Guessing North Korea's dangerous game. An interesting article applying Thomas Schelling's "rationality of irrationality" to recent North Korean moves.

Actually, Pyongyang seems to be following a familiar playbook in great-power politics. Its hardliners appear to have learned Thomas Schelling's teachings on the rationality of irrationality. Schelling saw the manipulation of shared risks as one of the best strategies to get one's way in international politics. Imagine, he suggested, a game in which you're walking on the edge of a cliff chained by the ankle to someone else. The first to cry uncle loses. What do you do?

 HT: The Monkey Cage

Google Refine. 

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.

See sample video (1/3) below:

HT: Andrew Gelman

Willian Easterly asks this question. 

Aid-financed scholarships for African students to study in the US or Europe would be worth a lot more than a million “capacity-building” projects. The usual argument against such scholarships is fear of brain drain — that the African students would not return home.

So why would Asian students return more than African students? The answer to this is highly related to the causes of return migration, and for those who know my current research you would probably know my answer. Looking forward to analyzing my data and see if the results support my theory!

Gallup's recent survey on "migration aspirations" suggests that United States attracts less educated migrants, developed Asia poised to lose most educated, and developing regions loses potential population across the board, etc.


These conclusions are based on three of their indices: Potential Net Migration Index, Potential Net Brain Gain Index, and Potential Net Youth Migration Index. Indices are based on responses from the following questions:

Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country?

(If "would like to move permanently to another country") To which country would you like to move?[Open-ended, one response allowed]

Ideally, systematic data that trace actual migrant movements across borders and record their individual characteristics (skill level, income, etc) would be the most reliable source for making inferences like this. However, as people who study migration or return migration probably understand, this type of data rarely exists. Another alternative is to make inferences based on survey data. First, you ask whether respondents plan to emigrate and where they plan to move to (in the case of emigration studies) or whether respondents plan to return to their home countries (in the case of return migration studies). Then you estimate probabilities of emigration or return migration based on individual characteristics and generate estimates for the coefficients of the variables of interest. 


My main concern about the above conclusions is how Gallup made inferences based on aspirations. For example, when I asked my wife the above 2 questions, her response was that if she had the opportunity, which may imply both budgetary and time permitting, she would want to move to Paris because it sounds so romantic to live there. However, if I changed the wording of the same question to whether you plan on moving to another country and where would you move, her answer changed to "no, there are many realistic concerns I have to take into account." 


Although you could argue that my wife's case may just be an anomaly, it seems pretty plausible to say that answers based on hypothetical questions ("if you had the opportunity") would be very different from questions that are based more on reality ("do you plan to migrate") even when both intentions may not ultimately realize. My bet is that responses to the latter type of question would be closer to actual migration outcomes.


Therefore, here I pose a question to Gallup and readers of this blog: if you had the budget to conduct such a survey, why not ask plans instead of "aspirations"? Am I missing something?