Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • The Crowded Market for Experiments

    Chris Blattman just dropped something of a bombshell on experiments as dissertation projects:

    the market [for field experiments] is getting very crowded, and there are a million in the pipeline. So this is a poor product placement. The premium on other types of research is high and getting higher.

    This voices a concern that I’ve been mulling over for years, ever since I completed my first (and only to date) experiment. This was a great second project, but it benefited from being on the early side of the wave of experiments in comparative politics, when the field was much less crowded. It also would have been nearly impossible to pull off as a dissertation project because it required lots of time, a rich network of research contacts in Indonesia, a willingness to coauthor, and a whole lot of luck. It’s also worth noting that as a survey experiment, it was probably easier to conduct than the field experiments that are the subject of Blattman’s post. (And as anyone who has asked me in the past two years knows, I very much do not advise building a dissertation around a survey experiment.)

    But what is most interesting about the quote above is the statement “the premium on other types of research is high and getting higher.” Here I’m not so sure, and I want to know more. What other types? Let’s focus here on the fields of comparative politics and the political economy of development, the audience to which Blattman’s post will most resonate. These fields are certainly not going back to the days in which cross-national regressions are dominant, so it can’t just mean that. I always enjoy reading big and messy structured macrohistorical comparisons, but I don’t detect a big premium on them. So I’m left wondering if others believe there is a growing premium on non-experimental research in CP and PED these days, because I sense that this would be a fairly striking departure from recent trends.

  • Malaysian Food Vocabulary Smackdown Watch, Brinjal Edition

    One of the benefits of having maintained a blog for 8½ years is that people end up looking at your old posts for all sorts of random reasons. For example, in the past 24 hours, people have found this blog by searching for

    • char kway tiauw
    • tom pepinsky causation
    • volkstellingen java
    • south vietnam what it could have been
    • roti canai using wheat flour recipe

    and dozens of other weird search strings. Every month or so I get an angry comment about how we wrote something outlandish six years ago. Which leads us to today’s Malaysian food vocabulary correction.

    Let’s go back to 2005—when I was still a graduate student, JMP was JM, our two kids were negative 4 and negative 7 years old, George W. Bush was early in his second term, etc.—to our post on the etymology of eggplant. We wrote that

    The local Austronesian word, terung, is kept in Indonesia, but has died out in Malaysia.

    However, a helpful Malaysian today commented that

    No it hasn’t

    Hmm. I just checked our Malay-language recipe books, Masakan Favorit Nyonya and Aneka Kerabu dan Sambal. The former has a recipe for Terung Masak Santan (eggplant with coconut milk), and the latter for Kerabu Terung (mixed veg [or however you’d translate kerabu] eggplant). If you google “kerabu brinjal” there are a couple of hits, but they are basically English-language pages. There are no results for “brinjal masak santan.”

    It is clear that the Malaysian commenter is right. We stand corrected. Brinjal is one of words used for eggplant in Malaysian English. Terung is the Malay word, just like in Indonesia.