite my desperation and begging to not go to Nairobi, it took some random stranger to tell me that I had the legal right to be sent to my home country. I think it was pretty unreasonable of the officer to just assume that I wouldn't be able to figure out a way to get a flight home. I don't think that was particularly fair treatment.
All in all, not a great travel experience. 2/10 (max) - would not recommend and would not do again.

Linkage

Fight! Fight! Jonathan Portes describes Krugman versus the European Commission.
Dani Rodrik, always worth reading, attacks political economy. I am pretty sympathetic, but will register a quibble. The -- commonly made -- argument that "endogenizing politicians' behaviour leaves analysts with no policy recommendations to make" has some force, but can be overplayed. The material and electoral interests that politicians face are real, and even quite idealistic politicians will be helped by being made aware of them.

An urgent appeal

We interrupt our normal programming to bring you this vital message.

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/skype-bring-back-the-original-skype-bear-emoticon

Please, for all our sakes, sign up now.

Leominster 1872

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions/entry_page.jsp?text_id=740110

LEOMINSTER popularly LEMSTER, a town, a parish, a sub-district, and a district in Herefordshire. The town stands in a fertile valley, on the river Lug, at the influx of two of its tributaries, and at the commencement of the Leominster canal, adjacent to the Shrewsbury and Hereford railway, at the junction of the Leominster and Kington railway, 13 miles N of Hereford. ...
The monastery was afterwards rebuilt as a college or priory; became a cell to Shaston and Reading abbeys; was notable for the preaching of the crusade in it, in 1187, by Baldwin and Giraldus;....

The town hall was built in 1856, at a cost of £3,000; is in the Italian style, 156 feet long and 48 feet wide; has, over the centre, a lofty cupola and clock-turret; and contains a council-chamber, 45 feet long and 30 feet wide.... The butter-cross stood on the site of the new market-house; was built in 1633, by John Abel, "the king's carpenter;" was a curious and beautiful example of Tudor timber-work, with 12 carved oak pillars, arches, shields, and varions carved devices; was taken down in 1855, to give effect to the town hall, and to afford space for the new market-house; and has been re-erected on a large open space, called the Grange.

The churchyard contains some interesting ancient monuments, and one to Mrs. Siddons and Mr. Kemble. ...

There are chapels for Baptists, Quakers, Moravians, Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, and Unitarians. ...

Marriages in 1863, 90; births, 442, of which 37 were illegitimate; deaths, 309, of which 89 were at ages under 5 years, ....

The schools were 18 public day schools, with 1,171 scholars; 20 private day schools, with 384 s.; and 18 Sunday schools, with 1,043 s.

Linkage

I made an analogy between online education and film. Alex Tabarrok uses the analogy with recorded music. Andrew Gelman and Bryan Caplan jump in.
Pictures of Syria, before and after. "[T]he greatest that in any form of government can possibly happen to the people in general is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries and horrible calamities that accompany a civil war..."

Meanwhile, in China:

And as she sees me turn around, she forces me into a conversation about her relationship to my great-aunt. Do you know? Your great-aunt was my class-mate, we got along greatly. When you two were class-mates, I wasn’t even born! That’s what I think, but on the surface, I can only bite the bullet, and at the risk of my ears breeding a silkworm, I have to let her finish....

Leigh Caldwell

Leigh Caldwell is coming by next Friday to look at the lab and say hi. He is a pricing adviser with an interest in behavioral economics and a blog here.

Is the search for exogeneity pointless in complex systems?

This idea came up in a response to a reviewer.

One of my hypotheses is that a psychological trait, honesty, may affect certain social or economic outcomes. The reviewer raised the legitimate point that other unobserved personality traits, correlated with honesty, could be the real causal factor. This is undeniable. We don’t know enough about human personality to control for everything that can affect a person’s social relationships.

The normal economist’s response would be to seek a source of random variation that affected honesty but nothing else: for example, an exogenous instrumental variable; or a natural experiment; or a real experiment. For example, if you want to see if economic growth makes war less likely in poor countries, but you are worried about reverse causality or unobserved confounds, then you may argue that weather is random, affectseconomic growth and does not affect war except via economic growth.

For psychological variables, though, this just seems impossible. Even if you could run an experimental treatment to change someone’s level of honesty (maybe an extra hour of Sunday school?), how could you guarantee that this would not change other aspects of their personality too? In fact, that would be extremely unlikely. A person’s character is a complex and interconnected whole. There seems no way to rule out unobserved heterogeneity – short of major neurosurgery, perhaps.

So it seems that if we want to investigate human psychology, we are stuck with finding the major dimensions of personality variation (such as the “Big Five”) via various forms of dimensionality reduction, and then controlling for them.

It seems as if this argument should also apply to other areas of science which study complex systems not subject to precise manipulation – say, ecology or climate science. What can we do about that?

Linkage

Orgtheory.net on combinatoric social science.
Health care price gouging in America (via interfluidity.com).
Andrew Gelman on academic versus political talk.
All published estimates are biased upwards.

Thomas Mann also knew about Jena's weather

... und schlechtes Wetter war über Jena, seit Wochen, seit Wochen, das war richtig, ein miserables und hassenswertes Wetter, das man in allen Nerven spürte, wüst, finster und kalt...
-- Schwere Stunde

Guaranteed entertainment

New paper from Christian Grose, Neil Malhotra and Robert van Houweling:

"It employed a within-subjects design in which the subjects of the experiment, U.S. senators, received one letter from a constituent taking a position in favor of immigration reform; and a second letter from a different constituent opposing immigration reform. By comparing how senators responded to these two letters we can identify the frequency with which they tailor their messages to constituents with differing views on this issue, as well as the form their targeted explanations take...."

How fast do institutional changes take effect?

Today I saw a presentation of a field experiment evaluating different ways to deliver aid. One was the standard method which had been used until that point. The other two “treatments” were new. The evaluation was over the course of a year. (There were lots of pictures of smiling villagers... lab guys don't have those.)

How long do we have to wait before new institutions settle down and we can evaluate them “in equilibrium” – meaning, not any rigorous game-theoretic concept, but just that people have somehow got used to them, and that all the changes have worked through the system? In this case I felt that a year was too little. Aid recipients are unlikely to be naïve about the fact that new institutions are being tried and evaluated, and they may therefore behave in a special way in the first season of a change.

I worry in general that social scientific evaluation is too short-termist, and that the tools of statistical analysis can encourage this. For major institutional changes, there is a good case that the smallest possible “independent” unit of observation is a generation. Until people have grown up under a new system, we are not sure that its full effects have been worked out.

In this context, advanced statistical analysis can actually be a step backward. For example, consider this paper which estimates the effect of democracy on GDP – a traditional hobby for political scientists. Now as everyone in the field knows, just looking at democracies versus dictatorships and comparing averages will not be informative, because these countries differ in many many other ways. So instead the paper looks at the few years before and after a change from dictatorship to democracy, and estimates the switchover effect from that. But this is crazy, because such massive changes to social institutions are not remotely likely to have all their effects within a few years. After all, many political decisions have ramifications that span decades – think of the choice to create the NHS, or Lloyd George's introduction of old age pensions, or Nixon's visit to China. Evaluating political institutions after seven years is like evaluating a new fitness regime after a week.

I can think of several cases where my previous beliefs were probably based on too short a run of evidence. For example, I assumed that privatization of e.g. water utilities was a good thing, because the privatized utilities performed better than public counterparts elsewhere. But a lot is going to depend on the first generation of entrepreneurs who take over, and these may not be the same as the second or third generation of entrepreneurs who inherit the system. In the 1950s, nationalization must have seemed as obvious as privatization did in the 1990s. I am not saying that privatization was a mistake – I still support it – but I am less confident of the evidence base.

My colleagues seem to be making a similar mistake about the effect of the Research Assessment Exercise (now the Research Excellence Framework) for UK academia. Everyone I know who was around in the 80s, when this came in, says that it swiftly forced a lot of unproductive, “dead wood” academics to either shape up or leave the system. So they are basically positive about it. (Well, Essex political scientists would be, wouldn't they?)

The question is whether it is still having the same effect now. When a new institution is imposed, there are two kinds of adjustment: people adjust to the institution; and the institution is adjusted to the people. After all, nobody wants to live under permanent revolution, so initially harsh conditions are gradually softened, informal routines grow up that may subvert the official rules, et cetera.

In this context it is pretty alarming to consider the Conservatives' and then New Labour's regime of targets for the NHS (known by some as “targets and terror”). Again, I have heard people in the industry talk about the salutary initial effects of having managers asking “why isn't this bed being used”? But now look where targets and terror have got us.

If this argument is right, we will often be unable to evaluate institutional changes rigorously until long after the fact – even if we are doing randomized controlled trials, which is often impossible. So, how can we decide what changes to make in the here and now? Two things might help.

First, a historical perspective won't tell us what will happen, but will at least give us a sense of what can happen. Without history we are doomed to parochialism. As Churchill said, "Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft."

Second, a sense of principle might often be a good guide. Actually, another Churchill quote is relevant: "In life the only wise course is to follow the course of duty and not of interest. Every man knows what his duty is. But it is not given to many to know their true interest." To apply this to academia: we may not know, now or ever, the true efficiency effects of such-and-such a government evaluation framework, or of the practice in an increasing number of European universities of – no joke – paying bonuses for top journal publications. But every researcher should feel that the search for truth is sacred, that it requires rigorous and demanding standards of honesty in the muddy waters of empirical analysis, and, therefore, that attempts to import monetary incentives, or impose pressure to publish, should be met with great suspicion.

A couple from bookslut:
A bit of an awkward read, this, about the Potato Famine. Not our finest hour.
"... and will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardon him for writing well."

Linkage

"... and will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardon him for writing well."

Linkage

"... and will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardon him for writing well."