Cartoons as a means of communicating research results

The latest IRANZ Connections newsletter (from the Independent Research Association of New Zealand) pointed me to this post from MRINZ, which in turn pointed to this new article by Cilein Kearns (MRINZ) and co-authors, published in the journal Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online, but there is a non-technical summary here). They compared study participants' preferences for receiving summaries of research results, across three different types: (1) a summary using a comic format; (2) a traditional non-technical lay summary; and (3) a published scientific abstract. Their research participants were 1236 research participants from a previous study, receiving a summary of earlier research (see the MRINZ post linked above), who received all three types of summaries in a random order, and rated each of them. The results are interesting:

The most preferred summaries were the comic N=716 (57.9%), lay summary N=321 (26.0%), and scientific abstract N=199 (16.1%). The least preferred summaries were the scientific abstract N=614 (49.7%), lay summary N=380 (30.7%) and comic N=242 (19.6%)... The trend of a majority most preferring the comic, and a majority least preferring the scientific abstract, was observed in all groupings except 18-24 year olds, where although the comic was still most preferred, the preferences for scientific abstract and lay summary were reversed.

When scored separately on understanding, satisfaction, and enjoyment, they get the following picture (although we are mostly left to guess at whether the differences are statistically significant):

What did the research participants like (and dislike) about comics? Kearns et al. report that:

The comic was reported to be easier to read and understand, more interesting, engaging, enjoyable, better at communicating data, to be relatable, provide more useful information through context, and to be more memorable. Many felt it was a faster format to read, despite being the longest in terms of both scrolling required, and text content. Many commented specifically on enjoyment of the art style and use of humour, and felt that the comic medium was non-threatening compared to the other media...

For the minority of respondents who least preferred the comic, reasons included finding the visuals distracting, the format too long or too short, that it had not enough or too much detail, could undermine the seriousness of the topic with the style or use of humour, and could be patronising or childish for some people.

This is some interesting research, because there is definitely a push from funders and research organisations for researchers to find better ways of communicating their results and conclusions (and methods) to the general public. The Conversation is one way of achieving this. Blogging, Twitter, and other social media are also available.

However, the format of the message is also important, and it is here than more novel ways of communicating may be important. Comics were used by Siouxsie Wiles and artist Toby Morris during the coronavirus pandemic to communicate important public health messages. Motu summarises each of its working papers in the form of a haiku. I've also seen some examples of using a movie-trailer-style video to summarise research (I can't find the original examples I recall, but here's a student assignment example, and research that finds using movie trailers to summarise course topics increases student interest - perhaps more on that in a future post).

The NZAE Conference last week had a poster session, with posters that were mostly uninspiring. Perhaps some cartoon posters are in order? Of course, the problem with these ideas is that time spent on communicating research through cartoons or other novel means takes a lot of time to do well, and the opportunity cost of that time spent is lost time on other research. Most researchers aren't cartoonists, graphic designers, professional type setters, or haiku poets (except for Motu, it seems). This is where research organisations (universities or other employers of researchers) could step up and make an important contribution. The Wiles and Morris collaboration could provide a model for collaboration in science communication that reduces the time cost to the researcher, and likely results in a higher quality output for the interested general public.

Who knows? Maybe in future I might summarise some of my research in comic form. Of course, in that case I would definitely like to collaborate with my preferred artist.

Book review: Good Economics for Hard Times

In late 2019, I reviewed Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's 2011 book Poor Economics. At the time, they were the latest Nobel Prize winners in economics (along with Michael Kremer). They also had a new book out at that time, Good Economics for Hard Times, which I passed over in favour of reading their earlier book, which was more closely based on their own research.

I've now read the more recent book, and like their earlier work, Good Economics for Hard Times is clearly written, well researched, and full of genuinely interesting insights. This is important because, as Banerjee and Duflo write in the introduction:

...it seems a large part of the general public has entirely stopped listening to economists about economics.

One can only hope that the general public would pay attention to this book, but sadly I fear that would not be the case. Banerjee and Duflo's solution, though, is as follows:

Our sense is that the best economics is frequently the least strident. The world is a sufficiently complicated and uncertain place that the most valuable thing economists have to share is often not their conclusion, but the path they took to reach it - the facts they knew, the way they interpreted those facts, the deductive steps they took, the remaining sources of their uncertainly.

That is the formula they follow in this book, including consideration of the costs (and not just the benefits) of international trade, the puzzle of why migration is so low, the sources of economic growth, the economics of climate change, and the rise of automation. These are the big issues of our times, along with inequality, about which they write:

Once again, this underscores the urgent need to set ideology aside and advocate for the things most economists agree on, based on the recent research. In a policy world that has mostly abandoned reason, if we do not intervene we risk becoming irrelevant, so let's be clear. Tax cuts for the wealthy do not produce economic growth.

That's the sort of clear statement (and advocacy for a particular normative position) that is missing from a lot of academic writing. However, while Banerjee and Duflo are excellent on laying out the research on particular issues, the book is noticeably light on solutions. I think this book would best be read in concert with a book that has solutions, but is much lighter on evidence, such as Mariana Mazzucato's Mission Economy (which I reviewed here). The combination of those two books, along with a bit of thoughtful filling in of the gaps, would provide an excellent outline of the problems, the evidence, and a prescription for the future.

We need some new inspiration to tackle the challenges that we face, and the solutions will involve some uncomfortable tradeoffs. We are vulnerable to politicians and policy advocates who try to sell us on ideas of change that come without associated costs. They should be resisted. As Banerjee and Duflo note in their conclusion:

Ideas are powerful. Ideas drive change. Good economics alone cannot save us. But without it, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of yesterday. Ignorance, intuitions, ideology, and inertia combine to give us answers that look plausible, promise much, and predictably betray us.

I interpret that as saying that we don't need a new economics. We need to properly apply the tools of the economics we already have, and listen to the lessons it provides. And that in itself is a lesson worth listening to. Recommended!

Social disorganisation and crime over two centuries

Social disorganisation theory is the idea that differences (or changes) in family structures and community stability are a key contributor to differences (or changes) in crime rates between different places (or times). It suggests that neighbourhoods that are more unstable (higher social disorganisation) will have higher crime rates than neighbourhoods that are less unstable (lower social disorganisation), ceteris paribus (holding everything else constant). It also suggests that if neighbourhoods become more unstable over time, crime rates will increase, ceteris paribus. I've mostly encountered social disorganisation theory in relation to the effect of alcohol outlets on crime. In that context, things become tricky, because alcohol outlets tend to locate in more unstable (higher social deprivation) neighbourhoods, which may also have higher crime because of social disorganisation. So, disentangling the effects of alcohol outlets from the effects of social disorganisation more generally is difficult.

The broader literature on social disorganisation theory faces issues as well, because of potential reverse causation and endogeneity. If you want to test the effect of neighbourhood instability on crime, you have to recognise that not only can instability cause crime, but crime can cause instability. Finding ways of dealing with these issues is important.

So, I was interested to read this recent article by Zeresh Errol (Monash University), Jakob Madsen (University of Western Australia), and Solmaz Moslehi (Monash University), published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). They use annual data covering the period 1840 to 2018 for 16 countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Their data includes crime rates (per 100,000 population), family structure (proxied by the divorce rate and the share of out-of-wedlock births), community structure (proxied by the urbanisation rate), GDP per capita, and the proportion of the population aged 15-29 years. The crime rates are disaggregated into property crime, violent crime, homicide, robbery and assault. Errol et al. then look at the relationship between the family structure and community structure variables and crime rates (controlling for the other variables, along with country and time fixed effects).

However, remember that endogeneity is a problem here for the family structure variables, so any simple regression analysis is not going to tell us about the causal relationship between family structure and crime. Errol et al. solve this problem using instrumental variables analysis. Essentially, this involves finding an instrument that affects the endogenous variable (divorce or out-of-wedlock birth rate), but has no direct effect on the outcome variable (crime rates). In a unique twist to this paper, Errol et al. use the weighted average of the family structure variables in all other countries as instruments for the family structure variables in country i. For example, for Australia's divorce rate, they use as an instrument the weighted average of the divorce rates in all other countries. The weighted average of other countries' rates is a valid instrument because divorce rates should be related across countries, but the divorce rate in Australia should not exert any effect on the crime rate in Belgium (or any other country). You can tell a similar story for out-of-wedlock birth rates.

Now, rather than using the straight average of all other countries, Errol et al. use a weighted average, where the weights are based on the linguistic distance between the countries. So, data from countries where the main language is more similar will have a greater weight in the calculation of the average. This is quite an exciting aspect of the article to me, because it relates closely to some ongoing work I have been doing on using cultural distance measures in new and exciting ways (more on that in future posts).

Looking at the IV regression results, Errol et al. run separate regressions for the five crime rates, and separately using the divorce rate and the out-of-wedlock birth rate as their proxy for family structure. Across these various models, they find that:

...the coefficients of Div and Owed are significantly positive in seven of the ten cases, where two of the insignificant coefficients pertain to homicide.

In other words, higher divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates cause an increase in crime rates. The size of the coefficients is a little difficult to interpret, given that what Errol et al. report is a coefficient that sums several lagged values. However, they do seem to be meaningful in size, given that Errol et al. note for the ordinary least squares (not IV) regression, that:

Based on the coefficients of the 10-year first difference estimates of Div (Owed), a one standard deviation increase in Div (Owed), is associated with a 15.4(1.8) and 174.4(153.3) percentage point increase in the rates of violent crime and property crime, respectively...

So, this paper demonstrates the important of social disorganisation in understanding differences in crime rates over an extremely long time period. However, it also illustrates a potentially fruitful way of constructing instruments for instrumental variables analyses, using cultural (or, in their case, linguistic) distance weighted averages. Expect to see more work in the future employing this approach.

When everything's a crisis, is anything really a crisis?

This Duncan Garner article in the National Business Review (gated) made me laugh, because it raised a point I have made many times (albeit, not on my blog):

The word crisis used to mean something. 

Now it seems everything is in a crisis. The latest crisis came just before our Matariki long weekend – a power shortage crisis. Maybe the Matariki stars will be our only form of light as now this country can't guarantee much at all, the latest being power.  

Why and how did this happen? And where's the accountability? The Minister overseeing this problem a year ago should walk the plank for failing to deliver a year later. That would be genuine accountability wouldn't it? 

So what's happening right now? Is it just us or is everything melting down? Look around – isn't everything a crisis or in crisis? 

There's the housing crisis, affordability crisis, cost of living crisis, mental health crisis, climate change crisis, health crisis, nursing shortage crisis, suicide crisis, water crisis, youth crisis, elderly abuse crisis, building supply crisis, Gib crisis. Did I mention the consumer confidence crisis? 

The obesity crisis? 

The manufacturing crisis?

Garner also missed the inequality crisis, the child poverty crisis, the supply chain crisis, the global data privacy crisis, and the Christmas toy crisis. And a few minutes on any search engine would no doubt turn up a dozen or more other crises.

Now, by definition, a crisis is: "a time of intense difficulty or danger". That may be true of most of the crises listed above (ok, maybe not the Christmas toy crisis, unless disappointed children and parents get really upset). However, the problem is that once you start to label everything as a crisis, the word starts to lose all meaning. In the good old days, a crisis really meant something. We had to act immediately, or face impending doom. Now, it just means things like a shortage of flowers on Valentine's Day. Yawn.

The problem here is that people's attention is scarce. People are not going to worry about the "pet adoption issue", or the "pet adoption problem", or even the "per adoption predicament". If you want rational people's attention, then it has to be a pet adoption crisis, or the perceived benefits of them paying attention won't outweigh the costs, and your issue will be lost in the general hubbub of people's social media feeds. However, if the incentive is to call everything a crisis, then there is no way for people to filter the really serious crises out from the noise, and they will stop paying attention.

Maybe, like Stephen Hickson's suggestion for a woolly words trading scheme, we need a more-specific crisis trading scheme, which caps the use of the word 'crisis'? We need this policy now, because we are in the middle of a crisis crisis.