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Interesting article (via Tyler Cowen, on MR) on the economics of the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by C. Bohanon (written a while ago). The recent obituary for him in The Economist seems to openly ignore some of the conclusions emerging from Bohanon’s analysis…
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Learn how to manage your (research) time, from Terry Tao. Not only for Maths nerds!
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The death of the Renaissance man: “If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity – a greater reliance on teamwork – and negative implications for growth.” This is from a super interesting, forthcoming ReStud paper, by Benjamin Jones.
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an older NYTimes article on The Economics of an Eye for an Eye. Interesting, though I think they mix a lot of sources in the NYTimes article, not all of the same degree of credibility. Generalization is quite cumbersome… By the way, I think the Romanians’ willingness to punish (cited in the newspaper article) is hump-shaped on the gravity of the crime… But that being said, I still haven’t had time to read Naci Mocan’s original NBER article on the topic, that might be much clearer.
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Ex post on Einstein and the peer review system (via Gabi Istrate on Ad Astra). I realize this detail somehow escaped Isaacson’s careful analysis; otherwise his recent book on Einstein is absolutely great, I warmly recommend it to everybody– and will say more about this book, once I will have read also its last two chapters.
