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Category: Social Sciences

Confusing Busyness with Productivity

Last week, Jean-Marie Baland (who was my colleague while I was on research leave at the University of Namur last year, and who is himself on leave at Harvard this year) was visiting Duke. One of the two talks Jean-Marie gave was about “The Distributional Implications of Group Lending,” in which him and his coauthors show that in most cases, group lending is more beneficial to the middle class than it is to the poor.

Becker and Posner on Food Prices in Developing Countries, and Social Science Epistemology

This weekend, Gary Becker and Richard Posner — two of the smartest and most prolific academics in the nation — wrote about food prices in developing countries on their blog. As always, their analysis is excellent and their writing is top-notch, so what I discuss in this post is really a quibble.