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Maitresh Ghatak on growth-wallahs versus poverty-wallahs in the Indian policy debate.

Giving doctors grades has backfired (sigh).

Linkage - Dan Drezner galore edition

Dan Drezner on Eurodoom.

Dan Drezner again on the financial crisis and international political economy.

One of my guides in trying to understand the financial crisis has been Karl Polanyi, via John Ruggie. Another idea that seems useful, not just in the economy but in the current unstable world climate comes from William Riker. He once said something to the effect that in times of stability institutions seem to be all that matters, but in crisis, preferences become important. (Remember that Riker called institutions "congealed preferences".)

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The management theory of The Office. The genius of this can be summed up in its picture:

The US justice system seems to have some problems, judging by the story of the Gorcycas.

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Climatologists finding out scary things, and dealing with it emotionally.

I didn't realise how well Farage could speak.

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Abortion delivered via drones.

Why kids don't read literature. I loved this essay.

Characters in a novel are neither words on a page nor real people. Characters in a novel are possible people. When we think of their ethical dilemmas, we do not need to imagine that such people actually exist, only that such people and such dilemmas could exist.
...
The second most common way to kill interest in literature is death by judgment. One faults or excuses author, character, or the society depicted according to the moral and social standards prevalent today, by which I mean those standards shared by professional interpreters of literature. These courses are really ways of inculcating those values and making students into good little detectors of deviant thoughts.

 And just when I was feeling a scientist's smugness at those crazy humanities profs:

There is an obvious proof that the great novelists knew more about human psychology than any social scientist who ever lived. If psychologists, sociologists, or economists understood people as well as George Eliot or Tolstoy did, they could create portraits of people as believable as Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke or Anna Karenina. But no social scientist has ever come close.

Ow.

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Bryan Caplan crystallizes a simple, interesting idea.

Paul Krugman versus the Austerians: the video game.

I don't know whether Paul Krugman is right, but he is a brilliant debater and an example of how one guy can change the discussion.

All we need now is an actual video game.

Linkage on science and freedom

GCHQ uses behavioural science to manipulate the public.

Richard Thaler writes "nudge for good" when he signs his book. Unfortunately, the bad guys have no incentive to follow that advice. It is sad when psychological science is used by unaccountable state securocrats as a source of human weaknesses to exploit.

A book by an academic who works in China saying that meritocracy beats democracy.

As non-Western democracies invest more in education, they are likely to be selective buyers of   research. Social scientists in democracy overwhelmingly favour democracy. It will be interesting to see what happens to social scientists in autocracies.

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Very funny, very rude and maybe a little bit justified review of Deirdre McCloskey's review of Thomas Piketty.

Maybe neurons evolved twice! If you don't understand, just nod sagely.

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How community groups helped implement genocide in Rwanda.

Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, in the years before the genocide, regularly used for spreading political propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations....

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Chris Deerin gets the EU referendum right: it's about identity, not economics.

Thoughtful, if slightly wacky, piece on open borders and the "hive mind hypothesis" (i.e. the idea that smart people get more productive when surrounded by other smart people).

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On Dread Pirate Roberts, and why libertarians end up having to create states.

More information about Guantanamo. If these allegations are true, then the people responsible must be prosecuted, all the way up the chain of command.

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Branko Milanovic on expecting institutions to do everything for us.

I have no answer to the “outsourcing” of morality. I see it as inevitable although I cannot say that I enjoy that prospect. Being an economist, I cannot even see exactly why I should not enjoy it, but I still do not.

Fish have advanced social behaviours. Work like this makes me wonder if evolutionary explanations of human behaviour should focus so heavily on the pleistocene. Maybe some basic patterns were laid down much much earlier.

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More from Paul Romer on science and mathiness.

As part of this process of defending science, exclusion by shunning, plays an essential role.

And:

This description of the reputational equilibrium in science shows that it is inherently unstable in the face of entry by people with the norms of politics. If a small group of people with the norms of politics can establish themselves inside a science, they can destroy the equilibrium that sustains trust and communication.

and, very pessimistically:

If I am right, that there are many economists whose judgment we should not trust and who collude with each other, how do we identify the people we can trust to make a judgment about who is trustworthy?

Governments right now are throwing money at science. Professor Romer's arguments suggest a problem with this. Oops, should I be saying that?

Grimly hilarious reading about the humanities (see earlier)

The Harvard report even admits that today, the humanities “serve only the critical function of unmasking the operations of power in language largely impenetrable to a wider public...”

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A Bangladeshi blogger standing up for freedom of speech:

But, is it really permitted to kill someone for their writing? Leaving aside freedom of speech, what does Islam itself tell us about it? I think a story from Prophet Muhammad’s life should be a reminder to the faithful. During his cumbersome days in ancient Arabia, when the prophet first began to preach Islam, he was being tortured and laughed at. One day, an old woman spread thorns all over the way he would travel. The prophet on his way found it very difficult to keep walking and his feet were hurt. But he didn’t utter a word against the old lady, who vehemently opposed Muhammad’s preaching of Islam. The story goes, this continued for days and the prophet never did any harm to the old woman. One day, he saw that the path he would walk on was clear; there was no sign of thorns. Instantly, he rushed to the old lady’s house and found her sick in bed. There was no one to take care of her. The prophet could have killed the woman instantly to avenge all the miseries imposed upon him. But he didn’t do so. He took care of the woman like his own mother and made her stand on her feet again.

 Schools that ban mobile phones get better academic results.

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Paul Romer on "mathiness" in economics.

UK government allows GCHQ to hack your computer.

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Coolest protest masks. It's the Kale Bloc!

Do nice people or nasty people get ahead, in our economic system? This is a vague and complicated question but not a meaningless one. Here is a data point.

Rebecca Roache beautifully illustrates my point about group identity in politics.

Michael Clemens argues that if the EU opened its borders completely, the sky would not fall in:

Gallup pollsters go to pretty much all countries, and in each country, they ask around 1,000 adults the same set of questions every year. One of the questions is about whether or not they would like to emigrate, and if so, where.
The bottom line is that Europe's overall population would rise by 10 percent if everyone who told Gallup they would like to move to Europe could do so. Germany's population would rise by 23 percent, because it is a particularly prosperous and desirable destination.
This is the best direct evidence we have. I say this evidence is only suggestive, because we don't know the extent to which stated desires reflect real behavior.

Indeed. My suspicion is that this is not very informative. It's like when people threaten to leave the UK after the Tories get in; some will, most won't. I would find it more interesting to look at historical examples of countries with open borders (actually almost everywhere, pre-1914: the real age of mass migration was in the 19th century). In any case, this is a great read:

In the United Kingdom, asylum seekers are net takers of benefits because they are banned from working. That is, UK voters apparently support policies that force asylum seekers not to generate tax revenue. Then some of the same voters complain about asylum seekers because they do not generate tax revenue.

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Love this quote from the NYT review of Misbehaving:

But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.

Lord Ashcroft's focus groups, the most encouraging view of democracy I've read all month:

“I went up to the bedroom but my boyfriend was watching the debate in bed so I went downstairs again. It’s alright, I’ve got my rabbit.” “Was that from the Ann Summers catalogue?” “I meant my bunny rabbit!”

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Revision control and dependency management for scientific literature? 

Teacher effectiveness correlates negatively with student evaluations.

Controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons, with translation and context. 

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Tyler Cowen defends the TPP, and reviews Samuel Johnson as a modern blogger.

Football predicts election results. Octopuses predict football. Draw your own conclusions.

Engineering thinking versus ordinary thinking. This is also about big, visible events versus chronic conditions – a contrast which pops up in political economy all the time, see this paper by Sharun Mukand for instance.

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Grimsby is voting UKIP because of Europe, not immigration.

Ted Jeory goes behind the headlines of the Lutfur Rahman case. (Non-UK readers: Lutfur Rahman was Mayor of a London borough and has recently been found guilty of corrupt practices. Ted Jeory was a  journalist who bravely investigated him.)

And lastly…I started my spare time blog in 2010 when I realised my former paper, the East London Advertiser, was no longer able or willing to keep an eye on the detail of the council administration. I kept plugging away where it should have been. For that, I received numerous legal threats from the town hall. None succeeded. But the retreat of so many local papers across the UK is deeply worrying. How many other Lutfur Rahmans are there out there?