Month: April 2013
Substitutes for the Second Amendment
One of the purposes of the 2nd Amendment was to protect the people from government tyranny. The most important aspect of this was probably not to arm the public per se but rather to minimize the necessity and use of a standing army. Unfortunately, Americans have long gone from fearing standing armies to loving them. So isn’t it time for an additional or substitute amendment? Given the immense changes since the founding what amendments would best protect the people from tyranny today? Here are some possibilities:
- The right of the people not to bear arms shall not be infringed (i.e. no conscription. Requiring someone to bear arms, thus taking all of their freedom, is a far worse example of tyranny than preventing them from bearing arms.)
- If 1/3rd or more of the Supreme Court rule that a law is unconstitutional it shall be unconstitutional. (Greater protection of minority rights).
- Congress shall pass no law abridging the right of the people to encrypt their documents and effects. (Modern supplement to the fourth amendment.)
Other ideas?
The 2nd Amendment does have an important (unique?) advantage in protecting against tyranny namely that the right is self-enforcing, it creates the conditions, an armed public, which make the right difficult to abrogate. To some extent, free speech works in a similar way but “you’ll have to take my gun from my cold, dead hands” is a bigger threat than “you’ll have to take my free speech over my objections.” Are there are other self-enforcing amendments?
Hat tip for discussion to Bryan Caplan.
Subsistence economies and surplus economies
I am not sure this paper (pdf) is sound, and it is hardly in publishable form. Still, it probably qualifies as the most interesting paper I have read this year to date. It is by Lemin Wu, graduate student in economics at UC Berkeley, who appears to have links to Brad DeLong and Peter Lindert. The title is “Millennia of Poverty: If Not Malthusian, Then Why?” and here is the abstract:
Living standards were constant for thousands of years before the industrial revolution. Malthus explained it this way: population grows faster when living standards rise; therefore, changes in technology alter the density of population but not the average welfare. This paper challenges Malthus’s explanation of the constancy and replaces it with the theory of group selection.
Malthusian theory is inadequate because it misses the fact that a dollar’s worth of diamonds contributes less to survival and reproduction than a dollar’s worth of grain. Grain is a subsistence commodity and a diamond is a surplus commodity. The Malthusian force anchors the average level of subsistence, but not that of surplus. If the surplus sector had grown faster than the subsistence sector, then living standards could have grown steadily before the industrial revolution, but they did not. The constancy of living standards thus implies that growth was balanced between subsistence and surplus, something Malthus did not explain.
To explain the balanced growth, I propose the theory of group selection. Selection of group characteristics, including culture and technology, goes on by migration and conquests. Since living standards rise with the ratio of surplus to subsistence, migrants and invaders usually move from places relatively rich in subsistence to those relatively rich in surplus. They spread the culture and technology of their subsistence-rich origin to the surplus-rich destination – the bias of migration favors the spread of subsistence over that of surplus. Even if surplus cultures and technologies would develop faster than subsistence ones in a local environment, the o setting biased migration balances the two sectors on a global scale. This explains the constancy of living standards.
My new theory reinterprets why living standards declined after the Agricultural Revolution and stagnated afterwards, how the Industrial Revolution happened and where the prosperity of Roman Empire and Song Dynasty came from.
I expect to hear more from Lemin Wu.
The paper is here (pdf), the slides to the paper are here, more pdf and 100 pp. at that. I first saw this cited by @mattyglesias.
How good are schools in Guinea-Bisseau?
Not that good. Here are some new results from Peter Boone, Ila Fazzio, Kameshwari Jandhyala, Chitra Jayanty, Gangadhar Jayanty, Simon Johnson, Vimala Ramachandrin, Filipa Silva, Zhaoguo Zhan:
We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 children, aged 7-17, tested for literacy and numeracy competency. Only 27% of children were able to add two single digits, and just 19% were able to read and comprehend a simple word. Our unannounced school checks found 72% of enrolled children in grades 1-4 attending their schools, but the schools were poorly equipped. Teachers were present at 86% of schools visited. Despite surveying 351 schools, we found no examples of successful schools where children reached reasonable levels of literacy and numeracy for age. Our evidence suggests that interventions that raise school quality in these villages, rather than those which target enrollment, may be most important to generate very sharp improvements in children’s educational outcomes.
On the bright side here are some true chances for low-hanging fruit.
Assorted links
2. How does competency-based learning work?
3. Are the Chinese switching out of Hollywood movies because the movies are too stupid? It seems so. And at what rate does popular culture depreciate?
4. James Hamilton on Reinhart-Rogoff, and a good overview/scoring of the overall controversy.
5. “Dwight Howard missed more free throws this season (366) than Lakers teammate Steve Nash has missed in his 17-year NBA career (322). Howard: 355 for 721 this season, 49.2 percent; Nash: 3,038 for 3,360 from 1996-97 through 2012-13, 90.4 percent.” Link here.
Why are younger Americans driving less?
Brad Plumer considers several good hypotheses, including the recession, gas prices, student debt, tougher legal requirements, and a stronger desire to live in places such as Brooklyn. I would add one other factor to his list: because they are working less. A more speculative additional hypothesis would be “because it is easier to have sex without driving to get it.”
Autocracy and Technology
It’s no surprise that autocracies have not created many innovations in information technology. The autocracies, however, are quite capable of adopting and adapting IT for the own purposes. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen argue that we are moving into a new era of autocratic IT. Here from the WSJ:
….everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state—including software that facilitates data mining and real-time monitoring of citizens—is commercially available right now. What’s more, once one regime builds its surveillance state, it will share what it has learned with others. We know that autocratic governments share information, governance strategies and military hardware, and it’s only logical that the configuration that one state designs (if it works) will proliferate among its allies and assorted others. Companies that sell data-mining software, surveillance cameras and other products will flaunt their work with one government to attract new business. It’s the digital analog to arms sales, and like arms sales, it will not be cheap. Autocracies rich in national resources—oil, gas, minerals—will be able to afford it. Poorer dictatorships might be unable to sustain the state of the art and find themselves reliant on ideologically sympathetic patrons.
And don’t think that the data being collected by autocracies is limited to Facebook posts or Twitter comments. The most important data they will collect in the future is biometric information, which can be used to identify individuals through their unique physical and biological attributes. Fingerprints, photographs and DNA testing are all familiar biometric data types today. Indeed, future visitors to repressive countries might be surprised to find that airport security requires not just a customs form and passport check, but also a voice scan. In the future, software for voice and facial recognition will surpass all the current biometric tests in terms of accuracy and ease of use.
Why no gdp-indexed bonds?
Might some eurozone nations benefit from gdp-indexed bonds? Imagine if required bond payments went down when your gdp went down, thereby providing some insurance against bad economic times. Here is a good summary blog post of the idea. Here are other writings on the idea. Alternatively, you might also ask why governments don’t find ways, indirect ways if necessary, to issue equity shares.
Yet we hardly ever see these instruments, although Argentina and Greece have tried what are arguably variants on the idea (pdf.) Why not? I can think of a few reasons:
1. Nations might falsify their gdp figures. Yet I am not sure it is the fundamental reason, since you can imagine the contracts based on more objective gdp correlates, such as prices taken from securities markets or prediction markets.
2. Signaling and adverse selection reasons make large, highly scrutinized entities reluctant to buy explicit, blatant insurance against their own failures.
3. There is no missing market here, because governments could always — either directly or indirectly — short themselves in the CDS market. See #2 for a caveat.
4. Prosperous and creditworthy nations do not need the bonds, and the less secure nations will encounter costs from splitting the liquidity of their government bonds market.
5. Most governments do not run big budget surpluses in good times, even though they should. The absence of gdp-linked bonds is a corollary of this failure and the consumption return profiles of those two options are remarkably similar. In any case if a government has the discipline to forsake cash in good times, to save it up for bad times, as for instance Chile and Norway have shown, savings are easier than the gdp-indexed bonds. Alternatively a profligate will neither save nor buy insurance.
Most of all, I say #5.
Contemporary macroeconomics and the phrase “aggregate demand”
Without meaning to take sides in the controversy, I got a kick out of this sentence, which describes the attitudes of contemporary macroeconomists:
Even something anodyne like “demand might also play a role” would come across like the guy in that comic who asks the engineers if they’ve “considered logarithms” to help with cooling.
The blog post, by JW Mason, is interesting throughout. I liked this bit too:
Only conservative economists acknowledge this theoretical divide. You can find John Cochrane writing very clearly about alternative perspectives in macro. But saltwater economists — and the best ones are often the worst in this respect — are scrupulously atheoretical. I suspect this is because they know that if they wanted to describe their material in a more general way, they’d have to use the language of intertemporal optimization, and they are smart enough to know what a tar baby that is. So they become pure empiricists.
This is a useful and fun piece for sorting out different attitudes, methods, and terms in contemporary macroeconomics. Hat tip goes to the excellent Interfluidity.
Assorted links
Two excellent books
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, recently a Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction.
The first of these is good enough to fall into the “worth reading even if you don’t think you want to read a book about this topic” category.
Apprenticeships need more respect
Ed Luce in the FT reports on increased interest in the German model of apprenticeships:
Germany channels roughly half of all high-school students into the vocational education stream from the age of 16….More than 40 per cent of Germans become apprentices. Only 0.3 per cent of the US labour force does so.
Luce, however, thinks that “In the US that would be seen as too divisive, even un-American.” In the United States we obsess about getting a college degree so much that anything else looks like second best. But what is so special about college? As I said in Tuning in to the Dropping Out:
The U.S. has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Most of them, however, crash before they reach the end of the road–some drop out of high school and then more drop out of college. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to knowledge.
German apprenticeship students are well-educated, highly skilled and employable and they are in no way second-class relative to college graduates. Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well educated. Moreover, as Luce goes on to note, even for those who do complete a college degree, all is well no longer.
Fifteen per cent of taxi drivers in the US have a degree, up from 1 per cent in 1970. Likewise, 25 per cent of sales clerks are graduates, against 5 per cent in 1970. An astonishing 5 per cent of janitors now have a bachelor’s degree.
Why did Cuba become healthier during the economic meltdown of the 1990s?
One should interpret anything about Cuba, or coming out of Cuban data, with extreme caution. Nonetheless I thought this was interesting enough to pass along:
The economic meltdown should logically have been a public health disaster. But a new study conducted jointly by university researchers in Spain, Cuba, and the U.S. and published in the latest issue of BMJ says that the health of Cubans actually improved dramatically during the years of austerity. These surprising findings are based on nationwide statistics from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, together with surveys conducted with about 6,000 participants in the city of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, between 1991 and 2011. The data showed that, during the period of the economic crisis, deaths from cardiovascular disease and adult-onset type 2 diabetes fell by a third and a half, respectively. Strokes declined more modestly, and overall mortality rates went down.
This “abrupt downward trend” in illness does not appear to be because of Cuba’s barefoot doctors and vaunted public health system, which is rated amongst the best in Latin America. The researchers say that it has more to do with simple weight loss. Cubans, who were walking and bicycling more after their public transportation system collapsed, and eating less (energy intake plunged from about 3,000 calories per day to anywhere between 1,400 and 2,400, and protein consumption dropped by 40 percent). They lost an average of 12 pounds.
It wasn’t only the amount of food that Cubans ate that changed, but also what they ate. They became virtual vegans overnight, as meat and dairy products all but vanished from the marketplace. People were forced to depend on what they could grow, catch, and pick for themselves– including lots of high-fiber fresh produce, and fruits, added to the increasingly hard-to-come-by staples of beans, corn, and rice. Moreover, with petroleum and petroleum-based agro-chemicals unavailable, Cuba “went green,” becoming the first nation to successfully experiment on a large scale with low-input sustainable agriculture techniques. Farmers returned to the machetes and oxen-drawn plows of their ancestors, and hundreds of urban community gardens (the latest rage in America’s cities) flourished.
And this:
During the special period, expensive habits like smoking and most likely also alcohol consumption were reduced, albeit briefly. This enforced fitness regime lasted only until the Cuban economy began to recover in the second half of the 1990s. At that point, physical activity levels began to fall off, and calorie intake surged. Eventually people in Cuba were eating even more than they had before the crash. The researchers report that “by 2011, the Cuban population has regained enough weight to almost triple the obesity rates of 1995.”
That is by Richard Schiffman, the full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Jim Oliver.
David Burliuk, father of Russian futurism
Assorted links
Robots are making a movie about humans, sort of
…the BlabDroids are attempting to make what could be the first documentary ever filmed and directed by robots.
Created by artist and roboticist Alex Reben for his master’s thesis at MIT, the BlabDroids are tiny, adorable robotic cinematographers who will be filming interviews at this week’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York as part of the the film festival’s transmedia Storyscapes program. At least 20 BlabDroids will zip around to attendees–they’re self-propelled via motorized wheels– and ask them often very personal questions like, “Tell me something that you’ve never told a stranger before,” “What’s the worst thing you’ve done to someone,” and “Who do you love most in the world?”
Each droid carries a digital camera, a speaker that asks a series of pre-programmed questions to ask whomever it encounters and a button to be pushed to prompt new queries.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.