Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Summer opportunities through the Institute for Humane Studies.

2. Why is Juarez getting safer?

3. How high are the costs of inequality?

4. Fake dragon attacks (the culture that is Japan).

5. Two-state condominialism (good luck).

Comments

Dan Weber

Tyler sounds like an old man when he calls girls acting out Dragon Ball "dragon attacks."

Now excuse me, I need to yell at my kid to stop playing video.

JWatts

Yep, I was definitely expecting to see some photo-shopped Dragons.

C

Tyler is showing his age... maybe. But Dragon Ball the manga is from the 1980s. So I would argue this is more of a combination historical/pop-cultural blind point regarding Japan, separate from relative age.

Careless

Yes, but its successor series became a hit in the US around the end of the millennium. No one heard of DB in the US in the 80s. Even people like me who were exposed to Japanimation in the mid 90s mostly didn't know what DB was. Tyler was way past being a native to kids culture when it crossed the Pacific.

C

Okay, but can we agree that if we see a link on this site in a year or that says "Fake pirate attacks (the culture that is Japan)" and it's actually just a bunch of photos of kids playing out Monkey D. Luffy moves, then we should at the very least take up a collection to buy Tyler some of the greatest hits of manga? ^^

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mavery

Personally, I think I find the fake DBZ attacks much more interesting than fake dragon attacks would be. What, do you photoshop the country side on fire, complete with burninated peasants?

Marie

TOGDOR!

Man, I miss that show.

Marie

Excuse me, tRogdor. Maybe that's what Tyler did and just inadvertently left out "ball".

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Bill

Watching them charge up for a half hour while making sounds of extreme constipation is not what I would call interesting.

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j r

This is my favorite bit of the Ann Marie Slaughter article:

"Ever since Bill Clinton nearly succeeded in brokering a comprehensive settlement in 2000..."

This is the sort of thinking you get into when you spend too long in an environment that measures success in terms of getting something approved through the inter-agency process and agreed upon by heads of state.

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Mondfledermaus

#2 Juarez is getting safer because they ran out of people to kill. Basically one cartel won by exterminating the other.

dkn

With a case as extreme as Juarez, you might expect some regression to the mean. It would have been more remarkable had they been able to sustain the murder rate.

Reminds me of Giuliani taking credit for NYC's drop in crime when the drop was about the same as the national baseline. What is it with journalists and the broken window theory? -- Must be something about the narrative that's irresistible.

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Roger Sweeny

5. And their currency will be ... the euro?

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Andrew'

Aren't those real dragon attacks and the fake ones in the video games?

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Danton

5.

Its also about time someone gave panarcism a try. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panarchism

John Schilling

So you've got a citizen of Israel living next door to a citizen of Palestine. One of their homes burns down, possibly with him inside it. The other is found sitting on his porch with a half-full can of gasoline, saying "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything!".

Which police force and court system gets the final say in who (if anyone) goes to jail?

If Israeli police get to arrest Palestinians on account of there's an Israeli victim, we know how that ends - we can see it in the West Bank right now. Every minor crime against an Israeli is used as an excuse to detain every vaguely suspicious Palestinian in sight, Palestinian homes get condemned as public nuisances, and Palestinian people get so righteously upset about this that their response makes peace impossible.

If Palestinian police get to arrest Israelis, the outcome seems unlikely to be any better.

And if each nation's police can only arrest its own citizens, or if no arrest can occur without the agreement of both, then arrests will rarely be made and a whole lot of homes will be burned. This, also, is not a recipe for peace.

This sort of thing is of course not unprecedented, and we have evolved various rules to deal with it in other contexts. They don't work all that well, even among friends, but they don't have to because they aren't needed that often and we can tolerate an occasional personal injustice in the name of international peace. The United States is not going to declare war on a Franco-Swiss alliance over Roman Polanski; Italy is not going to sever ties with the US just because they aren't getting Amanda Knox back.

But if you've got hundreds of French pedophiles raping* American children and hiding out under the French flag, hundreds of American satanic cultists* descending on Italy to kill and then fleeing home when they are done, things might start to look a little different. Worse still when retaliation isn't dependent on government policy, when irate citizens of one nation can easily take matters into their own hands and there is no safe haven for for the innocent or guilty.

So I'm thinking, maybe we want our first big experiment in modern panarcism to be among people who get along reasonably well to begin with.

(*) That the French pedophile's crimes are exaggerated in American accounts, and the satanic cultist was no such thing, matters not. Perception sometimes trumps reality.

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Ray Lopez

@#5 - "Imagine a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine in which Palestinians would have the right of return; Israelis could settle wherever they could purchase land in the West Bank; and Jerusalem need not be divided." - this is the old way of thinking--why is this article even mentioned? The trendy new solution is in fact to make the Arabs citizens of Israel; a one-state solution.

kiwi dave

The point of that suggestion is to head-off the one-state binational solution -- it's the only way a two-state solution would work. The binational one-state solution would inevitably require a set of disastrous Rube Goldberg-style mecanisms (a la Lebanon, with set asides for a Christian President, Sunni PM and Shiite House Speaker -- see how well that's worked), would be totally unacceptable to the masses on both sides and lead to a Yugoslavia-level disaster. The old version of the two state solution founders on where to join the boundary lines, as well as issues such as the right of return and status of settlements. Slaughter's solution is a big improvement on both.

Ray Lopez

Thanks for that clarification; I was under the impression that the Israeli left is pushing for a true 'one-state' Arab = Jew state, but I guess I'm misinformed. BTW once in a while I toss a few dollars to the non-profit jstreet.org, who somehow tries to square the circle and bring peace to the middle east. I have no idea what they do btw, but they seem worthy.

kiwi dave

I was under the impression that the Israeli left is pushing for a true ‘one-state’ Arab = Jew state, but I guess I’m misinform

Depends what you mean by the Israeli left. The mainstream Zionist center-left (e.g. the Labour Party) favours a two-state solution, as does the centre and the more moderate parts of the right (with obvious differences on how generous to be on the outstanding issues of settlements, Jerusalem, borders etc.). The "hard left" in Israel tends to favour a binational state.

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ThomasH

[These arguments] reveal little basis for thinking that inequality is at the root of our economic challenges, and therefore for believing that reducing inequality would meaningfully address our lagging growth, enable greater mobility, avert future financial crises, or secure America's democratic institutions.

This verges on a straw man. Reducing inequality, unless done in ways that very seriously reduce growth (which the recent marginally higher top marginal personal income tax rates surely are not), would mean more rapid income gains for a vast number of people and would reduce the dangers of populist policies that could seriously reduce growth.

Ray Lopez

"Reducing inequality ... would mean more rapid income gains for a vast number of people" - so dividing up a pie more equitably would result in giving people incentive to work harder? Got it. And people criticize me for promoting stronger patents as a way of encouraging more innovation as illogical. Ah, economics.

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Maurice de Sully

-- would reduce the dangers of populist policies that could seriously reduce growth --

Exactly. If we ever end up in a scenario where politicians are able to exploit wealth inequality in order to pass an increase in income taxes that do not address the stated concern and serve only to exacerbate it, we will be in big trouble.

--

Thankfully, that won't ever happen.

Maurice de Sully

"Does not" address the stated concern and "serves only".

Apologies for the mangled grammar.

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Dismalist

#3: We have a safety net. Argue about how high it should hang, yes, but don't moan about inequality. That just appeals to envy, one of the seven deadly sins.

j r

It depends on the nature of the inequality. If it's a just a story about skilled workers earning a larger and larger portion of the pie, then fine. It's not concern to me as long as the safety net works and the pie is getting bigger at a rate greater than the rich are getting richer. However, a great deal of our present inequality is likely due to political economy issues, like huge structural disparities in the education and criminal justice system or rent seeking in the financial services industry.

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Urso

We have a meritocracy. Argue about how cutthroat it should be, yes, but don’t moan about there being a safety net. That just appeals to greed, one of the seven deadly sins.

anon

"We have a meritocracy." Really??? "Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges..." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/education/scholarly-poor-often-overlook-better-colleges.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

DocMerlin

"Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges..."
Thats because the top colleges are monopolists that extract extremely high rents.

DocMerlin

They are one of the few institutions in the world (besides governments), that makes you tell them how much you earn before they will tell you how much their services cost (to maximize price discrimination).

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prior_approval

http://www.kosmosonline.org/ ?

Really? Is there any reason that IHS doesn't use its own address? OK, I actually have an answer or two to that question - but really, this using cut-outs and SEO tricks is starting to get old.

j r

Will you just come out and state your case against George Mason and IHS and the Mercatus Center? Make an actual argument about what you think they are doing that is wrong or corrupt or whatever. Your act is kind of amusing, but also grating.

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Wonks Anonymous

Funny that Slaughter mentions the EU as an inspiring example, even as its failure becomes more evident by the day. Mentioning Belgium later was also funny, since it should theoretically be able to make multiculturalism (biculturalism, really) work (not much violence between Flemish & Walloons), but has the world record for longest failure for a Parliament to form a government.

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IVV

5. Somebody needs to read China Mieville's The City & The City either more closely, or needs to put the book down. So far, I'm not sure which.

dkn

brilliant ... almost suspect that the novel and that insane 'think piece' were just a long-game set up for this comment

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jurisdebtor

"Cornell economist Robert Frank and former labor secretary Robert Reich are convinced that it fuels the indebtedness of the
middle class . . . But while the credentials of these advocates may be impressive, their arguments are not."

Well, I guess the argument is unimpressive . . . if we remove the facts that median incomes are stagnant, while consumer debt has risen and personal savings have fallen.

kvm

For a JD, it is surprising you think that facts = causality

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Richard

Does anyone else find it odd that the Winship inequality article lacks page numbers?

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