1. Swap your airline seat? (speculative)
2. Economists aren’t even consistent in their monetary policy mistakes.
4. Tibet’s Potemkin economy. And what happened this year in the real Washington, D.C., if there is such a thing.
5. Do heads of government age more quickly?
6. And from another segment of our world, “Hotz plans to best the Mobileye technology with off-the-shelf electronics.”
7. The new NYT column on academic press books, this time on inequality.
2) “It’s the waiting that gets to me” (true in WWII movies and monetary policy discussions)
Is Mr Cowen telling you off, Gochujang? Ignore him; it’s probably his evil twin Tyrone who wrote that snide comment.
It’s fine. I know I can over-post.
I would like to thank not just Tyler, but you all. I don’t think I’d know half the economics I do if I didn’t have a place to share my ideas, see the feedback, adjust, correct. I think my econ is slowly getting stronger, which it would not do without to a place to run something up the flagpole.
“I know I can over-post.”
But you routinely do so anyway. Obviously you do not see it as a problem, though you’ve received some polite hints otherwise.
Think quality, not quantity. Over-Posters clutter good blogs and discourage participation by other potential commenters.
“Over-Posters clutter good blogs and discourage participation by other potential commenters.”
Not something I’ve observed.
Does this happen here?
Just an observation. I can think of one or maybe two exceptions in the comments section on this site, namely people who are exceptionally bright and also talented assemblers of information. But for most of you, if you are leaving more than two or three comments on a blog post — you probably don’t have that much to say.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
First!
Second.
Any update on the status of the commenting system? At least there has to be a way to remove comments without destroying the whole thread. More effort would be some sort of approval system that would allow people to sort for best comments (like Disqus)- might resolve some commenting issues (or not).
Please do not go to Disqus.
You should close the comments section for six months. The people who just like to see yawp into the void will get bored and leave, while your actual audience will stick around. Then when you reopen for at least it little the comments section will be decent.
You will lose some page views, but I can’t imagine you make very much from the site anyway.
Some of us are only here for the comments
Can you limit comments by handle or IP address? Allot people only so many per month so people have to think carefully if they want to burn a comment.
What if you are having an active conversation with another poster or posters? These can result in many comments but conversations are a good thing, aren’t they?
That’s different than someone who just posts a lot and never responds to others. And we know who those folks are.
#3 was interesting. Starts off kinda whiny, but gets much better. One real criticism though:
Rebellion comes in many forms, such as Jang Kung-song, the only daughter between Jang Song-thaek, a former leading figure in the North Korean regime and his wife, Kim Kyong-hui, the current North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un’s aunt, who killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills in Paris.
Tibetan monks self-immolating is an act of rebellion (ineffectual as it has proven to be). Intentionally overdosing on sleeping pills is just running away. Don’t kid yourselves people.
I couldn’t decide which was the bigger satire, the initial self-criticism of the purported editor, or the article itself. Thank goodness that some youngsters still have a sense of humour.
It has come to our attention that one of the images that was originally made to accompany this op-ed bore a resemblance to the Japanese Rising Sun Flag. Though the flag has a complicated history, for many people around the globe it is negatively associated with imperialism and oppression. We apologize for not realizing beforehand the associations this image has, and we have since removed it from the op-ed.
The best education money can buy! The Top 4% of students in the world!
I was going to say what sort of idiot illustrates an article by someone of Chinese and Jewish origin with the flag of the quasi-Fascist Japanese Empire. But then I thought I am assuming too much of the Columbia brand. What sort of idiot illustrates an article by someone of Chinese and Jewish origin with anything vaguely Japanese?
That seems a quarter of a million dollars well spent by everyone’s parents
*What sort of idiot illustrates an article by someone of Chinese and Jewish origin with anything vaguely Japanese?*
clearly, someone who is not fitted to answer anything about chinese people and chinese society in general. Which is pretty Lame, considering the author a) being *from* china, b) is studying the social sciences c-z) the gazillions of dollars spent for her intelligence development. Probably for the better to sent her abroad.
But i like the idea that this is just a hoax. Would give me more hope for mankind. If it is real… Well there’s still hope for social mobility then.
7. “In INCOME INEQUALITY: Why It Matters and Why Most Economists Didn’t Notice (Yale University, $40), the economist Matthew P. Drennan draws attention to what he believes is another, and surprisingly overlooked, example of such a consequence: Income inequality, he contends, was a decisive factor in precipitating the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed.” “Surprisingly overlooked”? Maybe it’s a surprise to Drennan, but it’s no surprise to readers of this blog, the explanation given in this blog being that correlation is not causation. Sunspots. That’s more likely the cause.
Many factors contributed to building the housing and debt bubbles which burst causing the so-called great recession.
Income inequality may have contributed in an indirect manner. One symptom of the bubble was the quick rise in the US home-ownership rate to 69% of households. If not income equalty, what’s the purpose of Federal alphabet soup: CRA, ECOA, FHA, FHLB, FHLMC, FNMA, GNMA, HUD, HMDA? Possibly attempts to reduce income inequality, i.e., the ownership generation, contributed to the bubble and ensuing disaster.
Anyhow, I believe “income inequality” to be a liberal ejaculation or password. What’s the counter-sign, “compassion”?
And to suggest that an increase in home ownership is a symptom of increased inequality is asinine.
I was attempting to suggest that government (Clinton and Bush administrations) agencies’ strategies to reduce income inequality increased home ownership and may have contributed to the housing bubble: unintended consequence. What could go wrong?
Home ownership and income weren’t interchangeable. In fact, in the time frame, housing prices soared and the home ownership rates rose to historically high levels while GDP growth and median disposable incomes rises not so much.
I don’t remember “income inequality” being a liberal pass word or cause celebre in the build-up of the housing bubble.
I probably made it worse.
What was the URL of that hilarious spurious correlation website?
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
“7. The new NYT column on academic press books, this time on inequality.”
With NYT articles speculating on the causes of the growth in inequality, I always do a text search on the characters “immigra” to see if the author is intellectually serious. The NYT’s batting average is well below the Mendoza Line.
#5: maybe genetic predisposition to longer life is associated with physical tells (e.g. boyish features) that are not helpful for winning elections.
I’m not sure I believe that, having written it. On the other hand, Ed Miliband.
#1: I just image a client that points at the Ipad screen while the flight attendant tells in a calm but firm voice “stay sit because of taxing, takeoff, turbulence, food is being served, etc”. This would be specially complicated at boarding when the objective is get everybody seated and leave on time.
Changes of equipment, and sellers who miss the flight, will also cause problems. The buyer of an aisle seat is likely to find it already occupied by the person who was in the middle seat.
3. Now I feel so guilty for feeling that rich people use money for nice things while preparing for undemocratic sinecures.
Maybe Singaporean civil servants are so great because they have fully rationalised this position.
#3, why is that pull-quote from the author’s bio newsworthy? Because she is at once Jewish and Chinese, which is somehow freakish or ha-ha funny? I don’t get it.
The person is complaining about being on the top of the Chinese power structure. It doesn’t come more Jewish than that. I think that’s hilarious, don’t you?
On another note, I wonder how much inbreeding is occurring between Jews and Chinese. China is the future, and Jews want to be part of it…much like what happened in Europe early 20th century, with many Jews marrying into the prominent families of Germany and Russia.
@BeenBenjamin – are you aware of the Jews who escaped Hitler and went to China, started a ghetto there, and to this day are mixed Sino-Jewish? So it’s newsworthy, not a publicity stunt.
And hence the possibility of being able to find some decent bread in some parts of Shanghai.
Link 2 was a hilarious example of the bottomless depths of female narcissism that “modernity” treats as something of value rather than the worthless ramblings of the weaker sex.
I don’t know which belief is more amusing, that Columbia is an elite institution or that she is an actual card carrying member of the Chinese elite. This is something that Tyler’s reader should be aware of but are not, the children of Nouveau Riche Chinese do not attend Western schools because of any ideological commitment to the superiority of a liberal education. They send their children because it is a marker of status competition. It is Western, it is expensive, ergo it gives more mianzi to the parents. The actual education of their children is incidental to the expense, since their education is an act of conspicuous consumption. According to Chinese peasant logic, the value of the education lies not in the quality but in how much it costs.
The other point is that these children are mistakenly seen as Chinas future elite. Nothing could be further from the truth. Power in China flows through the Communist Party and its bureaucracy, the social web of obligations and patronage, and the relationships that form among its members. By virtue of spending so much of their adolescence and young adult lives removed from the network of party institutions such as the Communist Youth League and its associated patronage networks, these children will be veritable strangers to the Party and will find themselves locked out of Chinese political decision making process. Their parents pedigrees will only take them so far as their potential enemies will be legion ranging from paranoid old guards to more proletarian party members resentful of their privileged and pampered life. At most such children can expect to become managers at SOEs but the composition of the Politburo will consist entirely of military men and Beida/Tsingua alumni.
The rest is as I previously mentioned simply the pointless ramblings of a stupid little girl making her daddy/identity issues public.
Columbia is certainly an elite institution for significations of the word “elite” customarily understood by educated native speakers of English.
That rib at Columbia was actually a joke. I don’t actually care about the status competition of educational bureaucracies or their fleshly partisans.
The author of the article made your point for you, except with better writing.
I think you are correct about the first point, but that when these kids return to China, and become top level managers at Daddy’s state-run enterprise, or manage the land development firm, they will have the money to pay of those functionaries that stay home.
They will still be elites.
I think you and I have divergent definitions of elite. Simple wealth isn’t enough. The children of wealthy Chinese attending Western schools are functionally lottery winners who have had everything given to them. True power is never given, it must be seized by those with ambition and will.
You probably know more about this than me however as an Ivy League graduate in the late 90’s I encountered a number of students who were children of party elites most of whom seemed to prosper after returning to China.
#3 Another Grievance Studies major. Getting an article published in a college newspaper is likely to be the zenith of her career.
Very disappointed that The Duke meant link 3, not link 2. I normally ignore all fed-related links or discussions, but when I heard that a link about how “Economists aren’t even consistent in their monetary policy mistake.” was actually a “hilarious example of the bottomless depths of female narcissism”, I had to go read it…
I do wonder how someone of mixed Chinese/Jewish ancestry ends up being connected to the Communist elite. Perhaps some tale of White Russians in China c.1930?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews
“Most scholars agree that a Jewish community has existed in Kaifeng since the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), though some date their arrival to the Tang Dynasty (618-907) or earlier.”
Historically they were exceptional in passing the imperial court exam to be officials of the court.
Photo: http://www.sino-judaic.org/index.php?page=kaifeng_jews_history
Plus, there is Harbin, now most famous for its ice sculpture festivals, but which is legendary in Russia for being the place where, about a century or so ago, multitudes who could not honestly identify with the “White Russians” or the “Bolsheviks” and who were forced to flee eastwards wound up. For those who can read Russian that is, I believe, a very well documented stage in the history of emigration in those evil times; not sure how much material is available in English.
One can only imagine, in an alternate history, the near-miraculous collaborations we could have had between Nabokov and his wife (not White Russians) and the My Neighbor Totoro Guy and his wife if the Nabokov circle had fled to Harbin instead of Yalta (and, or course, if the Japanese had not invaded China…history has been much more brutal than one can bear to think about, to tell the truth. One consoles oneself that God is not mocked but still…)
2 can be consistent. Personally, I probably wouldn’t want to raise rates right now if I were in charge. But given that the Fed has been signalling that it was going to raise rates, failure to do so now would mean no one would listen to its forward guidance in the future.
That’s what my “waiting” joke was all about. No one could take it anymore.
al-Jamāʿat ul-Islāmíyatu (Jemaah Islamiah) was founded in the early 90’s. Its founding members began proselytizing just after Suharto’s fall in 1988. The groups leaders had formerly been imprisoned in the late 70’s for preaching a radicalised version of Islam.
Should be a reply to carlospin.
We could debate what was intended by the phrase “radical Islam” but Wahhabist groups have been active in Indonesia at least since the 70’s. Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (the Indonesian Society for the Propagation of Islam) was founded in the 70’s and Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Islam dan Arab (the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Studies, or LIPIA) in the 80’s.
Of course the majority practice of Islam in Indonsia has been and remains tolerant and syncretic.
Mate, Suharto was deposed in 1998.
I was there.
& the Islamic activism in the ’90’s was confined to Yogyakarta, with the government keeping the imams on a v short leash.
ps we’re in heated agreement re: the ‘majority practice of Islam in Indonesia has been & remains tolerant.’ I’m going to look up ‘syncretic’ 😉
Why do they keep them on a short leash?
Because the wealth and subsequently power in Indonesia flows through its tiny Chinese minority. And the place to send and spend their money – along with schooling for their kids – is in Chinese majority Singapore.
This delicate arrangement between leaders and the Chinese flew apart briefly in 1998 and the Chinese were slaughtered in the streets.
But generally, as in Malaysia, a Chinese minority, wealth-producing population may be the antidote to radical Islam. They’re too important to sacrifice for full islamisization.
I doubt that anyone will ever know, but my perception whilst ‘in country’ then, was that there was considerable vandalism & arson of CHI owned businesses in Jakarta in selected [‘chinese]* areas & there were some murders of CHI shopkeepers.
But, dozens. Not hundreds.
* in Indonesia, chinese must take ethnic malay names e.g.,
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ZO6gCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA372&lpg=PA372&dq=indonesian+tycoon+cooking+oil&source=bl&ots=IINSF8dZeN&sig=aseTu5L6Lil2051H2eSuGsBUwro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitlrXLmeXJAhXGLqYKHZyYCbgQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=indonesian%20tycoon%20cooking%20oil&f=false
1) Maybe I’m behind on the times, but it seems like the best most likely sellers- people who would be willing to swap a choice seat to make a couple of bucks- are the least likely to spring for the in-flight internet that would allow them to access the app. Is there a better way to live connect that I’m missing?
WiFi is free on Southwest, which is the airline where this will most likely be used by people who forget to pay for 24-hour automatic check-in.
Sorry…for people who forget or are unable to do 24-hour check-in.
#7
“Faricy observes that tax breaks, logically speaking, are just government spending in another guise.”
At least those guys are being honest for once.
The Chinese/Jewish writer sounds like something out of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, applied to a Chinese context. It demonstrates the predictive value of MacDonald’s work.
‘And what happened this year in the real Washington, D.C., if there is such a thing.’
How to tell that not a single commenter here is a native of DC (or has ever apparently known anyone who is a DC native) is the reality that a NJ born, Fairfax living suburbanite can make such an ignorant comment of a city he lives next to. A suburbanite who presents himself as a daring adventurer, but who seemingly knows nothing of the city a couple Metro stops from his Til Hazel created office.
Makes one wonder if he would write such a stupid comment about any other city –
‘And what happened this year in the real Singapore, if there is such a thing.’
‘And what happened this year in the real Chengdu, if there is such a thing.’
‘And what happened this year in the real Nanjing, if there is such a thing.’
I met a young Islamic radical in Indonesia who came up to me to confirm if the Chinese were the Jews of Asia.
This was very disturbing in 1991, and clued me in that Islam was going to have issues.
What a moron.
5% of the Indonesian population control > 90% of wealth.
Last, there was no ‘Islamic radicalism’ in Indonesia in 1991.
The claim that the Chinese are the Jews as Asia is very old and not particularly Islamic. It is usually assigned to a King of Thailand. I think the King and I King of Thailand too.
Richard Simpkin was a British military theorist and a tank specialist. A very interesting man in many ways even if he was a fan of the German Greens. Anyway in Race To The Swift, published in 1985, he noted the growing militancy of Malay Muslim fundamentalists.
Anyone who had not noticed the impact of the Iranian Revolution on the Muslim world by 1985 was just not paying attention. V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers came out in 1981, strange as it is to say. Still worth reading.
You are the saddest person in the entire world, E.
He should just probably eliminate comments altogether, then.
Say, were you there? Nope. you weren’t.
It was at a bookstore near Gadjah Mada.