Month: December 2005

Most status games are positive-sum

Robert Frank complains about status games:

To celebrate their daughter’s 13th birthday, for example, Amber Ridinger’s parents bought her a $27,000 Dolce & Gabbana gown and hired JaRule, Ashanti and other popular entertainers to provide live music at her party in Miami last month.

David H. Brooks, the chief executive of a company that supplies body armor to the American military in Iraq, invited 150 of his daughter’s friends to the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, where they were serenaded by 50 Cent, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and other luminaries during a birthday party reported to have cost $10 million.

Although these events have prompted much finger wagging by social critics, the parents involved are not behaving abnormally. They are merely spending their own money in an effort to provide a special occasion for their daughters. For a party to be special, however, it must somehow stand out from other parties that define the norm. Here, too, the problem is that expensive birthday parties have become a growth industry.

Kevin and Danya Mondell, founders of Oogles-n-Googles, a company described as an over-the-top event planner for children’s parties, recently announced their intention to license Oogles-n-Googles franchises. Yet no matter how much parents spend, the number of parties that achieve special status will be no greater than when everyone spent much less.

My take: Can’t every party be memorable in a different way?  Seeing Roger McGuinn perform has not detracted from my memories of seeing Paul McCartney or for that matter seeing Vladimir Horowitz.  Why should parties — or other status objects for that matter — be so different?  In many cases good experiences can even complement each other, rather than detract.  Let us also remember that status games encourage people to earn more income, and thus to partially offset the distortionary effect of taxes on labor supply.

My favorite things of Argentina

1. Tango CD: Astor Piazzola’s Tango: Zero Hour.  If you are looking to download a single song, try Carlos Gardel’s El Dia Que Me Quieras.

2. Novel: Cortazar’s Hopscotch [Rayuela].  I read one chapter (almost) every day, which amounts to about three pages.  I expect to finish in July, and no I don’t understand it in English either.  It does hold my attention, and is rapidly becoming one of my favorite novels.  Looking elsewhere, Eduardo Berti is a much underrated author.

3. Short story: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius, by Borges.  Could this be the best short story period?  Here is an excerpt.

4. Film: Nine Queens is the obvious choice, and yes it is implicit commentary on their economic crises.  Here is a longer list.  For "Film, Set In," you might try Kiss of the Spider Woman.

5. Pianist: Martha Argerich.  Try her Chopin, or perhaps her Prokofiev.  She is one of the sexiest women:

Argerich234

6. TV show: I only know one Argentinian TV show — Epitafios — but it is a blockbuster.  Noir about a serial killer in Buenos Aires; sometimes they show it on HBO. 

7. Social science: Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism.  The Argentinian Tocqueville, you might say, and just translated into English last year.  If you relish the idea that rural areas are barbaric, you will find intellectual company in this book.

8. Painter: Guillermo Kuitca.  Try this one, or here is a classic Kuitca image.

The bottom line: This is one of the best places on earth, and yes I am here now.  Comments are open, if you would care to add to this.

Does having daughters make you more interventionist?

This article is fascinating.  Excerpt:

…it was the “switchers” who provided the most compelling evidence. By examining declared voting preferences for the period 1991 to 2004, Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee found that 539 people switched from Left to Right, and 802 switched from Right to Left. The most significant difference between these two groups of switchers? The voters who swung from Right to Left had borne, on average, more daughters.

Read about the cross-sectional results as well.

Crossing the Sahara is costly

A Rough Calculation of Expences to convey Major Laing & Party to Tombuctoo & the termination of the Niger:

To His Highness before leaving Tripoli: $200
To have untouched on your arrival at Tombuctoo: $3000
A present to Hateeta to conduct you to Twat: $500
Do. to the Sheikh sent by the Bashaw: $500
Hateeta’s Friend at Twat to take you to Tombuctoo: $500
The Moor recommended by Messrs Denham & Clapperton: $150
Governor of Gadames Ghadames: $250
Small expences unforeseen say: $300
To Purchase Camels, Horses, Mules, to arm & clothe camel Drivers, say: $1000
Expences from Tripoli to Tombuctoo, say: $1000
on departure from Godames to the Bashaw: $2000
from Twat: $2000
from Tombuctoo: $4000

Total: $17,200

N.B. These sums are certainly large but are in my opinion necessary to ensure success to the Mission as well as your personal safety, and every One of the Africans will expect to make a sort of Harvest of your liberality, & by thus purchase their fidelity, it will leave a lasting Impression of a generous & disinterested conduct envinced by the English Nation.

That is from the fun but not at all new The Conquest of the Sahara, by Douglas Porch, and yes I have double checked the spelling. This anecdote is also a lesson in how the British bureaucracy worked.

David Friedman’s Blog

David Friedman has started a blog.  As you might expect, it’s interesting.  Here is an idea from one recent post.

Libertarians still tend to identify with the Republican party. Save for
historical reasons, it is hard to see why. The current administration,
despite its free market rhetoric, has been no better–arguably
worse–than its predecessor on economic issues. Its policy on public
schooling, the largest governent run industry in the U.S., has been a
push towards more central control, not less. Its support for free trade
has been at best intermittant. Reductions in taxes have been matched by
increases in government spending, increasing, not shrinking, the real
size and cost of government. It has been strikingly bad on civil
liberties. Its Supreme Court nominees have not been notably sympathetic
to libertarian views of the law. Libertarians disagree among themselves
on foreign policy, but many support a generally non-interventionist
approach and so find themselves unhappy with the Iraq war.

The
Democrats have problems too. While things have been looking up for them
recently, their ideological coalition has been losing strength for
decades, leaving them in danger of long term minority status.

The
obvious solution to both sets of problems is for the Democrats to try
to pull the libertarian faction out of the Republican party. How large
that faction is is hard to judge, but it is clearly a lot larger than
the vote of the Libertarian Party would suggest. ….

How
can the Democrats appeal to libertarian Republicans without alienating
their own base?…

I think I have an answer. In 2004, Montana went for Bush
by a sizable margin. It also voted in medical marijuana, by an even
larger margin. Legalizing medical marijuana is a policy popular with
libertarians, acceptable to Democrats, and opposed by the current
administration.

At the very least, prominent Democrats should
come out in favor of the federal government respecting state medical
marijuana laws, as it has so far refused to do. Better yet, let them
propose a federal medical marijuana law. That will send a signal to a
considerable number of voters that, at least on this issue, one of the
parties is finally on their side. It would be a beginning.

Why people don’t like Wikipedia (and blogs)


Q:
Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?

A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.

Q: Huh?

A: Exactly. Our brains aren’t wired to think in
terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an
encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there’s a
wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google’s results. We want to trust
what we read.

    When professionals–editors, academics, journalists–are running
the show, we at least know that it’s someone’s job to look out for such
things as accuracy. But now we’re depending more and more on systems
where nobody’s in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent.
These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically
optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They’re designed to
scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

Here is the link, thanks to http://kottke.org.

Why steal a Henry Moore?

Thieves simply drove up and loaded a two-ton Henry Moore statue into a truck.  But why?  Some commentators fear the statue — worth millions if sold properly — will be melted down to scrap and sold, possibly for no more than $9000.  It is hard to sell famous stolen artworks, and the number of clandestine buyers is smaller than many people think. The Financial Times (22 December, p.6) suggests another hypothesis:

…stolen masterpieces have other uses.  Criminal gangs sometimes use them as surety in deals: a drug dealer might give a supplier a 3 million pound painting in return for a batch of cocaine.  When he has sold on the cocaine, he pays back the supplier and the supplier returns the painting.

Is the use value of paintings so high for thieves?  It is odd to value collateral by its cost of production (i.e., its theft), or its non-realizable "white market" value, but nonetheless this sounds like a coherent equilibrium.  If you can steal a multi-million two-ton statue, and prove it, obviously you are a man to be trusted.

Barbie Torture

No, this is not Klaus Barbie:

Barbie, that plastic icon of girlhood fantasy play, is routinely tortured by children, research has found.

The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from
scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving,
according to academics from the University of Bath.

The
findings were revealed as part of an in-depth look by psychologists and
management academics into the role of brands among 7 to 11-year-old
schoolchildren.

The researchers had not intended to focus on Barbie, but they
were taken aback by the rejection, hatred and violence she provoked
when they asked the children about their feelings for the doll.

Violence and torture against Barbie were repeatedly reported
across age, school and gender. No other toy or brand name provoked such
a negative response…

She and her colleagues Christine Griffin and
Patricia Gaya Wicks concluded that, while adults may find a child’s
delight in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls to be
disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being
imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity, in the same way as
one might crush cans for recycling.

Here is the story.

Seasonal advice from the dismal science, Part 3 of 3

Buy next year’s Christmas gifts next December, not next week. The sales will beckon and a few organized shoppers will be tempted. Resist. What you gain in lower prices, you will lose as the year wears on. There are interest payments and storage costs, but worse is the loss of adaptability. If your gifts are carefully chosen, some of them will need to be junked as your friends, or their tastes, change. If they are bland and generic, worse yet. Flexibility is valuable, and there’s nothing wrong with paying for something valuable.

Make your New Year’s resolutions a little firmer. It was Thomas Schelling who pointed out that the your fight to lose weight is effectively a battle of wits with yourself: the body-conscious dieter battles the weak-willed gourmand who chooses chocolate dessert at every opportunity. Elementary game theory suggests that your inner dieter can gain the upper hand by making a strategic pre-commitment. Make a bet with a friend that you’ll lose 20 pounds or donate $200 to a favorite charity, and another one that if you don’t lose 10 pounds you have to send $200 to Martha Stewart.

Sign a petition: Alan Greenspan to replace Santa Claus. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.” Haven Gillespie’s famous lyrics suggest that behind the cotton-wool beard lurks Clint Eastwood. What a joke. We all know that Santa loves the kids too much to follow through with sanctions on naughty children. Naughty children know it too, which is why parental threats over the next few days will go unheeded. Nobel laureates Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott anticipated just such credibility problems – with monetary policy, as it happens, not stockings, but the principle is the same. Inflationary monetary policy has been banished by drafting in hard men such as Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan. Now that Mr Greenspan is retiring we know what his next post should be: Replacing that soft old fool Santa Claus. Children would know they had to be good, would be good, and the stockings would be filled after all.

Merry Christmas.