(Final Update: I'm on the verge of retracting this entire post. Something that I haven't done since I railed against Mrs. John McCain's selling of Budweiser to the heathens.
"A system with two countries and four potential explanatory variables is, of course, overdetermined. The only way to evaluate the relative importance of these four factors is to bring in other countries. We will do this directly, by running a set of cross-national regressions, while drawing on the long literature on the determinants of differences in country-level prosperity, such as Hall and Jones (1999). Although the limitations of cross-country regressions are well known, they can nevertheless provide us with a benchmark quantitative assessment of our candidate explanations."
Data porn. Not only that, it stars my two favorite ladies (other than the lovely and talented 99, of course), La Reina de la Plata and The Woman with the Broken Nose.
The above quote notwithstanding, Messers Glaeser and Campante's paper is a wealth of information and a really good read... whether or not you come to the same conclusions. Go read.)
A NYT blogger is kicking up some dust with his comparison of the parallel development of Buenos Aires and Chicago. As an immigrant to Buenos Aires from Chicago I find the discussion personally interesting. The comments are better than the article.
Although simplistic, the author promises a follow-up. I couldn't resist making lots of comparisons when I first arrived here. After a few years, however, I realized that the two cities are really nothing alike and have never really been.
The author's NYC roots begin to show quickly, as well; his description of both cities shows a bit of distain. He caught a lot of flak for his academic's skewing of the importance of education and his ignoring US backed dictatorships and the crony-capitalism of the "Mendez" administration. Being a Chicagoan, I was particularly tickled by his clean bill of health to my old hometown as regards ...wait for it ...corruption!(oops. strike that; I got that impression from the comments not his article. sorry.) I have a feeling that he doesn't really know too much about either city.
If you're interested, his paper goes into much more detail.
Update: I'm liking his paper a lot more than the blogpost. I hope we hear from him again soon.
...currently discussing the US presidential election campaign until Inauguration Day.
2 comments:
Mike, lamento escribir en Español.
Entre las varias incorreciones de la nota, me voy a detener en la parte educativa, aunque ya algunos lo detallaron en los comentarios de la misma.
Parecería que nos fallaron los profersores lo cual -como sabemos- no fue así.
http://inventario22-com-ar.server2.servidor-windows.com/textocomp.asp?id=24593
Si los autores no tienen los datos correctos, el diagnóstico será equivocado y tomaremos -como siempre- los remedios inadecuados.
Te envío un gran abrazo!
Luis.
I read the whole 49 pages paper and simplistic doesn´t even begin to describe the political and historic holes in it (not a mention about the biggest player at that time, England).
The paper is reductionist, discriminatory and biased. A very "harvard" view of the world.
These people really need to read Upton Sinclair´s "The Jungle" (Eduardo Galeano´s "Open Veins of Latin America" is too much to ask for) instead of playing around with spreadsheets to correlate pears and apples.
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