China’s Solyndra Problem
The NYTimes reports that China has a much bigger Solyndra problem than the United States ever did:
…China’s strategy is in disarray. Though worldwide demand for solar panels and wind turbines has grown rapidly over the last five years, China’s manufacturing capacity has soared even faster, creating enormous oversupply and a ferocious price war.
The result is a looming financial disaster, not only for manufacturers but for state-owned banks that financed factories with approximately $18 billion in low-rate loans and for municipal and provincial governments that provided loan guarantees and sold manufacturers valuable land at deeply discounted prices.
China’s biggest solar panel makers are suffering losses of up to $1 for every $3 of sales this year, as panel prices have fallen by three-fourths since 2008. Even though the cost of solar power has fallen, it still remains triple the price of coal-generated power in China, requiring substantial subsidies through a tax imposed on industrial users of electricity to cover the higher cost of renewable energy.
This bit also seemed familiar:
Mr. Li said in an interview that he wanted banks to cut off loans to all but the strongest solar panel companies and let the rest go bankrupt. But banks — which were encouraged by Beijing to make the loans — are not eager to acknowledge that the loans are bad and take large write-offs, preferring to lend more money to allow the repayment of previous loans. Many local and provincial governments also are determined to keep their hometown favorites afloat to avoid job losses and to avoid making payments on loan guarantees, he said.
New Videos: Leading Thinkers on Development
At MRUniversity we just released over 30 new videos on leading thinkers on development. We cover Amartya Sen (who gets three), Bela Belassa, Karl Polanyi, Adam Smith, Paul Romer, William Easterly and many others. In terms of the course these videos are optional, they are for dipping into as per one’s interest. In these videos, we sometimes provide a second perspective on issues we discuss in greater detail in forthcoming topic videos.
On Monday we will be releasing a new section of the Development Economics course, Food and Agricultural Productivity.
Hyperinflation in Iran
Steve Hanke estimates that Iran’s monthly inflation rate has reached 70%.
When President Obama signed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, in July 2010, the official Iranian rial-U.S. dollar exchange rate was very close to the black-market rate. But, as the accompanying chart shows, the official and black-market rates have increasingly diverged since July 2010. This decline began to accelerate last month, when Iranians witnessed a dramatic 9.65% drop in the value of the rial, over the course of a single weekend (8-10 September 2012). The free-fall has continued since then. On 2 October 2012, the black-market exchange rate reached 35,000 IRR/USD – a rate which reflects a 65% decline in the rial, relative to the U.S. dollar.
The rial’s death spiral is wiping out the currency’s purchasing power. In consequence, Iran is now experiencing a devastating increase in prices – hyperinflation.
Iran’s hyperinflation is still well below world leader Hungary whose inflation rate in July of 1946 reached 4.19 × 10^16 percent per month or Zimbabwe’s more recent November of 2008 rate of 7.96 × 10^10 percent per month.
The Evil of Pagination
I agree with Farhad Manjoo:
Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop.
Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.
Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. The practice has become so ubiquitous that it’s numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the Web has always been, and how it should be.
Neither is true: The Web’s earliest news sites didn’t paginate, and the practice grew up only over the past decade, in response to pressure from the ad industry. It doesn’t have to be this way—some of the Web’s most forward-thinking and successful publications, including BuzzFeedand the Verge, have eschewed pagination, and they’re better off for it.
Lottery Winners as Natural Experiments
The Detroit News: A Lincoln Park woman who won $1 million in the Michigan Lottery and was later convicted for still collecting state welfare died Saturday from an apparent drug overdose.
…Clayton isn’t the only Michigan Lottery winner to become notorious after making headlines.
In August, millionaire Freddie Young, of Detroit, was sentenced to 20 to 35 years in prison for fatally shooting his daughter’s landlord.
Young, 64, was convicted on second-degree murder and felony firearm charges in the May 2011 killing of Australian native Gregory McNicol.
Prosecutors said Young won an estimated $1.57 million share of a Michigan Lottery jackpot in February 2011. Three months later, he shot 45-year-old McNicol over $1,000 in back rent owed by his daughter.
Here is my previous post on this subject with more systematic data.
MR is Going to Korea: Gangnam Style!
Tyler and I will both be in South Korea in early October for the Asian launch of Marginal Revolution University. Tyler will be speaking at the World Knowledge Forum (Oct. 9-11). The WKF is known as the Asian Davos. In addition to Tyler, the speakers include Paul Krugman, Daron Acemoglu, Malcolm Gladwell, Cass Sunstein, Dani Rodrik, a number of other well known economists and social scientists and a host of political and business leaders.
Coincidentally, Google invited me to speak in South Korea on Oct. 9. I will be speaking on Innovation at the Google Big Tent event in Gangnam! I will also be on several panels at the WKF on the 10th and 11th.
Neither Tyler nor I have been to Korea before so we are looking forward to the trip. Recommendations welcome in the comments.
We are committed to making MRU a global player in online education.
Cambodian Genocide Denialism in Counterpunch
I was shocked by the latest issue of Counterpunch which includes a truly offensive article full of praise for one of the greatest mass murderers in human history, Pol Pot.
“The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot, a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch.
…St Francis and Leo Tolstoy would have understood him.
The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western invention.”
As if praise for Pol Pot were not enough, the author doubles down with support for Stalin and Mao.
“…To me, this recalled other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor. The people now in charge of the US, Europe and Russia want to present every alternative to their rule as inept or bloody or both. They especially hate incorruptible leaders, be it Robespierre or Lenin, Stalin or Mao – and Pol Pot.”
I consider this article to be on par with Holocaust denialism and praise for Hitler. Counterpunch is a leftist periodical but it is not without mainstream support and respect so I think this is worth calling out.
For the record, the most credible sources all estimate excess deaths under Pol Pot’s brutal regime of between 1.4 and 2.2 million people, approximately 20-25% of the entire population. The estimates come from three types of sources, 1) Interviews with survivors about relatives and neighbors killed, 2) Demographic estimates from before and after the Khmer Rouge which even today show massive discrepancies, especially for men of the relevant ages and 3) Surveys of mass graves. A good review is here. See also Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Project which does not overlook US involvement. None of this is especially controversial so Wikipedia is a good overview:
In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labour was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into “Old People” through agricultural labour. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.
…Modern research has located 20,000 mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia. Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 740,000 and 3,000,000, most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease.
The U.S. State Department-funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project estimates approximately 1.7 million. R. J. Rummel, an analyst of historical political killings, gives a figure of 2 million.
A UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed, while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a “most likely” figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that “these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution”.
Still the No Brainer Issue of the Year
In The No Brainer Issue of the Year I wrote:
Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open?
Once again, as the NYTimes reports, our dysfunctional political system has opted for Door #2:
A Republican bill to provide permanent resident visas for foreigners who graduate from American universities with advanced degrees in science and technology failed to pass the House on Thursday, a setback for technology companies that had strongly supported it.
…[The bill] would have eliminated an annual lottery and instead allocated 55,000 visas for legal permanent residency, known as green cards, each year to foreigners who have completed master’s and doctoral degrees from American universities in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin
Why 8 1/2 x 11?
Most books aren’t printed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper so why are these the standard paper dimensions? Paul Stanley offers an answer:
…we have ended up with paper sizes that were never designed or adapted for printing with 10-12 point proportionally spaced type. They were designed for handwriting (which is usually much bigger) or for typewriters. Typewriters produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving … around 65 to 78 characters: in other words something pretty close to ideal. But if you type in a standard proportionally spaced font (worse, in Times — which is rather condensed because it was designed to be used in narrow columns) at 12 point, you will get about 90 to 100 characters in the line.
The standard paper dimensions are thus not optimized for reading using printed fonts so typographers try to make adjustments. One adjustment is to abandon the standard paper size which is what books do. Another is to make the margins very wide which is the Latex default.
[Another] answer — which is what most wordprocessors did — was to stick to the standard “document design” (margins of an inch or so) and just use proportionally spaced fonts as if they were typewriter text. This produces very long lines, which are not comfortable to read. But that discomfort can be somewhat alleviated by increasing the space between lines (1.5 or double space), which helps prevent “doubling”, and by avoiding type sizes below about 11 or 12 points (depending very much on the design of the font).
Another possibility is to use the margins for marginalia, which I like. (Stanley points to the Latex tufte class as a way to do this.) One could also a two-column format or just make the text bigger.
Stanley concludes:
These are all potentially valid design choices. I happen to think that the most conventional one (stick with 1 inch margins, and add line spacing to prevent doubling) is probably the worst of them, and that it only seems “right” because we are accustomed to it. And it doesn’t generally save paper, because unless you use single spacing you lose vertically the extra space that you gain horizontally.
We need to fix this problem. Now is the time for a margin revolution.
Hat tip: John Cook at The Endeavour.
Music Break
The X Factor isn’t doing well in the ratings but this was Xcellent.
http://youtu.be/iAJyoiQEQco
Greek Islands for Sale
Telegraph: As international inspectors in Athens scrutinise the country’s fitness to receive the latest aid payment, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has said commercial exploitation of some islands could generate the revenue lenders need to see to continue funding the country.
The shortlist includes islands ranging in size from 500,000 square meters (5.4 million square feet) to 3 million square meters, and which can be developed into high-end integrated tourist resorts under leases lasting 30 years to 50 years, Mr Taprantzis said.
…The fund reviewed 562 of the estimated 6,000 islands and islets under Greek sovereignty. While some are already privately owned, such as Skorpios by the Onassis shipping heiress Athina Onassis, the state owns islands such as Fleves, which is near the coastal resort area of Vouliagmeni, and a cluster of three islands near Corfu. Mr Taprantzis declined to identify any of the islands.
Legislation needs to be passed to allow development of public property by third parties and reduce the number of building, environmental and zoning permits needed before the plan can proceed, Taprantzis said.
It’s a good idea to move these assets into private hands. The U.S. Federal government also has a lot of land that could be privatized. (For the U.S. see map and note that only a small portion is parkland).
Code is Law
Geeta Dayal, Wired: On Tuesday, some visitors trying to get to the livestream of Michelle Obama’s widely lauded speech at the Democratic National Convention were met with a bizarre notice on YouTube, which said that the speech had been blocked on copyright grounds….
On Sunday, a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them.
…As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech.
It is not just patent law which is out of control. If a copyright bot takes down a video for which there is fair use there ought to be grounds for a counter-suit.
Help Robin Hanson
At lunch the other day we discussed trends in world population. Some of the newer attendees were puzzled when Robin Hanson matter of factly predicted that there would soon be trillions of people. Bryan Caplan had to interject to explain that by “people” Robin means artificial intelligences, which includes robots and ems (brain emulations) plus flesh and blood people. Robin is writing a book on this topic and he needs a word to denote the class of natural plus artificial intelligences; people is obviously confusing. Vote for your favorite term here. Robin is especially interested in what the bots think would be appropriate, as he does not wish to offend his many future readers.
The Distribution of Summer Temperatures,1950-2011
Here is an animation from NASA showing the distribution of summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The initial smooth distribution is based on data from 1950-1980. The video advances in yearly increments showing data for 10 year periods from 1950-1960 through to 2001-2011. As the data advances one can see a pronounced shift in the curve to the right and also, a little less clearly, the curve gets shorter and fatter. Thus, not only are we seeing an increase in the mean temperature but also a greater possibility for extremes in temperature around the increased mean.
The visualization is an extension of ideas from a paper by Hansen et al. which includes additional, global data.
Addendum: Here are graphs using 1930-1980 as the baseline.
