It’s finals week at Duke. This means that most of my time will be spent holding office hours, grading exams, and holding office hours.
I will thus not be posting until next week, until something I really must talk about comes along. To all the students who read this blog, good luck on your final exams and term papers!
My apologies for the lack of new posts, but a weekend of migraines and one of the busiest weeks of the semester mean that I have little time to write new posts these days. Posting will resume on Monday, October 15.
Many of you have paid their first visit to this blog in the last few days, after my post on the trading game went viral on Reddit last Wednesday and Greg Mankiw linked to it on Thursday. If this describes you, welcome to my blog, and thank you for coming back.
If you wish to keep up with this blog, you have many options:
1. You can subscribe via Feedburner feed by clicking here or by copying the Feedburner link and copying into your Google Reader, or any other RSS reader.
2. You can subscribe via email by following the instructions in the right-hand column. You can choose to receive text or HTML versions of either previews of my posts or the posts themselves. After entering your email address, you will receive an email asking you to confirm that you want to receive updates via email.
3. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. Posts are typically published at 5 AM, and tweets announcing posts are typically scheduled for 9:20 AM.
4. You can subscribe to my Facebook profile updates by clicking here. Each tweeted post also appears on my Facebook wall, though do note that my Facebook also has more off-the-wall stuff.
I blog about development economics, agricultural development, food policy, economics, and empirical methods in the social sciences, with a few miscellaneous posts every once in a while.
I make absolutely no money from this website (no, not even when you buy a book on Amazon as a consequence of one of my links; that program is not legal in North Carolina), and I don’t ever intend to. I do this purely to contribute to current policy debates, contribute to my profession, interact with like-minded people, and become a better writer.
Oh, and I am always on the lookout for good topics. So if you’d like to see me write on a given topic, please email me.
The development blogosphere is all abuzz.
Once again, Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, has written about Africa.
While the usual ballyhoo about Kristof among the development twitterati is that he almost exclusively paints a bleak portrait of Africa-the-Dark-Continent whenever he writes about Africa, this time the development blogosphere is seemingly atwitter because Kristof wrote a column that can be summarized as follows: “Africa is rising.”
Although there was some discussion of Kristof’s column in the social media since Saturday when it was posted, the current brouhaha seems to have started when someone tweeted the following yesterday:
“In which @NickKristof wakes to the idea that Africa is Rising. Hey Nick, I’ve been writing that line for 5 years now.”
But don’t take my word for it. Go read the excellent summary of the hubbub written by Tom Murphy.
I don’t really have a dog in Development Blogosphere v. Nicholas D. Kristof, except to say that I just want reporting from Africa to be accurate.
There’s civil conflict somewhere? Report it accurately.
Thousands of people have escaped poverty? Report it accurately.
A dictator is living like Caligula while hundreds of thousands of his people cannot eat three meals a day? Report it accurately.
Life expectancy has unexpectedly and inexplicably improved? Report it accurately.
I am not a Kristof fanboi. In fact, I thought Kristof’s live-tweeting of a police raid on a Cambodian brothel he had been invited to join in on was in poor taste, and I find the “White Savior” persona — in Kristof or anyone else – off-putting. (UPDATE: I also thought his criticizing a poor Malawian for smoking, drinking, and visiting prostitutes in this column to be beyond patronizing.)
But I also think the Kristof bashing is unjustified. Instead of criticizing Kristof for his writing, criticize those who enable it.
The New York Times is in the business of selling newspapers. Space in the New York Times‘ editorial pages comes at a premium. Don’t think for a second that the New York Times would publish Kristof’s columns in its editorial pages if they didn’t correspond exactly to what the New York Times‘ readership wants from a foreign correspondent.
These controversies surrounding Nick Kristof remind me of when my folks rant about oil companies raising gas prices before the start of a long weekend. I never fail to remind them that if they’re seeing such high prices, it’s because other consumers are willing to pay such high prices.
If the New York Times has someone like Kristof writing in its editorial pages, it’s because there is a demand for it among the wealthy, educated, liberal readership of the New York Times. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Or, to channel my inner Last Psychiatrist: “If you’re watching, it’s for you.”
Let’s stop treating the symptom and start treating the disease, and let’s focus on educating the readers of the New York Times — by blogging, writing op-eds, teaching students etc. in ways that paint an accurate portrait of Africa — rather than on relatively less productive Kristof bashing.
25
Sep 12
Openness, or: Reason #353 Why I Blog
Andrew Gelman nicely summarizes an important reason why he blogs — and, incidentally, why I blog, too:
2. Openness: In a blog I can write about the limitations of my work. It’s a real challenge to discuss limitations in a scholarly article, as we’re always looking over our shoulder at what referees might think. Sure, sometimes I can get away with writing “Survey weighting is a mess,” but my impression is that most scholarly articles are relentlessly upbeat. Sort of like how a magazine article typically will have a theme and just plug it over and over. In a blog we can more easily admit uncertainty.
More here.
I feel as though that reason is especially important in
economicsthe social sciences, where one’s salesmanship is often what makes or break one’s papers owing to the fact that readers often make up their minds about the quality of a paper before they reach the end of the introduction. In the sciences, articles are much shorter, and there is a sense that no article is perfect.