Utopia, you are standing in it!

I have previously criticized universities and news outlets for their handling of racism on and around campus (and sexual assault, too). But I’m not in the business of giving activists advice. So I’mspeaking out of turn on one side point here, to recommend: don’t talk to the police. (Nothing personal.)

The campus police at UW have released body camera video ofthem escorting a student from class and arresting him for allegedly spray-painting anti-racist graffiti. (For critical commentary on this situation, here’s astatement from faculty at staff, including a bunch of sociologists; and a letter of support forstudents from the faculty and staff in Afro-American studies.) Several things are disturbing about this; I’d like to call attention to the conversation. Here’s the video, with my comment below:

(Other videos from the police department, showing other parts of their interactions, are here.)

I have no idea whether this man…

The Pew Research Center recently put out a report on the share of U.S. older women living alone. The main finding they reported was a reversal in the long trend toward old women living alone after 1990. After rising to a peak of 38% in 1990, the share of women age 65+ living along fell to 32% by 2014. It’s a big turnaround. The report attributes it in part to the rising life expectancy of men, so fewer old women are widowed.

The tricky thing about this is the changing age distribution of the old population (the Pew report breaks the group down into 65-84 versus 85+, but doesn’t dwell on the changing relative size of those two groups). Here’s an additional breakdown, from the same Census data Pew used (from IPUMS.org), showing percent living alone by age for women:

Two things in this figure: the percent living alone is much lower…

The World Bank’s latest PR campaign is that “for the first time in history” we can “eliminate extreme poverty” (for the hubris of this claim and the many times it’s been said before see here).

Lost in the fine print is the disclaimer that “extreme poverty” is defined as $1.25 / day.

And there has been some progress on that front (clic the pic for a better image):

However, since virtually all the decline from 1981 to 2009 is from China, I’d give the credit largely to “state capitalism” and not to any top down multilateral agency development program.

And, if we raise the bar on extreme poverty to, say, $2.00 per day, the situation is far from rosy (clic the pic for a better image):

At $2.00 China’s progress is not as great, India is regressing, as is SSA and overall, the number barely budges in the last…

Tyler Cowen doesn’t, at least not any more. In a provocative NY Times piece today, Tyler says, “sustained, meteoric growth in emerging economies may no longer be possible”. He points to 4 culprits, Automation, Global Supply Sources, Wider Economic Gaps, & Aging Populations.

There is some interesting academic work on the possibility that eventual global convergence is not a sure thing, even if countries ADOPT ALL THE “RIGHT” POLICIES

Here’s Howitt and Meyer (JMCB 2005), “a country may have only a finite window of opportunity in which to raise its skill levels to those required for R&D, failing which the country will remain trapped in implementation or stagnation even if it adopts the same policies and institutions as the world’s technology leaders.”

Yikes!

Even the ever-green prescription of “free-trade” may lead to divergence rather than convergence.

Here’s Bajona and Kehoe (RED 2010), “In models in which convergence in…

The Telegraph has a great piece lambasting the spending of the European Development Fund, an entity “managed by the notoriously spendthrift EuropeAid and has – it is fair to say – not covered itself in glory.”

Great Britain has also done its fair share of funding questionable aid projects. Here are some of my…

A HT to Michael Cameron associate professor in the Department of Economics for his post on Bazinganomics. It is a website that uses scenes from the comedy show The Big Bang Theory to illustrate economic concepts which mainly fall into micro topics:
FOUNDATIONS
MARKETS AT WORK
ELASTICITY
PRICE CONTROLS
EXTERNALITIES & PUBLIC GOODS
COSTS & PRODUCTION
PERFECT COMPETITION
MONOPOLY AND PRICE DISCRIMINATION
MONOPOLISTIC COMPETITION
STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR & OLIGOPOLY
BEHAVIORAL ECON & RISK
CONSUMER CHOICE

Like the Economics of Seinfeld, the purpose of Bazinganomics is to provide teachers with video clips from a popular television programme that can be used in the classroom to help facilitate engagement. Worth a look especially if you are a fan of the show.

Colin Camerer and colleagues recently published a Science article on the replicability of behavioural economics. ‘It appears that there is some difference in replication success’ between psychology and economics, they write, given their reproducibility rate of 61% and psychology’s of 36%. I took a closer look at the data to find out whether there really are any substantial differences between fields.

Commenting on the replication success rates in psychology and economics, Colin Camerer is quoted as saying: “It is like a grade of B+ for psychology versus A– for economics.” Unsurprisingly, his team’s Science paper also includes speculation as to what contributes to economics’ “relatively good replication success”. However, such speculation is premature as it is not established whether economics actually displays better replicability than the only other research field which has tried to estimate its replicability (that would be psychology). Let’s check the numbers in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Replicability…

The replicability of psychological research is surprisingly low. Why? In this blog post I present new evidence showing that questionable research practices are at the heart of failures to replicate psychological effects.

Quick recap. A recent publication in Science claims that only around 40% of psychological findings are replicable, based on 100 replication attempts in the Reproducibility Project Psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). A few months later, a critical commentary in the same journal made all sorts of claims, including that the surprisingly low 40% replication success rate is due to replications having been unfaithful to the original studies’ methods (Gilbert et al., 2016). A little while later, I published an article in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review re-analysing the data by the 100 replication teams (Kunert, 2016). I found evidence for questionable research practices being at the heart of failures to replicate, rather than…

Written by Anja Radjenovic,

© Sondem / Fotolia

Radicalisation and violent extremism that lead to terrorist attacks are a serious threat both to countries’ security and to their citizens. Although both phenomena often concern male perpetrators, the recent rise in European female fighters recruited by terrorist organisations, notably ISIL/Da’esh, shows the need to consider the role of women when addressing violent extremism. Acknowledging the potential threat resulting from radicalised women and paying greater attention to the gender dimension of counter-radicalisation strategies and the specific contribution that women can make in this area is urgent.

To understand female radicalisation and violent extremism, experts increasingly focus on the potential threat posed by radicalised women by asking questions: who they are, why they are being radicalised, and what role they play in radicalisation and within violent extremist organisations. The OSCE has found that there is no single pathway to radicalisation, nor a single…

My usual routine when I’ve exhausted the social media sites that I visit four or five times a day is to rotate between a specific three or four websites. I usually check in with ESPN, fivethirtyeight, reddit, and Rolling Stone. About a week ago when I was following this same pattern I stumbled onto Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the  “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.

In my last blog post I examined the best decades in music according to Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. I got some good feedback on this project so I decided to use a similar formula and examine the best decades for movies based on IMDb’s Top 250 movies list and Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 movies list.

via Normal Countries: The East 25 Years After Communism | Andrei Shleifer.