Month: November 2014
Assorted links
1. Against coal-based explanations of the Industrial Revolution.
2. Should a leader look intelligent or healthy?
3. Weyl and Posner on combining freer immigration with a tighter caste system.
4. The lower bound didn’t really matter until mid-2011 (an impressive and I would say definitive study).
5. The archaeology of late capitalism (Atari games on eBay).
What I’ ve been reading
I’ve been on a roll with my last few books:
1. Denis Johnson, The Laughing Monsters. This one doesn’t seem like it is trying very hard, and yet I like it more than the author’s other books, perhaps for that reason. It’s about two (ostensible) buddies, set in Africa, then all kinds of secrets unfold. There is a NYT review here.
2. Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things: A Novel. A missionary visits space aliens, some of whom embrace the Bible eagerly, almost too eagerly. Meanwhile he and his wife on earth write letters back and forth, showing they are the true aliens to each other. This is the fiction book this year I enjoyed most, and one I kept on wanting to pick up after I had put it down. Here is a useful NYT review, describing the book as “defiantly unclassifiable.”
3. Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life. The fact that so many pages still feel so non-comprehensive is a testament to the life being covered here, and to the richness of its historical period. Still, this is fresh and easy to read throughout, recommended.
Might this help explain Russia and Ukraine?
The excellent Akos Lada, a graduate student at Harvard, has a new paper on why countries sometimes invade their neighbors, it is called “The Dark Side of Attraction,” the abstract is here:
I argue that the diffusion of domestic political institutions is a source of wars. In the presence of an inspiring foreign regime, repressive elites fear that their citizens emulate the foreign example and revolt. As a result, a dictator starts a war against an attractive foreign regime, seeking to destroy this alternative model. Such wars are particularly likely when there are strong religious, ethnic or cultural ties between the dictator’s opposition and the inspiring country – connections that allow citizens to draw easy comparisons. My posited mechanism explains three case studies. The first describes the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1849. The second case study analyzes the origins of the First World War (1914-8), where Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. The final case study discusses the Iran-Iraq War (1980-8). In all three cases, a dictator started a war in order to extinguish the foreign flame that fueled his domestic opposition.
Akos occasionally writes blog posts here. Here is our previous coverage of Akos Lada — he stands a good chance of being one of the significant new “big picture” thinkers in economics.
Women earn less than men even when they set the pay
That women earn less money than men is well known. But research has revealed that even when women start their own not-for-profit “social enterprises” they pay themselves less than their male peers.
The study, comprising 159 social entrepreneurs in the UK, showed an adjusted pay gap between the sexes of about 23 per cent. That is similar to the global difference in earnings between men and women. The International Labour Organisation estimates that to be about 23 per cent – meaning that, for every £1 men earn, women earn 77p.
…The new research, by academics at London Business School, Aston University and the University of Antwerp, mirrors previous findings on the salaries earned by male and female founders of for-profit companies. A report on Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses programme, noted that female participants, on average, paid themselves 80 per cent of the salary of male participants.
Saul Estrin, visiting professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, London Business School, and co-author of the latest report, points out that the differences cannot be explained by discrimination since these chief executives set their own pay.
He looked at the entrepreneurs’ job satisfaction and found female social entrepreneurs to be more satisfied with their role than their male counterparts.
One hypothesis suggested in the article is that the female entrepreneurs prioritize autonomy over higher pay and end up happier in these jobs, relative to their alternatives, than do the male entrepreneurs.
Did seasonality drive the invention of agriculture?
Andrea Matranga has a job market paper (pdf) which is speculative but interesting:
During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture. In this paper, I argue that this innovation was a response to a large increase in climactic seasonality. Hunter-gathers in the most affected regions became sedentary in order to store food and smooth their consumption. I present a model capturing the key incentives for adopting agriculture, and I test the resulting predictions against a global panel dataset of climate conditions and Neolithic adoption dates. I find that invention and adoption were both systematically more likely in places with higher seasonality. The findings of this paper imply that seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions.
Here is his home page.
Assorted links
1. What is the task connectivity of a city?
2. Vanity Fair on Amazon vs. Hachette.
3. What do Chinese college presidents do? (hint: it involves price discrimination, but not just price discrimination).
4. In Tokyo a model will deliver your lunch if you spend at least $263.
5. Upward mobility: mule makes it to the dressage finals.
Telepathy over the Internet
A amazing paper in PLOS One demonstrating a kind of telepathy over the internet:
…two participants had to carry out a specific task in the form of a series of consecutive trials of a computer game. The game was designed so that the two participants had to play cooperatively, and the required cooperation could only be achieved through direct brain-to-brain communication. The goal of the game was to
defend a city from enemy rockets fired by a pirate ship… One participant was able to see the game on a computer screen, but was not provided with any input device to control the cannon. The second participant could use his/her right hand to press a touchpad, but could not see the game. The two participants were located in separate buildings on the University of Washington’s campus. Specifically, the Sender side was stationed in the Computer Science & Engineering building while the Receiver side was stationed in the Psychology building. The two buildings were located approximately 1 mile apart. The two participants could only communicate with each other through a brain-to-brain communication channel.
During rocket trials, the sender conveyed the intent to fire the cannon by engaging in right hand motor imagery. Electrical brain activity from the Sender was recorded using EEG, and the resultant signal was used to control the vertical movement of a cursor – this allowed the subject to get continuous feedback about imagery performance. When the cursor hit the “Fire” target (a large blue circle) located at the top of the screen, the Sender’s computer transmitted a signal over the Internet to the Receiver’s computer. The two computers communicated using the standard hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).
The Receiver’s computer was connected through a custom-made serial cable to a TMS machine. Whenever the Receiver’s computer received a fire command, a TMS pulse was delivered to a pre-selected region of the Receiver’s brain. The stimulation caused a quick upward jerk of the Receiver’s right hand, which was positioned above the touchpad. This up-down movement of the hand typically resulted in enough force to trigger a “click” event on the touchpad, causing the cannon in the computer game to be fired as requested by the Sender.
The players were able to perform significantly better than chance at firing the cannon and saving the city.
The content of the communication is obviously low–basically 1 bit–but the author’s offer some intriguing speculation. Language is a significant limit on communication. In Polanyi’s terms we know more than we can say; a lot of knowledge is tacit. But can we say what we know with telepathy?
…current methods for communicating are still limited by the words and symbols available to the sender and understood by the receiver….A great deal of the information that is available to our brain is not introspectively available to our consciousness, and thus cannot be voluntarily put in linguistic form. For instance, knowledge about one’s own fine motor control is completely opaque to the subject, and thus cannot be verbalized. As a consequence, a trained surgeon or a skilled violinist cannot simply “tell” a novice how to exactly position and move the fingers during the execution of critical hand movements….Can information that is available in the brain be transferred directly in the form of the neural code, bypassing language altogether? We explore this idea in the rest of this article….
We have a long way to go on that score. The authors haven’t transferred thought or the pattern of thought but rather have used a kind of intermediary language, namely the computer interpretation of the brain signal. Still, credit the authors with vision.
Oh, and if that isn’t enough to blow your mind, another group has demonstrated human to animal telepathy.
How much of racial discrimination stems from the customers?
Here is some reporting on a new paper by John Nunley, Adam Pugh, Nicholas Romero, and Richard Seals, here is one bit:
Black applicants faced major discrimination when applying for jobs with a customer focus. Researchers looked for jobs with words like “customer,” “sales,” “advisor,” “representative,” “agent,” and “loan officer” in the description. For jobs such as these, the discrimination gap soared. Instead of facing a 2.8 percentage-point gap between callback rates for whites and blacks, they faced a 4.4-point gap.
For jobs with descriptions that lacked those terms and were instead focused on interaction with coworkers, the level of discrimination collapsed. Descriptions with terms such as “manager,” “administrator,” “coordinator,” “operations,” and so forth, the difference in callback rates was 0.1 to 0.3 percentage points.
In other words, the problem isn’t that Joe Smith doesn’t want to hire young African-Americans, but that he is worried that if he hires a black sales associate, old Mrs. Jones may take her business elsewhere.
You will find the paper, and related work, here. By the way, the discrimination effect was weakest in the cities of Baltimore and Portland.
For the pointer I thank the esteemed Samir Varma.
The pot legalization gender gap
Scott Sumner directs us to this passage from Michele Martinez Campbell:
A fascinating new national poll from Quinnipiac University shows that men and women disagree markedly on the question of marijuana legalization. While men surveyed strongly favor legalization by a margin of 59 to 36 percent, women oppose it by a clear majority of 52-44 percent. This 15-point gender gap in support for marijuana legalization –let’s call it the “pot gender gap” — is not quite as large as the 20-point gender gap in support for President Obama in the 2012 presidential election, but it is striking. What’s most interesting, though, is how it confounds the expectations set by the voting gender gap. In voting, women trend more liberal and Democratic, while men trend more conservative and Republican. Yet with the pot gender gap, we see women taking the more conservative, law-and-order approach.
The article is here, Scott’s post, with commentary, is here.
Abu Dhabi window cleaner rescued by drone?
A terrified window cleaner was rescued by a high-tech drone after the scaffolding he was on malfunctioned.
The man was cleaning windows close to the top of a high rise building in central Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, when the motorised scaffold stopped working and started tilting dangerously.
The Security Media Department sent a wireless remote-controlled drone to rescue the cleaner amid dramatic scenes yesterday.
Assorted links
Is it better if cities have more compact shapes?
I was intrigued by the job market paper of Mariaflavia Hariri from MIT, the abstract is this:
Cities are valuable to the extent they bring people (and jobs) together. To what extent is this value affected by difficulty of commuting from various points in the city to others? While many factors can affect commuting length, this paper investigates one determining factor of urban commuting efficiency, previously highlighted by urban planners but overlooked by economists: city shape. A satellite-derived dataset of night-time lights is combined with historic maps to retrieve the geometric properties of urban footprints in India over time. I propose an instrument for urban shape, which combines geography with a mechanical model for city expansion: in essence, cities are predicted to expand in circles of increasing sizes, and actual city shape is predicted by obstacles within each circle. With this instrument in hand, I investigate how city shape affects the location choices of consumers, in a spatial equilibrium framework à la Roback-Rosen. Cities with more compact shapes are characterized by larger population, lower wages, and higher housing rents, consistent with compact shape being a consumption amenity. The implied welfare cost of deteriorating city shape is estimated to be sizeable. I also attempt to shed light on policy responses to deteriorating shape. The adverse effects of unfavorable topography appear to be exacerbated by building height restrictions, and mitigated by road infrastructure.
Mumbai immediately sprang to mind as a city which ideally would have a more compact shape, especially at the bottom. You will find her work here.
China ghost markets in everything
Two officials in China’s southern Guangdong province were arrested after it emerged that they had bought corpses from local grave-robbers and had them cremated in a bid to fulfill state-mandated quotas for such funeral practices. The incident is yet another reminder of the awkward tension between Beijing’s edicts and entrenched traditions in parts of rural China.
The arrested duo were officials responsible for local funerary practices, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. One allegedly paid a grave-robber $489 each for 10 exhumed corpses. The officials needed to meet expected quotas for cremations reported in their jurisdictions (towns that state media has not specified). Many locals entomb their kin in secret to skirt state laws regarding burial, which probably made the officials’ job rather difficult.
“Pushed to meet their quota, the two officials sought to purchase the corpses and send them to funeral parlour for cremation,” Xinhua reported.
And here is a rather vivid two paragraphs:
Body-snatching is, therefore, a lucrative, illicit business, involving bribe-taking local officials who look the other way, specialists capable of dressing up cadavers, and middlemen willing to connect desperate families to organized rings of grave-robbers and body-snatchers.
The practice of burying “ghost brides” also remains very much in the headlines. The old ritual involves burying a deceased young female alongside a dead bachelor, so the male will not be without a companion in the afterlife.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
Does union membership help cause marriage?
According to David Schneider and Adam Reich it does, their paper is called Marrying Ain’t Hard When You Got A Union Card? Labor Union Membership and First Marriage. The abstract is this:
Over the past five decades, marriage has changed dramatically, as young people began marrying later or never getting married at all. Scholars have shown how this decline is less a result of changing cultural definitions of marriage, and more a result of men’s changing access to social and economic prerequisites for marriage. Specifically, men’s current economic standing and men’s future economic security have been shown to affect their marriageability. Traditionally, labor unions provided economic standing and security to male workers. Yet during the same period that marriage has declined among young people, membership in labor unions has declined precipitously, particularly for men. In this article, we examine the relationship between union membership and first marriage and discuss the possible mechanisms by which union membership might lead to first marriage. We draw on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-79 to estimate discrete time event-history models of first marriage entry and find that, controlling for many factors, union membership is positively and significantly associated with marriage. We show then that this relationship is largely explained by the increased income, regularity and stability of employment, and fringe benefits that come with union membership.
That is via the excellent Kevin Lewis, who cites some other interesting papers at the link.