Is the election pitting the poor vs. the middle class?
Every day this seems more like the real story of the 2009 election. Class lines are more clearly drawn in this election than in the past. The common political narrative of reformers vs. conservatives is good description but not good political analysis. Political leanings have social and economic roots that makes them sensitive to the internal dynamics of the society. There are two fault lines that run deep in the Iranian society–the rural vs. urban and the poor vs. the middle class–both of which seem to be reflected in the political divisions that have come to the fore in this election. Crude personal observations (backed by TV images!) suggest that the supporters of the two leading candidates are socially diverse: the poor (and the rural?) are more likely to vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad and the middles class in either location is for Mr. Moussavi. (more…)
The Ahmadinejad-Karrubi debate: and the loser is …
Statistics. Between the two of them it was hard to tell who won that debate on June 6, 2009. But statistics was a certain loser. Mr. Ahmadinejad provided a series of charts to defend his economic record (which, by the way, was not under attack that night) but Mr. Karrubi dismissed them by simply saying that his numbers were wrong. Most of the numbers I was able to see on the television screen seemed right to me. But, unfortunately, numbers were not the point of the debate. (more…)
A surprising result for inequality in 2007
Following the good suggestion by a keen reader, I went back to the data to see if the rise in inequality I reported earlier was due to the housing boom. It turns out that taking out all housing expenses from expenditures does not change the decile growth rates significantly. So it seems that the housing boom did not cause expenditures at the higher end to be exaggerated relative to the poorer deciles. In other words, the housing boom appears to have been inequality neutral. While doing these calculations I came across a finding that, if it stands, is good news for Mr. Ahmadinejad. (more…)
Rising inequality in Iran: who is to blame?
There have been reports of rising inequality under the Ahmadinejad’s administration (for example, in the Persian sites of Rastak and Aftab), which, unlike their claims for rising poverty, are grounded in facts. Survey data show convincingly that inequality has increased in the last few years, but what has caused it is uncertain and subject to dispute. The popular explanation (popular among reformists) for the rise in inequality in recent years is, of course, President Ahmadinejad policies. But there is a deeper, somewhat related, explanation which should not be overlooked– the oil boom itself. Deciding which explanation is more important goes to the heart of political economy questions that have occupied many minds in Iran in recent years. (more…)
Stagnant rural incomes
The gap between rural and urban incomes has been widening because the rural areas appear to have missed the recent boom or President Ahmadinejad’s redistribution. According to survey data, in 2007, the gap between rural and urban per capita household expenditures reached its highest level, nearly 50 percent, up from 45 percent in 2004. During these three years, when urban families enjoyed (a modest) 3.5 percent annual growth, rural expenditures grew by zero percent! Why the rural economy has fallen behind or out of national favor is anybody’s guess, but here are a few leading explanations. (more…)
Distributing the oil wealth? Don’t hold your breath
Presidential candidates in Iran are racing to promise giving people back their oil money. According to the BBC Persian, Mr. Ahmadinejad plans to even include Iranians living abroad (like me). Holding my breath, I reached for a calculator. (more…)
Predicting productivity
To follow up on the discussion in my last post about testing regimes, I want to recommend a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about evaluating hard-to-evaluate skills. He describes a football scout named Dan Shonka working in his hotel room carefully reviewing the DVD of a game he has just watched live: “He had a stack of evaluation forms next to him and, as he watched the game, he was charting and grading every throw that Daniel [the quarterback] made…. Shonka had seen all the promising college quarterbacks, charted and graded their throws, and to his mind Daniel was special: ‘He might be one of the best college quarterbacks in the country.’ ” The football industry in the US also collects mountain of statistics on each player. Imagine just going with the objective statistics and losing the subjective evaluation of the scouts. Gladwell says that even with people like Shonka watching rising quarterbacks like a hawk, the failure rate is high. Some productivities are just very hard to assess and predict before the fact. (more…)
Testing regimes and productivity
There is a large literature on the effect of testing on learning, but as far as I know very little of it has been applied to Iran’s concour. How we evaluate students has obvious effects on the students’ incentives to learn and teacher’s incentives to teach. In market economies where employers have a voice in what is worth learning and what is not, because they have to pay for it when they hire workers, the effect of testing on incentives is not paramount. Teachers may teach to the test, but parents and students know what is important to learn for later life– holding a job with good pay and getting promoted. Not so in Iran. (more…)
Jobless youth: are they too many?
In my last post I argued that what is wrong with Iran’s unemployment is not the quality of data (though there are quality problems) nor that they come from official sources. The problem is rather with the structure of unemployment, which is is unjust and inefficient. The burden of unemployment falls disproportionately on the young and that they wait a long time after graduation to find a job and get along with their lives. Instead of arguing about the data collection and manipulation, we should be discussing the underlying economic structure that generates this pattern in the data. (more…)
What is wrong with Iran’s unemployment data?
As I wrote in another post a few weeks ago, every time a western reporter writes about unemployment and inflation in Iran, he or she seems obligated to say that the actual rates are twice the official rates. Often an “expert” is present to give this made-up claim an air of expertise. (See examples for unemployment here and here, and on inflation here and here.) I have not seen the claim repeated for inflation in 2008 ( I guess President Ahmadinejad took care of that in 2008 by doubling the actual inflation rate!), but for unemployment it is still being reported.
It is easy to dispel the myth that actual inflation has been always twice the official rate. If you take a calculator and punch in the price of anything in 1990 and then increase it every year at twice the rate of official inflation, you would know what I am talking about. But what about official unemployment data? Is there a way to check their veracity? The answer is yes. (more…)
Tyranny of numbers 
13 comments