Month: May 2011

More Assorted Links

1. The CDC explains how to prepare for a Zombie apocalypse.  Yes really, the CDC.

2. The Business of Bounty Hunting on Freakonomics radio, includes yours truly and legendary bounty hunter Bob Burton. It’s always interesting to me to hear how easy the professionals Dubner and Ryssdal make excellent radio sound.

3. Matt Yglesias warns (?) us about the Rise of the Robot Proletariat. Is this the beginning?

4. Who Killed Autopsies?

Scenes from the Class Struggle

Two quotes:

When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.

and

The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system. As long as there are no consequences if kids or adults don’t perform, as long as the discussion is not about education and student outcomes, then we’re playing a game as to who has the power.

….I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don’t behave differently.

Surprisingly, both quotes are from Albert Shanker, President of the American Teacher’s Federation from 1974 to 1997. Shanker is quoted in an excellent piece in the Atlantic by Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City’s school system, who argues that his eight years of attempted reforms in New York were undermined by teacher’s unions who continue to operate according to the former rather than the latter philosophy.

What do we know about population and technological progress?

Bryan Caplan writes:

The more populous periods of human history–most obviously the last few centuries–clearly produced more scientific, technological, and cultural innovations than earlier, less populous periods. More populous countries today produce many more scientific, technological, and cultural innovations that less populous countries… Here’s a challenge for you: Name the most credible measure of idea production that isn’t at least moderately positively correlated with population.

Is this about the absolute number of ideas generated or ideas as a percentage contributor to economic growth?  If we are estimating the costs and benefits of greater population, or the future of economic growth rates, the latter is arguably the more important variable.  In any case, most plausible theories of economic growth imply that higher populations should lead to higher rates of ideas generation, as measured in terms of value.  Ideas are non-rival and can be enjoyed by the entire group, thus yielding a higher social rate of return.  There are also larger markets to pay for the ideas or award more fame to the inventors.

Here is a famous Michael Kremer paper arguing for a version of Caplan’s position.  That all said, it is far from obvious that Caplan is correct:

1. The measured rate of technological progress, as it contributes to gdp, seems to have peaked in the 1930s.  At that time total population, including the population of scientists, was much lower than today.  “Effective” total population was yet lower, given the backward nature of transportation and communications and trade at the time, compared to today.

2. A recent paper by Ashraf and Galor (it’s also worth reading for other reasons) concludes: “…population density in pre-industrial times was on average higher at latitudinal bands closer to the equator.”  Yet the countries closer to the equator did not end up being the drivers of industrial progress, even though they sometimes had higher rates of progress in agricultural times.  Northern Europe, with the exception of the Dutch Republic, was never the star for population density.  This paper also indicates that technology drives population growth — more than vice versa — and that “time elapsed since a region’s neolithic breakthrough” predicts later technological progress fairly well.

If you add an extra baby to most societies, ceteris paribus, the rate of expected idea generation does indeed go up in theory.  But how important a factor is that, compared to other influences on ideas generation?

Or: at very gross time scales (“the last few hundred years” vs. “the dark ages”) a positive relationship holds between population and ideas production, or at very gross numerical comparisons (“one million people” vs. “ten people”).  But viewed at finer granulations (by the way, the evidence in the Kremer paper is quite gross; e.g., pp. 710-712), the relationship isn’t nearly as strong as one might expect.  In the time series, it’s been largely a negative relationship for the last eighty years or so, as mentioned above.

What model might give you a positive relationship between population and innovation at grosser scales but not finer scales?  Let’s say there are various technological “platforms,” such as “fire,” “agriculture,” and “fossil fuels,” and maybe someday “uploads.”  At any point in time, growth rates depend on how much a region has exhausted the potential of its current platform.  This is largely independent of current population.  That said, larger population areas may have a greater chance of progressing to the next platform, so there is a long-term, gross correlation between population size and levels of technology.  Furthermore, if all regions have more or less exhausted the current platform, the larger region has a greater chance of leading the next breakthrough and thus being first to have the new and higher growth rate, even if most of the time it doesn’t have a higher growth rate for technological progress.  That view is hardly anti-population, but it explains why you will find screwy population-innovation correlations all over the place.  Finally, further breeding, as a recipe for progress, is an extreme lottery ticket and it only works at some special margins.

Japan slides into recession

Japan’s economy contracted at a much-worse-than-expected 3.7% annualized rate in the January-March period, tipping the country into a recession as the March 11 earthquake and tsunami caused declines in consumer spending, business investment and private-sector inventories.

The article is here.  It’s not worse than I expected, or worse than what Michael Mandel expected.  The simple lesson is that earthquakes and tsunamis are contractionary, not expansionary.  This is a classic example of real business cycle theory and how it can also apply to economies which are, in some regards, still in Keynesian corridors.

Sentences to ponder

When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.

Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the researchers stressed, there was no way to know which approach better reflected students’ performance.

From Christopher Shea, here is more, including a link to the paper.

Supply curves slope upward, installment #1438

Hospital emergency rooms, particularly those serving the urban poor, are closing at an alarming rate even as emergency visits are rising, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Urban and suburban areas have lost a quarter of their hospital emergency departments over the last 20 years, according to the study, in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

…Emergency rooms at commercially operated hospitals and those with low profit margins were almost twice as likely as other hospitals to close, Dr. Hsia and her colleagues found. So-called safety-net hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of Medicaid patients and hospitals serving a large share of the poor were 40 percent more likely to close.

In addition, hospital emergency rooms in the most competitive markets were 30 percent more likely than others to close.

The laws of economics have not yet been repealed.

*A Convergence of Civilizations*

That’s the new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World.  I read it as offering three major messages: a) there is no unique pattern for Muslim demographic evolution, b) there is more civilizational convergence than divergence, and c) the demographic data we observe explain a good deal about various Muslim countries.  Here are some specific points:

1. In 1998-1999 about 55 percent of married women in Burkina Faso lived in polygamous relationships.  In the Muslim parts of Nigeria, rates of polygamy can run forty to fifty percent, as opposed to about thirty percent in the Christian parts of Nigeria.

2. Demographically, Iran is very much a Western country with a 2.08 fertility rate, and the authors strongly hint that Iran has a reasonable chance of modernizing as Turkey has; the authors also worry that Turkey has not made a complete demographic transition and thus is vulnerable to backsliding.  In general the authors seem to believe that the modernizing properties of Shiism are underrated.

3. Less than five percent of Uzbek or Tajik women are unmarried at age thirty.  In Morocco it is 41 percent unmarried at age thirty, in Tunisia it is 54 percent, 50 percent in Lebanon, and a staggering 58 percent unmarried at age thirty in Algeria.

4. Palestinian birth rates are not as high as they are often made out to be: “If one takes Israel and the occupied territories together, one can grasp the absurdity of the demographic confrontations: The high fertility rate of Israeli Arabs is an internal threat to the Jewish state, whereas the high fertility rate of the Jewish settlers threatens Palestinian predominance in the West Bank.” (p.67)

5. In Shiite Azerbaijan, there are almost twice as many abortions per woman as live births, 3.2 to 1.7.

6. Among the Muslims of Europe, the Kosovars are arguably the least religious but also the most demographically conservative.

7. The Muslim Malays seem to have combined high birth rates with relatively high status for women.

Speculative throughout, as they say, but always interesting.  Here is one short but accurate review.  For the original pointer to the book I thank Chris F. Masse.  Chris also points us to the DSK prediction market.

Vance isn’t sure if this article is a parody or not

Emotions are running high in the Northbrae area of Berkeley, and the friendly spirit of the neighborhood is at stake, according to a number of small merchants who are afraid they will not survive in the wake of what is being perceived as aggressive marketing strategies at Monterey Market.

Several small businesses say the owners of Monterey Market have begun to deliberately stock items that they specialize in — including certain cheeses, wine and flowers — and they are selling them at predatory prices, which threatens the local merchants’ livelihoods.

A group of Northbrae neighbors has distributed a hand-out in support of the small local merchants in which it criticizes Monterey’s approach. ”We are making a moral and ethical appeal,” said Tom Meyer, speaking for the group. Signatories on the hand-out include Monterey Fish, Gioa Pizzeria, Hopkins Launderette, and Storey Framing. (See the hand-out here.)

…Meyer said that recently the group had been approached by a representative of Monterey Market to set up a meeting. “That discussion will determine where we go from here,” he said.

Asked what he expected from the Market, Meyer said: “They should talk to their fellow merchants about how they could all flourish.”

The story — if that’s what it is and I believe it is — is here.  The caption on the photo reads: “Shirley Ng, owner of Country Cheese Coffee Market, says Monterey Market is under-cutting her prices.”

Kasparov on meta-rationality, the longer article is on Bobby Fischer

Many strong chess players go on to successful careers as currency and stock traders, so I suppose there is considerable crossover in the pattern-matching and intuitive calculation skills required. But the aptitude for playing chess is nothing more than that. My argument has always been that what you learn from using the skills you have—analyzing your strengths and weaknesses—is far more important. If you can program yourself to learn from your experiences by assiduously reviewing what worked and what did not, and why, success in chess can be very valuable indeed. In this way, the game has taught me a great deal about my own decision-making processes that is applicable in other areas, but that effort has little to do with natural gifts.

Read the whole thing.  A related point is that chess players cannot make many excuses when they lose.  “The sun got in my eyes” doesn’t cut it.

Words of wisdom

Basically when you ask questions where the left-wing answer is also the one supported by economics, suddenly left-wing people have a better understanding of economics. But when you ask the other set of questions, it comes out the other way. Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there. This is why I think people who teach economics ought to think harder about their choice of examples when teaching.

That is Matt Yglesias (check out the interesting graph), referring to this paper by Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic.