Experiments in Development

Today I went to the MIT IDEAS award ceremony. The basic premise is that teams come up with innovative new ideas that solve humanitarian problems. It's closely tied to the appropriate technology movement.

There were a lot of good ideas, but one team caught my eye: Korema. They're working on a way to cut the cost of sanitary pads by about 75% by using local materials and an "integrated" manufacturing process. They hope to have local women buy their machines and start local businesses supplying the pads. I'm a bit skeptical that women would be willing to buy pads for 8 cents each, but it's probably worth a shot. One of the problems with development (and businesses) is that we don't experiment enough.

I like this project a lot. The goal of generating employment and satisfying a basic hygenic need are cause enough for this project--which is why I was surprised Komera felt obliged to argue "[w]omen in Rwanda miss up to 50 days of school . . . due to lack of access [to pads]." Development practitioners have been peddling this theory for years, but skeptics have questioned the presumption along the way:

Yet skeptics abound. Esther Duflo, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that absentee rates are the same for boys and girls in much of Africa, and that programs like providing free uniforms and books seem to increase attendance. “What’s keeping children from school is the costs of attending,” she said.

Rebecca Thorton and Emily Oster recently did an experiment to settle the debate and found sanitary pads had no effect on improving school attendance. Komera should shift its marketing focus to the value of the pads themselves--the fact that people will buy them is evidence enough of their intrinsic worth.

Correlation is not Causation

At The Gradebook, a Florida education blog, the authors publish some talking points about why teaching kids Algebra 2 is worthwhile.

One of them is "[students who take Algebra 2] are more likely to score well on standardized tests because students who score well on the math portion of these tests do score well overall."

I don't think the error here is obvious to the editors at the St. Pete Times, but it should be. The fact that it isn't suggests that, as I've long argued, we need to teach everyone statistics. It's too easy to lie with statistics, even to the relatively educated.

Michael Wilbon's wishful thinking

Michael Wilbon has some nice commentary on the NBA playoffs thus far. But I think he got ahead of himself rewriting history when he claimed:

the suspension of Stoudemire and Boris Diaw . . . likely took an NBA title from the Suns and gave it to the Spurs in 2007

If the Suns were the better team they would have won Game 6 with Diaw and Stoudemire back. And while it may be true that Phoenix was a better team during the regular season in 2007, the Mavericks were the NBA's best team in 2007 and deserves the "should have won but didn't" title.

Best from the Web - March and April 2010

Runner-up: This is an excellent blog on the Sleeping Beauty Paradox.

I'm pretty sure that the correct answering is P(tails|awake) = 1/2. But you should bet on tails in the gamble they talk about.

Honorable Mention: Chris Blattman summarizes some big ideas from Lant Pritchett.

Best of the Best: "Hard Problems" in the social sciences. It will become known as the article that launched a thousand dissertations.

Philosopher's Grind My Gears

I usually think of my primary academic field as ethics. The questions I do research on and have interest in as questions I think have ethical significance. I've spent at least as much time thinking about ethical theory as economic theory.

But academic philosophers have a habit of ruining the fun in this enterprise. They tend to rehash the same arguments over and over with little intent to understand one another, and often write papers purposefully (it seems) misinterpreting what other people have to say. They also tend to comment on empirical issues without having a good background in psychology and economics. I summarized my opinion on applied ethics in this book review.

Richard Chappell of Philosophy, et cetera is among the more insightful philosophers I've read. He does dabble in abstruse topics of no consequence, but he's also made me stop and think a few times. He's also rather gracious in admitting when he makes mistakes.

Check out his post "In Defense of Free Riding." There is a subtle point that complicates things that I point out in the comments, but I generally agree. Another good one is Voting, Vegetarianism, and Other Chunky Impacts. I think this one simplifies the issues a lot. He's almost certainly wrong about voting (I'm working on a blog about this), and his argument about vegetarianism smooths over some technical (and questionable) assumptions about demand and derived demand decisions.

Assorted Links

I just caught up on a month's worth of RSS backlog. Here are some of the most interesting articles I found (in no particular order):

1. Why are sex prizes taboo

2. Change in Africa (pictures)

3. More Behavioral Economics

4. Bryan Caplanshowing off why he's a second tier thinker

5. Tim Harford calling it like it is

6. Sudanese Civil War, Act III?

7. Foreign aid works (we don't hear this enough)

8. Rodrik says industrial policy is back

9. Krugman calls out the fat cats

10. Landsburg on political listening problems

11. a Must Read: The Data-Driven Life

13. Roger Ebert's intellectual masturbation

14. The Asian Century that isn't

15. Paul Romer being insightful as per usual

16. One take on China in Africa

17. Sports economics Q&A.

Human Rights

Bill Easterly's writing normally rubs people the wrong way, but he occassionally makes some pithy remarks. Here is one that helps summarize my posts on immigration:

The domestic political constituency for caring about the rights of foreigners is so small that I could probably fit them all around my dining table.

Why is that constituency so small and the immigrant rights constituency so HUGE?