Ok, there’s a slightly more-than-evens chance that I’m going to fall asleep before I finish writing this email. I’ve been up since a little before five am to get up to Oxford and teach a couple of classes while still working a full day for CGD; adrenaline has taken me this far but may fail at any moment. I am not a naturally early riser; I prefer to work late than start early. But until the end of term I instead need to set my phone alarm, which sounds like an air-raid siren but much louder to make up for my deafness, and power through every Friday. All of which is an extended apology for any incoherence or incomplete sentences in what follows.
• I was teaching optimal taxation theory today, one of my favourite weeks every year (my favourite is of course the week on principal-agent problems and public procurement), so Tim Harford’s piece on the weird world of tax policy was very well-timed. Tax policy is a great microcosm of economics in public policy: it requires we be explicit about our objectives, both in terms of efficiency and equity; it leans on both theory and empirical observation to assess (and guess) what is going to happen when we act (or don’t); and it leads us, in practice, so some truly bizarre places. Tim takes us on a tour of them: taxes on beards, on being unattractive, and on harebrained schemes to avoid paying them. The lesson: what is simple is often what’s best; but rarely what is politically feasible.
• The Development Impact job market papers series continues. I could link them all, but I’ll limit myself to highlighting two. First, I loved this one by Gwyneth Miner on the effect of uncertainty on rural-urban migration in Kenya, less for the direct policy it tests than for the underlying mechanism it reveals. And it ends by observing that moving (to cities, but more generally migration) can be hard on your mental health. It reminds me of the excellent speech that Agnes gives in Idris Elba’s series In the Long Run, to her recent-migrant brother-in-law Valentine in a freezing car on council estate in Leyton: “if it feels difficult, that’s because it is difficult!” I was also a big fan of this, by Deivy Houix, on principal-agent problems and digitalisation.
• Two perspectives on Trump. First, Kaushik Basu on the fear that Trump will keep his promises (his early appointments are a clear signal in that direction, of course), and the cost that will have to, well, everyone. And second, Branko Milanovic makes his best guess as to Trump’s ideology.
• I was very, very pleased to be featured in Oliver Hanney’s list of good places to read about economics and development for free. The list is superb, too. It includes a lot of stuff I already follow avidly, but also introduced me to quite a lot of new sites, which is useful as some of my old reliables either slowly go quiet or turn into slightly mad cranks. Shamefully I hadn’t been following This Week in Africa, which is clearly a must-read.
• Two from Andrew Gelman: first, a post about how to do data exploration well, specifically about the value in making hypotheses about what you expect every time you look at the data. I have, over the years, begun to do this by habit, and I think it’s incredibly useful. Once you see the data it’s really easy to construct a plausible story in your head about why you always thought it would look that way. Writing down your expectation is a good discipline, because it also helps you spot when you need to look again. More than once I’ve found errors in the data or coding this way. And secondly, his new paper: meta-analysis with one study. It’s been sent to me a couple of times now, and I’ve yet to read in detail, but it looks useful.
• Normally, the links are seven-deep, but one must make allowances for exhaustion. But let me end on a happy—hilarious—note. The Onion have bought InfoWars, Alex Jones’s misinformation-spewing hate-site. It’s hard to think of a more perfect union: as someone on BlueSky pointed out, this means the site with the greatest moon-landing headline ever now owns the site that doesn’t believe in the moon (or something). Now it just needs to buy a few academic publishers and it’ll be a real force for good in the world.
