Breaking a three-day stalemate, the Senate approved an amendment to its health care legislation that would require insurance companies to offer free mammograms and other preventive services to women.
The vote was 61 to 39, with three Republicans joining 56 Democrats and the two independents in favor.
This happened directly [...]
Felix Salmon writes:
Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues [...]
I've been reading lots of year-end "best of" lists, from serious outlets that is, and these are the books which I see recurring with special frequency:
1. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.
2. Cheever: A Life, by Blake [...]
1. Jeff Frankel's vision of fiscal responsibility.
2. Sumner on Selgin; Scott remains one of the best arguments for the blogosphere.
3. Why was the Canadian housing market different?
4. "We found that negative emotions play a key role in how much we enjoy sports."
If you would like takes on Climategate different from my own, here are Megan McArdle, Seth Roberts, and Clive Crook, plus I have mislaid a Bob Murphy post, maybe he can leave the link in the comments (it's here).
I am by no means an expert [...]
Dubai now has the tallest building in the world, and 11 skyscrapers that are taller than any European building.
That's from Ed Glaeser, who offers a more general take on the city-state.
[...]1. Raisin-covered goat cheese (via Yana).
2. Markets in everything: chocolate phone edition.
3. Victor Niederhoffer reviews Modern Principles: Microeconomics.
4. Machine allows anyone to work for the minimum wage.
5. Scott Sumner on the Tabarrok-Cowen AS-AD model.
6. David Wessel on the financial crisis.
[...]I'm still thinking about this fascinating article from the NYT magazine last week, titled "Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?". Here are two excerpts:
...one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land is the billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone, a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the [...]
Davide Cantoni (who by the way is on the job market, from Harvard) reports:
Many theories, most famously Max Weber's essay on the 'Protestant ethic,' have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands [...]
People are not always eager to lay down good vs. evil thinking. I don't mean to pick on any single commentator but here is one example:
...E T Jaynes is spinning in his grave that you used Bayes to justify an increase[d] belief in AGW based on scientist's personal beliefs when they [...]
Somali pirates are raising money through a local equity offering:
In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.
Here is one internal account:
"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided [...]
Austrian "term structure of capital" paradox: high elasticity of derived demand + low elast of substitution in production.
That's from Garett Jones. Garett also asks:
Do smart phones make waiting rooms uglier?
[...]This book represents an attempt to explore the problem of the discrepancy between the trends in two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated.
That's the first sentence of Arnold Kling's second new book; in another context I might have called it "Words of Wisdom." My [...]
Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person's opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly. We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.
Sometimes this tendency will lead us [...]
This year, the budget deficit will rise to 12.7 per cent of gross domestic product - and this assumes there are no further accounting tricks to be uncovered. Deutsche Bank calculated in a recent research note that the country's public debt-to-GDP ratio is headed for 135 per cent. Gross external [...]
In economics, that is. A new paper by Daniel Hamermesh and Gerard Pfann tries to answer that question. Their abstract is worded a little awkwardly, I would summarize their results as follows:
1. Adjusting for citations and other measures, "reputation" (defined both in terms of awards and the quality of the [...]
I'll have three days there, fairly soon. I've never been to Nicaragua before, though I've spent a fair amount of time elsewhere in Central America. Your recommendations would be very welcome and many of them will be used.
[...]1. 83-year-old woman fights poverty in Haiti.
2. Will monkeys type Shakespeare if given enough time?
4. "I am not a number, I am a free man!": free and on-line.
Perhaps it's just political posturing, but on substantive grounds I don't get it. The biggest problems with the proposed reforms have to do with the incentives created by the mandates. That includes the incentives for would-be purchasers (better to just pay the fine and remain outside the pool), the incentives for [...]
I have a few points:
1. Sooner or later an open referendum process will get even a very smart, well-educated country into trouble.
2. Given that the referendum came up, it was wise to root for its defeat. The victory of the referendum is a symbol that prejudice [...]
It is Sunday, at least according to one study conducted in Germany, by Swedes. Could it be because there is much less to buy? Because the cities empty out? Because walking in nature is overrated? Because you are supposed to go to church or are supposed to spend more time [...]
1. "Best buy" programs, from the Poverty Action Lab.
2. More favorite fantasy novel picks.
3. The research productivity of Robert Tollison varies with the business cycle.
4. Economic incentives can work for blood donation: another blow against the Titmuss hypothesis.
5. Blog posts to giggle over; read the [...]
The column is here and one excerpt is this:
China uses American spending power to enlarge its private sector, while America uses Chinese lending power to expand its public sector.
A longer excerpt is this:
China has been building factories and production capacity in virtually every sector of its economy, but it’s [...]
I try not to blog Sarah Palin, but this passage, reproduced on Andrew Sullivan's blog, caught my interest for non-Palin reasons:
"Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoarding Ks and Qs and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores." -- Going Rogue, [...]
2. European arts philanthropy continues to grow.
3. Cookbooks aren't about cooking.
4. Magma bleg: is there anything to these jokers? Please let me know.
5. Is our universe optimized for spaceship travel?
[...]It's not what I had expected:
Observing an old and curious Navajo taboo, Narbona was not allowed to look at his mother-in-law, nor she at him. It was a custom designed to keep the peace and, apparently, to avoid sexual tension. In fact, many mothers-in-law in Navajo country went so far [...]
Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages [...]
A number of readers wrote me this morning and asked what I thought of Paul Krugman's column today. Krugman writes:
As Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick of Yale have shown, by 2007 the United States banking system had become crucially dependent on “repo” transactions, in which financial institutions sell assets [...]
This year my three favorite books were:
1. The new Gabriel García Márquez biography.
2. Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome, and
3. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, read it slowly in small bits.
A very good gift book is Eric Siblin's new The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, [...]
2. Via Arnold Kling (do read his new book), Presidential cabinets: prior private sector experience.
4. Via Bruce Bartlett, French government still paying off a 1738 annuity.
The rhythm of the nation’s kitchens can also be parsed, on an hour-by-hour basis.
At Allrecipes.com, pie searches got the most action on Wednesday morning. But by 10 a.m., people began earnest hunts for sweet potato casserole and stuffing recipes. By noon, 100,000 people had searched for mashed potato recipes. [...]
Dubai World won't repay its debt on time and the government of Dubai won't pick up the bag, raising doubts about its credibility. Who would bail out Dubai itself? Maybe it will be an "interesting" weekend:
Banking stocks tumbled on concern about their potential exposure to Dubai. Indeed, the [...]
Here's all you need to know about the real estate market in Michigan: The 80,000-seat enclosed Silverdome, built for $55.7 million in 1975 to house the Detroit Lions, has sold for $583,000.
And you thought your home had lost its value during this recession.
Think about it this way: $583,000 will get [...]
1. Reprogramming predators, and maybe a pan-species welfare state too.
2. The six great fantasy novels?
3. Forum on the new Robert Pozen book on the financial crisis.
4. Do you wish to hear the other side? Here is George Selgin's case for deflation, now on-line and free.
5. Ezra [...]
Not just the rich:
...cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year. About 70% [...]
Preliminary results are in, and they suggest it has helped with math skills but not with reading achievement, as measured in the 4th and 8th grades. Via Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob:
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school-accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect [...]
I missed this one while traveling, so I am grateful to the loyal MR reader who pointed it out to me:
... the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. [...]
There have been many posts on this topic lately, start with Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong if you need to catch up. Today I have a few simple points:
1. Even if "it is fine to borrow more" is the most likely scenario, it is not the only scenario. Let's take [...]
This possibility had never occurred to me:
Racial attacks like the ones behind the arrest of 32 suspects in Denver are part of a trend spreading across the country, gang experts said Saturday.
As part of the trend, black gang members videotape the assaults in trendy tourist districts and sell them on the underground [...]
I've had many readers emailing me, asking what I think of the "trove" of emails unearthed from climate change researchers. I'll admit I haven't read through the rather embarrassing revelations, I've only read a few media summaries and excerpts. I see a few lessons:
1. Do not criticize other [...]
Bryan offers the most extensive version of his view I've seen him blog. On overall method and meta-ethics, I'm not so far from Bryan (and someday he will get a post in praise of him). But I usually disagree with his applications of the method. For instance he seems [...]
I know of three very good books on the actual (or sometimes hypothetical) application of economic ideas to real world problems:
1. Alex Tabarrok's Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science.
2. Some other book I haven't read and can no longer remember.
There is now a third:
1. Ben Casnocha reviews Kling and Schulz.
2. Are better-looking athletes more likely to win?
3. "Mozart was a Red" -- Murray Rothbard's satire of Rand, here is the full text. It doesn't seem that funny to me.
The new (old) labor market idea -- you can call it fifth best perhaps -- is hereditary jobs:
It is a problem many a company faces in these tough times: how to replace older – and costlier – workers with younger, cheaper ones.
A Rome bank has what it thinks is the solution: to [...]
I have many favorite topics which I don't blog much or at all. One of these, taken from my time in Mexico, is the history of corn. I very much enjoyed this recent article on the topic. There is this good bit:
The sequencing revealed that an astonishing 85 percent [...]
Matt Yglesias writes:
The bill contains provisions that have front-loaded positive impacts on the deficit and also have provisions that have back-loaded positive impacts on the deficit. The bill, rather intelligently, seems to balance this out well leading to net deficit reductions in the short-, medium-, and long-terms. The bill [...]
1. Air Genius Gary Leff is hailed by CNN.
2. Good post on interest rates (though I am not sure I agree with it). Brad DeLong comments. Critically important stuff and two of the best recent economics blog posts, in some time.
A gang in the remote Peruvian jungle has been killing people for their fat, the police said Thursday, accusing the gang’s members of draining fat from bodies and selling it on the black market for use in cosmetics...
Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Col. Jorge Mejía, chief of [...]
1. How much will U.S. taxes ever go up?
2. Useful lateral thinking and how it is described by the lateral thinker.
3. The biological bases of business and entrepreneurship.
4. One hour show with me in Second Life; they even did up a Tyler Cowen avatar. [...]
As long as we are on the topic of slavery, why not consider fiction? This science fiction novel has an intriguing economic premise: you're born a slave and you're not free until you can buy yourself back from your owner (which may be a corporation).
It may sound funny [...]
My fondest memory of Robin Hanson is when we interviewed him for a job and, during his on-campus visit, I gave him some papers I had been working on. Later he emailed me back, before getting the offer I might add, and told me the papers weren't very good and [...]
1. Scott Sumner's most absurd belief: India as #1 in gdp by 2109.
2. Click "play" and watch unemployment grow.
3. Who is Hollywood's most overpaid star, relative to box office returns? Will Farrell is #1 it seems.
4. Markets in everything: NYC McDonald's with sleek Danish furniture.
5. [...]
1. "Self-recommending": the very nature of the authors and project suggest it will be good or very good. This also often (but not always) means I haven't read it yet. I am reluctant to recommend *anything* I haven't read, but I am signaling it is very likely recommendation-worthy and I [...]
Because the program would begin taking in premiums immediately but would not start paying benefits until 2016, congressional budget analysts have forecast that it would generate a nearly $60 billion surplus over the next 10 years, cash that would help the larger measure's balance on paper.
Not long ago I filed this under [...]
That's the title of the new and self-recommending book by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. This work has text by the authors, interspersed with interviews with famous economists, including Robert Fogel, Robert Solow, Joel Mokyr, Doug North, Bill Easterly, Edmund Phelps, Amar Bhide, William Lewis, and Bill Baumol. Here is [...]
Here is the abstract and it has to do with a Smithian theme, namely division of labor:
Using the large variation in the inflow of immigrants across US states we analyze the impact of immigration on state employment, average hours worked, physical capital accumulation and, most importantly, total factor productivity and [...]
I've been trying to find out what Obama ate in China and this is the closest I can come:
"We're also hosting a 'Stars and Stripes' week featuring iconic American cuisine," said a hotel spokesperson, who declined to give her name due to company policy.
"The White House guests may want to enjoy [...]
I think of the biographer as standing up and demanding that economists take their own method seriously. Surely the economist should at some point be required to explain something in the life of an actual human being.
That is from my (favorable) review of E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, [...]
1. Strange China video of the day.
2. Do men live longer if they marry smarter women? (No, I haven't checked if the original paper deals with the identification problem in a reasonable way.)
3. Another review of *The Big Questions*.
4. Daron Acemoglu in Esquire on economic growth.
5. [...]
The feverish but resilient Megan McArdle refers us to a problem in signaling theory:
Slate ponders how to communicate the danger of radioactive waste to the far future. The problem is, if they can't read English, or recognize the radiation trefoil, anything you do sounds more likely to intrigue future anthropologists [...]
Sheikh Mohammed oversees a cadre of undercover mystery shoppers...They pose as prickly members of the public seeking the government's help. Their reports are instrumental in firings and promotions. No bureaucrat can be sure the demanding customer across the counter isn't secretly reporting to the boss. Once in a while, Sheikh [...]
Today's bizarrely fascinating cultural nugget from Japan: Chindogu. Literally translated as "weird tool," Chindogu is the Japanese art of creating deliberately complex devices that solve simple everyday problems.
Here is one example:
The Dumbbell Phone
People cite "lack of time" as the number one reason they don't work out more. With the dumbbell [...]
Ezra Furman takes his music personally. He doesn’t want to just write songs, he wants to change lives, and in the process have his life changed as well.
Which is why the 23-year-old Evanston native is doing something (take your pick) outlandish, heroic, Quixotic, exhausting, ridiculous. He’s writing a song for every [...]Ezra Furman takes his music personally. He doesn’t want to just write songs, he wants to change lives, and in the process have his life changed as well.
Which is why the 23-year-old Evanston native is doing something (take your pick) outlandish, heroic, Quixotic, exhausting, ridiculous. He’s [...]Alex and I will be there for the Southern Economics Association meetings, along with many other economists. I don't know the city well, as I've been there only once. There might be a bit of free time. What should we do? Where should we eat?
[...]A lot of people think you have no right to criticize a bill unless you propose a better bill. I don't agree (if the aforementioned bill is bad on net), but in any case I will give this a try. These are not my first best reforms or even my second best [...]
Edmonton and Calgary are among the few metropolitan areas in the developed world that are not connected to comprehensive motorway systems.
Here is much more, on highways in Canada or rather the relative lack thereof. I am not convinced by his argument that a "bigger and better" highway system is [...]
1. Reverse remittances: Mexico to the U.S.
2. Will intelligent aliens look like us? (By the way, I say no.)
3. The most important law passed this year?
5. This is very dangerous information.
Controlling for location and time fixed effects, weather factors, the pre-game point spread, and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses by the home team (losses in games that the home team was predicted to win by more than 3 points) lead to an 8 [...]
Max Kaehn, an occasional MR commentator, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote:
You think a voting system that sticks us with a two-party cartel instead of a diverse market in political representatives isn’t a major problem? Are you sure you’re an economist?
Here are a few reasons why political competition [...]
Michael Nielsen has two of them:
Question 1: What’s the most notable subject that’s not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia?
Let’s assume for now that this question has an answer (“The Answer”), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all [...]
1. Only 35,000 viewers for Fox Business Network at a typical moment in time; MR content gets a bigger audience than that.
2. The economics of Second Life and Worlds of Warcraft: a discussion and comparison.
3. Atlantic books of the year.
In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, "exacerbating existing access problems" in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Here [...]
I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior. And the amazing thing once [...]
The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to [...]
1. Via Jura Stanaityte, Ten simple rules for choosing industry vs. academia. More simple rules here.
3. "Tell-all" book about IKEA.
4. Countercyclical asset: haunted house novels?
5. China's empty city (of the day). YouTube. At about 1:20 you will see [...]
My investigation has revealed that there are 132 teachers who have paid between Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for their own suspension.
Here is the full story and I thank Dilip Rao for the pointer.
[...]Here is a WaPo piece which suggests it has to do with the transition from adolescence. I recall another piece suggesting it had to do with the female fascination with gay men (is there one?).
Vampires are hardly "my thing," but I do like early Anne Rice, The Night Stalker, [...]
As the system gets gamed, the costs will be much, much higher than the CBO is estimating.
Arnold Kling explains his words in more detail. Elsewhere:
If you think of the social cost of this bill it's well below $900 billion. If we could collect in tax revenues all the dollars [...]
1. Undercover economist eats with Naked Chef.
2. Genetics and success, from Atlantic Monthly.
3. List of hot people in Tokyo.
4. Terse answers from Uwe Tellkamp. I guess he is tired from having written an almost 1000-page book. I really liked this one.
Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million, court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year- old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.
Kapernekas has agreed [...]
A few readers asked me to discuss range voting. Wikipedia defines it as following:
Range voting (also called ratings summation, average voting, cardinal ratings, score voting, 0–99 voting, or the score system or point system) is a voting system for one-seat elections under which voters score each [...]
1. Momofuku, by David Chang and Peter Meehan. This Nelson/Winter treatise on industrial organization teaches you the evolution of recipes and restaurants and (most of all) the mistakes made along the way. Smokiness is an important concept in Japanese food, pickling and fermentation are underrated cooking techniques, a cook can [...]
Every November I scour the critics' "Want Lists" from Fanfare, my favorite classical music periodical. Then I go and spend a lot of money. Here is the list of all the new recordings, from 2009, which were mentioned by more than one critic:
