An interesting read from Noahpinion: What I learned in econ grad school

I found the following blog entry to be very interesting. In some sense, it touched on my dissatisfaction with macro, and why I quit it.
Noahpinion: What I learned in econ grad school: I always find it interesting that criticisms of economics education focus more on the gra...

Names, names...

I remember one argument my friends and I got into. Qiao and I believed in the non-neutrality of names. Naming a concept frames peoples' thoughts, and it is the gateway to introduce bias. We both felt the name of "China Proper" to denote "Inner China" is inappropriate since it seem to imply the frontier region during Qing dynasty is not properly China's land. Another friend of us disagree.

Why I suddenly think of this? I recently realized that what we economists call "price discrimination" is elegantly called "price customization" for marketing people. The very act of charging different prices to extract more surplus is depicted as a special service---customization by the marketing people. I found that to be really amusing. We actively use language to frame, mislead, and remove stigma.

I am aware of some research in political science and economics trying to study the neutrality of of media (Jesse Shapiro from Chicago Booth had a paper on newspaper ideological leaning, Ali from Stanford GSB had one one cable media, Feng from HBS looked at bias in wikipedia). Most of the work I have seen involves searching for "key words". This has lots of problems. The baseline might employ keywords very differently from media (for example, congressman with known political leaning might have different frequencies of keywords as a result of differential participation in certain topics, while media might use the same keywords to ridicule opponents). Empirically, the estimates have been noisy. Maybe one could get more mileage by looking at the different naming of the same concept.

As for me, this is a very effective screening tool for me. I like to read news, but not biased news. For example, I can pick up an article from NYT, if I found manipulation via naming, I can quickly threw it to trash can, ignoring the prose carefully crafted to convey a sense of balance and neutrality.

Smart as you are, you must be aware that I chose to name NYT in the previous example to "manipulate" you into associating NYT with that tactics. Absolutely, an eye for an eye.