Month: March 2010
Markets in everything
The German municipality of Niederzimmern does not have the money to fix potholes. They are now selling the right to fix the road to anyone. In return, the owner of the fixed pothole can put on the road a text of her choice.
The link is here and I thank Henry Farrell for the pointer.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Land of Myanmar, by W. John Kress. The subtitle sounds so intriguing and then you discover its about the search for rare plants. But it turns out to be even better than you thought at first. It's a wonderful introduction to Myanmar, the idea of a scientific quest, and some aspects of botany. The photographs are beautiful too. I very much like books which serve up surprising combinations, as this one does.
2. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists. The color plates are beautiful and favor artworks with large numbers of massed individuals. The book itself is mostly excerpts of classic texts and it doesn't have much insight into…lists.
3. Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What To Do About It, by Randall O'Toole. This Cato book is mostly an attack on transportation planning, including a critique of high-speed rail subsidies.
4. Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman. Short but self-recommending. It is part of the "(Why X Matters)" series. Here is one good review.
5. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", by Kyle Gann. There are over twenty-four recordings of this piece and skeptics can consider that an attempt at competitive rent exhaustion. Yet probably none of those have come close to David Tudor's presentation of the work at its premiere.
6. Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, by Sam Miller. Bombay had its book, now Delhi has its. Recommended, it captures the feel of the place.
Ezra Klein interviews Paul Ryan
EK: And since then, the Congress has stopped it from cutting doctor payments seven times since then. I went back through the record, and you voted for five of those delays.
PR: Oh, yeah! I think we should fix the thing. Don't get me wrong.
That has to do with the Medicare payments "fix," which Congress keeps postponing, often with Ryan's support. There is much more here. Cutting spending is hard!
Here are recent developments on cost containment in the health care bill.
The auction begins
I thank Paul Sherman and Loren Poulsen and Eliot Williams for the pointer; a related link is here.
Assorted links
2. High-risk pools as a reform.
3. Recent account of Haiti, moving.
4. Myths about Russian demographics.
5. Have virtual worlds peaked?
6. Wisdom from William Galston (though I don't like the headline).
Test your moral intuitions, Kunming edition
This was a truly strange article, not only for its content but also for its odd shifts in tone. It seems that in China there is a theme park of dwarfs who perform for tourists; this reader felt he had stepped into a Brian Barry article. Here is one sample of what goes on:
And there is the Swan Lake parody, a crowd pleaser in which male dwarfs dress up in pink tights and tutus and wiggle their derrières.
“The first time I wore that, I felt really awkward,” said Chen Ruan, 20, who used to collect refuse with his parents. “But then I got up on stage and people liked it. People were applauding and I felt proud.”
So is this morally OK? Among other things, the article suggests that this theme park is raising the status of dwarfs, and the disabled, in China, at least relative to how things had been. You'll note that Chen Ruan, cited above, used to pick up refuse.
Is it better or worse that some of the dwarfs seem to enjoy the work? In this kind of "few other good employment options, culture of face-saving and honor, don't insult the boss to prestigious foreigners" setting, are there any employee reports that a reporter actually could trust and pass along at face value? What is the proper moral stance of a journalist toward a story like this one?
By the way, the piece claims that the park is not (yet?) profitable.
Los Angeles fact of the day
Not since the Beach Boys were in peach fuzz and crew cuts has it been so safe to live and play in the City of Angels. Believe it: you are more likely to be murdered in Columbus, Ohio, or Tulsa, Okla., than in the nation’s second most populous city.
Even Omaha, Nebraska now has a higher murder rate. Here is more.
Counterintuitive stories
This one is from Canada:
Muslim group moves to ban burka
"Considering the fact that women are in fact forbidden from wearing burkas in the grand mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it hardly makes sense that the practice should be permitted in Canada, she said."
The proposed ban comes on the heels of reports that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of Egypt's al-Azhar university and the country's highest Muslim authority, is poised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against the garments.
Sentences to ponder
The insurance commissioners in 11 states are elected. Under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, insurers will now be able to finance the election campaigns of those who will be their regulators. Among other powers these state insurance regulators have authority over rates and policy forms.
That's a letter to The New York Times.
Addendum: See the comment by Michael Yuri.
Markets in everything the culture that is Japan
Authentic Japan Airline outfits sell for as much as £11,000 on the black market.
The explanation for the high price is here. If you read the final sentence of the article you will see that this is perhaps one of the few prices that rises with deflation.
For the pointer I thank Ryan Briggs.
Assorted links
1. Incentives still matter on the supply side.
3. Bruce Bartlett criticizes spending caps.
4. Why is there no Jewish Narnia?
5. Will Yao Ming's baby be American and is that a betrayal?
6. Why did economic models fail to predict the medal count in this year's Olympics?
7. Some rules for graduate students; I mostly agree.
Paul Krugman on Chile
He writes (and check out the graph):
Actually, as you can see from the chart above, what happened was this: Chile had a huge economic crisis in the early 70s, which was, yes, partly due to Allende and the accompanying turmoil. Then the country experienced a recovery driven in large part by massive capital inflows, which mostly consisted of making up the lost ground. Then there was a huge crisis again in the early 1980s – part of the broader Latin debt crisis, but Chile was hit much worse than other major players. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, by which time the hard-line free-market policies had been considerably softened, that Chile finally moved definitively ahead of where it had been in the early 70s.
Krugman views this analysis as taking away some credit from Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Given his recent writings on the Euro, it is odd what he doesn't mention, namely that the Chilean catastrophe of 1982-3 stemmed in large part from a Chilean overvaluation of the currency, rooted in a peg to the rising U.S. dollar. Milton Friedman, of course, recommended floating exchange rates.
It's also incorrect to argue that the boom starting in the late 1980s stemmed from the considerable softening of hard-line free-market policies. More accurately, Chile increased its international credibility by becoming democratic, while showing that elections would likely leave the core economic reforms intact.
You would do better to read my post on the economic legacy of Pinochet. There are significant qualifications to the story of Chile as "free market miracle," but they're not the ones Krugman makes.
The Philosophical Cow
Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it's the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?
If each cow brought to life adds even some small bit of cow utility to the grand total of co
w welfare must not beef eaters be lauded, at least if they are hungry enough? Or is the pro beef-eater argument simply repugnant?
Should a cow behind a haystack of ignorance choose the world with the highest expectation of utility? In which case, a world of many cows each destined for slaughter could well be preferable to one with many fewer but happier cows.
Or is it wrong to compare the zero of non-existence with existence? Should a cow philosopher focus on making cows happy or on making happy cows? If the former, would one (or two) supremely happy cows not be best?
I think these questions are important both for thinking about cows and animal rights and for human beings. Tyler has thought a lot about these issues (e.g. here, here and elsewhere). Some people, however, think that cow philosophy is just a bunch of bull.
Diane Ravitch turns on school choice and testing
Her new book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. Her bottom line is this:
The more uneasy I grew with the agenda of choice and accountability, the more I realized that I am too "conservative" to embrace an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something market-based began to feel too radical for me. I concluded that I could not countenance any reforms that might have the effect — intended or unintended — of undermining public education.
Ravitch of course was once the number one advocate of these very ideas; read this excellent article on her intellectual evolution.
Overall it is a serious book worth reading and it has some good arguments to establish the view — as I interpret it — that both vouchers and school accountability are overrated ideas by their proponents. (Short of turning the world upside down, some school districts will only get so good; conversely many public schools around the world are excellent.) But are they bad ideas outright? Ravitch doesn't do much to contest the quantitative evidence in their favor. There are many studies on vouchers, some surveyed here. Charter schools also seem like a good idea.
Is American public education such a huge success these days that it should be immune from significant restructuring? I don't think so. One of the best arguments for our current system is simply that — because it is lax — it doesn't waste too much time for the really smart kids who want to be doing other things. That's an important factor but hardly a ringing endorsement for the system as a whole.
Questions that are rarely asked
On my electric stove, there are two big coils and two little coils. The big coils, not surprisingly, heat up food much better. Why can't I have four big coils? There seems to be room for them. Is that asking too much? Do the little coils have some special use I am not aware of?