HeyJaredPolitical Economy, Stats, and Society
Short posts on political-economic and other contemporary societal issues with an emphasis on data, quantitative reasoning, and causal inference.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 17
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 5, 2026
Latest issues
Did Europe rise and China fall because of family and clans? (opens the original)
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Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr (last year’s econ Nobel winner), and Guido Tabellini have a new book out – Two Paths to Prosperity – which seeks to explain the social and, through it, developmental divergence between Europe and China between 1000 and 2000 CE. In the book, they propose the following.Europe clearly pulled ahead, developed, and transitioned to modernity centuries before China did. In the 19th century, the difference between two
More markets/development, more altruism (opens the original)
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How do I squeeze the perennially interesting North-South Italy divide phenomenon and the criminally underemphasized fact about markets making people more prosocial and altruistic into a single post? Delia Baldassarri’s (2020) lost-letter experiment offers the perfect opportunity.We have loads of very different kinds of evidence that societies with higher market integration exhibit (or even plausibly cause) more societal cooperation and score higher on various measures of moral behavior, includin
Resist Dorm-Room Marxism (opens the original)
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I don’t think a stock market should exist.That’s what the award-winning filmmaker and host of the Dilemma podcast Jay Shapiro said at one point during a debate he recently had. Hearing that, you already know it’s going to be bad. But let’s pace ourselves and stay grounded. The point here will be to learn something, evaluate, and make useful generalizations, not just to be astonished or mock a single person.So, I should emphasize two important things at the outset. First, there’s actually somethi
Westerners are warm fuzzy collectivists, not competitive egoists (opens the original)
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The experts – in this case, cross-cultural psychologists – are wrong about important cultural differences in attitudes of Americans and the Chinese. I imagine the general public does no better.In the figure below, look first at the left side of the graph (first column). Cultural psychologists overwhelmingly think that Americans are more likely to agree with the statement “Winning is everything” than the Chinese. They also overwhelmingly believe that people in China would agree more with the stat
Democracy is good for economic growth – or is it? (opens the original)
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Liberal democracy is normatively preferable over its illiberal and authoritarian alternatives, not least because of important stuff like the greater personal and political freedom it affords to the ordinary person. It also (and relatedly) has some clear empirical upsides for economic life, like more trade and less corruption.But what about economic development?There’s been a longstanding debate in the social sciences over whether democracy helps countries economically thrive in general. That is,
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