Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (December 29, 2018)
- Comment of the Day: Graydon: Insecurity Management: "I think you're missing the central thing about Drake's writing. It is not so much that, yeah, these are not the best circumstances and our feels are in abeyance; that happens, that's depicted. But among that depiction you get what I think of as the essential Drake thing, which is a vehicle crew. They may not like each other much; they may not, in some senses of the word, trust one another. But they are entirely predictable to one another, and reliable...
Jon Schwarz: The 10 Most Awful Articles in the Weekly Standard’s Short Life: "Honorable Mention. Self-Flattering Quote by Anonymous Weekly Standard Minion [David Brooks], 2018: This isn’t an article, but deserves to be included here due to its timeless, crystalline beauty: According to a nameless Weekly Standard staffer, the magazine’s original masthead constituted 'one of the greatest collections of writerly talent ever put together outside the New Yorker. What makes this so perfect is that it shows the Weekly Standard training its keen power of observation upon itself.... Tucker Carlson, John Podhoretz and Charles Krauthammer somehow become James Thurber, Dorothy Parker and E.B. White. No matter the subject, the Weekly Standard assessed it with the exact same hubris, blindness, and lunatic hyperbole...
Ray Dalio: Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises
PS editors: PS Commentators’ Best Reads in 2018: "Project Syndicate contributors once again share some of the books that resonated with them the most over the past year. From sweeping histories to ambitious new works of fiction, readers of all tastes and persuasions should find something to pique their interest in this year’s selection...
Barry Ritholtz: How to Use Behavioral Finance in Asset Management, Part I: "Annual Mea Culpas: I learned this from Ray Dalio about a decade ago: every year I make a list of what I got wrong and what I learned from the experience.... Acknowledging your mistakes...
Cosma Shalizi (2007): g, a Statistical Myth: "Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can't tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work...
Sean Illing: What Is Fascism? Yale Philosopher Jason Stanley Explains How It Works: "This is probably a good time to pivot to the glittering elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Is he a fascist?" Jason Stanley: "I make the case in my book that he practices fascist politics. Now, that doesn’t mean his government is a fascist government. For one thing, I think it’s very difficult to say what a fascist government is...
Raymond Fisman, Keith Gladstone, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu (2017): Do Americans Want to Tax Capital?: Evidence from Online Surveys: "A vast theoretical literature in public finance has studied the question of the desirability of capital taxation. Distinct from questions of the optimality of taxing wealth is whether it is politically feasible. We provide, to our knowledge, the first investigation of individuals’ preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth, via a survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk...
Wikipedia: Tzoah Rotachat
Carlos Lozada: Anti-Trump Conservatives Want to Reverse the GOP’s Destruction. But They Helped Light the Fuse: "What kind of conservatism can survive, let alone thrive, in American politics today? The question hangs over the Never Trump volumes.... Flake... keeps the faith. 'With hard work... and maybe a little luck, we will right this ship'... #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility
Megan Burbank: A "neat" thing I have learned from writing food reviews: "There is nothing more upsetting to some people than a woman saying she ate a lot without caging it in guilt or apology. It was truly weird to discover people will actually chastise you for saying you ate a lot IN A FOOD REVIEW, where eating is, you know, essential. The absurdity mounts: the first time this happened to me it was on a story where I said I biked 7 miles before eating (and after). Look, no one should be food-shamed, I have so little time for it, and fitness is not a virtue, but I biked 14 miles. I gotta refuel! The second was on a story where I said I ate three pastries and was pretty gleeful about the whole thing. but if somebody enjoying what they eat is personally upsetting...
Mariana Zerpa: Short and Medium Run Impacts of Preschool Education: Evidence from State Pre-K Programs: "I also provide a discussion of two local average treatment effects under different counterfactual child care arrangements. I find implied effects that are very large, although not very different from the estimates found in the literature on Head Start. This finding highlights the relevance of estimating intention- to-treat effects on the full affected cohorts.... The relevance of externalities and peer effects in early childhood experience is an open question that is part of a promising research agenda...
Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken: Do Leaders Matter?: National Leadership and Growth Since World War II: "We use deaths of leaders while in office as a source of exogenous variation in leadership, and ask whether these plausibly exogenous leadership transitions are associated with shifts in country growth rates. We find robust evidence that leaders matter... strongest in autocratic settings where there are fewer constraints on a leader’s power...
Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Dylan Matthews: 2020 Democratic Nomination Predictions: Who’s Overrated and Underrated: "Nobody outside Amy Klobuchar’s state knows who the senior senator from Minnesota is, except for hardcore political junkies. But here’s the thing that hardcore political junkies know about her: She’s probably the most popular politician in America.... Even though Klobuchar isn’t well-known, she clearly has some political skills.... To the extent that Democrats want to put their various factional disputes aside and just try to win the damn election, Klobuchar smells a lot like the electability candidate...
