Month: October 2014

Sentences about Chinese anti-corruption campaigns

The theme of a study by Melanie Manion is that China’s approach to fighting corruption hearkens back to Maoist campaigns of the 1950s, with the same undesirable effects: campaigns are too frequent, do not last long enough to enlist public confidence, and undermine the growth of long-term institutions of surveillance and enforcement…

That is from Alan Heston and Terry Sicular in this very useful 2008 book.  The Melanie Manion book is here.

Assorted links

1. Do horses prefer wearing clothes, and how do we know?

2. The lists of Susan Sontag.

3. Monitoring bank phone calls.

4. Rick Searle reviews Average is Over.

5. We the economy, curated by Morgan Spurlock.  And why partyism is wrong.

6. MIE: selling places in clinical trials?  And ManServants, those new service sector jobs (caveat emptor).

7. France moves closer to private sector funding for culture.

Sardinians who want to be a Swiss Charter-City Island

Most secessionist movements want independence. But a small group in Sardinia, the beautiful island off Italy’s coast has another idea for secession.

sardinie2Angered by a system they say has squandered economic potential and disenfranchised the ordinary citizen, they have had enough. They want Rome to sell their island to the Swiss.

“People laugh when we say we should go to become part of Switzerland. That’s to be expected,” said Andrea Caruso, co-founder of the Canton Marittimo (Maritime Canton) movement.

While many have dismissed the proposal as a joke, its supporters insist they are serious. “The madness does not lie in putting forward this kind of suggestion,” said Caruso. “The madness lies in how things are now.”

The Sardinians are not mad. As with Charter Cities the idea is that if you can’t move to good rules then have the good rules move to you. Charter city proponents, however, are focused on relatively uninhabited areas to avoid political problems but the Sardinians are inviting new rules and rulers. In the United States, firms can choose which state to incorporate in and thus which of 50 packages of laws will govern the relations between their shareholders and managers. Why not let cities, states and regions adopt wholesale a package of laws that will govern them? Competitive federalism on a world scale.

The drunk utilitarian

Here is a new paper by Aaron A. Duke and Laurent Bègue:

The hypothetical moral dilemma known as the trolley problem has become a methodological cornerstone in the psychological study of moral reasoning and yet, there remains considerable debate as to the meaning of utilitarian responding in these scenarios. It is unclear whether utilitarian responding results primarily from increased deliberative reasoning capacity or from decreased aversion to harming others. In order to clarify this question, we conducted two field studies to examine the effects of alcohol intoxication on utilitarian responding. Alcohol holds promise in clarifying the above debate because it impairs both social cognition (i.e., empathy) and higher-order executive functioning. Hence, the direction of the association between alcohol and utilitarian vs. non-utilitarian responding should inform the relative importance of both deliberative and social processing systems in influencing utilitarian preference. In two field studies with a combined sample of 103 men and women recruited at two bars in Grenoble, France, participants were presented with a moral dilemma assessing their willingness to sacrifice one life to save five others. Participants’ blood alcohol concentrations were found to positively correlate with utilitarian preferences [emphasis added] (r = .31, p < .001) suggesting a stronger role for impaired social cognition than intact deliberative reasoning in predicting utilitarian responses in the trolley dilemma. Implications for Greene’s dual-process model of moral reasoning are discussed.

The gated version is here.  The original pointer is from SteveStuartWilliams.

Top STEM source cities as a percentage of Total F-1 students, the culture that is South India

1. Vijayawada, India

2. Visakhapatnam, India

3. Chennai, India

4. Hyderabad, India

5. Secunderabad, India

6. Pune, India

7. Teheran, Iran

8. Bangalore, India

9. Kolkata, India

10. Dhaka, Bangladesh

For absolute numbers, Hyderabad is #1.

That is all from the new Brookings report, The Geography of Foreign Students in U.S. Higher Education, by Neil G. Ruiz.

How far does the radius of trust extend?

I’ve long wanted to read a paper on this topic and I just ran across a 2011 essay in the American Sociological Review, by Delhey, Newton, and Welzel.  Most papers on trust work with general questionnaire responses, but those queries often conflate whether you trust the people you know, or the people who surround you, with whether you trust your government and other larger social institutions.  You can imagine for instance that a country could have strong interpersonal trust at the micro level but also lots of cynicism about its establishment power structures.

The innovation of this paper is to compare micro trust measures with macro trust measures and see where there are big differences.  Not surprisingly, the most trusting coutries, such as Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, score high on both the micro and macro measures of trust.

The countries where asking the macro question makes the biggest difference in overall trust rank are South Korea (falls 18 places when macro considerations are considered explicitly), Thailand (falls 17 places), and China and Romania.  Argentina, Poland, and Slovenia gain the most in their relative trust rankings when the radius of trust is brought into play.  In general, when we account explicitly for the macro governance dimension, Asian countries decline in the trust rankings and Latin countries go up in the trust rankings by some modest amount.

Assorted links

1. Economics in Hollywood romantic comedies, a history (fun, some interesting points too).

2. Air Genius Gary Leff on what makes a restaurant worth visiting many times.

3. Update on Catalonian independence — it seems they will be holding a symbolic, non-binding referendum on November 9th, organized by volunteers.

4. John Gray on H.P. Lovecraft.  The horror.

5. Jared Diamond update and how he raised his two children like Pygmies.

6. Atul Gawande has very good taste.

7. Gavyn Davies on whether economic growth is permanently lower.

Professor suspended for irony and sighing, the culture that is British

While American universities debate whether “civility” is an appropriate way to evaluate faculty members, a British institution has faced intense criticism for punishing a faculty member for sighing, unfriendly body language and the use of irony.

…Docherty’s suspension was revealed by Times Higher Education, which reported that the university said he was undermining the authority of his department head (who has since stepped down) by making “ironic” comments during job interviews, sighing and using negative body language. The suspension had Docherty banned from contact with anyone on campus, and even from writing a book preface.

Charges were just dropped, so could I request to be interviewed by this guy?  I think I would enjoy the experience.

How much of politics can be lined up along one dimension?

Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban report:

Despite occasional statements to the contrary, most political scientists have long known — going back at least to Philip Converse’s work in the 1960s, and probably farther to Walter Lippmann’s in the 1910s/1920s — that many Americans do not in fact show substantial ideological consistency across policy views, except among limited groups…The 20% of the adult population who are white voters with bachelor’s degrees show some degree of coherence when it comes to views on same-sex marriage and income redistribution.  But, when it comes to the 40% of the adult public who have one or none of these characteristics — including, for example, African Americans and Latinos without bachelor’s degrees and nonvoting whites without bachelor’s degrees — there is no tendency whatsoever for people who lean in a given direction on one of these issues to lean in the same direction on the other.  For the remaining 40% of the adult public, who have two but not three of these features (e.g., white voters without bachelor’s degrees), ideological coherence is barely measurable.

That is from their new book The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It, interesting throughout.

What I’ve been reading

1. Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov, The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, A Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia.  Blends fiction, non-fiction, and occasional social science (was a non-corrupt transformation of the Soviet Union really possible?, Gaidar ultimately decided it wasn’t), but in terms of the subjective experience of the reader it is most like a novel.  Excellent and also entertaining.  I consider this a deep book about why liberalism will never quite win over human nature.  Here is an interesting Julian Barnes review, although in my opinion it is insufficiently appreciative.

2. Kenneth D. Durr, The Best Made Plans: Robert R. Nathan and 20th Century Liberalism.  I may be biased because I just gave a talk at the Nathan Foundation and received it as a gift copy.  I call this the “real history of economic thought.”  It’s a look at the career of a man who worked with Simon Kuznets to improve gdp statistics, helped lead the war effort in the 1940s, supported the civil rights movement, founded a major economic consulting firm, and supported the idea and practice of economic development, most of all for South Korea and Myanmar.  It’s a splendid look at twentieth century economics as it actually influenced the world, without centering the story on academia.  By the way, here is Diane Coyle on Walter Lippmann.

3. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings.  This account of 1970s Jamaica, centered on a plot to shoot Bob Marley, shows a remarkable amount of talent, as well as a mastery of plot construction and different novelistic voices, some of which are in Jamaican patois.  If you pick up this book you will be impressed and indeed many of the reviews are glowing.  Yet somehow never did I care, feel entertained, or wish to read further.  I stopped.  I remain interested in that era, but will instead recommend a viewing — or reviewing — of The Harder They Come or Marley.

4. John D. Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element.  That element would be Providence, and this work looks at how Scholastic insights can serve as a foundation for economic thought.  Loyal MR readers will know that is not exactly my brew, but some of you will find this of interest.

Sentences to ponder

In “A More Perfect Union,” Mr. DuBois downloaded 19 million profiles from 21 online dating sites. He then wrote software to sort them by ZIP code, and determine the words most frequently used in each location. In the resulting maps, the top-ranked words replace city names. New York is “Now.” Atlanta is “God.”

That is from Steve Lohr at The New York Times.

First conviction for manufacturing a 3-D printed gun

It is from Japan:

The Yokohama District Court sentenced a former Japanese college employee on Monday to two years in prison for producing guns with a three-dimensional printer.

Yoshitomo Imura, 28, a former employee of the Shonan Institute of Technology, was found guilty of violating laws that strictly restrict the possession of guns and large knives and the production of weapons. The prosecution had demanded a 42-month prison term.

Imura’s actions were “vicious” because he made it easy to imitate his production method, presiding Judge Koji Inaba said, noting that Imura had released 3-D design data for his guns on the Internet.

The story is here, the pointer is from the excellent Mark Thorson.

Should we pay teachers more?

Libby Nelson reports:

It’s common to hear that teachers should be paid better — more like doctors and lawyers. In 2009, the Equity Project, a charter school in New York decided to try it: they would pay all their teachers $125,000 per year with the possibility of an additional bonus.

The typical teacher in New York with five years’ experience makes between $64,000 and $76,000. The charter school, known as TEP, would pay much more. But in exchange, teachers, who are not unionized, would accept additional responsibilities, and the school would keep a close eye on their work.

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a new study from Mathematica Policy Research. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere…

The gains erased 78 percent of the achievement gap between Hispanic students and whites in the eighth grade.

…The $125,000 number was eye-catching, but it was just the start of the school’s approach to teaching. Teachers were also eligible for a bonus of between 7 to 12 percent of their salary. The teachers, who are not unionized, went through a rigorous selection process that included a daylong “audition” based on their teaching skills. The typical teacher already had six years of classroom experience before they were hired.

Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others’ lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

There is more hereAddendum: Do read the comments, there are some excellent points in there.