Month: May 2011
The modern day candlemakers’ story
Chesapeake Bay Candle, known for scented and textured candles that sell for $9.99 at Kohl’s and Target, has set up three factories in Asia over the past 16 years. But when it came to building a plant in the U.S. to expand its customer base and better serve existing clients, the founders were unprepared for the regulatory hurdles.
The new facility was supposed to be up and running last fall, but now isn’t expected to open until the end of June. Expensive upgrades required to meet local building codes have dented margins and forced the company to rejigger its supply chain to backup deliveries with products from Asia.
But don’t feel too sorry for them, this I had not known:
Candles are one industry in which U.S. producers dominate their home market. The National Candle Association estimates the U.S. market is about $2 billion, with imports accounting for 20% or less of that. Imports have been low since 2004, when “the anti-dumping duties came into play,” said the association’s president, Frederic Contino. That’s when duties for Chinese-made candles entering the U.S. more than doubled to the current 108.3%.
Illiteracy and Testing
Here is Matt Yglesias who is always sensible and worth reading on education policy:
Something that I think drives at least some of my disagreements with other liberals about education policy is that I think a lot of middle class liberals implicitly underestimate the extent of really bad learning outcomes. Take this report (PDF) from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund which notes “that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations” and also that “within the tricounty region, there are a number of municipalities with illiteracy rates rivaling Detroit: Southfield at 24%, Warren at 17%, Inkster at 34%, Pontiac at 34%.”
Under those circumstances, I find it difficult to be seized with worry that schools are going to be ruined by teachers “teaching to the test” too much. It is true that school districts that have started taking testing more seriously now need to step up and also take the possibility of outright cheating more seriously. But the fact that huge numbers of kids are passing through school systems and not learning basic literacy drives home the fact that districts also need to take checking to see if the kids are learning anything more seriously. That means tests, and since it’s good to be able to compare different schools to one another that means standardized tests. It’s a limited tool, it shouldn’t be the sole criterion on which the effectiveness of anything is measured, but it’s also an important one.
What is the most neglected and underrated *accessible* pop music album?
You may have your favorite neglected microtonal drone guitar album, but let’s take this in another direction. What’s the best accessible pop album that never caught on with listeners and buyers?
Of course that’s a funny question. If it never caught on, what makes it so accessible? What makes you think it is so accessible? Those are exactly the sort of questions which require the high-octane collective intelligence of MR readers. And I do have a nomination:
Pop Said…, by The Darling Buds.
It’s pitched at the level of good ABBA, and yet few people other than my friend Eric Lyon know it. It has only five Amazon reviews and the band found little commercial success.
Another pick would be Pato Fu’s Televisao De Cachorro, which has only two Amazon reviews. It is better known in Brazil, though it still sounds as if it should have serious crossover potential. Some of the songs are in English, too.
What is your nomination? How can such albums fail to take off?
Assorted links
1. When should we tax goods with inelastic demand?
3. Will on the new Jerry Gaus book; Kevin Vallier’s summary is intended as positive, but it reflects my reservations about the book: “In sum, OPR defends public reason liberalism without contractarian foundations. It is Kantian without being rationalistic. It is Humean without giving up the project of rationally reforming the moral order. It is evolutionary but not social Darwinist. It is classical liberal without being libertarian. It is Hegelian and organicist without being collectivist or statist.” Too much engagement with macro-positions of philosophic others, too many strung together, semi-empirical casual observations, not enough focused, narrowed down progress on the knotty particular problems of social choice and aggregation and whether rules are simply an arbitrary category. The argument takes on too many moving pieces — not quite empirical, not quite theoretical — in a way which is to this reader was not persuasive.
In my pile
1. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels, by Heather Shouse. I’ve read enough of this book to know it is true to its title.
2. The Moral Lives of Animals, by Dale Peterson. It looks like Adam Smith’s TMS applied to the moral sense of non-human animals, making the point that the moral sense is not unique to human beings.
3. Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser.
4. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes; so far I love it, imagine a mix of Raymond Chandler, near-future science fiction, and South African grit.
All are worthy of purchase, we will see how they develop. I found The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, the most enjoyable science fiction novel I’ve read in a few years, and it should appeal to fans of Thailand too.
Electric Roads
Here is an interesting idea.
…what if the energy storage burden was shifted from our overworked cars to the road?
…Electric vehicles, or EVs, could pick up small amounts of electricity as they drive over charging pads buried under the asphalt and connected to the electrical grid. Researchers say that a continuously available power supply would allow EVs to cut battery size as much as 80 percent, drastically reducing vehicle cost.
“Basically you get power directly from the grid to the motors as the car moves,” said Hunter Wu, a Utah State researcher who was recruited from The University of Auckland in New Zealand, where the technology was pioneered, to further develop the concept. “You can travel from the West Coast to the East Coast continuously without charging.”…
The AV (alternative vote) electoral reforms
The UK is voting on this today. Here is a good survey of social choice approaches to the question, and here is a survey of how AV systems work. The basics are this:
Alternative vote (AV) is a type of preferential voting in which voters are asked to rank the candidates from first to last. The basic idea is that if no candidate is the first choice of 50% + 1 voters, then the candidate who received the fewest first place votes is eliminated. This candidate’s voters then have their votes reallocated to the candidate they ranked second. This reallocation process continues until one candidate achieves 50% + 1 votes (more on this later).
Too often the social choice approaches focus on the formal properties of the voting and do not capture the actual political incentives of electoral systems, which tend to follow from imperfect information and the behavioral tendencies of voters. In this case the key change is that competition for votes becomes messier and less clearly linked to major party identities.
A long time ago I wrote this analysis of related (but not always identical) systems:
Electoral systems based upon the single transferable vote tend to produce the
following effects:
• voters can express preferences for more than simply their favourite candidate
or party;
• representatives are focused towards constituency service and district policies,
rather than national policies;
• political parties are weak, non-ideological, and subject to frequent infighting;
• the ability of the legislature to check the executive is weak;
• most voters are confused by the mechanics of the single transferable vote;
and
• sophisticated voters have an incentive to manipulate the system and vote an
order which is not their true preference.
That is followed by a much more detailed analysis, scroll to p.56 for more. At best such systems are workable, but it is hard to see why they should bring any major advantages.
What is a good, short readable book on market economics?
Boswell, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I’ve been asked to select a book that all incoming freshmen will (supposedly) read over the summer and then give a lecture on the topic in the fall. The constraints are two-fold: it should be a short, affordable paperback, and it should be an interesting read that will engage nearly everyone, especially those who have no interest in economics whatsoever.
There must be a good, short book out there on economics that illuminates the power of markets and the economic way of thinking. Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek are out – too heavy and dense for the average reader. Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” was selected a few years earlier. Henry Hazlett is out of date. Any suggestions for possible books? P.J. O’Rourke on Adam Smith? Bastiat’s “The Law”? Charles Wheelan’s “Naked Economics”? Something by Tim Harford? “Fooled by Randomness” by Taleb? John McMillan’s “Reinventing the Bazaar”?
Ideas? There is also Russ Roberts and early Paul Krugman, among others.
The Military Industrial Complex
From Wired:
John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.
Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement, an entity designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.”
Chess, a game of war from India/Afghanistan/Persia
A reader at Everyday, No Days Off sent in this picture of a chess set made by a US Marine deployed in Afghanistan. The kings and queens are .50 caliber cartridges and the rooks are 40 mm grenade cases.
For the pointer I thank Selena Miranjian.
Assorted links
Bill James pursues serial killers
That’s right, the baseball guy with superb skills of pattern recognition. The article is interesting throughout. Here is one James proposal:
James also posits a way to reform prisons, which he dubs “violentocracies.” His proposal: smaller facilities that house no more than 24 inmates and are part of a larger, incentives-based system. At a Level 1 prison, for example, you get a lawyer, a Bible, and around-the-clock supervision; at Level 5, a cat and a coffee machine. At Level 10, you can earn a living and come and go with relative ease. The idea, James says, is not only to reduce the paranoia-fueled violence in large prisons but to encourage prisoners to work their way up the ladder.
The core of the article is more like this:
In reading so many crime stories over the years, James was surprised that so many weak descriptions are taken seriously, while so many good ones go unheeded. In his system, police would rank eyewitness accounts, from a few basic details about the suspect’s height or race (Level 1) to IDing your neighbor as he moves a body out of the garage freezer in broad daylight (Level 6). These scales could later be applied to James’ 100-point conviction system.
For the pointer I thank Brent Depperschmidt.
Jeremy Grantham vs. Julian Simon
Here is nineteen pages of Grantham (pdf), very much exaggerated in tone but useful and sometimes startling throughout. (I’ve linked to this before but I wanted to pull out some particulars this time around.) Check out the graph on p.5; most of the decline in commodity prices since World War II has been reversed in the last decade. Excerpt:
The highest percentage of any metal resource that China consumes is iron ore, at a barely comprehensible 47% of world consumption. Exhibit 9 shows the spectacular 100-year-long decline in iron ore prices, which, like so many other commodities, reach their 100-year low in or around 2002. Yet, iron ore hits its 110-year high a mere 8 years later! Now that’s what I call a paradigm shift! Mining is clearly moving out of its easy phase, and no one is trying to
hide it.
Of course China won’t be devoting fifty percent of its gdp to investment for much longer. Furthermore, a new technological platform will arise and commodity prices will fall once again. The question is — when? It doesn’t have to be soon. Catch-up growth boosts commodity demands and catch-up growth can outrace TFP-based extraction productivity growth for extended periods of time. That’s why China can grow at ten percent for decades but we have no real chance of doing the same. Progress is harder at the frontier. Julian Simon wrote about how high commodity prices create incentives for new discoveries but he never compared those potential TFP gains to the power of catch-up growth to boost demand and thus high prices; keep in mind The Ultimate Resource first came out in 1981.
Reihan Salam and Robin Hanson predict that, on the energy front, solar power will come to the rescue. Maybe so, but right now the prices of fossil fuels are robust or soaring. I don’t read many newspaper stories about the new solar power companies bubble, Spain aside, and that bubble seems to have burst. How many market prices indicate an optimistic prediction about solar power in the next thirty years? I find it striking that the two most popular and workable alternatives to fossil fuels are water and wind power (nuclear is not popular, though perhaps workable), which in their essence date from medieval times or earlier.
On Grantham, Paul Krugman offers useful comments, with which I largely agree. Here is Mark Thoma on decreasing crop yields. And Tim Worstall comments.
The culture that is Japan there is no great stagnation
Japanese invent a box that can simulate a kiss over the Internet:
The device looks like an ordinary box attached to a computer with a rotating straw. A closer look reveals otherwise. Students at Japan’s Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications have created a small device that uses motor rotations with the aim to simulate the feeling of a kiss over the Internet. Warning: this might be the most disturbing thing you’ll see today.
Upon closer inspection, we learn that the kissing device responds directly to a person’s tongue. On one end, a person rotates the “straw” in one direction and the “straw” on the other end will rotate in the same direction. The result is a powerful tactile response that feels like you’re giving or receiving a kiss. From the demonstration video, the device looks a lot more effective than that concept cellphone that uses a wet sponge to transmit moisture onto a person’s lips.
For the device’s creators at Kajimoto Laboratory, the kissing device has a lot of potential, “The elements of a kiss include the sense of taste, the manner of breathing, and the moistness of the tongue…
But where is the demonstration video? Can you find it on the site or elsewhere?
For the pointer I thank Natalie B.
Secrecy markets in everything how to know you are living next door to OBL edition
The neighbor said if local children kicked a ball into the compound, someone from inside would pay the children for the ball rather than let them step onto the grounds.
From CNN, via MonkeyCage.
From the comments: “Not surprisingly, the kids understood incentives. The lead audio report now on the NYT says that the kids would be given 50 rupees (about $1.12 USD according to x-rates.com) and that they would therefore repeatedly kick the ball over the fence.”