Month: May 2005

If you don’t like getting your paper rejected before it even reaches peer review, ask David Egilman how to get around the process: In what may be an unprecedented move, when the Brown University researcher’s paper was recently rejected from an occupational medicine journal, he simply bought two pages of ad space and printed the entire article in the same journal.

Here is the full story, and thanks to Newmark’s Door for the pointer.

Addendum: If you care about "Conferences in Everything," try this one.

During his Daily Show appearance Steve Levitt said that in estimating the effect of abortion on crime he controlled for other variables like police and prisons.  Jon Stewart pressed Steve for an explanation of how someone could "control" for other variables – amazingly, Stewart seemed genuinely interested in an answer but, wisely, Steve demurred.  The exchange got me to thinking, What is the shortest, non-technical, yet reasonably accurate explanation of how this is done?

I think the way to go is to use the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell Theorem.  Here’s my attempt:

Suppose you want to figure out the effect of weight on life expectancy.  Heavy people tend to be tall so you have to control for height.  You can do this with a two-step procedure.  First, calculate how height correlates with weight.  Let’s say that you discover that every 1 inch increase in height above say 5’7 correlates with a 5 pound increase in weight; you now subtract from each person’s weight that portion which can be explained by height.  For example, you would subtract 5 pounds from everyone in the data of height 5’8 and 10 pounds from everyone who is 5’9.   Since height doesn’t explain weight perfectly, you are left with a new variable, weight2.  In the second step, you calculate how life expectancy correlates with weight2, since weight2 is "weight after controlling for height" you have now calculated the effect on life expectancy of weight after controlling for height.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is what Steve should have said!  (If asked I would have said, "Well, I could tell you that Jon, but then I would have to bore you.")  I’ve opened the comments section if you have some other ideas.

By the way the ubiquitous Steve Levitt will be here on Wednesday, but I repeat myself.

The ever-insightful Henry Farrell asks whether (modern, left-wing) liberals can express their core attitudes in one simple sentence.

My version of his attempt is: "We don’t want to rake people over the coals with risk."

Some conservatives and libertarians, believe: "Risk strengthens your moral fiber, and induces you to work hard for others."

My sentence is a bit different: "Trying too hard to limit risk will increase the number of global people who are just outright screwed over."

My sentence is the least politically palatable or salient of the three.  But the more globalized the world becomes, the greater its relevance.  It is imperative to keep the United States — the number one generator of global public goods — as a highly productive, innovative economy.

The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of, and/or to rule out foreigners from the relevant moral universe.  Too many issues are (incorrectly) framed as "taking care" vs. serving the avarice of the wealthy. 

In turn, a conservative and libertarian vice is to get too obsessed with "desert."  Another conservative and libertarian vice is come up with some better means of helping people — usually involving markets — and if that doesn’t happen, to be content with doing nothing.  I am most sympathetic with modern liberalism when it buys into libertarian analysis, but then wants to do something through government anyway.

Note that conservatism and libertarianism, whatever their major differences may be, tend to share emotional vices.  That is why libertarianism remains more of a right-wing than left-wing point of view.