Toeing a line

The dictator Jorge Videla died today and I've been reading about it in the WaPo, the NYT and Argentine newspapers. Brings to my mind a question. How do you write an obituary for someone whose death nobody feels sad about and, as one public figure in Argentina said, whose actions in life were a monstrosity? It seems hard as a journalist to remain objective and restrained.

On a similar note (but not to compare the two) I had also been thinking about Alex Ferguson's retirement last week. It's easy to read this article about him and forget that the man is still alive. Or, to go back a couple years, to read this article about Paterno's retirement and think the same thing. It seems hard as a journalist to not jump the gun.

MakingConnections

Here's Marge Turner at Metrotrends making good points about Annie E. Casey's retrospective on the  Making Connection Initiative. It's important that they've been upfront about the shortcomings of the initiative, but Turner rightfully points out that the point of Making Connections wasn't only about directly changing those neighborhoods.

We've gotten great data from these ten cities across the country, and from great data great research (here's a link to all 93 papers just the Urban Institute has put together using MC data). I would also add that focusing on ten cities (Denver, Louisville, Des Moines, Providence, White Center, Oakland, San Antonio, Hartford, Indianapolis, Milwaukee) to study poverty and mobility  has added depth to the field. It's a field that either zooms out too much and misses important details or zooms in too much and always to the same places (Chicago, Boston).

And focusing on these ten neighborhoods doesn't just mean we've crunched all their numbers. Just the fact that the Casey Foundation did the work of defining the neighborhoods themselves has made the job easier for researchers interested in focusing their efforts on certain places. Here's a project I got to work on that used just two MC neighborhoods as the basis for a qualitative study, for example.

Episode IV

Yesterday I heard a talk by Derek Lemoine, an economist at Arizona. The man took the academic economics paper presentation to a place I hadn't been before. He's charismatic, unfazed by the nitpickiness, and his slides are white (and neon green!)-on-black instead of black-on-white.

What I really liked was his logic. He spent 15 minutes giving us a play-by-play account of the weekend in April 2010 that led to the collapse of the Waxman-Markey Bill, which would've  instituted cap-and-trade. It was full of pictures and newspaper clippings and the like. He told us why coal and natural gas futures markets should have reacted in such and such way, and we believed him.

Then he showed us his data on those markets, and it didn't look good. Everyone yelled about it for a bit, but Derek seemed prepared. He dodged, dipped, dived, ducked, and dodged. In the end what was left was his storytelling, and it convinced us.

If I signed up for this economics project to be an interpreter of the world instead of an exogeneity-hunter, then this was definitely a moment to remind me there's still hope left.

Fog of war

Dennis Prager, a writer and radio host over at Townhall, is someone I grew up listening to and admiring, on the radio and in person. Here he is on free school lunches, a topic I've let go under the radar. He makes some really great points, getting at some of the subtle effects of these huge programs that we may not always think about.
And that shines light on what I think might be part of a different problem. There is a lot of substance in his column, the material for a genuine, smart, honest debate about large and expensive policies. But the problem is the tone: Dennis's column is angry, a diatribe, with large font yelling at the "Left," which turn his incisive points into full-on indiscriminate hammer blows. Sadly, that's the way he and other conservative write, masking fodder for debate with frantic arm-swinging.