Peter Martin's bookshelf

Spousonomics - Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson

2011-03-12T23:09:00.001+11:00

Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes

www.spousonomics.com

Review: Economics, write the authors, "doesn't talk down to you or attempt to psychoanalyze. It doesn't care who won the last fight or whose turn it is to control the remote. Instead, it offers dispassionate, logical solutions to what can often seem like thorny, illogical, and highly emotional domestic disputes."

To be clear, this is principally a book of relationship advice, not a text from which to learn the finer points of Pareto efficiency. Each chapter applies an economic concept to marriage, and explores it through a few real–life case studies.

One chapter deals with the division of labour within a partnership. The first case study presents a couple that has taken an egalitarian approach to dividing up the household chores, only to find themselves miserable.

Elsewhere, Szuchman and Anderson apply the concept of supply and demand to people's sex lives, and frame the bad habits and apathy into which relationships can slide in terms of moral hazard. The same way that a bank deemed too big to fail might take greater risks — having the knowledge that its most severe mistakes will be underwritten by somebody else — so, too, can signing your name on a marriage licence offer a sort of insurance policy that changes your behaviour. "If I'm not married, I will make damn sure I work out every day so I can attract an equally fit husband," the authors write. "If I'm married, I might be tempted to stop going to the gym and grow a new ass. What's my husband going to do? Divorce me?"

Trivial Pursuit:- George Megalogenis

2011-02-13T13:23:00.002+11:00

Leadership and the End of the Reform Era

Quarterly Essay 40

In the aftermath of the 2010 election, George Megalogenis considers what has happened to politics in Australia. Have we entered a new phase with minority government and the rise of the Greens and independents?

The Hawke, Keating and Howard years were ones of bold reform; recently we have seen an era of power without purpose. But why? Is it down to powerful lobbies, or the media, or a failure of leadership, or all of the above? And whatever the case, how will hard decisions be taken for the future?

In a brilliant analysis, Megalogenis dissects the cycle of polls, focus groups and presidential politics and explores what it has done to the prospect of serious, difficult reform and the style of our leaders. He argues that politics-as-usual has become a self-defeating game and mounts a persuasive case for a different model of leadership.

This is also an essay that looks at the fate of progressive politics after the three years of opportunities lost. In distilling the meaning of election 2010, it offers a thought-provoking guide to the challenges to come. Now that the political landscape has changed, where to next?

Suddenly, Last Winter - Bob Ellis

2011-02-13T13:18:00.001+11:00

"Assassins get honeymoons? Discuss."

Just as Bob Ellis's last book One Hundred Days of Summer, about Tony Abbott's ascension to the Liberal leadership, was ready to hit the shelves, the nation was stunned to witness Labor suddenly call time on Kevin Rudd's Prime MInistership and replace him with Julia Gillard. Such political turbulence couldn't remain unexamined by this restless observer of our times.

Ellis watches in horror as his beloved Labor lurches from miscalculated announcement to egregious strategic error in the ensuing federal election campaign, threatening to lose government after one calamitous term to the hard-right charmer Abbott. When the rural independents swung their support behind Gillard, Ellis was there, chatting to them between the closed-door meetings that decided the government.

Suddenly, Last Winter is a diary of an extraordinary period in Australian political history.

The soulful science - Diane Coyle

2010-11-27T15:39:00.001+11:00

What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters

"I want to persuade you that economics gets an unfairly bad press. Even though economists are widely criticized for either failing to predict the financial crash, or for causing it, or sometimes both, economics is nevertheless entering a new golden age. This book is about the frontiers of economic research and empirical discovery during the past fifteen or twenty years. Yet these accomplishments are not widely known."

Diane Coyle is a writer and Harvard economics PhD. A member of the BBC Trust and the UK Competition Commission, and a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, she also runs an economic consulting firm, Enlightenment Economic

Introduction pdf

House of Cards - William D. Cohan

2010-11-22T12:07:00.000+11:00

A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street

On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.

How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.

Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.

How Do You Know? - Russell Hardin

2010-11-22T12:02:00.000+11:00

The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge

How do ordinary people come to know or believe what they do? We need an account of this process to help explain why people act as they do. You might think I am acting irrationally--against my interest or my purpose--until you realize that what you know and what I know differ significantly. My actions, given my knowledge, might make eminently good sense. Of course, this pushes our problem back one stage to assess why someone knows or believes what they do. That is the focus of this book. Russell Hardin supposes that people are not usually going to act knowingly against their interests or other purposes. To try to understand how they have come to their knowledge or beliefs is therefore to be charitable in assessing their rationality. Hardin insists on such a charitable stance in the effort to understand others and their sometimes objectively perverse actions.

Russell Hardin is professor of politics at New York University and the author of many books, including David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist, Indeterminacy and Society (Princeton), Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy, and One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton).

Man Bites Murdoch - Bruce Guthrie

2010-11-22T11:57:00.001+11:00

Bruce Guthrie survived tuberculosis, Melbourne's gritty northern suburbs and a boss who twice tried to sack him in his first six months in newspapers, to become a foreign correspondent and then one of Australia's feistiest and most controversial editors. His CV boasts editorships of The Age, The Sunday Age and the Herald Sun, magazines Who Weekly and The Weekend Australian, even a high level stint at America's celeb-news bible, People. Then, just as he claimed one of the industry's most glittering prizes, he fell foul of Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen, who promptly dispensed with his services. What would any self-respecting Broadmeadows boy do in such circumstances? Sue them, of course.

This is Guthrie's explosive account of almost forty years in the news business, his brutal dismissal from Australia's biggest selling paper and the celebrated court case that exposed the inner workings of the world's biggest media company – and the treachery of its most senior executives.

Rogue Economics - Loretta Napoleoni

2010-11-22T11:54:00.001+11:00

What do Eastern Europe’s booming sex trade, America’s subprime mortgage lending scandal, China’s fake goods industry, and celebrity philanthropy in Africa have in common? With biopirates trolling the blood industry, fish-farming bandits ravaging the high seas, pornography developing virtually in Second Life, and games like World of Warcraft spawning online sweatshops, how are rogue industries transmuting into global empires? And will the entire system be transformed by the advent of sharia economics?

Economist and best-selling author Loretta Napoleoni examines how dark economic forces are creating victims out of millions of ordinary people whose lives have become trapped inside a world they don’t understand.

Six months of panic - Trevor Sykes

2010-11-22T11:32:00.000+11:00

Few Australian writers can match Trevor Sykes' understanding of the murkier waters of Australian business, as readers of his Pierpont column and his magisterial works The Bold Riders and Two Centuries of Panic have shown.

He has now turned his eagle eye on what has become known as the GFC, and the waves of panic that began with the subprime crisis in America and flowed with tsunami-like force across Europe, Asia and Australia. This was a crisis which was borne from an excess of greed, and immorality, and Sykes singles the Wall Street banks out for particular blame.

He explains how the subprime phenomenon came about, and how the fall of Lehman brothers marked the beginning of the slide. Inevitably the crisis reached Australia, with Centro and MFS the first dominoes in the chain. With the same blowtorch he earlier applied to the likes of Alan Bond he dissects the questionable dealings which caused the fall of high flyers like Allco, Babcock and Brown, ABC and many more, and summarises the pain and harm caused by the myriad small companies and individuals feeding from the frenzy.

Disconnected - Andrew Leigh

2010-11-22T11:17:00.001+11:00

In this forensic examination of how we live, Andrew Leigh, one of our most exciting young thinkers, rips though Australian life and asks whether we are tightly-knit and looking out for each other, or are we all disconnected? Organisational membership records and surveys show that our society is shifting rapidly. These days, chances are you never quite get around to talking to your neighbours, or you’re always too busy to give blood. In Disconnected Andrew Leigh guides us through the reasons that our social fabric has begun to fray, and outlines steps to creating a better civic and personal life.

Contents pdf

1001 songs you must hear before you die - Robert Dimery

2010-11-22T11:11:00.000+11:00

1001 SONGS YOU MUST HERE BEFORE YOU DIE is an absorbing introduction to some of the greatest songs ever recorded. Written by a widely experienced team of music journalists and critics, and illustrated throughout with full-color photographs, this superb guide features nearly a century of timeless songwriting and legendary performers!

1001 SONGS YOU MUST HEAR BEFORE YOU DIE picks through nearly a century of music to bring you an inspiring selection of some of the greatest recordings ever made. Each entry in this wonderfully browsable book tells the story of a great song. Find out what inspired the songwriter, what makes the track so enduring, which songs it influenced in turn, and which cover version to listen out for. You’ll also pick up a wealth of fascinating trivia along the way. What links Lead Belly, Lonnie Donegan, and Black Betty? Whose gravestone inspired Phil Spector’s first hit? And when did Christina Aguilera join forces with The Moon People? Read on and find out.

Learning to be a Minister - Anne Tiernan and Patrick Weller

2010-11-22T10:59:00.001+11:00

Heroic Expectations, Practical Realities

In 1981, academic Patrick Weller teamed up with renowned political commentator and journalist Michelle Grattan to publish Can Ministers Cope?, a study of the challenges facing Australia’s federal government ministers.

With the federal Labor government just twenty months into its first term in office, it was time to revisit the question ‘Can ministers cope?’ and to broaden the focus to ask how they cope, especially as relatively young and sometimes inexperienced players, in the transition to government after a long period in opposition.

Anne Tiernan and Patrick Weller draw on extensive interviews with current and former ministers, ministerial staffers and senior officials, to discover how a new ministry learns to juggle their simultaneous roles of member of Parliament and Cabinet, local constituency representative, and media spokesperson, not to mention their lives outside work.

Learning to Be a Minister is an in-depth examination of the day-to-day life of Australia’s federal ministers at work.

Planet Obesity - Garry Egger and Boyd Swinburn

2010-10-06T09:38:00.001+11:00

How we're eating ourselves and the planet to death

Obesity is 'collateral damage in the battle for modernity'. It's the canary in the coalmine, which should alert us to bigger structural problems in society.

Our bodies can no longer cope with the excess of over consumption to which we are encouraged at every turn, and the planet is labouring under the effect of industrialisation and greenhouse gas emissions which are surely exacerbating and possibly causing a level of climate change which is ultimately unsustainable.

A fundamental change in thinking is needed both for how we treat our bodies and for our approach to the planet. Each is the only one we have.

Professors Garry Egger and Boyd Swinburn have been at the forefront of health obesity study for over three decades and have published widely in the area. Garry Egger is the author of the best selling Gutbuster series.

Zombie Economics - John Quiggin

2010-09-29T11:50:00.001+10:00

In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land.

The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism--the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many--members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess. In Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explains how these dead ideas still walk among us--and why we must find a way to kill them once and for all if we are to avoid an even bigger financial crisis in the future.

Zombie Economics takes the reader through the origins, consequences, and implosion of a system of ideas whose time has come and gone. These beliefs--that deregulation had conquered the financial cycle, that markets were always the best judge of value, that policies designed to benefit the rich made everyone better off--brought us to the brink of disaster once before, and their persistent hold on many threatens to do so again. Because these ideas will never die unless there is an alternative, Zombie Economics also looks ahead at what could replace market liberalism, arguing that a simple return to traditional Keynesian economics and the politics of the welfare state will not be enough--either to kill dead ideas, or prevent future crises.

John Quiggin is professor of economics at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Introduction [PDF]

The Plundered Planet - Paul Collier

2010-09-29T11:45:00.002+10:00

Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion was greeted as groundbreaking when it appeared in 2007. The Economist wrote that it was "set to become a classic," the Financial Times praised it as "rich in both analysis and recommendations," while Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times called it the "best nonfiction book so far this year."

Now, in The Plundered Planet, Collier builds upon his renowned work on developing countries and the poorest populations to confront the global mismanagement of nature. Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the rich world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.

Grounded in a belief in the power of informed citizens, Collier proposes a series of international standards that would help poor countries rich in natural assets better manage those resources, policy changes that would raise world food supply, and a clear-headed approach to climate change that acknowledges the benefits of industrialization while addressing the need for alternatives to carbon trading. Revealing how these are all interconnected, The Plundered Planet charts a way forward to avoid the mismanagement of the natural world that threatens our future.

LSE lecture 82 minutes Download here.

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals - Ray Moynihan

2010-09-21T19:48:00.001+10:00

ALLEN & UNWIN, September 2010

Hard-hitting and provocative, this powerful expose of the birth of a new 'disease' - and the multi-million dollar machine unleashed to market - takes us inside the corridors of medical power from Paris to Melbourne to Manhattan to witness the creation of 'female sexual dysfunction' as a twenty-first century epidemic.

The characters in this corporate thriller are the global drug giants, the doctors and psychologists working with them, and the critics trying to untangle medical science from marketing who argue the new disorders of desire are a misleading and dangerous distraction from the real problems in sexual relationships.

With claims that nearly one in two women suffer from 'female sexual dysfunction', some of the most profitable corporations on the planet are poised to exploit some of women' s deepest fears with hopes for new billion dollar markets.

Set against the great cultural contradictions of our time - increasing sexual liberation coupled with seemingly increasing sexual anxiety - Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals explores with compelling clarity what is really happening as the world prepares for the 'pink' Viagra.

The Little Book of Economics - Greg Ip

2010-09-10T10:44:00.004+10:00

The Little Book of Economics walks you through the critical issues in economics today: the sources of long-term economic growth, how recessions become depressions, inflation vs. deflation, globalization, how budget deficits can save an economy or bring on disaster, and why we keep having financial crises. It’s compact (less than 250 short pages), and written in plain English with ample analogies and examples to illustrate the main points.

Chapter One

The Secrets of Success; How People, Capital, and Ideas Make Countries Rich

In 1990, Japan seemed poised to overtake the United States as the world’s richest, most powerful economy. What went wrong? Its bubble economy collapsed, and, beneath the surface, the key determinants of long-term growth turned against it: productivity growth slowed down and its work force began to shrink. This chapter explains how population, capital and ideas (i.e. innovation and technology) add up to long-term growth and what government does to foster or ruin the climate for growth.

Chapter Two

Economic Bungee Jumping ; Business Cycles, Recessions, and Depressions . . . Oh My!

Business cycles are an unavoidable and largely unpredictable feature of market economies. In this chapter we learn how psychology, the financial markets and the Federal Reserve all drive these cycles of expansion and recession. Recessions became milder during the Great Moderation of 1982-2007 but they were not eradicated. Financial crises produce severe recessions and weak recoveries and can even result in a depression. The chapter explains how recessions and depressions are identified and the role of the National Bureau of Economic Research in dating recessions.

Read Excerpt 1 (PDF)

Read Excerpt 2 (PDF)

Read Excerpt 3 (PDF)

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior - Geoffrey Miller

2010-07-16T13:34:00.000+10:00

May 14th 2009 by Viking Adult
Hardcover, 368 pages
isbn 0670020621 (isbn13: 9780670020621)

“Marketing is not just one of the most important ideas in business. It has become the dominant force in human culture.” This is how evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller leads into an early chapter on the importance of marketing. In spent, Miller sets out to explain why humans buy the things they do. His perspective is based on the concept that compared to the time it took humans to evolve, our consumer society is so new that our brains are applying the skills developed for hunter-gatherer communities and applying them today. When we buy a Toyota Prius or Coach purse, we are still engaging in behaviors honed over the millenia on the veldt and in the forests.

I found the most valuable insights in Spent in the first half. In a discussion of what he terms consumer narcissism, Miller succinctly states the underlying premise of the book:

…All human brains have a deep and abiding interest in two big sets of evolutionary goals: displaying fitness indicators that were associated with higher social and sexual status in prehistory, and chasing fitness cues that were associated with better survival, social, sexual, and parental prospects in prehistory.

Miller explains conspicuous consumption as an indicator of fitness. Not unlike a male peacock that devotes a large portion of its energy resource to growing a tail with no practical survival applications, humans who “waste” resources demonstrate to others that they are “fit.” Only a fit individual of the species could, the theory goes, waste so many resources and remain healthy; a sickly peacock, for example, would likely be unable to grow an impressive tail.

Neuromarketing

This Time is Different - Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff

2010-07-08T20:11:00.001+10:00

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

published

September 1st 2009 by Princeton University Press

details

Hardcover, 400 pages

isbn

0691142165 (isbn13: 9780691142166)

description

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. This book proves that premise wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe.

The Myth of the Rational Voter - Bryan Caplan

2010-07-02T15:33:00.004+10:00

Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

Extract

April 16th 2007 by Princeton University Press
Hardcover, 280 pages
isbn 0691129428 (isbn13: 9780691129426)

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.

Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.

The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.

Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz

2010-07-02T15:28:00.002+10:00

June 1st 2010 by Ecco (first published May 2009)

Hardcover, 416 pages

isbn 0061176044 (isbn13: 9780061176043)

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken, and why do we react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness, and shame?

In Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken, and how this attitude toward error corrodes relationships—whether between family members, colleagues, neighbors, or nations. Along the way, she takes us on a fascinating tour of human fallibility, from wrongful convictions to no-fault divorce; medical mistakes to misadventures at sea; failed prophecies to false memories; “I told you so!” to “Mistakes were made.” Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan, and Groucho Marx, she proposes a new way of looking at wrongness. In this view, error is both a given and a gift—one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and, most profoundly, ourselves.

In the end, Being Wrong is not just an account of human error but a tribute to human creativity—the way we generate and revise our beliefs about ourselves and the world. At a moment when economic, political, and religious dogmatism increasingly divide us, Schulz explores with uncommon humor and eloquence the seduction of certainty and the crises occasioned by error. A brilliant debut from a new voice in nonfiction, this book calls on us to ask one of life’s most challenging questions: what if I’m wrong?

Shitstorm - Lenore Taylor and David Uren

2010-06-21T13:28:00.000+10:00

From respected journalists Lenore Taylor and David Uren comes the inside story of the Rudd government's first term in office. It is a tenure that will be forever defined by the Global Financial Crisis, or -- to use the Prime Minster's term -- the 'shitstorm' that engulfed the nation and the world.

Taylor and Uren uncover the challenges Rudd and his team faced, and through a study of their tactics and approaches, assemble a picture of a rookie government that is at once surprising and revealing.

The Big Short - Michael Lewis

2010-06-21T10:39:00.001+10:00

A brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff.

Truth really is stranger than fiction. Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.

Michael Lewis’s splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps even the face in your mirror. In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve. He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.

Excerpt

The Beauty Bias - Deborah Rhode

2010-06-12T17:34:00.002+10:00

"It hurts to be beautiful" has been a cliché for centuries. What has been far less appreciated is how much it hurts not to be beautiful. The Beauty Bias explores our cultural preoccupation with attractiveness, the costs it imposes, and the responses it demands.

Beauty may be only skin deep, but the damages associated with its absence go much deeper. Unattractive individuals are less likely to be hired and promoted, and are assumed less likely to have desirable traits, such as goodness, kindness, and honesty. Three quarters of women consider appearance important to their self image and over a third rank it as the most important factor.

The Beauty Bias provides the first systematic survey of how appearance laws work in practice, and a compelling argument for extending their reach. The book offers case histories of invidious discrimination and a plausible legal and political strategy for addressing them. Our prejudices run deep, but we can do far more to promote realistic and healthy images of attractiveness, and to reduce the price of their pursuit.

Mostly Harmless Econometrics - Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke

2010-06-03T19:17:00.000+10:00

DON’T PANIC! The core methods in today’s econometric toolkit are linear regression for statistical control, instrumental variables methods for the analysis of natural experiments, and differences-in-differences methods that exploit policy changes. In the modern experimentalist paradigm, these techniques answer clear causal questions such as: Do smaller classes increase learning? Do minimum wages reduce employment? Should wife batterers be arrested? How much does education raise earnings? Does democracy increase economic growth? Mostly Harmless Econometrics shows how the basic tools of applied econometrics allow the data to speak.

Mostly Harmless website