When I took his graduate class on the microeconomics of development, Chris Barrett mentioned that “Heterogeneity and the Three ‘Nons'” differentiate developing economies from industrialized economies:
- Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity of endowments, preferences, technologies, and abilities affect outcomes,
- Non-Separability: Households are both production and consumption units, and these two decision are not always separable,
- Non-Anonymity: Village life is not anonymous, and who one transacts with often affects the terms of exchange,
- Non-Market Institutions: High transactions costs often cause households not to participate in markets and to develop seemingly inefficient institutions.
In a post titled “The Transformation Process of Rural Societies,” Frankfurt-based Chilean economist Dany Jaimovich discusses a cool new paper of his which gets at #3 above, i.e., how one can move from non-anonymous to relatively more anonymous transactions:
Medical Analogies in the Social Sciences
Andrew Gelman writes:
Social scientists who use medical analogies to explain causal inference are, I think, implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for [their] own purposes.
Social scientists are often tempted to illustrate their ideas with examples from medical research. When it comes to medicine, though, we are, with rare exceptions, at best ignorant laypersons (in my case, not even reaching that level), and it is my impression that by reaching for medical analogies we are implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes. Evidence-based medicine is the subject of a large literature of its own.
Gelman’s post is a contender for the Post with the Longest Title 2012 award (the title of the post is indeed “Social scientists who use medical analogies to explain causal inference are, I think, implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes.”)
I wonder if he got his inspiration from the Red Sparowes, whose song titles are known for being long (“the great leap forward poured down upon us one day like a mighty storm, suddenly and furiously blinding our senses,” off of their album Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun.)