As a follow up to the story in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), I’ve been delving into the details of the calculations behind the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings for Chile. I thought it would be helpful to illustrate what the rankings would be under an unchanging measure of the business climate. To be specific, what I decided in advance was to pick all of the underlying variables for Doing Business indicators that are available for all 5 years, DB 2014-2018.

Because it is New Year’s Eve, I indulged in some Twitter. One exchange might be worth unscrambling from some others. Dani Rodrik triggered it with a post that offered this advice to non-economists: Do not let math scare you; economists use math not because they are smart, but because they are not smart enough. Lukas Freund responded on Twitter: Agree on many points, which in classic Rodrik-fashion are pithy but insightful.

Someone from at the World Bank wrote to ask what I thought about the Nobel Prize for Dick Thaler. Here’s my reply: I think it’s terrific that Dick got the prize. He deserves lots of credit for pushing forward the research agenda of behavior economics, and doing so with good cheer, despite the disdain it provoked from many quarters. He lead the wave of work that followed the pioneering basic scientific insights of Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky and their many colleagues from psychology.

Well, I figured that we’d get to this point. Since I joined the World Bank last fall, we’ve had a few internal conversations that involved what the diplomats would call “a full and frank exchange of views.” It is no surprise that the Bank has its own homegrown insurgents ready to wage their version of asymmetric warfare. One of those ways is via rumors. Apparently the word is out that when I asked people to write more clearly, I wasn’t nice.

For more that 20 years, October has been the time when the eager beavers in the university PR department get a little too excited as they drill in preparation for the possibility that I might receive a Nobel prize. I used to try to explain how low the odds are, but found that this was like talking to someone who has just been given a ticket for the upcoming $100 million lottery.