MAY 6 2016

Kishore Mahbubani, Lawrence H. Summers, Foreign Affairs: The Fusion of Civilizations. The Case for Global Optimism. To put it simply, the great world civilizations, which used to have detached and separate identities, now have increasingly overlapping areas of commonality. Most people around the world now have the same aspirations as the Western middle classes: they want their children to get good educations, land good jobs, and live happy, productive lives as members of stable, peaceful communities. Instead of feeling depressed, the West should be celebrating its phenomenal success at injecting the key elements of its worldview into other great civilizations.

Ghazala Azmat et al. IZA: What You Don't Know... Can't Hurt You? A Field Experiment on Relative Performance Feedback in Higher Education. This paper studies the effect of providing feedback to college students on their position in the grade distribution by using a randomized control experiment. This information was updated every six months during a three-year period. In the absence of treatment, students' underestimate their position in the grade distribution. The treatment significantly improves the students' self-assessment. We find that treated students experience a significant decrease in their educational performance, as measured by their accumulated GPA and number of exams passed, and a significant improvement in their self-reported satisfaction, as measured by survey responses obtained after information is provided but before students take their exams. Those effects, however, are short lived, as students catch up in subsequent periods. Moreover, the negative effect on performance is driven by those students who underestimate their position in the absence of feedback. Those students who overestimate initially their position, if anything, respond positively.

Indivar Dutta-Gupta et al., Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality: Lessons Learned From 40 Years of Subsidized Employment Programs. Subsidized employment programs have a wide range of potential benefits. First, these programs provide an important source of income to participating workers. Second, a number of experimentally-evaluated subsidized employment programs have successfully raised earnings and employment, with some programs providing lasting labor market impacts.4 Such programs have also decreased family public benefit receipt, raised school outcomes among the children of workers, boosted workers’ school completion, lowered criminal justice system involvement among both workers and their children, improved psychological well-being, and reduced longer-term poverty. There may be additional positive effects, such as increased child support.

Jutta Viinikainen et al., IZA: Born Entrepreneur? Adolescents' Personality Characteristics and Self-Employment in Adulthood. Is there an entrepreneurial personality and does it appear early in life? We provide a new answer on this question by using the so-called Type A behavior traits (Aggression, Leadership, Responsibility, and Eagerness-Energy), measured in childhood and adolescence, and examining their relationship to self-employment propensity in adulthood. Using data from the Young Finns Study linked to the Finnish Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data and the Longitudinal Population Census of Statistics, our results show that the early-life Leadership-dimension is significantly associated with a higher likelihood 1) of becoming self-employed later in life and 2) of being more successful as an entrepreneur, as approximated by sales. Our results also reinforce the prior evidence on the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship.

David Andolfatto: How old were the inventors of major inventions? I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions, like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, etc, along with their inventors. A thought crossed my mind: how old were these inventors when they invented these inventions? Were they young like Marconi, who invented the radio in his early 20s? Or were they old like Gutenberg, who invented the printing press in his early 50s? In short, is there an age demographic that is responsible for producing major innovations? I have to admit, I was a little surprised--the median age is 40 (I was expecting younger).

Dan Nixon, BoE: Less is more: what does mindfulness mean for economics? Economic theory generally assumes that more consumption means greater happiness. This post puts forward an alternative, “less is more” perspective based around the concept of mindfulness. It argues that we may achieve greater happiness by seeking to simplify our desires, rather than satisfy them. The result – less consumption but greater wellbeing – could be especially important for debates around secular stagnation and ecological sustainability.

Holger Kirchmann, Lars Bergström,Thomas Kätterer, Rune Andersson, Fri tanke (2014): Den ekologiska drömmen. Myter och sanningar om ekologisk odling. Föreställningar om att ekologisk odling är klimatsmart och ger bättre livsmedel är felaktiga. Hundra procent ekologisk odling skulle vara en katastrof för framtida livsmedelsförsörjning och innebär större belastning på miljön till en hög kostnad. Konsumenterna får varken bättre livsmedel eller en bättre miljö om de köper ekologiskt odlad mat. Ekologiska livsmedel är inte giftfria. Ekomaten är inte heller nyttigare än konventionellt odlad mat. Ökad ekologisk odling försämrar allvarligt livsmedelsförsörjningen, både i Sverige och globalt. Ekoodling ger inte ett lägre utsläpp av näringsämnen till yt- och grundvatten. Ekoodling är inte klimatsmart.