prior probability

The latest issue of EconJournalWatch is available here. (The table of contents of the new issue is also pictured below.) Two articles in particular caught my attention: one calling into question a series of studies by McKinsey & Company claiming a positive relationship between executive racial/ethnic diversity and firm performance (see here); the other debunking a much-cited 2015 Nature article on global temperatures and economic growth (here).

Alas, the front-runners for this year’s U.S. presidential elections are a senile octogenarian and a crooked businessman! So, who else is voting for RFK Jr.?

By the way, why is Easter Sunday so “early” this year? Via the Royal Museum Greenwich (RMG), “The simple standard definition of Easter is that it is the first Sunday after the full Moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. If the full Moon falls on a Sunday then Easter is the next Sunday.” This rule of thumb, however, is valid for the determination of the date of Easter in the Western/Catholic liturgical calendar; the date used by Eastern/Orthodox churches can be one, four, or five weeks later! See here.

File under: FINALLY! Via Wired, check out philosopher Leif Wenar’s devastating and definitive critique of such intellectual con artists like William MacAskill, Toby Ord, and Peter Singer. By way of example, below is a key passage from Professor Wenar’s brutal no-holds-barred must-read takedown of the “Effective Altruism” movement and of its leading charity scam, GiveWell (all links in the original):

Today, GiveWell highlights detailed calculations of the benefits of donations to recipients. In an estimate from 2020, for example, it calculates that a $4,500 donation to a bed nets charity in Guinea will pay for the delivery of 1,001 nets, that 79 percent of them will get used, that each net will cover 1.8 people, and so on. Factoring in a bevy of such statistical likelihoods, GiveWell now finds that $4,500 will save one person.

That looks great. Yet GiveWell still does not tell visitors about the well-known harms of aid beyond its recipients. Take the bed net charity that GiveWell has recommended for a decade. Insecticide-treated bed nets can prevent malaria, but they’re also great for catching fish. In 2016, The New York Times reported that overfishing with the nets was threatening fragile food supplies across Africa. A GiveWell blog post responded by calling the story’s evidence anecdotal and “limited,” saying its concerns “largely don’t apply” to the bed nets bought by its charity. Yet today even GiveWell’s own estimates show that almost a third of nets are not hanging over a bed when monitors first return to check on them, and GiveWell has said nothing even as more and more scientific studies have been published on the possible harms of bed nets used for fishing. These harms appear nowhere in GiveWell’s calculations on the impacts of the charity.

In fact, even when GiveWell reports harmful side effects, it downplays and elides them. One of its current top charities sends money into dangerous regions of Northern Nigeria, to pay mothers to have their children vaccinated. In a subsection of GiveWell’s analysis of the charity, you’ll find reports of armed men attacking locations where the vaccination money is kept—including one report of a bandit who killed two people and kidnapped two children while looking for the charity’s money. You might think that GiveWell would immediately insist on independent investigations into how often those kinds of incidents happen. Yet even the deaths it already knows about appear nowhere in its calculations on the effects of the charity.

And more broadly, GiveWell still doesn’t factor in many well-known negative effects of aid. Studies find that when charities hire health workers away from their government jobs, this can increase infant mortality; that aid coming into a poor country can increase deadly attacks by armed insurgents; and much more. GiveWell might try to plead that these negative effects are hard to calculate. Yet when it calculates benefits, it is willing to put numbers on all sorts of hard-to-know things.

That is the subtitle of this fascinating 2023 report by Brian Reinhart explaining why jalapeño peppers are less spicy now. (Hat tip: Aaron Cohen.) Yes, some conspiracies are real!

During my visit to the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum at Waseda University (which, by the way, is an exact replica of the Fortune Theatre in London’s famed West End; see here), I saw the 1950 movie Rashomon in one of the rooms of the first level of the theatre-museum, so this week’s “Wikipedia Wednesday” refers to an academic concept that was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s classic film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect

I am also following the progress of another experimental aircraft, the hypersonic ‘Stargazer’ (see here, for example). Tweet hat tip: Internet ‘information monster’ extraordinaire, Tyler Cowen.

Toyko update 3/25: I forgot to mention my two favorite papers from this year’s International Adam Smith Society (IASS) meeting at Waseda University in Tokyo earlier this month. One was “Adam Smith’s theory of music” by Tetsuo Taka (Kyushu University); the other was “Smith’s skepticism about the imitative nature of instrumental music: the unconscious recognition of absolute music” by Eiko Yamamoto (Seikei University), who also performed a number of 18th-century musical compositions on the piano at the banquet on the final night of the Adam Smith Tokyo conference. Alas, neither paper is posted online yet, but I will link to them as soon as they become available.

My daughter Adys and I overheard this beautiful ballad the other day while walking along Takeshita street, a crowded and narrow alley in the colorful Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo.