People think they can judge the character of politicians, but they confuse luck for skill. That was a particular problem in 2016. For The Economist.
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Why DACA is good, for the Economist.
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A paper by Dev Patel and me for CGD. This analysis examines the relationship between legal reform and social norms surrounding homosexuality. We document three main findings. First, about a fifth of the variation in individual preferences can be explained at a country level. Second, using a difference-in-differences strategy, legalizing homosexuality improves how individuals view the tone of their communities. Third, we provide further evidence supporting a legal origins argument by examining former colonies. Countries that were colonized by the British Empire have significantly worse legal rights for samesex couples than those under other colonial powers. We conclude that adopting legal reform can improve societal attitudes.
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Troops are worthy of support. The Pentagon, not so much. For the Economist.
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Time to revisit the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act. For the Economist.
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A review of The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce and The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea by Bill Emmott, for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
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Inequality of opportunity is a big deal in America. For the Economist.
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Trump's pandering is to a declining and small minority. For The Economist.
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Expanding and Measuring Opportunities is a working paper for the Center for Development and Enterprise. The idea that circumstances and free choice can be neatly divided is open to considerable debate. The [equality of] opportunity framework begs the question, ‘what is in the control of the individual?’ Regardless, equality of opportunity is about ‘birth luck egalitarianism’-minimizing the variance of birth luck– while maximizing or expanding opportunity is about efficiently raising the average birth luck. One advantage of ‘opportunity expansion’ over ‘opportunity equalization’ is that an accounting between free will and determinism is unnecessary–there is no concern with estimating the impact of genetic or in utero factors on outcomes, for example. However, if we are worried about maximizing or expanding opportunities rather than equality of opportunities, the approach that is appropriate when defining equal opportunity (the state when measured exogenous factors have no bearings on relative outcomes within a country) does not work. This is because we cannot take the stock (or flow) of outcomes as a given or an irrelevance. Empirically, allowing the stock of outcomes to vary suggests a goal of expanding or maximizing opportunity may involve a markedly different set of policies than equalizing opportunities. This is because variance in opportunities within countries is far smaller than variance across countries. That implies a focus on raising national average opportunity may have a far bigger payoff than redistributing opportunities or trying to raise the minimum opportunity to the mean within a country –although greater equality of opportunity is likely to be a method to increase absolute levels of opportunity.
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Baumol in the US –for the Economist.
Charles Kenny 