Weekend econlinks: The quest for perfection

• Gelman writes a useful overview on causality and statistical learning (caveat lector: I have only read through Angrist and Pischke's book, among the three Gelman mentiones; that one is very well written, but aimed at junior graduate students at best: hence, the book's tag "an empiricist's companion" is overselling it; and that has nothing to do with Josh Angrist kindly "advising" me to change my PhD topic/focus, sometime in my beginning graduate years, because 'nobody serious would be interested in structural modelling' :-)). I guess I would position myself more within the “minority view” set, represented here by Heckman (I wouldn’t say that is really a "minority" within Economics alone, by the way), but the usefulness of these debates cannot be questionned. And an outsider's (to Economics) opinion, such as Gelman's, is always more than welcome. Related, the WSJ talks about statistical time travelling to answer interesting counterfactuals; I have a feeling I'll stick to my structural guns for now...

• An excellent article on the junior meritocracy and the perils of standardized testing at very young ages. I share most of the worries expressed therein and indeed agree that the marshmallow test would say at least as much, and probably more, than a standardized intelligence test, in the case of toddlers. My general take is that young humans have much more complex personalities than usually warranted, in ways that elude any catch-all type of tests: after all, some even fall in love at 3 years old.

• The perfect, employer-focused, resume. Uses creativity somewhat differently than its more modern counterparts; I am sure Leonardo would be the one to get all the flyouts and job offers today, as his modern CV were obviously recession-proof.

• The ubiquitous problem with such academic et al rankings (which I brought over and over, including in earlier posts and articles, particularly concerning the academic ranking obsession in Romania, where they also-- still! -- have problems understanding that a publication 'anywhere in ISI' can be total nonsense) is that they try to rank overall, ie. over all disciplines, often over (too) long periods of time etc. The only meaningful hierarchies in science are those done on specific disciplines and, even better, subdisciplines, and over shorter periods of time, thus revealing top new places etc. Then, inter alia, one would not be able to claim that biological sciences are advantaged, since there would be a within-discipline focus. I haven’t heard a single serious (but plenty of marginal) scientist(s) stressing the relevance of the rank of her/his university/institution over that of her/his department/research group. Politicians and journalists should take note, too.

• The perfect chef? That is intriguing enough: I would certainly like to know whether one can trace his whereabouts anywhere around Chicago, in the near future. And the (allegedly) perfect place for the greatest wine-- Rekondo, San Sebastian-- for the far(ther) future.

• Gastronomic sacrilège: where have all the great cheeses gone-- roquefort, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Félicien, gruyère, comté, münster, pont l’évêque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de Savoie, crottin de chavignol?! Worse, together with the cheese, soon gone might be oysters, and epsilon common sense... Quo vadis, France?

• Searching for the perfect chess player, human or machine... Put your money on AI; leave poker for humans.

• The most exciting scientific upshot I've heard about in a great while: explaining the tip-of-the-tongue moments. It comes finally clear (although at this stage I understand it is still just speculative/conjectural, and needs more testing) why polyglots (such as I like to consider myself...) have more of a problem in remembering specific words than people who use a single language: “ […] this kind of forgetfulness is due to infrequency of use; basically, the less often you use a word, the harder it is for your brain to access it." Good, I will feel much better when invoking 'lapsus memoriae' next time :-).

• The quest for the better, simpler, (American) living times: old, but superb Daily Show clip, via Tabarrok, on MR

• Economics research in perfect worlds.


• How very true, though my feeling is that the battle for the brightest junior (and not only) Economists is far from over. It is sadly not Europe overall that might offer an alternative for European economists (not a chance: for starters, Europe needs to cut that embarrasing red tape where academics depend on useless, worthless, ridiculous bureacrats, and to think of attractive real wages... ), but Canada and Australia, which look more and more like worthy competitors to the USA (top; the bulk is way worse than pretty much anywhere in western Europe) places (related, earlier).

Sunday econlinks

• An interesting debate in the latest issue of Capitalism and Society on the current status of Economics and other Social Sciences, worth reading especially for the two comments to the leading article on the theme. Unfortunately, Jon Elster, in his "Excessive Ambitions", otherwise a welcome (and relatively informed) outsider's critique, does not manage to rise up to his declared ambitions of debunking the status quo / portraying "the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models", and eventually falls easy prey to his commenters: Pierre-André Chiappori (who, very elegantly, but unmistakenly, tackles most of the points raised by Elster in his criticism of economic theory and testing its predictions) and respectively, David Hendry (who virtually destroys Elster's line of reasoning and conclusions on empirical modelling in Economics). To add up to that, beyond the many (surprising!) fallacies that Elster commits in his scientific criticism (not even half of them acknowledged, e.g. his sole reliance on third-party sources in the discussion of the criticism to the empirics is somewhat revealed, however the very selected sample of those sources --strategy common also to his earlier sections-- does not seem at all problematic to the author), what strikes me throughout his text is his often bringing up the lack of "humility" of economists (e.g., "The competence of economists may not be in question, but their humility is"), although in reading his piece I was rather intrigued by Elster's own absence of humility whatsoever in his strongly opinionated, though insufficiently argued, assessment... I was really hoping for something more serious.
• Solving the public-goods free rider problem using neuronal measures of economic value. Looks super interesting!
• "[D]oes conspicuous consumption fall and efficiency increase in a society in which income is conspicuous?" or some of the potentially positive implications (research-wise only...) of Norway's recent crazy move to make public all tax records of its (tax-paying) residents...
• Even Robert Parker can make a total mess of himself when it comes to wine blind tasting (via cheaptalk). And a short review of a new wine book by somebody who really doesn't like Parker (thanks to Fred for the link).
• "Wellicht komt er ooit een nieuw paradigma dat voor de economische wetenschap net zo revolutionair zal zijn als kwantummechanica is geweest voor de natuurkunde. Tot die tijd is het beter om te blijven schipperen met de kapstokken die we hebben in plaats van alles jassen op één grote hoop te gooien." door Wouter den Haan, op MeJudice
• An older interview with the foremost cafeteria Keynesian (Part 1, Part 2). I only agree with about 50% of what he's saying here... And I think some are just too fast in dismissing Milton Friedman, but... on verra.
• Norman Manea on Herta Muller's Literature Nobel. Though ultimately there isn't much in there about her Nobel..., which might actually be the whole idea of that post.
• Brinkmann, Ehrman and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Very interesting, all news to me.
• Is shouting the new spanking? Hopefully not.
• I generally agree, though, for instance, Econophysicists seem to have a hard time both on the Economics and on the Physics academic/ publishing market. Not that I wonder much why that is the case, but others may...
  

Sunday night econlinks

• Bilingualism and early child development: very interesting brand-new research in PNAS (institutional or individual subscription needed, else only abstract is free). And yes, bilingualism clearly pays off, if you were wondering.

• Vienna and the largest Swiss cities top Mercer's quality of living index for '09, while Munich appears to be the winner if you account simultaneously for both quality of living (position 7) and infrastructure (position 2). "München mag Dich" indeed, as they say.

• There are many problems with (some of) these suggestions concerning reforming the academe and pre-academe, but there should indeed be a continuous debate on these issues. Proposals 3,4 and 5 could be ok with me in the current format; the other three are presented in an unnecessary radical perspective, despite being debated many times before and shown not to be that simple as they seem at first sight. Via Gabi Istrate, on Ad Astra. An interesting corrolary here is the following: why not decentralize completely the process and leave it up to each university to organize itself as it fits it best (e.g. by offering tenure or not, by having "generalist" or "specialist" departments etc) ? In the long run the best academic/educational system would win (by attracting the best/most students, by generating the highest-earning/most succesful graduates etc.)? Of course, to some extent these differences exist even now, but more among "unusual" types of academic/research institutes and "typical" universities.

• Going Dutch -- the article would like to give an "American perspective", but ends somewhere midway and misses much of what I would have expected. Oh, and 18 months... come on! After 18 months you know yet nothing about Amsterdam, not to mention the whole of Netherlands (even after long discussions with Geert Mak) ... I'd love to read his opinions after 80 months... As for 'Socialism gone Wild', the author could try his chance a bit more to the North of Europe :-).

Econlinks for the weekend

• NYU Stern business school economists on the crisis, pinning down the real causes much to the same factors as Caballero did (1st bullet point). The book they advertise will certainly be widely read.

• Science child psychology article on disparities in children vocabulary explained by early gestures acquisition (differentiating based on SES family background). Goes a mile in the direction of Heckman's research project (see for instance here, 5th bullet point) on the importance of very early non-cognitive and cognitive abilities. See also an earlier comment of mine on another topic-related Science paper.

• Tyler Cowen's intriguing advice on what places one should necessarily visit in the USA. Well, I've already toured 3 of his 5 top choices... but I also think Chicago and Boston cannot miss a top 5... And if you want to stop in one of those cities for longer, you might consult the US city matchmaker I mentioned earlier (5th bullet point)...

• Perhaps some (good) advice for friends & relatives who are parents of toddlers (or older kids, for that matter): a) 5 ways to outsmart your 2/3/4-year olds and b) what to do when your kids provoke you (though a cost-benefit analysis is only vaguely implemented...). And meanwhile all you (Economics-inclined...) parents should be waiting for the "Parentonomics" book (to be released quite soon) that might provide well argumented economic analysis of all that.

• It is a very important research topic, granted (and, my hunch has always been and continues to be that 'deliberate practice' explains most of the observed high achievements), but my feeling is that findings & methodology therein are so far overrated (and over-mediatized) and that much more research is needed to get a satisfying, not to say definitive, answer... One ought to welcome however the distinction between plain hard work throughout (the 99% perspiration...) and high productivity hours (the nap after lunch?...).

• Don't judge US presidents (or for that matter, Greg Mankiw...) by the outcome ... Good luck convincing people of that... :-).

• Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy with more words of wisdom: there's no stimulus free lunch. Murphy continues from his ideas put forward here. I guess the debate is really or mainly about the multiplier size; the fact that Becker and Murphy insist so much that it is much lower than the advocated 1.5 should get other economists paying more attention (including some European economists I know who also believe the effect of the multiplier might well be that large...)

• Envy and schadenfreude, in the brain. Confirms intuition, right?

• "I think we economists love to speculate about heterodox theories when times are good and we feel free to discuss experimental alternatives to economic orthodoxy (and nobody is paying us much attention during good times anyway). But when the global economy is in free fall and everyone else seems ready to throw each and every Econ 101 principle out the window, we get desperate to save the core principles that lead to prosperity and development." Read more in Easterly's excellent piece on the economists' returning home.

• High time for the Lehman Sisters! They have all my support.

• The statistician on the origins of instrumental variables (read also his earlier account on the soon-to-be-out Angrist and Pischke book, which he appears to warmly recommend)

• Esther Duflo sometimes adventures in areas where she does not necessarily have a serious comparative advantange (see 3rd bullet point here for the area where one shouldn't start an argument with her...) I don't see how proper incentives (here disincentives...) can be given by imposing pay caps in the financial sector, what is, unfortunately, happening de facto now (at least if the respective financial institution receives governmental help). Philippon's point is well taken (and the co-authored research this is based on looks pretty sound), but he stops short from recommending any policy initiatives that would involve income ceilings, despite obtaining that financial guru's were paid too much. Au contraire, I think Posner and Becker ('at any level' is well worth bookmarking...) are the ones right in this context.

Econlinks for the weekend

• Dan Hamermesh, on Freakonomics, tackles a very interesting issue: competition between kids, grandkids and so on, for parental bequests. I don't have such a parental dilemma as yet, but my parents do, I guess :-).

• Relative social status seems to dominate relative material status: the neuroscience evidence. Of course I knew that all the time :-).

• How Economics can turn bleeding hearts into capitalists (and mutatis mutandis, for most of the other social sciences :-)). Here's the perspective on the study, by Ray Fisman, in Forbes and here's a first draft of Fisman, Kariv and Markovits (2008).

• Serious carbon tax homework for Greg Mankiw.

Quote for week 13th to 19th of Jan '08

[...]The gift of early insight into chess or math or music is often also accompanied by a growing obsession with those activities, simply because of the wonders of connection and invention that unfold in the young mind. The world itself, with its more messy human interactions, its complicated histories, its emotional conflicts, can be put aside, and attention focused on an intricate bounded cosmos. Perhaps we should be grateful that such gifts are so rare, for if they were not, how many of us would prefer to remain cocooned in these glass-bead games? At least in mathematics and music, we may be grateful too that ultimately, with the coming of maturity, the world starts to put constraints on abstract play. Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone. But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world.

Edward Rothstein, "Fischer vs. the World: A Chess Giant's Endgame"

Read the quote of the previous week.

Quote for the week 6th-12th of Jan '08

[...] children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think. If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the scientific evidence, they grow up and decide that the Bible is literally true or that the movements of the planets rule their lives, that is their privilege. The important point is that it is their privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure. And this, of course, is especially important when we reflect that children become the parents of the next generation, in a position to pass on whatever indoctrination may have moulded them."

Richard Dawkins, in "The God Delusion"

Read the quote of the previous week.

Importance of early environment for children's cognitive development: Bucharest Early Intervention Project

A very important and welcome study on the cognitive recovery of socially deprived young children, using a randomized controlled trial with young orphans from Bucharest, Romania, has been published in Science, on the 21st of Dec '07. You can read the abstract here.

As you can see from the abstract linked above, none of the authors is affiliated with a Romanian institution; however, it comes clear from the full text that they were greatly helped (and initially invited to do the study) by the Romanian authorities, which is a very pleasant surprise; I must confess that I would have been (and in fact, still am, to a certain degree...) very pessimistic inasmuch cooperation of Romanian authorities is concerned in such cases (perhaps this one here went through just fine given the huge importance of the topic and continuing international pressure etc.). I copy-paste below the fragment depicting the chronological interaction with the Romanian authorities in context and parts of the crucial ethical considerations for such a study:

First, our study was initiated at the invitation of the then–secretary of state for child protection in Romania and was approved by the local commissions on child protection in Bucharest, the Romanian ministry of health, and, in 2002, by an ad hoc ethics committee comprising appointees from several government and Bucharest University academic departments. It was therefore done with the participation and approval of local authorities. Second, the institutional review boards (IRBs) of the home institutions of the three principal investigators (the University of Minnesota, Tulane University, and the University of Maryland) approved the project. Third, we implemented a policy of noninterference with placement of children in both groups into alternative family care environments, leaving those decisions to Romanian child protection authorities (according to Romanian law). The only exception to the noninterference rule was that we ensured that no child placed in foster care as part of the randomization process would ever be returned to an institution [...]. Fourth, after our preliminary results began to suggest positive benefits of foster care, we held a press conference to announce the results of our investigation. Key ministries in the Romanian government were invited to attend and sent representatives to this meeting. The then–U.S. ambassador to Romania (who was briefed in advance about our findings) gave the opening remarks at the conference. Fifth, although the usefulness of clinical equipoise is controversial among bioethicists [...], a reasonable interpretation of clinical equipoise supports the research design in this project. Clinical equipoise is the notion that there must be uncertainty in the expert community about the relative merits of experimental and control interventions such that no subject should be randomized to an intervention known to be inferior to the standard of care [...]. Because of the uncertainty in the results of prior research, it had not been established unequivocally that foster care was superior to institutionalized care across all domains of functioning, especially with respect to how young children initially placed in institutional care function when placed in foster care as compared with children who remain in the institutional setting. Moreover, at the start of our study there was uncertainty about the relative merits of institutional and foster care in the Romanian child welfare community, with a historical bias in favor of institutional care. Additionally, given that the study was invited by Romanian authorities and conducted there, with the aim of guiding child welfare policy in Romania, it made sense to assess the study in view of the local standard of care, which was institutional care. The study also presented no more than minimal risk to the subjects; specifically, children assigned to the IG continued to receive the same care as if the study had not been conducted, and the measures we used have all been used for many years in developmental science research. Lastly, we were aware from the outset of the policy implications of our work, and as the study progressed we made our results available to government officials and child protection professionals. Indeed, several years after our study began, the Romanian government passed a law that prohibits institutionalizing children less than 2 years old, unless the child is severely handicapped.

Despite the small scale of the study, the findings have enormous implications and confirm in several ways earlier research on the importance of the very early (and "very early" should be interpreted as crucial here!) environment for children's subsequent cognitive development. I quote below the summary of the findings of the Science report and the authors' conclusions regarding implications for child welfare:

Three main findings emerge from this study. First, as we have previously reported [...], children reared in institutions showed greatly diminished intellectual performance (borderline mental retardation) relative to children reared in their families of origin. Second, as a group, children randomly assigned to foster care experienced significant gains in cognitive function. Lastly, at first glance our findings suggest that there may be a sensitive period spanning the first 2 years of life within which the onset of foster care exerts a maximal effect on cognitive development. However, a closer reading of our analyses suggests a more parsimonious conclusion: That the younger a child is when placed in foster care, the better the outcome. Indeed, there was a continuing "cost" to children who remained in the institution over the course of our study. These results are compatible with the notion of a sensitive period, but discovering whether such a period truly exists or determining the borders that delineate it would likely require a larger sample size with a broader age range at intervention onset.

The results of this study have implications for child welfare because they suggest that placement in families is more advantageous for cognitive development in infants and young children than placement in institutional settings. For countries grappling with how best to care for abandoned, orphaned, and maltreated young children, these findings deserve consideration. The results also indicate that previously institutionalized children's cognitive development benefits most from foster care if placement occurs relatively early in a child's life.

I would only add that it would have been great to also deal with the non-cognitive implications of the child early environment, which are possibly even more important than the effect on the cognitive development. There is considerable current research addressing this issue (and a very important chunk of this research is also performed within economics nowadays-- area where I am personally interested in, in terms of future plans of research-- see for instance the very interesting related projects of Jim Heckman and his co-authors, e.g. here, under the headline "Studies in Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills"), but, as always, the difficulty rests with implementing such a randomized trial, to start with. Hence, this would have been a great opportunity (perhaps that idea is still pursued and a different study will be/is being published dealing with it); nonetheless, I agree that the initial focus was different and to design and perform this bit already required a lot.

If you want to read more on the topic of this post: the link to the full Science report (you need a subscription to Science to access it). Read also a summary with further comments regarding ethical considerations, on 60-seconds-science (I do not agree with the author's remarks, concluding in 'I’m not sure why this study was necessary', but I leave further discussions here for some other time). Finally, read also a short article on ethical guidelines concerning international research with abandoned children (again, subscription to Science required).

Raising smart kids

Here's a very well written article from the Scientific American, on raising smart kids (since I have quite many friends with young kids or expecting them: mothers and fathers (to be), pay great attention to this). You might also want to (re)read an older entry of mine on the same topic. Indeed, to sum up the article(s) above in my way, what one should induce to his/her children is the belief that nothing is impossible and that the key combination for achieving anything is ambition+ effort+ perseverance. Which is exhaustive. Really. In other words, you should get them to the stage where anything that looks difficult to start with, should be approached by "I so much love a challenge!"

Now, related in several ways to the above, as a (future) parent you should also realize that many things have been changing (which should be relevant unless you decide to isolate yourselves in a Blue Lagoon) and thus, for instance, that toddlers increasingly demand authenticity (this is via Tyler Cohen on MR, where you can also read some further interesting comments). And to conclude keeping on the psychological frequence, we still don't know enough about what drives adolescents to take so many risks, though certain myths are by now debunked and you should be well aware of that. Remember here the part about the challenges, one needs to keep them busy with the proper ones...

Funniest thing I've read today

...is about a "conversation with a slightly-lingual-in-two-languages toddler". Via Andy's blog. Enjoy (and try to stop laughing) :-).

How to (and how not to) praise (your) kids

I certainly agree with the conclusions of this interesting article in the New York Magazine (overviewing a few dozen recent studies on the topic): praising the effort rather than the intelligence or, even better formulated, praise needs to be specific. Could have certainly worked much better also in my case, though it wasn't my parents who didn't do their job properly :-). But the magnitudes observed even in very simple one-time experiments are simply unbelievable (plain counter-intuitive, from some point onwards). This clearly calls for more research and for seriously trying to formalize the findings by means of a model (again, we are faced with soft, descriptive social sciences, on the one hand vs. economics, on the other hand). And the NYMag author's self-impressions, in the end, even as a parent, are spoiling somewhat the spirit of the article so far. But it is still interesting.

The link is via Tyler Cowen on MR.