Month: March 2012

Project Nim

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I highly recommend Project Nim, the documentary about the life and times of the chimpanzee Nim who was raised as a baby in a human home and taught sign language.


There are a lot of strange moments in the film but perhaps none stranger than this: Stephanie LaFarge, Nim’s adopted mother who breast-fed him as a baby, is eager to reasure us that as Nim grew older and more interested in sex:

I never felt sexually engaged with him. There was a sensuality but Nim was a pre-teen.

Do think about that for a moment.

Nim is later taken from her but she sees him once again when she is now a much older woman. She describes her first thoughts and reactions:

He wasn’t particulary attracted to me now that he was an adult chimpanzee. I wasn’t beautiful or anything like that.

He wasn’t particularly attractive to me now that he was an adult chimpanzee. I didn’t have a, “Oh, isn’t he beautiful,” or anything like that.

Project Nim is from director James Marsh who also made the great Man on Wire.

Addendum: Lots of great comments in this post. See especially Belle Ball who knew Nim and who corrected my quotation.

Facts about Italy

by  Tyler Cowen in

Industrial output in January was five per cent down on a year earlier, while a study by Intesa Sanpaolo, a bank, shows that national consumption of food, drink and tobacco fell in 2011 to levels last seen 30 years ago.

And:

John Elkann, chairman of Fiat, expects Italians to buy fewer cars this year than they did in 1985. Registration of new Fiat group cars in Europe fell 16.7 per cent in February from a year earlier.

And:

Whereas electricity producers were fretting four years ago that Italy lacked generating capacity, one senior utility executive told the Financial Times he feared that industrial consumption would never return to the then levels.

Analysts warn the worst is yet to come. This month Italians will feel the first impact of Mr Monti’s revenue-raising measures when they start paying higher regional income tax. In June reintroduction of a tax on first homes and higher rates on second homes come into force, to be followed in October by a further rise in value added tax.

The article is here.

Corporate cash and Apple

by  Tyler Cowen

Apple alone represents $64 billion or 36% of the total $179 billion increase in corporate cash since 2009. And in 2011, overall corporate cash would have actually declined by $6 billion had it not been for Apple’s $46 billion increase.

…Supported by our expectations that consumers worldwide will continue to feast on Apple products, we expect overall corporate cash and its concentration will increase in 2012. Apple alone could represent 12% of total corporate cash, about three times more than the next cash king. …

There is more here, and I thank Brian Bares for the pointer.

Top marginal tax rates, 1958 vs. 2009

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is another excellent post from Timothy Taylor.  Excerpt:

It’s interesting to note that the share of income tax revenue collected by those in the top brackets for 2009–that is, the 29-35% category, is larger than the rate collected by all marginal tax brackets above 29% back in the 1960s.

And:

Raising tax rates on those with the highest incomes would raise significant funds, but nowhere near enough to solve America’s fiscal woes. Baneman and Nunns offer this rough illustrative estimate: “If taxable income in the top bracket in 2007 had been taxed at an average rate of 49 percent, income tax liabilities (before credits) would have been $78 billion (6.7 percent of total pre-credit liabilities) higher, taking into account likely taxpayer behavioral responses to the rate increase.” The behavioral response they assume is that every 10% rise in tax rates causes taxable income to fall by 2.5%.

And this zinger:

One could also use the example of 1959 to argue that many more taxpayers in the broad range of lower- and middle-incomes should face marginal federal tax rates in the range of 16-28%.

I do not favor such a shift, yet somehow that is a neglected comparison.

*A Naked Singularity*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Contemporary American fiction faces an ongoing problem of what to write about.  Yuppie life in Brooklyn doesn’t have the gravitas, suburban ennui is long since overdone, and so much of American life — mostly  for the better — doesn’t face serious moral choices.  Sergio de la Pava has solved this problem by writing about the American legal system, set in New York City and with a Colombian immigrant public defender.  At first I was skeptical but at page 256 (out of 678) it is still getting better.  It is likely to make my “best of the year” list.  My five word summary would be “A more approachable William Gaddis.”  You will note it is published by University of Chicago press and presumably it is “too serious” to have attracted a major trade contract.  It’s not for everyone, but it’s living up to its billing as a sleeper under the radar.  You can pre-order it here.

Very good sentences

by  Tyler Cowen

If the Fed is targeting inflation, then there is no liquidity trap, no paradox of thrift, no paradox of toil, no fiscal multiplier, no “Depression economics.”

That is from Scott Sumner, Q.E.D.  The rest of the post is about Switzerland, sort of.  Scott also reports in a p.s.:

The CA data is from the most recent issue of The Economist.  They also report that the consensus forecast for RGDP growth in the US is 2.1% in 2012 and 2.2% in 2013.  Because we are in a recovery, that’s obviously higher than the consensus forecast of trend growth.  In other words, most economists now see the US trend rate of RGDP growth as being something like 1.5%.  After 150 years of 3% trend, that’s a startling downshift.  Tyler Cowen is no longer a contrarian; The Great Stagnation is now conventional wisdom.

Has baseball become an inferior good?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From John D. Burger and Stephen J.K. Walters:

World Series telecasts are now an inferior good. Income and the time cost of consumption interact so that a ten percent income increase reduces viewership by 1.8 million households. Increased availability of substitutes reduces ratings but increased drama improves them.

What does that say about the future of the sport?  About the future of television?

For the pointer I thank Kevin Lewis.

Innovations>Patents

by  Alex Tabarrok in

AEI held a session on patents and patent reform building off Launching the Innovation Renaissance. I opened and Judge Paul Michel, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (retired), James DeLong of the Convergence Law Institute and Michael Abramowicz of George Washington University School of Law all offered comments.

Here is one brief bit from my talk. You can find the whole thing here.

Chimpanzees have police officers

by  Tyler Cowen in

Anthropologists now reveal that chimpanzees mediate conflicts between other group members, not for their own direct benefit, but rather to preserve the peace within the group. Their impartial intervention in a conflict — so-called “policing” — can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of moral behavior.

…primatologists from the University of Zurich can now confirm that chimpanzees intervene impartially in a conflict to guarantee the stability of their group. They therefore exhibit prosocial behavior based on an interest in community concern.

…The willingness of the arbitrators to intervene impartially is greatest if several quarrelers are involved in a dispute as such conflicts particularly jeopardize group peace.

…It is primarily high-ranking males or females or animals that are highly respected in the group that intervene in a conflict. Otherwise, the arbitrators are unable to end the conflict successfully. As with humans, there are also authorities among chimpanzees.

The article is here and for the pointer I thank Eduardo Pegurier.

Berlin fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen

Berlin has some catching up to do. Apartments in Berlin cost just 25% more in 2010 than in 1977, whereas prices in Hamburg and Munich—Germany’s second- and third-largest cities—rose by 55% and 135%, respectively, over the same period, according to real-estate association Immobilienverband Deutschland, or IVD.

Last year, the average price paid for apartments in popular Berlin locations was €1,700 ($2,221) a square meter, up from €1,625 a year earlier, and rose to €1,300 a square meter from €1,200 in standard locations, according to IVD. (One square meter equals 10.8 square feet.) This compares with €2,230 a square meter for high-quality condominiums in Hamburg, and €2,890 in Munich.

That, in a nutshell, is why Berlin is probably the best city in the world right now.  The article is here.

Parking spots as price controls

by  Tyler Cowen in

But not everywhere:

San Francisco is trying to shorten the hunt with an ambitious experiment that aims to make sure that there is always at least one empty parking spot available on every block that has meters. The program, which uses new technology and the law of supply and demand, raises the price of parking on the city’s most crowded blocks and lowers it on its emptiest blocks. While the new prices are still being phased in — the most expensive spots have risen to $4.50 an hour, but could reach $6 — preliminary data suggests that the change may be having a positive effect in some areas.

There is much more here.