Month: October 2014

Twitter’s science stars

Science picks a list of the top one hundred, I am flattered to have been selected.  Other designees from economics include Krugman (his bot actually), Sachs, Roubini, Florida, Goolsbee, Basu, Dambisa Moyo, Rodrik, Stiglitz, Wolfers, Jared Bernstein, Dean Baker, Mark Thoma, and Noah Smith.  “Science” is not quite the right word here, but “markers to science” might do, or in my own case perhaps “library science.”

The real news in the list is that economists are overrepresented and other scientists are, on the whole, underrepresented.  They don’t see the returns to it that we do, and if there is more room in our science for persuasion, you should slot that into your Bayesian estimates too.

Shenzhen notes

Many parts of the city are indistinguishable from Hong Kong, and even China pessimists should find it easy to imagine Shenzhen gliding into fully developed status.  At times Shenzhen looks better than Hong Kong, but that is due to what I call the myth of infrastructure.  Shenzhen being poorer than Hong Kong, and having developed later, are coincident reasons with the peak parts of the city having newer-looking infrastructure.

The OCT Design Center was impressive.  China probably will never dominate world music, but my bet is China will be the most important country for the visual arts within the next ten to fifteen years.

It didn’t strike me as a great city for food, if only because the place barely existed thirty years ago.  I passed by a bunch of places, but none were especially tempting and some parts of the city don’t seem to have many non-corporate restaurants at all.  Finally, I had a tasty meal at the Muslim Hotel Restaurant, food (and servers and diners) from the western part of China.  I believe that Cantonese food is due for a steep relative decline, given how much it relies on low labor costs and super-fresh ingredients.  It’s already the case that people thinking of taking you out to eat in downtown Hong Kong fixate on other options.  It is the New Territories part of town which will carry Cantonese traditions forward.

By the way, visiting Shenzhen will make you think that wages in Hong Kong and Taiwan are due for decline.

*The End of Normal*

That is the new James K. Galbraith book, subtitled The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth.  It covers a lot of ground and everyone will find something to object to in here.  Still, I found it a good example of some fresh thinking, though it is not a tract which sees through its arguments with a lot of detail.  I am glad to have read it.

I especially enjoyed the integration of high resource costs with Keynesian economics, as Galbraith has become more of a pessimist about long-run growth and he now sees the energy price shocks as essential to the economic history of the last forty years.  The analysis of the Soviet Union as an economic regime with super-high fixed costs, heavily reliant on (supposed) economies of scale, was my favorite part of the book.  Here is one excerpt from that:

The Soviet economy was a deeply integrated system, with little redundancy, little internal competition, weak capacity for introducing new technologies, and vulnerable to breakdowns in transportation and distribution.  This did not matter all that much for bulk items such as oil or steel, but it was a serious problem for perishables like food.  Fresh produce usually did not survive the trip from farm to market, which is why Russia’s urbanites so prized their dachas…

One way to sum up the Soviet system is to say that it operated with very high fixed costs.  It had high overheads.  To produce anything at all  (or, for that matter, even to produce nothing), those fixed costs had to be paid.  And they had to be paid whether or not output reached the consumer, and whether or not the consumer wanted that output when it did.

Galbraith also makes the important point that stagnant or falling median incomes need not imply growing envy or growing class warfare or growing frustration and the like.  Very often wage profiles fall by having the new labor market entrants start at lower rates.  Individuals still make steady wage progress over the major part of their working lives and feel they are “getting somewhere.”  Furthermore the gap between them and their most noticeable peers — those right above them — may not be growing at all.  Other discussions of median wages often serve up a good deal of sloppiness on this point.

Shenzhen fact of the day

Worldwide sales of smartphones totaled 968 million devices in 2013, an increase of 42.3 percent over a 12 month period, according to Gartner. Perhaps most significantly, sales of smartphones made up almost 54 percent of overall mobile phone sales in 2013, and outnumbered annual sales of feature phones for the first time.

There is more here, mostly about the Shenzhen smart phone market, via Mark Bergen.

Average is Over: Physicians

Important new research from Fletcher, Horwitz and Bradley:

Like teacher value added measures that calculate student test score gains, we estimate physician value added based on changes in health status during the course of a hospitalization. We then tie our measures of physician value added to patient outcomes, including length of hospital stay, total charges, health status at discharge, and readmission. The estimated value added varied substantially across physicians and was highly stable for individual physicians. Patients of physicians in the 75th versus 25th percentile of value added had, on average, shorter length of stay (4.76 vs 5.08 days), lower total costs ($17,811 vs $19,822) and higher discharge health status (8% of a standard deviation). Our findings provide evidence to support a new method of determining physician value added in the context of inpatient care that could have wide applicability across health care setting and in estimating value added of other health care providers (nurses, staff, etc).

As with teacher value-added measures, which I strongly support, the gain here is not simply that we discover who the best teachers and physicians are it’s that by discovering who the best teachers and physicians are we can discover why they are the best–what techniques are they using that others are not? And from there we can begin to scale and apply those techniques more widely.

A short history of democracy in Hong Kong

In case you had forgotten:

The degree of political participation in Hong Kong is actually at its highest in history. Before 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony for 155 years, during which it was ruled by 28 governors — all of them directly appointed by London. For Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, to now brand himself as the champion of democracy is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Only after the return of sovereignty to China 17 years ago did Hong Kong gain real public participation in governance. Today, half of the legislature is directly elected by the public and the other half by what are called functional constituencies. The chief executive, a native Hong Konger, is selected by a committee of 1,200 other Hong Kongers.

Further, Beijing has now devised a plan for voters to elect the next chief executive directly, rather than by committee, in 2017 among candidates fielded by a nominating committee — also made up of Hong Kongers. The proximate cause for today’s upheaval is the protesters’ demand for direct public nomination of candidates, too.

That is from Eric X. Li, all good points.  Please note however that I disagree with the general argument of this piece about inequality and the general tone that everything is fine under Chinese rule.

My favorite cinematic things Hong Kong

Where to start?

1. John WooThe Killer holds up the best on repeated viewings, but Hard Boiled makes the biggest first impression, at least circa the early 1990s.  It is less shocking today, precisely because it has been so influential.  Bullet in the Head has some incredible peak moments, but I’ve never loved A Better Tomorrow as many people do, neither part I nor part II.   Once a Thiefthe true Hong Kong edition only — is a good dark horse pick, nimble and philosophical.  Of the American Woo movies, Windtalkers, about the Navajo code talkers during World War II, is much underrated, a fine work.

2. Ringo Lam. City on Fire, and also Prison on Fire.  I would like to know more of them.

3. Wong Kar-wai.  I love all of his movies up through 2000, after that I have mixed feelings at best.  Essential viewing, perhaps my favorite is Chungking Express, for capturing a certain era in Hong Kong, although I doubt that is the best one.

4. Tsui Hark. I am sorry, but I never have loved them, the less pretentious the better.  I did enjoy Chinese Ghost Story.

5. Jackie Chan. Drunken Master II is my favorite, for some U.S. releases this was retitled simply Drunken Master.  You’ll just have to figure it out.  I love the first thirty minutes or so of Armour of God, you can skip the rest.  I consider him one of the comic geniuses of recent times.

6. Bruce Lee. Enter the Dragon is a perennial favorite, plus there is the fight scene with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Game of Death, and with Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon.

The Infernal Affairs trilogy is quite good, as is Election.  Some of the early Shaw Kung Fu movies have entertaining moments, best seen is excerpts.  Chow-Yun Fat is perhaps my favorite movie actor.  There is plenty more I don’t know about.

The bottom line: People, you need to have seen all of these movies, now.  Just ask Scott Sumner.

Occupy Hong Kong

I’m sitting in my room, in a hotel surrounded by a moat (literally) up in the New Territories.  It is traffic blockades I fear, not tear gas, I guess that is how you become living in the suburbs.  Last I saw, the game shifted to the protestors playing “dribs and drabs concessions” in response to a line-in-the-sand, “empty out by Monday” demand from the authorities.  Such games can go on for a while, especially since the protestors don’t quite have the coherent leadership and management capabilities to enforce an immediate concession, and so the powers that be will tolerate a good deal of sloth.  In between are the Hong Kong police, many of whom (most of whom?) sympathize with the protestors.  The businessmen seem more skeptical.  If you type “PLA” into the Twitter search function, and not much interesting comes up, probably things are OK.  Those three little letters stand for “People’s Liberation Army,” they look like this.  There exists an equilibrium where this event accelerates a) the pace of reform in China, b) a further crackdown in China, or c) both.

Which famous Chinese leader said this in 1943?

[China] must adopt a planned economy and social legislation to secure the livelihood and survival of every citizen, and it is imperative that we eventually accomplish the objective of “transforming [all] capital into state capital [nationalization of capital], and transforming [all] enjoyment into enjoyment of the masses.”

The answer is here.

That is from Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change, p.205.  This book is useful for showing early Chinese moves in the direction of state planning and state-owned enterprises.

Alcohol inequality

I double-checked these figures with [Philip] Cook, just to make sure I wasn’t reading them wrong. “I agree that it’s hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day,” he told me. But, “there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey.”

As Cook notes in his book, the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don’t drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.

The piece, by Christopher Ingraham, is interesting throughout.  Here is my earlier post on “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol”, one of my favorites.

Addendum: Via Robert Wiblin, Trevor Butterworth offers a good critique of the data.

Are surprises a good way of rewarding children?

Neil Parmar has a good recent piece on the best ways to bribe your children.  Here is one of his points:

In addition to spelling out expectations and agreeing on rewards for specific achievements, surprise them once a while with a special reward for good behavior on a continuing basis. Research on how the brain works shows that children react well to surprises.

An unexpected trip to the aquarium, a local museum or another special experience “can be very motivating to a child,” says Srini Pillay, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief executive of NeuroBusiness Group, which uses brain science to help children and adults overcome psychological obstacles.

Science has shown that unexpected rewards, especially for younger children, can encourage them to make certain behaviors into a lifestyle. Sometimes when Brett Arrington, who owns a consulting firm, is shopping with his 6- and 9-year-old boys he purchases a toy they really want. Mr. Arrington waits until the boys have been especially helpful—by cleaning up someone else’s mess, for example—then he surprises them with the toy. It “works well because it’s not a promise and can happen whenever and for whatever,” says Mr. Arrington.

The full article is here.  It also suggests letting your children choose the reward and “matching gifts,” where you match their contribution toward some good or service, especially as your children grow older and develop some earning capacity.