Results for “angus deaton”
42 found

*Experimental Conversations*

The editor of this truly excellent book is Timothy N. Ogden, the subtitle is Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics, and the contributors include Angus Deaton, Dean Karlan, Lant Pritchett, David McKenzie, Judy Gueron, Rachel Glennerster, Chris Blattman, and yours truly, with a focus on randomized control trials and other experiment-related methods.  Here is one bit from the interview with me:

I would say that just about every reputable RCT has shifted my priors.  Literally every one.  That’s what’s wonderful about them, but it’s also the trick.  You might ask, “why do they shift your priors?”  They shift your priors because on the questions that are chosen, and ones that ought to be chosen, theory doesn’t tell us so much.  “How good is microcredit?” or “What’s the elasticity of demand for mosquito nets?”  Because theory doesn’t tell you much about questions like that, of course an RCT should shift your priors.  But at the same time, because theory hasn’t told you much, you don’t know how generalizable the results of those studies are.  So each one should shift your priors, and that’s the great strength and weakness of the method.

Now, you asked if any of the results surprised me.  I think the same reasoning applies.  No, none of them have surprised me because I saw the main RCT topics to date as not resolvable by theory.  So they’ve altered my priors but in a sense that can’t shake you up that much.  If you offer a mother a bag of lentils to bring her child in to be vaccinated, how much will that help?  Turns out, at least in one part of India, that helps a lot.  I believe that result.  But 10 years ago did I really think that if you offered a mother in some parts of India a bag of lentils to induce them to bring in their kids to vaccination that it wouldn’t work so well?  Of course not.  So in that sense, I’m never really surprised.

And this:

One of my worries is RCTs that surprise some people.  Take the RAND study from the 1970s that healthcare doesn’t actually make people much healthier.  You replicate that, more or less, in the recent Oregon Medicaid study.  When you have something that surprises people, they often don’t want to listen to it.  So it gets dismissed.  It seems to me that’s quite wrong.  We ought to work much more carefully on the cases where RCTs are surprising many of us, but we don’t want to do that.  So we kind of go RCT-lite.  We’re willing to soak up whatever we learn about mothers and lentils and vaccinations, but when it comes to our core being under attack, we get defensive.

I very much recommend the book, which you can purchase here.  Interviews are so often so much better than just letting everyone be a blowhard, and Ogden did a great job.

What the hell is going on?

Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria.  I could list more such events.

Haven’t you, like I, wondered what is up?  What the hell is going on?

I don’t know, but let me tell you my (highly uncertain) default hypothesis.  I don’t see decisive evidence for it, but it is a kind of “first blast” attempt to fit the basic facts while remaining within the realm of reason.

The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males.  The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them?  Brutes?

Quite simply, there are many people who don’t like it when the world becomes nicer.  They do less well with nice.  And they respond by in turn behaving less nicely, if only in their voting behavior and perhaps their internet harassment as well.

Female median wages have been rising pretty consistently, but the male median wage, at least as measured, was higher back in 1969 than it is today (admittedly the deflator probably is off, but even that such a measure is possible speaks volumes).  A lot of men did better psychologically and maybe also economically in a world where America had a greater number of tough manufacturing jobs.  They thrived under brutish conditions, including a military draft to crack some of their heads into line.

To borrow a phrasing from Peter Thiel, perhaps men did better in the age of “technological progress without globalization” rather than “globalization without technological progress,” as has been the case as of late.

Here’s a line from Martin Wolf:

Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton note, in addition, a sharp relative deterioration in mortality and morbidity among middle-aged white American men, due to suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse.

(Addendum: note this correction.)

For American men ages 18-34, more of them live with their parents than with romantic partners.

Trump’s support is overwhelming male, his modes are extremely male, no one talks about the “Bernie sisters,” and male voters also supported the Austrian neo-Nazi party by a clear majority.  Aren’t (some) men the basic problem here?  And if you think, as I do, that the incidence of rape is fairly high, perhaps this shouldn’t surprise you.

The sad news is that making the world nicer yet won’t necessarily solve this problem.  It might even make it worse.

Again, we don’t know this is true.  But it does help explain that men seem to be leading this “populist” charge, and that these bizarre reactions are occurring across a number of countries, not just one or two.  It also avoids the weaknesses of purely economic explanations, because right now the labor market in America just isn’t that terrible.  Nor did the bad economic times of the late 1970s occasion a similar counter-reaction.

One response would be to double down on feminizing the men, as arguably some of the Nordic countries have done.  But America may be too big and diverse for that really to stick.  Another option would be to bring back some of the older, more masculine world in a relatively harmless manner, the proverbial sop to Cerberus.  But how to do that?  That world went away for some good reasons.

If this is indeed the problem, our culture is remarkably ill-suited to talking about it.  It is hard for us to admit that “all good things” can be bad for anyone, including brutes.  It is hard to talk about what we might have to do to accommodate brutes, and that more niceness isn’t always a cure.  And it is hard to admit that history might not be so progressive after all.

What percentage of men are brutes anyway?  Let’s hope we don’t find out.

Place plays a part in helping the poor live longer

There is a new Raj Chetty paper out in JAMA ( with seven co-authors, including David Cutler), and it is garnering a lot of media attention.  Here is to my mind the main result, although it is not being presented as such (NYT here):

The JAMA paper found that several measures of access to medical care had no clear relationship with longevity among the poor. But there were correlations with smoking, exercise and obesity.

I enjoyed the NYC angle from Margot Sanger-Katz:

New York is a city with some of the worst income inequality in the country. But when it comes to inequality of life spans, it’s one of the best.

Impoverished New Yorkers tend to live far longer than their counterparts in other American cities, according to detailed new research of Social Security and earnings records published Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They still die sooner than their richer neighbors, but the city’s life-expectancy gap was smaller in 2014 than nearly everywhere else, and it has shrunk since 2001 even as gaps grew nationwide.

That trend may appear surprising. New York is one of the country’s most unequal and expensive cities, where the poor struggle to find affordable housing and the money and time to take care of themselves.

But the research found that New York was, in many ways, a model city for factors that seem to predict where poor people live longer. It is a wealthy, highly educated city with a high tax base. The local government spends a lot on social services for low-income residents. It has low rates of smoking and has many immigrants, who tend to be healthier than native-born Americans.

Here is the accompanying NYT graphic about “your county.”  Here is Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham, good graphics too:

The poor live shorter lives in Las Vegas, Louisville and industrial Midwest towns, such as Gary, Ind. Geography also matters much more for the poor than the rich. The health behaviors of the wealthy are similar wherever they live. For the poor, their likelihood of risky behaviors such as smoking depends a great deal on geography, on whether they live in a place where smoking is common or where, as in San Francisco, cigarettes have been shunted out of view.

It’s almost as if health care policy should be local in orientation.  The link to the paper includes three comments, including one by Angus Deaton.

Swiss conference on randomized control trials

Working conference on ethics of randomized trials in development economics and health policy: An opportunity for graduate students and young scholars; application deadline March 11

Applications are invited for participating in a five day working conference and summer school on ethical issues posed by randomized trials in development economics and health policy, to be held June 20-24 at the beautiful Brocher Foundation villa in Hermance, Switzerland.  Participants will include Angus Deaton, Joshua Angrist, Michael Marmot, Will MacAskill, and yours truly.

The application deadline is March 11, 2016. Further information is available here.  For remaining questions, please email [email protected].

Be there or be square!

Monday assorted links

1. English departments are better than you think.

2. Angus Deaton on stuff, including what TV he watches (good taste).

3. More Alesina, on fiscal adjustments.

4. The Iranian film “About Elly” is one of the best movies to come out this year.  It is by the director of “A Separation,” and it will take you forty-five minutes to start realizing how good it is.

5. Michael Specter CRISPR article from The New Yorker, very interesting, more than just the usual.

Death rates are rising for white middle-aged Americans

Gina Kolata from the NYT reports:

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The original research is here (pdf).

Who will win the economics Nobel Prize this year?

Diane Coyle mentions some possible picks:

Environmental economics: Partha Dasgupta, William Nordhaus

Update: Twitter folks strongly recommend adding Martin Weitzman in this category.

Growth: Paul Romer, Robert Barro

Inequality: Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton

Innovation (and much else): Will Baumol (now 93!)

Econometrics: David Hendry

All good guesses.  I’ll add Diamond and Dybvig for banking, and possibly an early grant to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer for development and RCTs.  That would make economics look scientific, for a year at least.  I expect Bernanke, Woodford, and Svensson to get a prize as well for monetary economics, although probably not right now.  It is too close to Bernanke’s memoir and Svensson’s tenure at the Swedish central bank.

Here is a WSJ list.  What do you think?  Since I’ve never once been right about a particular year, trying to pick someone would only curse them.  The award will come this Monday of course.

Effective Altruism: where charity and rationality meet

That is the title of my current column at The Upshot.  I very much enjoyed my read of William MacCaskill’s Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.  The point of course is to apply science, reason, and data analysis to our philanthropic giving.

I am more positive than negative on this movement and also the book, as you can see from the column.  Still, I think my more skeptical remarks are the most interesting part to excerpt:

Neither Professor MacAskill nor the effective-altruism movement has answered all the tough questions. Often the biggest gains come from innovation, yet how can a donor spur such advances? If you had a pile of money and the intent to make the world a better place in 1990, could you have usefully expected or encouraged the spread of cellphones to Africa? Probably not, yet this technology has improved the lives of many millions, and at a profit, so for the most part its introduction didn’t draw money from charities. Economists know frustratingly little about the drivers of innovation.

And as Prof. Angus Deaton of Princeton University has pointed out, many of the problems of poverty boil down to bad politics, and we don’t know how to use philanthropy to fix that. If corruption drains away donated funds, for example, charity could even be counterproductive by propping up bad governments.

Sometimes we simply can’t know in advance how important a donation will turn out to be. For example, the financier John A. Paulson’s recently announced $400 million gift to Harvard may be questioned on the grounds that Harvard already has more money than any university in the world, and surely is not in dire need of more. But do we really know that providing extra support for engineering and applied sciences at Harvard — the purpose of the donation — will not turn into globally worthwhile projects? Innovations from Harvard may end up helping developing economies substantially. And even if most of Mr. Paulson’s donation isn’t spent soon, the money is being invested in ways that could create jobs and bolster productivity.

In addition, donor motivation may place limits on the applicability of the effective-altruism precepts. Given that a lot of donors are driven by emotion, pushing them to be more reasonable might backfire. Excessively cerebral donors might respond with so much self-restraint that they end up giving less to charity. If they are no longer driven by emotion, they may earn and save less in the first place.

On Paulson, here is Ashok Rao’s recent post on compounding returns.

Assorted links

1. Puffin holding flower (Proposing puffin).

2. Andrew Wylie on Amazon and other matters.  Angus Deaton on replication.

3. Iceland is no longer doing better in terms of gdp than Latvia or Estonia or Ireland.

4. Video on winemaker robots.

5. The favorite albums of Pope Francis.  He has very good taste in pieces and performances both.  And seventeen Janet Yellen papers that you can read about at this link.

*The Great Escape*

The author is Angus Deaton and the subtitle is Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.  It is a very good book, as you might expect.  Here are two bits I found especially interesting:

In Sweden in 1751 — well before the modern mortality decline — it was riskier to be a newborn than to be an 80-year old.

And, somewhat more recently:

…until around 1900, adult life expectancy in Britain was actually higher than life expectancy at birth.  In spite of having lived for 15 years, those teenagers could expect a longer future than when they were born.

The book’s home page is here.

Handicapping the 2012 Nobel

This article mentions Alvin Roth, Bob Shiller, Richard Thaler, Robert Barro, Lars Hansen, Anthony Atkinson, Angus Deaton, Jean Tirole, Stephen Ross, and William Nordhaus.

I’ll predict a triple prize to Shiller, Thaler, and Eugene Fama.  Fama clearly deserves it, can’t win it solo (too strongly EMH in an age of financial crisis), but can be bundled with two people from behavioral finance and irrational exuberance theories.

Barro will get it, but not in an election year.  Hansen and Ross are good picks but I don’t see them getting it before Fama does.  Paul Romer deserves mention but this is probably not his year because of politics in Honduras.

William Baumol cannot be ruled out.  A neat idea — but unlikely — is Martin Feldstein and Joseph Newhouse for their pioneering work in health care economics, plus for Feldstein there is public finance too.

Tirole and Nordhaus are deserving perennials, with various bundlings (e.g., Oliver Hart, or for Nordhaus other names in environmental).  I hope the Krueger-Tullock idea is not dead but I would bet against it, same with Armen Alchian and Albert Hirschman.  Dale Jorgensen has a shot.

I believe Duflo and Banerjee (and possibly Michael Kremer too, maybe even Robert Townsend) will get it sooner than people are expecting, though not this year as they just presented in Stockholm.  Next year I think.

Not once in the past have I been right about this.

Addendum: Here is the talk from Northwestern.