Evolutionary theories I don't believe
In their paper titled "Love's Labour Lost," recently submitted to a medical journal, anthropologist Edward Hagen, biologist Paul Watson and psychiatrist Andy Thomson suggest that full-blown major depression disorder may be a complex social adaptation originating in the human evolutionary past and designed to help otherwise powerless individuals influence their social groups, focus on problem-solving and obtain help from those with whom one is in conflict."Depression evolved to compel assistance from reluctant social partners," they theorize. "Depression signals need and compels social assistance by preventing the sufferer from providing benefits to others."
They cite the severe cost of depression not only to the individual but to the whole social network.
"The toll depression takes on both its victims and society may be precisely what it was, in human evolutionary history, designed to do."
This thinking — that depression is an important signal and part of a complex dynamic among people that provokes change — leads these researchers to argue that drug therapy alone for depression may not be the best solution even it relieves symptoms.
It may be that non-chronic major depressive disorder (MDD) is like fever — a signal that something has gone awry and needs to be healed.
Here is the full story. Here is a link to the relevant research. Here is the specific piece in question. Here is a related piece, called "Depression as Bargaining". For a good time try using that description on your girlfriend.
Why I am skeptical: I can see why emotional sensitivity to bad events has survival value. Emotions bring general benefits, plus the sensitivity keeps you away from bad events to some degree. It is harder for me to see a great importance for the negative reaction itself, ex post, once bad events have happened.
April 1, 2004 at 05:01 AM in Science | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Build a house in 24 hours
Randall Parker cites the following link:
Degussa AG, one of the world’s largest manufacturers and suppliers of construction materials, will collaborate in the development of a USC computer-controlled system designed to automatically “print out” full-size houses in hours.Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Behrokh Khoshnevis of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute has been developing his automated house-building process, called “Contour Crafting,” for more than a year.
Khoshnevis believes his system will be able to construct a full-size, 2,000- square-foot house with utilities embedded in 24 hours. He now has a working machine that can build full-scale walls and is hoping to actually construct his first house in early 2005.
Contour Crafting uses crane- or gantry-mounted nozzles, from which building material - concrete, in the prototype now operating in his laboratory - comes out at a constant rate.
Moveable trowels surrounding the nozzle mold the concrete into the desired shape, as the nozzle moves over the work.
Parker adds:
Robots and other automated equipment have increased factory automation so much that factories are a dwinding source of all jobs. The next big target for automation has been and continues to be office work. Office automation is being addressed with the development of huge amounts of software and information systems.What never seem to get as much attention is how to automate all the other places where people work aside from the office and the factory. Construction automation is an obvious big target. One approach is to do prefabrication of walls and other building pieces in highly automated factories. Then the prefabricated parts can be shipped to the construction site. But automated methods to doing construction at a site have advantages because they avoid the difficulty of shipping large walls, floors, and ceilings to a site. Also, automated site construction techniques allow more flexibility in site design.
My take: In economics language, this is called "g>r", which refers to the growth rate of an economy exceeding its rate of interest. If we're going to make it through our forthcoming fiscal crises, it will be through innovations such as these.
March 31, 2004 at 10:14 PM in Science | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Labor Standards and Bicycle Helmets
Robert Samuelson writes in today's Washington Post (registration required) that China, though in many ways an abominable economic landscape is a lot like the US 100 years ago. He argues that while growth is a messy thing, there is hope for the future in China, and recent progress is encouraging. He notes (citing the World Bank as his source):
• From 1978 to 2002, the average annual per-person income rose from $190 to $960. It's probably now above $1,000. (The U.S. figure: about $36,000.)• Life expectancy increased from 61.7 years in 1970 to 71 in 2002.
• Adult illiteracy fell from 37 percent in 1978 to less than 17 percent in 1999.
• Infant mortality dropped from 41 per 1,000 live births in 1978 to 30 in 1999 (the U.S. rate: about seven).
As the election heats up, we're going to hear a lot about labor and environmental standards and how we need to level the playing field in trade. China remains a very poor country. It cannot afford the luxury of our standards of today any more than America could have afforded them 100 years ago when the average work week was 67 hours (down to 34 today) and the work place was a much more dangerous place.
One way to see this is to think about bicycle helmets. Where are more bicycle helmets worn—Chicago or Shanghai? Manhattan or Mexico City? More are worn in Chicago and New York. Don't people in China and Mexico know that it's dangerous to ride a bike in traffic without a helmet? I suspect they do. It's just too expensive. Poor people are better off foregoing the helmet, keeping their kids in school a little longer and doing the best they can to avoid being hit by a car. Making the Chinese have factories as safe and clean as ours is like forcing them to wear bicycle helmets. It's a bad deal for them even though there are benefits.
March 31, 2004 at 07:58 AM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Politically incorrect paper of the month
African-Americans make up a larger proportion of students than teachers. Many educators say that as a result African-Americans students suffer because they lack role models and white students suffer because they lack diversity. In a newly published paper (working paper version), Thomas Dee (Swarthmore College) supports some but not all of this story. Using data from Tennessee's Project Star, a very important experiment in which K-3 students were randomly assigned to small and regular sized classes, Dee finds that black students improve when they have black teachers. So far so good. Dee also finds, however, that white students improve when they have white teachers. Uh, oh. There goes the diversity is good for everyone story.
Dee is quick to point out that we don't understand why students perform better with a teacher of their own race. If it is a role-model effect then why would white students perform poorly with black teachers - surely there are enough white role models to choose from that one more or less isn't going to have an effect on the self-esteem of white students. Another theory, with some support from other studies, is that teachers spend more time helping students of their own race. Note that if it is the latter then better teacher training, to overcome natural biases, could improve the effectiveness of both white and black teachers.
The cite for the paper is Dee, Thomas S. 2004. Teachers, Race, and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment. The Review of Economics and Statistics 86(1): 195-210.
March 31, 2004 at 04:35 AM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
Is it a Vermeer or not?
You judge. Here are some scholarly takes, pro and con, along with more photos. It doesn't look right to me, but many art experts now say yes. About three million pounds is at stake, according to The Telegraph. Since there are only about 35 other Vermeers in existence, and the last one was sold eighty years ago, I suspect it will go for more, no matter what the doubts.
My take: Researchers spent about ten years studying the picture. If it takes so long to tell the difference, spend your money elsewhere.
March 31, 2004 at 04:30 AM in The Arts | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Do women look better when they are fertile?
Read this article.
March 31, 2004 at 02:55 AM in Science | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
The French can compete
When the barricades that France's protectionist auctioneers had erected to prevent the reform of their art market were finally stormed in late 2001, it seemed as though revolution was in the air. Many people believed that "les Anglo-Saxons", as the French refer to Sotheby's and Christie's, were about to sweep their smaller, local competitors aside.
The logic was simple. The 456 licensed French auctioneers (commissaires-priseurs), who had been legally protected against foreign competition since 1556, would be no match for the two international giants now that the latter were allowed to hold sales in France for the first time. However, the reality has proved very different and in less than two and a half years Paris has evolved into the world's most unpredictable and fiercely competitive art market centre.
And how can the French possibly compete?
The local auctioneers have survived by using their contacts, particularly among lawyers who arrange estate sales, and in some cases by reorganising and bringing in outside investors, which the law reforming the market allowed them to do for the first time. ArtCurial is a new creation, an alliance of three well-known French auctioneers - Francis Briest, Hervé Poulain and Remy Le Fur - with the Dassault aviation and newspaper dynasty and the Monaco real estate millionaire and art collector Michel Pastor. Its main specialities are modern art and vintage cars, and last year it came in third behind Christie's and Tajan [another French firm] with sales of £41.7 million.
My take: European culture isn't dead, it is simply oversubsidized and overprotected. Here is the full story. Here is an article about how the French have an unjustified fear of being bought out by foreigners.
Note also that Coca-Cola has postponed and possibly shelved its plans to compete with the leading French mineral waters. The British version of the product, Fasani (a terrible name, no?), turned out to be purified tap water. It is now an open question whether the French release will ever see the light of day.
Addendum: Daniel Drezner points out that McDonald's is more popular in France than elsewhere in Europe. I blame expensive French food, high labor costs through regulation, and bizarre opening hours (i.e., your favorite place is usually closed). But if you think that French haute cuisine has been harmed, you haven't eaten in Helene Darroze, where last night I had one of the finest meals of my life.
March 31, 2004 at 01:12 AM in The Arts | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
New economics blogs
One is called The Idea Shop. Andrew David Chamberlain, the blogmeister, describes the focus as "economics made simple." So far it looks promising. The other is a new blog on economics for undergraduates.
March 30, 2004 at 11:32 AM in Economics, Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Tax and Spend
On my way in to work today, I heard a snippet of a President Bush speech on C-Span radio. "Tax and spend is the enemy of job creation," he said.
That's probably true. Unfortunately for the President, if tax and spend is the enemy of job creation, so is "borrow and spend," the President's recent formula.
The size of the budget and what it's spent on is more important than how it's financed. There are really only two choices for financing—taxes today and taxes tomorrow. Borrowing just means taxes tomorrow. The President likes to describe tax cuts as letting people keep more of their own money. I like that idea. Unfortunately, I agree with my hosts Tyler and Alex that the current administration has raised our taxes by increasing spending. So ultimately we're keeping more of our money today and expecting to give back even more tomorrow.
Ironically, Bush has raised spending in what I would guess is a labor intensive way. By expanding homeland security, a lot of workers have been drawn into public employment rather than the private sector.
Last month's job growth was "small" and almost all of it was in the public sector. That's most likely a result of government spending pulling people into public sector jobs rather than the private sector.
This Friday is a big day for Bush and Kerry. The job numbers for March will be released. If they are weak again, Bush will have to keep talking about home ownership being up.
March 30, 2004 at 11:11 AM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Does file-sharing hurt CD sales?
A new study by two researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, finds that sharing digital music files has no effect on CD sales. This is the first study that directly compares actual downloads of music files and store sales of CDs.The authors, Associate Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School in Boston and Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conclude that "File sharing had no effect on the sale of popular CDs in the second half of 2002. While downloads occurred on a vast scale during this period - 3 million simultaneous users shared 500 million files on the popular network FastTrack/KaZaA alone - most people who shared files appear to be individuals who would not have bought the albums that they downloaded," say the authors...
Even in the professors' most pessimistic statistical model, it takes 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by a single copy. If this worst-case scenario were true, file sharing would have reduced CD sales by 2 million copies in 2002. To provide a point of reference, CD sales actually declined by 139 million copies from 2000 to 2002.
Here is another interesting tidbit:
31 percent of all individuals who download music live in the United States. Other important countries are Germany with a 13 percent share of worldwide users, Italy with 11 percent, Japan with 8 percent and France with 7 percent. File sharers in the United States are particularly active. While they represent 31 percent of worldwide users, they download 36 percent of all files.U.S. file sharers download files from all over the world. Only 45 percent of the files downloaded in the United States come from computers in the U.S. 16 percent of music files are downloaded from computers in Germany, 7 percent from Canada, 6 percent from Italy, 4 percent from the U.K. A legal strategy that focuses mostly on the United States is unlikely to change the supply of music files.
In other words, going after domestic uploaders, as the RCAA is doing, won't cut off supply.
Here is one summary. Here is the original research.
My take: Yes I believe the result. Most downloaders are young or just sampling songs for kicks. But I doubt if this, legal developments aside, would be true five years from now. Over time I expect more people to forgo buying the CD, unless of course the law intervenes.
Addendum: Newmark's Door offers some additional links. Larry Lessig argues for complementarity. Here is an article that copyright is too strict more generally, and yes The Grey Album is wonderful.
March 30, 2004 at 08:52 AM in Music | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
Was Nietzsche right?
In recent weeks there's been a furor in the Washington D.C. area over lead in the District's water supply. Today, the Washington Post (registration required) looks at why lead is bad for you and covers some of the science and public policy. That lead is bad for you is open and shut. Too much lead kills you and for kids, too much is not that much. But I am skeptical of recent studies that find that the worst effects of lead happen at the lowest levels of exposure.
Here's a typical newspaper account of one of those studies and a quote from a leading researcher on the topic:
``There is no safe level of blood lead,'' said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, lead author of the lead study presented Monday at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting.
Edward Calabrese would not agree. Calabrese is a toxicologist at UMass-Amherst and a leading scholar of hormesis, the phenomenon that most if not all toxins are actually good for you at sufficiently low doses. This does not imply that you should start adding mercury to your eggs or lead back into your pots. But the impact of toxins appears to be U-shaped—good for you at sufficiently low levels then bad as exposure increases. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Hormesis also implies that linear models or threshold models of toxic impact are misspecified and understate the impact of toxins over some ranges of exposure.
Here's a Scientific American article on Calabrese and hormesis.
Here's my take on the economics and policy implications of hormesis.
March 30, 2004 at 06:26 AM in Medicine | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Twenty questions
Co-blogger Alex Tabarrok is interviewed by Will Baude of Crescat Sententia. Read Alex on why he blogs, the Alien and Sedition Acts, his 7-point plan for financial security, why we do not have comments, and many other interesting matters.
March 30, 2004 at 05:35 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Electronic voting
Many people fear electronic voting. What if there is an error? Don't we need a paper trial? How can we be sure that the election won't be stolen? My response is simple. Ever buy gas? When you buy gas do you pay cash or use a credit card? And when the terminal offers to print you a receipt do you take it, save it, and check it against your monthly Visa bill? Or do you press "no receipt" and drive away?
I have never once checked a gas receipt against my monthly credit card bill and I suspect most people don't either. The credit card companies have big incentives to record transactions quickly and accurately. The system isn't perfect but it's good enough so that I don't worry about being ripped off and, the key point, the electronic system is certainly more accurate than the primitive process of counting out paper and metallic tokens and handing them over to a minimum-wage cashier who repeats the process by counting out change. I see no reason why electronic voting should not be far superior to punch cards or other manual machine.
Obviously, we need to be careful, which brings me to a suggestion. How about open-source software for voting machines? Opening the source makes life easier for outsider hackers but harder for inside-hackers and open source is less-susceptible to bugs. Open-source would also be well, open - as in an open society.
I would say turn this project over to Linus Torvalds but he's a Finn and we have to be careful about them but surely there are some skilled programmers who would like to lay the core for voting in the twenty-first century?
Addendum: Yup, here is an open-source voting project.
March 30, 2004 at 04:50 AM in Political Science | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
Are video games art?
Some time ago I asked whether video and computer games would provide the next artistic explosion. I concluded: "I'm still waiting to see the payoff."
The New York Times ($) has nominated one such game, www.worldofawe.net as an aesthetically worthy experience, click on the link if you are curious. The game combines elements of music, travelogue, diaries, narrative, and digitally constructed artwork. One of the artworks has been included in the recent Whitney Biennial.
My take: Judge for yourself, but for me it is an interesting novelty more than a sustaining attraction. That being said, I didn't like Faulkner at first either.
March 30, 2004 at 04:30 AM in The Arts, Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Traveling last week and removing my shoes as I snaked through the rope-lines made me wonder whether the airline security people might not benefit from a consultation with the remarkable Temple Grandin. She works at finding ways at making cattle comfortable as they are led to slaughter. Oliver Sacks profiled Grandin, who is autistic, in his marvelous An Anthropologist on Mars.
March 29, 2004 at 07:28 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Bootleggers and Baptists
The Arizona Daily Star reports that Nogales, Arizona will be opening a new state-of-the-art truck inspection station:
The governor touted the new Motor Carrier Inspection Station as a state-of-the-art facility that will improve homeland security while not slowing down international traffic between the United States and Mexico. It gives state and U.S. federal officials a one-stop shop to inspect drivers' immigration papers, the safety of their semi-trucks, and the quality and safety of cargo crossing into the country.
But a legal challenge hangs over the new facility:
Attorneys about to argue a federal lawsuit against the NAFTA plan allowing Mexican trucks into the United States aren't satisfied. They will plead their case before the the U.S. Supreme Court on April 21. The problem with the new station: It isn't required to check emissions on incoming trucks. That means they aren't being held to the same standards as U.S. trucks and will only worsen air quality standards, said John Weissglass, the San Francisco-based attorney representing the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the lawsuit. In 2002, the Teamsters, watchdog group Public Citizen, and environmental groups sued the U.S. Department of Transportation to stop the NAFTA plan, citing environmental concerns, which eventually forced the government to conduct a $1.8 million study looking at the plan's environmental impact.
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but the Teamsters and Public Citizen? Bruce Yandle of Clemson explains it with a theory he calls Bootleggers and Baptists. The bootleggers like prohibition because it gets rid of competitors. But a politican who wants to listen to the bootleggers needs a more high-minded cause to sell to the public. The Baptists give the politicians cover with the argument that drink is from the devil—it leads to social unrest, unemployment, higher social costs and so on. Same with Mexican trucks. Who can justify keeping out lower cost Mexican trucks just to keep the wages of Teamsters high. Enter Public Citizen. This isn’t about greed. It’s about keeping American air clean.
The appeal of self-righteousness partnering with self-interest also explains why companies often support regulation of their industry. They'll claim a concern for safety or the environment but often such regulations fall more heavily on smaller competitors and will drive them out of business.
There's nothing wrong with politicians having both high-minded and low-minded motives. The real problem is that the bootleggers always push the form of the regulation to create higher profits.
NAFTA was supposed to allow Mexican truck companies to compete in the US. We're still waiting. Before the environmental issue, the alleged worry of the Teamsters was safety. My take on that claim is here.
March 29, 2004 at 06:44 AM in Political Science | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Microsoft, bundling and all that
Brad DeLong argues that he has been harmed by getting IE for free with Windows.
Remember the days when there was not one single dominant browser that came preinstalled on 95% of PCs sold? Back then there was ferocious competition in the browser market, as first a number of competitors and then Netscape and Microsoft worked furiously to upgrade their browsers and add new features to them....Progress in making better browsers was rapid, because browser-makers wanted to make a better product and any new idea about what a browser should be was rapidly deployed to a large enough user base to make it worthwhile for web designers to try to use the new feature.
But why was competition in the browser market so furious? Hmmm... couldn't have been because each firm knew that the winner would be a monopoly, could it? The alternative to Microsoft winning the browser war was not competition between many firms but a different dominant monopolist. Focusing on the economics, i.e. without getting into arguments about which firm was the better innovator etc., is there any reason to prefer one monopolist over another?
The double monopoly problem, first explained by Augustin Cournot in 1838, suggests that Microsoft might be the better monopolist. The double monopoly argument says that if two products are going to be monopolized its better if they are monopolized by one firm than by two (or more). The reason is that the single monopolist will take into account complementarities between the two products. The better the brower, for example, the more operating systems Microsoft will sell and vice versa. Separate the two products and you lose this added incentive to lower price and/or improve quality. (If you know the tragedy of the commons argument, the double monopoly problem is the same thing with the customers serving as the common resource).
An unappreciated aspect of this argument is that the reason that Microsoft might make the better monopolist is the same reason it will likely win in any battle with a stand-alone competitor. Microsoft has more to lose from losing and more to win from winning than does the stand-alone and will therefore put more resources into winning. This explains why the European directive requiring Microsoft to sell two versions of its operating system, one with and one without the media player, is pointless. Microsoft will simply sell the two versions at the same price - then which one would you choose?
Aside: I also think that Brad doesn't appreciate enough the power of potential competition. Low marginal costs and ease of distribution in the software market mean that one of the now relatively small competitors to IE could grow very rapidly. Microsoft knows this and cannot rest on its laurels/behind (your choice). Consider how rapidly the browser substitutes known as RSS readers are growing.
March 29, 2004 at 04:55 AM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (5)
Cuban art
Before leaving for Paris I had the chance to give a talk on Latin American art in Tucson. While preparing I spent some time browsing Google Images for fun. One of my favorite Cuban painters is the expressionist Tomas Sanchez, I like the lusciousness of how he paints forests.
Here is another Sanchez. Manuel Mendive has a more primitivist style, here is my favorite Mendive. If you would like something more avant-garde, try Jose Bedia.
Here is one place to buy some reasonably priced Cuban art.
And how about the economics in Cuba?
State-run galleries sell selected works to tourists and pay artists a percentage, but successful artists like Sandra Ramos and The Carpinteros (Dagoberto Rodriques and Marco Castillo) prefer to deal directly with collectors, inviting them into their homes and studios where they do business in dollars that allow them to support their entire families. The opening week of the biennial is a feeding frenzy of foreign buying with collectors arriving in tours organised by US museums or European travel agencies. (The US allows importation of Cuban art and educational materials.) With such considerable interest in the biennial, the State has been quick to recognise the potential of the market: an art auction at the biennial raised more than $100,000 to benefit a children’s cancer hospital, with an anonymous collector from Monaco paying $11,000 for a drawing by Kcho, an artist whose signature motif is a simple boat that might be interpreted as an allusion to Cubans’ efforts to escape the island. Somehow Kcho has been co-opted as a quasi-official artist, painting backdrops for Castro speeches and occupying a huge government house.
The bottom line: Censorship or not, if you tax everything else heavily, a good deal of talent will go into the art market. Alex and I wrote about this in our paper An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture (PDF).
March 29, 2004 at 04:31 AM in The Arts | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Buckley visits Galbraith
William F. Buckley drops in on John Kenneth Galbraith whom he says absurdly is "the most influential U.S. intellectual of the 20th century." The two old friends then proceed to have a rather doddering conversation.
Buckley asks, "What is it about Bush's policies that makes them unworthy of conservative benediction?"
"Their ignorance," Galbraith responds.
"What is Bush ignorant of?"
"Ricardo, for instance."
Score one for Galbraith.
Later, however, Galbraith delivers what he sees as a crushing blow. "There is not one member of the faculty of Harvard University who is pro-Bush."
Score several points for Bush!
Actually, it is not even true, Greg Mankiw is Bush's CEA chair.
March 28, 2004 at 09:49 PM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
The creative commons
Larry Lessig has followed his principles and put his new book, Free Culture, online for free with full rights to redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse or remix so long as you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Lessig. Some enterprising bloggers have already taken advantage of the license to record each chapter in MP3 format. Surprisingly, the Lessig book is being simultaneously published by Penguin, which seems like a big risk for them - and having told you where you can get the book for free, will you now buy it at Amazon earning us our vigorish?
I haven't read Free Culture yet but Lessig's earlier book, The Future of Ideas, was excellent. Believe it or not, the Future of Ideas, is an argument for the virtue of the commons based upon insights from Austrian economics. A strange but compelling combination.
Addendum: Read Russell Roberts interviewing Larry Lessig here.
March 28, 2004 at 05:01 AM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Piece work
Violinists at a German orchestra are suing for a pay rise on the grounds that they play many more notes per concert than their musical colleagues - a litigation that the orchestra's director yesterday called "absurd".
The 16 violinists at the Beethoven Orchestra, in the former West German capital Bonn argue that they work more than their colleagues who play instruments including the flute, oboe and trombone.
The violinists also say that a collective bargaining agreement that gives bonuses to performers who play solos is unjust.
Here is the full story. Here is a useful site on the labor theory of value. How about paying composers by the number of notes as well?
March 28, 2004 at 04:48 AM in Law, Music | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Bastiat's house is for sale
The Dufaur de Gavardie de Monclar family, who jointly own Bastiat’s property in Souprosse, inform us that they have reluctantly decided to put it up for sale, as no one member of the family is able to purchase it. It consists of a fine 17th century manor house, with early 20th century alterations, approached via a long tree-lined driveway, a barn and an outbuilding, all set in grounds of 28,000 m².
The main house has a surface area of 200m², on three levels, that is 600m² of living space. The barn, with a timber-frame roof of outstanding architectural interest, has a surface area of 400m² and consists of three levels. The outbuilding is a house on two levels, with a surface area of 100m².
The whole property is for sale for 426,900 euros.
Here is the link, thanks to the Mises blog for the pointer. Here is a short biography of Bastiat that also contains links to many of his works. Perhaps I will stop by the house to pay my respects.
March 28, 2004 at 04:34 AM in Economics, History | Permalink | TrackBack (2)
Nothing Secedes Like Secession
I’m in Tucson for a conference. Haven’t been here for a while and it’s striking how different the world looks here in the Southwest compared to the East Coast and most everywhere else. Desert. Cacti. The architecture. Javelinas—little wild boars. Saw some on the 18th hole of the resort's golf course, wandering around. Even the squirrels are different here.
We take it for granted that this is part of America. But this nation from sea to shining sea could easily be lots of different countries a la Europe. Jay Winik in April 1865: The Month That Saved America talks about how unlikely it appeared in say, 1790 or 1820 that the US would become what it is today. Before the Civil War, the Whiskey Rebellion threatened to split off the western part of the United States. New England almost signed a treaty with England and split rather than join in on the War of 1812. California and Oregon considered forming a Pacific Nation.
By the end of the 1820s and into the early 1830s…when many Americans spoke of the Union, however much they had come to love it, they spoke of “our confederacy,” or more simply of “the Republic.” The Constitution, however revered, was a “compact.” The United States was just as often “the states United,” or “the united States,” or even “a league of sovereign states,” and was invariably spoken of as a plural noun.
Would it make any difference if Arizona were another country? Besides the hassle of going through customs for this conference, it might make a lot of difference. It would depend on the institutions and culture. Without American culture, trust, legal system and so on, there might not be a resort here, there might not be a booming Tucson. And of course, it could be even better. And had Arizona or other states broken away, it would have changed how the rest of the country evolved along the way.
Here’s David Friedman’s theory of the size and shape of nations.
March 27, 2004 at 10:52 PM in Law | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
The ten most successful kleptocrats?
Directly below you will find a list of the most influential businessmen in history. For purposes of contrast, Ben Muse refers us to a list of the ten biggest political kleptocrats, here goes:
1. Mohamed Suharto President of Indonesia from 1967-98: US$15 to 35 billion
2. Ferdinand Marcos President of the Philippines from 1972-86 US$5 to 10 billion
3. Mobutu Sese Seko President of Zaire from 1965-97 US$5 billion
4. Sani Abacha President of Nigeria from 1993-98 US$2 to 5 billion
5. Slobodan Milosevic President of Serbia/Yugoslavia from 1989-2000 US$1 billion
6. Jean-Claude Duvalier President of Haiti from 1971-86 US$300 to 800 million
7. Alberto Fujimori President of Peru from 1990-2000 US$600 million
8. Pavlo Lazarenko Prime Minister of Ukraine from 1996-97 US$114 to 200 million
9. Arnoldo Alemán President of Nicaragua from 1997-2002 US$100 million
10. Joseph Estrada President of the Philippines from 1998-2001 US$78 to 80 million
It depends, of course, on what you count as stolen. Arguably some Saudis should make the list, though they claim to own the oil legitimately. Of course relative to gdp, Haiti's Duvalier is a clear number one.
Addendum: Here is a good article on how Suharto did it.
March 27, 2004 at 04:49 PM in History | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Who are the most influential businessmen in history?
Joel Mokyr offers his list:
Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) • Powered Industrial Revolution (Marginal Revolution's first post was on Boulton and his friends.)Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) • Carnegie's Steel Built America
Walt Disney (1901-1966) • Mega Media Blueprint
Henry Ford (1863-1947) • Democratized Transportation
Edward H. Harriman (1848-1909) • Proto-turn-around artist
Henry J. Kaiser (1882-1967) • Fathered the HMO
Ray Kroc (1902-1984) • Founding Father Of the Fast-Food Nation
William Lever (1851-1925) • Invented "The Brand"
Henry Luce (1898-1967) • Mass Media Pioneer
J. P. Morgan (1837-1913) • Saved Wall Street
Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) • Invented Dynamite, Holding Company
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) • Spawned Global Energy Industry
Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) • International Financier Pioneer
Alfred P. Sloan (1875-1966) • The Perfect Organization Man
Gerard Swope (1872-1957) • Wove Capitalism's Safety Net
Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930) • Smarter Machines Sage
Sam Walton (1918-1992) • Perfected Mass Retailing
Aaron Montgomery Ward (1843-1913) • "No Store" Retailer
Thomas J. Watson Jr. (1914-1993) • Wired Corporate America
Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) • Invented Celebrity Endorsements
A good list, but it fails to reflect just how much business has transformed our society. How about Zukor, Laemmle, Fox, or Cohn, some of the early founders of Hollywood? You could add the Medici, the unknown father of double-entry bookkeeping, or how about Gutenberg for that matter?
Here is the complete article. Thanks to Lynne Kiesling for the pointer.
March 27, 2004 at 05:10 AM in Economics, History | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
My whereabouts
Tomorrow I will be back at UNESCO, attending another meeting on cultural diversity. Several countries, most notably France, would like UNESCO to have the power to overturn the free trade commitments made through the WTO and the EU for that matter. Did you know that Brussels has told France that it must allow books to be advertised on television, something previously forbidden?
France and others would like to cement the principle of the "cultural exception" through as many international organizations as possible, UNESCO included. Of course the exceptions would not stop at culture, nor would the rubric of culture remain modest. Along other lines, some of the African experts at the meeting have come out for "enforceable sanctions" against countries that do not do "everything possible" to protect their native and indigenous cultures. I think this means us. I wonder if all of these people also favored sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In addition to his better-known crimes, Saddam went to great efforts to destroy the culture of the so-called marsh Arabs, draining the marsh was only part of his nefarious agenda. In these meetings I am arguing for...well, if you don't know...you haven't been reading this blog for long enough.
The timing for this visit is less propitious than my last trip. Then the Parisians were talking up cultural diversity while banning headscarves in the schools. Now U.S. officials are squawking because the WTO is telling us we cannot ban on-line gambling. Here is Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte, sounding like a Frenchman: "It's appalling...It cannot be allowed to stand that another nation can impose its values on the U.S. and make it a trade issue." The Bush administration is planning to appeal the ruling.
So I will be busy. My personal posts will continue, but at a lower level than usual. Alex and our excellent guest bloggers will be active, and I will be back in full force upon my return.
March 27, 2004 at 04:30 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (3)
We welcome the fools
The Motley Fool investment site wrote a nice article on MR. Thanks! We welcome all our new readers!
March 26, 2004 at 08:17 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
"Curing" Obesity
Researchers claim to have discovered one of the key causes of obese America. The AP reports:
Researchers say they've found more evidence of a link between a rapid rise in obesity and a corn product used to sweeten soft drinks and food since the 1970s.The researchers examined consumption records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 1967-2000 and combined it with previous research and their own analyses.
The data showed an increase in the use of high-fructose corn sweeteners in the late 1970s and 1980s ``coincidental with the epidemic of obesity,'' said one of the researchers, Dr. George A. Bray, a longtime obesity scientist with Louisiana State University System's Pennington Biomedical Research Center. He noted the research didn't prove a definitive link.
I like the hedging—the link isn't "definitive." No, I guess it wouldn't be. Obesity is surely also "linked" to the Iran hostage crisis and the stagflation of the late '70s and early 80s. Maybe I shouldn't be so skeptical. The study may be a little more scientific than merely looking at correlation rather than causation. But if the research is right, it will be easy to make America thin again. Just ban those high fructose sweeteners. One problem with this will be explaining why the advent of low calories sweeteners didn't stem the tide of fat that allegedly threatens to overwhelm us.
My theory is that we're fat because we enjoy it. We like food. It gives us pleasure. We're wealthy and food's cheap so we're taking on a few pounds. Alex points out that the entire increase in weight over the past several decades can be explained by an extra Three Oreo Cookies a day! Here is a paper by Glaeser, Cutler and Shapiro that takes the economists' approach to weight gain.
Here's my take on the claim that we should tax fatty foods because of the externalities.
March 26, 2004 at 05:00 PM in Medicine | Permalink | TrackBack (2)
Why are gas prices so high?
Today gas prices hit another high, at least in nominal terms. Why? It suffices to turn the floor over to Lynne Kiesling. Here is a related post of hers as well.
March 26, 2004 at 06:44 AM in Current Affairs, Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
You get what you pay for
Smart women who were shut out of the professions used to become teachers. That was bad for the women but good for their students.
The best female students - those whose test scores put them in the top 10 percent of their high school classes - are much less likely to become teachers today.
"Whereas close to 20 percent of females in the top decile in 1964 chose teaching as a profession," making it their top choice, the economists write, "only 3.7 percent of top decile females were teaching in 1992," making teachers about as common as lawyers in this group.
So the chances of getting a really smart teacher have gone down substantially. In 1964, more than one out of five young female teachers came from the top 10 percent of their high school classes. By 2000, that number had dropped to just over one in 10.
Women who do become teachers, however, are better educated today than in earlier years so rather than a total dumbing down there has been a trend towards mediocrity.
Merit pay would lead to better teachers but it is opposed by unions.
This is from the ever-wise Virginia Postrel, NYT password required. Here is a link to the original research. Caroline Hoxby argues that wage compression, often brought on by unionization, is responsible for three-quarters of the decline in the aptitude of female teachers.
March 26, 2004 at 04:20 AM in Education | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
The pledge of allegiance
Yesterday at the Supreme Court, Michael Newdow argued his own case against the phrase "under God" in the pledge of allegiance and apparently he did very well - managing to elicit a rare round of applause from the audience and ending gracefully on time and on point. Personally, although I am not religious, the phrase "under God" doesn't raise my hackles. It's the rest of the pledge that I hate.
Cato's Gene Healy says it well:
From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club....
Bellamy's ritual for honoring the flag was right in step with those other National Socialists. Here's a picture, dug up by Bob Wallace, illustrating the recommended salute (which later was to became politically incorrect).
The salute may be gone but the message remains.
Addendum: Hat tip to Walter in Denver who links to these even creepier photos of kids pledging allegiance.
March 26, 2004 at 04:05 AM in Current Affairs, Law, Religion | Permalink | TrackBack (8)
Water on Mars
Maybe there was once water on Mars. Maybe not. Reuters reports:
"We think Opportunity is now parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on Mars," said Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the science payload on Opportunity and its twin Mars exploration Rover, Spirit.On March 2, astronomers announced that the Red Planet was "drenched with water" at some point. But the rovers' analysis of Mars rocks has now produced the first concrete evidence that liquid water might actually have flowed on planet's surface.
"If you have an interest in searching for fossils on Mars, this is the first place to go," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science.
Love that alliteration—the shoreline of a salty sea. It conjures up images of beachcombers and cottages or at least seashells and seaweed with terns turning in the sunlight. Seems like a bit of a stretch. NASA thinks they've found not just moisture, not just a few molecules of H2O but a sea with rocks drenched with salty spray, rocks lovingly shaped by streaming water. Pardon my skepticism, but it seems that NASA has just a bit of interest in stretching the results. Notice that even Reuters uses the word "might."
This hasn't dampened any of the enthusiasm. Here's one analysis headlined "Mars water discoveries loom huge" that compares the finding to Galileo's discoveries.
...the sheer disclosure of the presence of water on a planet other than our own is monumental. It ranks with the moment, nearly 400 years ago, when Galileo Galilei peered through his telescope and discovered spots on the sun, mountains on the moon and four tiny bodies circling Jupiter.Those revelations, which today are taken for granted, also were monumental in their day. Prior to their disclosure, people confidently -- even fervently -- believed Earth was the immovable center of the universe, surrounded by all the heavenly bodies, each of which was a perfect, featureless sphere. Galileo's announcement was considered so shocking at the time he was charged with heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.
Opportunity's findings have been treated more matter of factly, with NASA officials holding a news conference and bubbling over with enthusiasm at the images Opportunity has transmitted, and members of the media duly reporting the information and displaying the rover's images.
Yet the importance of this finding cannot be overstated.
Until now, we have known for sure of only one planet on which liquid water has flowed -- and water is absolutely essential for supporting life as we know it. There are no chemical processes that will permit the formation of the long, complex organic molecules composing living organisms other than in the presence of water.
It is an extremely simple rule: No water, no life. As long as Earth was the only planetary body containing liquid water -- and, more particularly, seawater -- then it was the only place in the universe where life was possible.
Now, suddenly, there are two.
Is this a huge discovery? Huge for NASA, certainly, eager to send people to Mars in search of fossils or at least an abandoned sailboat.
I'm in the middle of Simon Morris's Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. I suspect Morris is unimpressed with the latest Martian chronicle. He argues that it is very likely that we're alone in the universe. The first part of the book that makes this claim is fascinating with quirky writing and lots of good information. The rest of the book argues for the inevitability of humanity evolving. The writing and narrative of the second half is less spritely and slower going but the first part of the book is very much worth a look.
March 25, 2004 at 09:09 PM in Science | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Can they read us in China?
Glutter.com reports:
All typepad.com and blogs.com hosted sites are banned in China starting this morning, a week after China has agreed to amend its constitution to respect human rights. This is another move by the Central government to curb free speech and freedom of information on the Internet. This is the first time in two years that China has blocked access to foreign servers that host personal sites.
Please write me from China and tell me this is wrong.
By the way:
81% of all cyber dissidents in the world are held in China: 59 out of 72 logged by Reporters Without Borders compared to 38 out of 48 in November 2003.
The afore-mentioned news is tragic, but if true it is a measure of how influential the blogsophere has become. Thanks to Scott Cunningham for the pointer, check out his blog, which covers a good deal of economics.
March 25, 2004 at 02:51 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Russ Roberts, Guest Blogger!
We are delighted to have our colleague, Russ Roberts, blogging with us over the next 10 days or so. Russ is the world's only economist who has written a fable and a romance and a number of papers in top academic journals like the Journal of Political Economy.
What's an economist doing writing a romance? Well, economics is a romantic science. Don't believe me? Here is a description of Russ's book The Invisible Heart.
Sam lives and breathes capitalism. He thinks that most government regulation is unnecessary or even harmful. He believes that success in business is a virtue. He believes that our humanity flourishes under economic freedom. Laura prefers Wordsworth to the Wall Street Journal. Where Sam sees victors, she sees victims. She wants the government to protect consumers and workers from the excesses of Sam's beloved marketplace. While Sam and Laura argue about how to make the world a better place, a parallel story unfolds across town. Erica Baldwin, the crusading head of a government watchdog agency, tries to bring Charles Krauss, a ruthless CEO, to justice. How are these two dramas connected? Why is Sam under threat of dismissal? Will Erica Baldwin find the evidence she needs? Can Laura love a man with an Adam Smith poster on his wall?
Doesn't it just make you want to tune in tomorrow?
March 25, 2004 at 01:52 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Stadium Construction and Broken Windows
USA Today reports on a study by University of Dayton economists Marc Poitras and Larry Hadley: privately financed sports stadiums pay for themselves. Tax dollars aren’t necessary to make them viable. Somehow I doubt that the study will slow the pace of publicly financed sports stadiums. While it may make it more embarrassing for franchise owners to ask for public handouts, what’s a little stigma among friends? The success of the begging strategy is mainly due to the threat of exit—owners demand public financing as a way of extracting money from cities fearful that teams will leave. There isn’t free entry into sports leagues—leagues tightly control new entrants—so cities are always vulnerable to the threat of a team leaving.
The claim that sports teams and new stadiums are good for the economy is a classic case of the “broken window fallacy” of Bastiat. The benefits are seen—the jobs building the stadium, the fans who spend money at the restaurants near the stadium. Unseen are the jobs lost elsewhere and the restaurants on the other side of town that lose business. Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist found that the net benefit of public stadiums is basically zero—there’s no stimulus to the local economy worth talking about. Their conclusion:
In our forthcoming Brookings book, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes, we and 15 collaborators examine the local economic development argument from all angles: case studies of the effect of specific facilities, as well as comparisons among cities and even neighborhoods that have and have not sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into sports development. In every case, the conclusions are the same. A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.
The U of Dayton study is here.
You can find the entire Noll and Zimbalist book online here.
March 25, 2004 at 01:19 PM in Sports | Permalink | TrackBack (2)
The IRS's chosen people?
According to this NYTimes article, a secret 1993 agreement between the IRS and the Church of Scientology lets Scientologists deduct the cost of a religious education as a charitable gift. The secret ruling appeared to come to light when the Sklar's, who are Jewish, attempted to take a deduction for the religious portion of their children's education at a Hebrew school. The IRS wrote them back asking for receipts from the Church of Scientology! The Sklar's provided receipts from the Hebrew school and the IRS denied the deduction. The Sklar's are now suing on the basis that all religions, or none, should be offered the deduction.
The secret agreement seems to have been leaked but no one knows for sure since the both the IRS and the Scientologists are fighting the subpoena demanding its release.
The world is always more bizarre than I imagine.
March 25, 2004 at 04:47 AM in Current Affairs, Law | Permalink | TrackBack (3)
Is Russia a normal country?
Conventional wisdom in the West says that post-Cold War Russia has been a disastrous failure. The facts say otherwise. Aspects of Russia's performance over the last decade may have been disappointing, but the notion that the country has gone through an economic cataclysm and political relapse is wrong--more a comment on overblown expectations than on Russia's actual experience. Compared to other countries at a similar level of economic and political development, Russia looks more the norm than the exception.
That's the take of Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman. Here is the full article. Here is a longer unpublished version.
Here is their view on economic performance:
The best estimate is that Russia's genuine output decline between 1990 and 2001 was small and that it was completely reversed by 2003, following two additional years of rapid growth. Considering the distorted demand, inflated accounting, and uselessness of much of the pre-reform output, it is likely that Russians today are on average better off than they were in 1990.
My take: Mostly I agree. Remember how The New York Times speculated about mass famine, civil war in the streets, or attempted reconquests of the Soviet empire? None of those dire events have come to pass. Parts of the Shleifer piece might be interpreted as Putin apologetics, but put that question aside. For the most part the former Soviet Union has made unexpected progress. If you don't believe me, read my post from yesterday.
March 25, 2004 at 04:45 AM in History, Political Science | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
And so it begins
Headline of front page article in the NYTimes yesterday, "Medicare costs expected to soar in coming years: Warning from overseers."
Perhaps Tyler and I will be able to settle our little debate earlier than expected. For a recap see, Alex 1, Alex 2, Tyler 1, Alex 3, Tyler 2, Alex 4.
March 25, 2004 at 04:30 AM in Economics | Permalink | TrackBack (0)