I’m pretty sure everyone has seen the new Azoulay et al paper about what would have happened had the NIH had been 40% smaller, but also: it’s very good.
- is, of course, self-recommending;1 he has a great post on the World Bank as degrowthers.
On a related note,
argues that consumer solar is good - but what African countries need more is reliable grid-scale solar.- has a literature review on the size of the motherhood wage penalty.
When people think undocumented immigrants make economic contributions, they feel more positively about them. On that note, may I recommend 3,000 words on the fiscal contributions of undocumented migrants in the US?
For my progress studies people, the rise and fall of rationality:
“After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.”
Here is a post of 43 things the author loves in London. I endorse many of these: getting the front seat on a double-checker bus, Choosing Keeping, Gay’s the Word, the Hunterian collection…
You can do IVF for free in Russia… if you use the founder of Telegram’s sperm.
I’m very proud that my largest reader overlap is with Ken Opalo’s Substack.
The rationality study has an interesting and I think compelling critique in a later issue (and a third short response from the original authors).
Sun (2022) argues that Scheffer et al (2021) is confusing language colloquialism with changes individualism and rationality. As more people learned to read and write, writing styles evolved (a more oral style of writing as one example). Scheffer et al (2022) in their reply say that their story better fits the timeline and is robust to these forms of language changes (colloquialization and others mentioned).
This isn't my area at all, and I'm not even sure what methods are common here. But my gut reaction to the PCA and trends in Scheffer et al was a bit of skepticism, I guess? It's more complicated than that, of course. I don't see how that accounts for changes in who is reading and who is writing? As literacy expands, then does that matter for the story?
Here's another thought, writing and publication technologies must have evolved over this time as well? Nietzsche has some complaint about his writing tool affecting his thinking.
I'm enough of a Neil Postman fan to say there's something interesting in language and, specifically, the switch from oral communication, to written, and then back. There's a lot of work to do here. I know Postman alleged this story, but is it even correct? How do you really measure this? What does time use survey data say about reading and writing?
Here's the response:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2205563119
Here's the reply:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2206616119