Month: February 2010
More assorted links
1. Rortybomb evaluates financial innovation.
2. Markets in everything: abandoned missile sites for sale.
3. Jamie Whyte: Would fewer voters make for better voters?
4. Haiti's top reconstruction official owns the country's only domestic source of ready-mixed concrete.
5. Markets in everything (the image is safe for work, though not the concept).
Jamie Lawrence’s principles for judging books
He writes me an email:
We somehow ended up talking about things we absolutely judge by first impression. We both read a lot and widely in general, and it was a fun topic.
An easy one for me to note was that I skip technical/professional/academic work that is far enough outside of my expertise that I know the baseline knowledge assumptions are beyond me. Imperfect, but in general, a good filter.
I skip nearly all books by politicians, executives, and similar people. Even when people tell me that one is good, it usually isn't.
I really dislike reading music reviews. They almost never seem insightful, and rarely tell me anything I didn't realize I wanted to know.
Sort of the opposite of the above filters, I tend to really enjoy reading applied trade books for things far outside my expertise. An example is that about six months ago, I read a treatise on elevator traffic management that was fascinating.
What other principles can you think of? I go to Mary Riley Styles Falls Church Public Library and check the non-fiction Return carts, to see what other people have been reading.
The economics of placebos for self-remitting diseases
Daniel Carpenter, who just wrote the very impressive FDA book, has an interesting paper on his home page:
I develop a simple stochastic model of inference and therapeutic utilization in the presence of placebo effects, when the underlying medical condition may be self-remitting. In the model, expectations generate a “felt” health state which can mimic the medically cured health state even when the treatment in question has no real curing power. This effect may be augmented by self-limitation of the medical condition for which the treatment is utilized. A human agent then applies Bayes’ rule to the felt history as if it were generated pharmacologically. A more sophisticated agent knows of placebo effects but does not know the precise extent to which they contribute to curing. I describe the bias that attends inference and the under – or overutilization of therapies under such a model. A central result of the model is that human placebo learning is generally subject to greater bias in estimating treatment efficacy when diseases are self-limiting. Human agents may commit several types of decision errors under placebo learning. They may continually choose a more costly (expensive, hazardous) treatment when a less costly one would work as well, or they may continually use inferior treatments for life-threatening illnesses. When diseases are self-limiting, both these types of error are more likely when the human agent has high initial beliefs about the treatment. Possible applications of the model include the patent medicine industry, the robustness of markets for herbal and nutritional supplements, and the contemporary stability of counterfeit drug operations.
Of course this applies a lot more broadly than to medicine. It helps explain why people overuse and underuse "treatments" of many different kinds, including education. Here is Dan Carpenter's page on fly fishing.
Behavioral Economics in Song
Liam Delaney gives The Flaming Lips "a honourable place in the
behavioral economics songs hall of fame for the 'yeah yeah yeah song' which
reminds us that it is 'a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you
want because you cannot know yourself…'."
I take Delaney's Yeah, Yeah, Yeah and raise it with Chris Smither's Heh, Heh, Heh song which runs in part:
Pretty soon you're gonna ask me,
How come the life you lead,
Doesn't make you very happy,
Or satisfy your needs,
You talk about your needs as though
You know just what they are,
When in fact to really know them,
Is like traveling to a star,
It takes so long you die along the way,
So I say hey, hey, hey.
One of my papers, which never got very far, took this as inspiration to think about how preference discovery could modify various economic concepts.
Your nominations?
What is theft?
Chris Hartman does a fill in the blank exercise on Google — "_______ is theft?" — and reports this:
It's #2 that warms my heart. Of course you'll note that it's publishers who appear on this list four times.
Addendum: Chris reports some additional results.
Assorted Links
- Andrew Gelman can't take von Mises seriously as a philosopher. Oh brother.
- To improve happiness, imagine valued things gone.
- Charlie Munger's parable.
Hat tip: Andrew.
*The New Yorker* writes up Peter Chang and *China Star*
Yes I know the article is gated but I wanted to blog the link anyway, out of sheer enthusiasm. It's a superb piece. China Star is my favorite Fairfax restaurant and it's the #1 restaurant for GMU blogger lunches and debates (though one of us hates it; can you guess which one? We make him go nonetheless). It's also where we take job candidates, at least the ones we respect. Even though Chang is now gone, the restaurant remains superb in the hands of his successors, who have kept many of his original recipes. Some people claim they get better meals when I go there to eat with them. It's so close to our house that sometimes Natasha and I walk there. They know us well and are rarely surprised by our order. For two, our default is the braised fish and Sichuan chili chicken, on the bone of course. Scallion fried fish is a must for larger groups. John Nye likes General Kwan's Spicy Beef there. They have real kung pao shrimp. Kudos to Calvin Trillin for covering Chang and his mobile culinary empire.
Lots of assorted links today, the world has been busy
1. What Brad DeLong really needs (hint: Peter Orszag already is getting it).
2. Claims about education and attention.
4. Problems with India's Green Revolution.
5. The well that never runs dry: the culture that is Japan, with a cameo by Gorbachev, who is being fed eels.
Sentences to ponder
You cannot imagine really solving the Greek imbalance without – at least somewhat – correcting the German imbalance.
Here is more, mostly on why the IMF cannot solve the problem.
Haiti fact of the day
Between 25% and 30% of postearthquake surgeries will need to be done again to avoid problems, says Dr. Jean "William" Pape, an infectious disease authority who is founder of Gheskio, an HIV/AIDS clinic next door to a field hospital set up by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The title of the article is "Emergency Doctors Leave Haiti."
The culture that is Japan
“The concept of this restaurant is that Robot No. 1 is the manager, which boils the noodles, and Robot No. 2 is the deputy manager, which prepares for soup and puts toppings,” said Famen’s owner, Kenji Nagaya. “Human staffs are working for the two robots.”
Here is much more, interesting throughout. Here is one more bit:
One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it “buys” itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, “like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?” Mr. Wurzer says, “We had that.”
The rice fields of Japan
I thank Yan Li for the pointer. Here is more information.
Assorted links
1. Myron Scholes lecture on YouTube.
2. Eliot Spitzer on taxes and growth.
3. Marriage and jobs: we're slowpokes in both.
4. Why has the Australian property bubble yet to burst?
5. Revisionist claim that Haiti death toll is below 100,000; hard to evaluate.
6. Hollywood Stock Exchange to go "real money."
7. Sometimes the internet complements TV.
8. Lars von Trier directs Danish tourism ads (or maybe this is a joke?)
*Reputation and Power*, a new theory of the FDA
The subtitle is Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA and the author is Daniel Carpenter. Here is the book's home page but I don't yet see an Amazon listing. Here is a Barnes&Noble listing, note the price discount.
Where to start? It exhausts me to even write about this book, which is the most comprehensive and most detailed study of a regulatory agency written — ever – to the best of my knowledge. It supplements and overturns all existing work on its subject and it will prove a model for future investigations. It's not short!
The starting point is the notion of reputational capital and the claim that the FDA seeks to preserve and extend its reputation, for a variety of political reasons. One implication of this is that the FDA is sometimes too loose and other times too strict but that both biases are possible. The framework is then used to address numerous questions, including the following:
1. Why the U.S. has the most bureaucratically intensive drug regulation in the world.
2. Why the 1962 amendments were passed.
3. Why FDA regulation is so often treated as de facto irreversible.
4. Why the tenure of a division director matters for how the decisions of that division are treated.
5. Why there is so much judicial deference to the FDA.
6. Why the FDA has been so influential on a global scale.
7. How public attention affects the speed of FDA procedures.
The author makes a strong case that the FDA is one of the most powerful and most important regulatory agencies in the world and one of the most important extensions of state power. Everyone interested in the economics of regulation should read this book, just be prepared to be a little overwhelmed. I would also note that this is not mainly a partisan book in one direction or the other, though on net I read the author as wishing to see a stronger FDA. (On p.379, for instance, I read Carpenter as overly dismissive of the "drug lag" argument.)
Here is Carpenter's previous book, which I have not read. For the pointer to this work I thank Steve Teles.
The laws of New York City (not from *The Onion*)
Here is a new one:
Months after it barred schools from holding most food fundraisers, the city says bake sales can go on–as long as no homemade treats with undisclosed calorie counts grace the fold-out tables. The new regulation, designed to combat ever-increasing childhood obesity, limits bake sales to "fresh fruits and vegetables, or one of 27 specific packaged items" that include low-fat Doritos, Nutri-Grain Cereal Bars (blackberry only) and Linden’s Cookies (butter crunch, chocolate chip or fudge chip cookies in two cookie packs) among other things.
The article is here and hat tip goes to Elmira Bayrasli.