ePODstemology

The ePODstemology Christmas Special! Popular guest, Bayesian Bae, and all round great person Rachel Meager from the LSE returns to ePODstemology to sit in the host's chair and interview regular host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University. The topic is all things wellbeing. The philosophy of it, the psychology of it, the economics and public policy of it. Why does wellbeing scholarship need to be interdisciplinary? How do we even measure it? What even is wellbeing? Fabian delivers hot takes faster than the New York Times pitchbot, from the importance of self-actualisation to the role of expectations, with sidebars into why tennis ain't what it used to be and why economics is the best social science. It's a festive episode but also an enlightening one. So pop on a Santa hat, sit down with some cocoa, and join the conversation.

https://sites.google.com/view/markfabian/home

Fabian, M. Scale Norming Makes Welfare Analysis with Life Satisfaction Data Difficult.  Online first in Journal of Happiness Studies. (Download open access)

Fabian, M. (2020) The Coalescence of Being: A Model of the Self-Actualization Process. Journal of Happiness Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1487 - 1508. doi: 10.1007/s10902-019-00141-7. Download.

Weiss, A., King, J.E., Inoue-Murayama, M., Matsuzawa, T., Oswald, A.J. (2012) Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes consistent with the U-shape in human well-being. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109 (49): 19949-19952. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212592109

Nakamura, J. and Csikszentmihaly, M. (2014). The concept of flow. In M. Csikszentmihaly (ed.), Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology, pp. 239 - 263. Springer.

Ryan, R. and Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and wellbeing. American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 68 - 78.

Ryan, R. and Deci, E. (2003). On assimilating identities to the self: A self-determination theory perspective on internalisation and integrity within cultures. In M. R. Leary and J. P. Tangney (eds.), Handbook of Self and Identity, pp. 253 - 272. Guildford. 

Infrastructure is the skeleton upon which the economy is built. Energy, water, sewerage and other utilities provide the fuel and take away the waste; roads, bridges, railways, ports, and broadband cables facilitate the movement of goods that is the essence of commerce; and town halls, leisure centres, parks are the sites on which the public sphere is manifested. So why don't we talk more about this critical aspect of our world? Even more pertinently, why don't we talk about how it is governed? Infrastructure touches of everyone's lives in some way, so perhaps we should have people more heavily involved in its design, implementation, and management. Or is that too unwieldy? Too idealistic? Perhaps it would be better to leave the infrastructure domain to technical analysts able to manage all its complexities for the common good. In this episode, ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian from Cambridge University is joined by Dr Rehema Msulwa, also from Cambridge, who helps us navigate the dynamic terrain of infrastructure policy, with an especial focus on how we can involve local voices to improve outcomes.   

https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/team/rehema-msulwa/ 

https://stateup.co/sit-down-with-stateup-dr-rehema-msulwa/

https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.17726abstract 

https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/ambpp.2017.10284abstract

Believed dead and buried after World War 2, the far right has risen like a zombie from the ashes of deindustrialising towns to once again plague the polities of the trans-Atlantic region. The electoral success of Trump and Brexit made the ‘elites’ pay attention, but it’s only recently that we’ve come to understand enough about what happened in 2016 to give a thorough accounting. Here to help us understand the nature, causes, and consequences of the far right is Dr Diane Bolet, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Durham University and Research Fellow in Political Science at the University of Zurich. Drawing on qualitative studies of French and Spanish former coal mining communities and quantitative evidence from studies of community pub closures in the UK, Diane mounts a compelling thesis about the roots of the far right lying in the disintegration of social and cultural cohesion more so than economic decay or prejudicial racism. It's a fresh take straight from the knowledge frontier to your ear drums. 

Papers and other links from this episode:

https://www.dianebolet.com/

Local Labour Market Competition and Radical Right Voting: Evidence from France. European Journal of Political Research, 2020.

Drinking Alone: Local Socio-Cultural Degradation and Radical Right Voting - The Case of British Pub Closures. Comparative Political Studies, 2021. 

Fabian, M., Breunig, R., and De Neve, J. (2020). Bowling With Trump: Racial Identification, Economic Anxiety, and Well-Being in the 2016 Presidential Election. Brookings Institution Working Paper.

Tim Carney (2019). Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Harper Collins.  

What is the difference between merely 'statistical' discrimination and prejudice? How can we disentangle these things in social sciences research, and should we? How can researchers get away from a focus on the individual in discrimination research to better understand how institutions, culture, and macro-history cause both statistical and prejudicial discrimination? What can economists learn from sociology and cultural psychology about discrimination, and vice versa?  Ben Harrell from the LGBT policy lab at Vanderbilt University joins ePODstemology host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University to Enlighten us.

Links to content from this episode:

https://www.benharrellecon.com/

twitter @elben

Button, P., Dils, E., Harrell, B., Fumarco, L. and Schwegman, D. (2020). Gender Identity, Race, and Ethnicity Discrimination in Access to Mental Health Care: Preliminary Evidence from a Multi-Wave Audit Field Experiment. NBER Working Paper #28164. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28164  

Mario Smalls AEA podcast on racial discrimination: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/economics-racial-discrimination-mario-small

Parable of the polygons game for illustrating neighbourhood diversity preferences and how benign preferences can lead to extreme segregation: https://ncase.me/polygons/ 

Raj Chetty et al. opportunity atlas: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-opportunity-atlas/ 

Edelman, B., Luca, M. and Svirsky, D. (2017). Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment. American Economic Review, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 1–22. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160213 

@besttrousers on twitter 

Goodman-Bacon, A. (2021). The Long-Run Effects of Childhood Insurance Coverage: Medicaid Implementation, Adult Health, and Labor Market Outcomes. American Economic Review, vol. 111, no. 8, pp. 2550–2593 

Buckles, K. Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Strategies for Making Economics Work for Women at Every Stage. Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 43–60. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.33.1.43  

The Undergraduate Women in Economic Challenge - https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/UWE 

Whether it's build back better, levelling up, or the climate transition, industrial policy is back in the news. Everyone wants to restructure their economies for geopolitical, equality, green, or good old fashion efficiency reasons, but how to do it? Nathan Lane from Oxford University joins host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University to discuss. Industrial policy has a mixed history, having been both the darling and the black sheep of the economics profession  in less than 100 years, embroiled in some of the most high profile adventures and misadventures of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and gone from the centre to the periphery of development economics. If you've ever wanted to understand this complex policy domain and understand how economists think about it today, now's your chance - tune in!

What can social scientists learn from biology? A great deal, according to guest Reuben Finigan of the London School of Economics. The burgeoning field of sociobiology provides mind-blowing insights into sociological phenomena like cooperation, common pool resource management, corruption and rent seeking behaviour, how market actors try to deceive regulators, and the efficient provision of public goods. Many of these insights are derived from applying models from the biological sciences, typically using evolutionary game theory, to questions in the social and behavioural sciences. Tune and find out how much we can learn from bees, ants, zebras, wolves, monkeys, flowers, fungus, and genes about how we should design institutions and regulations for the common good.   

'Creative destruction' is an inevitable and desirable part of ongoing economic activity, but it does have losers. In particular, the employees of firms that go bust and obsolete industries that disappear. In normal times, these workers will find employment elsewhere or in emerging industries, especially if they are able to retrain easily. But in times of industrial transition, when there are wide ranging structural transformations in the economy, the sheer volume of creative destruction can see many workers fall through the cracks. Such a transition is required if we are to respond meaningfully to the threat of climate change, but how can we deal with the losers of this transition? Fergus Green, Lecturer in Political Theory and Public Policy at University College London (UCL) helps to explain the ethics, political, and economic dimensions of this question. He also gives his thoughts on the green new deal and the kind of transition assistance that could help us to tackle climate change and avoid social misery.  

This episode is all about statistics in social science. It's one for all the new armchair epidemiologists out there, especially if COVID has got you thinking about how we can make "evidence-based policy". Statistics cheerleader Rachel Meager, who is Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Politics Science, joins host Mark Fabian of Cambridge University to  answer all your questions.  Should you be a Bayesianism Bae or a frequentism fan? Should all social science follow economics in its fixation with causal inference, or are there other important question we ought to focus our statistical skills on? What's a randomised-control trial and why do they matter for microfinance in Africa? You want knowledge and ePODstemology is gonna give to ya. 

What are the potentials and pitfalls of the new data economy and associated efforts at data governance? Tech entrepreneur, digital marketer, and academic researcher Sam Gilbert joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian of Cambridge University to discuss how we can achieve "Good Data". Sam explains the commercial, scientific, and social value of data, clarifies some common misunderstandings of how data is generated and used, and analyses the many political complexities around data regulation. If you've ever been pessimistic about the data economy, big tech, or "surveillance capitalism", this episode might just change your mind.   

The psychological science of happiness, well-being, and meaning in life has progressed rapidly in recent decades but it's insights are only just starting to penetrate the public discourse. Here to help is Frank Martela, a psychologist from Aalto University in Finland, the world's happiest country according to the World Happiness Report. Frank and host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University take you on a tour of the major theories of well-being in psychology, offer practical advice on how to secure meaning and wellbeing in your life, and discuss the prospects of applying insights from psychological science in public policy and organizational design. Straight from the cutting edge of science to your eardrums, only on ePODstemology.