Author: Joy Buchanan

Thoughts from the 55 hour non-stop ESA Conference

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I am a long-time member of the Economic Science Association, if someone my age can be a long-time member of anything. This is an excellent group of people. The leadership team designed a virtual replacement for what would have been an annual in-person conference.

The first time I saw the schedule it seemed epic. The schedule runs for 55 continuous hours. There is an Asia-Pacific period, which from my perspective in the US starts at night and goes “late”. I would stay up to tune into some of those events. The European time period was during the very early morning in the US. People were given a presentation slot that occurred as a good time of “day” for them.

Here’s a tweet quote to demonstrate the dedication to helping us all keep track of what was going on:
Another #2020ESAGlobal Conference Hang-out. For 2 hours at 6am L.A., 9am New York, 3pm Paris, 9pm Bejing, 11pm Melbourne.

The willingness to think outside the box and take advantage of the virtual format impressed me. It seemed like there were trying to make everyone in the world feel included.

Virtual conferences are not the same as in-person. I prefer in-person conferences and I will return to in-person experiences when I can.

There are advantages to virtual conferences. I’m not the first person to notice this, nor am I the first person to wonder if there will be more virtual conferences after the pandemic has completely subsided.

Working parents face certain costs and benefits to leaving for a conference. Working parents enter a totally different world when they fly away from their domestic responsibilities and attend an in-person conference. The flying is expensive and the domestic responsibilities have to be taken over by someone. Nothing if free. The benefit is that the working parent has an opportunity to focus on their profession which I consider to be valuable.


In a special social session, I had a chance to hear Ryan Oprea talking. I’m going to make a plug here for all of his work. He’s incredibly smart and dedicated to his craft. He’s generous with good ideas and practical help. Maybe you haven’t heard of him if you are Very Online, because instead of tweeting out hot takes he’s writing enduring research papers and doing professional service.

Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin Interview

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Birmingham, Alabama Mayor Randall Woodfin is one to watch. The city of Birmingham has been on the rise, although like all cities Covid has presented a major setback. Here’s a Rolling Stone feature on his role in removing a confederate monument from the city in the summer of 2020.

My university president recently sat down for an interview with him (35 minutes long). Mayor Woodfin talks about influences that shaped him and how he ended up in politics. He emphasizes personal experience in community service and politics as customer service. They discuss governance in the time of Covid, both the health and financial angle.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbsfS3MSoUk&feature=youtu.be

There are lots of books on race going around these days. Mayor Woodfin’s recommendation is Caste.

The city does not get much attention on the international stage. The fact that we share a name with a much larger city in the UK is problematic in a way. It’s our fault, because we stole the name from them in an attempt to assert our dominance in the steel industry over one hundred years ago.

Yglesias ‘One Billion Americans’ CWT podcast

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I have been looking forward to this podcast. It dropped today. I was too busy “at work” (I work from home on Wednesdays) to listen. Then in the evening I wanted to tell my kids that I could not sing “Wheels on the Bus” another time for them because I had a podcast I really wanted to listen to. Of course that doesn’t really work with a toddler. The upshot is that I’ve only listened to half of it.

Here’s a quote that I thought was interesting

There could be a lot of benefits to that. I went to Ireland. It was the last international trip I took. It’s a beautiful country, very successful in a lot of ways, but obviously, a really empty country. If you’re working on a book about a billion Americans while going across from Dublin to Galway, I could not help but be struck. It’s like, “Where is everybody here? Couldn’t we do more?”

Matt Yglasias

One of the interesting questions when you think about packing more people into prosperous countries is why must we focus on making congested cities larger. There really is a lot of land around.

I know of “blighted” neighborhoods near me that already have streets and ample parking and just everything that you could want except rich neighbors. The shrinking cities in cold places seem like the ideal candidates for where more people could go.

I haven’t read Matt’s new book. I do not endorse it, since I don’t know what is in it. However, I like the fact that he has a vision, and I’m excited to read it.

The Most Valuable Class I Took

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

In middle school, when I was about 12, I had a rotating non-academic period in my schedule. For at least 6 weeks, I can remember we had a typing class. We would go into the school computer lab and practice “touch typing”. I typed the letter “f” with my left index figure hundreds of times. They made us put a cover over our hands to force us to practice typing without looking.

I resented that class. I hated taking the long way round. I hated typing the letter “f” over and over. Since it’s so boring, I don’t know if I would have forced myself to learn QWERTY touch typing. Part of the value of school is a framework in which you do things that you don’t have the discipline to do on your own. (Tyler Cowen has written somewhere about teachers as coaches, but I could not find the link.)

Looking back, this is the most valuable thing I did in school. I’m writing this post almost as fast as I can think of the words.

Learning to type is not useful if you can’t read or write. I’m not saying that nothing else I did in school was valuable. Also, I recognize that this would not be the most valuable class for every student.  

There is the potential for Speech to Text to make touch typing obsolete. I don’t think I would work better that way and I do not personally know any professionals who write using Speech to Text.

I have seen a Trump boat parade

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Are boat parades a previously underexploited means of advertising? I quickly Googled Trump boat parades before posting this and found that just about every news outlet in the country, large and small, posted about them recently. They get noticed.

I was at a harber town in Florida for the weekend and you notice the Trump boats. I saw one large yacht with a cut out of President Trump and Melania on the deck. When the boat is going away from you it almost looks like Mr. & Mrs. are on board.

I’m the kind of person who likes to ask obnoxious questions. I asked a boat captain who works in the harbor if he had ever seen a Biden boat. He laughed at me. No. In case you were wondering, although many Americans plan to vote for Biden, none have rigged up a Biden boat to compete with the Trump regatta.

I am reminded of a classic movie “The King & I” in which the young prince says that his first act as king will be to order a celebration with fireworks and boat races.

Teaching with SAS Viya: First Report

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I teach a 400-level data analytics course to undergraduates at the Samford business school. Every semester, I have students apply the concepts we learn by using some analytics software. This semester, it was imperative that I choose a product that students could access from their own computers. We cannot all be together in the computer labs due to Covid.

For the first time, I am using SAS Viya for Learners. Currently, the students are learning SAS Visual Analytics through the Viya platform. SAS makes detailed tutorials that make it easy to teach software to a class. Something that I’m particularly happy about this Friday is that the product works. Class time is not getting chewed up by students who get errors that are difficult to troubleshoot.

(Of course, I tested the software myself before asking students to use it. Anyone who has taught large classes knows that there is no way to fully anticipate the problems that could arise when dozens of humans with different computers all try to do something.)

Something to know about SAS Viya for Learners is that it is free but the free version does not come with the whole range of functionality that SAS Visual Analytics offers. What seems most significant to me currently is that students cannot upload data into the program. There is a library of datasets to work with. That is what we are using for demonstrations and homeworks.

In previous semesters, students have been instructed to find their own data online and use that for their final project. This semester, students will use data that is pre-loaded into the SAS Viya for Learners library. There are many right ways to do a final project. Having less decisions to make about what data to use will allow students to focus more on the analysis and presentation.

So far, all we have done is logged in and built confidence with the interface. That’s the first step with any software. It works. The tutorials give excellent guidance. I will post another update as we get further along with SAS Viya.

No coding is needed (not even SAS coding). I have concluded that coding and data analytics are separate skills. They are both good skills to have. Sometimes teaching coding along with data analytics is appropriate. But the trade off needs to be recognized. Time spent learning to code, to some extent, takes away time spent learning about data analytics. Feel free to fight me on that in the comments if you disagree.

I also use a textbook to teach this course. So, SAS Viya is not the only resource.

Least Hypocritical Artist: Rich Mullins

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

I’m creating a new award: Least Hypocritical Artist Award. Rich Mullins is the winner.

The most human and not-overly-polished collection of works by Rich Mullins can be found here. You have to order it as a CD. I do not know of any digital platforms selling it. I bought a used copy for less than $3.

Since I have a CD player in my kitchen (left there by prior home owner) I have been listening to this album all week. Rich Mullins is a tremendously talented musician. These album tracks are live concert performances with jokes and introductions. Maybe I appreciate it especially this month because concerts and public gatherings cancelled for Covid. A DVD of a live concert is also included with the CD.

Because of social media, artists are getting in trouble when they say something that doesn’t fit the polished image their managers try to cultivate. Public figures disappoint sometimes. The spectacular fall of Jerry Falwell last month is an example of someone who presented a certain image to the world that turned out to be false.

Rich Mullins claimed to be a Christian, but he didn’t claim to be perfect. Rich Mullins put his whole heart and life out there. No surprises. You can’t disappoint your fans if you never tried to hide anything. Mullins was a bit self-deprecating in public but radically generous in his private life. He followed the example of St. Francis of Assisi. He lived very simply despite his modest professional success.

Mullins tragically died in a car accident at the age of 41 in 1997, when I was still too young to fully appreciate him. You can find his best selling albums and you can buy his popular songs on iTunes. This album is the best one that I have found for getting to know the man.

Leaves Drop in August

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Every year, the first few falling leaves catch me by surprise. ‘Summer can’t be over yet,’ I think. ‘Get back on those trees! It’s not even September. Starbucks isn’t even serving pumpkin yet!’

Pandemic or no pandemic, time keep passing. My children grow older, whether I squeeze every drop out of their childhood or not.

Those falling leaves represent this stage of my life slipping away. Living with young children is not all fun. I am lucky to be able to build a career and a young family at the same time. I understand that some women are constrained to choose one or the other.

If I did stay home with my kids full-time, then I would experience a greater total number of their precious moments. Those precious moments feel like the best of life. On the other hand, I imagine that when they inevitably grow up and away from me, the separation might be even more painful if I had been a stay at home mom. The leaves do not take sides in this debate. A few leaves drop in August. No matter how you spent your summer, it’s over.

Views on Christian Atonement

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

An outsider to the Church might assume that Christians agree on all of the details concerning Jesus-saved-us-from-our-sins. Things are not as simple as they appear. I recall a podcast episode in which investor Peter Thiel pushed back against the idea that the New Testament is tidy or straightforward. Thiel said “I think Christ is a very complex, very ambiguous figure in many ways, which makes the interpretation quite difficult.”

Some of that complexity is captured in an excellent new article “The Atonement Wars“. This explores exactly what happens to Christians and their guilt of sin, in light of Jesus’s death on the cross and resurrection. I recommend the whole article.

Here is a view from the Greek Orthodox tradition that might be unfamiliar to American Protestants who are used to thinking about Atonement in dry legal terms.

“Ontological theories” is a broad term to comprehend the teachings of many Greek-speaking church fathers, mainly in the eastern half of the old Roman Empire and mainly from 180 A.D. onward….

This scheme is an “ontological” (whole being) substitution by Christ to deal with the entire power of sin in humans, rather than primarily a legal substitution addressing the guilt of sin before God’s justice. It is sometimes characterized as a “medical” model, stressing the healing of sick humanity rather than the judicial acquittal of a guilty humanity. Much of subsequent Eastern Orthodox theology, such as stressing the Incarnation and Resurrection, and experientially participating in the divine “energies” so as to become more and more God-like (“theosis”), is an elaboration of this ontological approach pioneered by Irenaeus. As with the Ransom Theory, the various flavors of Ontological atonement were subsumed by Aulen under the “Christus Victor” or “classic” rubric.

The Atonement Wars

If you read modern theology books and blogs, you probably have not had many opportunities to hear what the Church Fathers have said. The church fathers are people such as Ignatius of Antioch whose writing did not make it into the Bible but who were writing much closer to the time of Jesus than we stand today. “The Atonement Wars” explores the views of early Christians on salvation. I also recommend a separate blog devoted to the church fathers on the Letters to Creationists site.

Whether you attend church twice a week or never, I recommend this clear writing on ideas that shaped our civilization.

Philosophy from a POW: Wittgenstein via Keynes

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

For now, I will not write blog posts on the weekend. This weekend I made a little progress reading through (500+ page) The Price of Peace about John Maynard Keynes. This is not an economics textbook, although you will come away from it with a better understanding of “Keynesian economics”. The author presents the most intriguing parts of a life that could fill both a salacious tabloid and a respectable financial newspaper.

Here’s a story that surprised me:

Previous chapters describes Keynes’ involvement in winning World War I. He had a literal seat at the table for negotiating resulting peace and reparations agreements. Before the war, intellectuals from central Europe were exchanging ideas with Keynes at Cambridge University.

The horrific WWI pitted some of these Cambridge friends against each other, since some were British and others happened to be born in Hungary or Austria. Some died and never got to re-join the conversation. Brilliant Ludwig Wittgenstein ended up on a POW camp near Italy after the war.

Keynes used his government privileges to get Wittgenstein’s manuscript shipped out of the POW camp and into the hands of Bertrand Russell of Cambridge. This led to the English-language publication of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. According to The Price of Peace, Keynes’ own work on philosophy was completely eclipsed by Wittgenstein’s book. The book that might easily have ended up burned or thrown in the garbage of a POW camp.

Would Keynes and Wittgenstein blog if they were alive today? Would they have produced brilliant books, or would they be too distracted by Reddit and video games?