Must- and Should-Reads: August 22, 2017
- Tim Worstall: The Robots Stealing Human Jobs-Bring It On: “Spinning especially was a hugely labour intensive process which near all women did to some extent… https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/08/19/the-robots-stealing-human-jobs-bring-it-on/#524f81a421ff
- John Holbo: Thinking About Groups: “I’m going to say a few (thousand) words about… Jacob Levy’s good new book, Rationalism, Pluralism, Freedom… http://crookedtimber.org/2017/08/20/thinking-about-groups/
- Jacob T. Levy: Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom
- Claudia Sahm: On Twitter: “And yes, Marginal Revolution commenters have got EJMR’ers back… I used to comment on @MargRev and it would really piss me off… https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/898620250287030272
- Justin Wolfers: Evidence of a Toxic Environment for Women in Economics: “Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman… https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/upshot/evidence-of-a-toxic-environment-for-women-in-economics.html
Interesting Reads:
- Kevin O’Rourke: It has finally happened: “in August of this year, the inevitable happened: measured in terms of industrial output, our current recovery was overtaken by that of the interwar period. Pretty dismal stuff…” http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2015/11/29/it-has-finally-happened/
- David Byrne and Dan Sichel: The productivity slowdown is even more puzzling than you think: “While the available evidence on mismeasurement does not in fact provide an explanation for the [productivity] slowdown, innovation is much more rapid than would be inferred from official measures, and on-going gains in the digital economy make the productivity slowdown even more puzzling…” http://voxeu.org/article/productivity-slowdown-even-more-puzzling-you-think
- Dana Goodyear: How Driscoll’s Reinvented the Strawberry: “The berry behemoth turned produce into a beauty contest, and won…” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/how-driscolls-reinvented-the-strawberry
- John Lanchester: You Are the Product: “‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’…” https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product
- Barry Ritholtz: “Markets Will Fluctuate” http://ritholtz.com/2017/08/markets-will-fluctuate/
- Stan Collender: Congress Can’t Do Tax Reform Without A Functioning President: “Tax reform… requires a politically strong and disciplined president… who can twist arms… and… sell the tax bill…. Donald Trump is not currently that kind of president and can’t do any of these things…” https://www.forbes.com/sites/stancollender/2017/08/20/congress-cant-do-tax-reform-without-a-functioning-president/#179afae88206
- Dara Lind: Sen. Jeff Flake to Trump: “low-skilled” immigrants make America great: “The senator’s argument is low-key kind of radical—even for a pro-business Republican…” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/18/16166996/republican-against-trump-immigration
- Amanda Bayer and Ceci Rouse: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.30.4.221
- Ben Chu: A View from the Top: Sir Richard Blundell, feted economist and possible future Nobel prize winner: “The veteran University College London professor talks Brexit, the minimum wage and why economists really do care about inequality…” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/sir-richard-blundell-nobel-prize-nemmers-prize-economics-inequality-interview-a7881241.html?amp
- Justin Wolfers: A Family-Friendly Policy That’s Friendliest to Male Professors https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension-policies-that-put-women-at-a-disadvantage.html
- Jeffrey Friedman: Public Choice Theory and the Politics of Good and Evil https://niskanencenter.org/blog/public-choice-theory-politics-charity/
- The Bootstrap https://web.archive.org/web/20101123034535/https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2010/3/the-bootstrap/1: “Statisticians can reuse their data to quantify the uncertainty of complex models…”
- Alice H. Wu: Gender Stereotyping in Academia: Evidence from Economics Job Market Rumors Forum https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6q7gfcbv9feef5/Wu_EJMR_paper.pdf?dl=0
- Nick Cohen: Public choice and market failure: Jeffrey Friedman on Nancy MacLean on James Buchanan https://notesonliberty.com/2017/08/10/public-choice-and-market-failure-jeffrey-friedman-on-nancy-maclean/
- Doug Campbell: Alfred Crosby Deserves a Nobel Prize in Economics: “Anton Howes started a nice thread on twitter asking for recommendations for items to teach undergrads in economic history. I suggested teaching Crosby. Pseudoerasmus suggested it’s easier to just give them Diamond, but agreed that, if there was no Crosby, there would have been no Diamond…” http://douglaslcampbell.blogspot.com/2017/08/alfred-crosby-obviously-deserves-nobel.html
- Andrey Kurenkov: A ‘Brief’ History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning, Part 1 http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
- Nancy LeTourneau: What It’s Like to Be Black or Brown in Trump’s Rural America: http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/08/17/what-its-like-to-be-black-or-brown-in-trumps-rural-america/
- Harold Pollack: A missed opportunity to report on the rural opioid crisis: “Columnist Salena Zito wasn’t very candid with me in a recent Twitter exchange. That’s annoying. More important, she’s missed a real opportunity to contribute genuine reporting on the rural opioid crisis. Twitter generally conveys the emotional warmth of a contentious economics seminar without the intellectual rigor…” http://www.samefacts.com/2017/08/health-medicine/a-missed-opportunity-to-report-on-the-rural-opioid-crisis/
- Sarah Kliff: An astonishing change in how Americans think about government-run health care: “For the past few years, pollsters have asked…. Does the government have an obligation to ensure all Americans have health care? They’ve found a remarkable shift, with Americans swinging sharply toward the belief that the government ought to play a very large role in the health care system…” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/16/16158918/voxcare-poll-government-run-health-care
- Cathryn Carson et al.: A Whirlwind Tour of UC Berkeley’s Data Science Education Program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I3ZFbEF7t0&ab_channel=Enthought
- Drew Conway: The Data Science Venn Diagram http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/: “The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise…”
- A Reason—a Small Reason, But a Reason—Why the Quality of Republican Policy Governance in America Has Fallen So Low http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/a-reasona-small-reason-but-a-reasonwhy-the-quality-of-republican-policy-governance-in-america-has-fallen-so-low.html
- Today’s Economic History: E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class: “Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared)…” http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/todays-economic-history.html