Month: April 2010
Colombia the economic turtle?
…because trade accounts for only a third of the economy, compared with a Latin American average of about half, Colombia has been sheltered from the worst of the global slowdown. The country also lacks the debt hangover of its western peers; credit is only a third of GDP, despite a mini credit-boom in mid-2007, when consumer lending grew more than 30 per cent.
As well as the peace dividend following the end of hostilities with insurgents, a burst of government spending in 2009, combined with swift interest rate cuts, helped keep the economy afloat. Colombia probably had Latin America's best economic performance last year.
But just as its slump was shallow, so may be the bounce-back. Fedesarollo, a think-tank, forecasts 2 per cent growth for 2010, versus a 3 per cent regional average. The new government faces a fiscal gap equivalent to 4 per cent of GDP. Furthermore, reinserting disbanded fighters into civilian life, plus reparations, could turn the peace dividend into a peace cost.
Colombia's so-called "doggie-paddle economy" – the stroke may be slow and inelegant but it is steady – has overcome far worse. Over the past century, the economy has only shrunk twice.
The link is here.
Colombia (China) estimate of the day
"It costs me as much to ship goods from China to Colombia's main Pacific port, as it does from the Pacific coast up to Bogotá," says one businessman.
The article is interesting throughout, for instance:
Until five years ago, only 15 per cent of Colombia's roads were paved, most of them single lane. In a country where some 70 per cent of cargo is hauled by truck, that made high transport costs a regular burden.
Assorted links
Extreme Foreclosure
The house at 10512 Baldy Mountain Rd. in Sandpoint, Idaho, looks like just another vacant foreclosed home. Some appliances, a bathroom mirror and even the hot tub are missing. The dining room of the three-bedroom house has water damage.
But this isn't your run-of-the-mill problem house. Call it an Extreme Foreclosure. The 3,678-square-foot McMansion is a product of the popular "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" reality television show. It isn't the only "Extreme" home to fall on hard times.
From the WSJ.
A revisionist perspective on ADHD
This article is not perfect, but it is much better than most MSM coverage of its topic. Here is one good paragraph:
That said, some adults with ADHD are highly intelligent, energetic, charismatic and creative, and are able to focus intently on a narrow range of topics that interest them. David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue Airways, and Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's, have spoken out about how the disorder helped them come up with innovative ideas for their corporations, despite their having done poorly in school.
I have tried to track this point through the research literature, but it still seems to me that the way in which ADHD brings a high variance of attention — rather than just jumpy, scatterbrained behavior — is poorly understood. There is, by the way, some preliminary evidence that ADHD is overrepresented in entrepreneurs.
Financial reform and why it is hard to blog
Paul Krugman writes an Op-Ed on where the political debate is at and I agree with most of his points. Of particular importance is this one:
So what the legislation needs are explicit rules, rules that would force action even by regulators who don’t especially want to do their jobs. There should, for example, be a preset maximum level of allowable leverage – the financial reform that has already passed the House sets this at 15 to 1, and the Senate should follow suit.
I favor this but I nonetheless think it remains problematic. The more binding the leverage restrictions, the more banks and other intermediaries may try to recreate implicit leverage off the balance sheet. (This is one reason to push for decentralized market monitoring, though I am not suggesting exclusive reliance on that.) It's fine to call for maximum transparency, but mostly that's just wishing for a different world. Activities off the balance sheet are off the balance sheet for a reason and it is hard to squeeze many of them into traditional accounting conventions. Nor should we try to ban off-balance sheet banking, as it would happen somewhere — both geographically and in some corner of the financial sector – and indeed many of these transactions limit rather than raise risk.
The upshot is that managing off-balance sheet risk requires an ongoing, hammer and tongs approach. There isn't any "once and for all" solution to banking regulation and the harder we try to find one probably the more we will end up relying on regulator discretion and judgment.
Bank regulation is a tough slog, it depends on the quality of the bureaucracy and the periodic attention of a somewhat responsible legislature, "toughness" can be counterproductive, the historic periodic of regulatory "easiness" relied on cartelization and near-automatic profits, and it is like a chess game whereby the private sector eventually finds a way around most of the binding regulations.
And now we can return to why financial reform is hard to blog. There's always a new proposal and a big tizzy over the particular contents of that reform. Whatever one thinks of the specific suggestions, I keep returning to the notion that the quality of the regulators — most of all Congress — truly matters.
How many times can one say that? How many times can one think that and run away in fear?
Arnold Kling has good remarks on transparency.
Do daughters make you more conservative?
Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher report:
Washington (2008) finds that, controlling for total number of children, each additional daughter makes a member of Congress more likely to vote liberally and attributes this finding to socialization. However, daughters’ influence could manifest differently for elite politicians and the general citizenry, thanks to the selection gradient particular to the political process. This study asks whether the proportion of female biological offspring affects political party identification. Using nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey, we find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.
I don't yet see an ungated copy, do you? By the way, I applaud the authors for their "stones" in writing the last paragraph of the paper, such as:
The conservative emphasis on family, traditional values and gender roles, and prolife anti-abortion sentiments all stress investment in children – for both men and women. Conservative policies mirror the genetic interests of women, writ large. They attempt to promote paternal investment in offspring. Further, they stress investment in conceived offspring – “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” In short, Conservative policies support the genetic fitness of women by capitalizing on each pregnancy, reducing male promiscuity, and increasing paternal investment in children. Such policies may impinge on the freedom of parents’ immediate offspring, but they increase the expected number of grandchildren via daughters.
I'm not sure that's true as stated, but it does deserve further debate.
Assorted links
1. Update on gaming the Massachusetts mandate, and more here.
2. When professors get their politics: early.
3. Steve Landsburg's influential books list; he mentions that Parfit is the book most frequently cited by others.
4. Labor hoarding is in decline.
5. China blocks Bob Dylan tour.
6. Literature on analytical anarchism.
7. The obesity epidemic began earlier than we used to think.
8. Bloggingheads TV: Glenn Loury and Ross Levine.
Favorite songs about technology
Michael Weintraub asks:
What are your favorite songs about technology? In my own thinking I have limited the universe of cases to those whose lyrics deal explicitly with technological innovations and their cultural effects, along the lines of Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble" or the Talking Heads' "(Nothing But) Flowers."
Those are good picks. For me, what comes to mind immediately is XTC's "Factory Brides," "Roads Girdle the Globe" (there should be more songs about infrastructure, no?), Kraftwerk's "Computer World" (and many others), and a number of Byrds songs, including "CTA-102" and "Space Odyssey." What do you choose?
Does incarceration make people black?
In a paper in Social Problems, Saperstein and Penner find that there is a surprising amount of variability in racial identification in the NLSY. Some of this variation is due to error or other random factors but some of it also appears to be systematic. In particular, the authors find that if someone has been incarcerated they are more likely to self-identify as black as well as to be independently identified as black. As the authors put it
Results show that respondents who have been incarcerated are more
likely to identify and be seen as black, and less likely to identify
and be seen as white, regardless of how they were perceived or
identified previously. This suggests that race is not a fixed
characteristic of individuals but is flexible and continually negotiated
in everyday interactions.
Here is a key table. In the first column is the respondent's self-identification, European or Black, in 1979. Thus 95% of the people who identified as European in 1979 and who were not incarcerated between 1979 and 2002 identified themselves as White in 2002. In other words, racial identification for the non-incarcerated was quite stable. But only 80% of the people who identified as European in 1979 and who were incarcerated between 1979 and 2002 identified themselves as White in 2002. Thus incarceration appears to affect how people identify themselves.
The result is surprising at first but makes sense once one sees it as a natural extension of Akerlof and Kranton's work on identity.
Note that there are some issues with the data since the precise
questions asked and options given changed over time (hence the change
from "European descent" to "White")–nevertheless, the differences
conditioning on incarceration appear to be robust–but see the paper
for more.
Hat tip Gabriel Rossman.
What I’ve been reading
1. King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes. An excellent short book on feminism, rape, and prostitution. Given how much ink has been spilt on these issues, it's more vital than you would expect; "full of energy," as they say.
2. Solar, by Ian McEwan. Maybe this is still better than most people's stuff, but I didn't finish it. He's lost his intellectual edge.
3. Wolf Hall: A Novel , by Hilary Mantel. Usually I'm willing to blame myself when I don't like "classics," but on this one I'll push back. I started thinking "magisterial" (itself a mixed blessing) and then found myself slipping to "dutiful." It's good — not great — and it doesn't beat reading non-fiction about British history. The second Amazon review hits the mark.
4. The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000, by Thomas A. Stapleford. No, I'm not actually reading this one, but I should be.
5. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, by Haruki Murakami. This remains one of the classic studies of collective action, although it is hardly ever recognized as such.
One more public talk
It's this Tuesday at 8:30 p.m., Room 301 of the Marvin Center at GWU, 800 21st Street Northwest, WDC. I'll open with some brief remarks on "Create Your Own Economy," but mostly I'll be answering written questions from the audience. All are welcome…
Assorted links
1. Judging bloggers by their books. (it's a tie for first)
2. The defining books of recent French literature? (in French, useful list in any case)
3. Richard Thaler: trading up in the NFL draft isn't worth it.
Medical innovation during war
Marines often go on foot patrols with tourniquets loosely strapped high on their thighs, so they can begin cranking right away if a foot is blown off.
The article is interesting throughout and thanks to The Browser for the pointer.
The iPad
Could this be the medium through which the fabled convergence finally occurs?
Most of all, think of it as a substitute for your TV.
It has the all-important quality of allowing you to bend your head and body as you wish (more or less), as you use it. By bringing it closer or further, you control the "real size" of the iPad, so don't fixate on whether it appears "too big" or "too small."
The pages turn faster than those of Kindle. The other functions are also extremely quick and the battery feels eternal.
So far my main complaint is how it uses "auto-correct" to turn "gmu" into "gum."
While I will bring it on some trips, most of all it feels too valuable to take very far from the house.
On YouTube I watched Chet Atkins, Sonny Rollins, and Angela Hewitt.
Note all the categories on this short post!