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This comes from Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gérard Roland, who find a correlation between how individualistic a country’s residents are and that country’s long-term economic growth. After some additional testing, they also claim there’s a causal relationship:

We find a strong causal effect of individualism on income per worker, total factor productivity, and innovation as predicted by our theory. These results hold even when we exclude the Americas and Oceania where settler colonization played an important role. They also hold when controlling for measures of geographic distance, human capital, ethnic fractionalization, and other factors affecting growth….Moreover, even after controlling for measures of institutions which were previously found (e.g., Hall and Jones, 1999, Acemoglu et al., 2001) to affect long-run growth, culture continues to play a statistically significant and quantitatively important role, implying that culture has an effect on economic development that is independent of institutions.

Summary here. I’d be interested in seeing a statistical critique of this result. (Via Free Exchange.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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