Must-Read: What Noah Smith does not get: The headline is not just part of the article–the headline is the most important part of the article. When academics complain that their articles have been misread because “I didn’t write the headline”, they do not have a valid complaint against the reader: the reader has correctly read what is in front of their eyeballs. They do have a valid complaint against the headline writer, and the organization that employs the headline writer. That’s who they should be directing their fire against.

Noah Smith: Who Is Responsible When an Article Gets Misread?: “How much of the responsibility for understanding lies with the writer of an article, and how much with the reader?…

…Most cases fall somewhere in between. And the fact that writers don’t usually get to write their headlines complicates the issue…. Susan Dynarski wrote an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing school vouchers…. Economist opinion is uncertain about… vouchers…. The headline of the article (which Dynarski of course did not write) might overstate the case a little bit: “Free Market for Education? Economists Generally Don’t Buy It”…. It’s a little click-bait-y, like most headlines, but in my opinion not too bad….

To be fair, [Scott Alexander’s] misreading was somewhat assisted by the headline the NYT put on the piece…. The fault here is partly that of the NYT, who used a headline that focused only on one part of Dynarski’s article and overstated that part. It’s a little harsh for me to say “Come on, man, you should know an article isn’t about what its headline says it’s about!” Misleading headlines are a problem…

A similar point applies to leads.

Headlines are the most important part of an article. And lead paragraphs are the second most important part.

When Jim Tankersley gives Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross the first eight uninterrupted paragraphs to denounce Marcus Noland, Mark Zandi, and Len Burman, that is unprofessional. I call you out, Jim. You are better than this.

Must-Read: The fact that Bloom et al. think that exponential growth is the baseline and the rule is rather odd, as is the use of the word “harder”. We have had 25 Moore’s Law cycles since the early 1970s. That means that computer chips now are 2^25 = 32,000,000 times as dense as they were then. And Bloom et al are surprised that it takes 25 times as many researchers to move computer chips from 32,000,000 to 64,000,000 times as dense as they were in 1970 as it took then to move to twice the 1970 density? It does seem to me that just because exponential growth models are easy to write down does not mean that they should always be our instinctive default…

Nicholas Bloom et al.: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?: “In many growth models… the long-run growth rate is the product of… the effective number of researchers and… research productivity…

…We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 25 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. Across a broad range of cases and levels of disaggregation, we find that ideas–and in particular the exponential growth they imply–are getting harder and harder to find. Exponential growth results from the large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.

Should-Read: Martin Wolf: Risks that Threaten Global Growth: “Consistent growth is a relatively recent phenomenon…

…Global output shrank in a fifth of all years between 1900 and 1947. One of the policy achievements since the second world war has been to make growth more stable…. The world has avoided blunders on the scale of the two world wars and the Great Depression… active management of the monetary system, greater willingness to run fiscal deficits during recessions and the increased size of government spending relative to economic output. Behind the tendency towards economic growth lie two powerful forces: innovation at the frontier of the world economy, particularly in the US, and catch-up by laggard economies…. China… gross domestic product per head rose 23-fold between 1978 and 2015. Yet so poor had China been at the beginning of this colossal expansion that its average GDP per head was only a quarter of US levels in 2015. Indeed, it was only half that of Portugal. Catch-up growth remains possible for China. India has still greater room….

The overwhelming probability is that the world economy will grow… by more than 3 per cent…. [But] if we consider the possibility of globally significant financial crises, two possibilities stand out: the break-up of the eurozone and a crisis in China. Neither is inconceivable. Yet neither seems likely…. A third set of risks is geopolitical. Last year I referred to the possibility of Brexit and “election of a bellicose ignoramus” to the US presidency. Both have come to pass. The implications of the latter remain unknown. It is all too easy to list further geopolitical risk….

Catch-up still has great potential. But economic dynamism has declined in the core…. Mr Trump promises a resurgence of US trend growth. This is unlikely, particularly if he follows a protectionist course…

Should-Read: Do historians do counter-factuals? Yes. Can you do historical counter-factuals? Yes. Could you do without historical counter-factuals? No. A world in which historians do not engage in and with counterfactuals would e a world in which human actions have no meaning, because you would never be able to say “this mattered”–you would only be able to say “this happened, and then that happened, and that is what was”. And why would anyone with any volition at all wish to create or live in such a world?

Dietz Vollrath: Can You Do Historical Counter-Factuals?: “Studying slavery and capitalism, for example, we do not have thousands of different societies or cultures to page through…

…to find one that looks almost exactly like the Anglo-American industrializing societies, but doesn’t have slavery. We cannot compare like to like, and do the plausible counter-factual… somehow “switch[ing] off” slavery…. The experience and implications of slavery are entwined with every other aspect of the industrializing societies, and pulling it out would entail massive shocks to all these other aspects. “Doing the counterfactual” looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is what Foner is objecting to because it sounds like writing some sort of alternative history novel. And it would be pure speculation to write such a novel….

[But] we don’t have to think about writing down an alternative history novel. We need to think about lots and lots of possible novels in which slavery did not exist, and lots and lots in which it did. And based on those thousands of alternative history novels, is it true that when slavery remains present into the 1800’s, that capitalism develops? And is it true that when slavery fails to persist (or maybe never really exists?) that capitalism fails to develop?… We could ask if – statistically speaking – alternative histories without slavery tended to be without capitalism, and alternative histories with slavery tended to have capitalism. When economists are talking about historical counterfactuals, I think this is what they have in mind. At least, it is what I have in mind….

The claim that slavery was not necessary for capitalism… mean[s]… that of all the alternative histories we could have gotten, the ones without slavery most likely would still have gotten capitalism anyway. And the proposed explanations for that – Indian and Egyptian supply responses, alternative labor arrangements in the US South – are arguments about the probability of capitalism occurring in those thousands of alternative histories.

I see why this can be frustrating…. How could you possibly conceive of thousands of different alternative histories, when we as yet know so little about this one?… Despite this, one advantage of thinking explicitly about this in terms of many-alternative-histories is that you can avoid falling into arguments about mono-causality. If you say that slavery is necessary for capitalism, and then say that in a counterfactual history without slavery capitalism would not have existed, you a careening perilously close to saying that slavery was the single cause of capitalism. You might try to swerve to avoid this by saying that speculating about that counterfactuals is silly in the first place….

I cannot get my head around asking “why”, as Foner does, without being able to undertake any kind of counter-factual exercise, whether in the data or in my head. But perhaps the concept of thinking in terms of many-alternative-histories, rather than feeling you must commit to a single one, is a way of making the idea of counterfactuals more palatable…

Should-Read: Dietz Vollrath: Dumb Luck in Historical Development: “Philip Hoffman’s Why Did Europe Conquer the World?… on its face is another…

…in a long line… argu[ing that] Western European economic and colonial dominance is… due to a… specific characteristic: disease tolerance, or cows, or a knobbly coastline…. Hoffman… learning-by-doing in gunpowder technology, but where learning-by-doing only occurs if you actually fight. Hence… four conditions… frequent war, lots of resources expended on those wars, use of gunpowder specifically in those wars, and few barriers to adoption of new technology…. Europe happened to meet the four conditions because of contingent historical events. In other words, Europe randomly found itself with a political setting that encouraged many high-stakes wars that involved gunpowder. Its lead was not due to some unique European characteristic, but rather was luck of the draw…. Are there any deep structural advantages that Europe had? Maybe. But my guess is that a good portion (over 50%?) of the reason Europe advanced ahead of other areas was dumb luck…. A tip of the hat to Hoffman for his effort in that direction…

Should-Read: Edward L. Glaeser (2004): Reinventing Boston: 1630–2003: “The three largest cities in colonial America remain at the core of three of America’s largest metropolitan areas today…

…This paper asks how Boston has been able to survive despite repeated periods of crisis and decline. Boston has reinvented itself three times: in the early 19th century as the provider of seafaring human capital for a far flung maritime trading and fishing empire; in the late 19th century as a factory town built on immigrant labor and Brahmin capital; and finally in the late 20th century as a center of the information economy. In all three instances, human capital—admittedly of radically different forms—provided the secret to Boston’s rebirth. The history of Boston suggests that a strong base of skilled workers is a more reliable source of long-run urban health.

Should-Read: George Orwell: On Book Reviewers: “These books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant…

…that he will have to read at least fifty pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader…. At about nine p.m. his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit in a room which grows colder and colder, while the cigarette smoke grows thicker and thicker, skipping expertly…. In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases — ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc. etc.’ — will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go…