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Amartya Sen on Keynes, Robinson, Smith, and the Bengal Famine

Sen in conversation with Angus Deaton and Tim Besley — pdf and video. Excepts: On Joan Robinson “She took a position—which has actually become very popular in India now, not coming from the left these days, but from the right—that what you have to concentrate on is simply maximizing

Routine Maintenance: How to Build Habits

With Mark Paluta Building a habit means trying to maximize the probability of doing something at some regular cadence. max [P(do the thing)] This is difficult because we have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if we would prefer to run or watch TV next Wednesday afternoon, we are more likely

What Academics Can Learn From Industry

At its best, industry focuses people. It demands that people use everything at their disposal to solve a problem. It puts a premium on being lean, humble, agnostic, creative, and rigorous. Industry data scientists use qualitative methods, e.g., directly observe processes and people, do lean experimentation, build novel instrumentation,

Unsighted: Why Some Important Findings Remain Uncited

Poring over the first 500 citations of the over 900 citations for Fear and Loathing across Party Lines on Google Scholar (7/31/2020), I could not find a single study citing the paper for racial discrimination. You may think the reason is obvious—the paper is about partisan prejudice,

Gaming Measurement: Using Economic Games to Measure Discrimination

Prejudice is the bane of humanity. Measurement of prejudice, in turn, is a bane of social scientists. Self-reports are unsatisfactory. Like talk, they are cheap and thus biased and noisy. Implicit measures don’t even pass the basic hurdle of measurement—reliability. Against this grim background, economic games as measures

Predicting Reliable Respondents

Setting aside concerns about sampling, the quality of survey responses on popular survey platforms is abysmal (see here and here). Both insincere and inattentive respondents are at issue. A common strategy for identifying inattentive respondents is to use attention checks. However, many of these attention checks stick out like sore

Interacting With Human Decisions

In sport, as in life, luck plays a role. For instance, in cricket, there is a toss at the start of the game. And the team that wins the toss wins the game 3% more often. The estimate of the advantage from winning the toss, however, is likely an underestimate