Immigration, Innovation, and the Time to Publish

About two years ago we talked about a new paper by Jennifer Hunt entitled, "How Much Does Immigration Boost Innnovation." That paper has now been published, with a new coauthor, in the AEA journal on Macroeconomics. You can find the abstract here, and you can see our previous post for the ungated working paper version.

Congratulations to Donald Marron

The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of Brookings and the Urban Institute has hired Donald Marron to be its new director. This is great news for both Donald and the organization. Hopefully Donald will maintain his blog when he assumes his new job duties in May. It is a great source for solid economic analysis. Donald has now served as the director of quite a prestigous list of acronyms here in DC: JEC, CEA, CBO, and now TPC. On a more personal note, you can read about his near brush with Somali pirates on his personal travel blog. Once again, congratulations.

On the Upcoming Nomination to the Supreme Court

Tim Kane wonders why there are no economists on the Supreme Court (Growthology):

There are nine justices, and nowhere in the Constitution does it say that a law degree is a qualification. Yet, what we have now is a monopoly of lawyers on the Court. A monopoly. All I'm suggesting is that a mere one of the nine have an economics degree. And to assuage the fears of the status quo, a nominee with dual degrees would be more than fine. My own colleague, Bob Litan, has a Ph.D. in economics from Yale AND a law degree from Yale.

The problem is even more concentrated than Tim lets on. This morning CQ Today had an article focused on why recent nominations have all been federal appellate court judges. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy has been pushing for a bit more competition in the selection process. From the article, which is gated:

In 1960, for example, the court included a former governor, an ex-senator, a law professor, a former U.S. attorney general, a former state judge and a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. As recently as 1971, Republican President Richard Nixon nominated a pair of non-judges, Lewis F. Powell and William H. Rehnquist, to the court at the same time.

But the trend toward selecting federal appellate judges, which began under GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower, has accelerated in the past 30 years, said Lee Epstein, a Northwestern University law professor.

Perhaps Tim is right and we need more competition from other fields, but maybe even a different composition of lawyers would lead to more diversity of thought and perhaps even results that would be more agreeable to economists. The economomic analysis of the law has been around for some 50 years (often dated from Coase/Calabresi in 1960s) and I see no reason why someone with this background should be excluded from the Supreme Court, although I can't say that having vocal ideas on these issues will help anyone get appointed, since we seem to be fairly risk averse these days.

But by the same token there is no reason we shouldn't consider someone with a strong focus on science and technology and innovation policies more broadly. Perhaps the question is why we end up with so many generalists and so few specialists. Anyway, the basic principle is that innovation is generally good, even in non-high tech areas. So maybe Tim's call will get some traction.

The Valley of Death

There are a lot of interesting components to the recent health care bill, once you go looking in the weeds. From FasterCures:

Medical research leaders and patient advocates yesterday participated in a forum that spotlighted the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN) provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010. Speakers and participants were eager to discuss CAN and its potential to transform the medical research enterprise by supporting efforts specifically designed to bridge a gap in the therapeutic development pipeline between basic and clinical research.

Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) introduced CAN to bridge this gap, often referred to as the “Valley of Death,” where research lies dormant and ideas come to a halt because the necessary next steps to take basic research discoveries and turn it into a safe and effective therapy are not taken. The forum was convened by Parkinson’s Action Network and FasterCures.

Forum on Social Entrepreneurship

McKinsey & Company has a special "What Matters" dedicated to social entrepreneurship. Currently there are six writers and it's expanding. They are all top names. A couple to check out would be Bill Drayton's essay entitled, "Tipping the world: The power of collaborative entrepreneurship," Sally Osberg's piece, "Driving change: It's not just about size," and J. Gregory Dees, "Creating large scale change: Not 'can' but 'how'." But do check out the rest.

Tap Tap

In Praise of Partisanship

Mark Harris writes in praise of partisanship in his latest column for Entertainment Weekly (don't laugh, it's one of Tyler Cowen's favorite magazines). Along the way Harris discovers public choice theory from watching Parks and Recreation. The show's heroine, Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler (not yet online) :

[...] loves the idea of elected office; she thinks ambition is cool; she has a bedrock conviction that politics itself is awesome. Sadly, her day-in, day-out decision-making is somewhat hindered by the fact that she has absolutely no coherent ideas or belief in any particular policies except the ones that might allow her to keep her office or make people like her. Leslie occasionally remembers to mouth some garbled syllables about public service and making the world a better place. Mainly though, she's just terrified of losing the gig. Also, she wants to be president.

The idea that politicians are motivated by self-interest and are primarily concerned with their next election, or that they care more about keeping their job than searching for entrepreneurial solutions to challenging problems is often dismissed as a deeply cynical view of the world. It is, however, not so far off, and it's nice to see that the show apparently throws public choice theory front and center.

As a disclaimer I should add that I am not one of the six or seven people that actually watch the show.

Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East

Just when I write that there are few examples of social entrepreneurship in the Middle East comes this press release about the Acumen Fund working with Saudi Arabia's King Khalid Foundation (MENAFN):

Jeddah, 31 March 2010: Social enterprises -businesses that provide goods and services to undeveloped segments of the society - are increasingly recognized as effective tools against poverty. Saudi Arabia's King Khalid Foundation - a Royal foundation, established in 2001 to make a positive impact in people's lives by providing innovative solutions to critical social and economic challenges in Saudi Arabia - and Acumen Fund - an international not-for-profit venture fund that invests in enterprises delivering critical goods and services to low-income customers - are partnering to recruit a Saudi national for Acumen Fund's Fellows Program. Fellows receive an opportunity to work with high impact social entrepreneurs for one year.

via @auerswald.

Clay Shirky on Incumbency

From Principled Innovation:

Earlier this week at the South by Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) conference in Austin, Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky told attendees, “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” The relevance discussion feels like a reflexive institutional response to the loss of control associations have experienced over the last 20 years as their stakeholders have become less dependent on them for access to information, education and connections. We may say we’re searching for fresh answers, but it is not clear to me that we are willing to ask different questions.

Searching for Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East

"Fewer than 10 percent of Muslims in the West Bank have checking accounts." That's a pullquote from a new article in the World Policy Journal (pdf) on microfinance and the Muslim world. The article focuses, in part, on the efforts of Reef Finance ("rural" in Arabic), a microfinance organization based in Ramallah, Palestine. There are few good examples of entrepreneurship, let alone social entrepreneurship in the Middle East, so this is a bigger story than it might look at first glance. (The interested reader should also see the profile of Sekem in Innovations).

Check it out. The summary:

These efforts described here are still quite new, but so far, they seem to be working for both financiers and rural Palestinians. So, while the amount of funds being loaned may be relatively small, the goals are anything but. Building a sustainable economic foundation in the rural West Bank is a powerful inducement to keep young men off the streets, and a big step forward in the march to a lasting peace in the Middle East. If international aid efforts are to be focused on this particular goal, a dramatic expansion in shariah-based microfinance is likely to bear enormous dividends, far beyond any immediate economic impact.