U.S. clothing chains do not support pact on Bangladesh reforms

by on May 16, 2013 at 1:39 pm in Current Affairs, Law | Permalink

From Brad Plumer:

Nearly all U.S. clothing chains, citing the fear of litigation, declined to sign an international pact ahead of a Wednesday deadline, potentially weakening what had been hailed as the best hope for bringing about major reforms in low-wage factories in Bangladesh.

Companies including Wal-Mart, Gap, Target and J.C. Penney had been pressed by labor groups to sign the document in the wake of last month’s factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed at least 1,127 people. More than a dozen European retailers did so. But U.S. companies feared the agreement would give labor groups and others the basis to sue them in court.

…Wal-Mart reiterated Wednesday that it would not sign the accord at this time, because it “introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”

…Most U.S. companies, however, balked at the language in the accord. Some said it would would expose them to excessive legal liability — particularly in America’s litigious courts. Written by labor groups, the agreement would require retailers who source clothing from Bangladesh to commit to pay for inspections, building upgrades and training — all enforced by binding arbitration.

Here is more.  Most likely, the damage done to Bangladesh will continue.  Note that the prospect of successful litigation was not what drove FDI into the 19th century United States, or twentieth century Singapore, to the point where wages rose significantly.

14 comments

Claims about pastries

by on May 16, 2013 at 11:32 am in Education, Food and Drink | Permalink

Which raises a delicate question: Having already eclipsed Paris in Michelin stars, could Tokyo chefs one day eclipse the French at their own cuisine?

I put the question to pastry chef Sugino, who trained in France and is one of only four Japanese members of the prestigious Relais Desserts, an association of the world’s top pastry makers who meet regularly to exchange ideas.

Choosing his words carefully, he notes that pastry shops in France are having difficulty finding young people willing to put in the time and effort required to learn the craft. He also says that even top French patisseries are now taking shortcuts — by using stabilizers in their desserts, for instance.

“They are losing the basics,” Sugino says. “It is possible that, 10 or 20 years from now, the French will have lost the art of pastry but that it will live on in Tokyo, in Japan.”

Here is more.

15 comments

Have we seen self-defeating austerity in the United States?

by on May 16, 2013 at 6:12 am in Current Affairs, Economics, Uncategorized | Permalink

Everyone has been talking about the revised CBO deficit forecast, which suggests the short-term U.S. fiscal picture is more favorable than had been realized.  It can be said that in the short- to medium-term, the deficit is no longer an issue (in my view that was the case anyway, but that is a different story.)

But I am puzzled as to how the whole story is supposed to fit together, at least from an Old Keynesian perspective.

For instance, we have been told that the United States has been engaged in a good deal of fiscal austerity in the last few years.

We also were told that fiscal self-austerity was quite possibly self-defeating (or here, pdf) or at the very least fairly close to self-defeating.  That is, it would make budget balance harder rather than easier.

The amount of attention, and the fervor of the rhetoric, also suggest that this was seen as a major issue, not one minor to moderate factor with seven other significant confounding factors operating on top of it.  Admittedly this latter point is more of a subjective impression, but I believe many people have shared it.

OK, now here goes the potential story.  We did fiscal austerity, it was self-defeating, that was a major factor, and we ended up in…a better budget situation than we had been expecting?

It is fine to say “our budget situation could have been better yet,” but then the fiscal austerity story then seems to collapse into one factor among many confounding factors.  Which is fine by me, but it is not the story we seem to have been receiving.

I am myself comfortable arguing something like “when underlying fundamentals are sound, and/or there is monetary accommodation, an economy can withstand fiscal consolidation just fine.”  That is simply a more specific variant of the above.

Another “way out” is to question whether “austerity” is always to easy to measure, given the associated modalities and baselines involved in its current definitions, and given the multiple dimensions of fiscal policy, and so perhaps the degree of austerity has not been nearly as high as we were told.  I can buy that too, but still it would be news to the Old Keynesian accounts we have been reading.

So what’s up?

102 comments

Matt Yglesias appreciates *Star Trek*

by on May 16, 2013 at 4:12 am in Film, Philosophy, Television | Permalink

You will find his essay here, and I have many points of agreement with him, but I think he undervalues the first series.  Characters and script were excellent in about sixty percent of the original episodes.  It is also noteworthy that the original characters have entered popular culture for an enduring period of time and we are still making movies about them forty-five years later.  It’s not absurd to think of someone saying “Beam me up, Scotty” fifty years from now.  I don’t see Data or any other later character receiving the same treatment, nor do I think that any of the later installments would have, on their own, generated an entire franchise of installments, spin-offs, sequels, and the like, where Matt can tweet something like “Animated series is non-canon, people. Get with the program.”  If you’d like a treat, watch some of the D.C. Fontana-scripted Star Trek episodes, noting that “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is one of the funniest and most profound takes on “the great stagnation” to be found in popular culture or anywhere else for that matter.  And it was written before the great stagnation even started, and by Roddenberry’s office assistant at that.  Magic was in the air.  As for “Spock’s Brain,” well, that is another matter.

73 comments

How to eat well in Genoa [Genova]

by on May 15, 2013 at 3:55 pm in Food and Drink, Travel | Permalink

Genoa is one of the best food venues in Italy, as is Liguria more generally.  It is also one of the best places in Europe for vegetarian dining.  Maximize the number of tarts and vegetable tarts you eat, skip hotel breakfast and look for small places with morning snacks, preferably baked goods, and treat them as the equal of cooked dishes.  Forget about meat altogether.

1. Antica Sciamadda, 14-16 Via San Giorgio, arrive at the 11:30 opening and keep on buying the tarts and farinata as they are freshly baked and put out on the counter.  There is a vaguely Arabic feel to the dishes, and there is an excellent video of the place here.  There are many excellent “sciamadda” in Genoa and they lie somewhere between a food stall and a very small restaurant, so do not count on them being open for dinner.

2. Trattoria alle Due Torri, Salita del Prione 53, near the Columbus house.  Order pasta and focaccia, this is some of the best spaghetti I’ve had, and the pansotti (ravioli in walnut sauce) is notable.

3. La Rina, superb seafood restaurant, don’t focus on the main courses.

There are relatively few tourists in town, although the most common group — by far — is Russians.  From Bologna, here is a post about flunking out of Gelato University.

7 comments

Our improving short-term budget picture

by on May 15, 2013 at 1:44 pm in Current Affairs, Economics | Permalink

You will find summaries here from Annie Lowrey and also Ezra Klein.  I like Ross Douthat’s remarks:

…almost nobody is willing to break out the champagne on these estimates. The Keynesians think our shrinking deficit is a sign of the White House’s foolish surrender to austerity at a time when the economy still needs more government spending, not less, to achieve real lift-off. The deficit hawks think a dropping deficit will only encourage Washington’s fatal short-term thinking, by persuading policymakers to ignore the still-yawning gap between our long-term commitments and our revenues. Conservatives don’t like the extent to which we’re taxing our way to temporary fiscal stability (some of the unexpected deficit reduction reflected high-income tax filers paying extra for 2012 to avoid higher rates for 2013), while liberals have reason to fret that the White House’s “fiscal cliff” strategy squandered an important opportunity to raise upper-income taxes even more. And anyone who worries about the American political system’s ability to do structural reform can’t be that encouraged by the path we’ve taken to this point – the crude cuts to discretionary spending that leave entitlements untouched, the higher marginal tax rates rather than a rate-lowering, deduction-capping tax reform, and of course the general inability to compromise in the absence of artificial deadlines and self-created crises.

I don’t drink champagne but I’ll break out the dark chocolate instead.  One way to put it is that “yapping” — on all sides of the political spectrum — is overrated, most of all by the yappers themselves.

A slightly different take would be this.  Voters are getting more or less what they want, which is some spending restraint, mostly holding the line on taxes, not too much trust in government as a way of moving forward, and a love of entitlements.  One can find that objectionable, and indeed I do across a number of fronts, but there you go.  We are not going to elect a new people anytime soon, and in this odd sense you can see all the recent political gridlock as reasonably democratic, more so than its critics would like to admit (I know I’ll generate a bunch of criticisms citing poll data about how Americans really want this, that, or the other but I’ll hold my ground on this one).  Relative to the quality of the preference inputs, we are getting a better outcome than one might otherwise have expected.  After all, isn’t that what this country is really all about?  We may not have the world’s best farinata, but let’s raise a toast to America once again.

37 comments

Assorted links

by on May 15, 2013 at 11:39 am in Uncategorized | Permalink

1. Peter Chang has opened a new restaurant in Fredericksburg.

2. “If only the government would apply the same level of thoroughness to their supervision of food and milk in China.”

3. What is the real IRS scandal?

4. Is the real estate market crashing in Canada?

5. Robin Hanson on robot economics.

6. Ashok Rao reviews our MRU course on the economics of the media.

7. D.H. Lawrence on Edgar Allen Poe (excellent short essay).

56 comments

The future is here

by on May 15, 2013 at 7:21 am in Economics, Education | Permalink

The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.

Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.

Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master’s program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.

…The deal started to come together eight months ago in a meeting between Galil and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun.

“Sebastian suggested to do a master’s degree for $1,000 and I immediately told him it’s not possible,” Galil said.

Eventually, the program came together for about $6,600 per degree. In a blog post, Thrun compared the day of the announcement to the day he proposed to his wife.

There is more here.  Hi future.

75 comments

Whose entire body of work is worth reading?

by on May 15, 2013 at 7:15 am in Books, History, Philosophy, Uncategorized | Permalink

Ryan T. asks:

I’d be curious to see Tyler’s “completist” list. In other words, authors whose entire body of work merits reading. If this does get a response, I’m most interested in seeing the list begin with literature.

I’ll repeat my earlier mention of Geza Vermes.  And to make the exercise meaningful, let’s rule out people who wrote one or two excellent books and then stopped.  Adam Smith is too easy a pick.  I won’t start with literature, however, but here are some choices:

1. Fernand Braudel.

2. George Orwell.  Plato.  Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.  Hume.  William James.

3. Franz Kafka, he died young.

4. T.J. Clark, historian of art and European thought.

5. J.C. D. Clark, the British historian.

Let’s stop here and take stock.  Many historians will make the list, because if they are good they will find it difficult to produce crap.  Without research, they cannot put pen to paper, and with research a careful, thoughtful historian is likely to be interesting.  With thought you could come up with a few hundred historians who were consistently interesting and never wrote a bad book.  Then you have a few extreme geniuses, and J.S. Mill might make the list if not for System of Logic, which by the way Mill himself thought stood among his best works.  Timon of Athens hurts Shakespeare but he also comes very close.

Do any producers of “ideas books” make this list?  Other than those listed under #2 of course.  And are there truly consistent (and excellent) authors of fiction, other than those with a small number of works?  I’m not thinking of many.  How about Virginia Woolf or John Milton or Jane Austen?

One also could make an “opposite” of this list, namely important authors whose works are mostly not worth reading, and you could start with Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley.  The existence of Kindle makes it easier to discover who these people really are.

168 comments

Brink Lindsey’s *Human Capitalism* is now out

by on May 14, 2013 at 3:09 pm in Books | Permalink

The subtitle is How Economic Growth Has Made us Smarter — and More Unequal, you can buy a copy here.

35 comments

Red Lights for Profit

by on May 14, 2013 at 1:13 pm in Economics, Law, Political Science | Permalink

TAMPA BAY, Florida — A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines.

The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state’s policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs).

…Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year…with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies….”Red light cameras are a for-profit business between cities and camera companies and the state,” said James Walker, executive director of the nonprofit National Motorists Association. “The (FDOT rule-change) was done, I believe, deliberately in order that more tickets would be given with yellows set deliberately too short.”

See Buchanan and Brennan’s The Power to Tax for an analytic approach and Benson, Rasmussen and Sollars for another example of bureaucratic revenue maximization.

Hat tip: Radley Balko.

48 comments

Assorted links

by on May 14, 2013 at 12:40 pm in Uncategorized | Permalink

1. Google flu trends, and Google dengue trends.

2. Against empathy?

3. Kevin Drum on robots.

4. Japanese butter grater, and the standing restaurant (Japan also, coming to New York), and more Edward Hugh on Abenomics.

5. Italian designed sneakers.

6. The place names of Orkney and the Shetlands.

7. The wisdom of Steven Pearlstein, on austerity.

8. Geza Vermes has passed away, read all of his books.

39 comments

Markets in everything, the culture that is Manhattan

by on May 14, 2013 at 11:21 am in Economics | Permalink

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida.

“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”

That is by the way much cheaper than Disney’s own “VIP service,” which costs over $300 an hour.  Here is more, and I thank Neal and also Adam Cohen for the pointer.

88 comments

Stereotyping in Europe

by on May 14, 2013 at 6:23 am in Current Affairs, Data Source, History | Permalink

stereotyping

Each column is interesting, for instance read down for “Most Compassionate.”  It’s funny how many individuals do the same for themselves, I might add, in what has to be one of the simplest and most common of all intellectual mistakes.

Those results are from the new Pew report, summarized by David Keohane here.  The French are growing increasingly disillusioned with the European project, and on key questions the French see the world as the Italians or Spanish do, not the Germans.  And there is this: “The report also takes down a few German stereotypes. Apparently, Germans are among the least likely of those surveyed to see inflation as a very big problem and the most likely among the richer European nations to be willing to provide financial assistance to other European Union countries that have major financial problems.”

78 comments

Attempted fish markets in everything, economies of scope edition

by on May 14, 2013 at 5:54 am in Economics, Science | Permalink

The headline is: “Desperately Seeking Cichlid: Fish Species Down to Last 3 Males, No Known Females.”

Once upon a time the Mangarahara cichlid (Ptychochromis insolitus) lived in a single habitat: a river in Madagascar from which the species gets its name. That river has now been dammed and the habitat has dried up. Today there are just three Mangarahara cichlids left—all males. Two reside at the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) London Zoo Aquarium; the third lives at the Berlin Zoo.

Although the species appears to be extinct in the wild, ZSL London Zoo hopes that somewhere, somehow a female or two might exist in private hands. “We are urgently appealing to anyone who owns or knows someone who may own these critically endangered fish, which are silver in color with an orange-tipped tail, so that we can start a breeding program here at the zoo to bring them back from the brink of extinction,” aquarium curator Brian Zimmerman said in a press release last week.

The zoo has already reached out to other facilities around the world, with no luck. Now the only hope lies in private aquarium owners, fish collectors and hobbyists who might see the zoo’s appeal and realize that they own a female cichlid. The zoo has even set up a dedicated e-mail address for anyone with information: fishappeal@zsl.org.

Of course you can’t count on the market alone, as there are cultural preconditions for cooperation:

…even if a female does turn up, breeding won’t be guaranteed. Zimmerman told the BBC News that the Berlin Zoo used to have a female that it had hoped to breed with its male. Instead, the male killed its potential mate. “It’s a fairly common thing with cichlids,” Zimmerman said.

We’ll see how the supply elasticity works out on this one…

For the pointer I thank Chris MacDonald.

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