Very cool JMP from @lydia_assouad : quantifying the effect of Ataturk randomly-happening-to-visit your town on the odds you adopt a Turkish (i.e. nationalist) name!

Leaders matter!
dropbox.com/s/93e05vg2euks…
It's a very nifty paper. Ataturk went on a political tour around Turkey promoting stronger Turkish/secular/Republican identity. Part of that was promoting the new "Pure Turkish" language. Baby names are a nice test case for this!
Also really good controlling for confounds. Paper has data on Ataturk's interaction with/co-optation of local elites, the formation of branches of his political party, etc. It can show mechanisms, complementary effects, etc. Leaders matter, but so do institutions!
The method of causal inference here seems decently good to me. Results are robust to "all visited cities" vs. "only cities along the route in-between major cities," i.e. cities which were not *main destinations* but *just happened to be along the way*.
Of course, geography is never random, so this isn't a true random treatment: what cities happen to be along routes between major cities is in fact highly endogenous to the traits of those cities and what institutions they might possess!
However, the balance tests mostly look good, with just a few problems related to minority prevalence, which the paper then addresses in several rounds of quite good looking robustness tests.
My *only* critique, which @lydia_assouad may have an answer to not in the paper, is about the administrative process of generating a birth certificate. The paper uses ~15 million birth certs across 30 years, so about 500,000 a year. That seems a little low?
Just doing some guesswork from censal populations and plausible crude birth rates, seems like Turkey should have had around 800,000 births per year.

So I wonder how complete the vital registry data is, and to what extent changes in *registration* behavior could matter?
Since the birth cert data catches a very large share of plausible births I don't expect this would eliminate the result, but one *can imagine* that Ataturk visiting could change *registration behavior* of more persuaded individuals, not just naming behavior.
But that doesn't necessarily undermine the paper. While the naming effect estimate would be inflated, a registration effect is arguably *more important*: if Ataturk got people to more directly engage with the state and participate in vital registries, that's a big deal!
So this is why I don't think my critique is a big problem: because even if it's true, it doesn't change the conclusion that leaders can be highly influential for socially important behaviors. Just changes *which behavior* from "language adoption" to "state interaction"
HT @jenniferdoleac for sharing

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More from @lymanstoneky

18 Nov
china just lowkey vanished a tennis star after she claimed a government official sexually assaulted her
seriously how are we not boycotting the olympics
Read 14 tweets
18 Nov
Your regular reminder that a major reason the US is high on both of these is that *we measure them more inclusively* than many other countries.
There are many reasons to not correct! One reason is that it's not always clear which method is better so the correct direction of correction is unclear.

Another is that we sometimes have no idea what effects may exist, because we don't have parallel measurement.
That is, sometimes two measurement techniques exist in parallel so we can see precisely how they differ in aggregate effects. But often we don't have this, so all we know is "it's different measurements so may not be comparable."
Read 41 tweets
18 Nov
The Navy is as bad as it looks.

However, the consolation is that other countries' navies are even more ruinously mismanaged!

Modern navies are just an absolute crapshoot!
Ships are very hard to protect, deploying a global navy without directly controlled colonial empires and bases requires incredible tolerance for espionage and security risks, oversight is extremely difficult, and many historic methods of disciplining naval personnel are untenable
i.e. if you look at how navies *historically* kept sailors and officers in line compared to how they disciplined soldiers on land, you'll understand that in fact preventing the navy from collapsing into disorder is a major historic problem!
Read 21 tweets
18 Nov
Um, lowkey huge paper right here (cc @swinshi @hamandcheese @Claudia_Sahm ):

25 years of CPS data suggest that bigger CTCs tend to INCREASE single mother employment. hyeinkang.com/uploads/1/3/9/…
I have not carefully checked out all the method here. And of course it COULD be that higher CTC benefits would encourage work *because the CTC has a phase-in*, whereas making it flat would change that.
But still, overall this seems to suggest that worries about CTC effects on LFP may be somewhat overstated.
Read 4 tweets
18 Nov
the use of the word "hyperobject" is in fact prima facie proof that a person is an unreliable narrator of the world, and in fact even their own mental states

few know this
it is with some pleasure i inform everyone that object-oriented ontology is absolutely nuts, and the fact that it has given rise to the complete fabrication of fake objects merely for the purpose of reifying depression into a philosophical concept is the proof!
the rock does not care how it relates to the tree!
Read 17 tweets
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Just want to note that this is how absolutely nuts the "Christian nationalism" discourse has become, that suggesting (correctly) that the US was historically a Christian nation is seen as "Christian nationalism."
The US still has treaties IN FORCE TODAY which legally declare the country a Christian nation!

It's quite literally the law!
Now, those treaties are very old and clearly those terms are no longer seen as operative--- but it is nonetheless very clearly the case that the US *at a minimum historically was* a "Christian nation" in both practical/social and also literal/legal terms.
Read 39 tweets

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