BH Blog Awards Nominee for Intellectual Tresspassing

RK's Musings

Make Games Not War

A great book- highly recommended; The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

Free Chapters;
Chapter 6: The game begins with an idea.
Chapter 9: The experience is in the player’s mind.
Chapter 23: The designer usually works with a team.

Book Review: The Art of Game Design

THE ART INSTINCT

THE ART INSTINCT-Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
By Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton is the founder and editor of the hugely popular Web site Arts & Letters Daily, named by the Guardian as the best Web site in the world. He also founded and edits the journal Philosophy and Literature, and is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Quote of the Day

“How the discipline of economics fares in revealing previously unrecognized social relations depends on the competition of disciplines in terms of both subject matter and techniques, as Coase has noted. I expect economics to fare well in this competition, but in the end to reveal, describe, and explain no more than an island in man’s behavior.”

-G. Warren Nutter 1979, p. 268.

cited in How to Buy, Sell, Make, Manage, Invent, Produce, Transact, Consume, Marry with Words by Deirdre McCloskey

Parenting Advice from Steven Pinker

Pinker goes on to suggest that we'll probably never really know exactly what part genetics plays in the differences between races and genders - "it's a taboo field of academic research" - but he has been prepared to accept that the claim that men and women's talents - and, by extension, those of different races - overlap but are not identical is quantifiably defensible. "Those who argue this is nothing more than racism or sexism are guilty of statistical illiteracy," he says. "Besides which, just because someone may have a genetic predisposition towards doing a particular thing, it doesn't follow they will automatically do it." Pinker himself is a case in point. While most scientists would accept that humans are genetically programmed to reproduce, Pinker has steadfastly resisted the temptation.

This could well be just a reflection of the relatively low status he gives parents in child development. "The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated," he says. "A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration." Large parts of government social policy, too, are governed by the principle that parents are central to child development. So what does he suggest government should do instead? "It's a tough one," he admits. "But I think it would be better off looking at how cultural change is effected within society."

His views on parenting don't make him an easy person to interview. The standard practice is to try and draw together various threads from childhood to present a coherent portrait of how a life and ideas have been shaped. Yet all that goes out of the window with Pinker if you want to play by his rules. So what sort of him would be talking to me now if he hadn't had Jewish parents and hadn't been born in Montreal in the 1950s? "You mean if I'd been kidnapped at birth and placed with a working-class family somewhere completely different?" he laughs. "There are a lot of variables, but there's a better than average probability I would have been doing something in much the same scientific and intellectual fields."

Like most kids, Pinker had no real idea of what he wanted to do. "I used to like reading," he offers. "We had a set of encyclopaedias and I must have got through about 90% of them." So he was a bit of a nerd? "Yes. Wait, I mean a bit. I did have friends and I did subscribe to Rolling Stone." He was also a bit of a hippy on the sly - still is, you suspect, as he keeps his hair unfashionably long - and when the time came to go to college, he signed up for the year-old Dawson's College in Montreal. "It promised interdisciplinary courses and alternative styles of learning. I'm glad I went, but I came to realise there was something to be said for more traditional learning.....

Pinker certainly shows no signs of abandoning his successful formula of mixing the counter-intuitive with good science. He had sleepless nights before the publication of The Blank Slate - "I knew I was going to get vilified for it in some quarters" - and he'd do well to get in a good supply of sleeping pills before his next book comes out - on how the world is now a far safer place, with fewer wars, genocides and homicides than at any time in its history. But is there a chance his controversy will become the norm and that he'll end up as a national institution just as his old sparring partner once was? "I like ice hockey," he laughs. "No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. It's just a bunch of people beating the shit out of each other chasing the puck." Sounds like as good a metaphor as any to me."

The Global Power Elite

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf

Related Book- The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

Is Chinese action in Tibet terrorism?

Jerrold M. Post and Louise Richardson talks with Riz Khan on what motivates terrorists.

Their books;
The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda
by Jerrold M. Post

What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat
by Louise Richardson

More interesting

How many economics books have acknowledgments like the following

"I'm also grateful to world-leading artists and humanitarians including Bono, Angelina Jolie, Quincy Jones, John Legend, Madonna, and Roger Walters for their unstinting commitment, generosity, leadership, and outreach to millions of fans."

I'll leave up to the readers to guess the author and book.

Futility, Perversity and Jeopardy

We have to gird ourselves against the unholy trinity of reactionary rhetoric identified by the great development economist Albert Hirschman. He noted that every new idea for constructive change is met with three attacks. The first is futility: the course of reform cannot work because the problem is unsolvable. The second is perversity: any attempt at solution will actually make matters worse. The third is jeopardy: attempt to solve the problem will take attention and resources from something even more important. This negativism is a state of mind, not a view based on facts. Vigorous debate over the methods of change is, of course, healthy and vital, but relentless acceptance of the status quo is not acceptable in the face of challenges we confront.

-Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth, p.313

Have a look at the book website- Earth Institute certainly appears to have a lot of cash. I would like to see a Rodrik review of the book- though one of his students don't seem to like the book.

Development economists love to quote from Albert Hirschman- are any of his works really used in teaching development courses at Ivy league universities?

Related;
Intellectual Trespassing and Socratic Humility

The Making of Dani Rodrik, political scientist

So within two months of arriving at Harvard, I set my sights on political science, which seemed like a lot more fun. The test was going to be survival in Harvey Mansfield's political philosophy course--required of all concentrators.

At the time, Harvey Mansfield and Michael Walzer alternated as the instructors of this course. Aside from obvious differences in political orientation, these two also differed greatly in their grading policy. One of the first things that Mansfield did on the first day of class was to write down on the board the grade averages in the course over the last few years. The see-saw pattern was obvious: you didn't need to run a regression to know that the Mansfield dummy was negative and statistically significant. Mansfield looked at the class and smiled. We nervously smiled back.

In fact, Mansfield was soon to become (or perhaps was already, I do not remember) the Chair of the department. So he extended his Quixotic fight against grade inflation throughout the Gov department. When graduating students complained that their low grade average--relative to concentrators in other departments--was hurting their graduate school placement, the result was that we all got a letter from Mansfield inserted in our file explaining that the Gov department was different, and that grades really meant something here.

But I persevered as a Gov concentrator. I did take a minor in economics thanks to my father's prodding. (My father still had hopes that I would go to business school and do something useful in life.) I stayed with Gov because the rest of the program was so fantastic and stimulating. The courses I took with Stanley Hoffman, Joel Migdal, Joe Nye, James Q. Wilson, Sidney Verba were mind expanding. I am, I think, a far better economist for having studied political science early on.

Not so related;
Saving Christmas from the economists.

Rodrik's students are lucky

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for sending my resume to ... 2 years ago.... I love my job mainly because I get to do what I studied at the MPAID and most importantly do these things with the perspective that you've provided me via PED101. It's amazing how many development practitioners have such a siloed view of what they do. I can't explain to you how much your class and the program as a whole has grounded my perspective on development.

I can't tell you how often I've actually used your PED101 presentations for work purposes... [E]specially where you've got transitions from humanitarian aid to development needs, you need a holistic perspective like this and MPAID provides that perspective. In particular, it provides students with the tools they need to (a) question the advice of individuals who try to sell a "one-size fits all" approach to development e.g. structural adjustment loans or anti-corruption fixes and (b) equips students with the training now most needed (and in high demand) by government ministries - ability to provide sound policy advice to developing countries regardless of the most 'sexy' approaches e.g. globalization, trade liberalization, etc. which might not be appropriate in every context.

-Customer satisfaction

Lt. Col. John Nagl is leaving the Army

Why is the Army losing so many talented midlevel officers?


The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual- this is one book (and the story about the writing of the book) that need to be used for teaching public managers.

Origin of Norms

Interesting talk- Origins of Norms: The Place of Value in a World of Nature

Featuring Akeel Bilgrami, Lorraine Daston, Gerald Edelman, John Forrester, Lawrence Friedman, Anne Harrington, and Joel Snyder

Death by Sewer Gas

Peter D. Ward, paleontologist talks with Carl Zimmer.

via Gene Expression

Stern-omics, climate change and academics having fun

David Warsh has interesting comments on the recent Ely lecture by Stern;

But the centerpiece of the convention was a lecture by Nicholas Stern. It is the prerogative of the incoming president, who organizes the meetings, to invite a lecturer to deliver a single plenary address. Avinash Dixit, of Princeton University, chose Stern, long-time professor at Warwick University and the London School of Economics. As adviser to the British government on the economics of climate change and development, Stern recently published an enormous study of global warming that was simultaneously admired for its agenda-setting power and widely criticized by Stern’s fellow economists – Kenneth Arrow, William Nordhaus, Partha Dasgupta and Martin Weitzman among them – for certain of its assumptions about the time horizons and ethical obligations of ordinary human beings, which led ineluctably to his view of the current situation as being one of dire emergency.

Stern’s long and complicated address was masterful, but he did not make available a text, so those who follow this issue closely will have to bide their time to consider in detail what he said. But his basic thrust was clear enough: looking back, he said, he felt his report had underestimated the risks of doing nothing.

The question of what we owe to future generations will not be settled in debates among technical economists, but it has its beginnings there. A particularly lucid review of the differences of opinion among Stern and two of his principal critics — Yale’s Nordhaus and Harvard’s Weitzman, both of whom contributed thoughtful essays to the current issue of the Journal of Economic Literature – is to be found in a particularly acute “Letter from America” by Angus Deaton in the October Newsletter of the Royal Economic Society. Deaton, a Scot, is a professor at Princeton University. “There is an enormous gulf,” he writes, “between the American and British economic professions in the way that they analyze the central questions of public economics.” He continued:

Both Nordhaus and Weitzman express their discomfort with Stern’s taking an explicit ethical position on what the current generation owes to those yet unborn, on the grounds that Stern has no right to impose an ethical position on others. Both Arrow and Weitzman believe that a zero rate of pure time preference, while defensible in theory, is typically only so defended by British economists and philosophers, a comment that is clearly not meant to be taken as any recognition of the superiority of British thinking. The paternalism of any such ethical judgment is certainly a concern, and it seems right to want a more democratic discussion and determination of the ethics of climate policy.

But a judgment needs to be made on some basis, and Arrow, Weitzman and Nordhaus argue that we can find at least some of the relevant evidence in markets, revealed by, as Weitzman writes, “the preferences for present over future utility that people seem to exhibit in their everyday savings and investment behavior.” Even if the markets do not reveal everything we need to know about the present and the future, whatever ethical choices we make need to be consistent with market behavior, because this shows how ordinary people think about these matters….

If zero discounting (with perhaps a touch of paternalism) is the British vice, the refusal to consider ethical questions explicitly but to leave them to the market is surely the American vice. How do the preferences of unborn generations get expressed in the bond market? Do we really want to discriminate across people by their date of birth? And do we really think that savings rates, whether by individuals or governments, are the results of optimal inter-temporal planning, even over their own lives, let alone over those of their unknown descendents, who will live as far in the future as King George III and George Washington lived in the past?

Look for the argument to continue, at levels both high and low. An appropriate and consensual response to global warming is an issue that underlies much of the US presidential campaign this year. And Deaton is the incoming president of the American Economic Association. As such, he will organize the ASSA meetings in San Francisco next January.

It continues to amaze me the number of times Stern has to give the same lecture over and over again to different audiences and yet continues to fascinate other economists.

I wonder whether the issue of climate change is going the way of MDGs- the creation of a huge consulting industry, innumerable reports and never ending academic conferences.

Thomas Schelling gave almost the same talk at AEI-Brookings on November 26th and at the World Bank in December.

Here's another recent panel discussion- climate change and its impact on the poor. Rest assured that international development agencies are going to spend millions of dollars in the coming years on fancy academic conferences on climate change- which would add little to our knowledge of the issue.

By the way I would highly recommend the AEI conference- especially the session by Martin Weitzman and Thomas Schelling.

Related;
Weitzman: Formalism Run Amok
Cool It, by Bjorn Lomborg

Economics says we should act on climate change
The Stern report on global warming

Podcast of AEI conference mentioned above.

The Economist who's only an economist

"The physicist who is only a physicist can still be a first-class physicist and a most valuable member of society. But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist - and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger."- Hayek

Watch Dani Rodrik talk about One Economics, Many Recipes

IMF Book Forum on One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth

One Economics, Many Recipes- IMF Bookforum

One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth
Thursday, November 29, 2007

In an important new book, Dani Rodrik shows that countries that grow and reduce poverty do so by following eclectic policies tailored to their own realities rather than by following a recipe of best practices cooked up by the international globalization establishment.

Nobel laureate George Akerlof says that Rodrik’s new book "does for economic development what Julia Child does for French cooking.... Rodrik teaches economists and policy planners how to construct successful, sustainable development programs."

The book describes the varying recipes that successful countries such as China, India, Korea, Chile, Mauritius, and Botswana have crafted to attain economic growth—and what other countries can learn from their experiences.

Rodrik says further globalization should be combined with the provision of social insurance to help those who lose out: "it will take a lot of work to make globalization’s rules friendlier to poor nations" and to those displaced by globalization within nations.

Register now and be there.

Working Paper of the Day

Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks

Abstract;In soccer penalty kicks, goalkeepers choose their action before they can clearly observe the kick direction. An analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide shows that given the probability distribution of kick direction, the optimal strategy for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal’s center. Goalkeepers, however, almost always jump right or left. We propose the following explanation for this behavior: because the norm is to jump, norm theory (Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136–153) implies that a goal scored yields worse feelings for the goalkeeper following inaction (staying in the center) than following action (jumping), leading to a bias for action. The omission bias, a bias in favor of inaction, is reversed here because the norm here is reversed – to act rather than to choose inaction. The claim that jumping is the norm is supported by a second study, a survey conducted with 32 top professional goalkeepers. The seemingly biased decision making is particularly striking since the goalkeepers have huge incentives to make correct decisions, and it is a decision they encounter frequently. Finally, we discuss several implications of the action/omission bias for economics and management.

Rodrik writes

Hirschman believed that the possibilities for economic development are not nearly as constrained as comprehensive theories lead us to believe. The imbalances specific to underdevelopment create opportunities that policy makers can seize on. Instead of relying on fads emanating from abroad, we need to experiment and look for the unique solutions that will allow us to circumvent ingrained social structures that inhibit growth.

Hirschman’s central insights on development have held up extremely well. The key lesson of the past half-century is that policy makers must be strategic, rather than comprehensive. They have to do the best with what they have instead of wishing they could transform their society wholesale. They need to identify priorities and opportunities, and work on them. They must seek sequential, cumulative change rather than a single, all-inclusive breakthrough.

Successful countries do share some common features. They all provide some degree of effective property rights protection and contract enforcement, maintain macroeconomic stability, seek to integrate into the world economy, and ensure an appropriate environment for productive diversification and innovation.

But how these ends are achieved differs. For example, greater integration with world markets can be achieved via export subsidies (South Korea), export-processing zones (Malaysia), investment incentives for multinational enterprises (Singapore), special economic zones (China), regional free trade agreements (Mexico), or import liberalisation (Chile).

The best-designed policies are always contingent on local conditions, making use of pre-existing advantages and seeking to overcome domestic constraints. That is why successful reforms often do not travel well.

Moreover, generating economic growth requires hitting the right targets, not doing everything at once. What matters at any point is to alleviate a society’s immediate binding constraints. China was constrained by poor supply incentives in agriculture in the late 1970s. Today’s Brazil is constrained by inadequate supply of credit. El Salvador is constrained by inadequate production incentives in tradable goods. Zimbabwe is constrained by poor governance. These problems all require different methods for unlocking growth. What we need is selective, well-targeted reforms, not a laundry list.

Countries run into trouble when they do not use high-growth periods to strengthen their institutional underpinnings. Two kinds of institutions in particular need shoring up: conflict management institutions to enhance economies’ resilience to external shocks, and institutions that promote productive diversification.

This line of thinking has vast implications for the design of appropriate global economic arrangements. Hirschman would be aghast at the extent of intrusion into domestic policy-making that the World Trade Organisation or the International Monetary Fund engage in nowadays. As international bureaucracies with a penchant for “best practices” and common standards, these institutions are poorly suited to the task of seeking innovative, unique pathways suited to each country’s particular circumstances.

Many economists were sceptical about Hirschman’s approach because they could not quite fit it into the economics they had been trained to practice. But, over the years, economics has become richer, too. Dynamic models have become much more common, an economics of the “second-best” has flourished, political economy has become mainstream, and behavioural economics has thrown the “rational actor” into doubt. As a result, Hirschman looks less and less the maverick that he fancied himself to be. Conventional wisdom may finally be catching up with him

- World too complex for one-size-fits-all models