Month: March 2005

What determines foreign aid after a disaster?

When it comes to Uncle Sam doling out disaster
relief dollars to foreign countries, it apparently helps to be a friend
of the United States and to catch the eye of the New York Times.  That’s because each news story in the Times about a
natural disaster abroad produces more than a half-million dollars more
in U.S. disaster relief than what the stricken country otherwise would
have received, based on the magnitude of the calamity and other
factors, claim three political scientists who have studied the politics
of disaster relief.

A. Cooper Drury of the University of Missouri, Richard Stuart Olson of
Florida International University and Douglas A. Van Belle of New
Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington compiled data on 2,337
natural catastrophes occurring between 1964 and the end of 1995,
including how often stories about a disaster appeared in the Times.

The Times, in this context, serves as a proxy for general media attention.  Furthermore:

…disaster assistance is awash in politics at every step of the process.
For example, basic foreign policy concerns have a huge impact on the
initial decision of whether to give aid. Allies of the United States
are about seven times more likely than non-allies or neutral countries
to win OFDA approval. And while the Cold War may have brought the world
to the brink of nuclear extinction, those were the salad days of
disaster relief: Awards were significantly larger during the Cold War
years than they are now…

Here is the story; scroll down further for an interesting but flawed discussion of social security and demography (what about birth control pills?).  So far I cannot find the paper itself on line.

Tomatoes and the force of law

This last week my home state of New Jersey made the tomato the official state vegetable [NB: this is the same state that named an NJ Turnpike rest stop after Vince Lombardi].  But isn’t the tomato a fruit?  In defense of its action, the state cited an 1887 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that tomatoes were subject to tariffs on vegetables.  Supposedly tomatoes can qualify as a vegetable because they are served with dinner and not as dessert.

Here is the link.  I believe the blog is by Craig Newmark’s daughter, it is worth a look.

Camille Paglia on poetry

In my new book, Break, Blow, Burn, I offer
line-by-line close readings of 43 poems, from canonical Renaissance
verse to Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, which became an anthem for my
conflicted generation. In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak
individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured
poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for
their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased
focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive,
self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they
can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they
treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for
effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or
images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a
sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points
are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas
are rampant – a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and
depression or a simplistic, ranting politics (people good, government
bad) that looks naive next to the incisive writing about politics on
today’s op-ed pages. To be included in this book, a poem had to be
strong enough, as an artefact, to stand up to all the great poems that
precede it. One of my aims is to challenge contemporary poets to
reassess their assumptions and modus operandi.

In
the 1990s, poetry as performance art revived among young people in
slams recalling the hipster clubs of the Beat era. As always, the
return of oral tradition had folk roots – in this case the incantatory
rhyming of African-American urban hip-hop. But it’s poetry on the page
– a visual construct – that lasts. The eye, too, is involved. The
shapeliness and symmetry of the four-line ballad stanza once structured
the best lyrics of rhythm and blues, gospel, Country and Western music,
and rock’n’roll. But with the immense commercial success of rock music,
those folk roots have receded, and popular songwriting has grown weaker
and weaker.

Read more here.  And here is the Amazon link, if you are willing to pre-order on the presumption that the book actually appears; Publishers Weekly gives the release date as April 1…

Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

Markets in everything: A Dog’s Life

Now it is bottled water for your dog or cat:

Jason, a spaniel-retriever mix, is now the chief product tester for…PetRefresh for finicky critters nationwide…

It’s also costly to slake a pet’s thirst from bottles. With the average 60-pound dog drinking a liter of water a day, that’s a roughly $400-a-year habit at $2.29 per 2-liter bottle of PetRefresh.

The company is now selling about 50,000 bottles a year.  And Jason, by the way, is no longer drinking from the toilet bowl (in fact the water tries to mimic some qualities of the ever-loved toilet juice, poochies like coolness too).  That is from Friday’s Wall Street Journal, and thanks to Courtney Knapp for the pointer; here is the link, here is her blogNB: The product is also considered safe for people.

Addendum: Jacqueline Passey (whose excellent blog relates the gripping and  dramatic story of her life) sent me this NPR article and clip about music and songs for your dog.  Apparently dogs don’t like percussion, or the word "no" in songs.

Underappreciated economists, a continuing series

Julio Rotemberg.  OK, so being tenured at Harvard Business School is not the same as lost in the woods.  But you don’t hear enough about him in the economics profession, when in fact he is one of our most creative thinkers.

My favorite Rotemberg paper is "A Theory of Inefficient Intrafirm Transactions," American Economic Review, 1991.  It is poorly written and the model is clumsy but I love the idea.  Firms do not exist to lower transactions costs, rather they usually raise transactions costs (price aside, wouldn’t you rather go buy a new computer from a retail outlet than try to order one through your purchasing department?).  An asset is brought into a firm when an entrepreneur sees that the asset is currently underpriced.  The firm buys the asset to capture future rents, but don’t expect ex post transactional efficiency to result.  That being said, it makes sense to allow this process to continue, given the absence of serious alternatives to market bidding, however imperfect it may be.

Rotemberg’s paper on altruism explores the idea that you often feel altruism for your co-workers, but you rarely feel altruism for your boss.  This will limit the degree of hierarchy; furthermore some firms may fear inter-employee altruism, knowing that it will be used against them.  His paper on fairness constraints on market pricing is a brilliant, sprawling mess on a vitally important topic.  Why do firms hold poorly publicized temporary sales?  They want one group of customers to think the firm cares about their welfare, while those who buy after the sale ends feel no regret at paying the higher prices.

Here is a previous installment in this series on Brian Loasby.

Markets in everything — talk to aliens

A group of engineers has offered a solution for people who want a
direct line to aliens – by broadcasting their phone calls directly into
space.

People
wanting to contact extraterrestrial beings through www.TalkToAliens.com
can dial a premium rate US number and have their call routed through a
transmitter and sent into space through a 3.2-metre-wide dish in
central Connecticut, US.

The
service, launched on 27 February, will cost users $3.99 per minute,
says Eric Knight, president of the company. He says that a large radio
receiver – like the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico – situated on a distant
planet might be large enough for an alien civilisation to receive the
calls.      
   

But who pays the long distance charges when ET returns your call?  Here is the story, and thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

Should under-20s be allowed in the NBA?

It appears that Commissioner David Stern is pushing to ban under-20s from NBA play.  And surprise, the player’s union — whose median member is older than 20 — is not screaming about this proposal.  But what are the economics?  If a team drafts an under-20 player, are there negative external costs placed on the rest of the league?  I can see a few scenarios:

1. Drafting younger players makes it harder for bad teams to improve.  The lower-ranked teams pick first, but now they are no longer assured of getting real value.  The draft becomes more like a true lottery, which hurts the long-run competitive balance of the league.  And if teen players do pan out in a few years time, they can become free agents and move to winning teams.

2. Drafting younger players forces teams to spend more on scouting to predict player quality.  College ball in essence provides free training and free information.

3. Drafting younger players gives the league as a whole a bad reputation.  Furthermore the overall quality of play is lower.  Teams invest in future stars and future wins, not caring enough about the bricks they shoot up in the meantime.  But hey, other people are watching, or at least we hope so.

4. Forcing young athletes to play in college induces college ball fans (blecch, I hate college basketball) to take greater interest in the NBA.

5. Young phenoms, such as LeBron James, now have more years in the league since they are drafted earlier.  This boosts interest and attendance for everybody.  If you think that the NBA is superstar-driven, arguably teams do not draft young enough.

6. Perhaps later drafting would produce more stars.  Many players rush to the NBA and lose the chance to learn the game.  They are overconfident, while a commons problem plagues the drafting teams.  Waiting would make almost everyone better off, yet no single party can be induced to wait.

I’ll side with #5.  I suspect that Stern and the player’s union are either a) making a simple mistake in the name of misguided moralism, or b) crafting some broader Faustian and Coasian bargain where Stern offers this as one chip.

The commercialization of European art

Arts and business, once parallel worlds in Europe, are
merging as never before. More companies than ever back the visual
arts: Patronage has more than doubled in the past 15 years in the
U.K. and more than tripled in France.  The difference is that, where once companies funded the arts
selflessly and on a whim — the chairman’s, or his wife’s — they
now seek bang for their buck: their name in the show’s title, free
museum access for staff and client parties, the right to advertise
their sponsorship, and the right to run spinoff educational and
social programs. And when all is said and done, they conduct
studies to make sure it was worth it.      

European nations find themselves so upset by U.S. influence, in part, because they are being drawn inexorably toward our economic model; read more here.  And by the way:

Surveys show that only 4 to 7 percent
of consumers see sponsorship as a betrayal of the art, according
to Angela Diakopoulou, managing director of Marketlink Research,
which conducts sponsorship evaluation studies on behalf of
customers such as UBS, Unilever and the National Gallery.

Who stays up the latest?

The Portuguese, it turns out.  3/4 of them stay up past midnight.  Next in the night owl rankings come Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Spain, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, in that order.

And how about the earliest risers?  91 percent of Indonesia is up before 7 a.m..  Then come Vietnam, Philippines, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan (hey, they stay up late too; 41 percent catch less than six hours), India, Finland, and Norway.

The biggest snoozers?  The Australians — 31 percent of them sleep more than nine hours a day, or lie very badly.  As always, we are sampling only those who can and do respond to the survey.  The study was by Nielsen, here is one summary.

Four things you (I hope) already know

The purpose of our blogging is to circulate ideas that are new, or at least new to us and perhaps to you.  But every now and then there is something to be said for sheer repetition of the important.  If nothing else, this incursion into the known might make those points more memorable, more salient, or more likely to influence your behavior.  So here goes:

1. Torture is morally wrong, and the U.S. government should not be torturing people or easing the use of torture.  And yes I will make an exception for the ticking nuclear time bomb.

2. We have dropped the ball on securing Russian nuclear weapons.  There was simply no good reason for this mistake.

3. Avian flu could be a very very serious pandemic; here is the latest.  We are not prepared.  How about more investment in faster vaccine production technologies, not to mention an improved legal and regulatory climate?

4. Choose the better, not the worse.  Have you failed to apply for your 401K employer-matched savings contribution?  Do you simply refuse to see the doctor for a needed check-up?  Do you fail to perform small considerate but ultimately costless household chores for the benefit of others around you?  Do you fail to realize that all food tastes better when cooked with sea salt?  Repent and reform.

We now return you to the regularly scheduled blogging…

Identity and Transhumanism

(The debate so far Tyler 1, Alex 1, Tyler 2).  Transhumanism raises two issues of identity, personal identity and species identity.

We change our personal identities all the time not only in obvious ways such as cosmetic surgery, psychoactive drugs, and emigration but even more through personal growth.  A university is at it most glorious and exciting when students are confronted with new ideas and visions that forever change who they are.

Contra Tyler, what Kass, Fukuyama and others worry about is not that the demand for identity is too strong but that it is too weak.  In their equation, Personal growth + Biotechnology = Velociraptors.

When the demand for a change in personal identity is strong it can have important external effects.  You may not want to be a velociraptor but if I change what choice do you have?  Or you may simply have a preference (atavistic and irrational perhaps but still a preference) for human beings as they are now.

Tyler makes the mistake, however, of jumping from such and such preferences are important and real to such and such preferences justify regulation/taxation/subsidization etc.

But I have many real identity preferences that do not justify coercing others.  I think of myself as a professor of economics at GMU but I do not have an absolute right to my job.  I am a friend of Tyler but Tyler gets a say in this too.  I understand why the Quebecois want to prevent the use of English in Quebec but I don’t agree that they have the right to do so.

In the same way, I understand that some people don’t want to expand the human lifespan beyond its "natural" limits but I object to their preventing others from doing so just because they don’t like the sight of sprightly senior citizens.

Women, IQ and Marriage

In one study, four British universities measured the IQ of 900 11-year-olds
and revisited them 40 years later to see how their lives had moved on.

They found that the brighter girls were less likely to find a man who
wants to marry them, with their chances diminishing dramatically in
direct proportion to their level of intelligence.

For each 16-point rise in their IQ, their marriage prospects fell by 40 per cent.

In contrast, boys’ chances increased by 35 per cent with each 16-point rise.  (Qtd. here).

One theory is that men want to marry women who are not as smart as they are.  I thus explained to my wife (who has a PhD in microbiology) how lucky she was to find a really smart man.  Her response was unprintable in a family blog.  Let’s just say that she had an alternative theory of why smart women don’t get married, something about a fish and a bicycle.

Why are there so many overweight NBA players?

A new study by The Associated Press reveals that nearly half of NBA players qualify as overweight using the body-mass index (BMI). According to the BMI, the only NBA player at a healthy weight is Mavericks center Shawn Bradley.

Here is the link.  Here is a photo of 7’6" Shawn Bradley, occasionally known as "The Stormin’ Mormon" and "The Human Stick."  Here is more information.

Addendum: The Bradley line is a joke…(: