EconTech

From VoxEU by Jane Humphries:

Child labour: lessons from the Industrial Revolution
Societies have long sought to eliminate child labour. Yet two hundred years after the first Factories Act and despite a level of prosperity that our forefathers would have deemed unimaginable, there are an estimated 186 million child labourers worldwide –5.7 million in forced labour, 1.8 [...]

I have nothing to add:
Will Argentina waste a historic opportunity?

Rarely do you see a country where the mood among business people tells such a different story than the statistics. Now, in Argentina there are statistics are then there are damn lies–inflation figures are made up–but the broad contours of the economic performance of the [...]

I rather like the graph, except for the fact that it doesn’t fit on my monitor in one view.
Bartels bash

We’re having a panel discussion this afternoon about Larry Bartels’s new book, Unequal Democracy. One of Larry’s really striking results is his finding that inequality systematically increases under Republican but not Democratic presidents. I’ve written that [...]

Well, Alex says a lot of what I said. Bartels isn’t so surprising given the previously existing PBC literature, even in other countries. However, the literature does have a number of mechanisms, more than just sticky prices if I remember correctly; if you are interested in scoping it out, read the previous posts for the [...]

Rodrik gives Bartels space to guest blog, and he produces an excellent Q&A formatted response to the questions and criticisms many had of the result we showed last week. Tyler has a few comments up on Bartels’ response:
Larry Bartels responds

Professor Rodrik has kindly invited me to respond to some of the questions and comments generated [...]

Well, I thought that since PK said he doesn’t buy the Bartels graphs because he doesn’t have a sound reason to believe they are true I would mention that. I am posting though, because people are looking very confused at them (comments and trackbacks). I cannot speak to Bartels’ book, but there is already a [...]

Not exactly breaking news here. And delving into the economic numbers isn’t exactly necessary to indict Putin. But more data is always useful, so here goes. There is more, and if you have an FT subscription it is worth reading, but I don’t want FT getting mad at me for reproducing in full:
Why Putin’s rule [...]