What's new

... or rather not entirely new- objectively speaking- but recent impressions from my part, so to say. This time about classical music, economic research and some new scientific highlights...

I ran into an excellent resource of classical music online that has, among other things, short informative biographies of many composers and- particularly- complete librettos for a few hundreds of the most famous world operas. See for instance the libretto for Leoncavallo's "I Pagliacci" (not randomly selected: if it all goes well, I would have seen I Pagliacci performed live in the famous Arena di Verona by the end of June). And since we talk about classical music, these are two of my favourite live classical music radios: ClassicFM UK, Radio 4 NL (they work most of the time!). Enjoy!

I reread a part of a very much cited interview with Jim Heckman (see also on this blog a short biographical note about the Nobel Laureate Heckman that I wrote a while ago for the Educational Supplement of the newspaper Gandul- in Romanian though) last year. This is about the "cute economics" literature that seems to be favoured by many economists nowadays, to the expense of the trully important research questions. I could not agree more with Heckman who turns against all these researchers- and I can say I even have personal reasons for that: one of these cute economics fans (and a world famous economist...) literally told me to change my PhD topic - since really nobody is interested in complex structural models & co - and tackle one of these cute economics topics that gets published immediately. It is true that I would have perhaps finished my PhD for quite some time now if I had followed his advice- nonetheless that would go against my principles (and therefore I am still stressing out with this thesis...). Anyways, this is the excerpt from Heckman's interview that every economist should digest:

In economics there's a trend now to come up with cute papers in an effort to be cited as many times as possible. All the incentives point that way, especially for young professors who seem risk-averse rather than risk-taking after they get tenure. In some quarters of our profession, the level of discussion has sunk to the level of a New Yorker article: coffee-table articles about “cute” topics, papers using “clever” instruments. The authors of these papers are usually unclear about the economic questions they address, the data used to support their conclusions and the econometrics used to justify their estimates. This is a sad development that I hope is a passing fad. Most of this work is without substance, but it makes a short-lived splash and it's easy to do. Many young economists are going for the cute and the clever at the expense of working on hard and important foundational problems.

There were two studies in Science last months that really caught my attention. One of them is a experimental sociological study investigating the secrets of success in the entertainment industry (an artificial "music market" in this case)- inter alia it could attempt to explain why some puerile and lacking any musical virtue songs such as "Dragostea din Tei" (aka "The MiYaHee" song for most foreigners) caught up so well all around the world- the initial inertia matters!- and another one is a psychological (field) study about the decisions made by consumers faced with different choices- this basically tells you- counter to common sense- not to think too much before buying a car or a house since you'll only have regrets (and headaches) and you'll be far less satisfied than when you choose these complex goods very fast, based on a minimum of features. From the monthly highlights of the AAAS:

Salganik, Dodds and Watts (2006) argue in the 10 Feb Science that there are no guarantees when it comes to knowing who or what the next big hit will be. In a study designed to understand the social underpinnings of success, the sociologists set up a Web site where people could listen to, rate, and download previously unknown songs by unknown musicians. Participants in one group were only given song titles and band names as their guide, while other groups received information about previous participants' choices (i.e., how many times songs were downloaded). The researchers found that popular songs were more popular (and unpopular songs less popular) in the groups where participants had access to other people's opinions; but which particular songs became very popular was nearly impossible to predict. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.

We generally believe that taking time to think about a decision will result in a good choice. And the more complicated the decision, the more time many of us will spend agonizing over it. Now a Report in the 17 Feb 2006 Science suggests that thinking too much can sometimes get in the way of making the right decision. In a set of laboratory and "real-world" experiments, Dijksterhuis et al. [researchers from the University of Amsterdam] studied people making a range of consumer choices -- from simple ones like deciding what kitchen accessories to buy, to more complex ones like choosing a new car or furniture. They found that shoppers who spent time consciously thinking about simple items like oven mitts or shampoo were generally pleased with their purchases. But when faced with a more complicated choice like picking the best of 4 cars based on 12 attributes (with one car clearly better than the rest) conscious thinkers performed no better than chance, choosing the best car only 25% of the time. Even more surprising was that when researchers distracted the participants with puzzles before asking for their car choices, more than half ended up picking the best car. Counter to what we might think, the findings suggest that as choices become more complex, better decisions come from allowing one's unconscious to sift through the options.