For me, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are the original “blog kings” — I have been a huge fan of their “Marginal Revolution” blog since 2006 — so why not share the love every Tuesday by featuring my favorite Cowen/Tabarrok posts from the previous week?
What if southern Spain were still an Islamic emirate? On this day (25 November) in 1491, the Treaty of Granada was signed and ratified by Boabdil, the last sultan of the Emirate of Granada, and Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Castile, León, Aragon, and Sicily, who completed the “Reconquist of Spain”. (Here is an English-language translation of the treaty.) Among other things, this treaty decreed a truce between the warring parties, followed by the relinquishment in January 1492 of the sovereignty of the Muslim Emirate of Granada (founded in the 13th century) to the Catholic monarchs of Spain.
Gino is the Harvard Business School professor accused of using fake data in her papers, including at least one purporting to show how to elicit honest behavior (see here, for example)! Earlier this week, Daniel Engber, a senior editor at The Atlantic, published this damning report explaining why the research fraud problem in the trendy field of behavioral psychology is much bigger than Gino. Below is an excerpt:
More than a year since all of this began [i.e. the original allegations of research fraud committed by Gino], the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder [one of Gino’s co-authors] would become a suspect.
Alas, I have no idea how I stumbled upon this particular Wikipedia entry, but Chesterton’s fence is the Smithian idea that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood, and the original quotation is from G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing in the chapter “The Drift from Domesticity”:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
As an aside, G. K. Chesterton was a popular English author known as the “prince of paradox”; bonus link below:
Are college professors, lawyers, political pollsters, or opera singers examples of productive or unproductive labour? Does this distinction even make sense? See, for example, this short lecture by the imitable Tyler Cowen explaining Adam Smith’s classic distinction, via Marginal Revolution University:
prior probability 