Whole Earth Discipline, RAND's halcyon days, digital competition...
I have been reading very little over the last few months. That is, until I found Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand on Patrick Collison’s bookshelf list. Brand’s argument is directed at the Green movement, arguing that environmentalists should be pro-nuclear, pro-density, pro-GMOs, and pro-geoengineering. He also made me finally appreciate trees. Every section is beautiful, in-depth, contains references to a ton of interesting sources, and single-handedly rekindled my reading habit. (I’ve tweeted some quotes.)
When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica by Pradyumna Prasad and Jordan Schneider. “In short: RAND had the best and brightest people working with the best computing resources in an environment that celebrated excellence, welcomed individual quirks, and dispensed with micromanagement and red tape.” Anything by Pradyu comes highly recommended :)
India's Proposed Digital Competition Framework: The License Raj by Another Name by Shruti Rajagopalan and Shreyas Narla. “The proposed framework is a heavy-handed attempt to regulate digital markets. It imposes arbitrary and ambiguous punitive obligations—which are yet to be completely known—on large digital firms, disregarding sound competition law principles and risking the stifling of innovation and investment.”
The long-run costs of highly competitive exams for government jobs by Kunal Mangal. Really enjoyed it, prompted me to get a copy of Karthik Muralidharan’s new book, which discusses government jobs and the bureaucracy in depth. Abstract:
Public sector recruitment exams can be highly competitive. Does this competition encourage candidates to develop generalizable skills, or do investments in exam preparation burden candidates who fail to get selected? I address this question by studying the impact of a partial public sector hiring freeze in the state of Tamil Nadu, India on male college graduates. The hiring freeze eliminated 86% of the usual vacancies. This increased the applicant-to-vacancy ratio for the remaining posts. Cohorts that were exposed to the hiring freeze delayed full-time employment, most likely in order to invest more time in exam preparation. A decade after the hiring freeze ended, the affected cohorts demonstrate a lower earning capacity, have delayed household formation, and appear more likely to remain unemployed. Together, these results suggest that highly competitive exams encourage candidates to make investments that are ultimately unproductive.
Ezra Klein. I listened to a lot of his podcast growing up, in its previous form at Vox (now titled “The Grey Area with Sean Illing” but you can scroll down to listen to Ezra’s episodes). I found it impressive that he helped successfully depose a presidential candidate over the last few months with his op-eds. So, that’s how I started binging. It ended with me scrolling through his old Typepad posts, and then two profiles, one by the New Republic and one by New York Magazine. And then a video from the World Bank where he tells researchers why no one reads their research. By far my favourite rabbit hole of the month.
How to Write a Lot by Paul Silvia is, by all appearances, a useful book — but I realised that it wasn’t going to help me about when Silvia wrote, “...if you like writing in coffee shops because you can have a great latte while illustrating how a method actor would play the role of ‘plucky assistant professor with an overdue book manuscript,’ then you need a new place” and I realised romanticisation is probably a better motivator for me than sheer discipline is. Probably this is why I don’t Write a Lot™. If anyone wants to give me advice on balancing full-time research with writing, I will be grateful.
I would also recommend a few other books, which I’ve started and read parts of, before I got distracted:
Anyway, perhaps you will hear from me again soon. I will try to write publicly more often, even if I cannot Write a Lot.™