{"id":6489,"date":"2011-04-17T12:49:35","date_gmt":"2011-04-17T17:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=6489"},"modified":"2011-04-18T01:51:42","modified_gmt":"2011-04-18T06:51:42","slug":"brown_john_clak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/17\/brown_john_clak\/","title":{"rendered":"The brown near misses of the John Clark Bates Medal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stanford’s Jonathan Levin<\/a> won the John Bates Clark Medal<\/a> a few days ago. Prior to this via Tyler Cowen<\/a> I noticed a post in The Wall Street Journal<\/i> blog Real Time Economics<\/a> mulling the potential winners. Note that this award is given to a prominent economist under the age of 40, and is referred to as the “Baby Nobel” because so many past winners have gone on to win that prize (e.g., Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman).<\/p>\n\n

Here were the brown possibilities:<\/p>\n\n

Harvard University’s Sendhil Mullainathan<\/b> is another top choice. Mr. Mullainathan, 38, has been marrying field experiments with behavioral economics to examine problems in the developing world. He is also a founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab with last year’s Clark winner, Esther Duflo, and Abhijit Banerjee.\n\nFor one paper, he and frequent co-author Marianne Bertrand sent out fictitious resumes in response to want ads, randomly assigning each resume with very African American sounding or very white sounding names. The resumes with the very white names got more call backs. For another paper, he and Ms. Bertrand, Simeon Djankov and Rema Hanna followed 822 people as they went through the process of getting a drivers’ license in Dehli, India, giving some of them cash bonuses and some driving lessons (with a third control group getting neither). The people who got the cash fared best, since they were able to pay bribes.<\/blockquote>\n\n

Mullainathan<\/a> is a relatively prominent public intellectual, and is already a “MacArthur Genius”<\/a>. So I was curious as to his biography, and found this<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n

In his short life Mullainathan has seen a lot of poverty and hard times. Born in Chennai, he grew up in a small village in Tamil Nadu — Kozhiyum — with his mother and paternal grandfather. (He still keeps in touch with his boyhood friends who are sharecroppers and earn meager wages.<\/b>)<\/blockquote>\n\n

Makes you wonder about a world where a Harvard economics professor can have boyhood friends who are Indian peasants. There was also a promising future candidate on the list:<\/p>\n\n

Finally, many economists consider Harvard’s Raj Chetty<\/b>, an expert on the effects of tax and social insurance programs, the most talented economist of his generation. But at just 31 he may be too young to be considered for the Clark just yet.<\/blockquote>\n\n

Best of luck to both in the future! Though with their current accomplishments it seems unlikely that luck will be needed at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stanford’s Jonathan Levin won the John Bates Clark Medal a few days ago. Prior to this via Tyler Cowen I noticed a post in The Wall Street Journal blog Real Time Economics mulling the potential winners. Note that this award … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":503,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6489"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/503"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}