1. Fibonacci in Budapest: Mathematics appearing beautifully on city streets or a contrived imposition of pattern? Fascinating either way.

2. The less-lofty life of an adjunct (Should I be relieved that this is not a story of an economist?).

3. The illustrated guide to the knowledge process of earning a PhD.

4. Outspoken and clever Frank DeFord on International Olympics Committee decision to host the Olympics in Sochi:

How is it possible that the IOC could have done so little due diligence to award the games to a Soviet throwback bent on putting on a show in an out-of-the-way place where poverty and payoffs thrive, where terrorism and tragedy loom, where the environment is in danger, where dissent is disallowed and prejudice is certified by law?

5. Mr Gates on the myths of international development.

Hat tip: COCO, ARP and Dad.

From @CBlatts:

We investigate whether the show [16 and Pregnant] influenced teens’ interest in contraceptive use or abortion, and whether it ultimately altered teen childbearing outcomes. …We find that 16 and Pregnant led to more searches and tweets regarding birth control and abortion, and ultimately led to a 5.7 percent reduction in teen births in the 18 months following its introduction. This accounts for around one-third of the overall decline in teen births in the United States during that period.

One third?? Wow.

I'm hoping for a 20% increase in the uptake of contraceptives in my research district in Tanzania, which may not even translate into a reduction in teen births at all.  And my intervention includes real people visiting homes, an attempt at solidifying the impact of the intervention with a very clear and personal message. 16 and Pregnant, on the other hand was a) optional b) could be turned off at any point c) is interrupted with commercials and d) may have included unclear and varying messages that affect fertility behavior in different directions.

The effect of TV shows on fertility behavior is not new, however, Brazil's soap operas had the effect of reducing fertility by showing happy families than are much smaller than the realistic size in Brazil at the time. How does one show send a positive message about smaller families and one show send a negative message about teen pregnancy? Artistic choice, I suppose, and probably something economists won't ever know.

Bongaarts and Casterline in Population and Development Review explore whether sub-Saharan Africa's fertility is systematically different from the rest of the world, a theory first posited by Caldwell (1992). The authors reject Caldwell's hypothesis that these countries are experiencing a different type of transition in which declines in fertility are occurring at older ages. However, they do confirm some unique characteristics of sub-Saharan Africa's fertility experience. First of all, in many regions, the decrease in Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has stalled, in contrast to the pattern of steep TFR decline in the earliest stages of demographic transitions in Latin American and Asia. And secondly, the small decreases in TFR are mostly driven by larger birth intervals rather than a desire for smaller families.

Except Rwanda. The Rwandan DHS shows an unusual pattern in which unmet need (as defined by women who do not want to get pregnant and are not using contraception) declined by nearly a half between 2005 and 2010, to which the authors credit the invigoration of a national family planning program. Contraceptives use more than doubled between 2005 and 2010. This stands in stark contrast to other sub-Saharan countries (e.g. Ghana, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Nigeria) where use of contraceptives has basically stalled since the mid-1990s.

What this paper doesn't answer is how the drivers of unmet need (e.g. lack of knowledge of contraceptive methods and supply; low quality and limited availability of family planning services; cost of methods in travel and time; familial objections and concerns about acceptability) that are propping up that green curve, can be fixed.

"Economists know a lot of stuff, the only problem is that a lot of it is wrong. What evidence-based economics or evidence-based policy is about is: party modesty (not thinking you know all the answers to all the questions), curiosity and a willingness to collect data"

That's Richard Thaler in an interview with Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics, about using evidence to fight poverty. Both Thaler and Dean Karlan discuss the changing landscape of research on effective economic policies.

Perhaps this quote sums up my interest in impact evaluations and empirical work: soul-crushing preliminary exams keep me modest, graduate school generally fosters curiosity and I might be overly-willing to ship off to the developing world for the sake of insight into microeconomic decisions and fertility choices.

1. My favorite podcast from the 2013- a Radiolab survival story that begs questions about life and death.

2. Bill Gates' graph of the year. And others, including Emily Oster, Alan Greenspan, Paul Farmer and Chuck Schumer.

3. My favorite new song/artist/music video of 2013.

4. And general themes of 2013 on this blog:
    a. Academia is weird. Should we try something else?
    b. Not surprising: there aren't many of us and we don't make a lot.

@CBlatts:

More and more I wonder whether the causal fetish club in labor and development economics (of which I am a card-carrying member) is asking too many old and tired questions with clever causation rather than new and important questions.

There is a limit, however small, rigorous and valuable, that causality obsession places on the set of questions a researcher can ask. As I said back last year, "why" should not be an afterthought and questions should not be inspired merely by rainfall:

However, my concern is that the exogeneity bar (likely due to the gold standard of randomized controlled trials) has been raised so high that our focus on exogeneity as the primary objective can consequently side-line development research objectives.... my fear is that switching the objective of the research to exogeneity limits the set of development questions we might even ask.

From the Elusive Quest for Exogeneity.

This video was easily my favorite part of Jameel Poverty Action Lab 's ten year anniversary celebration last weekend in Cambridge. And I wasn't alone; I'm pretty sure these J-PAL research assistants -cum- directors garnered the most applause of the entire event (even more than Bono... albeit on video).

Because I am PhD student conducting my own RCT, I have the pleasure as serving as my own principle investigator and as my own research assistant. The joys of reviewing piles of surveys, getting intimate with Stata and traveling in the back of vans on terrible East African roads rocking out to some American pop.... yes.

Although the prime publications, important policy implications and fancy awards get all the press, the real brilliance on an RCT happens in the field. Cheers, RAs.

I'm doing a presentation on balancing professional and personal lives in academia next week for my Teaching in Higher Ed class. The title of this post is sarcastic; don't get your hopes up.

1. Who earns more: a tenured professor or a fry cook?

I’m a tenured professor of history of science and mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. I finished high school 25 years ago. What if instead of attending college I had worked at McDonald’s?

2. How to be realistic about the pre-tenure life.

I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

3. And why am I such a pessimist about job market prospects and getting tenure? Because academia acts as a drug cartel.

Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.

Hat tips: Students of GRAD8101

1. Shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed. Turns out economists can't resolve their differences either.

2. Peeta Mellark, the feminist.  Unpredictably, I love the challenges of typical gender roles in this film. But full disclosure: I'm on a complete Hunger Games binge at present. The second movie was amazing.

3. Do Mark Dayton's policies promote job growth in Minnesota? While I agree with many of Dayton's progressive policies, drawing the distinction between Wisconsin and Minnesota economies only based on three years of state leadership is audacious. Ceteris paribus? Not even close.

Hat tips: LANS, DW, Mom.
 

Superstition.

It's awkward to discuss. Religion is tied enormously to development work; it often motivates international organizations, catalyzes fundraising and plays a huge role in the lives of the poor.

But religion, spirituality and superstition can also stand in the way of preventative health behavior, education, financial savings and can serve as a pretentious vehicle of exploitation.

Narendra Dabholkar, a "fighter against superstition" was killed in Maharashtra, India in September. His obituary in the Economist is inspiring.

Yet over three decades, ever since he had decided to switch his work from curing bodies to curing deluded minds, he had become famous. The organisation he had founded in 1989, the Committee for Eradication of Blind Faith (MANS in its Marathi acronym), had 180 branches in the state. In village after village he and his activists would confront the babas, sadhus and other “godmen” who preyed on the poor and simple, challenging their claims and reporting them to the police. He investigated and demystified cases of black magic and possession by ghosts; he campaigned against animal sacrifice, the prodigious waste of drinking water and good food during religious festivities, and the pollution of local rivers during Ganesha’s birthday festival by the immersion of thousands of idols made of plaster of Paris.

Prior to the influx of community family planning workers in my little research district in Tanzania, most people were seeking their reproductive healthcare from the witch doctor. I occasionally refer to him as "traditional medicine healer," in a weak effort to be respectful, but my Tanzanian colleagues are insistent that the correct translation is witch doctor. It's a fair, he did try to sell me love potion.

People like Dabholkar are fighting an underestimated battle in favor of education, rationality and welfare improving decisions. As an American, its awkward for me to address this abroad without a lot of cultural (and religious?) imperialism. It's much easier to talk about innocent reasons for poverty: lack of good schools, insufficient healthcare, limited labor markets, but what if the poor are just making bad superstitious decisions?

Uninformed opinions affect household decisions every day, and counter the central economic tenant of rational decision-making. It's unexpected and awkward, but so is the fact that I ask complete strangers about their sexual behaviors.

What is the impact of superstition on poverty? Worth more research.