Another book review for the Irish Times, this time of Sebastian Mallaby’s “More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite”. You can read my review here.
On June 16, 2010, In Journalism, By Aidan Kane
On June 4, 2010, In Journalism, By Aidan Kane
I contributed a short piece to a Sunday Tribune feature last week-end which canvassed some economists’ views on the inevitability or otherwise of sovereign default for Ireland. The full article is here. My contribution is about mid-way down.
On May 21, 2010, In Journalism, Political economy of policy reform, By Aidan Kane
I reviewed Crisis Economics: a Crash Course in the Future of Finance By Nouriel Roubini with Stephen Mihm for the Irish Times “Book of the Day” slot. You can read the review here.
On May 10, 2010, In Historical Irish public finances data, By Aidan Kane
I presented on my ongoing work in historical Irish public finance data to the “Mapping the Irish State” research project at the UCD Geary Institute last Friday. It was hugely useful for me to have an insight into their ongoing work also. I’d presented an overview of the work at a Geary Institute seminar earlier last month, which paved the way for this.
You can download the pdf file of my slides here.
I’m going to keep an email list to update people on this: just send me an email aidan.kane@nuigalway.ie and I’ll add you to my little black book.
On March 26, 2010, In Political economy of policy reform, Uncategorized, By Aidan Kane
Paul Krugman recently blogged on the apparent shift in public opinion on health care reform from negative to positive once the bill had been passed by the House of Representatives. His comments brought to my mind the following influential paper from some time ago by Raquel Fernandez and Dani Rodrik on the political economy of reform processes:
Resistance to Reform: Status Quo Bias in the Presence of Individual- Specific Uncertainty
Author(s): Raquel Fernandez and Dani Rodrik
Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 5 (Dec., 1991), pp. 1146-1155
Published by: American Economic AssociationAbstract
Why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency-enhancing? Our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform. We show that there is a bias towards the status quo (and hence against efficiency-enhancing reforms) whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand. There are reforms which, once adopted, will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante. The argument does not rely on risk aversion, irrationality, or hysteresis due to sunk costs.
The full paper can be found on jstor (which requires a subscription for full-text) here.
One could of course engage with the debate as to whether any given set of reforms are in fact truly efficiency-enhancing, which is fairly core to the health care debate in the US, but it was striking that proponents of the measure were frustrated that some of the opposition to the Obama proposals came from those who the administration felt would directly benefit from it.
I guess the precise terms of the paper weren’t exactly anticipating that perceptions of reform proposals would change so quickly i.e., merely by the passage of a reform proposal, as opposed to its implementation, but the paper cited above was I think a wonderful working-through of the logic of some important messages to political reformers. It speaks, I think, to the need for policy advocacy to maximize credible information for citizens about the consequence of reform, and to the ultimate necessity for political leaders in a representative democracy to actually lead, and not merely regard themselves as uncritical conveyers of existing social preferences. More generally still, it’s a line of thought that speaks, I think, to the political possibilities of creating constituencies for reform over time. That’s especially important, I would suggest, in the midst of a crisis, when it’s tempting to imagine, for both citizens and politicians, that nothing can change for the better.
On March 15, 2010, In Data visualisation, By Aidan Kane
The animated population pyramid (Ireland 1950-2009) previously posted here can be used to generate this series of small multiple images. Click on the image below to see the pdf version for a better resolution.
On March 15, 2010, In Data visualisation, By Aidan Kane
My previous example of an animated population pyramid for Ireland relied on data from Censuses in Ireland. The Census has generally been held every ten or five years in Ireland. My latest example relies on mid-year annual population estimates from the CSO, covering 1950 to 2009.
You can download the animation (a pdf file 226Kb) from
here.
You can view the file in your browser, and it can also be saved locally as a pdf file. The animation should work in recent versions of Acrobat Reader.
A number of basic features in the changing population structure emerge, I think, fairly readily from running the animation forward (maybe others will spot a lot more):
- Most obviously, overall population growth, as the pyramid takes more real estate on screen
- The missing young people in the 1950s and 1960s as the large numbers of young children don’t stay around long enough to be young adults/adults, so that the distribution is pinched.
- A bit of a reversal of that by the time the early 1970s come along as emigration decreases and indeed we experience net immigration (mainly returned migrants).
- The return of emgration in the 1980s, again reflected in the age structure as young people leave, and so e.g., the age group 15-19 doesn’t transition so readily into 20-24.
- A big impact on age groups 25+ from immigration post 2004 or so
- Absolute increases in older age groups (a percentage version of this graphic would probably work well to bring out proportions) and the systematically higher life expectancy of women at the upper age groups
In any event, a useful way of introducing some of the basic patterns in the data.
On March 14, 2010, In Data visualisation, Uncategorized, By Aidan Kane
Another attempt to explore the animate package in latex, this time using US monthly unemployment and inflation data. I plot both time series from 1948 to 2010, from the wonderful data resource FRED at the St. Louis Fed.
I also plot a scatter plot of one series against the other, or rather, the last 36 months of data at any point in time, so you are seeing what a policy-maker looking backwards for a three year inflation-unemployment trade-off might see (roughly!).
The file itself (a pdf file) is big..far too big, (about 7.5 MB) …so be warned!
You can download the file here
It should work best in Acrobat Reader. But I think my own Perl script is pretty hacky, and not in a good way. I wrote it so that the pgfplots package can generate something that the animate package can deal with. I’ll probably work on trying to get file sizes down.
On March 11, 2010, In Innovation policy and strategies, By Aidan Kane
The report of the Innovation Task Force is now available.
http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Innovation_Taskforce/
Note: in a previous post I mistakenly said that the chair of this group was Chris Horn, who is indeed one of the group’s most high-profile members–but the chair, is of course, Dermot McCarthy, Secretary to the Government.
On March 9, 2010, In Data visualisation, Uncategorized, By Aidan Kane
I’ve been exploring the LaTeX package animate which, as the name suggests, facilitates animated graphics.
I’ve been using the basic features of the package to generate an animation of population pyramids for Ireland, showing the evolution of age cohorts in the population since the first post Independence Census, in 1926. This file is a pdf file, so it can be saved and viewed locally. Never knew pdf was so flexible!
More examples of the package are available here.
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