Race/ethnicity and slacking at work

What's it to you?

’16 and Pregnant’ and less so

Is this a success story of working paper culture gone right -- driving attention to good work faster, and then also drawing the benefits of peer review through the traditional publication process?

Get your dependency ratio off my lawn

Old people work more than they used to. This is important if you're worried about what an aging population means for the economy. When they taught me demography, I learned about the dependency ratio, which was the number of people presumed to be dependents (those ages 0-14 and 65+) relative to those presumed to be…

Is the New York Times trapped in an economics echo chamber?

Ask a stupid question. When Justin Wolfers wrote about the dominance of economists in the pages of the New York Times, he concluded, "our popularity reflects the discerning tastes of our audience in the marketplace of ideas." I discussed the evidence for that in this post, which focused on the particular organizational features of the NYT. At…

Sociology: “I love you.” Economics: “I know.”

Economics, 41; Sociology, 6.

I overspoke myself on Twitter

Possibly not the only time. A blog called Random Critical Analysis (RCA) has posted, "On Philip Cohen’s knee-jerk response to Chetty’s “causal mobility” data and its association with single-motherhood." I now must admit that I overspoke myself on Twitter. But I think the blog post I wrote holds up OK. I complained in the post that…

I knew that marriage-is-good-for-the-economy thing sounded familiar

Did you know that married couples with children spend 50-times more on childcare than single adults without children?

Exceptions overwhelm the rules in economics

I wrote a short essay for the New York Times Room for Debate feature. The question was, "Have we given economists too much authority?" Here's my answer, as edited by the Times. You can read the other essays and comments here. Exceptions Overwhelm Economic Rules There is a lot to be said for the common critique of…

On Contexts: Sociology unfound

Over on the Contexts blog, I wrote a follow-up to Justin Wolfers' piece about economists dominating the news: here it is.

Post-summer reading list: The Family, gender, race, economics, gayborhoods, insecurity and overwhelmed

A few things I read, almost read, or thought about reading, on vacation.