Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

L'affaire Potter

You are all, I think, familiar with the details of L'Affaire Potter, so I need not enumerate them here. If you aren't already familiar with this story, you probably don't care what I have to say about it, so you can skip the rest of this post. But as a Quebec-based academic with a weekly column in a national newspaper, I feel obliged to say something.

Econoblogging - still a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative?

This Friday I will be joining colleagues in international affairs, journalism, public policy and political science to talk about "Academics in the Media Landscape: The Role of Scholar-Columnist-Bloggers". The panel is part of Carleton's Visions for Canada, 2042 conference, which explores "the ways innovative collaboration among researchers and the community may be the most effective response to Canada’s future challenges." As part of that exploration, us scholar-columnist-bloggers have been asked to talk about trends in our corners of the blogosphere, and make some predictions and prescriptions for the role of scholar-op-ed-writers-bloggers in Canada as it hurtles towards 2042. Here are my speaking notes for that event. The event is open to the public, if you would like to drop by.

That height study: bad science, bad reporting, both - or neither?

It's been reported on NPR: Americans are shrinking, while Chinese and Koreans sprout up. In the New York Times: Adults have become shorter in many countries. In the Guardian: Women and men have grown taller over last century.  On Global News: Canadians don't stack up in height quite like they used to. In the Daily Telegraph: British overtake Americans after growing 11 cm in 100 years. By Quartz India: India's women are gaining height faster than India's men, but Indians are still very short. 

The study is called "A century of trends in adult human height". It's attributed to a research team called the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, and the corresponding author is Majid Ezzati, a Professor at Imperial College’s School of Public Health. The research team did a meta-analysis of 1472 studies, all of which were based on direct (not self-reported) measures of height. The aim of the project was to estimate the height, at age 18, of people born each year between 1896 and 1996. When the population sampled was older or younger than 18, the authors used a growth model to estimate height at 18 years of age. When no data on a particular birth cohort was available, they projected observed trends forwards or backwards to get some estimate of the heights of the missing cohorts.  

My reaction, upon reading the study, was: “wow, they’ve done a lot of work, and they’ve got some cool data, but I’m not sure I trust the results”.  

Place for comments on "Keynesian Parables of Thrift and Hoarding"

This is not really a blog post; it's an experiment. I have no idea if it will work, but the downside costs seem trivial.

If you subscribe to Review of Keynesian Economics, or if your university has a subscription, you can read my article "Keynesian Parables of Thrift and Hoarding". (Anyone can read the abstract and get the gist.) If you want to comment on that article, here is your chance to do so.

[OK, that was the blog post. But it seems to me that one of the problems with academic articles is that the reader doesn't get a chance to comment on the article, and the author doesn't get the chance to read readers' comments and respond to them. So if you want that opportunity, here is your chance to comment, and my chance to reply to your comment. It's an experiment to see if there might be some complementarity between articles and blogs.

And thanks to Matias Vernengo and Louis-Philippe Rochon for the invitation to a non- (or sorta-) Keynesian to submit an article to ROKE. They wanted contributions from "the other side" too (see Simon Wren-Lewis's article too). So I tried to write a sort of "internal" critique of Keynesianism.]

3 practical things, and one abstract thing economists could do to improve economic coverage in the media

This was written by CBC Radio's Matthew Lazin-Ryder

1. Pitch better stories

Frances Woolley rightly states that Canadian journalists put a disproportionate amount of our time into following up on Stats Can reports, OECD reports, and think-tank publications. The primary reason is simplicity. Virtually any of the talking heads in our rolodexes can say something about Stats Can and OECD reports. Think-tanks? Well, think-tanks always, always answer the phone.

Four practical things journalists could do to improve economics coverage in the media

1. Find better stories.

The Canadian media does a pretty good job of covering Statistics Canada and OECD news releases, and think tank reports. Where they lag behind the US is in coverage of academic research. 

Take, for example, a paper published in Canadian Public Policy last year by Luc Godbout, Yves Trudel and Suzie St-Cerny on the rate of return that Canadians can expect to receive on their contributions to the Canada Pension Plan. It shows someone who retired in the mid-1990s could expect to receive a 10 percent rate of return on their Canada Pension Plan contributions, but late boomers, Gen-Xers and subsequent generations can expect a rate of return closer to 2 percent.

How (some) Canadian academic economists learned to love the media

The following are notes for a panel discussion with Andrew Coyne, Tavia Grant, Kristina Partsinevelos, Chris Ragan and Chris Waddell, organized together with Stephen Gordon, at the CEA meetings at Ryerson University on Saturday, May 30th. Program information here. Registration info here. Media info here.

At the 2007 Canadian Economics Association meetings, there was a panel called "How to talk to the media". At this year's meetings, we're having a panel called "Why can't we be friends? Economists and journalists in conversation". The changing titles reflect both how much Canadian academic economists' relationship with the media has changed, and how little.

Eight years ago, journalists would ask the questions, and economists would answer. Economists needed to know "how to talk to the media" because traditional media - print, radio, television - was the primary way for economists to get their research findings and opinions widely circulated. 

Fast forward to 2015. Twitter and blogs have changed the interactions between economists and journalists from question and answer sessions to conversations.  It's now possible for academic economists to uncover a news story - like Stephen Gordon did with the cancellation of the long-form census.  We can shape the questions that are asked, and the way journalists think about a story, through tweets, blogs, and other before-its-news coverage. 

Moreover, if we don't like the way that journalists are covering a story, we can report it ourselves. The move to digital has created space for academic economists' voices. 

There are no Friedmans today, except maybe Friedman himself

How come no economist on the right is asking "Where are the Galbraiths of yesteryear?"? It's because Milton Friedman won the debate, and John Kenneth Galbraith lost. Both Friedman (on the right) and Galbraith (on the left) were once leading public intellectuals and economists. I used to read them both. I wonder how many young economists have even heard of Galbraith?

[I wrote this a couple of days back, but wasn't sure whether to post it. Today I asked a colleague in Political Science/Political Economy about Galbraith's reputation as an academic, and he said it was high - in the same ballpark as Friedman's academic reputation in economics. Then, by sheer chance, I found a Brad DeLong post, recently hoisted from his archives, saying something similar. In an alternate universe, Galbraith won and Friedman lost, and economics would be very different today. So I decided to post this, FWIW.]

Doug Saunders has written a dreadful column about the "resource curse", and I'm going to explain why it's dreadful

This column by Doug Saunders on the "resource curse" in last Saturday's Globe and Mail is quite dreadful:

When the price of oil is the foundation of your country’s economy, a sudden plunge to half its value focuses the mind wonderfully, doesn’t it?

One's heart sinks at the very first sentence: the premise is wildy at odds with the facts and can lead to nothing useful.

Where has all the spam gone?

Dumb question. The most recent genuine spam comment in the WCI spam filter is dated 17th February. The second most recent is dated 4th February, and the third is dated 28th January. There are 30 spam comments dated 28th January, and 62 dated 27th January. And roughly the same number each and every day before that. (The spam filter still catches a few real comments by mistake, which I fish out, and I'm not counting them. I can't remember when the last spam comment got missed by the filter.)

The quantity of spam seems to have dropped off a cliff around noon 28th January 2014. Does anybody know why? Is it the same at other blogs, Typepad or not? No real reason for asking; I'm just curious about this good news.

Update: and the two most recent spam comments, that came in after the cliff, are not like the others. They look like adverts for sophisticated financial services, rather than the usual adverts for more, err, consumer-oriented products.

What will really old, stupid, and uneducated people do?

Typepad puts almost all my comments in spam. Me! Don't they know who I am? I can fish them out of the spam filter when it's my own post, but it means I have given up commenting on other people's posts, both here and on other blogs, if they use Typepad. Because my comments go straight to spam, and don't get fished out, which presumably confirms to Typepad I really must be a spammer.

But my problems with Typepad are just a symptom of a wider problem.

Copy/paste/re-write; student essays as collages

This is not about economics. Maybe it's about teaching. Maybe it's about the internet. I only have anecdata, and it is compromised by sample selection bias. I don't have any theory, and I don't have a proposed policy.

The economics of paywalls

With on-line advertising revenues stagnant at best, and print in terminal decline, newspapers are starting to build paywalls. 

The economics of on-line media is a little different from the economics of print, and a lot different from the economics of, say, potatoes. The difference is shown in the diagram below. 

"The Invisible Hand" on CBC radio

CBC radio is running a new program this summer on economics; it's called "The Invisible Hand". The first episode is scheduled to be broadcast Wednesday morning (this Wednesday - June 27) at 9:30 am and will be re-broadcast the following Saturday morning at 11:00 am. (Half an hour later in Newfoundland, of course.)

I am well-placed to tell you that the show is much, much better than you may be thinking and that you should give it a listen.

Why the distribution of reality is skewed and so newspapers are biased towards bad news

"News" is the difference between what happens and what you expected to happen. If you have rational, and hence unbiased, expectations, then the news, on average, should be neither good nor bad. The good news and the bad news should cancel out.

So why does the news that gets reported seem mostly bad news? Does bad news sell more newspapers than good news? Are newspapers biased?

Suppose reality is skewed. The distribution of the news has a zero mean by assumption, if our expectations are unbiased. But suppose the distribution has a long tail on the bad news side, and a short tail on the good news side. And suppose newspapers only report on big news, that's (say) one standard deviation or more away from the mean. Then most of the news reported would be bad news, because there are very few good news stories that are big enough to be worth reporting, just lots and lots of little good news events. "There were no serious accidents today on highway 401" never makes it into the newspapers.

But why should reality be skewed? That's the tricky question. But I think I can answer it.

Real wages during the recession

I've seen a few stories about recent trends in wages, and too many of them seem to be trying to make a big deal out of movements that - when in put in context - are really too small to say much of anything.

[Updated in an almost-certainly futile attempt to combat confirmation bias.]

Reality TV as union busting?

TV writers and actors get paid decent money, because they're unionized. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists's contract specifies fees for every type of TV appearance.

Reality TV stars are not "television and radio artists" and do not need to be paid union rates. Reality television shows can feature non-union performers without violating AFTRA agreements. 

This is why reality TV dominates television: it's cheap to produce.

The Fed's Dark Age communications strategy

One sentence in Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen's speech caught my eye:

"Indeed, I believe that the Federal Reserve qualifies as one of the most transparent central banks in the world."

That is total bullshit. The Fed is one of the least transparent central banks in the world.

Ironically, in the excellent paragraph immediately following her bullshit sentence, Janet Yellen tells us precisely why it is a bullshit sentence:

Literary You-genics

In days of old, literature was subject to strict population controls. As John A Hobson put it back in 1910: 

"Before the arts of printing and of reading became common, most of the great deeds of man, his finest thoughts, his noblest feelings, perished for lack of enduring record and easy accurate communication.... Almost all that was original and beautiful or serviceable in the intellectual and spiritual life of primitive man inevitably died as soon as it was born." 

The rise of the public economist

Canadian Business blogger Andrew Potter calls it the economists' election. "This is the first election," he writes, "in which a large number of Canadian economists are making direct, unmediated, real-time interventions into the debates over policy and the various party platforms." 

The obvious story is that technological change has made it possible for economists to blog, tweet, etc. But sociologists could be blogging, or political scientists, or philosophers. Why economists?