approximately 25% of all respondents, and larger shares of less educated, less affluent, and minority groups, do not believe their ballot choices are kept secret. Second, 70% of respondents report sharing their vote choices with others. In sum, few people view their vote choices as truly private.
…The expectation that one may reveal one’s vote to others casts a shadow over choices made in the voting booth, opening these choices to the influence of social expectations. Of course, revealing one’s vote choice is not compulsory, but in an environment where there is a norm of sharing political views, the freedom to refuse to discuss one’s vote may be pointless—failing to disclose your vote may effectively reveal it.
Lying about one’s choice or refusing to participate openly in a conversation about the election is always an option, but individuals typically experience discomfort when lying or keeping secrets. In situations where that discomfort is anticipated, voting the “right” way is perhaps the easiest way to avoid having to be secretive or deceptive.
…Consequently, choices in the voting booth may reflect not just personal preferences, but also fears about going against the wishes of those who would learn of one’s vote choices.
That is a new paper from several Yale colleagues: Gerber, Huber, Doherty and Dowling.
Previously I blogged aboutThe Right to Vote, a history of the dubious US franchise. I recall several founding fathers decrying the secret ballot as odious and cowardly. Mostly, though, I enjoyed reading about the election antics that would make an African dictator blush.
I just hope no one passes the book around today; I would hate for this generation’s global thugs to rehash old American ideas.
It reminds us neither the present nor past of American democracy is always what we believe.
Yesterday Ethiopians received a September surprise when the central bank devalued the currency by 20 percent.
Even if you don’t work on anything Ethiopia-related, you should be interested. Why? Here’s the reaction from a leading bank and investment firm in the country:
Given the apparently little justification for a large devaluation from a short-term macroeconomic perspective, we see more longer-term and structural motives for the authorities’ actions. More specifically, we think there is now a conscious effort to experiment with a deliberately undervalued exchange rate (the “China Model” one might call it) and to pursue a more aggressive strategy of import substitution.
Frankly it’s surprising more African nations have not attempted this path. Exchange rates are thought to be grossly overvalued in most countries, making their exports look expensive and other countries’ goods look cheap by comparison. That is not good news for industrial development. Some blame aid for the overvaluation. (See this bit by Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian.)
Here’s another policy lesson we can all learn from. (It’s time for unintended consequences again.) This one devaluation might look good (say, for exports), but by making an unexpectedly big and unexpectedly timed change, the government has increased the future policy uncertainty. Investors do not like a wildly unpredictable government. A surprise depreciation of 20% leads to a lot of wealth unexpectedly changing hands.
Savers might like the uncertainty ahead even less. If I were a middle class Ethiopian, right now I would be thinking very seriously about pulling my money out of Ethiopian banks and putting them into foreign ones. If the government lets me.
In case it doesn’t show, I am no macroeconomist. Reader opinions? (Especially if you are better informed than me.)
I bet Ethiopia’s neighbors are watching very closely to see if this is a model worth emulating.
Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades.
Don Green and Allison Sovey have a new reader’s guide to instrumental variables. It is much needed.
For the uninitiated, instruments are God’s gift to causal identification. Like so many miracles, they are not always what their greatest believers want you to believe. If a journal sends me one more referee assignment where the author grossly misuses instruments, blog rampages will ensue.
The authors try to put an optimistic spin on what is still (at least in political science) a sad state of affairs:
…it is clear that the percentage of articles that provide some justi cation for the choice of instruments has risen substantially. Articles falling under the “Experiment,” “Natural Experiment,” “Theory,” “Lag,” and “Reference” categories have all risen overtime. Collectively, the articles in these categories have increased from a low of 14% between 1991-1996 to 56% in the most recent period.
…The percentage of articles reporting fi rst stage results increases from a low of 7% between 1991-1996 to 33% between 2003-2008. In absolute terms, there is still much room for improvement, and only a fraction of those who report fi rst-stage results assess statistically whether instruments are weak or whether overidentifying restrictions are satis fied.
The article offers clear guidelines for judging, reporting and refereeing instruments. Most interesting, however is the take-down of the growing use of rainfall as a valid instrument:
…the reason using rainfall as an instrument is intuitively appealing is that we think of rainfall as patternless. It appears that rainfall growth is systematically related to a range of other observable variables, and therefore we have to assume we have just the right covariates in order to isolate the random component of rainfall.
That is the sound of a dozen top papers crumbling?
The United States discovered human rights two years ago or five years ago. Suddenly it’s the main object and leads to a degree of interference with the policy of other countries which, even if I sympathized with the general aim, I don’t think it’s in the least justified. People in South Africa have to deal with their own problems, and the idea that you can use external pressure to change people, who after all have built up a civilization of a kind, seems to me morally a very doubtful belief. But it’s a dominating belief in the United States now.
Human rights trouble me less than their blind acceptance. Not least because of the steadily creeping definition.
Recently I’ve been reading Thomas Pogge, who more or less takes human rights as a starting point for a moral commitment to help the poor. He says many things I find compelling (I will blog the book another time) but I was disappointed to see so much taken seemingly for granted.
Not long ago I discussed Michael Ignatieff’s take: human rights are merely useful, and that is good enough. I find this mostly persuasive. If I had to draw the veil of ignorance, not knowing what role or gender or nationality I would receive, I’d be much relieved by a world with human rights.
This is still a fairly weak basis for a global system of morality and justice (and not, I venture, the reasoning for many rights activists). I also do not have a good answer for my libertarian friends (and the little libertarian influence inside me). This philosophical neophyte welcomes recommended reading.
The recommendation, from Owen Barder, is well deserved. At first I picked it up to learn how to eat before and after long runs and bike rides. But it was much more useful as a general nutrition guide (my first attempt since the food pyramid in fifth grade).
One of the more unexpected lessons: if you are hungry in the middle of the afternoon, eat. You’ll have more energy, be less irritable, you won’t overeat and dinner, and you’re less likely to break down and gorge on Reese’s peanut butter cups.
The key: don’t call it a snack, call it a second lunch; you’ll hold yourself to a higher standard and are more likely to eat healthy.
Poor economic conditions may lead more able, better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact, terror missions.
Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists against Israeli targets between the years 2000 and 2006 we provide evidence on the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists and the targets they attack.
High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit more educated, mature and experienced suicide terrorists who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.
A new working paper from Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi, and Esteban Klor.
This ties with a growing body of evidence that suggests that economic shocks help intensify conflicts but not necessarily increase their likelihood. See also a terrific paper by Oeindrila Dube and Juan Vargas on Colombian paramilitaries and guerrillas here.
The groaning, clattering machines never stop, transforming 12 tons of whole wheat flour every day into nearly a quarter-million discs of flatbread called roti.
…Soupy lentils, three and a third tons of them, bubble away in vast cauldrons, stirred by bearded, barefoot men wielding wooden spoons the size of canoe paddles.
The pungent, savory bite wafting through the air comes from 1,700 pounds of onions and 132 pounds of garlic, sprinkled with 330 pounds of fiery red chilies.
It is lunchtime at what may be the world’s largest free eatery, the langar, or community kitchen at this city’s glimmering Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion.
I thought it was an excellent article, but I’m always wary when I get the warm and fuzzies from the NY Times. The feeling can be a fairly reliable barometer for nonsense. Any Sikh readers to weigh in?
UNBRANDED is a series of advertising imagery targeted at African-Americans found in magazines from the late 60s to current day which have been digitally manipulated and appropriated by artist Hank Willis Thomas. He has removed all traces of advertising information like logos, headlines and text, which he hopes encourages viewers to recognise that which has become second nature to our experience of life in the modern world.
” I believe that in part, advertising’s success rests on its ability to reinforce generalisations around race, gender and ethnicity which can be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying, but which at a core level are a reflection of the way culture views itself or its aspirations”
Doing (applied) mathematical research is a little bit like walking through the woods: sometimes I get stuck and have to work around an obstacle, and I usually don’t end up exactly where I intend to go, but I usually make some progress. And in many cases the math is smarter than I am, in the sense that, through mathematical analysis, I’m able to find a correct answer that is surprising, until I realize how truly right it is.
When people like me demand transparency and say “We want to know where the money went.”, I think we actually mean “We want to know what the money did.” In this case, I really don’t care if World Vision blew 90% of their budget on strippers and Grey Goose vodka. What I want to know is what did they deliver? What changed on the ground? How many people were helped? I want transparent impact. I couldn’t care less about transparent budgets.
The International Rescue Committee seeks a full-time research advisor to conduct and support research and evaluation related to governance, institution building, civil society, or community-driven programs. The job requires a mix of operational and research skills, a strong knowledge of governance issues in areas affected by armed conflict. The position will be based in NYC and start around October 1, 2010.
The previous post was for children and education research. This post is for governance research, which in a conflict and humanitarian NGO basically means, “how are we making sure our programs aren’t actually making conflict worse?” Sounds like a noble aim.
Sharlet recently traveled to Uganda to speak with Bahati, the bill’s author.
…”Bahati said: ‘If you come here, you’ll see homosexuals from Europe and America are luring our children into homosexuality by distributing cell phones and iPods and things like this,’ ” Sharlet recounts. “And he said, ‘And I can explain to you what I really want to do.’ ”
Sharlet accompanied Bahati to a restaurant and later to his home, where Bahati told Sharlet that he wanted “to kill every last gay person.”
Disgusting and frightening. Is Bahati really so influential? I’ve written before about some of the more hopeful aspects of being gay in Uganda. Perhaps my optimism is misplaced. Even today, Uganda’s Anglican Church is saying some deeply disturbing things about homosexuality.
“What is so exciting about yams? Everything!” Zobi, a taxi-driving muppet, shouts in a Nigerian lilt to anyone who will listen. “I can fry the yam. I can toast it. I can boil it. I love yams!”
“Sesame Street,” once a mainstay for a generation of Nigerian children who grew up with the U.S. show on the state-run TV network, will return to screens in Africa’s most populous nation this fall, funded by American taxpayers but distinctively Nigerian.
The show is to be renamed “Sesame Square”, but is also known around this blog as “possibly the greatest USAID intervention in history”. More here.
The muppets’ adventures take place between original recorded “Sesame Street” segments, re-dubbed with Nigerians voicing the parts of familiar characters like Bert and Ernie.
In the episode, Bert and Ernie run a 419 scam, with Governor Big Bird taking kickbacks.
There seem to be three broad pushes in New Atheism. The first is proselytizing, and I think this is perfectly healthy.
…The second push is PR and consciousness raising, and this is great. From Richard Dawkins’ insistence that people stop referring to children as “Catholic” or “Hindu” children to Hemant Mehta’s really powerful perceptual tool of replacing “atheist” with “Jew” or “Christian” in any statement about atheists to see if it would still pass muster with common tolerance norms. For instance, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ statement that “Atheism leads to brutality” does not jar the typical American brain the way “Judaism leads to brutality” does, and this needs consciousness raising.
But the third push of New Atheism is intolerance of believers.
…The atheists are obviously right in these criticisms, but they’re wrong in the “Ha! I’ve got you now!” that follows.
Somewhat unrelated, is an atheist as American President more or less likely than a Muslim? A few weeks ago I would have said less. After the August hullabaloo, I say more. A sad statement either way.
“Glamour” and “Grammar” are essentially the same word. In classical Greek and Latin, “grammar” (from the Greek “grammatikos,” meaning “of letters”) covered the whole of arts and letters, i.e., high knowledge in general. In the Middle Ages, “grammar” was generally used to mean “learning,” which at the time included, at least in the popular imagination, a knowledge of magic. The narrowing of “grammar” to mean “the rules of language” was a much later development…
Meanwhile, “grammar” had percolated into Scottish English (as “gramarye”), where an “l” was substiuted for an “r” and the word eventually became “glamour,” used to mean specifically knowledge of magic and spells.
That comes from The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Clark. Reviewed in the Times‘ weekend Book Review, I pulled it down to my Kindle right away. (Yes, really.)
I’m a fan of Clark’s earlier book, Writing Tools. Unfortunately the new book added little but took away much. More showy and leisurely, and longer to the point. I think it’s supposed to be more fun to read, but it seemed to try too hard.
I’m an Assistant Professor of Political Science & Economics at Yale. I use field work and statistics to study poverty, political participation, the causes and consequences of violence, and policy in developing countries. [Read more]
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