ePODstemology

The advancement of health care is one of the hallmarks of development and a central objective of not for profit, public, and private organisations, especially in the developing countries of Africa. Wiktoria Tafesse is an early career researcher working on a range of topics at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics. She joins ePODstemology’s regular host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the role health plays in development, the idiosyncratic features of developing countries with respect to health care provision, how we can improve outcomes in the space, and what to expect from the 10 years of activity and research. 

 Show notes

Wiktoria’s academic website: https://www.york.ac.uk/che/staff/research/wiktoria-tafesse/

De Silva-Sanigorski, A. et al. (2010). Reducing obesity in early childhood: Results from Romp and Chomp, an Australia community-wide intervention program. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 91, no. 4, pp. 831–840

Kasman, M. et al. (2019). Activating a community: An agent-based model of Romp and Chomp, a whole-of-community childhood obesity intervention. Obesity, vol. 27, no. 9, pp. 1494-1502. 

Miguel, E. and Kremer, M. (2003). Networks, social learning, and technology adoption: The case of deworming drugs in Kenya. Working paper: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/e271_f03/miguel.pdf  

Tafesse, W. (2022). The effect of universal salt iodization on cognitive test scores in rural India. World Development, vol. 152, e105796

Tafesse, W. et al. (2019) The effect of government contracting with faith-based health care providers in Malawi. CHE Research Paper; No. 167.

Tafesse, W. and Chalkley, M. (2021). Faith-based provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare in Malawi. Social Science and Medicine, vol. 282, e113997 

Kwan et al. (2019). Use of standardised patients for health care quality research in low and middle income countries. BMJ Global Health, vol. 4:e001669. https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/5/e001669.abstract 

Fitzpatrick, A. (2022). The impact of public health sector stockouts on private sector prices and access to health care: Evidence from the anti-malarial drug market. Health Economics, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 102544

Banerjee, A. et al. (2020) The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries. Harvard Business School Working Paper, December 2020. 

Fleming et al. (2016). Health-care availability, preference, and distance for women in urban Bo, Sierra Leone. International Journal of Public Health, vol. 61, pp. 1079–1088   

Through most of human history, we needed more food, cheaper food, and easier to access food, so we built economic systems that could deliver mountains of the stuff. Now that was a noble effort at the time, but we didn’t think much about waste, and so huge quantities of food today ends up in landfill where it turns to greenhouse gases, or rots on the vine, squandering the resources we used to produce it. Much of our food is also of dubious nutritional quality but can meet our demands for supposedly ‘fresh’ produce in all seasons by surviving long supply chains of freezer ships, freezer trucks, and freezer supermarkets. All that is carbon intensive. What if we could more efficiently utilise the food system we already have to produce higher quality food less wastefully? A win for our waistlines, a win for our wallets, and a win for the planet. To guide us through the latest research on food waste, ePODstemology’s guest this episode is Dr Christian Reynolds, Senior Lecturer in Food Policy at City University London. Dr Reynolds is an economist by training, but like many early career researchers is thoroughly interdisciplinary in his work, operating out of the school of health and psychological sciences. Christian’s work has appeared in numerous top journals including Food Policy, The Lancet, Ecological Economics, and Waste Management. He talks us through the research issues in food waste management, what food waste is, what drives it, and what we can do about it. We hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Christian’s Academic page: https://www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/about/people/academics/christian-reynolds 

Gavin Stewart at University of Newcastle doing evidence synthesis: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/nes/people/profile/gavinstewart.html 

University of Aberdeen Rowitt Institute for Nutrition Science: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/rowett/ 

Wansink, B., & van Ittersum, K. (2013). Portion size me: Plate-size induced consumption norms and win-win solutions for reducing food intake and waste. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 19(4), 320–332. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035053

World Resources Institute on food loss and climate change: https://www.wri.org/insights/whats-food-loss-and-waste-got-do-climate-change-lot-actually 

EAT Lancet report on a scientifically-informed healthy and sustainable diet: https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/ 

Dr Megan Blake at University of Sheffield who works on food security and food justice: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/people/academic-staff/megan-blake 

FareShare: https://fareshare.org.uk/ 

HelloFresh meal boxes: https://www.hellofresh.com.au/ 

Riverford organic, sustainable, smallholder produce boxes: https://www.riverford.co.uk/ 

Oddbox wonky fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/

Blue Apron ready meals: https://www.blueapron.com/ 

Chill the fridge out: https://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/article/chill-fridge-out 

Plastics Pact: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/the-plastics-pact-network 

Regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by philosopher of science Dr Riana Betzler from Washington University in St Louis to discuss the nature and study of empathy. In popular culture, empathy is one of these haloed qualities that we generally perceive as good and desirable. Yet in recent years some psychologists, notably Paul Bloom at Yale, have argued that empathy is overrated, indeed, harmful, because it biases our moral judgements towards our in groups. Riana’s research is principally concerned with the scientific practices upon which these debates turn. Are scholars in favour of or against empathy using the same definition of the term? Are meta-analyses of empirical results reliably distilling the true effects of empathy, or are they in fact horribly undermined by differences in the way empathy is operationalised across studies? How do these questions play into broader trends in psychological science like the supposed theory crisis and recent critiques of factor analysis? Tune in to find out. 

https://rianabetzler.com/

Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338 

Jessie Prinz Against Empathy: https://philpapers.org/rec/PRIAE-5 

Anna Alexandrova on theory avoidance in psychology: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780199300518.001.0001/oso-9780199300518-chapter-6 

Discretionary time and wellbeing: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000391.pdf 

Chancellor and Lyubomirsky on humility: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/spc3.12069 

Dan Batson’s view of empathy: http://people.uncw.edu/hakanr/documents/batsononempathy.pdf 

fMRI study of compassion: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763419306918 

The psychologically-rich life questionnaire: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656619300649 

Settler mortality instrumental variables paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369 

interpersonal reactivity index: https://fetzer.org/sites/default/files/images/stories/pdf/selfmeasures/EMPATHY-InterpersonalReactivityIndex.pdf 

Anna Alexandrova and Daniel Haybron (2016). Is Construct Validation Valid? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303753840_Is_Construct_Validation_Valid 

ePODstemology is about popularising the genuinely new ways of thinking emerging from the pathbreaking research of young scholars. There are few fields that represent this agenda more than machine learning, a branch of computer science and statistics that promises to dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, crack open hard questions that have bedeviled humanity for decades, and even crack open our minds with whole new ways of understanding our world. In this episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the universities of Tasmania and Cambridge is joined by Dr David Watson, a postdoc at University College London making voluminous contributions to the machine learning literature. Their discussion ranges over what machine learning, why deep neural networks are so hot right now, how they are being applied in areas as diverse as protein folding and x-ray imaging, and their potential to transform society, for both good and ill. 

https://dswatson.github.io/

The rhetoric and reality of anthropomorphism in artificial intelligence. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-019-09506-6

Local explanations via necessity and sufficiency: Unifying theory and practice. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-022-09598-7 

Mass Effect Full Game Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5dSRaeUcFc 

Joy, Bladerunner 2049: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL0gX1_NWTk

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me

Athey and Imbens – Machine learning methods economists should know about. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-economics-080217-053433  

The biggest change in electoral politics in the last decade is without a doubt the advent of social media. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in Brexit, Russian bots in the EU, the zone that Steve Bannon suggests political parties flood with shit, it’s all happening on our favourite doom-scrolling apps. How is political science getting to grips with this new and influential phenomenon? Dr Kevin Munger from Pennsylvania State University joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss. The conversation covers Munger’s seminal model of fake news, the differences between online and offline politics, the technological and psychological mechanisms by which social media influences political behaviour, and the importance of low digital literacy, especially among the elderly, for understanding why toxic forces on social media are so effective. In the 2nd half of the episode we get the inside line on Munger’s forthcoming book, Generation Gap, which analyses the impact of the boomer generation’s outsize demographic heft on politics, policy, culture, economics, and even niche industries like academia. 

Kevin’s website with all his many outputs: http://www.kevinmunger.com/ 

Follow Kevin on twitter: @kmmunger 

Kevin’s substack/blog: https://kevinmunger.substack.com/ 

Kevin’s forthcoming book on boomer ballast: https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Gap-Dominate-American-Politics/dp/B08ZK7YV47 

Kevin is also founding editor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital – Check it out if you’re an academic active in this field. https://journalqd.org/ 

BJPS article on social media in the 2015 UK election: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/political-knowledge-and-misinformation-in-the-era-of-social-media-evidence-from-the-2015-uk-election/EF26FA6C515D9C697DD72B95F452B2C5 

Blog post on social media toxicity as reflective of the misery of American society:

https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/facebook-is-other-people?s=r 

Political Communication article on the political economy of fake news: https://kmunger.github.io/pdfs/pc_clickbait.pdf 

What are the big questions in macroeconomics right now? Well there’s the unprecedented assault on Russia’s financial architecture, that’s quite topical. We usually study how to avoid financial crises, not how to start them. How do a tank a central bank? Just a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the big news was the return of inflation. After a decade or so of ‘secular stagnation’ and fears of deflation, consumer prices across the world are rocketing up. Is this just a hangover from COVID, or is there more to it? How should we plan our lives around inflation expectations? Wind the clock back a little bit further and macroeconomists were very puzzled by productivity. As Nobel Laureate Bob Solow said: “you can see the impact of computers everywhere except the productivity data”. Why’s that? Is it just really hard to measure productivity in the digital and service sector economy, or it productivity really going to flatlining, with implications in turn for the heart rate of our economies? And finally, if we really wind the clock back all the way to 2008 (just yesterday really), then the big question is how has macroeconomics updated itself in the wake of the biggest loss of confident in the discipline in decades?

Here to answer all these questions is Dr Adam Triggs, a man with a very long signature block. He is director at the Canberra office of AlphaBeta, an economic consulting firm within Accenture Strategy, non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, a visiting fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy in the Australian National University, a fellow at Macquarie University’s e61 institute, and a columnist for the Canberra times. All these hot shot agencies want Adam’s insights, and he’s giving them away to you for free on ePODstemology. Do tune in. 

Adam’s website: https://adamtriggs.com/resume/ 

Cambridge’s Diane Coyle provides an overview of the productivity puzzle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRrbjmrqJw 

Noah Smith interviews Emi Nakamura:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-emi-nakamura-macroeconomist 

Do you want to understand all the macroeconomic and financial attacks on Russia in response to the Ukraine invasion? Then this is the audio for you. This is a teaser from a forthcoming episode on the big topics in macroeconomics with Adam Triggs, Director at the Canberra office of AlphaBeta, an economic consulting firm that is now part of Accenture Strategy, non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, a fellow at Macquarie University’s e61 Institute, and a columnist for the Canberra Times. 

How does science, the quintessential secular enterprise, study religion? What can we learn about religion by applying the tools of scientific method, and what can religion teach secularists about how to build thriving societies? In this episode, social psychologist Dr Kitty O'Lone from Cambridge University's Woolf Institute joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss these and other questions pertaining to the secular benefits of religious practices. Dr O'Lone discusses her previous work on interfaith dialogue, her new work on religious forgiveness and its role in healing post-conflict societies, and her ambition of studying the similarities and differences between religious and secular fasting practices. The episode also ranges over mindfulness and the two-way learning that has taken place between academics and traditional communities of practice, the vacuum left by the disappearance of priest's from everyday life, whether science really offers 'explanations' for seemingly supernatural phenomena like sleep paralysis,  and want the frontiers are in the social psychology of religion. Please tune in.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS

https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/people/katherine-olone

Atkinson, Quentin. D and Pierre Bourrat. 2011. “Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation.” Evolution and Human Behavior, 32 (1): 41-49.

Boyd, Robert., Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles and Peter J. Richerson. 2003. “The evolution of altruistic punishment.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. USA, 100: 3531–3535. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0630443100

Carlsmith, Kevin M., John M. Darley and Paul H. Robinson. 2002. “Why do we punish? Deterrence and just desserts as motives for punishment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83: 284–299.

Nikiforakis, Nikos and Dirk Engelmann. 2011. “Altruistic Punishment and the Threat of Feuds.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 78 (3): 319-332. 

Johnson, Kathryn A. and Adam B. Cohen. 2016. “Authoritarian and benevolent god representations and the two sides of prosociality.” Behavioral And Brain Sciences 39: 32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15000461

Karremans, Johan C and Paul A. M. Van Lange. 2004. “Back to caring after being hurt: The role of forgiveness.” European Journal of Social Psychology 34: 207-227. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.192

https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/category/books-by-dops/study-of-reincarnation/

Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 49, pp. 65-85

Van Elk, M., Karinen, A., Specker, E., Stamkou, E. and Baas, M. (2016). 'Standing in Awe': The effects of awe on body perception and the relation with absorption. Collabra, vol. 2, no. 1. 

Artist, feminist economist and activist Cassie Thornton joins ePODstemology host Mark Fabian to discuss her recent project The Hologram, a social technology for creating peer to peer care networks and unlearning capitalism. Inspired by the community health clinics of post-GFC Greece, The Hologram seeks to cultivate our capacity for caring about others in a collective, non-reciprocal, and holistic fashion. The project illustrates how the steady professionalisation, individualisation, and commercialisation of care, medical or otherwise, has eroded our sense of belonging in community, our ability to give care generously and ask for it guiltlessly, and our capacity to conceptualise our personal journeys as bound up with others. Through social technologies like The Hologram – free, amateur, and collective – Cassie explores how we can remember and relearn how to be a cooperative species and move together against the financialisation of everything.
 
https://thehologram.xyz/

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/

http://feministeconomicsdepartment.com

https://linktr.ee/TheFeministEconDept

Trailer for the movie PIG with Nicholas Cage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4nRpdONaAA

Genevieve Vaughan’s work on the gift economy: http://www.genevievevaughan.org/

Long before Donald Trump referred to Mexican migrants as 'bad hombres', migration was a perennially hot topic in economic and social policy. Some of the endlessly debated question in this space include: do migrants hurt the labour market prospects of locals by taking away jobs and depressing wages? Or do they instead create more opportunities by bringing capital and spurring economic activity? Is there a difference in effects between skilled and unskilled migrants? What about refugees? Do temporary visa schemes for seasonal labour solves more problems than they create? What about a points-based migration system like the way they have in Australia? Here to answer all these questions and more, including what we can learn about migration from observing the pacific, is Dr Ryan Edwards  from the Australian National University. Ryan is deputy director of the development policy centre, and was formerly a postdoc at Stanford and Dartmouth. This is a million-mile a minute episode that will answer your questions and then some. 

Grattan Institute reports on migration policy: https://grattan.edu.au/migration-and-labour-markets/ 

Clemens, M. A. (2011). Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 83–106. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83 

Elinor Ostrom’s (Nobel Prize Winner) Magnum Opus Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. TOC and First chapter: https://www.burmalibrary.org/docs20/Ostrom-1990-governing_the_commons.pdf? 

(Nobel Prize Winners) Banerjee, A. and Duflo, E. (2019). Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems. Penguin.  

Bahar, D. and Rappaport, H. (2018). Migration, Knowledge Diffusion, and the Comparative Advantage of Nations. The Economic Journal, vol. 128, no. 612, pp. F273–F305

Dustman, C. and Görlach, J. (2016). The Economics of Temporary Migration. Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 98–136

Fifer McIntosh, M. (2008). Measuring the Labor Market Impacts of Hurricane Katrina Migration: Evidence from Houston, Texas. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, vol. 98, no. 2, pp. 54 – 57

D’Amuri, F. and Peri, G. (2014). Immigration, Jobs, and Employment Protection: Evidence from Europe Before and During the Great Recession. Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 432–464 

Breunig, R., Deutscher, N. and To, H. T. (2017). The Relationship Between Immigration to Australia and the Labour Market Outcomes of Australian-Born Workers. Economic Record, vol. 93, no. 301, pp. 255–276     

Dustman, C., Schönberg, U. and Stuhler, J. (2016). The Impact of Immigration: Why Do Studies Reach Such Different Results? Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 31–56. https://www-aeaweb-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.4.31 

Clemens, M. and Hunt, J. (2019). The Labour Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results. ILR Review, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 818–857