Patriotism

Here's the punchline graph from a recent Wapo article. Needless to say my dinner that night was patriotic.

 

Oranges

After reading John McPhee's Oranges and The Control of Nature in quick succession, I've been left wondering how it's taken me so long to even hear of the guy. Here are two reflections on Oranges:

1. The writing in this book is good enough to make me want to make a special trip to Indian River County groves the next time I'm in Florida. Would a similar treatment of another boring commodity be just as fascinating? My hunch is yes. I read this a while back and found it entertaining. And Nature's Metropolis is the tale of an entire city, Chicago, told through its boring commodities, and will blow you away.
2. "Oranges" is from 1967. How much has changed? Clearly McPhee's wrote the book in part as a response to the explosion of the orange industry after the invention of concentrate. But he does mention there was no mechanized way to pick oranges. I'm sure that bottleneck is gone, but has the human element that the book points breaks open in describing orange pickers (the "Orangemen") gone with it? 

150 years

Gettysburg sesquicentennial celebrations are up and running. So far this article about Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels and this interactive map of the battlefield are my favorites. I didn't know that some of Shaara's research was new and influential at the time, though I did suspect that he had something to do with getting going the hagiography of Joshua Chamberlain.

In other news, I just bought Doctorow's The March. Don't know much about it, but looking forward to reading it.

Reinventing Writing

I just taught myself how to write in Latex yesterday. My instinct is to say it felt like learning to read another language, but it didn't. It felt like jumbling the entire idea of writing. It must have been a strange moment to learn to type in Word however many years ago, but I don't remember what that was like. This was probably just as strange and just as rare.

At least now everything I write will look just as official, and credible, as any other upstart economics graduate student anywhere else in the world.

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.