Tag Archives: political science

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. South Africans, trying to come to grips with the astonishing scale of the crisis, have adopted a once-obscure political science term, “state capture,” as a staple of even casual conversation … Yet previous examples of state capture have almost always involved a broad cast of protagonists: an entire industry, for example, or wealthy businessmen as a group. In South Africa, it may have been pulled off by a single...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. In The New Yorker, John Cassidy reviews a new free online open-source economics textbook, The Economy. From an international collaboration of economists, it focuses on newer, post-financial crisis ways of thinking about and teaching economics. Case Western economist Justin Gallagher documents the bizarre fight he went through to get one research group at the University of Texas to turn over the public state data set it was...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. In The New Yorker, John Cassidy reviews a new free online open-source economics textbook, The Economy. From an international collaboration of economists, it focuses on newer, post-financial crisis ways of thinking about and teaching economics. Case Western economist Justin Gallagher documents the bizarre fight he went through to get one research group at the University of Texas to turn over the public state data set it was...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. In The New Yorker, John Cassidy reviews a new free online open-source economics textbook, The Economy. From an international collaboration of economists, it focuses on newer, post-financial crisis ways of thinking about and teaching economics. Case Western economist Justin Gallagher documents the bizarre fight he went through to get one research group at the University of Texas to turn over the public state data set it...

Jobs: NPR’s Planet Money is looking for someone who knows about econ to do shorter stories linked to the news of the day (explaining the econ of current issues in the news). Good communication/explainer skills but no previous journalism experience required. I know several of the people there and they’re all amazing, I can’t recommend them enough. (I would just caution, from experience, that journalism culture differs from academia. It moves fast and requires precision under hard deadlines...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Jobs: NPR’s Planet Money is looking for someone who knows about econ to do shorter stories linked to the news of the day (explaining the econ of current issues in the news). Good communication/explainer skills but no previous journalism experience required. I know several of the people there and they’re all amazing, I can’t recommend them enough. (I would just caution, from experience, that journalism culture differs from...

Table 1: Distribution of Votes Among Parties and Districts DistrictToriesWhigsTotalI5149100II5149100III3367100Total1351653001.0 Introduction This post, amazingly enough, is on current events. Stephanopoulos and McGhee have developed a formula, the efficiency gap, that measures the partisanship of the lines drawn for legislative districts. In this post, I present a numerical illustration of this formula and connect it to current events. I conclude with some questions. 2.0 Numerical Example...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. “Why Poverty is Like a Disease” looks at epigenetics and how poverty interacts with one’s own biological development. It’s well written, by someone who describes what it was like growing up poor and how hard it was to escape. (h/t David Batcheck) Our World in Data asks “How Much Will it Cost to Mitigate Climate Change?” Some nice news via Dina Pomeranz: globally deaths from diarrheal disease fell by a third between 2005 and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. The datasets above all have the same means, SD, and correlations explain Justin Matejka & George Fitzmaurice of Autodesk in a modern update of Anscombe’s Quartet. But the lesson is the same – always plot your stuff. (h/t everybody) Jobs postings: Summer jobs with Busara Center, full-year with Michael Clemens, and many at the IPA/J-PAL (and several other orgs) jobs portal. Podcasts: Tyler Cowen talks with Cardiff Garcia on FT...