It’s already October. Unbelievable.
There is a painful non-convexity in academic research. Only really good ideas are worth pursuing but it takes a lot of investment to find out whether any given idea is going to be really good. Usually you spend a lot of time doing some preliminary thinking just to prove to yourself that this idea is not good enough to turn into a full-fledged paper. Knowing that most ideas are unlikely to pan out there is an incentive not to experiment on new projects.
That’s from CheapTalk. I started blogging years ago with the understanding that my audience was three of my nerdy friends. For me, blogging is a way to bookmark cool ideas and fix them in my mind by getting them down on paper.
A few articles that caught my eye:
1) Here are two great posts on inequality (Scott Sumner) and (Will Wilkinson). Sumner in particular talks about what inequality statistics fail to measure. Wilkinson’s paper “Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality” is a classic and *must read* you are going to discuss inequality. There have to be measures of inequality out there that take into account the factors Sumner mentions. Does anyone know of any?
2) Should we engage flawed institutions like the UN Human Rights Council? A report highlighted by David Bosco says:
The overall message from the General Assembly is clear: The Obama administration’s re-engagement in UN human rights diplomacy has persuaded some non-Western countries to rethink their positions. But, in general, the drift away from the West continues, and core disagreements will continue to split the UN membership in the years ahead.
He notes: “They argue that the emnity that the Bush administration generated masked a broader trend against liberal internationalism at the U.N. and a shift toward a strong defense of sovereignty.”
I fear that the costs, in the short term, of sitting on the UNHRC vastly outweigh the eventual benefits from reforming the organization through engagement.
3) The Nobel Prize may highlight China’s human rights problems.
4) Bad news in the Ukraine about political liberalization? Alex Brideau says maybe not.
Haven’t been blogging much because school started back up, and I’ve continued doing research from this summer at the Hoover Institution. More on that later.
