Year: 2016
Wednesday assorted links
1. The man with a bionic penis will lose his virginity to a dominatrix who ran for parliament (there is no great stagnation).
2. Do better-looking women get better grades?
3. My old post on whether we should split up big banks. And what is getting too little attention from financial regulators, an excellent post from Timothy Taylor.
4. The Turkish Mustang and Norwegian Blind are both excellent movies. Do any of you have opinions of the new Tarantino?
5. If you google “gourmet rutabagas,” absolutely nothing of substance comes up.
6. Pierre Boulez has passed away (NYT).
China pessimists are China optimists, and vice versa
If you think a lot of China’s growth slowdown already has come, the rest should prove manageable, albeit painful. That is true for both the global economy and for China. And that is in fact my view.
But if you think China has been growing at six to seven percent over the last year…egads! The roof will be falling in all at once, and what a long and steep way it has to tumble. The previous China optimists, provided they are not asleep, should be really worried now.
If you take Australian prices as a kind of bellwether, arguably the Chinese slowdown started about four to five years ago. (Five years ago, the Australian government was forecasting Australian growth rates of seven percent, now the growth rates are at about two percent.)
I call it the Soft Hard Landing.
Obamacare in 2016
During the election season Democrats can’t admit Obamacare is broken and Republicans can’t admit it won’t be repealed.
An excellent post from Robert Laszewski, read the whole thing.
Religion is good for the poor, installment #1437
From Jessica Shiwen Cheng and Fernando Lozano:
What is the role of religious institutions and religious workers in the racial earnings gap in the United States? In this paper we explore the relationship between childhood exposure to religious density, as measured with the number of religious workers at the state level, and the labor market outcomes of the worker thirty years later. We use data that spans over fifty years to identify changes in earnings due to early exposure to religion: our first source of identification uses changes in these two variables within states, and our second source of identification uses states’ differences by following workers who moved to a different state. Our results suggest that living in a state with a an extra clergy member for each 1,000 habitants increases the earnings of black workers by 1.7 to 3.6 percentage points relative to white workers.. In addition we show that this relationship is robust to different measures of exposure to religious density, and that these estimates increase to 7.6 percentage points when the change on religious density is defined exclusively increasing an extra black religious workers for each 1,000 habitants. Finally, we estimate a series of robustness tests that suggest that these results are not due to spatial sorting across states, nor to secular time trends associated with changes in labor market outcomes for black American workers.
You can find a copy of the paper if you dig through this link to the AEA program, look under Jan 03, 2016 12:30 pm, Hilton Union Square, Powell A & B, National Economic Association/American Society of Hispanic Economist. The title of the paper is”Racial/Ethnic Differences in Self-Identification and Income Inequality,” but do any of you know a better, more direct link?
As I see things, to overgeneralize perhaps rather grossly, Democratic economists are more concerned with social and intellectual status, often in good ways, than are many conservatives. The former group therefore is led to violate strictures of science through the omission of inconvenient truths, rather than through outright denialism or simply “making things up.” The benefits of religion, including sometimes extreme religion, are one example of that. On the Left, redistribution is a popular remedy for poverty, religion much less so.
That was then, this is now, part II
“Do I think they have the capacity to make a hydrogen bomb? I think that’s virtually impossible,” said Daniel Pinkston, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear weapons who is currently at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania.
…South Korean intelligence specialists also were skeptical and dismissed Kim’s words as rhetoric. “We don’t have any information that North Korea has developed an H-bomb,” Yonhap News Agency quoted an unidentified intelligence official as saying. “We do not believe that North Korea, which has not succeeded in miniaturizing nuclear bombs, has the technology to produce an H-bomb.”
That is from The Washington Post, December 10, 2015. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the test actually was a hydrogen bomb.
Brookings fellowship
From my inbox:
Tyler,
We’re recruiting for our next Okun-Model fellow, which is a one-year visiting position at Brookings for early career economists. Previous fellows include Melissa Kearney, Jens Ludwig, and Amanda Kowalski. If you know of anyone interested for academic year 2016-2017, or anyone who might know someone interested, please pass along the link: http://www.brookings.edu/about/employment/position/2015/es15216
Ted [Gayer]
That was then, this is now
China’s top leadership plans to push ahead with deep structural reforms of agriculture and the countryside next year, but the most pressing matter is how to deal with its huge stockpile of surplus grain.
The source is here, via Bill Bishop.
Tuesday assorted links
When can median income consumers afford the very best?
A random Econ ? that pops into my head: are there any goods that a US median income maker can buy that are the best available?
I can think of quite a few:
iPhones and Kindle
mineral water (Gerolsteiner)
most vaccines and antibiotics
writing paper
books
movies
basketballs and many other sporting goods
rutabagas
Coca-Cola, Mexican or otherwise
Google and Facebook
Raffi himself cites “razor blade” on Twitter.
What else?
Regdata, a new database of the regulatory state
There is a new and very important regulatory database now published and on-line:
RegData: A numerical database on industry-specific regulations for all United States industries and federal regulations, 1997–2012
Omar Al-Ubaydli and Patrick A. McLaughlin
Abstract
We introduce RegData, formerly known as the Industry-specific Regulatory Constraint Database. RegData annually quantifies federal regulations by industry and regulatory agency for all federal regulations from 1997–2012. The quantification of regulations at the industry level for all industries is without precedent. RegData measures regulation for industries at the two, three, and four-digit levels of the North American Industry Classification System. We created this database using text analysis to count binding constraints in the wording of regulations, as codified in the Code of Federal Regulations, and to measure the applicability of regulatory text to different industries. We validate our measures of regulation by examining known episodes of regulatory growth and deregulation, as well as by comparing our measures to an existing, cross-sectional measure of regulation. Researchers can use this database to study the determinants of industry regulations and to study regulations’ effects on a massive array of dependent variables, both across industries and time.
Here is the published piece. Here is a working paper version. Here is the database itself. Here is background and an explanation of different versions of the data base.
The end of Schengen?
If so, a sad day, here is the scoop:
Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone is facing the biggest test of its two-decade existence after Sweden re-imposed controls on visitors crossing from Denmark across what had been one of most open borders in the world.
Hours after the measures came into effect, Denmark announced it would slap new controls on its own border with Germany, while Berlin warned that the 26-nation zone of passport-free travel was now “in danger”.
Six Schengen countries – Austria, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark and non-EU member Norway – have now reintroduced border checks as Europe struggles to cope with an unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants from conflict zones including Syria and Afghanistan.
Here is the story, via Meg Greene.
Monday assorted links
1. Detroit renaissance fact of the day.
2. Earth fact of the day: “According to BIS total public and private debt to GDP for the world stands at 265% vs 220% at the peak of the prior credit cycle” Good thing those interest rates are low, I guess.
3. A comic on RCTs.
4. MIE: a history of farting for money. Those old service sector jobs…
5. MIE: death by chocolate.
6. Cato on Oregon. Better background than I’ve seen from any other media source.
The minimum wage and the Great Recession
I believe Card and Krueger will and should win Nobel Prizes, but their work is also not the last word on the minimum wage, especially during weak labor markets. Here is the most recent study, by Jeffrey Clemens:
I analyze recent federal minimum wage increases using the Current Population Survey. The relevant minimum wage increases were differentially binding across states, generating natural comparison groups. I first estimate a standard difference-in-differences model on samples restricted to relatively low-skilled individuals, as described by their ages and education levels. I also employ a triple-difference framework that utilizes continuous variation in the minimum wage’s bite across skill groups. In both frameworks, estimates are robust to adopting a range of alternative strategies, including matching on the size of states’ housing declines, to account for variation in the Great Recession’s severity across states. My baseline estimate is that this period’s full set of minimum wage increases reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points. This estimate accounts for 43 percent of the sustained, 13 percentage point decline in this skill group’s employment rate and a 0.49 percentage point decline in employment across the full population ages 16 to 64.
Do any of you see an ungated version? In any case I hope this receives the media attention it deserves. Will it?
The first beauty contest judged by a robot jury
…people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.
The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.
I wonder who will win.
The full story is here, via Michelle Dawson.
A new age of discovery
Caving offers explorers opportunities to test themselves that until recently were not even known to exist. Speleology “has changed massively” in the past two decades, says Andy Eavis, widely considered the world’s foremost caver. The Krubera cave in Georgia, near the Black Sea, down which a Ukrainian team descended in 2004, is twice as deep, at more than 2,000 metres, as the Pierre St Martin cave in the French Pyrenees, which had been reckoned the deepest when Mr Eavis plumbed it in 1971. A new technique of laser scanning can measure such “chambers” far more accurately than before. Mr Eavis still marvels at the great chambers still being found in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. In 1981 he was the first to explore a cave there that is still the largest by area in the world—it could enclose the Hollywood Bowl. Now South China, among other places, is offering new opportunities for cavers. Its Miao Room, penetrated in 1989, is 852 metres long, and the largest by volume.
Access to forest canopies is also being transformed by technology. Towers, balloons, inflatable rafts, light aerial walkways, drones and even giant cranes that have been helicoptered into place allow scientists to see what is going on under once-inaccessible foliage. A new remote-sensing technology known as lidar can illuminate objects high up under the canopy and analyse them through reflected light.
Not as good as jetpacks, but in the meantime it will have to do. The ocean depths remain mostly unexplored, although a variety of attempts are underway, as discussed in the article.
It is also suggested, contrary to what I had thought, that there are still a variety of undiscovered peoples in the Amazon.
That article is from this week’s Economist.