Author: cogiddo

A happy occasion

~ cogiddo ~ 1 Comment

On Friday, October 9, Temple University had its annual Gallery of Success awards ceremony, as part of homecoming weekend. This year the awardees included Dr. Jeffrey S. Coons, who was my first Ph.D. student at Temple University.

Jeff gave a very generous donation to the Economics Department at Temple University a few months ago. You can read a bit more about this on this page, along with a brief synopsis of Jeff’s career since leaving Temple.

Jeff Coons and DD 2015-10-09
Jeff Coons and Dimitrios Diamantaras at the Temple University Gallery of Success reception on October 9, 2015. Photo by Marianne Miserandino.

I am grateful to Jeff for his generosity to my department and its graduate students and his recognition of my work in helping him succeed in his doctoral studies. I was delighted to be able to attend the Gallery of Success event and applaud Jeff and all the other awardees for their impressive achievements.

News organizations provide positive externalities, but we stand to lose them

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Adblockers. They’re all the rage in discussions about the future of news organizations. This post on Medium by Dave Pell is one more restatement of the positive externalities generated by news organizations. While it is eloquent, it has no suggestion of how to deal with the problem. That’s because the problem of externalities is a genuinely hard one for our market-based economic organization (and way of thinking). Activities that generate positive externalities (and by extension public goods) are constantly under-provided and are likely to continue to be under-provided for the foreseeable future.

Publication bias leads to error; psychology edition

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Academic journals frequently do not publish papers that did not find an “interesting” effect. This comes under the “publication bias” moniker. This paper in PLOS One shows one specific ill effect this has on our perceptions of what research has shown: the papers that do make it to publication present an overly optimistic view of the effectiveness of psychological treatment of major depressive disorder.