Morning roundup

The morning worthies:

• Why do academics resent markets? Nozick was right.


• Chris Ruhm on shackling the identification police. No, this isn't about the TERF wars. It's more important than that. Ruhm worries that the need for clean identification constrains the questions empirical economists now investigate. I worry that it also means multi-year lags in getting reasonably but not perfectly identified in economics, and that public health work that thinks you can solve endogeneity with a logit gets published on PLOS.One or at the Lancet within minutes, so you can have years before error gets corrected because econ makes the perfect the enemy of the good. 


• New Zealand's Chief Censor is building his case for regulating porn on the internet. I hope he realises that he can only do more harm than good in this area before he does harm. 


• Every get frustrated that Statistics New Zealand only ever releases cross-tabs that somebody working there thought would be important, and that getting other cross-tabs is a huge hassle? Well, IPUMS has solved that over in American data. Here's the mobile-friendly version of their site letting you build whatever cross-tabs you like out of ACS data. And remember that IPUMS hosts data for other countries too, so we could totally have access to this kind of facility instead of waiting for the never-will-come made-in-NZ variant. I'd yell again about the lack of open data in NZ, but Stats seems to be falling apart in even trying to get the last Census out, so they've bigger things to worry about right now. 


• Martin van Beynen reports on costs of the government's student loan scheme. Comments from me included, but Martin gives me an undeserved promotion.