1. Gelman on Douglas Campbell on genetic distance.
2. This is so much asking the wrong question.
3. Why was the Fed’s rate hike technically so smooth?
4. Merry Xmas slide show, using math and math alone.
5. “The total absence of a cultural footprint for Avatar is fascinating…Hey. Right now. Try to quote Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time. Quote ANY line. Or name 2 characters. No cheating.” Twitter link is here.
#1 A really powerful commentary on the appallingly sad state of professional journals in economics.
Campbell and Pyun’s paper is a completely misguided criticism of our paper “The Diffusion of Development,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2009. In that paper, which focused on the determinants of income differences, we did control for continental dummies, as well as for latitude and longitude, climate, percentage of land in the tropics, and so on, as any reader of the QJE can check. Moreover, our results hold when we exclude Sub-Saharan Africa and so cannot be driven solely by those countries (see tables A14, A15 and A16 at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/downloads/diffusionmisc.pdf). Finally, our results hold even more strongly within Europe, where the issue of controlling for continental effects is obviously moot.
Campbell and Pyun’s paper is marred by several methodological and conceptual errors – as we pointed out to them repeatedly – and the authors completely misinterpret our contribution. To start with, contrary to Campbell’s claims in Gelman’s blog entry, our results do not suggest a “direct impact on GDP” of “genetic endowments,” for the numerous reasons we have discussed in many papers, including the fact that genetic distance as measured by Cavalli-Sforza and co-authors captures neutral changes not subject to natural selection, and that our main empirical analysis focuses on barriers to the diffusion of development, running horse races between relative genetic distance and absolute genetic distance in income-difference regressions (a point completely lost on Campbell and Pyun, whose paper only shows regressions on income levels, which are not the focus of our QJE paper).
Regarding their income-level regressions, Campbell and Pyun’s main claim is that the correlation between genetic distance from the US and income per capita is completely driven by Sub-Saharan Africa. This is obviously false, because the correlation is robust to excluding Sub-Saharan Africa from the regressions (see table A14 at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/downloads/diffusionmisc.pdf). This simple fact should be the end of the story: if an empirical relation holds for the whole sample excluding a subgroup, it cannot be driven by that subgroup.
Moreover, the authors never show that just adding Sub-Saharan Africa or distance to the equator reduces the significance of genetic distance (in fact, it does not). They obtain such a result only when they add several other variables at the same time, all of them also highly correlated with genetic distance. In fact, Campbell and Pyun need additional and highly collinear controls at the same time to get what they would like to show: a significant effect of the Sub-Saharan dummy along with an insignificant effect of genetic distance. Overall, one gets the impression that these two authors only show that subset of regressions that provide this joint result, even if that requires arbitrary subsets of controls, with little conceptual and empirical justification.
We share commentator ohwilleke’s sentiment about this being “a really powerful commentary on the appallingly sad state of professional journals in economics.” It is indeed appalling that a professional journal such as the Journal of International Development would publish an incorrect and misguided frontal attack on somebody else’s work without ever asking for the authors’ input or inviting us to provide a formal reply. Obviously, there were very good reasons for Campbell’s paper’s being repeatedly rejected at much better journals, without any need to invoke a conspiracy between numerous editors (and referees) and us. We wish we were that powerful!
Finally, we want to make clear that our data on genetic distance were made available on our websites as soon as our work was published in 2009.
Genetic distance correlates closely with genealogical distance. Why would it be surprising if, for reasons of nature and nurture, people turn out to tend to be more similar behaviorally to people who are more closely related to them genealogically?
I would be quite surprised.
As with most things relating to genes/”race”/etc., the differences within groups are so much larger than the differences between groups (a fact which most geneticists use to disregard the biological basis for “race” and consider it as merely a social construct) that, imagining that cultural/nurture differences were eliminated, the differences between groups would fade into irrelevance given the existing level of variation within each of these socially constructed groups.
Considering it’s now 2015, it’s striking how common this type of smug delusion still is.
Back at ya. The new world wide explosion of economic development has ruined many theories of why it cannot happen.
“As with most things relating to genes/”race”/etc., the differences within groups are so much larger than the differences between groups”
That’s not true. Any genome wide association study will stratify based on race because SNPs differ between subpopulations (and of course stratifying based on particular ethnicity is even better if you can get a sufficiently large sample size).
The incidence of certain genetic diseases differ between ethnicities too.
@Gochujang
I don’t think Steve’s statement was addressing genetically endowed intelligence and economic development, though I know he holds those views. I don’t think there’s nearly enough evidence or a strong enough methodology to tell for sure, but genetic differences between races or ethnicities is widely accepted in the medical and genetics community.
If you are white, your doctor will use different lab values than if you are black. If you are Ashkenazi Jewish, you are susceptible to certain genetic disorders and will be counseled accordingly. This is undeniable.
I am not sure you can use the more specific (and scientifically accurate) “ethnicity” to justify the big old buckets of “race.” I mean, an American might talk freely about “Asians” as a race, but they are many incredibly diverse ethnicity. To even speak of them as one is lazy, sloppy, and given to improper generalization.
Gochuchang,
That is wrong. Sure they are rougher, broader categories, but on a group level they are still quite meaningful. Asian ethnicities are closer genetically to other Asian ethnicities than to African or European ones.
No Cliff, it is all about the ethnicities, and it is rare to find an ethnic group that is not greatly mixed by past migrations.
@ Gochujang
The population genetics literature has made it clear that there are significant aggregate differences between classically conceived racial groups. Knowing which of the classically conceived racial groups one hails from allows you make better predictions about other physical and mental characteristics.
I find the construct validity critiques to be so ill-conceived because this criterion for judging the utility of a concept is literally how everything else in statistics/biometrics works. The critiques against race being useful, if taken seriously, would also cause one to discard 98% of the extant social science/medical literature.
“it is rare to find an ethnic group that is not greatly mixed”: I always pause when I see this kind of remark, often strengthened to “there’s no such thing as pure XYZ because of mixing”. Mixing of what? Is it an argument that there were once easily differentiated XYZs but there aren’t now?
Hi Nathan,
I’m ambivalent on this whole thing, so, just trying to prod a little:
Can you help me fill in the argument here? I accept that differences within groups (DWGs for short) are greater than differences between groups (DBGs). But what follows from that? DBGs can still hold, even if DWGs are greater. It just doesn’t follow that if the cultural/nurture differences were eliminated, that the existing level of variation of these groups would fade into irrelevance – not from the premise.
Now, of course, it might be **true** that races and ethnicity are mere social constructs that will fade into irrelevance, but if it is true, the move from the premise of DWGs being greater than DBGs to the conclusion that race/ethnicity is a social construct, seems like a non-sequitur.
@ Gochujang December 22, 2015 at 12:38 pm,
I’m attracted to this way of conceiving the issue, but expanding the argument a bit, shouldn’t your view be just as controversial on the left as the old bucket of “race?”
In other words, the left’s view on whether genetics impacts the characteristics of human populations, (and more importantly, whether and how these characteristics cluster) is such that it wouldn’t improve one’s leftist bona fides much to say, “OK so race is a social construct, but ethnicity is real!”
Aside from the strict boundaries of the left’s position, presumed ethnic groups are often large enough to count as a category that people generalize on just as easily as race, positively and negatively.
Would it be fair to say that race began as external assignment and that ethnicity began as internal identity?
Jay Jeffers – Good point, that “It just doesn’t follow that if the cultural/nurture differences were eliminated, that the existing level of variation of these groups would fade into irrelevance”.
I’m just parroting the words of my genetics professors from U of T, a fairly world class-ish genetics research university. I think they would also agree with your point/question, but, having failed basic statistical tests, most scientists would conclude that this is not likely to be a very fruitful area of inquiry, and most certainly not a priority.
Nathan W December 23, 2015 at 12:21 am
So is the argument really so esoteric that the typical educated layperson couldn’t even hope to understand? Forgive me if your reply at 12:21 seems like it might be a bit snarky.
I maintain that there is nothing inconsistent in differences within groups being greater than differences between groups on the one hand, and the differences between groups to be biologically real, on the other. I also maintain that every other time I’ve heard the argument you’re advancing, the person hasn’t had the insight to tackle this question. It wouldn’t shock me to find out you were the first/ But, taking the risk that your reply wasn’t pure snark, if your world class geneticist professors would agree with my point/question, then what are they basing their skepticism on re the fruitfulness or lack thereof of the line of inquiry?
Personally, I don’t want to pursue the question further (empirically, that is). Maybe we don’t need to know certain things. This makes me a bad (classical) liberal, and a bad leftist, (since I take the question seriously enough to be disturbed by it), and obviously not fit for the racial realist crowd (or however we should refer to them), for whatever that’s worth.
Gochujang,
“Would it be fair to say that race began as external assignment and that ethnicity began as internal identity?”
To be honest, I do not know. And since I do not know, I can’t dispute it. It sounds plausible to me.
Still, anyone who has experience having conversations on this topic will understand what I mean when I say that the left’s position on race (there’s no official leftist committee, but again anyone with experience having these conversations will know what I mean) is so… total, so as to preclude the possibility that ethnicity can be biologically real in any non-trivial sense. Wouldn’t you agree?
I have no idea the True Left position. I was never really exposed. I do remember when anything genetic brought Nazi memories for some at the table.
“I have no idea the True Left position. I was never really exposed. I do remember when anything genetic brought Nazi memories for some at the table.”
Fair enough.
Well, your enlivened response certainly lived up to your referee reports! In any case, let me say up front that I can certainly understand your desire to defend your work. Nothing about this is personal, and as I wrote over at Gelman’s blog, any ambitious researcher will occasionally have a result that doesn’t pan out. What is perhaps special about this case is that the critique in question appears to also affect your papers from 2013, 2014, and 2015. If not for this, I might have dropped the matter.
Let’s start with what we all agree on. In the income-level regressions, genetic distance does not predict income per capita after one includes a dummy variable for sub-Saharan Africa and a second dummy for Europe, with no other controls. (Our paper is here: http://dougcampbell.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/2/10227422/diffusion_of_development_110514a.pdf). Secondly, in their table 1, Spolaore and Wacziarg only controlled for “absolute difference in latitude with the US” rather than distance from the equator, which is another influential control. Distance from the equator and a dummy for SSA also kill their results. These are two standard controls in the cross-country income literature, and their omission is puzzling. I say we all agree on this because, above, you did not question these results despite being the crux of the matter, and even a very partial and unfriendly referee (who had access to your data and wrote a report longer than our paper!) also validated this.
The controversy is over whether it is reasonable to include a sub-Saharan Africa dummy as a control, compared to excluding sub-Saharan Africa countries, as you very strongly prefer. My question is, why should we get to exclude data selectively? Africa has more variability in genetic distance than any other continent, so it should be an interesting test case of your theory. In the data, poor east African countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia are closer to the US genetically than developed countries such as Korea and Japan. Within sub-Saharan Africa, as we show in our Figure 3, there is actually a positive correlation between genetic distance from the US and development. So, too, for Asia. If we exclude SSA and Europe, there’s also no correlation between genetic distance and income. Additionally, in the introduction to your paper, you did not write that your results are only robust when you exclude sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, you wrote that “genetic distance…is robust to controlling for a large number of measures of geographical distance…” And that “we control for a vast array of measures of geographic isolation.” A dummy for sub-Saharan Africa could certainly fit this bill.
Another motivation for including a dummy variable for sub-Saharan Africa could be something like this:
The largest genetic distances observed worldwide occur between populations that live on different continents. One concern is that genetic distance may simply be picking up the effect of cross-continental barriers to the diffusion of development, that is, continent effects.
Actually, this isn’t my motivation – I copied the above motivation from your paper. You guys yourselves argued that your results were robust to the inclusion of continent dummies. Only, when you did this, in your country-pairs regressions, you lumped together rich North Africa with sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, as we point out in our paper, you included a sparse number of fixed effects (12 fixed effects for 6 various continent pairs – which have 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 21 possible combinations and thus require 21 FEs). Thus, you never even include a full set of continent controls, even when you lump in middle-income North Africa combined with sub-Saharan Africa. We show in our Table 3 that your results don’t hold in the country-pairs regressions – which you say you prefer — using regional dummies.
In response to some of your comments:
“a point completely lost on Campbell and Pyun, whose paper only shows regressions on income levels, which are not the focus of our QJE paper”
Try again. Our Table 3 does the country-pair income differenced regressions. This is not really distinct evidence, as the data you manufactured here is highly dependent. These regressions were just included to give your paper an heir of sophistication.
“Finally, we want to make clear that our data on genetic distance were made available on our websites as soon as our work was published in 2009.”
The full dataset, including your sample of countries and other variables, are not available. One of your variables was not available at all online. A very partial referee who did have access to your original data sample still criticized us for not using the exact same sample as you. We believe this was disingenuous. I emailed you asking you to share your full data for your regressions, and you did not respond. That’s fine, everyone can miss an email, and, admittedly, I did email also about the genetic distance data specifically and you did respond to that, to your credit. However, this is why it’s advisable to simply post your data and regressions on your webpage. In that case, no one could ever criticize you for not sharing your data. Perhaps you guys can become trend-setters on this point.
“It is indeed appalling that a professional journal such as the Journal of International Development would publish an incorrect and misguided frontal attack on somebody else’s work without ever asking for the authors’ input or inviting us to provide a formal reply.”
Don’t worry – we shared with them our previous referee reports. I’ll close by giving you the last word, one of the gems from these reports: “There is no reason to interpret the Sub-Saharan Africa dummy as a geographic variable…”
Very Respectfully Submitted,
Doug Campbell
We would not like to start a detailed back-an-forth with Doug Campbell here, but we must make a few important points in response to his reply.
First, it is not true that our results in the QJE were robust to continental dummies only because we aggregated North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results continue to be robust when we control for Sub-Saharan Africa separately, as shown in table A16 columns 2 and 3 (“CP” stays for Campbell-Puyn, as those tables were prepared in response to Campbell and Puyn’s criticism, and use their definitions of continents). So we do not agree with Campbell’s claim – our QJE results are indeed robust to including a Sub-Saharan Africa dummy, as well as other appropriate geographical controls.
Second, we did not run income-difference regressions to give our paper “an heir [sic] of sophistication.” We did it because our paper was NOT about a permanent effect of genetic distance on income levels across countries, but about the barriers to “the DIFFUSION of development” (title of the paper!). In fact, our framework predicts that, in response to a major innovation – such as the Industrial Revolution – initially countries farther from the technological frontier tend to be poorer than those closer to the frontier, but over time many of them catch up. So the effect of relative genetic distance on income differences should decrease and possibly disappear over time, as innovations and development spread. We have made that point repeatedly, and documented it in several papers. Alex blogged about one of our more recent papers at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/trade-development-and-genetic-distance.html, and showed our Figure 1, documenting a decrease in the effect of genetic distance over time as development spreads. Hence, our income-difference regressions are key to test our hypothesis that relative genetic distance works as a proxy for those barriers to the diffusion of development. (Moreover, the technological frontier also changes over time. It was Britain in the nineteenth century, the US in the twentieth century, but a thousand years ago it was probably China, and so on. So when studying the effect of relative genetic distance on income differences across societies over time, such frontier change must be taken into account).
Third, the effect obviously takes place on average, and there are important exceptions, such as Japan – a fact that we discussed explicitly in our 2013 Journal of Economic Literature article (http://sites.tufts.edu/enricospolaore/files/2012/08/RootsF.pdf), where we wrote (p. 40): “The diffusion of modern development to East Asia, which started in Japan and spread to nearby societies, is an example of successfully overcoming long-term barriers. Japan is geographically, historically, and genetically distant from the European innovators, but it got the Industrial Revolution relatively early. This is not inconsistent with the existence of historical and cultural barriers across populations, because such barriers operate on average, and it is always possible for some society to develop traits and characteristics that make it closer to the innovator, or to sidestep cultural and historical barriers altogether through historical contingencies. When Japan got the Industrial Revolution, it became a cultural beachhead. South Korea followed, and then industrialization and modernization spread across several societies in East Asia. North Korea, in contrast, is a sad example that very bad policies and institutions can kill growth and development in a society irrespectively of any long-term historical and cultural variables.”
Fourth, we interpret the effect of genetic distance not as a direct effect of genetics but as a proxy for differences in inter-generationally transmitted traits, such as culture and norms, acting as barriers to the spread of development (in fact, we are currently working to shed more light on the relation between ancestry and different measures of cultural distance across societies – for a short summary: http://www.voxeu.org/article/ancestry-and-culture, and for the longer version: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/downloads/ancestry.pdf). Therefore, given our own framework, we DO expect that appropriately controlling for such relevant traits and barriers would greatly reduce or eliminate the measured effect of genetic distance on income – in fact, we would welcome a paper showing that with the appropriate variables and methodology. Unfortunately, Campbell and Pyun’s is not such a paper.
Finally, it seems obvious to us that continental dummies in income regressions do not necessarily capture the effects of geography, and in that sense they should not be interpreted as pure “geographical” variables. For example, they may capture the impact of historical and cultural differences between societies located in different continents. By the way, standard definitions of “continents” are themselves culturally constructed concepts – “Europe” for instance is geographically part of Eurasia.
OK, I understand you guys have to write something to keep some doubt, as few people will read the details of these long posts anyway.
In any case — we’re moving toward convergence on some issues. Particularly, I see we’re in agreement that the evidence in Table 1 from “Diffusion of Development” isn’t robust. In your Column 7 of Table A14 in your web appendix, you reproduced our results showing that the apparent impact of genetic distance on income is sensitive to controls for latitude and an SSA Dummy. (I’ll post this myself, as I recognize it from the table from the referee who zinged us for not using the same exact sample as you even though you knew full well this was impossible.)
In this post, you backed off of the claim that we should simply drop the sub-Saharan Africa observations, and argue instead that now you’d like us to ignore the income-level regressions. Now the paper, you say, is all about the country-pair differenced regressions. But, in the abstract of your paper you wrote “We find that genetic distance, a measure associated with the time elapsed
since two populations’ last common ancestors, has a statistically and economically significant effect on income differences across countries….” Times seemed to have changed…
In any case, I see the income-level regressions popped up again in your 2013 paper…. This was a long time after we first emailed you our results in January of 2011, when I offered to buy you lunch, share our results, and collaborate. You then asked to see our data, and we obliged. Then we asked for yours, and … crickets.
Re: the country pairs regressions. What you did here is manufacture 10,000 data points from a sample of 150 countries by taking the differences of everything with each other. But you don’t remotely have 10,000 independent data points. In fact, you didn’t have 150 independent data points, which was part of the problem initially — both genetic distance and incomes are highly correlated in large geographic clusters. If genetic distance to the US doesn’t predict income differences across countries, then it can’t be the case that relative income differences to the US predict relative income differences generally. Thus, I don’t agree that there is any sense in these regressions once you’ve agreed that your Table 1 isn’t robust. In any case, I see you claim robustness to continent effects, using the data and code you won’t share. See, we found otherwise, in our Table 3: http://dougcampbell.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/2/10227422/diffusion_of_development_110514a.pdf
I don’t know what is driving the difference in our results. The difference between us, however, is clear: we put our data and code on our webpage: http://dougcampbell.weebly.com/.
One difference, of course, is that we put our data and regressions on our webpage. You haven’t done this. For any of your papers. Perhaps you did this precisely because you don’t anyone to see how soft your results are.
Oh, and these income-level regressions, which you now say your paper was never about, also showed up in your 2013 paper, which appears to suffer from precisely the same problem. I’d check, except I see the data is not available on your webpage and I somehow don’t think you’ll share it.
“Hence, our income-difference regressions are key to test our hypothesis that relative genetic distance works as a proxy for those barriers to the diffusion of development.”
Given a) colonialism and b) systemic racism, this seems entirely plausible to me.
Strategy: a) stack the deck against them, b) observe that we’re better, c) claim we never stacked any decks but they are just inferior.
Nathan,
You obviously have no clue what this research is about.
Hint: not everything is about your hobby horse which you don’t even bother to read about, preferring to rely on received wisdom from your professors 15 years ago to troll comment threads.
Thanks for your friendly comments Cliff. I’m clearly the troll.
Gochujang,
“Would it be fair to say that race began as external assignment and that ethnicity began as internal identity?”
Interesting question, but, to be honest, I really don’t know. But, since I don’t know, I can’t say it’s unfair, and so won’t dispute it.
Still, my core point is that the left’s argument (there’s no official leftist committee, but anyone who has much conversational experience to speak of re this topic will know what I mean) is so… total, so as to preclude the intellectual respectability of real biological ethnicity just as real biological race. Wouldn’t you agree?
2. I’m not sure which question Cowen believes is wrong, but here’s my question: If not for China’s rapidly increasing inequality, would Singapore be the country that Cowen so admires?
Branko Milanovic seems turned around when he asks if a fast-growing China increases inequality. He frames a scenario where prospering cities advance but hinterlands do not. In this scenario no one is worse off, but the measured Gini coefficient increases.
I think we should worry more about growth faltering and Gini “improving” as city welfare falls.
Too many people obsess over that metric.
How about *everything* on that blog is wrong?
Instead of asking the wrong question: “Why is income inequality going down? Maybe I can figure out why and then try to make a new metric that shows it going up.” And then when realizing that China was the main reason for income inequality going down instead of asking: “How can we make the China story seem worse?” and “maybe we should just exclude China?” instead maybe asking “How did China do it? Is there anything we can learn from them?” and “Perhaps there is something to learn from the greatest increase in human welfare?”.
Global inequality is calculated using national means. I think he underemphasized that this can be misleading when considering the inequality within China.
Chinese authorities are assumed to have concerns about internal inequality in order to ensure social/political stability.
#5
This is a standard feature of disposable mass junk culture, right?
An attempt at a counterexample … the comment “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” has become a meme. But do you know any Mae West films?
Good question. Here is a data point – I have an average (median) knowledge of old films compared to the average person who watches old films. “My Little Chickadee” comes immediately to mind – wasn’t she the Chickadee of the title? And the Jimmy Stewart western where she said in a Dodge City courtroom that she wasn’t ***trying to show contempt*** for the court. She ***was*** showing contempt for the court – Destry Rides Again? I would love to see a high-quality biopic of Mae West’s life.
At 1st I disagreed with this comment, but then I looked at the numbers. Here are the top grossing films of all time:
Avatar, Titanic, Jurassic World, The Avengers, Furious 7, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, Frozen, Iron Man 3
Of these only 3-4 had impact on mass culture:
Titanic, The Avengers, and Frozen. Maybe Age of Ultron as well (not worthy, he’s the boss, hulkbuster … solid memes).
It seems many top grossing films actually have little/no cultural impact. But Avatar was impressive in how little it had.
Have the “top grossing” figures been adjusted for population growth and inflation?
No and yes.
Avatar followed the green Global Warming (lie?) culture, so it’s not an impact, it’s an effect.
5. Quarritch, Sully. “You can not fill a cup that is already full”. “I’m a marine – a warrior, from the Jarhead clan.” “You think you’re one of them? Time to wake up.” “The aliens went back to their dying world”.
By the way, I haven’t watched the movie since it came out in theaters. That’s what I came up with after years of not watching it.
To be honest, Quarritch is extremely memorable as a character.
Probably the only line I remember is about keeping the soldiers alive: “I will not succeed. Not with all of you”.
It was a lame movie but it was a movie people watch for catharsis. They go, they feel bad about what their ancestors did to the Indians, they go out for ice cream after. And never think about it again. People remember lines that come with a joke or with an explosion. Not those that come with a moral lecture. See Dances With Wolves.
Besides, in the end we want the unobtainium. James Cameron’s entire career is based on unobtainium and the technology it provides. So we all know the script is hypocrisy anyway. Not a single writer gave up their comfortable Californian lifestyles to go live in a grass hut in the mud in the middle of the rainforest.
So we accept it as a ritual we go through. And then forget about.
Quarritch has become something of an icon of humanity’s will to conquer the stars in some places where such things are seen positively.
That’s very interesting. I also rooted for the humans, though I saw Quarritch as more of a tool. Can you give me a link to some sort of forum where this kind of view can be found? I hope we get back at the aliens and the race-traitors in the second movie 😉
Which one was Quarritch?
Avatar is a terrible movie, but it looks fantastic. Its the blueray to get to show off you HDTV.
Yep, visuals are what I remember. I don’t recall ever feeling so engrossed in another “world.” I saw it both in 2D and 3D, but effect was similar.
Maybe the pod racing scene in the very first star wars movie was similarly memorable.
“Yep, visuals are what I remember.”
Then you have a movie like The Wizard of Oz. Many parts today are cheesy, but the flying monkeys and the talking trees still creep me out.
And *every single line* in the movie is memorable.
There’s the standard, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
But…
“She bit ye?”
“No, her dog.”
“Oh, she bit her dog, eh…?”
“I got them hogs to get in.”
“Rubbish! You have no power here. Begone, before someone drops a house on you!”
“I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!”
“Oh, what a world, what a world!”
I would say I could name more of the The Wicked Witch of the West’s lines alone, than I could name in 95+% of any movies I’ve ever seen.
And of course, the lyrics to all the songs are memorable. (“Oh I could tell you why the ocean’s near the shore.”)
I don’t believe a week goes by without my citing Harry Callahan. Usually it is “A man’s got to know his limitations”, but sometimes it’s “Do you feel lucky?” or “Make my day.”
2.
Global poverty would also be reduced by Soylent Green.
That would depend. Depend on who you ate. If you ate a random sample of people, it would have no impact on global poverty. If you ate the poor of the Third World, then obviously it would have an impact but you would have to eat an awful lot. If you ate the rich, as per Motörhead [1], and adopted a relative definition of poverty, then you would reduce global inequality and hence poverty in the relative sense.
Perhaps you could try to eat the stupid? That may have an impact on poverty. Apart, of course, from Philosophy Majors working at McDonald’s. Try a game of cards perhaps. If they lose, into the pot they go:
Or you could follow the Simpsons and eat disruptive students. Could work.
[1] Actually from a film of the same name. Which is rightfully forgotten like so many other examples of preachy cr@p.
Avatar haf a technical impact not a cultural one. I’d argue there wouldn’t be 3-D movies in theaters today without it.
Honestly, 3-D movies in theaters today still remain little more than an unfulfilled promise and a gimmick. Almost no movies are so “native” to the 3-D format that you need to watch it in 3-D to really appreciate the movie, and many 3-D scenes just don’t really deliver the 3-D feel. Someday we may get there (some of the “4-D” rides with exclusively “4-D” content come close), but we aren’t there yet in ordinary movie theaters.
I don’t think the technology is very good but I think it’s the only impact that Avatar actually had.
I agree that Avitar was for the special effects, not unlike Jurassic Park, and I liked Gravity for the same reason.
As for 3D and the dearth of quality, I agree. For example, take porn. The Y3DF site, which should be a quality site, has nothing but clunky 3D porn for the most part, that for some reason (not a subscriber, looking at a pirate site rip) features incest as a theme, ruining whatever enjoyment you get if you read the captions. On occasion you do get some good visuals but nothing like Milo Manara’s work, which should be the norm.
I say the great pornographic 3D comic book has yet to be written.
Will “Force Awakens” produce any referencable lines?
“Chewy, we’re home” is the one that comes immediately to mind.
“Ben!”
3) Rate hike “by decree” may be part of it, but this analysis totally ignores the IOER increase, which is where the real action was. As of Dec. 9, there were approx. $2.4 trillion of excess reserves on deposit at the Fed. Raising the rate on that was a massive amount of tightening. This was all widely discussed a few years ago on the blogs. I wish I could find the links. IOER is a different approach that doesn’t require “draining liquidity” in the old way of doing open market operations.
There’s a good explanation here: http://www.moneyandbanking.com/commentary/2015/8/6/how-the-fed-will-tighten
Here’s a good Jan. 2013 post from Stephen Wiliamson that gives a flavor of the discussion that happened back then about the Fed “floor system”, involving among others Steve Randy Waldmann, Krugman, Izabella Kaminska and Scott Sumner. Good times: http://newmonetarism.blogspot.com/2013/01/floor-systems.html
But isn’t it all just basically a sleight of hand? In a few months (or maybe just a day-last Wednesday), isn’t the market likely to realize that there is no fundamental difference in what the Fed is doing vs the private market having to hold Treasury bills at 0.25% vs holding those, or cash, at 0% previously?
#5 I think that people will remember avatar when the sequel comes out. The line I remember best is: “look at all that cheddar!”
I, too, think this was missing part- Avatar had no sequel as of today. Now, having written that, I always thought the movie was absolutely terrible outside the technical features. I wouldn’t even watch a sequel to Avatar for free.
Regarding the Treasury repo question: this sounds like the age old question of how much flows affect prices. If everybody agrees an asset will go down $1 tomorrow, only one bond needs to change hands to achieve it. If half the people think it will go down $1 and half think it will go up $1 there’s going to be a lot of flow and there could be no change to the price (interest rate of appreciation). So would somebody please explain why we ought to be surprised?
Avatar was forgettable. That is how most movies are.
Music is a big driving factor of epic movies like that. Star Wars had an instrumental score that mass audiences loved. Even fans of Avatar or Lord of the Rings or other recent Sci Fi hit movies generally don’t care much about the soundtrack, AFAIK. Am I wrong?
The other movie that had an epic classical instrumental soundtrack that fans obsess over is Conan the Barbarian. You can feel the emotion of the movie just by listening to that music and it doesn’t feel dated at all.
Any other best soundtrack contenders?
2001: A Space Odyssey.
‘Blade Runner’
Commando’s steel drum tracks are instantly recognizable
Jurassic Park
“Jaws”, “Raiders of the Liost Ark” have instantly recognizable themes
To continue with the John Williams theme, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Frozen has a very memorable soundtrack, despite the lame plot. Further back, the Lion King was more recognized for its soundtrack (one Golden Globe and two Academy Awards) than for the movie itself (just one Golden Globe). They might not be the “best” soundtracks, but they’re highly memorable.
Not a movie, but I don’t think half as many people would know who Ken Burns is if he hadn’t used the song “Ashokan Farewell” as the theme for his Civil War documentary. That is one memorable tune.
I’d argue LOTR has some pretty iconic music, I could definitely whistle you the tunes, big part of the movies appeal. Much more so than the average recent scifi or fantasy films. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iYEwFDLVnM&t=3m36s &
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J93fc–VsaI
I agree with this. LotR has a strong main theme that I can recall with absolute clarity and pleasing vividness. Avatar? Uhhhh….there was music?
Well, I think that Avatar would still be forgettable even if the music had been excellent. Aesthetic responses tend to be fairly holistic. At least mine do.
5. The same will happen to a degree with Force awakens. No memorable lines. New characters are meh. The novelty of the leads will wear off.
My kids loved Poe Dameron.He will have staying power. Kylo Ren was also a hit, in the sense that they liked the idea of a wannabe Darth Vader who is actually kind of an incompetent putz. As far as lines, probably the nurse’s exchange with Chewbacca was the most memorable,
Does anyone else get the impression there were a lot of people waiting to hate on the new films, so they’ll look smart?
My guess is these people are going to look as silly as the people who came out raving about The Phantom Menace in the first few days.
It will take a while for people to reason out if TFA is a great film – it was certainly fun. But it was all plot and character, with big space battles taking a back seat. We need to find out if the plot and character goes somewhere interesting, and we’ll need to see the subsequent films to know that.
It had character, that’s for sure. Plot, er, less so. I’m not sure after watching I could even tell you what the difference between the Republic or the Resistance was.
“Star Wars had an instrumental score that mass audiences loved.”
It wasn’t the whole score. It was a couple of melodies from the movie that audiences remember. Star Trek and James Bond also have tunes most people recognize.
I liked Avatar better then most Bond movies but I didn’t think much of the score.
Campbell and Pyun’s paper is a completely misguided criticism of our paper “The Diffusion of Development,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2009. In that paper, which focused on the determinants of income differences, we did control for continental dummies, as well as for latitude and longitude, climate, percentage of land in the tropics, and so on, as any reader of the QJE can check. Moreover, our results hold when we exclude Sub-Saharan Africa and so cannot be driven solely by those countries (see tables A14, A15 and A16 at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/downloads/diffusionmisc.pdf). Finally, our results hold even more strongly within Europe, where the issue of controlling for continental effects is obviously moot.
Campbell and Pyun’s paper is marred by several methodological and conceptual errors – as we pointed out to them repeatedly – and the authors completely misinterpret our contribution. To start with, contrary to Campbell’s claims in Gelman’s blog entry, our results do not suggest a “direct impact on GDP” of “genetic endowments,” for the numerous reasons we have discussed in many papers, including the fact that genetic distance as measured by Cavalli-Sforza and co-authors captures neutral changes not subject to natural selection, and that our main empirical analysis focuses on barriers to the diffusion of development, running horse races between relative genetic distance and absolute genetic distance in income-difference regressions (a point completely lost on Campbell and Pyun, whose paper only shows regressions on income levels, which are not the focus of our QJE paper).
Regarding their income-level regressions, Campbell and Pyun’s main claim is that the correlation between genetic distance from the US and income per capita is completely driven by Sub-Saharan Africa. This is obviously false, because the correlation is robust to excluding Sub-Saharan Africa from the regressions (see table A14 at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/downloads/diffusionmisc.pdf). This simple fact should be the end of the story: if an empirical relation holds for the whole sample excluding a subgroup, it cannot be driven by that subgroup.
Moreover, the authors never show that just adding Sub-Saharan Africa or distance to the equator reduces the significance of genetic distance (in fact, it does not). They obtain such a result only when they add several other variables at the same time, all of them also highly correlated with genetic distance. In fact, Campbell and Pyun need additional and highly collinear controls at the same time to get what they would like to show: a significant effect of the Sub-Saharan dummy along with an insignificant effect of genetic distance. Overall, one gets the impression that these two authors only show that subset of regressions that provide this joint result, even if that requires arbitrary subsets of controls, with little conceptual and empirical justification.
We share commentator ohwilleke’s sentiment about this being “a really powerful commentary on the appallingly sad state of professional journals in economics.” It is indeed appalling that a professional journal such as the Journal of International Development would publish an incorrect and misguided frontal attack on somebody else’s work without ever asking for the authors’ input or inviting us to provide a formal reply. Obviously, there were very good reasons for Campbell’s paper’s being repeatedly rejected at much better journals, without any need to invoke a conspiracy between numerous editors (and referees) and us. We wish we were that powerful!
Finally, we want to make clear that our data on genetic distance were made available on our websites as soon as our work was published in 2009.
@Spolaore and Wacziarg (Pasted after both of your posts for good measure…)
Well, your enlivened response certainly lived up to your referee reports! In any case, let me say up front that I can certainly understand your desire to defend your work. Nothing about this is personal, and as I wrote over at Gelman’s blog, any ambitious researcher will occasionally have a result that doesn’t pan out. What is perhaps special about this case is that the critique in question appears to also affect your papers from 2013, 2014, and 2015. If not for this, I might have dropped the matter.
Let’s start with what we all agree on. In the income-level regressions, genetic distance does not predict income per capita after one includes a dummy variable for sub-Saharan Africa and a second dummy for Europe, with no other controls. (Our paper is here: http://dougcampbell.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/2/10227422/diffusion_of_development_110514a.pdf). Secondly, in their table 1, Spolaore and Wacziarg only controlled for “absolute difference in latitude with the US” rather than distance from the equator, which is another influential control. Distance from the equator and a dummy for SSA also kill their results. These are two standard controls in the cross-country income literature, and their omission is puzzling. I say we all agree on this because, above, you did not question these results despite being the crux of the matter, and even a very partial and unfriendly referee (who had access to your data and wrote a report longer than our paper!) also validated this.
The controversy is over whether it is reasonable to include a sub-Saharan Africa dummy as a control, compared to excluding sub-Saharan Africa countries, as you very strongly prefer. My question is, why should we get to exclude data selectively? Africa has more variability in genetic distance than any other continent, so it should be an interesting test case of your theory. In the data, poor east African countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia are closer to the US genetically than developed countries such as Korea and Japan. Within sub-Saharan Africa, as we show in our Figure 3, there is actually a positive correlation between genetic distance from the US and development. So, too, for Asia. If we exclude SSA and Europe, there’s also no correlation between genetic distance and income. Additionally, in the introduction to your paper, you did not write that your results are only robust when you exclude sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, you wrote that “genetic distance…is robust to controlling for a large number of measures of geographical distance…” And that “we control for a vast array of measures of geographic isolation.” A dummy for sub-Saharan Africa could certainly fit this bill.
Another motivation for including a dummy variable for sub-Saharan Africa could be something like this:
The largest genetic distances observed worldwide occur between populations that live on different continents. One concern is that genetic distance may simply be picking up the effect of cross-continental barriers to the diffusion of development, that is, continent effects.
Actually, this isn’t my motivation – I copied the above motivation from your paper. You guys yourselves argued that your results were robust to the inclusion of continent dummies. Only, when you did this, in your country-pairs regressions, you lumped together rich North Africa with sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, as we point out in our paper, you included a sparse number of fixed effects (12 fixed effects for 6 various continent pairs – which have 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 21 possible combinations and thus require 21 FEs). Thus, you never even include a full set of continent controls, even when you lump in middle-income North Africa combined with sub-Saharan Africa. We show in our Table 3 that your results don’t hold in the country-pairs regressions – which you say you prefer — using regional dummies.
In response to some of your comments:
“a point completely lost on Campbell and Pyun, whose paper only shows regressions on income levels, which are not the focus of our QJE paper”
Try again. Our Table 3 does the country-pair income differenced regressions. This is not really distinct evidence, as the data you manufactured here is highly dependent. These regressions were just included to give your paper an heir of sophistication.
“Finally, we want to make clear that our data on genetic distance were made available on our websites as soon as our work was published in 2009.”
The full dataset, including your sample of countries and other variables, are not available. One of your variables was not available at all online. A very partial referee who did have access to your original data sample still criticized us for not using the exact same sample as you. We believe this was disingenuous. I emailed you asking you to share your full data for your regressions, and you did not respond. That’s fine, everyone can miss an email, and, admittedly, I did email also about the genetic distance data specifically and you did respond to that, to your credit. However, this is why it’s advisable to simply post your data and regressions on your webpage. In that case, no one could ever criticize you for not sharing your data. Perhaps you guys can become trend-setters on this point.
“It is indeed appalling that a professional journal such as the Journal of International Development would publish an incorrect and misguided frontal attack on somebody else’s work without ever asking for the authors’ input or inviting us to provide a formal reply.”
Don’t worry – we shared with them our previous referee reports. I’ll close by giving you the last word, one of the gems from these reports: “There is no reason to interpret the Sub-Saharan Africa dummy as a geographic variable…”
Very Respectfully Submitted, Doug Campbell
We reply to this above.
5. The most widely seen Avatar quote is probably this fansub that mocks the movie’s premise:
Avatar was beautiful and fun and a great movie, but we all kind of knew it was silly.
Avatar was a great leap forward in 3d technology. It would be more influential if there had been more subsequent development of 3d, but so far there hasn’t been enough to make people want to buy 3d home theater systems. So nobody is watching Avatar at home because it was made to be seen in 3d and nobody has 3d at home.
Also, the arts have been getting surreptitiously more rightwing over the last half decade, so Avatar has been kind of stranded as an Obama Era relic.
See the fansub comment above, quoted by TallDave: someone on Reddit wrote a speech for Quarritch (the main military guy on the human’s side) about explicitly comparing civilization and savagery. “And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us” would have easily been the most powerful line in the movie. (I’m not sure it’s one I would quote much–good opportunities don’t come up that often–but it’s the sort of thing I could see getting tattooed on me.)
The WT is strong in this one.
+1
Disney has a park area devoted to Avatar under construction now. I think it’s fairly obvious they should change that plan. It will be seen as anachronistic and foreign to a bunch of children who will never have seen Avatar content.
Avatar was watched at home when it was on the pay channels – HBO, Showtime, etc. But it doesn’t get played on the networks. And while it isn’t gore-filled, it also is fairly violent, at a level above you see in Star Wars. No one is going to sit down their 7 year old and pop in Avatar, and get a story about getting your legs shot off as a marine and the attempted genocide of another species in pursuit of mining. The PG-13 level of the movie takes it out of the realm of kid-friendly fare.
3. Why was the Fed’s rate hike technically so smooth?
Because it was signaled a month before and moving it to .25% is hardly qualifies as ‘tight’. Anyway the rest the global is in deflationary “Dollar Standard” economy right now.
Perhaps Avatar hasn’t had a big cultural impact because it also didn’t have a big box office impact, at least in inflation-adjusted per-capita (that’s U.S. population) spending. Here’s a blog that purports to provide the top hits expressed in inflation-adjusted per-capita revenues:
Top 200 box office hits, adjusted for inflation and (U.S.) population
Avatar comes in at an unimpressive #44. Here are the top 10 hits according to that blog:
1. Gone with the Wind (1939): $12.54 per capita 2015 dollars
2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937): $6.87
3. Star Wars (1977): $6.57
4. The Ten Commandments (1956): $6.30
5. The Sound of Music (1965): $5.95
6. Doctor Zhivago (1965): $5.19
7. Fantasia (1941): $5.05
8. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982): $4.97
9. Jaws (1975): $4.82
10. Ben-Hur (1959): $4.47
Looking at that list, it’s clear what a genius Walt Disney was:
#2 Snow White…#7 Fantasia…#11 101 Dalmations…#13 Pinnochio…#15 Bambi…#21 Sleeping Beauty.
From a PBS TV special of a few days ago, as I remember it (which is probably badly). Disney was making Snow White. His company was almost out of money (as in bankrupt). He needed a banker to pay for finishing Snow White, but the banker insisted on seeing the movie first. Disney reluctantly agreed, because the movie wasn’t nearly finished. The banker watched the movie, with only some sequences complete, and others with just static story board pictures while the dialog ran. The banker said nothing through the whole film. They walked out towards the banker’s car. The banker was just making chit-chat…not saying anything at all about the film. The banker finally gets in his car. The last thing he says after he puts it in gear: “You’re going to make a ton of money on this.”
If you’re going to adjust for inflation and population, it seems like you also need to adjust for changing viewing habits due to changing technology such as TVs, VCRs, DVD players, and now streaming. People don’t go to the movies like they used to. These days the movies with the most cultural currency may have only been middling box office hits, but they have remained perennial staples for home viewing. Also, I believe Avatar’s box office numbers were inflated by the gimmick of charging extra for 3D.
You could try to do that. I’d say Mark’s list feels like a pretty good place to start, and the point it really makes is that it’s silly to compare inflated box office numbers with historic figures. But studios have the incentive to do that (makes new stuff seem bigger) and the media is lazy in reporting.
I am mesmerized at the fact that most comments focused on Avatar and not the glorified verbal street fight between 4 academics, which while highly entertaining also missed the point: Journals in Economics do not incentivize this type of discussion, and the authors are left to battle it out over comments at MR.
So, +1 for MR for providing the space.
-1 for the journals for giving preferential treatment to colleagues,
and -100 for anyone who does not post their data, which is the biggest point. If your full data and code is not fully public you have something to hide and your paper should not be published, anywhere!
Agreed. I’m getting more enjoyment out of it than out of all recent Star Wars movies combined.
#5
“I see you”