Month: September 2014
German airline markets in everything
In case you don’t like Wiener Schnitzel and doner kebab:
Now Germany’s Air Food One is a subscription service that lets anyone get airline meals delivered to their home once a week.
Offered by online grocery Allyouneed.com, members can choose between two options — classic or vegetarian — just like on a real flight. The service has teamed up with LSG Sky Chefs, which provides airline food for Lufthansa, to prepare a different meal each week that matches the business class menu on airplanes. For example, this week it’s serving Arabic seafood or panserotti with porcini mushrooms. The meals are delivered every Wednesday evening and are suitable for freezing. When it comes time to cook, members can simply place the meal in the oven. The idea is that the healthy subscription meals can be ordered by busy professionals who would otherwise be ordering a takeaway. Additionally, the service lets LSG Sky Chefs get rid of the excess meals not needed by its flying customers, avoiding waste and acting as an advertisement for its food quality.
The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
Assorted links
1. Very unlikely markets in everything (not even sure I should believe it, though perhaps some of you have extreme faith in signaling and adverse selection models).
2. Clive Crook makes the best case for Scottish independence I have seen.
3. Attach your iPad directly to your face (department of why not?).
Do I wish to revise my time management tips?
Here are my suggestions:
1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.
2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you. Estimate “most important” using a zero discount rate. Don’t make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.
3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them. Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.
4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to. Better to approach your next writing day “hungry” than to feel “written out.” Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.
5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always “now.”
Rahul R. asks me if I would like to revise the list. I’ll add these:
6. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t take drugs.
7. At any point in your life, do not be watching more than one television show on a regular basis.
8. Don’t feel you have to finish a book or movie if you don’t want to. I cover that point at length in my book Discover Your Inner Economist.
I think I would take back my old #5, since I observe some bloggers who have gone years, ten years in fact, without being so productive.
The agricultural productivity gap
That is the recently published (QJE) paper by Douglas Gollin, David Lagakos, and Michael E. Waugh, the abstract is here:
According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the nonagricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, particularly in developing countries. Taken at face value, this “agricultural productivity gap” suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors. In this article, we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what extent the gap is still present when better measures of sector labor inputs and value added are taken into consideration. We find that even after considering sector differences in hours worked and human capital per worker, as well as alternative measures of sector output constructed from household survey data, a puzzlingly large gap remains.
There are ungated copies here.
I believe there is something “funny” about agriculture. Productivity convergence is also slowest in that sector, especially compared to manufactures. I see a few possible factors at work:
1. Status quo bias keeps a lot of workers living in rural areas and employed in agriculture, lowering productivity in that sector and also hindering the transfer of new ideas and technologies. Wages stay low and approaches remain hidebound and old-fashioned.
2. The influence of “non-rational” culture — in the Weberian sense — is usually stronger in rural and agricultural areas.
4. Liquidity constraints limit movement into urban areas.
5. Fear of loss of status and local friendships also limit the movement into urban areas and prevent an equalization of returns as defined in terms of pecuniary variables only.
Or put agriculture aside, and let’s pose the same question about wage equalization in Puerto Rico and the mainland United States, given that free migration is allowed and wages in the U.S. are considerably higher. In a lot of different settings, factor price equalization isn’t as strong as you might think. Maybe this is just showing that agriculture is in fact a remarkably human activity.
The language of restaurant reviews
Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times reports on the work and new book of Dan Jurafsky:
In a study of more than a million Yelp restaurant reviews, Mr. Jurafsky and the Carnegie Mellon team found that four-star reviews tended to use a narrower range of vague positive words, while one-star reviews had a more varied vocabulary. One-star reviews also had higher incidence of past tense, pronouns (especially plural pronouns) and other subtle markers that linguists have previously found in chat room discussions about the death of Princess Diana and blog posts written in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In short, Mr. Jurafsky said, authors of one-star reviews unconsciously use language much as people do in the wake of collective trauma. “They use the word ‘we’ much more than ‘I,’ as if taking solace in the fact that this bad thing happened, but it happened to us together,” he said.
Another finding: Reviews of expensive restaurants are more likely to use sexual metaphors, while the food at cheaper restaurants tends to be compared to drugs.
Previous MR posts on Jurafsky are here.
Livestream of Solow and DeLong vs. Cowen and Roberts debate on Piketty
Friday, 1:15, EST. The LiveStream is here. I commend the Center for Equitable Growth for sponsoring this event.
Assorted links
1. Rerun of my earlier post “My favorite things Scotland.”
2. David Hume wine cellar may lie behind office block.
3. The National Pygmy Goat Association.
4. Search movie and television dialogue for word usage (some juvenile results)
5. China’s president advises Chinese tourists: not so many instant noodles.
Colombia extends its wealth tax
Colombia is one of the world’s most unequal societies. Last week, the government of Juan Manuel Santos, who began his second term as president in August, announced the extension of a wealth tax introduced in 2002 to pay for the mounting costs of the country’s 50 year drug-fuelled guerrilla war.
“In that sense, we are actually ahead of the curve of what Piketty proposes,” says Mr Cárdenas.
…“This touches only 50,000 Colombians out of the entire population” of 48m people, he says, “that is less than 1 per cent of the population.”
President Santos himself is a product of that 1 per cent. A US-educated economist and member of a wealthy family of the Colombian establishment, he heads up a centrist administration, not a Venezuela-style leftist regime.
Mr Santos has increased rates for various tranches of the levy, in some cases by 50 per cent. Those with a net worth of between $510,000 and $1.5m must pay a 0.4 per cent tax. The rate rises to 2.25 per cent for net worth above $4m. That applies to 45,000 businesses and about 1,000 individuals, Mr Cárdenas said.
Only about five percent of Columbians actually pay into the standard income tax system. The FT piece by Andres Schipani is here.
Why don’t we have more free trade?
I remain amazed that we have as much free trade as we do. Here is from a recent Pew poll:
President Barack Obama and other world leaders are having a tough time selling the benefits of the trade agreements they’re negotiating, in part because much of the public thinks all the talk about trade’s benefits is a bunch of baloney.
Out of 44 nationalities surveyed this year, only one — Israelis — tends to believe the basic tenet of economists that increased trade will foster competition and deliver lower prices for consumers.
On a broader question of whether increasing trade and business ties with other countries is a good thing, only 68% of Americans agree, compared with 76% worldwide, according to the study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.
The Pew study itself is here and it is interesting throughout. It is in Bangladesh, Uganda, and Lebanon that people are most likely to believe trade raises real wages, and Bangladeshis are most sympathetic to foreign direct investment. Only 28% of Americans believe it is good when foreigners buy up U.S. companies. 58% of Chinese think trade leads to price increases, perhaps a sign of the prevalence of foreign luxury goods in that country.
For the pointer I thank Ray Lopez, who himself benefits from free trade, factor mobility, and foreign direct investment.
Creative ambiguity, Scottish independence, and sudden death
Many political unions subsist on creative ambiguity. That is, if the right question were posed, and the citizenry forced to answer it definitely, political order might spin out of control.
Canada, Belgium, and indeed the entire European Union seem to be organized on this basis. It’s not quite that everyone thinks they are getting their way, but rather explicit concessions are not demanded for each loss of control embodied in the broader system. Certain rights are held in reserve, with the expectation that they probably will not be exercised, but they can nonetheless influence the final bargaining equilibrium.
Most international treaties rely on some degree of creative ambiguity, as do most central banks, with their semi-promises of bailouts but “not too much not too certain you know” as the default. You might like the mandated outcome (or not), but I doubt if it would improve political discourse in the United States to have an explicit thumbs up vs. thumbs down referendum on abortion.
Many partnerships and marriages rely on creative ambiguity too. Should the Beatles have forced Lennon and McCartney to specify who had the final say over each cut? That probably would have led to a split in 1968 and there would be no Abbey Road. Must parties to a marriage specify the entire division of chores and responsibilities in advance?
We find the same in many academic departments. Things can be going along just fine, but once the department has to write out an explicit plan for future growth and the allocation of slots across different fields or methods, all hell breaks loose.
Question posers and agenda setters have great power.
All praises of democracy must be embedded in a broader understanding that a) formal questions can be destructive, and b) we cannot be allowed to pose questions without limit, at least not questions which require explicit, publicly verifiable, and commonly observed answers.
Once a question is posed very explicitly, and in a manner which requires a clear answer, it is hard to take it off the table. There is thus an option value to holding these questions in reserve, which means that the expected return from the question has to be pretty high to justify changing the agenda in a hard-to-revoke manner.
I am thus not impressed by claims that a “yes” vote for Scottish independence would represent “the democratic will of the people.” It might just be a question which should not be asked in such a blatant form.
This article, by the way, argues quite well that the current independence referendum is not really democratic at all. Who gets to vote, and who not, is quite arbitrary. Maybe they first should have held a referendum on that?
Should a restaurant require prepayment for meals?
This I found in a Quora forum on prepaid meals in China:
We’ve actually experimented with prepaid vs postpaid meals in our restaurant. The verdict? Upfront payment increased table turnover by over 80%.
The difference is that customers who haven’t paid can justify their occupation of a table. They surf facebook. They chat away for hours on end. They get comfy. It matters not whether they intend to order more stuff, the mere possibility of them ordering more gives them the moral upper hand.
Customers who have paid up on the other hand, do not have moral justification. They could order more food, but diminishing marginal utility and inertia discourages that act. They get edgy. They feel guilty. They leave.
It all depends on the restaurant’s business model. If it’s a low-end restaurant, this tactic will serve it well. If it’s a high end restaurant, paying $150 for that bottle of wine buys you a little more time.
For the pointer I thank Eduardo Pegurier.
Assorted links
1. First 3-D printed car? (speculative)
2. There is no great stagnation.
3. There is no polenta great stagnation.
4. The Chinese don’t actually want to leave that badly after all.
5. What is network theory teaching us about soccer?
6. Jeff Sachs argues for Scottish independence. Angus goes further yet.
Secession threats magnify petty resentments (there is no core, ultimately)
Here is the latest:
David Cameron faces a “bloodbath” at the hands of Tory MPs after all three parties pledged to continue high levels of funding for Scotland if it rejects independence.
The Prime Minister is facing mounting dissent among English backbenchers after promising that Scotland’s special funding arrangements will continue even when the country is given control over its own taxation and spending.
One Tory MP said the promise to Scottish voters, issued by Mr Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg in the Daily Record newspaper, “smacks of desperation”.
Under the Barnett formula, devised in the 1970s by Labour Treasury minister Lord Barnett, spending is allocated according to population size, rather than the amount each country actually needs.
Critics say this gives Scotland an unfair share of government spending and even Lord Barnett has called for it to be replaced.
According to research at Stirling University, England loses around £4.5 billion of public spending every year because the money is handed to Scotland instead
In other words, this story will not end with a “no” vote from Scotland, unless it is strongly decisive. Regardless of the result, allowing this referendum to go forward likely will go down as one of the greatest unforced errors in recent times.
A Guide and Advice for Economists on the U.S. Junior Academic Job Market
That is a new paper (pdf) by John Cawley, here is the abstract:
This guide, updated for the 2014-15 job market season, describes the academic market for new Ph.D. economists and offers advice on conducting an academic job search. It reports findings from published papers, describes practical details, and provides links to internet resources. Topics addressed include: preparing to go on the market, applying for academic jobs, the AEA’s new electronic clearinghouse for the job market, signaling, interviewing at the ASSA meetings, campus visits, the secondary market scramble, offers and negotiating, diversity, and dual job searches.
Here is some of the good news from the paper itself:
National Science Foundation data indicate that Ph.D. economists have the lowest unemployment rate (0.9%) of any doctoral field,
as well as one of the highest median salaries of any doctoral field. Finally, the vast majority of people are happy with the outcome of their search. Of the new Ph.D. economists in 2001-02, 94% reported that they liked their jobs very much or fairly well (Siegfried and Stock, 2004).
For the pointer I thank Bruce Bartlett.
The new issue of Econ Journal Watch
Too little, too late on the excess burdens of taxation: Cecil Bohanon, John Horowitz, and James McClure show that public finance textbooks do a very poor job of illuminating the excess burdens of taxation and incorporating such burdens into the analysis of the costs of government spending.
Does occupational licensing deserve our seal of approval? Uwe Reinhardt reviews Morris Kleiner’s work on occupational regulation.
Clashing Northmen: In a previous issue, Arild Sæther and Ib Eriksen interpreted the postwar economic performance of Norway and the role of economists there. Here Olav Bjerkholt strongly objects to their interpretation, and Sæther and Eriksen reply.
Pull over for inspection: Dragan Ilić explores replicability and interpretation problems of a recent American Economic Review article by Shamena Anwar and Hanming Fang on racial prejudice and motor vehicle searches.
Capitalism and the Rule of Love: We reproduce a profound and rich—yet utterly neglected—essay by Clarence Philbrook, first published in 1953.
EJW Audio
The link to the issue is here.