Tag Archives: history

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A wonderful back and forth between David Evans and DFID Deputy Chief Economist Nick Lea, ostensibly about regressions, but to me resonated more broadly on methods. Papers seem to have to need the magical pixie dust of a regression to get accepted for publication, but is it the case that every problem in development is a nail waiting for a regression hammer? Lea wonders if methods are constraining the kinds of questions economists...

Need education outcomes explained in a more intuitive way? Better call Dave Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A lovely tribute to Dave Evans, who’s been a boon to the field, and a prolific producer of public goods, from David McKenzie and his Development Impact Blog colleaguesI ran a quick search, and I’ve cited him about 50 times in my links It’s fitting that Dave’s final Dev Impact post is in one of his specialities, making research more understandable to...

Systemic uncertainty in a complex adaptive system. Spontaneous natural order is messy.Cassandra's LegacyShould we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past Ugo Bardi | Professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of FlorenceSee alsoStatistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social ScienceHey! Here’s what to do when you have two or more surveys on the same population!Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied...

Mythos Der Kapitalismus ist entzaubert und bringt uns das größte Faschismusproblem seit den Dreißigern Was im Herbst 2008 an der Wall Street geschah, hatten die allermeisten Menschen bis dahin für unmöglich gehalten, schließlich hatte man ihnen jahrelang weisgemacht, dass etwas Derartiges schlichtweg nicht passieren könnte. Es war, als ob man dabei zuguckt, wie die Sonne, kurz nachdem sie am Horizont aufgeht,...

Again, follow the money, here the conversion of the Reichsmark to the DM. Very interesting from the monetary point of view — who controls the money, and all that. I think some of you may have heard on more than one occasion about how that bloodthirsty tyrant Stalin set up a blockade of West Berlin in 1948 and how the freedom-loving nations organized the Berlin airlift to circumvent it. But today we’ll let you in on what really happened.... Russia InsiderWho Really Put up the Berlin Wall?...

Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the world ceased to make sense in terms of what, a few weeks before, passed as conventional wisdom –...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. If you can get past me at the beginning, this Planet Money episode The Poop Cartels (Apple/iTunes link), I think shows the power of good econ theory put into practice. Molly Lipscomb of the University of Virginia explains how she, with Laura Schechter, and a big research team in Senegal tried to introduce what some people have also called the “Uber for Poop.” Peter Biar Ajak is a former Sudanese “lost boy” who went on to train...

British policy was to depend upon alliances with others, rather than to maintain a large standing army itself. So it was important to be able to draw upon a force of colonial troops when needed, including for the policing of the British Raj. Important though they were for British power, Indian troops commonly faced racial discrimination, were looked down upon by white officers and were often used as cannon fodder, while also being given worse grade arms and equipment than regular British...

As you grow up and experience more of the ups and downs of the economy, you will notice a piece of mindbending hypocrisy: during the good times, bankers, entrepreneurs—rich people in general—tend to be against government. They criticize it as a “brake on development,” a “parasite” feeding on the private sector through taxation, an “enemy of freedom and entrepreneurship.” The cleverer among them even go so far as...

Former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was quoted as saying during the 1979 Austrian election campaign that: “I am less worried about the budget deficits than by the need for the state to create jobs where private industry fails”. That is the statement of a social democrat. That is a progressive Left view. In June 1982, with French unemployment at 7.2 per cent (having risen from 2.4 per cent in 1974 after a near decade of austerity under the right-wing Prime Minister Raymond Barre), the...