Economics & Marginalia: February 25, 2022

Hi all,

How can I start with anything other than the absolute horror unfolding in Ukraine at the moment? We went from watching Big Jet TV to an actual ground invasion in the space of a week, and I much, much preferred last week’s  viewing. I have no special knowledge or insight into the situation (save for having a few links to share below), and I’m not an expert in the kind of sanctions that have been proposed to deter and/or punish Russian aggression. All I can really express is my sense of depressed outrage: at Putin and the choice he has made that will cost so many lives; at the rest of the world for lighting up their monuments but putting their ability to sell luxury goods above their morals. The last six years have been a series of tests, and we’ve failed nearly every one. So many bad decisions with lasting consequences, and so few lessons learnt. It’s beyond depressing.

1. I’m not a Russia or Ukraine expert by any means, but here are a few things I found useful this week. First, a superb thread of non-fiction books to read on Ukraine and modern Russia, from a Waterstones buyer. The fiction thread is also good, though less new to me. It is hard to imagine what life must be like for those living through these days in Ukraine, but I liked Branko Milanovic’s recollections of NATO’s bombings of Belgrade in 1999, a 78 day-long campaign. He wasn’t in Belgrade at the time, but reflects on the stories he heard from friends and family, as well as the sight of his own apartment lit up with the reflection of nearby fires (by the way, this is not an incitement to what-about-ism, so please spare me any). I also very much enjoyed Chris Blattman’s take on the mentality of people doing bad things—that they convince themselves that they are in the right, and behaving valorously. Everyone thinks they’re the good guy (Grendel probably thought he was the hero for resisting Beowulf), as That Mitchell and Webb Look captured in just one perfect shot.
2. In a normal week (do such things still exist?) I would have led with the return of Paper Round! Life, jobs, and Covid got in the way of this episode, so what starts in a summery London is finished in the chill blast of winter, over Zoom. In Episode 5 Matt and I discuss two papers by Alex Eble and co-authors about an intervention that managed to not just improve, but completely transform educational outcomes in places where learning levels are near zero. The catch? It’s wildly expensive, and it’s not clear how it would transport to other settings. This is a little about education, a lot about policymaking and a touch about Andy Garcia. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts (transcript).
3. In US news, FiveThirtyEight dig in to how the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson could change the ideological make-up of the Supreme Court over time. It’s still 6-3 to the conservative judges, but that doesn’t stop her appointment having an influence.
4. This is fantastic: Tim Harford on the gender pay gap, heavily featuring Oriana Bandiera, and in particular her new paper and LSE-based inclusion hub. One interesting finding here is the higher-bar effect: in some places, where representation of women is really heavily restricted, those women who make it through all the hurdles in their path actually get paid more than men. Why? Because the only women who can make it through those hurdles are truly extraordinary individuals. The upshot of all of this is that there likely exists an enormous amount of misallocation in the economy, driven by all sorts of completely irrelevant criteria: the colour of your skin, who your parents are, the organs you were born with.
5. Noah Smith’s interview with Emi Nakamura is the kind of thing you should read with a full afternoon to spare. The interview itself is a quick read, and very fun. The problem is he links to a number of her papers and other works, and almost all of them demand your full attention. The rabbit hole I went down was her paper on the economic benefits of mobility, which uses a volcanic eruption as a natural experiment to learn about the gift of mobility.
6. Two more pieces on how policy is made: first, Shaoda Wang and David Yang have an excellent, partly revisionist piece in VoxDev about the how China’s much-admired local policy experimentation was actually organised, and the trade-offs it involves; most of all, it shows that doing anything potentially valuable in the real world inevitably entails some distortions. And Markus Goldstein covers a new paper showing how training policymakers in econometrics increases the value they attach to causal evidence, and increases their demand for it in policymaking. I’m not sure how to interpret the result; in one sense, we find that giving people a hammer means they use hammers more. How sure are we that, at the margin, what we need is more hammering?
7. Lastly, if it weren’t for the ongoing disaster in Ukraine, I would have led with the devastating news that Mark Lanegan passed away this week, at the far-too-young age of 57. This one hits me very hard indeed. He soundtracked my teenage years and my twenties particularly heavily but has never ceased to be in heavy rotation on my playlists. I’ve seen him live five times, and he was just getting better and better; there was something about that voice that could carry any emotion at all, even in writing, as his superb autobiography attests. I saw him play in Islington the day Lou Reed died and he covered Satellite of Love from memory, and it was just devastating. This obituary by Stevie Chick is good (despite mistaking All I Know for No-One Knows, both of which he sang on), but the best way to celebrate him is with his music: turning the Gun Club’s punk anthem Carry Home into this dark and moving ballad, his elegiac 100 Days, his frankly scary love song Field Song; his work with the Screaming Trees, and Greg Dulli… all of it.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R