1. F*ck Nuance: I know what you're thinking, but that's not what this item is about. It's actually about Kieran Healy's forthcoming paper in Sociological Theory called, well, F*ck Nuance. He argues that the rising demand for "nuance" in sociological theories inhibits clear thinking and useful research. It reminds me of what I've heard a lot of economists say about the demand for complicated formal models in economics papers. It's not what Healy intended, but here's a story about a FinTech start-up ditching FICO scores while offering "the fastest [credit] on the market," which certainly doesn't bother with any nuance like whether the product is good for customers.
2. F*ck Impact: So that's not what Jishnu Das's blog post is actually titled, but it might as well have been. Das (quite ironically, as David McKenzie noted) blogs about how researchers being held accountable for having impact beyond academia, for instance by writing blog posts, is a drag. It's worth reading because there are some valuable nuggets especially about the "poorly specified model" of impact in use and the breakdown of trust between funders and researchers. If you were interested in hearing the thoughts of some development economists who care a lot about having an impact, you could do worse than checking this out. On a different note, the subdued reaction to the post convinces me that the development blogosphere really is dead.
3. Commitment Savings: In the WSJ, Bernartzi and Beshears argue that evidence from commitment savings evaluations suggest that restrictions around retirement accounts should get even more severe, particularly citing the original Ashraf, Karlan, Yin work in the Philippines. It's true that retirement accounts in the US are very leaky, but the cause isn't just temptation or present bias as Benartzi and Beshears imply. Volatility of incomes and expenses seems to play a large role. Here's a video of Dean Karlan discussing the possibility that less restrictive accounts may work better.
4. Mobility: Kevin Williamson writes in National Review that more should be done to help the poor move to better opportunities. Of course, he's only talking about mobility for the poor within the United States (and he weirdly cites the circa 2000 early evaluations of Moving to Opportunity which were contradicted by later work, but then overturned again by the more recent, more comprehensive work from Chetty et al) and never seems to consider the implications of his argument for trans-national mobility. Here's what I wrote not too long ago about philanthropy stepping in to help the people of Flint, MI move (and here, channeling Hirschman). Speaking of philanthropy, I was disappointed to see that the semifinalists for the MacArthur 100&Change $100 million grants didn't include anyone working on mobility. They're described as "eight bold solutions" but mostly seem to be scaling up ideas with mixed evidence that have been around for a quite a while.
5. Nuance Lives!: At least for Daniel Kahneman, who responds to a blog post analyzing the Replicability Index of the papers on priming cited in Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman explains what he missed and how he came to believe too much in the priming results. The nuance comes at the end where Kahneman states that he has not "unbelieved" the individual studies and that he still believes that priming is possible, but has changed his views about the size and robustness of priming effects.
Credit Suisse's 2016 Global Wealth Report provides some perspective on why trans-national mobility is so attractive, and why it's meeting more resistance than in the recent past. Source: Credit Suisse Research Institute
