faulker020

The economics of rap lyrics would be an interesting subject for a pop econ book. When I was a kid, I barely listened to rap, and most of what I knew was West Coast "gangsta rap." To me, gangsta rap was basically a form of chivalric fiction -  a glorification of the honorable, violent lifestyle of warriors in an anarchic society. It was all just "Mine enemies besmirched my honor, so I smote them down with the strength of my good right arm." Medieval knights were basically just gangsters, after all, so it makes sense that they'd have similar romantic myths. I also was dimly aware of protest rap ("Fuck tha Police", Public Enemy, KRS-One, etc.) and 80s dance rap (a variant of goofy 80s dance music). But as I got older and started to listen to more rap, I noticed one theme that was overwhelmingly common, and seemed to be getting more dominant: the rags-to-riches story. A huge amount of rap these days, and for at least the last ten years, has lyrics that are...

Earlier this year, there was an interesting debate between Russ Roberts of EconTalk and Adam Ozimek of Forbes about ideology and economics. Basically, Roberts (mostly on Twitter) took the cynical position that ideology governs much of people's stances on policy positions, that this is inevitable, and that we should just accept it. Ozimek said no , economists aren't as ideological as Roberts thinks, even commentators in the public sphere. He also said that if you find that your own positions are driven by ideology, it's a sign that maybe you should rethink how you form your positions. More recently, the argument flared up again. Roberts declared the following: Then one day I realized that if I knew one policy position of an economist, I could predict the others ones. 3/ — Russell Roberts (@EconTalker) October 20, 2015 I then challenged Russ to predict my positions on various policies. Initially I suggested that I would tell him three of my positions, and then name three oth...

I do not understand this Tyler Cowen post about Chinese catch-up growth: It seems obvious to many people that Chinese growth is Solow-like catch-up growth, as the country was applying already-introduced technologies to its development.  But how many other economies have grown at about ten percent for so long?  Was there not a secret ingredient added to the mix?  Increasing returns to scale?...Something about Communist Party governance which enabled the corruption to be channeled productively into building more infrastructure rather than holding up progress?  Tiger Mom parenting combined with a relatively meritocratic exam system?...  More radically, is there some “natural,” culture-neutral rate at which innovations trickle down from the world leaders to the poorer countries?  The diversity of growth rates would seem to indicate not.  Is each country then not innovating — with varying degrees of success — by building its culture-specific net for catchi...

I wrote a post about lazy econ critiques , so some folks on Twitter were asking me "Which critiques do you think are good, and which are not?" So since I'm overjoyed when someone actually cares what I think enough to ask, I decided to make a list! Naturally, the critiques will be simplified and a bit straw-mannish, but you get the idea. Bad Critiques 1. "Econ should stop pretending to be value-neutral." Call me crazy, but I think researchers should try to keep facts and values ("positive" and "normative" econ) separate. They won't completely succeed, but they ought to try their best. No matter what your values are, you'll be better able to implement them if you know the facts as much as possible. That doesn't mean economists shouldn't have values, it just means they should try not to let those values interfere with their assessment of the facts. "But dude, being anti-ideological is an ideology too!" Mmm, an insightfu...

There's a very interesting debate going on between Harvard's Sendhil Mullainathan and Barnard's Rajiv Sethi, on racial bias in police shootings. Mullainathan looked at the data and found that police likelihood of shooting a black person in a given encounter was no higher (or barely higher) than their likelihood of shooting a white person. He concluded that while police may be racially biased in terms of how often they go after black people, they're not very biased in terms of how likely they are to shoot the people they go after. Sethi said: Not so fast . Mullainathan just looked at the killing rate conditional on an encounter, but Sethi wants to also condition on the  type  of encounter, which probably differs on average across races. Police might be more likely to misinterpret nonthreatening encounters with black people as threatening, and therefore be more likely to pull the trigger. Sethi's hypothesis says that police basically give black people a hard time, in...

Robin Hanson declares that thanks to Big Data, we will soon discover the SUPER FACTORS that drive all of human differences: In a factor analysis, one takes a large high-dimensional dataset and finds a low dimensional set of variables that can explain as much as possible of the total variation in that dataset. A big advantage of factor analysis is that it doesn’t require much theoretical knowledge about the nature of the variables in the data or their relations – factors are mostly determined directly by the data...  [P]eople vary in far more ways than intelligence, ideology, and personality, and factor analyses have been applied to many of these other human feature categories. For example, there have been factors analyses of jobs, brands, faces, body shape, gait, accent, diet, leisure behavior, friendship networks, physical health, mortality, demography, national cultures, and zip codes.  [F]actors found in different feature categories are often substantially correlated with ...

Martin Beraja, Erik Hurst, and Juan Ospina have constructed state price indices from retail scanner data! That's pretty badass. Nice job, guys. I don't know what state-level price indices already exist, but these look pretty good, so if you need state-level price data for your research, you might want to mail these guys! It's only from 2006, of course, and it's biased because it only includes stuff that people buy in stores. Anyway, Beraja et al. use their state-level data to help make a model of regional shocks. (I don't really believe the model that much, but that's not the point.) This kind of micro-flavored macro - "dissagregated" macro, if you will - seems to be getting more important . I've heard a number of other macro folks talk about making these sorts of models, and there seems to be a lot more focus on collecting region-, industry-, and firm-specific data. Related trends include models with heterogeneity, network models, and institutio...

Hey, you know, I like a good econ critique as well as the next person. Goodness knows, econ needs some critiquing. The profession is still too soft on wanky (i.e. useless or untestable) theory, still sloppy with the evidence , still focused too much on macro, still too enamored with libertarian ideas, and still too accepting of sexism. But compared to a lot of fields out there, econ is really on an upward trajectory. Theoretical particle physics is in the process of abandoning empiricism for wanky string theory, psych has a huge reproducibility crisis, anthropology has degenerated into leftist activism, and sociology appears to be in danger of following. Compared to those guys, econ looks like it's in pretty good shape, with much better data, more of an applied micro focus, and rapid innovation in empirical methodology. BUT, it's Econ Nobel season, and so someone needs to do the job of standing up and repeating all the old disses. This year, it's Joris Luyendijk in The Guar...