3 ms·

This article feels seriously below the standard of quality I've come to expect from Asterisk magazine. I don't think it should have made the cut. Some problems

This article feels seriously below the standard of quality I've come to expect from Asterisk magazine. I don't think it should have made the cut. Some problems: - Lots of studies cited with no mention of replications or potential caveats. - Lots of effects measured where causation-vs-correlation would be a real concern (in one of them apparently the control group is "firms that dropped out because of a lack of budget"? Wtf?), but the articles never mentions confounders. - The whole article has a "for decades we've done development wrong" slant, but its ultimate conclusion is... We need less protectionism, more liberalization, and more information technologies? Hardly groundbreaking. Overall some observations are interesting, but they're really not conclusive enough to form a single narrative that would justify the incendiary title.

nabla9 2y ago
See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=41774909&goto=item%3Fid%3D41774467%2341774909 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=41774909&goto=item%3Fi... This is 101 microeconomics. Not very controversial
marcosdumay 2y ago
> Lots of studies cited with no mention of replications or potential caveats. The one about Brazil got my attention because of the entirely absurd idea¹. Turns out it's a computer model trying to predict how to retrain people when industries change in size. 1 - International commerce liberalism? In Brazil? And unemployment at the same time? The only time Brazil tried the first on recent history, we got a strongly growing middle class and the least amount of unemployment of recent history. (Probably due to completely unrelated factors.)