"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
Tyler Cowen blogged about this today, so I better publish this piece, which I wrote two months ago, when I was really fed up with bad question askers after the ITAB trip, but it never made its way onto the Forum. Here it is, verbatim.
Five Types of Question Askers to Avoid
Kevin Burke
Pot, meet kettle:
The person who just [...]
When I’m in a foreign city I use these proxies to find a place to eat:
No outside advertising in English: +1 point. Generally, ads in English mean a place is catering to tourists, and thus likely to try and steer me to the non-spicy items, etc.
More than half full with locals: +3 points. This is [...]
I’m about to finish my fifth book in 5 weeks (What Works in Development? edited by Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen), in addition to reading a higher number of academic papers and the same number of RSS feeds that I usually read. There are a few good reasons for this:
1) Amazon Kindle app for iPhone: [...]
I read a bunch of really cool stuff this weekend. The highlights:
This Salon interview is old, but the gist is that a professor realized that as young, innocent children most victims of sexual abuse don’t feel that traumatized while the abuse is happening. In contrast to an event like a rape, where the victim immediately [...]
Daniela Papi has a great post on the many problems with “voluntourism,” or traveling to a foreign country to do volunteer work. She points out that most volunteers don’t know much about the local culture, you don’t speak the language and don’t have relevant skills, and this makes it very difficult to find work that’s [...]
Two economists just completed a huge worldwide survey on management practices. A team of MBA’s went to firms and interviewed them on their management practices, generating scores in three different categories (Incentives, Monitoring, and Targets) and then using the data to draw a whole bunch of conclusions about management. Everything in here is correlation (it’s [...]
Two articles today show how difficult it is to maintain good incentives in poor countries. The first was from Madagascar, one of a handful of countries in Africa which was exempt from U.S. tariffs under a special program, the AGOA program. The textile industry in Madagascar was thriving, employing over 100,000 workers and also employing [...]
I’m almost finished rereading The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my favorite books. It involves a prison escape, buried treasure, delicious revenge and a reversal of status. One thing I’ve noticed now is how egotistical the Count is: taking pleasure in others’ misfortune, being convinced of his complete superiority over everyone else, believing that he [...]
Kumbulgarh
Kumbulgarh is a giant fort, in the middle of nowhere, on top of a plateau, with huge walls and a series of gates and walls leading up to a castle on a hill on the plateau. Given the fortifications and technology at the time I guessed it would have taken around twenty invaders for every [...]
From Poverty to Prosperity is full of excellent quotes. Here’s one from Robert Solow:
It is far from obvious to me that the way to foster competition is to leave the private sector alone. The private sector does not much like competition; it has its own ways of creating monopoly power, restricting access to wealth (and [...]
