Things to Read on the Morning of June 24, 2014

Should-Reads:

1. Jason Gubbles sends us to Esther Duflo: Patronizing The Poor: “Paternalism is everywhere in our lives. We have to immunise our children unless we are upset about it. In India, it is the opposite. It is possible to get your kids immunised but you really have to want to. In our lives, water comes clean out of the tap so we don’t have to ask ourselves whether to boil it, or just put chlorine in it…. For the poor, the default is that they have to think very hard. They can get it wrong not because they are stupid but there is a chance they will. And even if they don’t get it wrong, by the end of the day, they have exhausted all their mental energies, self-control and intellectual energy to solve problems that are not very interesting. There shouldn’t be a debate that it is better not to have diarrhoea than to have diarrhoea…”

2. Heather Boushey and Alexandra Mitukiewicz: Job Quality Matters: How Our Future Economic Competitiveness Hinges on the Quality of Parents’ Jobs: “The consensus on the importance of early childhood education… rests on the findings of a small number of important experimental studies done in the late 1960s and early 1970s…. We will most likely never see a controlled experiment assigning one group of parents in otherwise identical families to high quality jobs with the kinds of flexibility that allows them to address conflicts between work and family…. We are already having a national conversation about the importance of job quality for addressing conflict between work and family. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is a call to action for women to push themselves to aspire professionally and she devotes an entire chapter, “Don’t Leave Before You Leave,” to encouraging women to ask for the flexibility they need. Professional women may have the power to demand these kinds of workplace changes…. But, as Sandberg and others recognize, not all workers have the ability to make these kinds of demands, let alone get what they need…”

3. Council of Economic Advisers: The Economics of Paid and Unpaid Leave | Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility | Nine Facts About American Families and Work | The Economics of Fatherhood and Work

Should Be Aware of:

• Justin Fox: Gerd Gigerenzer has spent his career focusing on the ways in which we get things right… using heuristics, rules of thumb, and other shortcuts often leads to better decisions than the models of ‘rational’ decision-making developed by mathematicians and statisticians…”
• **John YingerThe Impact of Education Finance Reform on Student Achievement in Massachusetts
• Heather Boushey: Family Policy: The Foundation of a Middle-Out Agenda
• Danny Vinik: “Herein lies the problem for Democrats: They have an economic agenda that would help return the economy to full employment…. But those ideas have lost their political salience, because of their supposed lack of success in the Obama era…”
• • Matthew Yglesias: Wall Street is talking about inflation, but betting against it
• Drew Keeling: When nations declared war in 1914, migration policies changed. This column describes some of these changes and how they affected later migration incentives and patterns. Before 1914, migration had been peaceful and driven by market incentives. Since 1914, it has been shaped by politically determined quotas, legal restrictions, and flights from wars and oppression…”
• Marin Sklar: The United States as a Developing Country

And:

1. Mark Strauss: Star Wars Still a Bust: “On Sunday, a ground-based interceptor fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base destroyed a mock enemy warhead launched from the Marshall Islands. The Pentagon hailed it as a major success for the troubled national missile defense system, which has cost $40 billion since 2004. But, in truth, it changes little… the U.S. Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system has been plagued by mismanagement and design flaws since the Bush administration decided to rush it into development ten years ago…”

2. Michael Ignatieff: Are the Authoritarians Winning?: “The conflict between authoritarianism and democracy is not a new cold war, we are told, because the new authoritarians lack an expansionary ideology like communism. This is not true. Communism… as a model of state domination… is very much alive in… China and in Putin’s police state. Nor does this new authoritarianism lack an economic strategy… modernization that secures the benefits of global integration without sacrificing political and ideological control… price-fixing state capitalism… rule by (often corrupt) fiat in place of the rule of law… a claim that the Chinese and Russian civilizations are self-contained moral worlds. Persecution of gays… is intrinsic to their vision of themselves as bulwarks against Western individualism…. Both explicitly refuse to accept liberal democracy… insist that their twentieth-century experience… necessitates centralized rule with an iron fist…. The new authoritarians offer the elites of Africa and Eurasia an alternate route to modern development: growth without democracy and progress without freedom. This is the siren song some African, Latin American, and Asian political elites, especially the kleptocrats, want to hear. Faced with these resurgent authoritarians, America sets a dismaying example…. Its constitutional machinery… in the hands of polarizing politicians in Washington and in the two parties… generates paralysis…. It’s difficult to defend liberal democracy with much enthusiasm abroad if it works so poorly at home…”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Rob Grimshaw: “Ultimately, it does come back to the content”: “We were always going to a niche site on the web. Our traffic figures were always going to be a constraining factor…. When the advertising guy took over the business, which is me…. conscious of the fact that advertising wasn’t going… we needed an alternative… being much more bold on the subscription side… turning the dial on the meter model over toward subscription… to the point where many people were coming up to barriers, a lot of people went through, and more than that, they were happy to come through at price points that were far above what any of us had anticipated…”

2. Twitter / amprog: STARTING NOW: “STARTING NOW: The White House Summit on Working Families! Watch the livestream here h #FamiliesSucceed…”; Betsey Stevenson: “Fact 1: Mothers are increasingly the household breadwinners…”

3. Dominick Bartelme and Yuriy Gorodnichenko: Linkages and Economic Development: “A single Honda… is made of 20,000 to 30,000 parts produced by hundreds of different plants and firms…. Complex production chains are a salient characteristic of modern economies and the immense productivity gains of the past several centuries have relied on an extensive division of labor across plants which trade specialized inputs with one another in convoluted networks…. An early literature (e.g. Hirschman (1958)) reasoned these industry linkages were essential for economic development and focused on how to promote the formation of robust input markets in poor countries and target investment to the industries with the strongest linkages. However, before the data and methods to test these ideas became available, one-sector models that abstracted from intermediate goods altogether became the standard framework for studying growth…. Most of the analysis at this middle level is theoretical and qualitative but the predictions are clear: these linkages should play an important role in economic de- velopment…. Having built a database of input-output tables for a broad spectrum of countries and times, we provide evidence consistent with these predictions… [that] is quantitatively strong and robust… in line with the results from a calibrated multisector neoclassical model…”

4. WCEG: Gender pay gap linked to workplace flexibility: “The White House, the Department of Labor, and the Center for American Progress are hosting a Summit on Working Families… to explore… equal pay and workplace flexibility…. Claudia Goldin… two issues are intimately related… hold implications for the broader economy… ‘A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter’. [Goldin] calls the converging roles of men and women “among the grandest advances in society and the economy in the last century…”