Month: October 2019
Not a single child born in the U.K. in 2016 was named Nigel
When he heard that no babies born in Britain in 2016 were named Nigel, Nigel Smith began to fret that the people with whom he shared a first name were a “dying breed.”
“I thought that’s a bit of a worry, really, because most of us are over a certain age,” Smith told As It Happens host Carol Off.
Instead of going into mourning, however, he decided to have some fun with it. He owns the Fleece Inn, near Worcestershire, so he organized “Nigel Night” at the pub.
“We’re going to die out soon, so it’s important to sort of celebrate our Nigel-ness before we all pop off the planet.”
Smith says 434 Nigels — including himself — joined in the festivities on Saturday to enjoy some music, food and celebrating their mutual “Nigel-ness.”
It’s believed to be the biggest gathering of Nigels in the world — though it’s unclear who’s keeping track of this unusual statistic…
All attending Nigels, ranging in age from seven months to 80 years old, were verified with an ID check, and handed a badge with their name on it. Other attendees were issued badges that read “Not Nigel” on them.
According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, no boys born in 2016 were named Nigel. The name enjoyed a slight uptick with 11 new Nigels in 2017, and eight in 2018.
That number pales in comparison to the most popular name, Oliver, which saw 5,390 new additions in 2018. Other top boys’ names over the last decade included George, Harry, Noah and Jack.
And:
Smith didn’t rule out the possibility that Farage’s role in the 2016 Brexit referendum may have even played a part in the dearth of newborn Nigels that year.
“Despite the man, we are fighting back.”
Here is the link, via Michelle Dawson.
Are you a harbinger customer?
If so, stop reading MR!:
Previous research has shown that there exist “harbinger customers” who systematically purchase new products that fail (and are discontinued by retailers). This article extends this result in two ways. First, the findings document the existence of “harbinger zip codes.” If households in these zip codes adopt a new product, this is a signal that the new product will fail. Second, a series of comparisons reveal that households in harbinger zip codes make other decisions that differ from other households. The first comparison identifies harbinger zip codes using purchases from one retailer and then evaluates purchases at a different retailer. Households in harbinger zip codes purchase products from the second retailer that other households are less likely to purchase. The analysis next compares donations to congressional election candidates; households in harbinger zip codes donate to different candidates than households in neighboring zip codes, and they donate to candidates who are less likely to win. House prices in harbinger zip codes also increase at slower rates than in neighboring zip codes. Investigation of households that change zip codes indicates that the harbinger zip code effect is more due to where customers choose to live, rather than households influencing their neighbors’ tendencies.
Here is more from Duncan I. Simester, Catherine E. Tucker, and Claire Yang. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “Cheap books make authors canonical.” From a new study of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas.
2. “Wealth taxes: a future battleground” — my 2013 NYT column. Recommended.
4. Kara Walker one of the finest artists of our time (NYT).
Donor Cycle Dynamics
It’s an ill-wind that blows no good and in Allocating Scarce Organs, Dickert-Conlin, Elder and Teltser find that repealing motorcycle helmet laws generate large increases in the supply of deceased organ transplants. The supply shock, however, is just the experiment that the authors use to measure demand responses. It’s well known that the shortage of transplant organs has led to a long waiting-list. The waiting-list, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Many people who could benefit from a transplant never bother getting on the list since their prospects are already so low. In addition, some people have access to substitutes for a deceased organ transplant namely a living donor. Finally, there is a quality tradeoff: as more organs become available the quality of the match may increase as people may pass on the first available organ to get a better match. The authors use the supply shock to study all these issues:
We find that transplant candidates respond strongly to local supply shocks, along two dimensions. First, for each new organ that becomes available in a market, roughly five new candidates join the local wait list. With detailed zip code data, we demonstrate that candidates listed in multiple locations and candidates living out-side of the local market disproportionately drive demand responses. Second, kidney transplant recipients substitute away from living-donor transplants. We estimate the largest crowd out of potential transplants from living donors who are neither blood relatives nor spouses, suggesting that these are the marginal cases in which the relative costs of living-donor and deceased-donor transplants are most influential. Taken together, these findings show that increases in the supply of organs generate demand behavior that at least partially offsets a shock’s direct effects. Presumably as a result of this offset, the average waiting time for an organ does not measurably decrease in response to a positive supply shock. However, for livers, hearts, lungs, and pancreases, we find evidence that an increase in the supply of deceased organs increases the probability that a transplant is successful, defined as graft survival. Among kidney transplant recipients, we hypothesize that living donor crowd out mitigates any health outcome gains resulting from increases in deceased-donor transplants.
In other words, increased organ availability increases the quality of the matches for organs that cannot be given by a living donor (hearts, lungs, pancreases, partially liver) but for kidneys some of the benefit of increased organ availability accrues to potential living donors who do not have to donate and this means that match quality does not substantially increase.
The authors also critique the geographic isolation of kidney donation regions. As I wrote when Steve Jobs received a kidney transplant:
Although there is no reason to think that Apple CEO Steve Jobs “jumped the line” to get his recent liver transplant, Jobs did have an advantage: He was able to choose which line to stand in.
Contrary to popular belief, transplant organs are not allocated solely according to medical need. Organs are allocated through a complex system of 58 transplant territories. Patients within each territory typically get first dibs on organs from that territory. That’s great if a patient happens to live in a territory with a lot of organ donors and relatively few demanders, but not so good for a patient living in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles, where waiting lines are longest.
As a result of these “accidents of geography,” relatively healthy patients in some parts of the country get transplants while sicker patients in other parts of the country die waiting.
Arrived in my pile
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All.
Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work.
Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson, Ingenious: The Unintended Consequences of Human Innovation.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
Volume 16, Issue 2, September 2019
In this issue:
Let facts be submitted to a candid world: Ron Michener explains the role of monetary affairs in the hardships that helped to justify the rebellion of the American colonies, and criticizes Farley Grubb’s Journal of Economic History article on the money of colonial New Jersey.
Fads and trends in OECD economic thinking: Using the frequency of terms in the OECD’s Economic Surveys, Thomas Barnebeck Andersen shows how policy ideas in economics changed over time, including ‘demand management,’ ‘incomes policy,’ ‘output gap,’ ‘potential GDP,’ ‘structural unemployment,’ ‘structural reform,’ ‘macroprudential,’ ‘incentives,’ ‘deregulation,’ ‘liberalisation,’ ‘privatisation,’ ‘human capital,’ ‘education,’ and ‘PISA.’
The economics of economics: Using 291 person-year observations from UCSD Econ, Yifei Lyu and Alexis Akira Toda model Econ faculty compensation on publications and citations and find, among other things, no evidence of a gender gap.
The Liberal Tradition in South Africa, 1910–2019: Martin van Staden describes the unique history and current standing of classical liberalism in South Africa, including an extensive account of liberals in the nation’s politics. The article extends the Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country series to 19 articles.
Lawrence Summers Deserves a Nobel Prize for Reviving the Theory of Secular Stagnation: Julius Probst makes the case, inaugurating the series on Who Should Get the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Why?
Convention defined: We reproduce by permission a large portion of David K. Lewis’s Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969), wherein he defined coordination equilibrium, coordination problem, common knowledge, and convention.
Mizuta’s 1967 checklist of Adam Smith’s library: We reproduce by permission the 1967 checklist created by Hiroshi Mizuta of the titles that were owned by Adam Smith. This checklist (supplemented by a list of additional once-elusive titles) provides a handy means for determining whether a title was in Smith’s personal library.
EJW Audio:
Ron Michener on Why It’s Important to Get Colonial U.S. Monetary History Right
Maybe corporations don’t have enough power
In a context of monopsony power, wages at the top of the spectrum would be held lower. Corporations wouldn’t then voluntarily distribute them to workers with lower wages. But if firms lacked monopoly power, they wouldn’t be able to retain the gains from that. The gains would be captured as consumer surplus by the firms’ customers. In order to be competitive in the market for their goods and services, firms would have to assert their monopsonist power just to remain competitive by transferring those gains to the consumer.
…it does match with a context where more skilled workers were captured by powerful firms and less skilled workers benefit indirectly as consumers. Maybe labor incomes had less variance because firms back then were more powerful.
That is from Kevin Erdmann.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Felt anger in the previous day. A national ranking.
2. Which Medicare innovations really worked? (NYT)
3. Prediction markets in which research will replicate.
5. Black women in economics (NYT).
My forthcoming debate with Slavoj Žižek
We are excited to announce the program for the Dec. 7 Holberg Debate! Slavoj Žižek will give the keynote “Why I Am Still A Communist” and then be interviewed by @tylercowen
We invite everyone to watch the livestream and tweet Qs for Žižek. Use #qholberg.
https://www.facebook.com/events/2524051877814963/
Bergen, Norway — I’ll be there!
Free Trade and Peace
We investigate the effect of trade integration on interstate military conflict. Our empirical analysis, based on a large panel data set of 243,225 country-pair observations from 1950 to 2000, confirms that an increase in bilateral trade interdependence significantly promotes peace. It also suggests that the peace-promotion effect of bilateral trade integration is significantly higher for contiguous countries that are likely to experience more conflict. More importantly, we find that not only bilateral trade but global trade openness also significantly promotes peace. It shows, however, that an increase in global trade openness reduces the probability of interstate conflict more for countries far apart from each other than it does for countries sharing borders. The main finding of the peace-promotion effect of bilateral and global trade integration holds robust when controlling for the simultaneous determination of trade and peace.
From Lee and Pyun, Does Trade Integration Contribute to Peace?
Who favors unbreakable commercial encryption?
Governments may be the main threat to big tech companies’ current approach to encryption, but there is another, more surprising threat: their own business interests. The techno-libertarians’ absolutist rejection of lawful access has never been tenable in a commercial context. Barr lambasted Silicon Valley for claiming that government access to consumer devices was never acceptable, even for a purpose as critical as stopping terror attacks, while insisting that its companies had to have access to all their customers’ devices for the purpose of sending them security updates (and, in Apple’s case, promotional copies of unwanted U2 albums). What’s more, Big Tech’s best customers—that is, businesses—don’t want unbreakable end-to-end communications direct to the end user. That encrypted pipe makes it impossible to find and stop malware as it comes in and stolen intellectual property as it goes out. It also thwarts a host of regulatory compliance mandates. So, pace the absolutists, tech companies have found ways to ensure that their business customers can compromise end-to-end security.
And there is this:
…I believe the tech companies are slowly losing the battle over encryption. They’ve been able to bottle up legislation in the United States, where the tech lobby represents a domestic industry producing millions of jobs and trillions in personal wealth. But they have not been strong enough to stop the Justice Department from campaigning for lawful access. And now the department is unabashedly encouraging other countries to keep circling the tech industry, biting off more and more in the form of law enforcement mandates. That’s a lot easier in countries where Silicon Valley is seen as an alien and often hostile force, casually destroying domestic industries and mores.
The Justice Department has learned from its time on the receiving end of such an indirect approach to tech regulation. It has struggled for 30 years against a European campaign to use privacy regulation to prevent tech companies from giving the U.S. government easy access to personal data. But as the tide of opinion turned against U.S. tech companies around the world, the EU was able to impose billions in fines on them in the name of privacy. Soon it really didn’t matter that these companies’ data practices weren’t regulated at home. They had to comply with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. And once they accepted that, their will to lobby against similar legislation in the United States was broken. That’s why California—and perhaps the federal government—is inching closer to enacting a privacy law that resembles Europe’s.
Here is the full Stewart Baker post, interesting throughout.