Month: May 2010

Gattaca University

by  Alex Tabarrok in

From the NYTimes, Berkeley will give its students genetic tests. 

…this year’s incoming freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, will get something quite different: a cotton swab on which they can, if they choose, send in a DNA sample.

The university said it would analyze the samples, from inside students’ cheeks, for three genes that help regulate the ability to metabolize alcohol, lactose and folates.

Those genes were chosen not because they indicate serious health risks but because students with certain genetic markers may be able to lead healthier lives by drinking less, avoiding dairy products or eating more leafy green vegetables.

Don't be surprised if this is soon canceled.

Adam Wheeler’s resume

by  Tyler Cowen in

You'll find it here.  He's the fraud who lied his way into Harvard.  Here is the description of his "book" (supposedly) under review at Harvard University Press:

The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne

– Under review with Harvard University Press 2008-2009

The massive proliferation, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, of technologies for measuring, projecting, and organizing geographical and social space produced in the European cultural imaginary an intense and widespread interest in visualizing this world and alternative worlds. As the new century and the Stuart era developed, poets and dramatists mediated this transformation in the form of spatial tropes and models of the nation. I examine the geographical tropes by which Tudor and Stuart writers created poetic landscapes as a mode of engagement with the structures of power, kingship, property, and the market. Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.

I've read worse.  How you react to that description is a Rorschach test of sorts, especially if you are not thinking it is fraudulent.  Here is a TNR post on Wheeler.  Here is a Princeton University Press post about Wheeler and the book he claimed to have under contract with them, to be co-authored with Marc Shell, a very well-read scholar.

Why are none of the sources reporting how well he actually did at Harvard and elsewhere?  Isn't that an interesting question?  How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud?  I don't mean that question in a cynical light, it is one genuine way of trying to think about how education adds value to labor market outcomes.

Investing in the Poor

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Unincorporated Man is a science fiction novel in which shares of each person's income stream can be bought and sold.  (Initial ownership rights are person 75%, parents 20%, government 5%–there are
no other taxes–and people typically sell shares to finance education and other training.)

The hero, Justin Cord a recently unfrozen business person from our time, opposes incorporation but has no good arguments against the system; instead he rants on about "liberty" and how bad the idea of owning and being owned makes him feel.  The villain, in contrast, offers reasoned arguments in favor of the system.  In this scene he asks Cord to remember the starving poor of Cord's time and how incorporation would have been a vast improvement:

"What if," answered Hektor, without missing a beat, "instead of giving two, three, four dollars a month for a charity's sake, you gave ten dollars a month for a 5 percent share of that kid's future earnings?  And you, of course, get nothing if the kid dies.  Now you have a real interest in making sure that kid got that pair of shoes you sent.  Now it's in your interest to find out if he's going to school and learning to read and write.  Now maybe you'll send him that box of old clothes you were thinking of throwing away.  Under your system you write a check and forget about the kid, who'll probably starve anyway.  Under our system, you're locked into him.

…the real benefit comes about when those 'evil, selfish, horrible corporations' get involved.  How long will it take for a business to realize that there's a huge profit to be made in those hundreds of millions of starving children?…Imagine a world where a bank gives a loan to a corporation to build a school, hospital or dormitory.  Not because its the right thing to do; who cares!  They'd do it because it's the profitable thing to do.  And because of that, my system, not in spite of greed and corruption and incorporation, but because of it, will work better than yours in any time period with any technology you choose."

So who do you stand with, JC or Hektor?

Hat tip to Robin Hanson for lending me the book and from whom I cribbed the description of ownership rights.  Hanson offers other thoughts on the novel.  And here are earlier comments from Reihan Salam.

Draw the rational Bayesian inference here

by  Tyler Cowen in

Germany’s BaFin financial-services regulator said it will temporarily ban naked short selling and naked credit-default swaps of euro-government bonds starting at midnight. The ban also includes naked short selling of 10 banks and insurers.

I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer, my apologies I have misplaced the email and I don't know your name.

Questions that are rarely asked

by  Tyler Cowen in

If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?

That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR reader.  I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English.  The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications.  Plus "N" could be used to mark sentences with novel ideas.  I also would ask for a punctuation mark meaning: "This sentence adds an "N+1" understanding to a problem which everyone else is discussing at an "N" level."  Maybe the mark could be an arrow pointing up to the sky.  Similarly, you could imagine an arrow pointing downwards to hell.

What kind of punctuation mark would you add?

Social welfare expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries

by  Tyler Cowen in

Price Fishback has a new paper and perhaps this abstract should be screamed from the yttertak:

The extent of social expenditures in the U.S. and the Nordic Countries is compared in the early 1900s and again in the early 2000s. The common view that America spends much less on social welfare than the Nordic countries does not survive closer inspection when we consider the differences in the structures of social expenditures. The standard comparison examines gross social expenditures. After adjustments for direct and indirect taxes paid, the net social expenditures in the Nordic countries are much closer to American levels. Inclusion of mandatory and private social expenditures raises the American share of GDP devoted to social expenditures to rank among the middle of the Nordic countries. Per capita net public social expenditures in the U.S. rank behind only Sweden. Add in the private spending, and per capita spending in the U.S. is higher than in all of the Nordic countries. Finally, I document the enormous diversity across time and place in public social expenditures in the U.S. in the early 1900s and circa 1990.

Fishback does discuss how, in line with intuition, the U.S. system is more porous and less universal.  He also stresses how common it is that people do not claim or apply for benefits for which they are eligible.

Here are some of Fishback's papers on-line, but I do not see an ungated copy of this one.

Theories of transparency cross the Atlantic

by  Tyler Cowen in

The European Central Bank disclosed Monday that it had bought 16.5 billion euros in bonds in the first week since taking the unprecedented step of intervening in markets to halt a sell-off of Greek and other European debt.

The bank did not say which countries’ debt it was buying, how much it would spend in the future, or whether it bought any corporate bonds. The 16.5 billion euros ($21 billion) was considered a relatively small amount for the market.

Analysts said the bank would want to keep investors guessing to maximize the psychological impact of the move.

If you paw through the article, you'll see they restored the scary Trichet quotation about markets having started to shut down last week.