Miscellaneous

Commentary / Culture / Miscellaneous — No Comments
15
May 12

Posner on Gay Marriage

Probably the best thing I have read on the issue of gay marriage:

[The gay] population is on the whole law-abiding and productively employed, and having a below-normal fertility rate does not impose the same costs on the education and welfare systems as the heterosexual population does. It is thus not surprising that in response to the President’s announcement of his support for homosexual marriage, Republican leaders cautioned their followers not to be distracted by this issue from the problems of the US economy. This was tacit acknowledgment that homosexual marriage, and homosexual rights in general, have no economic significance.

It seems that the only remaining basis for opposition to homosexual marriage, or to legal equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals in general, is religious. Many devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims are strongly opposed to homosexual marriage, and to homosexuality more generally. Why they are is unclear. If as appears homosexuality is innate, and therefore natural (and indeed there is homosexuality among animals), and if homosexuals are not an antisocial segment of the population, why should they be thought to be offending against God’s will? Stated differently, why has sex come to play such a large role in the Abrahamic religions? I do not know the answer. But whatever the answer, the United States is not a theocracy and should hesitate to enact laws that serve religious rather than pragmatic secular aims, such as material welfare and national security.

The emphasis is mine, but here is more from Richard Posner, and here is his co-blogger Gary Becker’s response.

Interestingly, in his post, Posner brings up the 1975 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. In that case, the Court held that prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional. Continue reading →

Commentary / Culture / Miscellaneous — 3 Comments
11
May 12

Things to Do Before You Die

From an article by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar:

Look at lists of “100 Things to Do Before You Die,” and you’ll find them dominated by exotic sensations of one kind or another (“Skydive”; “Shower in a waterfall”; “Eat jellied eels from a stall in London”).

Really? This is the best we can do? This is what it’s all about? These are the things that make our lives worth living? When I think about what really makes me happy, what I really crave, I come up with a very different list: concentrated, purposeful work, especially creative work; being with people I love; feeling like I’m part of something larger. Meaning, connectedness, doing strenuously what you do well: not sights, not thrills, and not even pleasures, as welcome as they are. Not passivity, not letting the world come in and tickle you, but creativity, curiosity, altruism, engagement, craft. Raising children, or teaching students, or hanging out with friends. Playing music, not listening to it. Making things, or making them happen. Thinking hard and feeling deeply.

None of which involve spending money, except in an ancillary way. None of which, in other words, are consumer experiences.

(HT: Andrew Sullivan.)

Blogging / Culture / Miscellaneous / Social Sciences — 2 Comments
9
May 12

Fixing the Peer Review Process by Crowdsourcing It? (Continued)

We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published — serving as some of the very first dictionaries in Europe.

Any article, journalistic or scientific, that sparks a debate typically winds up looking more like a good manuscript 700 years ago than a magazine piece only 10 years ago. The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline.

Sure, there is still the authority that comes of being a scientist publishing a peer-reviewed paper, or a journalist who’s reported a story in depth, but both such publications are going to be crowd-reviewed, crowd-corrected and, in many cases, crowd-improved. (And sometimes, crowd-overturned.) Granted, it does require curating this discussion, since yahoos and obscenity mavens tend to congregate in comment sections.

That’s from a New York Times op-ed in last weekend’s Sunday Review by Jack Hitt, who is also a frequent contributor to This American Life (here is my favorite This American Life story by Jack Hitt).

Hitt’s point should be be taken more seriously by academics. In all fairness, however, in some corners of academia, the idea is being taken seriously: the AEJs — the four new journals of the American Economic Association — have comments section for every published article (I don’t know why the AEA has not also done so for its flagship journal, the American Economic Review.)

Unfortunately, readers of the AEJs seem to be slow to embrace that change, as few articles appear to have garnered any comments. Moreover, a quick look at the latest issue of each AEJ indicates no comments at all. Perhaps the problem is that one needs to be a member of the AEA to comment.

If those comments thread ever take off, and if other journals start offering similar comment sections, this would be a cheap, quick way of building canonical knowledge within any discipline, as I discussed in my previous post on this topic.

Commentary / Economics / Miscellaneous — 2 Comments
2
Apr 12

Fixing the Peer Review Process by Crowdsourcing It?

Try the following experiment. Take any article accepted for publication at any journal. Now  submit it to another journal. What are odds it will be accepted as is? Zero. There is even a pretty good chance it will be rejected. Our profession seemingly believes that its published articles are in fact not good enough to publish!

That’s from forthcoming editorial (link opens a .pdf) in the Review of Financial Studies by the Yale School of Management’s Matthew Spiegel.

Spiegel’s point is that editors and reviewers should stop chasing perfection. No paper is or will ever be perfect. For Spiegel, the real peer review process begins after an article has been published:

There is almost no reason to worry if a particular article is “right.” What horrors will befall us if a paper with a mistaken conclusion is published? Not many. The vast majority of articles are quickly forgotten. Who cares if their findings are accurate? The profession will not use the material regardless. What if an article is important — that is, people read and cite it? In that case, academics will dissect its every aspect. Some will examine the article’s data filters; others will check for coding errors; still others will look for missing factors or reverse causality explanations. The list is endless. But, that is the point. The list is endless. Authors, referees, and editors cannot even scratch the surface. Nor do they have to. The fact that our colleagues will stress test any important publication means our profession’s received canon of knowledge has a self-correcting mechanism built in. We have faith that important articles are “right” because their results have been tested over and over again in myriad ways.

A recent example of the vetting process described by Spiegel relevant to development economics is that of David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch failing to replicate failing to replicate earlier findings by Mark Pitt and Shahidur Khandker.

(HT: Gabriel Power.)

Miscellaneous — Comments Off
22
Mar 12

Why Not Just Give Money to Charity?

It’s tax season, so my wife and I have recently had to compile how much we have given to charity in 2011. For those of you who do not live in the US, this is because money given to charity is nontaxable here in the US, which might go a long way toward explaining why Americans give more to charity than the citizens of any other country.

At a little over 0.7 percent of our total household taxable income given to charity, we have given a lot less than I expected. Sure, my wife dedicates some of her time every weekend to volunteering at our local animal shelter, but ideally, I would like to see our household’s charitable giving increased to at least 2.5 percent of our income next year.

Oddly enough, many people are reticent to giving any money to charity. Development blogger extraordinaire Alanna Shaikh (if you are interested in getting a job in development, you do subscribe to her International Development Career List, right?) explains why — and why you should give money to charity: Continue reading →

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