The Foreign Policy blog alerts us to the Fall issue of Virginia Quarterly Review on “South America in the 21st Century”:
VQR has tapped dozens of the continent’s best writers in an effort to paint a picture of where Latin America stands today—from the street level—including drug wars in Columbia, protests in Caracas, and transsexuals in Lima. It’s an extraordinary effort that deserves kudos.
A US Army Lieutenant Colonel gives the Small Wars Journal his professional reading list.
Here is Bill Easterly’s review of Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion in The Lancet. (Thanks to Austrian Economists for the heads up).
Commentary on and links to the revision of UN AIDS prevalence figures by Bayesian Heresy.
In an opinion piece in last weekend’s New York Times, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates describes his study of the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans (e.g. Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the astronaut Mae Jemison) and is taken by the fact that 15 of the 20 descend from a set of grandparents who (like only 25% of African Americans of their generation) received property under a national government program. Gates’ conclusion: policies to economically empower the underprivileged can reduce inequality generations down the road.
Unfortunately, as a few social scientist bloggers have pointed out (Greg Mankiw and, in more detail, Andy Eggers), Gates’ conclusion may be the result of faulty mathematical reasoning and the absence of a research design. Since we all have four sets of grandparents, the probability that an African-American today has at least one who received the land grant is not 25%, but roughly 68%. With a sample of only 20 African-Americans, finding 15 that have a grandparent with a land grant is just as consistent with the conclusion that the land grants had no effect as the alternative. What is needed is a reasonable comparison group of African-Americans who descended from grandparents who did not receive the land grants for contrast.