Conditional Optimism
In the summer of 2016, I discussed an important paper by Martin Stuermer and Gregor Schwerhoff at an academic meeting and wrote up a blog post that summarized the key points from my discussion. In light of decision to award a Nobel prize in economics for work on climate change and endogenous technological progress, I thought it would be helpful to go back to the issues I discussed there. In particular, I thought it might be useful to restate my stance of “conditional optimism,” a term that has resonated for many. As I wrote back then:
Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. Conditional optimism is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. “If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.”
There is more to the Gender Gap than the Partisan Divide
A recent post at fivethirtyeight.com reaches a conclusion that is plainly false. This is no doubt an honest mistake caused by some mixture of haste, confirmation bias, and careless overstatment. There is no reason to suspect any conscious intent to mislead; no justification for ad hominem attacks on the author.
What matters are the facts. The facts here bear on profoundly important personal experiences and equally important collective decisions. It would be inexcusable to let false statements about such facts go unchallenged or to let false claims divert attention from the question that matters: “Is the gender gap on questions about sexual harassment and assault a sign that women have a better grasp on the facts?”
Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper
The Atlantic has a great article on new ways to share research results. Its three parts make three points: A graphical user interface (GUI) can facilitate better technical writing. Wolfram’s proprietary notebook showcased innovative technology, but decades after its introduction, still has few users. Jupyter is a new open-source alternative that is well on the way to becoming a standard for exchanging research results. Each is spot on. I had to learn the hard way why so many kept their distance from Mathematica.
My Email Quoted by the Financial Times
The Financial Times quoted accurately the following sentence from an internal email that I wrote: “Imagine a field of science in which people publish research papers with data that are obviously fabricated. …”Some readers mistakenly assumed that this sentence was supposed to convey a hidden meaning. To be clear, I am not aware of a single instance in which someone at the Bank published fabricated data, most certainly not “obviously fabricated” data.
My Unclear Comments about the Doing Business Report
In a conversation with a reporter, I made comments about the Doing Business report that gave the impression that I suspected political manipulation or bias. This was not what I meant to say or thought I said. I have not seen any sign of manipulation of the numbers published in Doing Business report or in any other Bank report. What I did want to say is something many of us in the Bank believe–that we could do a better job of explaining what our numbers mean.