NEUDC 2020 roundup - Indonesia papers

This year's NEUDC was fully online--so not only I was able to watch Ben presented our paper succinctly in 15 minutes, it was super convenient to catch up on some of the other interesting panels, too. All from the comfort of my (really cold) apartment. David Evans and Almedina Music wrote a helpful summary of the papers from the conference, and the summary for all Indonesia-related papers are below:

When one child is born smaller than another, do parents compensate for those differences with health and nutrition investments, or do they reinforce them? Evidence from Indonesia suggests that in early childhood, parents reinforce differences. Data from 50 countries suggest parents are more likely to “reinforce initial inequalities in poorer countries.” (Banerjee and Majid) #FE

If you took the Indonesian secondary school entrance exam on a particularly hot day, it not only affects your math and science score, it also has “compounding negative effects on a wide range of long-term achievements such as adult educational attainment, labor market returns and entry to the marriage market.” (Das) #IV

Palm-oil price shocks in Indonesia benefit producing districts with higher per capita expenditure, while price shocks on rice do not. Districts exposed to palm-oil price shocks and those surrounding them receive more migration resulting in an overall welfare increase of 0.39 percent, with one third due to internal migration. (Siregar)

Indonesian firm-level data shows that democratization increases firm productivity, a critical determinant of economic growth. (Abeberese et al.) #DID

Massive public-school construction in Indonesia in the 70s decreased attendance in primary Islamic schools in favor of public schools but increased enrolment in religious schools at secondary level—absorbing the higher demand that resulted from mass public primary schooling. (Bazzi, Hilmy, and Marx)

Natural disasters in Indonesia increase risk aversion among exposed individuals, with variation by severity, type and time frame of the disasters. (Purcell)

Grassroots monitoring leads to a decrease in the share of missing expenditures of 8–10 percentage points in non-audit villages in Indonesia. However, “in government audit villages, individuals are less likely to attend, talk, and actively participate in accountability meetings.” (Gonzales, Harvey and Tzachrista)

OLS estimates of relative income mobility based on household data in Indonesia show higher mobility than the preferred IV estimates. Absolute mobility in income and consumption expenditure also suggests lower upward mobility. (Zafar) #IV

One of the papers tagged as a paper from Indonesia is actually about India's MNREGA, so I do not include it here.

Bonus: summary of three papers from other BU Econ PhD students, below.

Switching from appointed to randomly assigned municipal auditors in Italy increased municipality’s surplus by 9 percent and debt repayments by 8 percent, with improvements coming from those that ran deficits before the reform and where the mayor did not face re-election pressure. (Vannutelli) #DID

“Refugees who have access to a larger co-refugee network tend to have more interactions with the local population” among Syrian refugees in Turkey. This is likely because “immigrant networks share experiences and information on the local population, therefore making it easier for refugees to interact with locals.” (Gautier) #IV

What happens when your local school closes in China due to a school consolidation program? Delayed enrollment, but no change in lifetime education attainment. Later in life, it may have led to later marriage and more off-farm work. (Zhao) #DID

Thanksgiving five

This Thanksgiving, here are five things that I am grateful for:

1. Good health. We've avoided COVID-19 so far and fingers crossed we'll stay that way.

2. Companionship with the obvious suspects: Freida and Sammy the cat.

3. Schitt's Creek. Watching the Roses, Stevie, and Patrick has been an absolute joy.

4. Libraries: BPL, Mugar, CPL/Minuteman, NOBLE, Old Colony Library Network, SAILS.

5. Youtube cooking videos: we have been trying out so many things. New staples in our household: galettes, seitan, soy sauce egg.

Internet Reading Q3 2020

Here we go, three fourth of the very strange year is behind us. So it's time for another round-ups of links:

1. This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”

And: The bubonic plague did not go away, it remained endemic, like influenza or chickenpox today. Losing a friend or sibling to plague was a universal experience from 1348 to the 1720s, when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work.

More about the pandemic:

• Before I become your doctor, you have been intubated for weeks. Your name is a poem I’m required to keep to myself. Who were you before the virus, before you were this — this list of failing organs run in despair by a repurposed trainee neurologist? The New Stability
• This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic: k is a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen.
• Herd Immunity Is Not a Strategy
• Why Everything Is Sold Out: The pandemic broke online shopping.
• We Need to Talk About Ventilation: How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we are still doing so little to mitigate airborne transmission?
• How Covid Sends Some Bodies to War With Themselves
• Bureaucrats defer to the policy decisions from the president and his ministers and implement them without asking any questions – no matter how good or bad these policies are. Indonesia’s Half-hearted Response to COVID-19
• Rents Swoon in San Francisco, Other Expensive Cities Y/Y.
• An Unexpected Consequence of the Covid-19 Pandemic? A National Coin Shortage
• Despite its epochal effects, COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one.
• FAQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission

2. The Great Climate Migration Has Begun

More about the environment and natural sciences:

• The desperate fight to save his family ends in tragedy
• How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
• Reducing the cobalt content in lithium-ion batteries is good for the environment, human rights, and maybe even the performance of the battery itself.
• The Rise of Eko Atlantic
• The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19): "Shifting baselines syndrome" means we could quickly get used to climate chaos
• How do trees find their sense of direction as they grow? Bent into shape: The rules of tree form
• How to Plan a Space Mission
• Mathematicians and physicists are also lazy - or rather, they want to be efficient, so that if they see something similar happening again and again in different places they want one unified way of understanding it so that they don't have to start from scratch every time. Eugenia Cheng's answers to Gracie Cunningham's questions

3. I’ve been deeply interested in personal knowledge management for almost 10 years now. V1 of my interest was a private wiki I created in college to help organize the notes I started taking from non-fiction books I was reading. Roam is V4. Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It

More about thinking and knowledge:

• How might one create timeful texts--texts which continue the conversation with the reader as they slowly integrate those ideas into their lives? Timeful Texts
• I’ve worked in around Cambridge, and yet I can report that basically nobody has a schedule resembling the same rigor as that of a professional athlete. This is not to say that researchers don’t work hard—they absolutely do. It’s that information is gathered inconsistently, and that there is very rarely an organized process for testing recall/understanding of new facts. Let’s Take Our Brains More Seriously When Learning
• AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them? I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom. We Are All MsScribe
• I’ve increasingly been seeing people outright reject the idea that they ever were anywhere but where they are now, and anyone who isn’t here already is lost forever. We need to remember the directions we followed. Remember How You Got Here
• The diversity of perspective is typically correlated with diversity of goals – someone who disagrees with how you see the world is also likely to want different things from it. But you should still push towards the margins of diversity as best as you can. In praise of negativity
• Negativity (when applied with rigor) requires more care than positivity.
• Views on politics reflect a lot about people. For instance, they show your first-hand knowledge, your courage and insight, how much you’ve read, your ability to think and distinguish right from wrong, how much you care for others and feel a sense of social responsibility, how well you can resist swindlers, whether you feel part of a national mission and love your compatriots, whether you especially love your homeland or other things, and so on. These things all distinguish people’s fundamental judgment. 'Thanks to Coronavirus, I Realized My Spouse's Brain is Broken'
• I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds! This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking--individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets.
• My own production function, in some ways, of continuing current projects is fine. I can do that. But I do feel that if this carries on for another year, the US economy is going to suffer a little bit in terms of struggling to come up with new ideas. I’m not randomly meeting people. I can easily Zoom current people I know, but it’s much harder to come up with random people at seminars you would’ve gone to, but clearly aren’t. Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress

4. Economics is a disgrace

More about economics and research sausage making:

• The stock market does not reflect the US economy. The stock market, for example — right now it’s 30 percent high tech, which has only 7 percent of US jobs. Also, when interest rates drop because the economy slows, it makes the stock market go up because it’s suddenly a relatively better investment. I think the stock market and the state of the US economy are only weakly linked. Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress
• A tool to create application packets for the academic Economics Job Market. With this code, you can create multiple templates for your cover letters, research statements, teaching statements, and diversity statements and inject wild cards into each letter or statement to customize them to a specific job
• Four Steps to an Applied Micro Paper by Jesse Shapiro
• Plotting regression coefficients and other estimates in Stata
• Best Practices for Code Review: R Edition
• Digital Exam Grading
• A Manifesto for Globalization
• Long or mutliple-line notes in esttab with automatic wrapping
• On the Frontier Thesis
• Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?
• Economics is obviously an important subject, and economists know a lot of good and useful things. But in academia, you are rewarded for pushing the frontiers, for having the edgiest idea out there. But you don’t really want to base policy recommendations on something like that, right? One promising line of research that some hot shots have two new papers on is not what you want to bet the future on. To talk about policy, I think you want to know the basics, but the basics are relatively easy to learn. Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low

5. The 450 Movement: I do peer review and I want you to pay me four hundred and fifty dollars. I’ll even say please.

More about social science:

• The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
• The Value of the Third-Person Perspective in Evicted
• Robustness checks are a joke
• What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers
• When a manuscript with 20+ authors have grammatical errors, typos, and/or no page numbers, you wonder how many authors actually read it. Researchers wrestle with co-authorship
• NIH General Guidelines for Authorship Contributions
• CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy

6. Seen in the best light, a wealthy person excited by stoicism is seeking a philosophy that helps the mind resist greed and the capitalist rat race and offers a wiser perspective and inner happiness; seen in the worst light it can be a tool for justifying keeping one’s wealth and power and not trying to help others.

More about social justice and racism:

• Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system.
• While I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything. Anti-racism work is supposed to be hard
• VC Firms Promised to Help Black Founders. My Experience Shows a Different Reality.
• Why We Won't Defund the Police (in two graphs)
• We Want More Justice For Breonna Taylor Than The System That Killed Her Can Deliver
• When I assigned Abbott in May, I had no idea how timely it would be. Students started the series the week after George Floyd was killed and completed it the day after protestors in Minneapolis occupied and burned down the local police precinct. While students were quick to locate parallels between the series’ depiction of 1970s Detroit and our contemporary moment in terms of police brutality, they also interrogated how news stories get told in Abbott—and by whom. “Burn His Words”: Abbott and the Illumination of Whitestream Culture
• 10 Ways to Reduce Our Reliance on Policing
• In a gerontocracy, equality feels like oppression
• Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race
• An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
• If ever there were a well-respected class of rodent, it would have to be the beaver. They’re notoriously hardworking, acting as tree-cutters, masons, and engineers. Given this impressive resume, beavers seem like the perfect animal mascot for the Republican conception of Personal Responsibility. But not only is it impossible for many humans to work like beavers, but that people who do work like beavers are exhausted and frequently desperate.
• The Labour Movement: My Part in its Downfall
• Throughout my years in Wilkes-Barre, I believed the area had no culture. But I was mistaken. What I didn’t realize was that drinking alcohol is culture. Drinking Alone

7. Why Does Monaco Exist?

More readings about the US politics, Australia, China, Africa, Indonesia, UK:

• When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number
• I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.
• Yes, We Are in an Ideological Competition With China
• China and the Rules‑Based Order
• The World That China Wants (III): Taking Chinese Communism Seriously
• Indonesia's harmful restrictions on foreign journalists, academics
• In the US, around 163 million cats and dogs consume as much dietary energy as all of Canada’s humans. The Naturalistic Fallacy Has Pet Owners Barking up the Wrong Tree
• Coronavirus pandemic will serve the same historic function as major wars in recent history. Yuan compares current Sino-American relations, in geopolitical terms, to relations between Great Britain and the United States at the end of WWI. Britain’s historical moment was waning but while America was on the rise, she was not ready to take Britain’s place. Today’s America is thoroughly dysfunctional, but China is not yet ready to lead.The Coronavirus Pandemic and a Once-in-a-Century Change
• Why Do Republican Leaders Continue to Enable Trump? History Will Judge the Complicit
• What can Africa do to overcome the limitations of having so many landlocked countries? The obvious thing would be a transportation network that’s improved beyond what they currently have, particularly railways, so that landlocked countries can transport their goods to the sea. And we know that sea transport is much, much cheaper, much more effective.
• Multinational baby formula companies, such as Nestlé and Danone, are turning Indonesian Instagram into free formula ads
• It’s so hard to find good help: Chinese broadcasters are making inroads in Russia, but Beijing has stumbled due to a shortage of capable propagandists
• A long trip through Malaysia, Indonesia and China leaves me more convinced than ever that east Asia has two distinct destinies in economic development terms, and that the south-east Asian states are on the wrong side of the tracks.
• a critique of How Asia Works with specific reference to Indonesia.
• From 2022, all students in Inner Mongolia will be taking classes solely in Chinese. Previously, in many schools in Inner Mongolia, these subjects were taught in Mongolian through high school. The message in a Chinese developmental context is clear: Mongolian is backward and cannot be developed. [https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/08/30/bilingual-education-in-inner-mongolia-an-explainer/]
• The scaly sweet was too valuable to eat - a single fruit was worth thousands of pounds and often the same pineapple would be paraded from event to event until it eventually went rotten. The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple Once the pineapple was on the menu for ordinary people, did the upper classes learn their lesson from the short-lived status and money-sucking nature of the pineapple? No, they didn't. They set their caps at another luxury and difficult-to-grow food: celery.
• Indonesia Merdeka Karena Peraih Beasiswanya Rajin Plesir dan Kena Paham Radikal
• When your name is Osama and you’re living in post-9/11 America, you always know The Question is coming. “Do You Get Shit for Your Name?”
• QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded
• Why Are Conservatives Obsessed with Pedophilia Right Now?
• Effective Political Giving What Ails America
• Informational Lobbying: Theory and Effectiveness

8. During this [Radical Honesty] experiment, a freelance writer asked me if I would go to coffee with him, and I said, “I just got to be honest. The thought of it gives me dread”. And I was terrified to send it, but he wrote back, “You know what, I am not very social either. It gives me dread. But I felt I had to do it for my career”. And then we came to a compromise that we would talk on Skype.

And: Of course it’s ridiculous and cartoonish, but also I liked it. And so I do say to my wife, half-jokingly every Valentine’s day, “The benefits of being married to you outweigh the cost”. But I say, “I love you, but there are things that annoy me. But overall I love you very much”. And I think that might not work for everyone, but it works for our relationship so far, at least.

More about relationships and queerness:

• A queer take on gendered Japanese
• Polish towns pay a steep price for anti-LGBTQ views
• Here's the Thing: Stop Cheating

9. Anduin is Indus River, Mordor is Pamir/Himalaya/Tian-shan. The Tale of the annotated map and Tolkien’s hidden riddles

More about books, writing, and other miscellanea:

• This all started with a particularly sexy fairy.
• She Still Loves the Dragon BY ELIZABETH BEAR
• Muggeridge’s description of World War II is actually super hilarious. I was not expecting this. When you take one of the darkest and most pessimistic writers of the twentieth century and put him in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s greatest horrors, you might expect the result to have at least a touch of grimness about it, or at least not to leave you rolling on the floor laughing. You would be wrong. Book Review: Chronicles Of Wasted Time
• Everything I've Learned: Reader Funding and Memberships
• In retrospect, I mistook hard work and unusual data for an interesting article. The Courage (and Disappointment) of Pitching a Visual Essay
• Pure Skill Minesweeper
• Divinity consultants are designing sacred rituals for corporations and their spiritually depleted employees
• How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole
• It is easy to fall into self-orientalism — taking aspects of one’s culture or background and allowing oneself to fetishize it for the comfort of late-stage capitalism. However, it is problematic when we allow some members of victims of orientalism to speak over others. - This becomes even more problematic when they not only speak over others, but use others’ cultures to create profit and to exemplify cosmpolitanism. Self-Orientalism Amongst Muslim Content Creators

Lumer

Ini awal tahun ajaran baru, tapi tahun ini sudah berasa panjang sekali. Aku rasa selain tahun 2020 ini adalah tahun yang sangat-sangat melelahkan, bagiku 2019 dan 2020 seakan lumer menjadi satu; penanda khatamnya sebuah dasawarsa. Rasanya aku siap beralih ke periode baru.

10 Plonga-plongo di Kyoto
11 Bebersih di Tohoku
12 Bau-bau -> Wangi-wangi
13 Ngajar di Banggai
14 Disangka dokter di Salemba
15 AKDP Kb Sirih, Cempaka Putih, Pedurenan
16 Berharap-harap beasiswa (yang lalu gagal)
17 Bertolak ke Boston
18 Lulus qualifier, Duolingo ID lulus beta

— Masyhur Hilmy (@masyhurh) December 25, 2019

Di dua tahun yang sedang berlalu, ada enam perubahan besar dalam hidupku: menikah, mudik, riset, pindah, kucing, dan pandemi. Keenam hal ini bergumul menyatu dalam kegundahanku melihat digerendelnya gerbang ke Nickerson Field BU minggu lalu. 

Aku mulai berolahraga lari lagi, dan di akhir musim panas ini aku mulai pergi ke Nickerson Field. Lapangan ini hanya berjarak lima belas menit dari rumah dan kalau aku pergi cukup pagi, lintasan larinya tidak ramai. Ini satu-satunya aktivitas fisik semi-rutinku karena sasana gimnasium kampus ditutup ketika pandemi, sementara Chestnut Hill Reservoir menjadi jauh ketika aku pindah apartemen. Ada Charles River Reservation yang jadi lebih dekat, tapi untuk mencapainya tetap perlu menyeberang jalan tol dan berjalan setengah jam. Aku sudah setengah tahun lebih tidak berenang. 

Minggu lalu, aku pergi dengan niat berlari, tapi mendapati gerbang ke lintasannya terkunci. Ini sepertinya langkah kampus untuk membatasi penyebaran covid ketika mahasiswa S1 kembali masuk asrama: kampusku berkeras mengadakan kuliah tatap muka. Ini keputusan berbeda dengan Harvard dan MIT—dua universitas tetangga di seberang sungai. 

Kebijakan kampusku dan dua kampus lain itu baru berbeda untuk semester baru ini. Semester lalu, semua pindah online. Freida lulus dari Harvard dan pandemi mengurungkan rencana perjalanan Ibu plus Abang, Kak Linda dan ponakan untuk merayakan kelulusan Freida. Wisuda Freida dialihkan online dan ijazahnya dikirim via pos. Aku dan Sammy si kucing ikut menonton wisudanya sambil tidur-tiduran. 

Ini adalah persilangan tiga perubahan yang lain: riset, menikah, dan mudik. Wisuda Freida di akhir Mei hampir bertepatan dengan peringatan setahun pernikahan kami. Tapi karena aku sudah masuk tahap riset independen sejak semester musim semi aku fokus di situ... dan merasa mampet tidak banyak kemajuan selama satu semester. Ini adalah perasaan yang akan terus membayangi hingga akhir musim panas, terlebih jika aku ingat tahun 2019 aku mudik ke Indonesia (untuk menikah) dan membawa pulang dua set data.  

Bayang-bayang kemampetan inilah yang membuatku agak sebal dengan ditutupnya akses ke Nickerson Field. Bertahun lalu aku belajar mengakali perasaan suram kemampetan dengan lari pagi di GOR Soemantri: kalau sudah mulai hari dengan suatu hal yang produktif/sehat mau sekacau apapun sisa hariku, suram bisa kuhalau. Sementara kini, lapangan ditutup justru ketika musim dingin mendekat. 

Freida bertanya kenapa aku tidak lari di trotoar blok sekitar rumah saja. Aku jawab sulit berkonsentrasi di trotoar karena medannya naik turun tiap melintas persimpangan jalan. (Aku juga baru ingat terakhir aku melakukan ini di Kyoto, dan itu juga aku lebih pilih berlari di tepi Sungai Kamogawa.)

Lalu bagaimana (Pak RT)? Entahlah. Aku masih perlu menghalau suram, tapi tak tahulah bagaimana caranya. Yang jelas untuk semester baru ini aku masih perlu menimbang bagaimana aku mau bekerja: di kampus atau di rumah. Aku khawatir bekerja di kampus menggoda bencana dengan mengundang paparan virus corona. Di sisi lain, selama musim panas aku bekerja sepenuhnya dari rumah dan kekusutanku menggila. Untungnya ada Sammy dan Freida, tapi tetap saja ada minggu-minggu ketika semangatku lenyap entah ke mana. Di minggu-minggu itu, jenuh membekapku. Membuatku ingin beralih ke hal baru.

Aku tak sabar—sembari gentar—untuk beralih ke periode baru. 

Internet Reading Q2 2020

I had thought that this quarter my reading list will be dominated by covid-related writing. Boy was I wrong.

1. Recently I read, rather by accident than design, short lives of several contemporary economists. What struck me was their bareness. I was wondering: how can people who had lived such boring lives, mostly in one or two countries, with the knowledge of at most two languages, having read only the literature in one language, having travelled only from one campus to another, and perhaps from one hiking resort to another, have meaningful things to say about social sciences with all their fights, corruption, struggles, wars, betrayals and cheating? (Non-exemplary lives)

More about economists:

• Mervyn King's new book insists that we shouldn't use numbers when forecasting. Are economists really this stupid?
• The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe
• The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change
• Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources?
• An Economist’s Guide to Potty Training

2. Short stories: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

More short stories and Tor.com rereads:

• Blood Is Another Word for Hunger
• Between the Dark and the Dark
• Siapa Namamu, Sandra?
• How do we feel about Kaladin’s plan? Kaladin was literally wearing the skin of his enemies into battle. Are we okay with the fact that, if this setting had war crimes, our hero would be a war criminal? Chapter 62-63
• Recap: Dalinar betrayed by Sadeas at the Tower, Kaladin speaking the Second Ideal. Chapter 66-67

3. COVID-19: This changes everything, unless it doesn’t

More on COVID-19:

• What Happens to All the Un-Hugged Hugs?
• Q1: Will breathing in recirculated air on a plane put me at a greater risk of contracting the new coronavirus? A: The risk of contracting the new coronavirus via the air on planes is low if cabin air filters are well-maintained. Q2: Are HEPA filters enough to protect me if someone with the virus near me sneezes or coughs? A: Not entirely.
• COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months
• Coronavirus Blunders in Indonesia Turn Crisis Into Catastrophe
• 'The way we get through this is together': the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus
• How King Arthur Flour found itself in the unlikely crosshairs of a pandemic
• The Deranged Civic Religion of the Lockdown Protesters
• 'COVID-19 is real': Virus ravages family in Indonesia's second-largest city
• It was my job to call people whose Covid-19 tests were positive. That taught me a lot about medicine, the law, and society
• The first modern pandemic
• Like many New Yorkers, I was jaywalking and nearly walked into a Latino deliveryman whizzing by on his bicycle. “Chinese bitch!” he shouted as he rode by. I wasn’t filled with hot rage or a hurt that cut me to the bone. I was just rattled and then sad.
• Indonesia and COVID-19: What the World Is Missing
• My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?
• The dire need for information should not mean rush to produce unreliable information quickly. This is what I am afraid is happening right now with hydroxychloroquine. (Hurry, don’t rush)

4. Racism: The disparity between NKRI Harga Mati and Pro-Kemerdekaan created by the public can be destructive for the Papuan Lives Matter campaign. People should see the movement as a fulfilment of the common or basic needs of humanity first, not in a frame of who is taking benefit from this situation. If both Papuans and Indonesians come together to talk about racism and humanity, that’s how the movement can move forward. But the moral of the story is to stop preaching to Papuans about how to run their own movement.

More reading on racism:

• The Logic of Stupid Poor People
• We need to talk about the [New York Times Bestseller] list.
• A white woman, racism, and a poodle
• “I'm free, white, and 21”
• The day I met James Baldwin at Harvard
• The debate about whether the removal of a statue is a violent act or not is dwarfed by the sheer evil and violence of slavery. The lay out of a slave ship in the pictures below should be a help to those who are struggling to work out how they feel about all that has taken place. As should the picture of a slave, a person, being tossed into the ocean to drown.
• Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop
• Reflections on the Color of My Skin By Neil deGrasse Tyson
• #boscops Boston residents organizing to challenge the power of the police!
• This Is Fascism
• What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?
• Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom
• Essential Workers Are the New “Magical Negro”
• The military presence at D.C. protests was disturbingly familiar. Being in the streets of Washington reminded me of the occupation I endured as a Palestinian.
• Kadir Nelson’s “Say Their Names”
• Yamko Rambe Yamko Bukan Lagu Daerah Papua

5. Climate Change: The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?

More reading on climate change:

• Bedazzled by Energy Efficiency
• Insulation: first the body, then the home
• Lessons in the Impermanence of Permafrost
• Plastics: The New Coal in Appalachia?
• International Trade Policies Subsidize Pollution

6. Capitalism: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

More on capitalism:

• What Is the Stock Market Even for Anymore?
• An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron
• Zero-Interest-Rate-Policy explains the world
• I may be certain that capitalism will eventually destroy Earth’s biosphere, but I can also recognize the danger of pinning hopes for the preservation of the latter on the end of the former. I am not convinced, however, that those who recognize that capitalism may not end soon must simply accept it.
• How might we get better at imagining new worlds? These are 52 questions to help you think about what alternative worlds might look and feel like.
• Tom McHenry mario
• Capitalist Catastrophism

7. Econometrics: Thanks to multi-collinearity checks that automatically drop predictors in regression models, a two-way fixed effects model can produce sensible-looking results that are not just irrelevant to the question at hand, but practically nonsense. Instead, we would all be better served by using simpler 1-way fixed effects models (intercepts on time points or cases/subjects, but not both). (What Panel Data Is Really All About.)

More econometrics and other sausage-making:

• Difference-in-Differences: What it DiD? by Andrew Baker
• [Pre-analysis plans and Registered Reports: What the new opinion piece does and doesn’t imply(https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/pre-analysis-plans-and-registered-reports-what-new-opinion-piece-does-and-doesnt)
• An overview of multiple hypothesis testing commands in Stata
• Why ex-post power using estimated effect sizes is bad, but an ex-post MDE is not
• The Generalizer can help education researchers: Define an inference population, Select important features of the population, and Develop a recruitment plan for a future experiment.
• We Need More Respectful and Inclusive Experiments in Development Economics: A Proposal
• Migrant Remittances Will Plummet. Here Is What That Means for Global Development
• Stata Coding Guide
• How to put multiple lines in a Markdown table cell (multiline table)

8. Languages and Writing: The undecipherable rongorongo script of Easter Island

More on languages and writing:

• Antara Dubai dan Yogyakarta: Esai Tentang Huruf yang Berkompromi
• Nobita Lari Sampai Surabaya: Menilik Lucunya Terjemahan Doraemon
• Over 80% of published authors quit within 3 books. Only about 10% of published authors make it to six books. And only 5% make it to twelve.
• Federal plain language guidelines

9. Thinking: One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused, and school actively destroys this ability. The most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don't really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway.

More on thinking:

• [Three Things to Unlearn from School: Attaching importance to personal opinions, solving given problems, and earning the approval of others.] http://casnocha.com/2007/07/three-things-to.html
• I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (Of course Slate Star Codex is currently taken offline)
• Idea Generation
• I’m not saying that donating 10% of your money to charity makes you a great person who is therefore freed of every other moral obligation. I’m not saying that anyone who chooses not to do it is therefore a bad person. I’m just saying that if you feel a need to discharge some feeling of a moral demand upon you to help others, and you want to do it intelligently, it beats most of the alternatives. (Nobody is perfect, everything is commensurable)

10. Japan: Learning to speak, read, and write Japanese is enormously fun. So is starting a company. I recommend not combining the two.

More from India, China, Japan, Peru, Yemen, Britain, Indonesia, US, and Tonga:

• Not long after Time’s article came out, an Indian news anchor at the leading channel CNN-IBN, hosted a segment on Modi. In her right hand, she held a copy of Caravan’s cover story, and in her left, a copy of Time’s profile, as she asked the cameras: “Which Modi is the real Modi?”
• The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West. China’s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order
• It can be seen that Marie Kondo is no kook, but heir to an ancient tradition that recognises the spirit in the sword, the anima in the inanimate.
• Potato Travelogue: A month-long journey into the flavors and traditions of Peru’s favorite food
• Ise-ji: Walk With Me, notes on the coastal pilgrimage route in Mie Prefecture, Japan
• I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system.
• Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity
• The Regency And Its Offensive Smells
• Indonesia, 20 Tahun Lalu: Yang Mau Reformasi, Ikut Kami!
• 1998
• How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience
• [The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months] (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months)
• Indonesia’s inconsistent income distribution data
• Malam harinya datanglah kapal patroli TNI-AL dan Polisi Air, mengeret mereka ke luar wilayah Indonesia menuju Malaysia selama satu hari satu malam. Sampai di sana, tambang diputus dan mereka ditinggal. Berbagi Tiga Seri Cerita Nelangsa Pengungsi Rohingya

11. Asexuality and the Baggins Bachelors: Finding My Counterparts in Middle-earth

More on LGBTIAQ+, sexuality, and relationships:

• Sara Hegazy was gay. She was also an atheist. She did not hide the fact that she was either. And she paid for it in every horrible way possible. A few days ago, she committed suicide in Canada.
• Self-Build
• The Anti-Abortion Movement Was Always Built on Lies
• I did not call my uncle, even though each Friday I resolved to. Then he passed away.
• Love Will Be the Death of Us
• Philip, the Last Sweet Potato

12. Science: I'm an astrophysicist, but that doesn't mean I have a motivation to debunk those UFO videos

More science writings:

• Why Sleep Deprivation Kills
• How Apples Go Bad
• Australia's first astronomers

13. Build build build: When the America of the 1910s faced a national crisis, America responded by creating and dozens of emergency response committees at the local level. Today's children have learned instead to solve conflicts by appeal to authority.

Andreessen's essay and reactions to it:

• It's time to build by Marc Andreessen
• How Tech Can Build
• Why we can’t build: America’s inability to act is killing people.
• Managerialism and Civil Service

14. Miscellaneous: Lessons Learned the Hard Way in Grad School (so far)

More miscellanea:

• 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
• Against Dog Ownership
• On Smarm
• Triwizard tournament X The Great British Bake Off
• When Tailwinds Vanish: The Internet in the 2020s
• Bye, Amazon
• Why is it that the people freaking out the most about taxes on the rich are the ones who don’t seem to know how the tax code works? Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Down

Islam dan Akar Kesenjangan

Di bulan Ramadan kali ini saya ingin mengulas tulisan ihwal persilangan Islam dan teori ekonomi. Bukan apa-apa, mumpung peringatan Nuzulul Quran dan saya baru saja membaca tulisan yang pas: Islam, Inequality, and Pre-Industrial Comparative Development yang terbit di Journal of Development Economics tahun 2016. Ini adalah tulisan Stelios Michalopoulos di Universitas Brown, Alireza Naghavi di Universitas Bologna, dan Giovanni Pralolo yang juga di Universitas Bologna.

Studi ini adalah sebuah kajian teori yang membahas akar-akar ekonomi yang menghasilkan struktur doktrin Islam. Dengan kata lain, mereka mengajukan teori ini untuk merasionalisasikan prinsip ekonomi dalam doktrin Islam. Namun perlu dicatat bahwa mereka tidak berteori tentang teologi Islam di makalah ini. (Saya pun juga tidak mau berteori tentang hal itu.)

Kajian mereka bersandar pada tiga komponen: perdagangan, kesenjangan, dan teori permainan (game theory).

Perdagangan: Islam muncul dengan goyahnya jalur-jalur perdagangan lama di abad ke-7. Perang berkepanjangan antara Kekaisaran Romawi dan Kekaisaran Sasani di Persia mengganggu perdagangan di Jalur Sutera. Pun runtuhnya Kerajaan Ghassaniyah di Syam dan Kerajaan Lakhmid di Irak membuat rute yang biasa dilalui para saudagar tidak lagi aman dari serangan. Di selatan Jazirah Arab, Kerajaan Himyar di Yaman takluk pada Kerajaan Aksum. Sementara itu, menyusutnya kekuatan maritim Kekaisaran Romawi Timur membuat jalur perdagangan Laut Merah rawan perompakan.

Ini mendorong terbukanya rute perdagangan baru di tengah jazirah, karena kaum saudagar mulai  melintasi Gurun Arab.

Kesenjangan: Gurun Arab adalah daerah penuh kesenjangan. Mayoritas tanah gurun tidak bisa dipakai bercocok tanam dan hanya kantung-kantung oasis terpencil yang mampu menyokong pertanian dan perdagangan. Para penulis mengkarakterisasikan masyarakat ini menjadi dua kelompok: kaum saudagar dari daerah subur yang kaya dan kaum badui dari daerah gersang yang miskin. Kaum saudagar berdagang, sementara kaum badui mencoleng.

Teori: Berdagang ada biayanya bagi kaum saudagar, pun mencoleng ada pula biayanya bagi kaum badui. Pencolengan belum tentu sukses, tapi jika dengan perhitungan probabilitas sukses itu ekspektasi imbalannya lebih besar maka kaum badui akan mencoleng. Begitu pula untuk kaum saudagar, jika dengan suatu probabilitas mereka bisa sukses mempertahankan dagangan mereka dari kaum badui untuk mendapat imbal yang besar, mereka akan berdagang.

Kaum saudagar ini bisa juga bersedekah atau berzakat kepada kaum badui agar mereka tidak mencoleng. Dengan kata lain, kaum saudagar punya dua opsi: berzakat atau tidak berzakat sementara kaum badui juga punya dua opsi: mencoleng atau tidak mencoleng. Pasangan {zakat, tidak mencoleng} adalah pilihan yang paling memakmurkan kedua belah pihak, namun piilhan ini rentan diingkari karena zakat adalah konsep redistribusi satuwaktu (statis). Kaum badui akan mendapat imbalan yang lebih besar dari {zakat, mencoleng} maka mereka akan ingkar. Pun kaum saudagar akan jadi berstrategi untuk tidak berzakat. Ekulibrium Nash permainan ini maka akan berakhir di pasangan {tidak berzakat, mencoleng}.

Beranjak dari sistem statis yang buyar, Islam bisa dilihat sebagai suatu kesepakatan untuk mengubah sistem redistribusi satuwaktu menjadi redistribusi antargenerasi (dinamis). Menurut para penulis, inti dari redistribusi dinamis ini bisa mengambil bentuk friksi apa pun yang mencegah pemusatan aset. Dalam teori mereka, ini berbentuk zakat plus wakaf dan hukum anti-riba.

Skema teori permainan ini kini berubah dari permainan statis ke dinamis. Dari skema pohon permainan ini pasangan aksi {adopsi islam, tidak mencoleng} bisa langgeng dengan satu syarat: distribusi tanah gurun di sekeliling tanah oasis yang subur ada di atas suatu ambang kritis (lamda c-tilda-s). Dengan kata lain, dominasi tanah gurun yang menghambat kaum badui untuk memetik manfaat langsung dari terbukanya jalur perdagangan baru inilah yang lalu berujung pada sistem kelembagaan ekonomi Islam yang diadopsi bangsa Arab.

Para penulis menutup studi dengan menyitir kajian mereka yang lain yang terbit di Economic Journal tahun 2018 yang melihat jarak ke jalur perdagangan dan kesenjangan geografis bisa memprediksi adopsi Islam di kawasan Afro-Eurasia. Saya sarankan untuk membacanya jika tertarik.

Rujukan
Michalopoulos, S., Naghavi, A., & Prarolo, G. (2016). Islam, inequality and pre-industrial comparative development. Journal of Development Economics, 120, 86-98.
Michalopoulos, S., Naghavi, A., & Prarolo, G. (2018). Trade and Geography in the Spread of Islam. The Economic Journal, 128(616), 3210-3241.

Growing Up Queer in Australia

December last year Freida and I got to travel to Sydney and Brisbane. We skipped the kangaroos and (predictably) found ourselves in the NSW and QLD state libraries. In Sydney, though, I wanted a souvenir for myself and after checking what's not available at the Boston/Cambridge Public Library I bought Growing Up Queer in Australia. This is a collection of essays from multiple people curated by Benjamin Law, and it was an amazing read.

I picked out a number of quotes, and these span a number of important topics: on growing up; desire; backlash and bullying; isolation; religion; coming out; bi-erasure; race; relationships; conforming to queer stereotypes; and on growing older.

Full quotes below.

On growing up:

Few people grow up queer in Australia: we're not allowed to. Heterosexuality guards its supremacy. [114]

(More on growing up):

Some things I wish I’d had, growing up queer in Australia: clothes that fit, less acne, wavy hair like the local hot white surfer boys, queer role models, stories that spoke to me, gay porn. Those last three things—queer people, stories and depictions of queer sex — proved much harder to find, and I craved them with a desperation that bordered on hunger. [i]

Growing up queer for me was fear: fear embedded so deeply it felt natural. It’s taken me years to peel back the scar tissue, to find out what was there in the first place. And I’m still scared. Do I get to belong now? [84]

On desire:

Alone, words are dangerous, terrible things. [29]

(More on desire and media):

This is something I still struggle with as a 36-year old! Do I just wanna look like them or fuck them?
Honestly, I will say this: across the board, I’ve never felt like I fit in to one place, ever. That includes my bisexual identity. [157]

It doesn’t start with a kiss. It starts with a look and your stomach going back flips. You don’t need to kiss someone to know that you are attracted to them. [269]

Call Me by Your Name is interesting in that it takes male queer desire and wanting, traditionally associated with violence, corruption, infection, and monstrousness (if it was depicted at all) and places it within the language of mainstream feminine desire. [279]

I thought how nice it would be to talk to something, to be in conversation but not have someone talk back. [277]

Among other things, the Hays Code had decreed that homosexual relationships not be coveted as happy, healthy, or successful, so for decades there were only four ways for a gay relationship to end: murder, madness, (straight) marriage, or suicide. It took until the 1980s for a film about lesbians to have a happy ending. [270]

There’s a scene of gay sex in that movie that formed—still forms—part of my sexual fantasizing.
Isn’t it so interesting how that stuff imprints?
Exactly. [160]

On backlash:

You don’t want to be the thing people tease you about.
Exactly. Over of the other things I was scared of was that friends of mine would say I told you so. The shame that other people knew this thing about me before I knew it. I hated that. [149]

(More on backlashes and bullying):

One of the homo-police ground my hand into the asphalt with the heel of his shoe, another attempted to use the back of my neck as a lemon squeezer, kneading shattered glass into my nape. There was no fight. There was no flight. Only pure submission.
Feelings on worthlessness and humiliation reigned supreme. The tone the bullies used when they inflicted that word on me made my heart tighten. I figured that if I felt like scum whenever they used that word on me, I must be scum.
I am a fag. [265]

If your body is different to other people’s, then by some weird logic they own it. They get the right to speak about it. I started school as a fat boy and that didn’t change. But in any other context than school, this would probably seem ridiculous. I look at photos of myself from high school and I don’t look fat at all. Just not athletic. [180]

I remember driving down Stirling Highway in Perth and it clocked in my head, this sudden realization. And it felt like realizing I had cancer. I was driving and crying, because all of a sudden there was a thing inside me. I didn’t choose it, I couldn’t get rid of it, I couldn’t control it. [149]

I have never heard the word queer. I have heard these words: gay, poofta, faggot, homo, lezzo, dyke. They are used to cut people. No one I know is queer. They must all live on the city, gathered by the coastline like shorebirds; winged creatures. [53]

On isolation:

I had not a single clue that gays and lesbians even existed. I’m part of (hopefully) the last generation of kids to grow up thinking they were the first, or indeed the only ones to be attracted to the same gender. It was a profoundly lonely experience. [268]

(More on isolation):

As a reader, I look for self recognition in other people’s stories. For queer people it’s especially important, because while other forms of prejudice — like racism —can make you feel just as alone and isolated, ethnic minorities like me go home to families and communities who share our backgrounds and experiences, and affirm who we are. Queer kids growing up typically don’t have that. I didn’t. [xi]

As a child I had always wanted a friend. [300]

By fifteen, I had become a textbook, first-generation academic overachiever. My world turned grey again. [64]

I didn’t mind being nerdy. I avoided sports and the gym, because I told myself I could never be or have anything like that—glimpsed is bodies and snippets of locker run banter posed a threat I couldn’t yet name. [304]

On religion:

The school chaplain had already been pursuing my soul for years, hammering on about sin and salvation. I wasn’t convinced. There didn’t seem anything worth forgiving, until sex came along. Uneasiness at thirteen was turning to shame at fourteen.

(More on religion):

First shame then forgiveness. You don’t have to be a young queer for this to work. There’s a trace of self-disgust in most of us that can be worked up into shame. But a young homosexual is particularly easy pickings, fearful of himself, his family, and the disapproval of his world.
Where does shame come from? I look back to my childhood and can’t remember anything being said. All I heard from the pulpit were grim hints. [7]

On coming out:

I resented the idea of coming out. It wasn’t that I was introverted, or that i felt like my romances were shameful, but that I loathed the idea of being pigeonholed. The social narratives around homosexuality had always left me with the impression that coming out was more than a courtesy. It was an expectation: like taking a ticket to join a queue or picking up litter; it was the responsibility of every good citizen to keep things neat and tidy. [229]

(More on coming out):

On a September morning three years ago, Appa called me, crying on the phone. Appa sobbed. He asked why I was choosing this.
I choked on the silence and pain, unsure of where to take the conversation. No amount of YouTube videos and queer think pieces prepared me for this moment. But I was not naive enough to think they would. It does not get better. It just gets lost in communication. [128]

But this white, western LGBTIQA+ discourse didn’t anticipate the reaction of a Catholic Vietnamese woman. It didn’t anticipate that, for some minorities, the closet might be the better place to be. That the closet is a safe space, a tactical move, and even a powerful, fluid space for some. That the imposition of western queer values on a person whose non-white culture left them unprepared for coming out ritual can cause pain rather than liberation. [67]

Movies and TV don’t much show what it’s like coming out to a non-white mum. There was no sympathy or an everything is going to be okay moment. There was shock, confusion, denial. [65]

On bi-erasure:

To some gay people, being bi seems easy. We have the supposed luxury of being chameleons, the privilege of choosing from the entire buffet rather than being confined to a corner table, as if sex were simply a smorgasbord and falling in love a matter of calculated odds.
The truth is, being bisexual means being invisible, especially if you are in a monogamous relationship, whether you paint yourself like a rainbow or a white picket fence. [230]

(More on erasure):

Mum couldn’t understand why I bothered to tell her I was bi—I was in a relationship with a man, so why did it matter? At various points in the relationship, I alternated between thinking I was a lesbian and thinking I was asexual. [18]

I soon realized that being queer is a full time job: having to correct people’s assumption that you had a boyfriend; being presumed to be straight; overhearing flip and degrading comments about you; having to censor affectionate behavior with your partner to avoid the leering off certain men; pulling up friends when they were thoughtlessly negative or dismissive. [318]

“I think who you end up with determines your sexuality.” Cue me opening a discussion on romantic, sexual, and gender spectrums. [68]

On race:

Coming out to me was both coming out as being gay and coming out as being gay and Chinese. Those two things can’t be separated. They cannot be untangled from my experience of the gay world. It’s a complicated issue because nothing triggers gay men more than the accusation that they’re racist. [146]

(More on race):

I dream of creating space and having a queer presence within the Tamil community. I am tired of resisting to be represented.
However, I am nervous. To fully embrace my Tamil and queer identities, I need to make myself visible. I need to be visibly Tamil in queer spaces, and dare to be visibly queer in Tamil spaces. I don’t want other people to have authority over my Tamilness or my queerness. I know this community has not been made for me.
But I am not going to apologize for being here. I am not going to apologize for existing. [130]

Racism only hurts when you actually want to be part of something. I remember going to this gay bar in Canberra... over two hours, no one would look at me, no one would talk to me.
Which makes you question your worth and attractiveness; all of that stuff.
You’re constantly second-guessing. [146]

When I was growing up, even I had that feeling: I don’t find other Asian men attractive. But that changed when I went on this long trip to China and found myself surrounded by other Asian men. They stopped being Asian men and they started just being men. [147]

On relationship and family:

Romance is a narrative of power. Falling in love with Paul meant that what I wanted (him, his attention, his affection) subsumed my own needs (agency, independence, self determination) so completely that I allowed a relationship to develop with the power differential skewed entirely in his favor. [231]

(More on relationship and family):

A lifetime of hetero conditioning had set me up for relationships based almost entirely on conflict, yet this was pleasant, comfortable, easy, nice. I didn’t know what to do. [233]

‘How do you know you love me?’
‘I don’t, I just do,’
‘And you’re okay with that? That not knowing?’
‘Sure’ [281]

Despite my mother’s protestations that she had no idea I was a lesbian, she quite obviously had suspected something and had conspired with this other woman to throw their two ugly duckling queer kids together in the hope of creating the beautiful swan of heterosexual mariage. It failed. [271]

Until I started writing this essay, I had never reflected on how important queer people are to keeping families functioning. [20]

It is possible to despise and fear the thing you pity. It is possible to understand that what my stepfather said and did to me as a child came from a place of utter weakness. [220]

Romance and baby-making for same sex couples are not necessarily connected. Less like hot sex, more like worming the cat. But it did get the job done. Twice. [107]

It’s a long way to Madrid, and even there i won’t be home. There’s still so much more unpacking to do. But despite the uncertainties, we’re optimistic about our future. In either world, or in both. [298]

‘You’re not special,’ my sister reminded me, ‘just because you have HIV. It’s an epidemic.’ [226]

Because I was afraid of HIV, I saw it everywhere, and engaged with it nowhere. [224]

On conforming to queer stereotypes:

There are two main, acceptable versions of your story: 1. It is awful here; I’m really struggling; please help me get out of here because I obviously couldn’t do it without your incredible, glitter-shitting self. And 2. It was awful there. I really struggled. I’m so glad I am out now and that I’m allowed to shit glitter almost anytime I want.
These stories are not necessarily lies. They’re just oversimplified. [111]

(More on queer-conforming):

I didn’t want to dress in ways that announced queerness, and for that I suffered the judgement of some prouder queers. I was considered, in those circles, ‘not gay enough’, which was confusing. [3]

Ten years ago, I would probably have written this as a fairly standard growing up gay in the country story. Back then the emphases would have been identified in a more positive way, the non-normative aspects would have been presented as badges of being gay. As if I was struggling towards something recognizable, rather than being something that was in itself interesting. [177]

So I hung around instead with the freaks and geeks, goths and punks and pixie and nerds, because with them I felt more often than not that my sexuality was just another dimension of me: not a flag to fly, or an aberration I had to justify, or something I had to think about all the time. [230]

‘Look, I just don’t know,’ I said. ‘In a room full of gay people I feel straight. And in a room full of straight people...’
‘... you feel like vomiting?’ my friend finished helpfully. [86]

On growing older:

There’s a freedom in being able to enjoy yourself, unapologetically, regardless of your age. I too find myself becoming more playful the older I grow. Worrying about others’ expectations means less when you’ve already announced who you authentically are. [317]

It’s the week after the plebiscite. Despite the confident lesbian life I am living now, I was still carrying around an 80s-kid view of Australia. Believing that outside my little protective bubble the great masses disapproved, thought I was abnormal, lesser, sinful, wrong. A perv and a lemon. I hadn’t dared hope that my country had moved on from homophobia to affirmation. [169]

For queer people, adolescence often stretches beyond teenage years. Most of my queer friends, in their twenties, live life with the fervent excitement of delayed adolescence, of ascending to yourself long after puberty has passed; of needing to regress to progress, to go back to your adolescence in order to grow up, telling the story correctly this time. [39]

It is one of the great oddities of life that as you grow older, you realize the past is not fixed, that ripples of various historic events are still moving through our culture. [270]

I don’t believe, necessarily, that people are born queer, or that I was born trans. I think I was born free from anything and then the stories accumulated on me and some of them turned out to be incorrect. I made my own attempts to write convincing stories too. None of these stories was objectively true, then or now, but the more I learnt the more I had at my disposal to understand myself. [39]

I always knew, but I didn’t have the words. Because when I was growing up, queer was not included in the acronym. It has not yet been reclaimed by the people against whom it had, for years, been leveled as an insult. I don’t remember when and how I first came across it, only how well the word seemed to fit: it was, and is, a word without expectations, with undiluted difference, a word the can be everything and every way. [186]

A word can be a wonderful thing. It can be a container. A mirror. It can click everything into place. [186]

I want to tell people all the time: there is no deadline for growing up, no submission date for your life’s narrative. You can work it out now or later. You can reveal yourself in parts, or as a whole, and make revisions. For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up. [37]

Internet Reading Q1 2020

Between two round-trip flights to Jakarta from Boston and the order to shelter in place brought by COVID-19, I read ... a lot of stuff. Really I just spend so much of my time staring at various screens. If you need reading materials to while away your time, there are plenty of interesting stuff in the list.

1. COVID-19: In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. So, now what? (How the Pandemic Will End by Ed Yong)

More on COVID-19: (click the triangle to reveal)

• How to Talk About the Coronavirus by Liz Neeley
• Strange COVID-19 Bedfellows: Gnawing Anxiety and Under-Reaction
• It Will Probably Go Pandemic, and We Should All Prepare Now. Suggesting things people can do to prepare for a possible hard time to come doesn't just get them better prepared logistically. It also helps get them better prepared emotionally. It is better to get through this OMG moment now rather than later.
• America Is a Sham: Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.
• The coronavirus did not escape from a lab. Here's how we know.
• COVID-19 Is The Best Argument Yet For A Wealth Tax
• $13 Cross Country Airfares! But Why Are Airlines Pricing Below Marginal Cost?
• Flatten the Curve of Armchair Epidemiology
• Rebuttal to John Ioannidis' opinion piece about the coronavirus pandemic
• Covid Observations from Beijing, March 11

COVID-19 dashboards, trackers, aggregators:

• JAWA TENGAH TANGGAP COVID-19
• Less wrong coronavirus database
• Yale SOM 2020 Financial Intervention Tracker
• COVID near you
• Key Economic Facts About COVID-19, Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago
• COVID-19 Economic impact from ONE.org

2. Climate Change: It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed, absent a significant adjustment, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. (The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells)

More on the environment and science:

• The pesticide industry’s playbook for poisoning the earth: a sophisticated information war
• 'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession
• Astrophysical Classics: What did Newton actually discover in quarantine?
• No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay In The Air
• A World Without Pain: “I know the word 'pain,' and I know people are in pain, because you can see it. I've seen pain, what it does, but I'm talking about an abstract thing.” Cameron does not have neuropathy: she can feel all the sensations the rest of us do, except pain.
• When We're Wrong, It's Our Responsibility as Scientists to Say So. We tried to reproduce our 2012 paper on how to make people report their income more honestly—and we ended up refuting it
• E.O. Wilson on Becoming a Great Scientist
• The best thing you can do to fight COVID-19 is nothing. Stop writing that paper. Don't put it on the arxiv.
• The Unequal Impact of Indonesia's New Year Flood
• the Nugent Lab Carbon Policy

3. India is not really a country. It is a continent. More complex and diverse, with more languages, more nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe. Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile, fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu supremacist organisation that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution. (Intimations of an Ending by Arundhati Roy)

More from India, Afghanistan, Angola, Iran, Singapore, and Syria:

• A mosque on fire, shops looted, people celebrating: My five hours in northeast Delhi
• THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.
• How Angolan ruler's daughter used her status to build $2bn empire
• Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art by ADAM GARFINKLE. Having succeeded beyond its expectations, Singapore doesn’t seem to know what to do next—except to keep on driving ahead, pedal to the metal.
• War by other means: Syria’s economic struggle
• Was Killing Suleimani Justified? by Peter Singer
• Kepulangan WNI Eks-ISIS: Seberapa Jauh Media Membantu Publik Memahaminya?

4. Conrad Bastable: Germany is a major outlier among high-GDP developed nations and nobody talks about it

More from Conrad Bastable, Agnes Callard, and on rationality:

Agnes Callard:

• The Problem with Letters of Recommendation: The kind of positive feedback sought at a letter request cannot mean much, precisely because it has been asked for; what matters has been freely given all along, and it has taken the form not only of approval and encouragement but, more importantly, of spontaneous reactions such as excitement, interest, curiosity, surprise, joy, amusement and, yes, pride.
• Who Wants to Play the Status Game?
• The End is Coming

Conrad Bastable:

• The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier?
• Steelmanning Free Speech: An Argument for Unfettered Content
• Steelmanning Censorship: An Argument for the Removal of Content

Rationality:

• Seeing the Smoke: COVID-19 could be pretty bad for you. But the worst thing that could happen is that you're seen doing something about the coronavirus before you're given permission to.
• Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real? If Rationality made you 25% more successful it wouldn't be as obviously visible as Scott thinks it would be. In this 25% world, the most and least successful people would still be such for reasons other than Rationality. And in this world, Rationality would be one of the most effective self-improvement approaches ever devised. 25% is a lot!
• Growth and the case against randomista development

5. Coding: My "refactoring" was a disaster in two ways: Firstly, I didn't talk to the person who wrote it. Rewriting your teammate's code without a discussion is a huge blow to your ability to effectively collaborate on a codebase together. Secondly, nothing is free. My code traded the ability to change requirements for reduced duplication, and it was not a good trade. (Goodbye, Clean Code)

More on econometrics and coding:

• Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a Regression Only Partially Controls for that Variable
• “The Determinants of…”: How Not to Do Social Science
• Revisiting the Difference-in-Differences Parallel Trends Assumption: Part I Pre-Trend Testing
• Is IV unbiased/consistent?
• Learning to love the shell

6. Politics: I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories. What I'm doing, that isn't politics. (Politics is for Power, Not Consumption by Eitan Hersh)

More on politics, sexuality, and history:

• ‘You're a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals
• Queer Like Pete: For all the talk of diversity, LGBTQ equality, and representation of gays in the media, many Americans still have limited exposure to gay men. A subspecies they aren't as familiar with, however, are the Type A, politically driven, never-take-their-eye-off-the-ball gays—a group of which Pete Buttigieg is an extreme example.
• Dear Therapist: I'm Afraid My Boyfriend's Sexuality Will End Our Relationship. He says he's bisexual, but I'm worried he's actually gay.
• Dear Therapist: I Will Probably Take the Secret of My Sexuality to the Grave
• Was Majapahit really an empire?
• Global Romans (1). The classical world through post-colonial eyes It is kind of ironical how we, in the Netherlands, and in larger parts of North-Western Europe (never mind North-America), have somehow decided, long ago, that our collective historical narratives start from Greece and Rome, far away in the Mediterranean. In a way, we have artificially appropriated a past that is wholly or partially unrelated to the land where our families come from and we have made it our own.
• Perempuan di Singgasana Majapahit

7. Writing: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me. (Writing grant applications)

More on communication and writing, a fiction and a poem:

• How to Write the Introduction of Your Development Economics Paper
• Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time. Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.
• And All the Trees of the Forest Shall Clap Their Hands BY SHARON HSU
• Poem of the week: Antidotes to Fear of Death by Rebecca Elson

8. Technology and Miscellaneous: On a social media platform in 2019, a message from a single human can fan out, unfiltered, and reach thousands of others in minutes. This is a very strange superpower!! It can be fun, but there's an edge of danger to it, too… a runaway train kind of feeling. Here's a simple solution: Cool it down. (Rosegarden: A thread from a fictional social network.)

More on tech and miscellaneous:

• How to Build a Low-tech Internet
• Facebook's Id Is Showing: An executive's leaked memo suggests that the company wants to return to the pre-Trump world. "It reshapes people's behavior and companies' investments, and then is surprised when that changes the system. It's silly to say you can't change the way a river flows when you are the watershed."
• WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism
• Survei Gaji IT (Tanggapan)
• There's an Entire Industry Dedicated to Making Foods Crispy, and It Is WILD
• The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver
• Daftar entri KBBI
• A list of ten ways we are decadent and a (speculative) theory about why it might not matter
• That idea [of dark humor] really only works if you are the one who is suffering from what is being joked about and you are taking ownership of that pain and suffering.