Job Seeking the MR Way
Check out the blogad to the right, MA in Economics looking for a Job! I don’t know the candidate, the ad came across the transom just as do other blogads. But I do know this job seeker is entrepreneurial, has a sense of humor and has fine taste in blogs. Someone hire this person!
Vermont Fact of the Day
I’m in Vermont singing Eagles songs and toasting marshmallows while gathered around a campfire. I know, know, but I have only one vote! One the positive side, it is has been a long time since I’ve really seen the stars.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from our guidebook:
The 1870s saw the maximum of cleared land in the state – at that time as little as 20% of the state was in forest – the figure today approaches 85%.
I can’t vouch for the specific fact but the general idea is certainly correct. Forestland is up not down. We think of the city as the enemy of the environment but in fact the main constraint on forest is farmland and better technology has meant that we are producing more food from less land than ever before. See here for more.
Thanks to Monique van Hoek for the pointer.
Another reason for vouchers
In the spirit of Indiana’s attempt to simplify math by legislating Pi to be equal to 3.2, California Democrats in the Assembly have just approved a bill (soon to go to the Senate) shortening textbooks to a maximum of 200 pages. I imagine that there are some school board members in Kansas who know just what should be cut.
Thanks to David Theroux for the pointer.
More on Real Estate Commissions
Earlier I wrote that when house prices increase real estate commissions don’t fall very much but instead we get increased entry and wasteful competition. A recent article from the LA Times (reg. required) describes the process:
One of the few things increasing faster than house prices in California is the supply of agents licensed to sell them.
More than 22,000 applicants took the state’s real estate exam in April, nearly three times as many as in April 2003, according to the Department of Real Estate. To handle the surge, the department has rented six test centers around the state to supplement the five it already has.
The last time so many people wanted to sell real estate in California was in 1990. In what might be an ominous sign for the current boom, that year marked a peak in the housing market.
and get this:
There are 437,000 agents in California, enough to form the state’s eighth-largest city. With only 680,000 home sales a year, competition for listings can be savage.
Thanks to Paul N. for the pointer.
Grumpy makes me Happy (and probably a little Dopey too)
As I walked into the hotel I couldn’t help but notice a strikingly attractive woman who was also checking in. I was just outside of Nashville to talk about my work on bounty hunters to the Tennessee Association of Professional Bail Agents. Imagine my surprise (and delight!) when the next day at the lecture there she was front and center! Leah Hulan a former Miss Tennessee and first lieutenant in the United States Army Military Intelligence is the owner and president of Grumpy’s Bail Bonds.
If you commit a crime in TN, now you know who to call.
Krugman has a Hangover
Brad DeLong gives a nice overview of Austrian business cycle theory and points out (correctly) that in recent columns Paul Krugman has put forward a variant of the theory. (Krugman has also done this before in explaining the recession of 2001.) All of this is most puzzling since Krugman also wrote a famously nasty attack on Hayekian/Hangover business cycle theory calling it "about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire."
The Dubner Effect
Earlier this year, Tyler posted on the research of Emily Oster, a Harvard econ graduate student, who suggests new and compelling explanations for Asia’s missing women and why Aids rates are so high in Africa (here and here). Today, Dubner and Levitt discuss Oster’s research on Asia’s missing women at greater length in Slate. I’d like to say that Marginal Revolution had it all first but you should still read the Slate piece for the final twist. Damn you Stephen Dubner!!! (That last, to be shouted to the sky ala Jon Stewart.) 🙂
Anno Mirabilis
The Teaching Company is offering two free lectures to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the year that Einstein, then an unknown patent clerk, published five revolutionary papers on the atomic nature of mattter, quantum physics and special relativity. You can stream the audio or even download an MP3 to listen to on your morning jog. Highly recommended but addictive.
Markets in Everything: Rent a Son
RentMySon provides safe and trustworthy child-rental services in multiple
metropolitan areas. Our service area is growing every year and we are on target
to provide services in 50 cities by the end of 2006.
Here is Zach, age 9.
About Me: Zach enjoys playing in the park. He has gone on several
afternoons with single men trying to attract women by looking like the "father
type". He also has fun at birthday parties.Specializes in: Father-Son Events, Playing in the
Park.
And yes, you can also rent a daughter for take your daughter to work days.
On the day my son was born I taught a law and economics class on the economics of baby-selling. I’ve always been rather proud of this but I don’t think I’m ready to rent my kids. On the other hand, I never refuse an offer before hearing the price.
Thanks to J-Walk Blog.
Addendum: Probably a hoax. Thanks to Stephen Ayer of disinterested party for the investigation. KipEsquire adds, Tabarrok got punked!
PC History
Admiral Nelson defeated the French blue team at the battle of Trafalgar. More here.
Thanks to John Palmer, the Eclectic Econoclast for the link.
The Secret to a Good Marriage? Delusion
At lunch the other day Robin Hanson offered a perceptive comment on marriage and divorce (I paraphrase).
We tend to remember slights and frustrations more than favors and kindnesses. So inevitably in a marriage the weight of negative remembrances of thing past comes to exceed that of the positive. Divorce is the result.
The secret to a good marriage, therefore is selective forgetfulness. Coincidentally some psychologists have recently come to the same conclusion. The couples who stay together are the delusional ones – the ones who look at their past with rose-colored glasses.
Psychologists believe that what they are observing in couples who endorse these and similar sentiments are strongly selective memories that ignore inevitable negative events over the course of marital history. Maybe a distorted view of your marriage that emphasises the positive and forgets the negative is crucial to accounting for who stays and who flees when it comes to relationship endurance.
Similarly:
A kindred spirit is someone who appears especially to understand us and uniquely share our experiences, probably because they see the world they way we do and are therefore, in important respects, just like us.
Murray’s group measured marital partners’ personalities, values and day to day feelings and compared these to marital satisfaction. Those in the happiest and most stable marriages were those most likely to believe their partners were most like them – that is, "kindred spirits" – even when objective comparison of personality found that the similarity was much more imagined than real.
Meanwhile Bryan over at EconLog offers some useful ideas on how to remember and how to forget.
Angry Bear is Happy about Globalization
Kash at Angry Bear, a left of center economist, writes eloquently on trade and economic integration:
I’m not sure why we care more about economic integration than other
types of economic change. Every time there is a technological
innovation, some people benefit but others lose. Every time a person
decides to patronize one store over another, some people benefit but
others lose. Every time any economic transaction happens, in fact,
there are winners and losers. Why does it make a crucial difference
whether or not that transaction happened to cross a national border?…
When thinking about the costs and benefits of economic integration, why
should we only consider those that apply to people in our own country?
Is there any particular reason that I should care more about the
welfare effects of economic integration on people in Lubbock, Santa
Barbara, or Chattanooga than the effects on people in Lucknow, Sao
Paolo, or Chongqing? Personally, I can’t think of any good reason why.
Me neither. I also like Kash on the market test.
I realize that some of you are disappointed that I agree with the
orthodoxy by thinking that international economic integration is
generally a good thing, despite the fact that I call myself "liberal".
And I realize that some of you think that economists are all simply
brain-washed when it comes to international trade. But…if the vast majority of economists agree
about something, it’s not because we are simply turning off our brains
(and analytical power) on that one subject. It’s because the theory and
evidence on the subject are convincing, and have withstood relentless
efforts to debunk it. In general most economists think economic
integration is a good thing, not because it’s convenient to do so, but
because the work of thousands of extremely smart people working over
decades has convinced us that it usually is.
Star Wars: Another Straussian Reading
Tyler’s artful reading of Star Wars inspires my own Straussian reading.
The Star Wars saga consists of 6 chapters. Six equals 2 times 3. Three is now and for
quite sometime has been considered a good number, as in the holy trinity, but in former
times it was also and even primarily considered an evil number, as in three makes a crowd. So
‘twice 3’ might mean both good and evil, and hence
altogether; a balance of good and evil, surely the central theme of the entire saga.
The Exam
Exam week is just ending at GMU. One day I hope to have the courage to give this exam as a final in all my classes. I believe it would correlate well with more conventionally derived grades.
Why the Chets Get on Top
A correspondent writes to Brad DeLong, Why do the Chets of the world get on top? You know the type, she writes,
Chet is a hail-fellow-well-met sort, cracking jokes all the time… Chet is tall, probably tan, and has big white teeth like a mouthful
of chiclets…. Chet is a member of country clubs, and has a thin wife, and two
adorable kids…Chet has an incredibly high opinion of himself. He is confident to
the point of arrogance, but friendly, outgoing. There is one thing Chet is not,
ever, in my experience, and that is particularly bright.
I like Brad’s answer:
… there are four relevant human capabilities here: the ability to master
details, the ability to quickly grasp what the salient issues are and follow
them through to their conclusion, the ability to work like a dog, and the
ability to size up people–figure out quickly who will actually produce
something useful and who will not, who will hang tough and who will easily bid
more, who will soften if wooed and who will stay hard-nosed. Next to nobody has
all four or even three of these capabilities in world-class measure. Fewer
people than you think have even two. And for someone who has one of the other
three–mastery of detail or skill at analysis or the ability to work like a dog
for ungodly periods of time–mastery of Chet-hood is a very valuable and
lucrative skill.
The correspondent is asking about investment bankers but the discussion applies equally well if not better to politicians.
Pushing the model a bit further I suggest that detail mastery, analytical thinking and working like a dog are more open to meritocracy than sizing people up because to size people up it helps to get them to like you and that is more culturally bound than the other skills. Minorities may rise to the top more quickly in fields that emphasize the first sets of skills than in those that emphasize the latter. Birth in general, connections etc. are also more important for the latter set of skills. Thus in America, it’s Chet not Vijay even though Indian Chets surely exist in just as high a proportion as WASP Chets.