Category Archive: Sources

  1. The Summit

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    LEGITIMATE ASSESSMENT

    Moving beyond computational questions in digital ethics research

    ⤷ Digital Ethics

    In the ever expanding digital ethics literature, a number of researchers have been advocating a turn away from enticing technical questions—how to mathematically define fairness, for example—and towards a more expansive, foundational approach to the ethics of designing digital decision systems.

    A 2018 paper by RODRIGO OCHIGAME, CHELSEA BARABAS, KARTHIK DINAKAR, MADARS VIRZA, and JOICHI ITO is an exemplary paper along these lines. The authors dissect the three most-discussed categories in the digital ethics space—fairness, interpretability, and accuracy—and argue that current approaches to these topics may unwittingly amount to a legitimation system for unjust practices. From the introduction:

    “To contend with issues of fairness and interpretability, it is necessary to change the core methods and practices of machine learning. But the necessary changes go beyond those proposed by the existing literature on fair and interpretable machine learning. To date, ML researchers have generally relied on reductive understandings of fairness and interpretability, as well as a limited understanding of accuracy. This is a consequence of viewing these complex ethical, political, and epistemological issues as strictly computational problems. Fairness becomes a mathematical property of classification algorithms. Interpretability becomes the mere exposition of an algorithm as a sequence of steps or a combination of factors. Accuracy becomes a simple matter of ROC curves.

    In order to deepen our understandings of fairness, interpretability, and accuracy, we should avoid reductionism and consider aspects of ML practice that are largely overlooked. While researchers devote significant attention to computational processes, they often lack rigor in other crucial aspects of ML practice. Accuracy requires close scrutiny not only of the computational processes that generate models but also of the historical processes that generate data. Interpretability requires rigorous explanations of the background assumptions of models. And any claim of fairness requires a critical evaluation of the ethical and political implications of deploying a model in a specific social context.

    Ultimately, the main outcome of research on fair and interpretable machine learning might be to provide easy answers to concerns of regulatory compliance and public controversy”

    Link to the full paper. ht Milo ht Abby

    • Among their references is an illuminating doctoral dissertation by Caley Horan examining the history of the American insurance industry after 1945. A chapter focussing on activist critiques of actuarial discrimination in redlining through the 1970s and 80s proves highly relevant for current debates over algorithmically-enhanced discrimination. “The failure of activists to secure legislation and their demands for more precise statistical measurements in the field of insurance underwriting reflected the diminishing utility of rights-based frameworks in combating discrimination in insurance and signaled the triumph of a new, actuarial, understanding of political community as structured around the notion of risk… Once insurers were granted their own unique definition and claim to fairness separate from that of society writ large, the application of social legislation became nearly impossible.” Link.
    • Another 2018 paper by four out of the five listed co-authors proposes alternate uses for ML in addressing complex social problems. “We posit that machine learning should not be used for prediction, but rather to surface covariates that are fed into a causal model for understanding the social, structural, and psychological drivers of crime. We propose an alternative application of machine learning and causal inference away from predicting risk scores to risk mitigation.” Link.
      ‡ digital_ethics risk_assessment

    New Researchers: TRANSIT(ORY) SHOCKS

    A small traffic fine can have a huge negative effect

    In his job market paper, Princeton PhD candidate STEVEN MELLO brings data to the oft-discussed issue of financial insecurity. Mello finds that “among the poorest quartile of drivers… the increases in financial strain induced by a 175 dollar fine are observationally similar to what would be predicted by a 900 dollar earnings decline.”

    Mello also explains the policy implications, and how traffic fines can be self-defeating:

    “Using back-of-the-envelope calculations and a standard willingness-to-pay framework, a conservative estimate of the welfare cost associated with the average ticket is about $500. Intuitively, this quantity has a policy-relevant interpretation. To the extent that welfare costs are greater than the revenue raised and public safety produced by an additional traffic citation, there is deadweight loss associated with ticketing. Governments who do not consider the outsized welfare costs of citations will generally choose to overpolice.”

    Link to the full paper here.

    ‡ crime economic_effects new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student. Have you read any excellent student work recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • JFI will be at the Harvard Startup Career Fair on Friday February 15. Come talk to us if you’re in the area. Link.
    • Guy Standing at the World Economic Forum reviews the results of a year in basic income experimentation. Link.
    • From Mark Stelzner and Mark Paul at Equitable Growth, a December paper that models monopsony conditions’ effect on wages taking into account “collective action and efficient contract bargaining.” Link.
    • In the LRB: Paul Taylor on the trade in medical records. Link.
    • Dylan Matthews at Vox covers the anti-poverty plans from five Democratic 2020 presidential candidates, with evaluation conducted by our friends at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty & Social Policy. Link.
    • New work by Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner examines how we measure whether universities provide opportunities for low-income students: “We demonstrate that, with well-thought-out data analysis, it is possible to create benchmarks that actually measure what they are intended to measure. In particular, we present a measure that overcomes the deficiencies of the popular measures and is informative about all, not just low-income, students.” Link. ht Sidhya
    • Tangentially related to the above, new research from Seth Zimmerman examines whether elite colleges promote low-income students’ achieving “top positions in the economy.” Link.
    • An excellent post by Rahul Menon on the “neoliberal” character of British colonial economic policy. Link.
    • For the Green New Deal Files: At the People’s Policy Project, Matt Bruenig with a paper proposal outlining how the Tennessee Valley Authority could be used to decarbonize electricity across the country. Link.
    • More ed research: Benjamin Marx and Lesley Turner demonstrate the immense benefits of borrowing for community college attainment. Link. (Highlight thread from Professor Susan Dynarski. Link.)
    • “Although demand for wax was high across Europe, production itself was unevenly spread. In northern and central Europe high medieval urbanization and settlement expansion came at the expense of favourable bee habitats. This meant that the areas with the greatest need for wax were under intense pressure to meet demand through local production. These regions were therefore especially attractive to merchants bringing wax from the Baltic hinterland, where large-scale sylvan wax production took place in forests which had not been felled to make room for arable fields. This high-quality wax became an important feature of Hanseatic trade, and a brisk westward trade brought this wax ‘de Polane’ to England and Bruges where eager buyers were readily found.” Alexandra Sapoznik on the impact of religious beeswax consumption on the medieval economy. Link.

  2. Bone Mobile

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    LONG RUNNING

    Learning about long-term effects of interventions, and designing interventions to facilitate the long view

    ⤷ Guaranteed Income

    A new paper from the Center for Effective Global Action at Berkeley surveys a topic important to our researchers here at JFI: the question of long-run effects of interventions. In our literature review of cash transfer studies, we identified the need for more work beyond the bounds of a short-term randomized controlled trial. This is especially crucial for basic income, which is among those policies intended to be permanent.

    The authors of the new Berkeley report, Adrien Bouguen, Yue Huang, Michael Kremer, and Edward Miguel, note that it’s a particularly apt moment for this kind of work: “Given the large numbers of RCTs launched in the 2000’s, every year that goes by means that more and more RCT studies are ‘aging into’ a phase where the assessment of long-run impacts becomes possible.”

    The report includes a summary of what we know about long-run impacts so far:

    “Section 2 summarizes and evaluates the growing body of evidence from RCTs on the long-term impacts of international development interventions, and find most (though not all) provide evidence for positive and meaningful effects on individual economic productivity and living standards. Most of these studies examine existing cash transfer, child health, or education interventions, and shed light on important theoretical questions such as the existence of poverty traps (Bandiera et al., 2018) and returns to human capital investments in the long term.”

    Also notable is the last section, which contains considerations for study design, “lessons from our experience in conducting long-term tracking studies, as well as innovative data approaches.” Link to the full paper.

    • In his paper “When are Cash Transfers Transformative?,” Bruce Wydick also notes the need for long-run analysis: “Whether or not these positive impacts have long-term transformative effects—and under what conditions—is a question that is less settled and remains an active subject of research.” The rest of the paper is of interest as well, including Wydick’s five factors that tend to signal that a cash transfer will be transformative. Link.
    • For more on the rising popularity of RCTs, a 2016 paper by major RCT influencers Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer quantifies that growth and discusses the impact of RCTs. Link. Here’s the PowerPoint version of that paper. David McKenzie at the World Bank responds to the paper, disputing some of its claims. Link.
    ‡ basic_income metaresearch welfare

    New Researchers: CRIME BOOM

    Understanding why local crime may increase during an economic boom

    In a fascinating new job market paper, Texas A&M Phd candidate BRITTANY STREET examines the puzzling incidents where crime increases in response to economic prosperity. To properly analyze these black swan cases, Street isolates “the effect of local economic opportunity from the effect of changing composition due to in-migration” during periods of economic boom. Street uses the recent boom in hydraulic fracturing in North Dakota as a case study and finds that “economic expansion leads to a 22 percent reduction in criminal cases.”

    “Local residents engage in less criminal activity at the start of the boom with a smaller effect in later years. Effects are largest and most robust for drug offenses, and are shown across all counties with fracking activity. Results suggest that residents reduce their criminal activity in response to improved job opportunities, but that other changes from local economic shocks, such as peer composition, seem to reduce this effect. This is consistent with economic opportunities reducing crime and highlights the role of compositional changes on the aggregate effects on crime.”

    Link to the paper. And link to an explanatory thread by Street.

    ‡ crime economic_effects new_researchers

    In this new section of the JFI Letter, we will be highlighting great work from a graduate student each week. Have you read any excellent student work recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    +++

    • New on the Phenomenal World, a post on “Why Rational People Polarize” by Kevin Dorst, a PhD candidate in philosophy at MIT. “The informational choices that drive polarization are not irrational or suboptimal. Polarization is a structural problem. It arises because people are exquisitely sensitive to the informational problems they face—because they are smart. The solution doesn’t require educating them; it requires altering the choices they face.” Link.
    • JFI research fellow and MIT Philosophy postdoctoral associate Abby Everett Jaques inaugurated a new course on the “Ethics of Technology” within MIT’s department of Linguistics & Philosophy. The course aims to “integrate ethical thinking within engineering practice” and to teach engineering students “an ethics protocol that they can apply to projects of their own.” Link.
    • “Economists were winning Nobel prizes for their studies of how and why markets fail, psychology was being integrated back into economics, and yet students weren’t being taught much of that.” Esche Nelson writes in Quartz about the CORE Econ textbook. Link to the article, link to CORE’s website.
    • From Robert Dur and Max van Lent, a big new study on “socially useless jobs”: “We use a representative dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four points in time. We find that approximately 8% of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17% are doubtful about the usefulness of their job.” Link.
    • Finland is teaching 1% of its population the basics of AI, “to raise awareness about the opportunities and risks of AI among people who are strangers to computer science, so they can decide for themselves what’s beneficial and where they want their government to invest.” Story in Politico here. Online course here.
    • A compilation of 2018’s best data visualizations, from Maarten Lambrechts. Link.
    • On Twitter, Marshall Steinbaum recommends the 1889 book “Monopolies and the People”: “That guy understood how the economy works as well as anyone since, and far better than most.” Link to the full free text on Google Books.
    • Almost six months after the cancellation of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction released the pilot’s baseline survey. The survey reveals “that participants were hoping to break the cycle of poverty and enhance employment opportunities, stabilize their housing, eat healthier and improve their health.” Link. ht Lauren
    • A new study on minimum wages from Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, et al, summarized on Twitter by Dube: “Little effect on jobs from US min wage hikes to date; sizable wage effects include spillovers.” Link to the NBER paper, link to the ungated version.
    • “Google Maps for Ancient Rome”: The Stanford Classics department recently launched ORBIS, a new geospatial network model of the Roman world, which accurately “reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associate with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity.” Link. ht Kapu

  3. Self-Portrait

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    PLENARY CONFIDENCE

    A look at China’s social credit system

    In a recent newsletter, we noted a spate of reporting drawing attention to the authoritarianism of China’s growing Social Credit System. This week, we are sharing a paper by YU-JIE CHEN, CHING-FU LIN, AND HAN-WEI LIU that casts light on the details of the program’s workings, corrects common misconceptions, proposes some likely and disturbing future scenarios, and offers a useful frame for understanding the significant shift it is bringing about in Chinese governance.

    “A new mode of governance is emerging with the rise of China’s ‘Social Credit System’ (shehui xinyong zhidu) or SCS. The SCS is an unusual, comprehensive governance regime designed to tackle challenges that are commonly seen as a result of China’s ‘trustless’ society that has featured official corruption, business scandals and other fraudulent activities. The operation of the SCS relies on a number of important and distinctive features—information gathering, information sharing, labeling, and credit sanctions—which together constitute four essential elements of the system.

    In our view, the regime of the SCS reflects what we call the ‘rule of trust,’ which has significant implications for the legal system and social control in China. We define the ‘rule of trust’ as a governance mode that imposes arbitrary restrictions—loosely defined and broadly interpreted trust-related rules—to condition, shape, and compel the behavior of the governed subjects… The ‘rule of trust’ is in fact undermining ‘rule of law.’

    In the context of governance, the unbounded notion of ‘trust’ and the unrestrained development of technology are a dangerous combination.”

    Link to the paper.

    • Jeremy Daum at China Law Translate responds to international coverage of the SCS and provides useful synthesis of the programs actually existing threads: “WIRED magazine recently described China’s ‘social credit’ plan as a social ranking system creating ‘three digits that dictate your place in society’. Others have compared it to an episode of Black Mirror where citizens constantly rate each other to devastating effect. None of these descriptions hits the mark, and the reality may be much worse.” Link.
    • Also at China Law Translate, the published text of the government’s plan for the SCS through to 2020. Link. (For much more from CLT on SCS, click through to this collected list of posts and translated documents.)
    • Tangentially related, a JW Mason post from December on a speech by Claudio Borio, which contains this analogy: “Think about that—a number assigned to every person, adjusted based on somebody’s judgement of your pro-social or anti-social behavior. If your number is too low, you aren’t allowed to fly on a plane. If it’s really low, you can’t even get on a bus. Could you imagine a system like that in the US? Except, of course, that we have exactly this system already. The number is called a bank account.” Link. Robert Hockett makes and expands on similar points in his column on the SCS for Forbes. Link.
      ‡ credit scoring social fabric

    New Researchers: CATASTROPHIC LOSS

    Migration as anticipatory response to climate shocks

    In an important new job market paper, economist ESTEBAN QUIÑONES examines the relationship between the observed effects of climate shocks and migration patterns. Using socioeconomic panel data from across rural Mexico and weather data, Quiñones assesses whether people adjust their labor and location in response to heat-induced crop losses in nearby households.

    “I find evidence of domestic migration in anticipation of crop shocks, particularly among females and households with lower land-labor ratios. I also show evidence of local labor reallocation onto household land (agricultural self-employment), especially among males and households with higher land-labor ratios. This study highlights the substantial influence of the environment-agriculture mechanism, the salience of anticipatory adaptation, and the relevance of learning from others in the context of climate risk.”

    Link to the paper. In a blog post, Quiñones explains his research and situates it within the climate migration literature:

    “This study makes three contributions: Individuals mitigate against the increased probability of destabilizing climate events in an anticipatory manner through domestic migration; Adaptation to climate change can take place via a learning from others; The appearance of adaptation gaps to climate change may be explained by a nearly exclusive focus on the ex post.”

    Link to the post.

    ‡ climate new researchers

    In this new section of the JFI Letter, we will be highlighting great work from a graduate student each week. Have you read any excellent student work recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    +++

    • From Thomas Hale in the Financial Times, an analysis of income share agreements with a focus on how philanthropic capital can play a part in building the market. JFI and our partners, Better Future Forward, are both in the story. “If philanthropic or charitable foundations take a ‘first loss’ stake, they can conceivably bridge the risk-reward gap between private capital and social goals, in a manner comparable to what the government might otherwise do (and does all the time, all over the place).” Link.
    • A huge new universal basic income study in Sikkim, India. “Sikkim’s ruling party has announced an ambitious plan to implement a universal basic income for every one of its 610,577 citizens. If successful, the scheme would represent the largest trial run anywhere in the world. Link to coverage in the Washington Post by Niha Masih.
    • From late December, Adam Tooze writes on the implications of climate change for “sovereign permanence”—particularly in island nations: “The assumption that nations have infinite time horizons is the foundation of all ideas of a stable and lasting international community… The world must decide how to treat sovereign states when their time horizon becomes limited. What kind of investment can be justified in a state whose life span is numbered in decades?” Link.
    • The Affordable Drug Manufacturing act, covered in Politico by Alex Thompson and Sarah Karlin-Smith, “would establish an Office of Drug Manufacturing that would be required to manufacture at least 15 different generic drugs in its first year where the agency determines there is a failure in the market.” Link.
    • Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed covers a new report on community college students transferring to four-year institutions. Link. And link to the original study, from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.
    • Do online offerings increase access to education? Joshua Goodman, Julia Melkers, and Amanda Pallais answer this question using Georgia Tech’s groundbreaking online MS in Computer Science as a case study with encouraging results. Link.
    • Matthew Nisbet on the philanthropic politics of funding the decarbonization push. Link. Also on climate, the economics establishment is again backing a carbon tax. Link.
    • A paper by Hoda Heidari, Claudio Ferrari, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Andreas Krause looks at fairness in ML from behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Link.
    • Economic history from Mikio Ito et al: “This article studies the interrelation between spot and futures prices in the two major rice markets in prewar Japan from the perspective of market efficiency.” Link.

  4. Worldviews

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    SOFT CYBER

    Another kind of cybersecurity risk: the destruction of common knowledge

    ⤷ Digital Ethics

    In a report for the Berkman Klein center, Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier identify a gap in current approaches to cybersecurity. National cybersecurity officials still base their thinking on Cold War-type threats, where technologists focus on hackers. Combining both approaches, Farrell and Schneier make a wider argument about collective knowledge in democratic systems—and the dangers of its diminishment.

    From the abstract:

    “We demonstrate systematic differences between how autocracies and democracies work as information systems, because they rely on different mixes of common and contested political knowledge. Stable autocracies will have common knowledge over who is in charge and their associated ideological or policy goals, but will generate contested knowledge over who the various political actors in society are, and how they might form coalitions and gain public support, so as to make it more difficult for coalitions to displace the regime. Stable democracies will have contested knowledge over who is in charge, but common knowledge over who the political actors are, and how they may form coalitions and gain public support… democracies are vulnerable to measures that ‘flood’ public debate and disrupt shared decentralized understandings of actors and coalitions, in ways that autocracies are not.”

    One compelling metaresearch point from the paper is that autocratic governments receive analysis of information trade-offs, while democratic governments do not:

    “There is existing research literature on the informational trade-offs or ‘dictators’ dilemmas’ that autocrats face, in seeking to balance between their own need for useful information and economic growth, and the risk that others can use available information to undermine their rule. There is no corresponding literature on the informational trade-offs that democracies face between desiderata like availability and stability.”

    Full paper available on SSRN here.

    • Farrell summarizes the work on Crooked Timber: “In other words, the same fake news techniques that benefit autocracies by making everyone unsure about political alternatives undermine democracies by making people question the common political systems that bind their society.” Many substantive comments follow. Link.
    • Jeremy Wallace, an expert on authoritarianism, weighs in on Twitter: “Insiders, inevitably, have even more information about the contours of these debates. On the other hand, there’s a lot that dictators don’t know—about their own regimes, the threats that they are facing, etc.” Link to Wallace’s work on the topic.
    • Related reading recommended by Wallace, from Daniel Little, a 2016 paper on propaganda: “Surprisingly, the government tends to pick a high level of propaganda precisely when it is ineffective.” Link.
      ‡ metaresearch social fabric

    SADNESS FEEDBACK

    An exploration into the relationship between income and psychological well-being

    ⤷ New Researchers

    For this week’s graduate student spotlight, we’re sharing the work of Mo Alloush, a PhD candidate in economics at UC Davis. His job market paper probes the relationship between a person’s psychological and economic well-being. Alloush finds that “causal impacts in both directions create a feedback loop between income (and by extension poverty) and psychological well-being that has the potential to affect income dynamics and put individuals on vicious or virtuous cycles.”

    On Twitter, economist Martin Ravallion wrote that the paper included “striking findings on the interrelationship between poverty and mental health.” Link to paper.

    In a corresponding blog post, Alloush concisely discusses the larger policy implications of his findings:

    “While the results mainly stress the potential negative consequences of this relationship, there is a positive story to tell. Poverty-alleviation programs have an added benefit of positive impacts on psychological well-being, which is an important goal in itself, and may also enhance the beneficiary’s capability to further increase their economic well-being. The results in my paper reaffirm the importance of considering psychological variables in poverty-alleviation programs. My hope is that the results from this paper guide and encourage future research on this topic and that organizations begin to consistently and seriously track mental health.”

    Link to the post.

    ‡ poverty new research

    +++

    • Our friend and colleague Kevin James, along with Peter Taylor of ECMC, has published an editorial in Crain’s Chicago Business on the promise of income share agreements for low-income students and new pilots in Chicago. Link.
    • Relatedly, in the NYTimes, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes about ISAs’ appeal to venture capitalists. Link.
    • “Can a set of equations keep US census data private?” Article by Jeffrey Mervis. Link. ht Jack B
    • On a similar note to last week’s spotlight, Innovations for Poverty Action is setting new goals for making sure evidence is relevant, accessible, and applicable. Post by Annie Duflo here.
    • UC Berkeley’s Evan Rose and Yotam Shem-Tov have a new paper on the causal effect of incarceration on reoffending. They use a regression discontinuity analysis to show “that one year of incarceration reduces the likelihood of committing new assault, property, and drug offenses within three years of conviction by 38%, 24% and 20%, respectively.” However, the paper also suggests that “the benefit of reducing crime by lengthening sentences is outweighed by the large fiscal costs of incarceration.” Link.
    • Paul Romer and Tyler Cowen in conversation. Lots of interest here, including Romer’s thoughts on R&D, and an old policy idea of his to fund graduate students rather than professors: “I think that the problem in higher ed is that the institutional incentives don’t provide the kind of training that would maximize the opportunities for the students or, for that matter, maximize outcomes for the nation. There’s, for example, much too much persistence in disciplinary lines and modes of inquiry… We subsidize graduate education through money that goes to professors, but we let the professors make the decisions about the problems they work on, and then, therefore, the things the students are trained in.” Link.
    • At MDRC, Colleen Sommo, Dan Cullinan, and Michelle Manno evaluate the first findings from the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) Ohio Demonstration. Their findings “show that students in the program group clearly outperformed the control group with respect to persistence in school, credit accumulation, and graduation” and that graduation rates more than doubled. Link to the research brief.
    • How to make smart cities accessible? Smart Cities for All has designed a toolkit: “Each of the tools addresses a priority challenge identified by global experts as a barrier to the digital inclusion of persons with disabilities and older persons in Smart Cities.” Link. ht Lauren
    • On the Replication Network blog, David Roodman reflects on the process of replicating studies about hookworm and malaria. Link. ht Michael
    • We wish we could have attended this ASSA session, “The Economics of Ancient Data,” with papers on trade in the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. Link.

  5. Aunt Eliza

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    PROCESS INTEGRATION

    Bringing evidence to bear on policy

    ⤷ Metaresearch

    Happy 2019. We’re beginning with a report from Evidence in Practice, a project from the Yale School of Management. The report focuses on how to integrate rigorously researched evidence with policy and practice, with an emphasis on international development. The needs numerous stakeholders involved in research and policymaking are enumerated, along with their own needs and priorities: funders, researchers, intermediaries, policymakers, and implementers each receive consideration. One of the strengths of the report is its quotations from dozens of interviews across these groups, which give a sense of the messy, at times frustrating, always collaborative business of effecting change in the world. As to the question of what works:

    “The most successful examples of evidence integration lessen the distinction between evidence generation and application, and focus on designing approaches that simultaneously generate (different types of) rigorous evidence and develop an iterative process for integrating evidence into practice. These projects turn the need to negotiate evidence generation and integration into an asset rather than a roadblock. In that sense, the best examples of evidence integration resulted from programs with robust, explicit learning and evidence sharing agendas. This commitment to learning opens the door for different types of linkages and information flows across stakeholders to share experiences, perspectives, and insights with the explicit (and non-threatening) goal of learning.”

    Another key point is that academic researchers and implementers have different definitions of evidence: Academics have a “tendency to think of evidence as abstract, ‘universal’ knowledge, while implementers have learned that knowledge is always and necessarily enacted and situated in practice, where few universal principles seem to hold across multiple complex contexts.”

    Full report, by Rodrigo Canales et al, here.

    • In October, Ruth Mayne, Duncan Green, Irene Guijt, Martin Walsh, Richard English & Paul Cairney published a paper detailing Oxfam’s experience with promoting research-uptake in the policy sphere: “Academic studies of the politics of evidence-based policymaking suggest that policymaking can never be ‘evidence based’ (Cairney, 2016). At best, it is evidence-informed.” Link.
    • At the World Bank’s Development Impact Blog, David Evans summarized the Oxfam paper into eight key points, including: “Great research is informed by engaging with people outside of our academic circles. We learn from people and policymakers (and people in other disciplines) what big new/unsolved problems are out there, and how institutions (formal and informal) really work.” Link. ht Tim Ogden
    ‡ metaresearch policy applied research

    INDUSTRIAL PROMOTION

    Post-war industrialization in Finland, and its impact on mobility

    ⤷ New Researchers

    This week we’re introducing a new section of the newsletter: a spotlight on great work from a graduate student. Have you read any excellent student work recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    Inaugurating the series is a paper from Matti Mitrunen, a PhD student in economics at Stockholm University. Mitrunen looks at the impact of Finnish war reparations after World War II: Finland was required to build out its industrial capacities (in a manner Mitrunen describes as “in many ways straight out of the industrial policy playbook”) and the effects of this shift toward industry reverberated through generations.

    “From 1944 to 1952, Finland, a country with 60% of its labor force still working in agriculture, had to export 5% of its yearly GDP in industrial products as a reparation for losses caused during the war. This episode introduces plausibly exogenous variation in temporary government policy as the Soviet Union dictated the structure of the indemnities. The Soviet Union placed most of the reparations burden on relatively complex metal products such as ships, locomotives, cables, and engines – sectors where Finland had little previous experience.

    … Having shown that the older generation of workers left agriculture for more modern sectors and obtained higher wages, I move on to the third and principal finding of the paper: the lasting intergenerational response to increased industrialization. I show that the increase in manufacturing led to better occupational and education outcomes for younger cohorts in more exposed places.”

    Link to the paper, which concludes: “This experience of the Finnish war reparations illustrates opportunities and challenges for government action to spur structural transformation in today’s developing countries.”

    ‡ new researchers history

    +++

    • Interactive data visualizations of citation patterns across scientific fields from economics to astronomy, from Moritz Stefaner and Eigenfactor. Link.
    • From Cynthia Miller and MDRC, a study titled “Boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit for Singles” finds that Paycheck Plus “reduced severe poverty” and “modestly increased employment rates.” Link. ht Sidhya
    • In our last newsletter, we listed some favorite studies and researchers of the past year. If you liked our picks, you’ll love the list of favorite development papers from David McKenzie and others at the World Bank. Link.
    • Continuing on that theme, Quartz has once again put together “Twelve leading economists on the research that shaped our world in 2018,” which includes Sue Dynarski’s work on the effects of promising of tuition-free college, and Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr’s research on the effects of “Ban the Box” legislation. Link to the full piece in Quartz. See also The Economist’s list of the eight best young economists of the decade. Link.
    • What happens when more women enter the police force? “Increases in female officer shares are followed by significant declines in rates of intimate partner homicide and non-fatal domestic abuse.” Link to the paper by Amalia Miller and Carmit Segal.
    • In late December, the Niskanen Center released a widely shared paper detailing their center-right research and policy mission. Link. Among the interesting responses, a thread from Glen Weyl offers some fundamental critiques of their program. Link.
    • At Data for Progress, Greg Carlock specifies a number of goals for the Green New Deal. Link. David Roberts at Vox has a great general-interest summary of what the Green New Deal means and the political struggle that awaits it. Link.
    • Maura Francese and Delphine Prady have a new IMF working paper about how to assess UBI and related policy tradeoffs. “In short, efficiency and equity impact of a UBI cannot be gauged in isolation.” Link.
    • For German speakers (or those equipped with Google Translate), JFI was included in a Zurich newspaper article about the increasing importance of applied ethics, especially digital ethics. Link.
    • A postdoc found a lost 1613 letter by Galileo—previously miscatalogued at the Royal Society library in London—that reveals his early thinking about separating science from church doctrine. Link.

  6. Frohes Fest | Year in Review

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    The JFI Letter has grown and morphed over the past twelve months; thank you to our readers for opening, skimming, clicking, and writing us every week. We’ll be offline until January 5. In the meantime, here’s a list of our favorite spotlights from last year and a list of favorite researchers to watch in the next.

    VERY MANY LIGHTS

    • The staff’s favorite paper of the year was Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu’s work on the staggeringly influential Manne seminars, 2-3 week intensive courses in economics which, by 1990, had been attended by 40% of federal judges. This brief course shaped the federal judiciary, pushing verdicts rightward: “Economics-trained judges significantly impact U.S. judicial outcomes. They render conservative votes and verdicts, are against regulation and criminal appeals, and mete harsher criminal sentences and deterrence reasoning. When ideas move from economics into law, ideas have consequences.” Link to the archived letter.
    • “The adoption of risk assessment tools may signal the abandonment of a centuries-long project of using rationality, science, and the state to improve upon the social and economic progress of individuals and society.” The stakes are high in the estimation of Eric Silver and Lisa L. Miller, whose 2002 paper on actuarial risk assessment we paired with 2018 work by Chelsea Barabas, Karthik Dinakar, Joichi Ito, Madars Virza, and Jonathan Zittrain. The earlier work by Silver and Miller provides historical overview of the adoption of actuarial tools in the criminal legal context. Barabas et al take up their caution, probing technical alternatives commensurate to the ethical-political problems augured by risk assessment. Link to the archived letter.
    • One of the most intriguing cash transfer studies published this year was from Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Mohammed H. Mostafavi-Dehzooei on Iran’s national cash transfer program. “No support found for a negative effect on hours worked or labor force participation.” Link to the archived letter. A related spotlight focused a World Bank review by Sarah Baird et. al about cash transfers’ impact on the labor market. Link.
    • Historical analogues to revolutionary technical advancements can be difficult to locate—a problem for many working in the digital ethics space. A spotlight from September looks to the foundations of bioethics, a field that emerged out of high-profile ethical controversy and involved rushed and innovative interdisciplinary interventions: “Outsiders to medicine—that is, lawyers, judges, legislators, and academics—penetrated its every nook and cranny, in the process giving medicine an exceptional prominence on the public agenda and making it the subject of popular discourse.” Link to the archived letter.
    • In higher education, we spotlighted work from Jeffrey T. Denning, Benjamin M. Marx, and Lesley Turner that reaches the promising conclusion, “Our estimated impacts on earnings alone are enough to fully recoup government expenditures within 10 years, suggesting that financial aid likely pays for itself several times over.” Link to the archived letter.
    ‡ end of year social epistemology

    RESEARCHERS TO WATCH

    • Shira Mitchell and Jackie Shadlen updated Mirror Mirror —a critical survey of quantitative articulations of fairness—earlier this year. Link to the project. Link also to a recent paper co-authored by Mitchell that covers similar themes, and whose byline is shared with another JFI favorite, Solon Barocas.
    • From Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at Berkeley, we flagged “Universal Basic Income in the US and Advanced Countries,” written with Hilary Hoynes, and “Inequality of educational opportunity? Schools as mediators of the intergenerational transmission of income,” after Chetty.
    • Martin Ravallion’s “Guaranteed Employment or Guaranteed Income?” in April looked critically at arguments in favor of and against both policies in India and beyond. Link. Two more from Ravallion with a metearesearch approach: “Social Protection and Economic Development: Are the Poorest Being Lifted Up or Left Behind?” and “Should the Randomistas Continue to Rule?” (Also on basic income, we loved Abhijit Banerjee’s work on universal basic income in the developing world. Link.)
    • Arindrajit Dube’s work on labor economics and beyond includes such noteworthy pieces as “Monopsony in Online Labor Markets,” “Monopsony and Employer Mis-optimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers” (both co-authored with another previously mentioned mainstay, Suresh Naidu), and a Twitter thread on Modern Monetary Theory (his Twitter is very much worth a follow).
    • Danielle Citron, an expert on privacy and digital ethics, made three appearances in our newsletter this year: for her paper on sexual privacy, her work with Daniel Solove on data-breach harms, and her classic paper with Frank Pasquale, “The Scored Society: Due Process for Automated Predictions.”
    • Ozan Jaquette’s innovative work on student recruitment by public universities came to wide attention in an excellent NYTimes data-vis piece co-authored with Karina Salazar.
    • Judith Scott-Clayton’s work on student debt and financial aid made several appearances in our letter, including her report for Brookings, “The looming student debt crisis is worse than we thought,” available here, and a piece on financial aid simplification, available here. Her work on how to measure students’ labor market outcomes furthers a much-needed discussion on accountability in higher education.
    • If you like our newsletter, here are three other links round-ups we highly recommend: Ugo Gentilini’s Social Protection Links; Jeff Mosenkis’s weekly Innovations for Poverty Action links at Chris Blattman’s blog, and the Weekly faiV from the Financial Access Initiative. All three cover development economics from different angles, providing an overview of the breadth of work in this area. We’ve also enjoyed Dylan Matthews’s Future Perfect newsletter, associated with his new Vox vertical on effective altruism.
    • Finally, this year we launched the Phenomenal World. See our recent interview with Johannes Haushofer on cash transfers, JFI fellow Kapu Rao’s exploration of medieval and early modern finance, and lead researcher Sidhya Balakrishnan’s extensive lit review, with fellow Gary Tan, on cash transfer studies. We’re looking forward to sharing more original content with you in 2019 and we are, as always, deeply grateful for your readership.

  7. Space Dance

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    SCIENTIFIC RETURNS

    A new book examines the economic and social impacts of R&D

    ⤷ Metaresearch

    Last May, we highlighted a report on workforce training and technological competitiveness which outlined trends in research and development investment. The report found that despite “total U.S. R&D funding reaching an all-time high in 2015,” it’s shifted dramatically to the private sector: “federal funding for R&D, which goes overwhelmingly to basic scientific research, has declined steadily and is now at the lowest level since the early 1950s.” This week, we take a look at the returns to these investments and discuss how best to measure and trace the ways research spending affects economic activity and policy.

    In the most recent Issues in Science and Technology, IRWIN FELLER reviewsMeasuring the Economic Value of Research, a technical monograph that discusses how best to measure the impact and value of research on policy objectives. Notably, the book highlights UMETRICS, a unified dataset from a consortium of universities “that can be used to better inform decisions relating to the level, apportionment, human capital needs, and physical facility requirements of public investments in R&D and the returns of these investments.” While it represents a big data approach to program evaluation, Feller notes that UMETRICS’ strength is in the “small data, theory-driven, and exacting construction of its constituent datasets,” all of which offer insight into the importance of human capital in successful R&D:

    “The book’s characterization of the ways in which scientific ideas are transmitted to and constitute value to the broader economy encompasses publications and patents, but most importantly includes the employment of people trained in food safety research. This emphasis on human capital reflects a core proposition of UMETRICS, namely the ‘importance of people—students, principal investigators, postdoctoral researchers, and research staff—who conduct research, create new knowledge, and transmit that knowledge into the broader economy.’

    In particular, the chapters on workforce dynamics relating to employment, earnings, occupations, and early careers highlight the nuanced, disaggregated, and policy-relevant information made possible by UMETRICS. These data provide much-needed reinforcement to the historic proposition advanced by research-oriented universities that their major contribution to societal well-being—economic and beyond—is through the joint production of research and graduate education, more than patents or other metrics of technology transfer or firm formation.”

    The UMETRICS dataset traces the social and economic returns of research universities and allows for a larger examination of universities as sociopolitical anchors and scientific infrastructure.

    Link to Feller’s review, link to the book.

    • In a recent book, Jason Owen-Smith, executive director of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) which compiles the UMETRICS dataset, provides a robust defense of research universities, which, he argues, “more than any other institution, [are able] to innovate in response to new problems and opportunities.” Link. And link to an Inside Higher Ed interview with Owen-Smith.
    • The IRIS UMETRICS Twitter page compiles innovative research and papers that make use of UMETRICS data. Link.
    • A 1979 Science paper—linked to in Feller’s review—outlines the economic benefits of research for agricultural productivity. Link.
    ‡ metaresearch social epistemology

    +++

    • New on the Phenomenal World, an interview with Johannes Haushofer on the state of the evidence for cash transfers. “For cash transfers, we have pretty good evidence that for short and medium run they do have those positive effects. Then, there’s a second question, which we talked about earlier: if you’re choosing from a menu of options, which one should you choose? And that’s a question that scientists can’t really speak to–it hinges on what you, as a policymaker, prioritize.” Link.
    • Helen Nissenbaum and Julia Powles on the problems of algorithmic fairness as a master category in the digital ethics space: “Addressing bias as a computational problem obscures its root causes… When underlying systemic issues remain fundamentally untouched, the bias fighters simply render humans more machine readable, exposing minorities in particular to additional harms. Bias is real, but it’s also a captivating diversion.” Link.
    • Does spending on K-12 matter? (Yes.) By C. Kirabo Jackson. Link.
    • “The Statistical Insignificence of Seemingly Significant Experimental Results.” Alwyn Young re-analyzes 53 major RCTs published by the AEA. Link.
    • New from Susan Dynarski, C.J. Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen: When students are offered four years of free tuition (and fees) upon admission, application rates of low-income students to selective colleges more than doubles. Link. ht Sidhya
    • JW Mason with some helpful notes on regression analysis (a must read for the uninitiated).Link.
    • A new NBER paper on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: “Firms with greater expected tax savings from the TCJA are those most likely to announce payments to workers and plans to increase investment. Firms with a Political Action Committee that donates more to Republican candidates are also more likely to announce benefits to employees.” Link. More on TCJA from perennial favorite Brad DeLong. Link.
    • From VoxDev, on corruption in Brazil: What’s the preferred source of money for corrupt officials? Link.
    • “A Danish trade union signed a collective bargaining agreement with Hilfr.dk, a platform providing domestic work. This agreement debunks many myths about platform work, the first one being that it is not compatible with existing forms of labor protection. Secondly, it shows that labor protection is not necessarily an alternative to autonomy.” Link.
    • “The relationship between armed rebels and local civilians is among the least understood aspects of insurgency. This article posits a novel theory, the rebels’ resource curse, to argue that the interaction between rebel groups and local communities can be traced to the availability of revenue-generating resources. Rather than resource wealth contributing to greater social engagement and fruitful insurgent-civilian interactions, it appears to precipitate isolationist, and even exploitative and violent relations. Conversely, resource scarcity predicts a greater degree of social integration and cohesion between civilians and insurgents.” Link.

  8. Energy Field

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    GREEN INFLUENCE

    A discussion of different approaches to climate policy

    ⤷ Geoengineering

    Last week, the U.S. government released the Fourth National Climate Assessment which outlined the dire economic and environmental consequences of climate change. Instead of highlighting key findings of the report—two good summaries are available here and here—we’ll contextualize the current climate debate within legal history, which shows the limitations of current economically-focused arguments for climate policy.

    A 2010 Yale Law Journal article by Jedediah Purdy situates the current climate debate within the long tradition of political argument about the natural world, and challenges assumptions that environmental values which appeal to moral and civic duty are too weak and vague to spur political action. In fact, Purdy argues that major environmental legislation emerged from “democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and scale of government.” Purdy does more than just argue that environmental public language is more coherent than conventionally understood, he argues that understanding climate policy through economic self-interest diminishes the role political struggle plays in shaping national values and interests:

    “Consider one example that makes little sense through the lens of narrow self-interest, much more as part of an ongoing debate over environmental values: the organizing project that has led 1015 city governments to adopt the goals of the Kyoto Protocol (a seven percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2012) through an instrument called the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Since the costs are not zero, and the benefits, in theory, are almost exactly that, the question of motivation is still fairly sharply presented.
    …

    In private interviews and public statements, city officials explain their efforts in several ways. They are quick to cite the advantage certain regions hope to enjoy from early adoption and manufacture of technologies that may later become standard. They embrace a simple public-choice motive: city governments hope to benefit from green-development block grants and, in the longer term, density-friendly economic development, and early efforts may position them to do both.
    They also regard themselves as engaged in political persuasion that they hope will induce others to take similar action. Whether this is plausible is partly endogenous to the politics itself. This politics seeks to affect the reasons—specifically those grounded in environmental values—that people understand themselves to have for joining collective undertakings. Rather than a specimen of an independently established logic of collective action, it is an engagement with that logic itself.”

    Link to full paper.

    • In a 2018 article, Purdy looks more deeply at the history of environmental justice, and why its concerns were left out of mainstream environmental law: “Mainstream environmental law was the last major legal product of ‘the great exception,’ the decades of the mid-twentieth century when, unlike any other time in modern history, economic inequality was declining and robust growth was widely shared.” Link.
    • The new climate reports have brought attention back to solar geoengineering, which the Guardian, covering a Gernot Wagner paper, notes is extremely inexpensive and possibly an option for desperate circumstances: “The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report said geoengineering might be adopted as a temporary “remedial measure” in extreme circumstances.” Link.
    • A 2017 dissertation examines the environment as an object of politics, as opposed to natural capital, and argues that the environment is a “political problem that entails ongoing negotiations over the legitimacy of market rule, the role of the state in relation to the market, and the value of ecological stewardship.” Link.

    +++

    • “Although the EITC is one of the largest and most important public assistance programs in the U.S., we show that the EITC is actually one of the least expensive anti-poverty programs in the U.S., costing taxpayers about half as much as the school lunch and breakfast programs.” Link.
    • New from Shira Mitchell, Eric Potash, and Solon Barocas: “Prediction-Based Decisions and Fairness: A Catalogue of Choices, Assumptions, and Definitions.” Link.
    • A recent Brookings report examines borrowing outcome of parents who use Federal Parent PLUS loans to help finance their children’s education. “Many parents are saddled with large debt burdens, ultimately repaying just enough to avoid default and sometimes owing significantly more than their initial balance.” Link.
    • A summary of a new World Bank report on the future of work: “The report argues that, on balance, concerns about robot-induced unemployment appear to be unfounded. Instead, the future of work is driven by the competing forces of automation and innovation, the other ‘AI.'” Link. ht Sidhya
    • New research explores whether Congressional staff actually recognize the opinions of their members’ constituents. Among the findings: “Staffers who rely more heavily on conservative and business interest groups for policy information have more skewed perceptions of constituent opinion.” Link.
    • A new paper evaluates to what degree public policy represents mass public preference in the United States and finds that “policy outcomes are more conservative than preferences in each state.”Link. Related, a recent paper by David Broockman and Christopher Skevron examine the misperception of constituency opinion among political elites. Link.
    • A 2016 paper by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode discusses the faulty history of the New History of Capitalism. Link.
    • JW Mason posted a long version of his Jacobin article on “how a decade of crisis changed economics”: “It’s probably a mistake to see economists primarily as either carriers of valuable technical expertise or systematic expositors of capitalist ideology. They are participants in public debates just like anyone else. The profession as the whole is more often found trailing after political developments than advancing them.” Link.
    • Causal inference animated plots: “On this page, I take several popular methods for getting causal effects out of non-experimental data and provide animated plots that show you what these methods actually do to the data and how you can understand what the effects you’re estimating actually ARE.” Link.
    • On the ethical quandary of human infection studies. Link.
    • Using genomes to find the path of the plague: “We describe five genomes from the second half of the 14th century … Corroborated by historical and ecological evidence, the presented phylogeny could support the hypothesis of an entry of plague into Western European ports through distinct waves of introduction during the Medieval Period, possibly by means of fur trade routes, as well as the recirculation of plague within the human population via trade routes and human movement.”Link.

  9. Poetry Machine

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    STAGNANT INFLUENCE

    The inefficiency of lobbying

    ⤷ Metaresearch

    A few weeks ago, we spotlighted work by Elliott Ash et. al. on the startling influence of the Manne economics seminars in shaping judicial decision-making. This week we’re looking at an industry that, conversely, seems extremely influential, but is frequently ineffectual: lobbying.

    In a 2009 book, “Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why,” FRANK R. BAUMGARTNER et. al. take an unprecedentedly thorough look at lobbying in Washington, scrutinizing “ninety-eight randomly selected policy issues in which interest groups were involved and then followed those issues across two Congresses.” What they find is complexity and gridlock:

    “Since we followed our issues for four years, we know a lot about what eventually occurred (if anything did). In fact, as we outline in the chapters to come, for the majority of our issues, little happened.

    If what they are supposed to be doing is producing change, interest groups are a surprisingly ineffectual lot. A focus by the media and many academics on explaining political change or sensational examples of lobbying success obscures the fact that lobbyists often toil with little success in gaining attention to their causes or they meet such opposition to their efforts that the resulting battle leads to a stalemate.

    Of course, many lobbyists are active because their organizations benefit from the status quo and they want to make sure that it stays in place. We will show that one of the best single predictors of success in the lobbying game is not how much money an organization has on its side, but simply whether it is attempting to protect the policy that is already in place.”

    Preview on Google Books here.

    • The book is full of surprising conclusions; to name a few: “We find surprisingly weak links between material resources and moving public policy in one’s preferred direction. The causes for this are complex but interesting. For example, the wealthy often oppose the wealthy. Similarly, our results suggest that the impact of partnership and elections may be significantly less than is often assumed” (25).
    • This old-school website contains additional information and documentation related to the book, including the multifarious list of lobbied topics.
    • Another angle on the inefficiency of lobbying, from Federico Huneeus and In Song Kim: “We show that firms’ lobbying activity decreases aggregate productivity by 22 percent relative to an economy without lobbying activity. The main force behind this effect is changes in the size distribution of firms because, through lobbying, some firms get bigger than what they should.” Link. ht reader Patrick S
    • In Song Kim also created LobbyView, a searchable database of lobbying information. Link.
    • Dylan Matthews mentions the Baumgartner book in a recent Vox piece that critiques some philanthropy for ploughing too much funding into already crowded fields. As a counterpoint, Matthews mentions the Open Philanthropy Project’s “importance, neglectedness, and tractability” framework for choosing what problems to tackle. Link.
    ‡ microstructure politics

    +++

    • ImpactAlpha published a piece on income share agreements featuring our friend and partner Kevin James, and his mission-driven ISA servicer, Better Future Forward. “Better Future Forward, a nonprofit focused on making ISAs more accessible, has launched a pair of funds to test the viability of ISAs with more than 200 low-income students in the city of Chicago and states of Minnesota and Wisconsin.” Link.
    • “The sun sets at least an hour later in Madrid than in Munich because Franco’s Spain switched clocks ahead one hour to be in sync with Nazi Germany in 1940, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain, not Germany. Similarly, for a range of historical reasons, clocks in large parts of the planet—e.g., France, Algeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Russia, and Argentina—are set to be ahead of their (solar) time. These arbitrary clock conventions—by generating large discrepancies in when the sun sets across locations—help determine the geographic distribution of educational attainment levels.” Link.
    • Andrew Gelman: Robustness checks are a joke. Link.
    • A post by Cecile Gaubert at VoxEU looks at the effects of place-based subsidies that incentivize firm relocation. From the post: “Such subsidies have costly long-run effects, both on the productive efficiency of the economy and in terms of welfare. Moreover, place-based policies do not necessarily decrease spatial disparities.” Link. And link to the research behind the post, at American Economic Review.
    • “The kilogram is dead. Long live the kilogram.” Link. ht Jay
    • New work from Ryan Calo brings legal realism’s indeterminacy thesis into the privacy law conversation. Link.
    • At the Journal of the History of Ideas, an excellent roundtable discussion on the history (and historiography) of quantification, featuring Dan Bouk, William Deringer, Jamie Pietruska. Link.
    • On the diminishing returns of scientific research. Link.
    • “The exceptional weather conditions and associated harvest failures of 1315–17 marked the beginning of the worst subsistence crisis in European history. Historians have mainly viewed the Great Famine, and medieval famines in general, through theoretical models of the larger fourteenth‐century crisis. This article suggests that this approach is flawed, and applies recent theories on contemporary famines to the crisis of 1315–17 in the county of Flanders. This new perspective not only leads to a re‐examination of existing explanations, such as the role of warfare, but also reveals the importance of property rights in entitlement to food: the power of elites, the relative number of large‐scale landowners, and the structure of household income all influenced peasants’ degree of vulnerability.” Link.
    • Sarah Baird, David McKenzie, and Berk Özler on how the labor-leisure trade-off model leads us astray in research and policy conversations around cash transfers. Link.
    • “If you use an app to go to work, should society consider you a consumer, an entrepreneur, or a worker?” An excerpt from Alex Rosenblat’s new book on Uber and the platform economy is up now at FastCompany. Link.
    • “The social causes of a ‘subculture of coping’ in the late medieval coversand belt.” Link.

  10. Two Figures

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    DISCRETION DIFFERENTIAL

    On the varying modes of conceiving of privacy (and its violation) in the law

    ⤷ Digital Ethics

    In a 2004 YALE LAW JOURNAL article, comparative legal scholar JAMES Q. WHITMAN explores differing cultural and legal postures toward privacy. Through his comparison, he draws a slim taxonomy: privacy rights are founded on either dignity (throughout Western Europe) or on liberty (in the United States). The distinction—while far from perfectly neat either historically or in the present—raises a number of interesting questions about privacy law that are currently being worked out as scholars and legislators move forward in the creation and implementation of digital governance procedures. From the paper:

    “If privacy is a universal human need that gives rise to a fundamental human right, why does it take such disconcertingly diverse forms? This is a hard problem for privacy advocates who want to talk about the values of ‘personhood,’ harder than they typically acknowledge. It is a hard problem because of the way they usually try to make their case: Overwhelmingly, privacy advocates rely on what moral philosophers call ‘intuitionist’ arguments. In their crude form, these sorts of arguments suppose that human beings have a direct, intuitive grasp of right and wrong—an intuitive grasp that can guide us in our ordinary ethical decisionmaking. The typical privacy article rests its case precisely on an appeal to its reader’s intuitions and anxieties about the evils of privacy violations. Imagine invasions of your privacy, the argument runs. Do they not seem like violations of your very personhood?

    Continental privacy protections are, at their very core, a form of protection of a right to respect andpersonal dignity. The core continental privacy rights are rights to one’s image, name, and reputation, and what Germans call the right to informational self-determination—the right to control the sorts of information disclosed about oneself. They are all rights to control your public image.

    By contrast, America is much more oriented to values of liberty. At its conceptual core, the American right to privacy is the right to freedom of intrusions by the state, especially in one’s own home.”

    Link to the paper.

    • Forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, an in-depth review of the significance of the Supreme Court’s June decision in Carpenter v. United States: “Carpenter holds that the police may not collect historical [cellphone location tracking data] from a cellphone provider without a warrant. This is the opinion most privacy law scholars and privacy advocates have been awaiting for decades.” Link.
    • An excellent repository of scholarship on the GDPR—the new European data protection law—from the journal International Data Privacy Law. Link.
    • Danielle Citron and Daniel Solove’s 2016 paper explores how US courts have dealt with legal standards of harm—anxiety or risk—in cases of personal data breaches. Link. See also Ryan Calo’s 2010 article “The Boundaries of Privacy Harm.” Link.
    • Khiara Bridges’ 2017 book The Poverty of Privacy Rights provides a corrective to universalist claims to a right to privacy: “Poor mothers actually do not possess privacy rights. This is the book’s strong claim.” Link to the book page, link to the introductory chapter.
    ‡ Privacy law digital ethics

    +++

    • A new report out this week from our colleagues at Stanford’s Basic Income Lab and the National League of Cities: “Basic Income in Cities: A Guide to City Experiments and Pilot Projects.” Link.
    • Beyond GDP: Charles Jones and Peter Klenow propose a new measure for the economic well-being of people in a country. The measure incorporates data on consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality to account for differences between general welfare and GDP per capita. Link.
    • Studying the logic of insurgent electoral violence: “Insurgents try to depress turnout while avoiding backlash from harming civilians. Counter factual exercises provide potentially actionable for safe-guarding at-risk elections and enhancing electoral legitimacy in emerging democracies.”Link.
    • Mark Koyama’s multipart series from 2016 on the economy of Ancient Rome. Link.
    • A new article for Issues in Science and Technology examines how high-profile scientific controversies (GMOs, climate change, and vaccines) often serve as limiting proxies for philosophical and political debates. Link.
    • Managing the discontent of losers: a new working paper on the material basis of the neoliberal capital-citizen accord, which includes “the ability of households to accumulate debt in order to limit the growth of consumption inequality in the face of burgeoning income inequality.” Link. ht Barry
    • On the wages and value of nonemployment. Link.
    • The Leap Forward project—partially supported by the Haas Institute for a fair and inclusive society and our colleagues at the Economic Security Project—recently published an essay on “A Half Built Connected Economy” in the San Francisco Bay Area. It presents a “framework of policy ideas big enough to tackle extreme income and wealth inequality.” Link.
    • Three new reports on UBI: UC Berkeley’s Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein examine the potential role of UBI in countries with well-developed (if incomplete) safety nets. Link. Researchers at MIT and UC San Diego probe the efficacy of a universal versus a targeted basic income. Link. And, finally, a review of possible theoretical justifications for a universal basic income proposal.Link.
    • “Our research examines the role of factor endowments (the amount of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship that a locality possesses) in determining the location of technology adoption in English textile industry and its persistence since the Middle Ages. In line with recent research on economic growth, which emphasizes the role of factor endowments on long run economic development, we claim that the geographical and institutional environment determined the location of watermill technology adoption.” Link.