Witness to history!
What a game! What a team! What a university!
Final four!!!!!
Thanks to Kevin (and Charles!).
Taxes by the Mile
Fuel-efficient vehicles are cutting into gas tax revenues. As a result, some states are experimenting with per-mile tax systems. In Oregon, an experimental system uses GPS to monitor how many miles a car drives. Drivers are then charged an appropriate road tax when they fuel up.
In this case, leviathan’s hunger has some benefits. The current system breaks miles down into rush hour and non-rush hour which allows for improved congestion pricing. But more generally, there is no reason why the tax, insurance and road pricing systems cannot be fully-integrated. Aaron Edlin and Pinar Karaca-Mandic point out
that tort law does not fully internalize accident costs. A fuel tax
helps but since the externality is
per-mile not per-gallon a per-mile tax is more efficient. Insurance by the mile is also more efficient than the current system which subsidizes heavy users. Finally, GPS can be used to price by the road and not just by the time of day. Indeed, as pricing by the mile/road becomes more common, the idea of private for-profit roads will no longer seem so radical.
Bribery at the UN
The United Nation’s Security Council has 5 permanent members and 10 non-permanent members, the latter are elected from regional groups and serve two year terms. Yesterday Eric Werker presented a fun paper at GMU showing that US foreign aid increases dramatically to countries elected to the Security Council.
The result isn’t that surprising but Werker did a good job of ruling out explanations other than bribery. Foreign aid, for example, increases just as a country joins the council and drops just at it leaves. Foreign aid also increases especially dramatically in important years, as measured by the number of New York Times stories involving the council. Perhaps most interestingly, although US foreign aid is larger for democracies than for autocracies on average, autocracies get bigger increases in aid when they join the council. The result makes a lot of sense. Autocracts can sell their votes more easily than democratically elected leaders (no domestic constituencies to worry about) and transactions costs are lower – the aid goes directly to the vote seller.
AI, Consciousness and Robot Outsourcing
One of my "absurd views" is that the first computer to become conscious was Deep Blue playing against Gary Kasparov in 1997. It only happened for a moment but in one spectacular move Deep Blue performed like no computer ever had before. After the game, Kasparov said he felt a presence behind the machine. He looked frightened.
Ken Rogoff, a top-flight economist and chess prodigy, wonders whether we don’t all have a little something to fear.
But the level that computers have reached already is scary enough.
What’s next? I certainly don’t feel safe as an economics professor! I have no doubt that sometime later this century, one will be able to
buy pocket professors – perhaps with holographic images – as easily as
one can buy a pocket Kasparov chess computer today.
Rogoff thinks that the upheavals caused by cheap AI will be far more important than those caused by low-wage labor from India and China.
…will
artificial intelligence replace the mantra of outsourcing and
manufacturing migration? Chess players already know the answer.
Red Dawn
Brad just doesn’t know right-wing agitprop. My friends walked out, but I exited the theater, pumped my fist in the air and shouted, Wolverines! (That’s when I first knew I was a rather odd Canadian – perhaps this was destiny.)
Comments are open if you have any idea what I am talking about – this will provide a test of Ben Domenech’s thesis. My apologies if you are utterly mystified.
Best Sentence I have read today
You can’t enjoy the bread if the rioters have cut off the path to the bakery.
Robert Schwartz in the comments section of my post, Le problème du pain.
Le problème du pain
Bread is one of the great pleasures of Paris. The croissants melt in your mouth, the tarts have a crust that is to die for and when you break a baguette the bloom crackles perfectly and yet the inside is moist and chewy. Moreover, I’m not talking about the best bread in Paris (which is likely the best in the world), I’m talking about the bread that you can find in any of thousands of neighborhood boulangeries and patisseries. Why is the bread in Paris better than any that I can find in Washington?
Two answers come quickly to mind. First, competition is intense. Every neighborhood has at least half a dozen shops to buy bread. Second, the French are used to high quality and will reject anything of low quality so tourists benefit from the informed local demanders.
I find both of these explanations wanting. We do have artisanal bread in the United States and take a look at your local supermarket, competition on bread quality is intense. At my local supermarket, there are dozens of different breads all of which compete with an on-premise bakery.
Furthermore, isn’t bread making about knowledge? – i.e. the paradigmatic example of a public good and one that is supposed to diffuse easily around the globe. How difficult can it be to follow the recipe? (I know, that is my point.)
Comments are open if you have some ideas about why bread isn’t nearly as good in the United States as in Paris. But you might also have guessed that I have a larger point in mind.
Le problème du pain is this – if it’s difficult to spread the art of bread making from Paris to Washington then how can we ever hope to spread democracy from Washington to Baghdad?
Three of my Favorite Things (for travelling)
Here are three items I always bring on long trips.
1. Kensington noise canceling headphones.
These are much cheaper than the heavily advertised version by Bose and they work very well. With the headphones on you can actually listen to music on an airplane, but don’t think that you are going to sleep all that much better. One AA battery will get you there and back although I always bring a spare in case I forget to turn off the noise canceling switch.
2. Paul Fredrick Non-Iron Dress Shirt.
Although not sold as a travel shirt this non-iron shirt looks almost as good on the second wearing as on the first and you can wash it in the sink, hang it to to dry and wear it again on day three. I have "non-iron," and "wrinkle-free" dress shirts from other manufacturers but none are as good as the Paul Fredrick.
3. Kodak DX7590 digital camera. There are plenty of things wrong with this camera – like almost all digitals it’s slow to start and has a long refresh rate between pictures (and thus is not good at capturing action) and it’s bulky. This camera, however, has two redeeming features. First, and most importantly, it has a 10 times zoom and not a useless digital zoom but a real 10 times optical zoom. The zoom makes all the difference when you want to get the close-up of that gargoyle on top of Saint-Chapelle.
As noted, the real lens makes the camera bulky but do you want to impress your friends with your "cute camera" or do you want to impress your friends with your photographs? (Also, if you want impress your friends with your photos be sure to delete 80 percent of them.)
The other redeeming feature is the battery life. With an additional 256mb memory card I can take well over 100 pictures, about right for a week trip, and can leave the battery charger at home.
Trackbacks are Off
Due to an onslaught of spam, we have stopped accepting trackbacks. If Typepad improves their spam filters we will turn trackbacks back on but at present the ratio of spam to real trackbacks is over 500 to 1. We like trackbacks and regret the inconvenience.
Sentence of the Day – French Edition
Unexpected violence broke out in Lyon when a march of about 2,500 Turks
protesting against a memorial to Armenian victims of a 1915 massacre in
the then Ottoman Empire crossed paths with the anti-CPE demonstrations.
(From Reuters
regarding today’s huge protests in France against the new bill allowing
firms to fire young workers in their first two years of empolyment if
they don’t work out.)
At the Bastille
As I arrived at the Bastille Metro a mass of students exited, marched across the 5 lane roundabout and sat down. Chaos ensued. Unfortunately for them the road was so wide they could manage a blockade only 2 to 3 students deep. This was not enough as angry young french men with jobs drove their mopeds through the crowd kicking the students along the way. Apparently the workers of the world are not united, at least not in France. Unable to maintain their ranks the protest fell apart. Today, however, some 40,000 students protest across France and the police presence in Paris remains strong.
Here is my previous post describing the economics behind the protests.
At the Sorbonne
French riot police stormed the Sorbonne on the weekend, ousting students who had barricaded themselves in the first occupation since the events of 1968. I am in Paris (did you guess?) and the police presence at the Sorbonne is impressive, but student protests continue in the streets.
The students are protesting a new labor law which would make it easier to fire workers under the age of 26. Of course, this would also make it easier to hire young workers who currently have an unemployment rate of 23 percent. You cannot have it both ways; raise the cost of firing and you raise the cost of hiring. In my opinion, the Sorbonne students need a little less Foucault and a little more Bastiat.
Or perhaps the students know more economics than I credit them with. Under the current law it is costly to fire anyone but the effect on hiring is not symmetric. The workers least likely to be hired are those who are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a risk. The fear of hiring effect falls not on the privileged students at the Sorbonne (trust me today’s protesters were tres chic), but on young French North Africans whose unemployment rate exceeds 30 percent.
Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, today’s protests by the Sorbonne elite are a cause of the riots of late last year.
Road to Serfdom ala Ken Burns
Jared Rhoads has taken the Road to Serfdom cartoons and made them into a really elegant movie with music, ala Ken Burns. Check it out!
Addendum: Jared also writes regularly the Lucidicus Project.
M1 and Me
Michael Kinsley helps Alan Greenspan with his memoirs.
Although developments in human biology are always–and, in the view
of many experts, perhaps not un-including myself, quite
properly–subject to a variety of interpretations, the evidence does
tend to suggest, with only a limited amount of ambiguity, that I was
born…
DVDs and Movie Theaters
A lot of people have argued that DVDs, home theater, and the shrinking time from big screen to DVD sales are spelling doom for the movie theater business. Michael Campbell, CEO of Regal, the nation’s largest chain of theaters, has some smart things to say in response. I particularly like his first response which shows a keen appreciation of market inter-dependencies, "general equilibrium" in econ-speak.
I think DVD’s have been the savior of not only the studio model but
have been beneficial to theater owners, too, because it funnels more
money back into the studios, which in turn fuels higher production
budgets, greater numbers of films, and so on.We have seen the
window shrink from an average of about six months between theatrical to
video 10 years ago to about four and a half months today. Some
compression of that window over time is justified, or has been
justified at least in the past, because we generate our piece of the
pie at the box office much quicker today than we did a decade ago.People
who run the studios are smart people, and I think they realize the
tremendous value of having that theatrical launch pad. And I don’t
think that’s going to change. They make films to be released on the big
screen.