Tyler Cowen never ceases to amaze:

Popular economics books reveal their true colors most clearly when they talk about sex. In Freakonomics sex is not holy but rather sex and reproduction lead to the birth of criminals…For Harford sex is a slightly naughty pleasure, and a pleasure to be mocked, but at least it is a real pleasure; this American reviewer again cannot help seeing the British tinge of his work.

There is more, much more. Do I agree? I’m not saying.

I was astonished when the enormous Old Theatre at the LSE was packed out at least fifteen minutes before I gave my talk on 6 Feb. Lots of people were turned away, including some for whom I’d reserved seats. I’m a bit embarassed about that, although obviously pleased that the event was popular.
But… there will be another chance to hear me talk about “The Logic of Life” at the Cass Business School on 12 March. Details are here - along with details of other talks in The Lake District, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Singapore, Wellington and several Australian cities too. Looks like we’ll arrange a couple more London events later in the spring, too.

We just moved our blog platform and none of my posts seem to be going live at the moment, but in a spirit of hope, let me link to the latest from Bryan Caplan on whether racial discrimination means that African-Americans have little incentive to become educated (randomised trial says no incentive, Bryan’s regressions say otherwise) and Kevin Grier, who is discussing my chapter on cities.

In the New Statesman, Mario Pisani, a former Nico Colchester fellow at the FT, asks how economics got to be so cool all of a sudden:

One of the earliest examples of what many call “pop economics” was Steven E Landsburg’s book The Armchair Economist. He recalls how “in 1991, when I first approached publishers, my covering letter began thus: ‘When lawyers or executives meet for lunch, they more often speculate about economics than about evolutionary biology. Yet bookstore shelves are well stocked with books on evolution and almost empty of economics.’ Nobody could say the same thing today. Dozens of good writers have stepped in to explain the economic way of thinking to a wider audience.”

The essay is pegged on the publication of The Logic of Life, but ranges widely. Even readers who are fed up of my linking to reviews of The Logic of Life should enjoy this one.

Yesterday I reported on Bryan Caplan’s thoughtful criticisms of chapter six of The Logic of Life. One of the things that worried me most in that chapter is the possibility that employers don’t value qualifications or experience of minority groups, which in turn means that the victims rationally invest less in education and work experience, which in turn feeds statistical discrimination.
Bryan is quite right to point out that there is nothing inevitable about this. It might well be that a victim of discrimination had a higher return to education, not a lower one. I argue that this is true for women and that is a likely explanation of the fact that women tend to be better educated than men. Bryan thinks the same story is true for African-Americans:

I tested these claims using one of the world’s best labor data sets, the NLSY. The results directly contradict Tim’s self-fulfilling prophesy story. Blacks actually get a substantially larger return to education than non-blacks! The same goes for experience, though the result is not statistically significant. The real lesson of the data is that if you are young, gifted, and black, you should get a ton of education, because it has an exceptionally large pay-off.

Bryan is very smart so I take that claim seriously. But it’s informal work, not published in a journal. Bryan says he will tell us more, and I’ll look forward to that. I set it against the results of a large (n=5000) randomised audit trial from Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, who find that qualifications and experience on an apparently-black CV do not result in a higher chance of being invited to interview. Qualifications and experience on an apparently-white CV, of course, substantially improve those chances.
Let’s recognise the limitations of that trial. It is just one experiment, and focuses on employers only in Boston and Chicago. It’s also true that a distinctively black name may indicate something about social class as well as race. And I admit that an interview call-back is not the same thing as a job. But I still find a randomised trial awfully persuasive even when set against peer-reviewed econometrics, let alone Bryan’s informal analysis.

One commenter (at Bryan’s blog, EconLog), writes:

Bryan, this is a good post, but you need to cite your sources…If this isn’t published, Hartford [Harford, please - TH] can’t be faulted.

I wouldn’t put it quite that way. Bryan can be unpublished but right. I can still be wrong even if I “can’t be faulted”. For now, I think Bryan’s critique is powerful but unproven.

For CV-audit junkies, this paper by Judith Rich and Peter Riach is well worth a read: shows discrimination in favour of men in a traditionally-male occupation (engineering) and in favour of women in both traditionally-female and mixed occupations. All the firms surveyed are based in England.

Update: Bryan links to further research supporting his calculations.

The latest round of the Marginal Revolution book forum on "The Logic of Life" has been outsourced to Megan McArdle at Atlantic Monthly - and I am way behind, apologies. The subject of the chapter is "Why Your Boss is Overpaid". Megan is focusing especially on CEO pay.

Using some remarkably clever techniques and imaginative perspectives, a bold new breed of economists is busily demonstrating that life makes more sense than anyone would have thought. Using every clue that comes to hand, from a laboratory brain scan to the hidden patterns in old maps, they are discovering that there is a surprisingly rational basis to the seemingly irrational world around us.
This is new territory for economics. Some early attempts to popularise economics read more like a book of cute logical puzzles than an investigation into the nitty-gritty of the world around us. But don’t blame the popularisers too much: that was actually a fair reflection of the way economists used to do their work.
Things are different now.

That is me, writing for Waterstones Book Quarterly. The piece is posted here with permission.

The BBC reports:

Wine, we know, gets better with age - but now it appears it tastes better the more it costs.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have shown that a person’s enjoyment of wine can be heightened if they are simply told that it is an expensive one.
Twenty-one volunteers were asked to sample different bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and rate the ones they preferred.
The only information they were given was the price of the wine - but in a number of cases, they were not told the real price. In one case, the volunteers were given two identical red wines to drink and were told that one cost much less than the other.
Most described the "higher priced" wine as much more enjoyable.
Researchers also managed to pass off a $90 (£46) bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon as a $10 bottle and presented a $5 as one worth $45.

Daniel Ariely, author of the (recommended) new book "Predictably Irrational", would not be surprised. Ariely managed to enhance the placebo effect of a (fake) painkiller by telling people it was expensive, and also enhance the perceived taste of coffee by offering odd condiments such as orange peel in better  containers. Nobody ever took the condiments, but they said the coffee tasted better when the condiments
were nicely presented than when they were offered in cheap plastic cups.
Alex Tabarrok is not so impressed with this kind of thing.

Looks like a low-frequency, high-quality blog so far. Ariely is blogging to support the publication of his book, "Predictably Irrational", which I heartily recommend.

It’s this Wednesday at the London School fo Economics. Here’s more about "The Logic of Life"; Hamish McRae will be in the chair.. All are welcome, the details are here.

Date: Wednesday 6 February 2008
Time: 6:30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Tim Harford
Chair: Hamish McRae

From teenage sex to the scourge of racism, Tim Harford explains why economics can provide the answers other disciplines cannot reach.

Tim Harford is the author of The Undercover Economist, is a member of the Financial Times editorial board and writes a regular column for the FT magazine.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. If you are planning to attend this event and would like details on how to get here and what time to arrive, please refer to Coming to an event at LSE