Tag Archives: anthropology

Continuing from last week, a few more favorites of the past 12 months (none of which were written all that recently). And a reminder that you can sign up to get posts by email. Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King, alongside Euphoria, by Lily King (and Gillian Tett’s Anthrovision for good measure) Euphoria was my recommendation for best book in 2015. “Pioneering anthropologists in the field, making it up as they go along: The novel,” was my description. It was a thinly-veiled...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action The animation above comes from a cool page of causal inference animations by Nick Huntington-Klein (h/t Alex Tabarrok), which go through, step-by-step with scatterplots, how different methods work. Alex was one of many who offered helpful tips for getting through undergrad econometrics. Call for papers for the Y-Rise conference Dec 15-21 on the science of scaling promising interventions. They have research networks looking at...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A very cool job market paper and explanatory thread, from Ph.D. candidate Matthew Klein. He, Bradford L. Barham, and Yuexuan Wu, link women’s household bargaining power to malaria rates in Malawi. They find that a one standard deviation increase in a woman’s household bargaining power implies a 40% reduction in chances that anybody in the household contracts malaria. They caution their ability to infer why this works is limited...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth reading the article about star economist Roland Fryer’s sexual harassment. Here’s his response. At issue here is how easily academic structures put junior people at the mercy of senior ones. It’s not unique to economics – see psychology Antarctic geology, and the world’s top empathy researcher terrorizing the people who worked in her lab, among many others. Given how common we’re discovering this...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Chris found this above, (from a 2016 post) anthropologist Jennifer Esperanza got annoyed at how her field’s textbooks always had exotic cover images, when anthropology is really the study of all humanity. “‘Why can’t there be images of, for example, a group of white American women eating salads, on the cover?,’ she asked.” Dori Tunstall and Julie Hill took up the challenge of putting white people on the covers of anthro...

These early humans were using tar to make tools long before Homo sapiens did. Beginning of technology. Ars TechnicaNeanderthals were distilling tar 200 thousand years ago in EuropeAnnalee Newitz