8 ms·

Nobel Laureates Aim Too Low on Global Poverty

32 points by jriot 7y ago

eaenki 7y ago
The human race has gone downhill since the 60s. No more Apollos Or Manhattans projects. This is just another example of the last 70 years culture. Taboos, abstractions, political correctness, pessimism and escapism are the symptoms of a sad era.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  There are still very large project going on in the world. Libya's irrigation project (35th year and still going); various rail projects; International Space Station. I'm not so pessimistic.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    How did Lybia's irrigation project continued to move forward with the civil war and subsequent local conflicts?
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Well, getting bombed by British jets didn't help.
  - eaenki 7y ago
    Interstellar travel, colonies in space, traveling x10 faster and reversing ageing are comparable to the scale of the atomic bomb, the first space missions or the microprocessor. You drank the kool aid "everything is progressing so quickly".
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Keeping up on medical news? Aging issues making progress weekly. Colonies in space? How many different billionaires are working on that now?
- keeganjw 7y ago
  Oh yes, the 60s, when racism was still written into law, the Vietnam War was raging, and the world was on the brink of nuclear apocalypse but hey, at least we went to the moon.
  - Throw_Away_9451 7y ago
    Just because the current time is worse in some aspects doesn't mean it's worse in all.
  - vkou 7y ago
    The Syrian war (an echo of the Iraq war) is still raging, and the world is still every day on the brink of nuclear apocalypse (With a longer-term, slower, climate apocalypse looming in the distance.) I don't care about the Moon, and besides it, the problems in 2019 aren't much different.
- spinach 7y ago
  'Political correctness' just means people can't be jerks to the less well off people and have to take responsibility for what they say about minorities, women, disabled people etc. Seems like the human race improving to me. And people are pessimistic about life because of climate change that was helped to be created by the pollution of the past when we discarded crap everywhere and didn't care about the earth.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  I'm kind of confused what taboos, abstractions, political correctness have to do with a sad era. Pessimism and escapism- do we have evidence they are increased today compared to the 60s?
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Remember the 50's? Too long ago. Anarchist bombings, shootings all over American, the world. Today is so much safer and saner than back then.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      The irony is that your statement about violence is true of both the 50s and the present day.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wongarsu 7y ago
  The Manhattan project was a military WWII project, and the Apollo project was a Cold War project with military and propaganda value. We haven't done any of those lately because we aren't involved in wars of that scale right now.
  - eaenki 7y ago
    This is sadly likely to be the case but the sample size is too small to say for certain.
- krageon 7y ago
  Are you implying the manhattan project was somehow a good thing?
  - eaenki 7y ago
    I'm not.
- paxys 7y ago
  There are multiple particle accelerators in operation today that are teaching us more about the universe than scientists in the 60s could imagine. Poverty is decreasing across the globe. Diseases are being wiped out. Infant mortality and child-birth deaths are trending down. We have multiple rovers on moons and planets across the solar system, and are preparing for a manned mission to mars. Different races & genders have opportunities today that they couldn't even dream of in the 60s. Freaking cars are starting to drive themselves. I can't imagine the thought process of someone who looks at all this progress and comes away with "damn liberals are ruining the world today with their political correctness".
  - eaenki 7y ago
    I don't even know who liberals are. I'm out of politics. Anyway, what you listed is all incremental improvement with the exception of computer vision (which is still in the very early days still). Interstellar travel, colonies in space, traveling x10 faster and reversing ageing are comparable to the scale of the atomic bomb, the first space missions or the microprocessor. You drank the kool aid "everything is progressing so quickly".
yboris 7y ago
Immigration is an easy win for significantly reducing global poverty. In a classic Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? Michael Clemens argues that it would be a win-win-win scenario to open up our borders. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.25.3.83 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.25.3.83
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  The political reaction to it means it's far from "easy".
  - chrchang523 7y ago
    More importantly, the comparative lack of political resistance to the policy package facilitating e.g. India and Indonesia growing at ~6% a year for the last 20 years means that we already have a better way of bringing about mass catchup. Perhaps the biggest geopolitical question of the moment is whether we did too good a job of facilitating China’s rise...
kauffj 7y ago
http://archive.is/CAIBq http://archive.is/CAIBq (Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)
Gimpei 7y ago
The problem with focusing on big questions in economics is that it is very difficult to produce convincing evidence. Humanity is complicated and it is impossible to control for unobservables in cross country studies. The Nobel winners see this and decided to focus on smaller, provable questions instead. I'm not saying RCTs are perfect, but they are much better than a lot of the snake oil that still comes out of the discipline. We need more of them, not less.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. I think the discipline in general has something to prove. For economists, it shouldn't be an alien concept to actually produce results and hard data. These particular people have done their part and more. But I feel this price is used to absolve the whole industry. I already hear the open borders arguments again. No, if an underdeveloped nations completely opens up for trade, its domestic economy will get destroyed. And China should be the falsification of that theory anyway. People lift themselves from poverty. Not by easily bored economists from the developed world and their insights. So don't let them experiment with your society too much. Why is immigration good for developed countries? Maybe because you simply catch motivated individuals that have the means to migrate? Think this comment sounds a bit hostile to the discipline? I think you would be correct.
duxut_staglatz 7y ago
The argument of this article is strange. The "randomista" revolution essentially states that we know (or knew) very little about what actually work to foster development and that RCTs are the best tool we have to obtain this knowledge. Macro-scale policies are important, but we have no tool to evaluate their effects appropriately. The article essentially says that this approach is wrong because we know that some macro-scale policies will have a much bigger impact than all those micro interventions. In this case, reducing barriers to immigration. But we do not know that, that's the whole point of doing RCTs in the first place. You can make an argument that we should spend less time focusing on micro scale interventions and more on macro-scale interventions because the former will never have a large impact and thus the best way to foster development is finding which macro intervention work. However saying that focusing on the micro scale is useless because we _already_ know about some macro intervention that work better than the micro ones is unfounded. The evidence on macro intervention is much, much weaker than the evidence from RCTs.
scottlocklin 7y ago
It's worth pointing out that economics is a fake "Nobel" prize, funded not by the Alfred Nobel foundation, but by a Swedish bank trying to cash in on the name recognition. Economics is almost entirely ideology accompanied by linear regression, and should be ignored or at least laughed at by numerate people.
- duxut_staglatz 7y ago
  Saying _a_ Swedish bank is misleading, since it is the central bank of Sweden. If instead of "central bank" they had called it "federal money & banking administration", suddenly the negative connotation would be (mostly) gone. This year's recipients got it for RCTs. Would you say that recipients from the real Nobel Prize in Medicine that use the same methodology should also be laughed at?
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    A rose by any other name... The massive conflict of interest in that set up is something I didn't know. It does greatly affect how I view it. In terms of Medicine, that's different. Doctors aren't only financially driven. Bankers are.
    - bentona 7y ago
      That's a pretty strong claim. I know people in accounting because they like organizing, finance because they love analysis, quant because they love math, etc. I've also met anesthetists and cardiologists who chose their speciality for financial reasons.
      - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
        I should have used more accurate language 'primarily driven'. I've known a bunch of doctors (my sister's partner is a doctor). They tend to list helping others as their primary motivation, with fulfilling a childhood dream as another big one. Financial rewards for a specialty sure, but not for why they got into medicine. I don't know many bankers. But I'd guess their primary motivation will be different. Sure they might enjoy something like analysis. But in the end of the day, you could be an analyst for a conservation NGO. Being a banking analyst attracts people with a specific set of financial desires.
bentona 7y ago
I know that hacker news usually stays away from paywalled articles - do enough people have subscriptions to WSJ that this isn't an issue here?

32 points by jriot 7y ago

The human race has gone downhill since the 60s. No more Apollos Or Manhattans projects. This is just another example of the last 70 years culture. Taboos, abstractions, political correctness, pessimism and escapism are the symptoms of a sad era.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
There are still very large project going on in the world. Libya's irrigation project (35th year and still going); various rail projects; International Space Station. I'm not so pessimistic.
- baud147258 7y ago
  How did Lybia's irrigation project continued to move forward with the civil war and subsequent local conflicts?
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Well, getting bombed by British jets didn't help.
- eaenki 7y ago
  Interstellar travel, colonies in space, traveling x10 faster and reversing ageing are comparable to the scale of the atomic bomb, the first space missions or the microprocessor. You drank the kool aid "everything is progressing so quickly".
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Keeping up on medical news? Aging issues making progress weekly. Colonies in space? How many different billionaires are working on that now?
keeganjw 7y ago
Oh yes, the 60s, when racism was still written into law, the Vietnam War was raging, and the world was on the brink of nuclear apocalypse but hey, at least we went to the moon.
- Throw_Away_9451 7y ago
  Just because the current time is worse in some aspects doesn't mean it's worse in all.
- vkou 7y ago
  The Syrian war (an echo of the Iraq war) is still raging, and the world is still every day on the brink of nuclear apocalypse (With a longer-term, slower, climate apocalypse looming in the distance.) I don't care about the Moon, and besides it, the problems in 2019 aren't much different.
spinach 7y ago
'Political correctness' just means people can't be jerks to the less well off people and have to take responsibility for what they say about minorities, women, disabled people etc. Seems like the human race improving to me. And people are pessimistic about life because of climate change that was helped to be created by the pollution of the past when we discarded crap everywhere and didn't care about the earth.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I'm kind of confused what taboos, abstractions, political correctness have to do with a sad era. Pessimism and escapism- do we have evidence they are increased today compared to the 60s?
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Remember the 50's? Too long ago. Anarchist bombings, shootings all over American, the world. Today is so much safer and saner than back then.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    The irony is that your statement about violence is true of both the 50s and the present day.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wongarsu 7y ago
The Manhattan project was a military WWII project, and the Apollo project was a Cold War project with military and propaganda value. We haven't done any of those lately because we aren't involved in wars of that scale right now.
- eaenki 7y ago
  This is sadly likely to be the case but the sample size is too small to say for certain.
krageon 7y ago
Are you implying the manhattan project was somehow a good thing?
- eaenki 7y ago
  I'm not.
paxys 7y ago
There are multiple particle accelerators in operation today that are teaching us more about the universe than scientists in the 60s could imagine. Poverty is decreasing across the globe. Diseases are being wiped out. Infant mortality and child-birth deaths are trending down. We have multiple rovers on moons and planets across the solar system, and are preparing for a manned mission to mars. Different races & genders have opportunities today that they couldn't even dream of in the 60s. Freaking cars are starting to drive themselves. I can't imagine the thought process of someone who looks at all this progress and comes away with "damn liberals are ruining the world today with their political correctness".
- eaenki 7y ago
  I don't even know who liberals are. I'm out of politics. Anyway, what you listed is all incremental improvement with the exception of computer vision (which is still in the very early days still). Interstellar travel, colonies in space, traveling x10 faster and reversing ageing are comparable to the scale of the atomic bomb, the first space missions or the microprocessor. You drank the kool aid "everything is progressing so quickly".

yboris 7y ago

Immigration is an easy win for significantly reducing global poverty. In a classic Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? Michael Clemens argues that it would be a win-win-win scenario to open up our borders. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.25.3.83 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.25.3.83

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
The political reaction to it means it's far from "easy".
- chrchang523 7y ago
  More importantly, the comparative lack of political resistance to the policy package facilitating e.g. India and Indonesia growing at ~6% a year for the last 20 years means that we already have a better way of bringing about mass catchup. Perhaps the biggest geopolitical question of the moment is whether we did too good a job of facilitating China’s rise...

kauffj 7y ago

http://archive.is/CAIBq http://archive.is/CAIBq (Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)

Gimpei 7y ago

The problem with focusing on big questions in economics is that it is very difficult to produce convincing evidence. Humanity is complicated and it is impossible to control for unobservables in cross country studies. The Nobel winners see this and decided to focus on smaller, provable questions instead. I'm not saying RCTs are perfect, but they are much better than a lot of the snake oil that still comes out of the discipline. We need more of them, not less.

raxxorrax 7y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I think the discipline in general has something to prove. For economists, it shouldn't be an alien concept to actually produce results and hard data. These particular people have done their part and more. But I feel this price is used to absolve the whole industry. I already hear the open borders arguments again. No, if an underdeveloped nations completely opens up for trade, its domestic economy will get destroyed. And China should be the falsification of that theory anyway. People lift themselves from poverty. Not by easily bored economists from the developed world and their insights. So don't let them experiment with your society too much. Why is immigration good for developed countries? Maybe because you simply catch motivated individuals that have the means to migrate? Think this comment sounds a bit hostile to the discipline? I think you would be correct.

duxut_staglatz 7y ago

The argument of this article is strange. The "randomista" revolution essentially states that we know (or knew) very little about what actually work to foster development and that RCTs are the best tool we have to obtain this knowledge. Macro-scale policies are important, but we have no tool to evaluate their effects appropriately. The article essentially says that this approach is wrong because we know that some macro-scale policies will have a much bigger impact than all those micro interventions. In this case, reducing barriers to immigration. But we do not know that, that's the whole point of doing RCTs in the first place. You can make an argument that we should spend less time focusing on micro scale interventions and more on macro-scale interventions because the former will never have a large impact and thus the best way to foster development is finding which macro intervention work. However saying that focusing on the micro scale is useless because we _already_ know about some macro intervention that work better than the micro ones is unfounded. The evidence on macro intervention is much, much weaker than the evidence from RCTs.

scottlocklin 7y ago

It's worth pointing out that economics is a fake "Nobel" prize, funded not by the Alfred Nobel foundation, but by a Swedish bank trying to cash in on the name recognition. Economics is almost entirely ideology accompanied by linear regression, and should be ignored or at least laughed at by numerate people.

duxut_staglatz 7y ago
Saying _a_ Swedish bank is misleading, since it is the central bank of Sweden. If instead of "central bank" they had called it "federal money & banking administration", suddenly the negative connotation would be (mostly) gone. This year's recipients got it for RCTs. Would you say that recipients from the real Nobel Prize in Medicine that use the same methodology should also be laughed at?
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  A rose by any other name... The massive conflict of interest in that set up is something I didn't know. It does greatly affect how I view it. In terms of Medicine, that's different. Doctors aren't only financially driven. Bankers are.
  - bentona 7y ago
    That's a pretty strong claim. I know people in accounting because they like organizing, finance because they love analysis, quant because they love math, etc. I've also met anesthetists and cardiologists who chose their speciality for financial reasons.
    - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
      I should have used more accurate language 'primarily driven'. I've known a bunch of doctors (my sister's partner is a doctor). They tend to list helping others as their primary motivation, with fulfilling a childhood dream as another big one. Financial rewards for a specialty sure, but not for why they got into medicine. I don't know many bankers. But I'd guess their primary motivation will be different. Sure they might enjoy something like analysis. But in the end of the day, you could be an analyst for a conservation NGO. Being a banking analyst attracts people with a specific set of financial desires.

bentona 7y ago

I know that hacker news usually stays away from paywalled articles - do enough people have subscriptions to WSJ that this isn't an issue here?