Ed Glaeser on the nascent social sciences

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser writes cogently in this article in Harvard magazine about how nascent the social sciences really are. Formal modeling and reliance on data driven research has only been the case for social scientists for less than a century. In the grand scheme of knowledge production and academic progress, this is not very long at all. Glaeser's article is worth the short read, but here are some passages worth quoting.

As data quality has improved, social scientists have moved beyond facts and correlations to the deeper quest for causality.

...

Good social-science experimental research first proliferated in psychology labs. Economists followed the psychologists by creating labs that tested (and often rejected) the predictions that game theory made concerning behavior in markets and auctions. But there is only so much that laboratory experiments can teach us about the long-term impact of having good neighbors or the functioning of a large, real market.

...

The adoption of experimental methods and improved data quality have, in turn, helped generate the third major social-science trend—the increasing irrelevance of traditional field boundaries. Empirical approaches are far more likely than theoretical edifices to be common across fields.

...

Social science is changing rapidly, as better data and real experiments replace the worldly philosophy of the past. Yet that change means that nineteenth-century field definitions feel increasingly obsolete.

Commanding Heights - PBS Documentary

Last week I watched all three episodes of Commanding Heights, a 2002 PBS documentary based off of a book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw titled The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World. The documentary was presented in three, 2-h0ur long episodes that discussed the development of the modern global economic system. The subject matter could easily double as a doctoral dissertation or an academic sub-discipline of its own.

Episode 1: The Battle of Ideas takes an in-depth look at John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek as two competing yet highly influential economists post World War I. The episode features depictions of Keynesianism's rise to prominence in the middle part of the 20th century, the ascendence of communism, the establishment of Chicago-school economists in the US and finally the development of market-oriented policy under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK.

Episode 2: The Agony of Reform starts out by showing global economic downturns in both Western democratic and communist countries. Mostly working to highlight the failure of centrally planned economies, this episode shows the struggle that many (if not all economies) went through to transition toward privatization and moving away from Keynes toward Hayek. Jeff Sach's "shock therapy" is centrally featured, as is the fall of the USSR and the emergence of post-Soviet bloc states.

Episode 3: The New Rules of the Game delves into concepts and issues in globalization. Unequal distribution of resources and wealth are highlighted as the episode wanders through the rise and fall of the Asian Tiger economies, troubles in Mexico, concerns of labor unions who felt powerless in the United States and the Clinton administration's relentless pursuit of unfettered globalization.

All in all, the documentary features interviews from former and current heads of state (Clinton, Thatcher, Goni, bin Mohamad), economic powerhouses (Hayek, Friedman, Sachs) , policy-makers (Rubin, Corzine) and leaders of international organizations - a veritable who's who of international political economy. If you find yourself with 6 hours to kill and an insatiable appetite for understanding how and why the global economy works as it does today, I highly recommend this documentary. In all honesty, I can't recommend this documentary highly enough. The in-depth analysis, narrative structure and highly convincing content is a must see for all students of politics, economics or the world at large. It is my contention that just as the tragedy of 9/11 created greater interest in foreign policy, military strategy and comparative politics, the economic and financial crises we're in today will be responsible for a new generation of students concerned with economic, political and global issues. It's unfortunate that it takes such tragedies to spark these interests, but with these events so prime in our minds, there is no doubt that young-people like myself will work to understand what went wrong and do our best to avoid repeating these failures in the future.

Incidentally, this has also made me look forward to reading Yergin's newest book on energy, security and post-9/11 global issues.

A literature review of the impact of the Internet on the brain

In this report published by Nominet Trust out of the UK, a neuroscientist compiles the latest research in neuroscience about the impact of the Internet on our brains. As with most academic ventures, no real conclusions are drawn and lots of caveats populate the pages, but this is a well put together compilation of the state of knowledge on the subject. Below are some take aways from the executive summary that I liked.

On painting with broad strokes -

Rather than label any type of technology as being good or bad for our brain, it is how specific applications are created and used (by who, when and what for) that determine their impact.

On offline behavior influencing online behavior -

Existing forms of online communication for supporting existing friendships are generally beneficial for their users, with little basis for considering that social network sites and online communication, in themselves, are a source of special risk to children. Internet-related abuse (eg inappropriate sexual solicitation, cyberbullying) appears related to issues beyond the use of the internet.

On learning and the Internet -

The internet is a valuable learning resource and all learning involves changes in the brain. Some technology-based types of training can improve working memory, and others can provide mental stimulation that helps slow cognitive decline

On sleep -

Evidence linking technology-based activity to a reduction in physical exercise is mixed, but how and when technology is used does appear to influence sleep. In particular, late night technology use is linked to reduction in sleep and sleep quality, and teenagers who use their mobile phones after “lights out” are considerably more likely to suffer daytime sleepiness. Again, games may be different from most other types of
technology in their influence on neurobiological processes, with some evidence that they can disrupt children’s sleep and learning even when played early in the evening

Disaggregating social media and civic governance theories

"In the Indian capital of New Delhi, a tiny cohort of Internet savvy consumers is demanding better services from their government and is using social media to make it happen, even though the vast majority of the town’s residents remain off the Internet"

The end of this article claims some minor successes (mostly relating to public shaming of abuses of power by the Delhi traffic police) but in the quote above, the line "even though the vast majority of the town's residents remain off the Internet" caught my eye.
I am not sure exactly what my thoughts are yet, but the difference in what demographic of a political constituency uses a social media tool versus embodied protest might be an interesting way to model social media usage for political purposes. Perhaps educated, networked, drivers in New Delhi are completely well-suited as a demographic who would use social media to air grievances. While uneducated, disenfranchised, impoverished residents might not be the right demographic to try and pose or answer questions about social media usage.

Sex, lies and overblown statistics

John Kay writes in the Financial Times -

Statistics are only as valid as the sources from which they are drawn and the abilities of those who use them. When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake.

A short and worthwhile read about how to consume statistical information. Among the basic questions to ask yourself and the author are "what is the question to which the number is the answer?", "where does the data come from?" and "is an unexpected finding a feature of the data or a feature of the world?"

Edit (@10:55): this post on Kay's website is pretty great too. It's about political decisions and how they rarely adhere to cost-benefit analyses or statistical evidence. He wrote this in 2003, right around the time the UK was considering adopting the Euro.

Podcast: Darren Acemoglu on inequality and the financial crisis

After reading Darren Acemoglu, MIT economist, in the Harvard Business Review the other day on the topic of threats to growth in the United States, I ran across this podcast with him from earlier this year. In it, he takes on Raghuram Rajan's main argument that

growing income inequality in the last part of the 20th century created a political demand for redistribution and various policy changes. This in turn created the push for higher home ownership rates and led to the distortions of the housing market that in turn led to excessive risk-taking in the financial market. Acemoglu suggests a simpler story where the financial sector through its political influence distorted the rules of the game, benefiting executives in the industry, which in turn led to outsized rewards and ultimate instability in the financial industry. The conversation discusses ways of distinguishing between these two arguments and what might be done to change the incentives of politicians.

The clarity with which Acemoglu explains his argument is worthy of the hour spent listening to the podcast, in itself. Add to that, the argument that Acemoglu is putting forward and its focus on political institutions rather than consumer behavior is much more in line with some of my concerns regarding the crisis. Well, I should be less sensationalist here. Acemoglu takes on the idea of differentiating between the two (political institutions and consumer behavior) rather than one of the other. None the less, in the never ending stream of punditry and waxing on and on about the financial crisis, I found this to be one of the better hours I spent.

Gary King on future data-richness in the social sciences

Gary King (Harvard social scientist, statistician and R-magician extraordinaire) published a piece in the journal Science earlier this year that provided some philosophical and methodological grounding for the future of data usage for social scientific inference. In it he puts forth the idea that social science is at the cusp of the ability to study human society as never before.

Analogous to what it must have been like when they first handed out microscopes to microbiologists, social scientists are getting to the point in many areas at which enough information exists to understand and address major previously intractable problems that affect human society.

King, correctly in my opinion, supports the idea that if privacy is adequately protected we can take advantage of new (sometimes digital, sometimes not) data, facilitate data sharing and replication and gain inferential powers that have hardly been seen in our field. The whole piece is worth reading (much shorter and much more consumable than most academic articles) and the PDF link is provided here.

On a tangential note, with the recent controversy over illegal spread and usage of academic articles, namely the arrest of Aaron Swartz, I think one solution might be for researchers to publish their pieces on their personal/professional websites. This might come with some backlash from journals and I'm not exactly sure what the ownership rights over a published piece in a journal are, but most researchers have their own sites these days, and this might serve as a good compromise until we can figure out a better solution.

Edit: Here's a great Techheads.tv with Julian Sanchez and Timothy B. Lee about the Aaron Swartz controversy, and IP issues at large.

Better analysts, better data, better theory? All of the above

Harvard Business Review has a new blog post up by Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets, in which he argues that with a market teeming with better and better analysts, its not the skills of these analysts that will be the future of successful quantitative analysis, but instead the quality of data.

The answer is better data. Yep, that's right. Raw numbers, not the people and programs that attempt to make sense of them. Many organizations have spent the last few years hiring top analysts based on the belief that they create differentiation. Smart companies such as Google believe they need savants to crunch those numbers and find the connections that regular humans could not. But my experience, and what I'm hearing from more organizations (sports and non), shows that real advantage comes from unique data that no one else has.

I'm not so convinced. I think we're headed toward an age of a quantifiable representation of a majority of our world. So, in some ways, I am on board with Morey's call for higher quality data. But I believe that will be almost inevitable. What I would like to see is better theory applied to analyze this data, for data to be open for use and analysis by experts and non-experts alike and for the inferences that are drawn on the data to be put toward actionable results (in my field of interest, toward smarter policy).