Book review: The Worldly Philosophers

I just finished reading Robert Heilbroner's excellent book The Worldly Philosophers. I forget who recommended it to me, but perhaps it was a mention in this blog by Dianne Coyle. Anyway, the book was first published in 1953 and has been through seven editions, with the last edition (which was the one I read) published in 1999. No doubt, Heilbroner would have written further editions, but he passed away in 2005.

The book is a great primer on the history of economic thought. It doesn't have as broad a coverage as New Ideas from Dead Economists (which I reviewed here) or The Economics Book (which I reviewed here). Heilbroner limits consideration to the truly big names in economics - Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Thorsten Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph Schumpeter. And there is a fairly large cast of supporting actors. But what the book lacks in breadth it more than makes up in depth, as well as in the sheer quality of the writing. Heilbroner writes in an easy and engaging style, and large parts of the book read more like a historical novel than an exposition of some of the great thinkers in economics. For example, consider this passage, part of a longer section introducing the reader to Keynes:

But this is only a sample of his many-sidedness. He was an economist, of course - a Cambridge don with all the dignity and erudition that go with such an appointment; but when it came to choosing a wife he eschewed the ladies of learning and picked the leading ballerina from Diaghilev's famous company. He managed to be simultaneously the darling of the Bloomsbury set, the cluster of Britain's most avant-garde intellectual brilliants, and also the chairman of a life insurance company, a niche in life rarely noted for its intellectual abandon. He was a pillar of stability in delicate matters of international diplomacy, but his official correctness did not prevent him from acquiring a knowledge of other European politicians that included their mistresses, neuroses, and financial prejudices. He collected modern art before it was fashionable to do so, but at the same time he was a classicist with the finest private collection of Newton's writings in the world. He ran a theater, and he came to be a Director of the Bank of England. He knew Roosevelt and Churchill and also Bernard Shaw and Pablo Picasso. He played bridge like a speculator, preferring a spectacular play to a sound contract, and solitaire like a statistician, noting how long it took for the game to come out twice running. And he once claimed that he had but one regret in life - he wished he had drunk more champagne.

As you can see, Heilbroner gives much insight into the private lives of the great economists (or worldly philosophers, as the book is titled), which you wouldn't normally see in a book on the history of economic thought. Heilbroner does a good job of linking together the key sites of agreement and disagreement, as well as the development of economic theory and philosophy over time. However, he is efficient enough in his writing that the economists' lives outside of economics can be given far more colour. Indeed, he makes them come alive in a way that I hadn't appreciated before, and it was those parts of the book that I especially enjoyed. Of course, that could just be because the history of economic thought was mostly not new to me.

The book is not without its flaws though. He repeats a discredited idea that Thomas Carlyle labelled economics the 'dismal science' after reading the work of Thomas Malthus, when in fact Carlyle was decrying that economists were not in favour of reintroducing slavery in the West Indies (see Wikipedia on this point). Also, I wonder about this point:

Purely by way of curious illustration, it is reported that among the New Zealand Maoris you cannot ask how much food a bonito hook is worth, for such a trade is never made and the question would be regarded as ridiculous.

Heilbroner is relying there on the doctoral work of the ethnologist Raymond Firth from the 1920s (I have Firth's book on the economics of Māori, but haven't read it as yet), but I strongly suspect that work has not aged well, and trade was certainly not unknown to Māori even earlier than Firth's writing.

Nevertheless, I did really enjoy this book. If you are looking for a nice gentle introduction to the history of economic thought, with a bit more history and biography, and a bit less of the economics, this would be a great book to try.

Missed opportunity by the New Zealand Herald on school fees and student performance

I was interested to hear the New Zealand Herald's Front Page podcast this morning, which focused on two issues: (1) the high and increasing cost of private schools; and (2) the close correlation between student performance at high schools (as measured by NCEA pass rates) and a measure of socioeconomic status (the Equity Index, or EQI, which replaced the decile ranking system at the start of last year). The first issue was interesting but uninspiring. It's hard to feel sorry for the rich families who have to pay even more to send their kids to private school. You could try to argue that it makes private school even more unaffordable for low-income families. But, newsflash! Private school is already unaffordable for those families. When something is already so expensive that some people can't afford to buy it, making it even more expensive doesn't make those people any worse off.

What I want to focus on is the second issue (which is based on this paywalled article). As New Zealand Herald head of data Chris Knox noted in the podcast, there is a very strong correlation between NCEA (and University Entrance) pass rates and the Equity Index (in fact, a student group project in BUSAN205 last year showed this quite clearly). Higher socio-economic schools have higher pass rates. On top of that, Knox noted that private schools have higher pass rates than public schools.

The combination of those last two results makes me wonder. What is the cost, to parents, of sending a child to a school with a higher pass rate? In other words, what is the parental willingness-to-pay for an additional percentage point of pass rate? It would actually be relatively easy to work out the correlation between school fees and NCEA pass rates, controlling for the EQI and other relevant school-level variables. All we would need is data on pass rates, EQI, and other school variables (all available from the Education Counts website), and data on school fees (which might need to be hand-collected from school websites - I don't think that data is collated anywhere [*]). The results of this analysis would provide a lower-bound on how much parents are willing to pay for additional pass rates (it is a lower bound, because it is what they actually pay - they might be willing to pay even more, if the school was bold enough to charge higher fees).

This was definitely a missed opportunity by the Herald team. Their results are interesting but, aside from showing correlation rather than any causal relationship (as my ECONS101 class covered last week), they don't show us something that would be of great interest to economists. And not only economists. No doubt schools themselves would be interested to know how much parents are willing to pay for higher pass rates. That way, schools that have high pass rates would feel justified in charging higher fees.

*****

[*] That's the main reason why I haven't already done this analysis. Education Counts has some data on school donations (that is, fees), but it's really just a collation of how many schools in each region have opted into the government scheme that gives them higher funding if they make school fees voluntary for parents.

Reason to be sceptical about trends in adult height in India

A couple of years ago, I read this 2021 article by Krishna Kumar Choudhary, Sayan Das, and Prachinkumar Ghodajkar (Jawaharlal Nehru University), published in the journal PLoS ONE (open access). I've been holding off blogging about it, in the hopes that I could get one of my past PhD students interested in exploring this data and testing the claims further, but no one seems too interested (or, at least, they're too busy doing other exciting things). So, here we go.

Choudhary et al. use data across multiple waves of the Indian National Family Health Survey, and track trends in adult height in Indian provinces over the period from 1998-99 (NFHS-II) to 2015-16 (NFHS-IV). They found that:

Between NFHS-III and NFHS-IV, the average height of women in the age group of 15–25 showed a decline by 0.12 cm [95% CI, -0.24 to 0.00, p-0.051] while in the 26–50 years age strata it demonstrated significant improvement in the mean height by 0.13 cm [95% CI, 0.02 to 0.023, p-0.015]. However, Between NFHS III and IV, the average height of women in the poorest wealth index category registered a significant decline [-0.57cm, 95% CI, -0.76 to -0.37, p-0.000]. Between NFHS III and IV, the average height of Scheduled Tribe (ST) women in the age group of 15–25 years also exhibited a significant decline by 0.42 cm, [95% CI, -0.73 to -0.12, p-0.007]. Among men, between the two surveys, both the age groups of 15–25 years and 26–50 years showed significant decline in average height: 1.10 cm [95% CI, -1.31 to -.099 cm, p-0.00] and 0.86 cm [95% CI, -1.03 to -0.69, p-0.000], respectively.

You read that right. According to Choudhary et al., people in India are shorter in 2015-16 than they were in 2005-06 (NFHS-III). The distribution of mean height by age for those two surveys is given in Figure 4 in the paper:

Notice that, within every age group, the mean height is lower in 2015-16 than in 2005-06. However, here is where I have severe doubts about this analysis. The sample of Indian men in 2015-16 is (for the most part) the same as the sample of men ten years younger in 2005-06. So, if you compare a given age group's mean height in 2015-16, it shouldn't be too much different from the mean height of the age-group ten years younger in 2005-06. And yet, that doesn't appear to be true for almost any comparison in Figure 4. Look at the mean height for any age on the bold line in the figure, move to the right by ten years, and you will never intersect with the dashed line.

So, one of three things is going on here. Either, Indian men are shrinking, there are measurement errors that are changing over time, or there are compositional changes in the sample that explain the differences. It seems unlikely that people are genuinely shrinking. So, that leaves the other two explanations.

Although the NFHS is a 'nationally representative survey', there are serious issues with the survey (as documented by Sylvia Karpagam here). That suggests that measurement error might be at play. However, it would have to be measurement error that occurs in a way that heights were either systematically under-reported in NFHS-IV, systematically over-reported in NFHS-III, or both. That does seem a little unlikely.

What about compositional changes? There may be differences in survey coverage (see here), especially between women in NFHS-II (which only included ever-married women) and NFHS-III (which included both ever-married women and never-married women). However, it is less clear that the changes affected men in the sample. On the other hand, this bit from the Choudhary et al. caught my attention:

The samples drawn for analysis of women’s height were 83876 out of 90303 from NFHS-II, 121728 out of 138592 from NFHS-III, and 700602 out of 749344 from NFHS-IV. For men’s height, sample of 66468 out of 74396 from NFHS- III and 105783 out of 126543 from NFHS-IV were drawn.

Notice that the sample for women increases nearly six-fold between NFHS-III and NFHS-IV, but the sample for men increases only by about 60 percent. That might be accurate, but it strikes me as odd, unless men are only surveyed in a subset of households, and the proportional subset that were selected was different (and much smaller) in NFHS-IV than in NFHS-III. That could cause a change in the composition of the survey sample, and might explain the results for men (less so for women). Anyway, there is reason to doubt these results, and it might be an interesting project for a suitably motivated Honours or Masters student to follow up on.

This week in research #12

 Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Milanovic (with ungated earlier version here) documents three eras of global inequality: (1) between 1820 and 1950, when inequality increased both between and within countries; (2) between 1950 and the 1990s, where inequality was high; and (3) since the 1990s, when inequality has fallen mostly thanks to increases in income in Asia, and particularly China (see here or here or here for more of Milanovic's work on related topics)
• Masset, Terrier, and Livat (open access) find that wines that use more feminine descriptors sell for similar prices to wines that use more masculine descriptors, but are perceived as having more limited ageing potential (in other words, more wine bullshit, like here or here)
• Connolly et al. (open access) find that allowing Sunday beer sales in Connecticut had a short-term impact on beer sales, but no impact on the number of grocery retailers or liquor stores
• Cattaneo et al. summarise the papers in a special issue of the Journal of Econometrics in honour of Jianqing Fan, devoted to data science in economics and finance (the papers themselves tend to be quite technical, but the summary, including on the work of Fan, seems good)