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January 15, 2018

From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "Which historians and biographers do you most admire?"):
Amongst those currently writing, Simon Schama stands out as the Dickens of modern historiography: bewilderingly erudite and prolific, passionate in his enthusiasms and armed with the complete contents of the thesaurus. We agree to disagree about politics. I have also hugely admired Anne Applebaum for her trilogy on the Gulag, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe (“Iron Curtain”) and, most recently, the Ukrainian famine (“Red Famine”). Walter Isaacson has established himself as the great American biographer of our time. “Leonardo da Vinci” is his best book, I think. Whereas the earlier books were pure journalism, he is now showing academic scholars how to write accessibly about subtle and even recondite subject matter. I read quite a number of biographies while researching “The Square and the Tower.” My favorite was probably Michael Ignatieff’s on Isaiah Berlin, which led me into the vast, delightful rabbit warren of Berlin’s correspondence.

From Harper's:
Swedish scientists studying the benefits of robot-assisted news production worried that it might make human journalists lazy.

From The Economist:
“Poor people and rich people want the same things,” says Kathryn Edin, who studies the romantic lives of impoverished Americans. If anything, she says, the least fortunate cling most tightly to a romantic marriage ideal. Faced with messy reality, though, people of different means prioritise different things. Poor women tend to put children above marriage, largely because the men they might marry are not up to much.

From The Economist:
America’s federal government has given hundreds of millions of dollars to programmes that seek to nudge poor people into wedlock or teach couples how to resolve conflict. These programmes have been found to have hardly any effect.

From Economic Systems:
The economic literature has attributed part of the increase in government expenditure over the 20th century to female voting. This is puzzling, considering that the political science literature has documented that women tended to be more conservative than men over the first half of the 20th century. We argue that the current estimates of this relationship are afflicted by endogeneity bias. Using data for 46 countries and a novel set of instruments related to the diffusion of female suffrage across the globe, we find that, on average, the introduction of female suffrage did not increase either social expenditures or total government expenditure.
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