FolderShare
FolderShare is a very cool service that synchronizes folders in real-time on two or more computers. I can work on Stata files at the office, for example, and by the time I get home the same files will be on my home computer. No more forgetting to shuttle the latest update of my work from office to home or vice-versa! FolderShare is also useful for transfering large files to a co-author. You can open folders on your computer to a guest, for example, and let them synchronize files up to 2 gigabytes in size. No more mailing of CDs! And oh yes, it’s free!
Democide
Rudy Rummel writes that due to new evidence he has significantly updated his figures for 20th century democide, i.e. murder by government.
Many scholars and
commentators have referenced my total of 174,000,000 for the democide
(genocide and mass murder) of the last century. I’m now trying to get
word out that I’ve had to make a major revision in my total due to two
books. One is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, and the
other is Mao: the Unknown Story that she wrote with her husband, Jon
Halliday. I’m now convinced that that Stalin exceeded Hitler in
monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin.From the time I wrote my book on China’s Bloody Century, I have held to these democide totals for Mao:
Civil War-Sino-Japanese War 1923-1949 = 3,466,000 murdered
Rule over China (PRC) 1949-1987 = 35,236,000 murderedHowever,
some other scholars and researchers had put the PRC total as from
60,000,000 to a high 70,000,000. Asked why my total is so low by
comparison, I’ve responded that I did not include the China’s Great
Famine 1958-1961. From my study of what was written on this in English,
I believed that:
(1) the famine was due to the Great Leap Forward when Mao tried to catch up with the West in producing iron and steel;
(2)
the factorization of agriculture, forcing virtually all peasants to
give up their land, livestock, tools, and homes to live in regimented
communes;
(3) the exuberant over reporting of agricultural
production by commune and district managers for fear of the
consequences of not meeting their quotas;
(4) the consequent belief
of high communist officials that excess food was being produced and
could be exported without starving the peasants;
(5) but, reports from traveling high officials indicated that peasants might be starving in certain localities;
(6) an investigative team was sent out from Beijing, and reported back that there was mass starvation;
(7) and then the CCP stopped exporting food and began to import what was needed to stop the famine.Thus,
I believed that Mao’s policies were responsible for the famine, but he
was mislead about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and
changed his policies. Therefore, I argued, this was not a democide.
Others, however, have so counted it, but I thought this was a sloppy
application of the concepts of mass murder, genocide, or politicide
(virtually no one used the concept of democide). They were right and I
was wrong.From the biography of Mao, which I trust (for those
who might question it, look at the hundreds of interviews Chang and
Halliday conducted with communist cadre and former high officials, and
the extensive bibliography) I can now say that yes, Mao’s policies
caused the famine. He knew about it from the beginning. He didn’t care!
Literally. And he tried to take more food from the people to pay for
his lust for international power, but was overruled by a meeting of
7,000 top Communist Party members.So, the famine was
intentional. What was its human cost? I had estimated that 27,000,000
Chinese starved to death or died from associated diseases. Others
estimated the toll to be as high as 40,000,000. Chang and Halliday put
it at 38,000,000, and given their sources, I will accept that.Now,
I have to change all the world democide totals that populate my
websites, blogs, and publications. The total for the communist democide
before and after Mao took over the mainland is thus 3,446,000 +
35,226,000 + 38,000,000 = 76,692,000, or to round off, 77,000,000
murdered. This is now in line with the 65 million toll estimated for
China in the Black Book of Communism, and Chang and Halliday’s estimate
of "well over 70 million."This exceeds the 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Union 1917-1987, with Hitler far behind at 20,946,000 wiped out 1933-1945.
For
perspective on Mao’s most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in
combat dead 34,021,000 — including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the
Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many
as were killed in combat in all these wars.Now, my overall
totals for world democide 1900-1999 must also be changed. I have
estimated it to be 174,000,000 murdered, of which communist regimes
murdered about 148,000,000. Also, compare this to combat dead.
Communists overall have murdered four times those killed in combat,
while globally the democide toll was over six times that number.
Giving Thanks
I went to Wegman’s less than 24 hours before Thanksgiving and purchased a turkey, yams, cranberries, a pumpkin pie, wine, cranberry cheese, fresh bread, peanut butter and some more wine. Not a single item was in short supply let alone in shortage. I give thanks for capitalism.
Gambling on Science
In 1990 my colleague Robin Hanson wrote:
Imagine a betting pool or market on most disputed science questions, with
the going odds available to the popular media, and treated socially as the
current academic consensus. Imagine that academics are expected to "put up
or shut up" and accompany claims with at least token bets, and that
statistics are collected on how well people do….This would be an "idea futures" market, which I offer as an alternative to
existing academic social institutions.
More and more it looks like Robin was right on. Consider this story from the London Times:
WHEN Ladbrokes teamed up with New Scientist magazine
in August last year to offer odds on five great breakthroughs being made by
2010, it looked like a typical silly-season stunt.It is now expected to become a very expensive one. As soon as the book
opened, physicists began to put their money where their theories were and backed
themselves to find gravitational waves – ripples in space and time predicted by
Albert Einstein but not yet proven to exist.Alan Watson, of the University of Leeds, was astounded
to see odds of 500-1 on a discovery that he considered a matter of when, not if,
and promptly wagered £50.So many other scientists did likewise that by lunchtime Professor Jim Hough,
of the University of Glasgow, who leads a team seeking the waves, was allowed to
stake only £25 at odds that had fallen to 100-1. When his colleague Sheila Rowan
placed her bet in the early afternoon, the odds were down to 5-1, and when the
book was closed they were 2-1.
It’s amazing how far we have come since Robin proposed idea futures, especially given that the idea could have been implemented hundreds of years ago. But Robin’s vision is even more radical than betting markets. Robin proposes that betting markets can substitute for many of the funding arrangements that we use today. Consider the part of the quote I excised above:
Imagine that funding
agencies subsidize pools on questions of interest to them, and that
research labs pay for much of their research with winnings from previous
pools.
Imagine indeed! We are not there yet but the odds are increasing in Robin’s favor.
Review of File-Sharing Papers
Rufus Pollock draws the following conclusions from the literature on file-sharing:
The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing does have a
negative impact on traditional sales. The size of this effect is
debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent
years, but a figure of between 20 and 40% would be a reasonable
consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 20-40% of the
decline in sales not a 20-40% decline in sales).
Beyond this
basic result several other very interesting facts have emerged.First
is the differential impact of file-sharing on an artist depending on
their existing popularity. According to Blackburn who investigates this
issue the ‘bottom’ 3/4 of artists sell more as a consequence of
file-sharing while the top 1/4 sell less.Second is the first tentative estimates (by Waldfogel and Rob) of the
welfare consequences of file-sharing. Waldfogel and Rob’s dramatic
result is that file-sharing on average yields a gain to society three
times the loss to the music industry in lost sales.
The conclusion seems right to me – file-sharing increases social-welfare, so in theory a win-win solution is possible, but in practice the increase comes at the expense of music firms. See here for the blog post and here for a summary of each of the main papers in the literature.
Hat-tip to Cory Doctorow at Boing-Boing Blog.
Would Aspirin Be Approved Today?
I’ve often said that if aspirin were invented today it would not be approved by the FDA. Drug researcher Derek Lowe says I’m wrong – aspirin wouldn’t even make it out of the lab. Read the whole thing.
Thanks to Ted Frank for the pointer.
Tabarrok’s Offer
Pascal’s Wager came up at the great debate the other night and Bryan Caplan was kind enough to refer to my paper as the definitive refutation. Coincidentally, a reader in search of counsel on matters economic and theological writes to the Financial Times’s Dear Economist who replies by trying to take the vig out of my scam ministry!
The economist Alex Tabarrok points out that if there is even a tiny
chance that Pascal is right, a tiny chance of a tiny chance of a second
of infinite bliss is still infinitely valuable.Now, if you give
me all your money, I’ll intercede with God on your behalf and increase
your chance of going to heaven. Of course, there is only a tiny chance
that my intercession will help, but a tiny chance of infinite bliss is,
again, infinitely valuable.Please send your cheque via the FT, and quickly please – I’ve already given Professor Tabarrok all my cash.
Water of Life
While most countries are committed to increasing access
to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, there is little consensus
on how to actually improve water services. One important proposal under discussion
is whether to privatize water provision. In the 1990s Argentina embarked
on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world, including the privatization of local water
companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country’s municipalities.
Using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and space generated
by the privatization process, we find that child mortality fell 8 percent in
the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was largest (26 percent) in the poorest areas. We check the robustness of these estimates using cause-specific mortality.
While privatization is associated with significant reductions in deaths from
infectious and parasitic diseases, it is uncorrelated with deaths from causes
unrelated to water conditions.
That is the abstract to a very important paper, Water for Life: The Impact of the Privatization of Water Services on Child Mortality, by Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler and Ernesto Schargrodsky in the February 2005 issue of the JPE. (free working paper version).
In theory, water services are not an easy thing to privatize well because of natural monopoly problems and because some of the benefits of clean water are externalities. In practice, however, governments in developing countries do such a poor job at providing water that there are large potential gains to privatization even given such problems.
See also Tyler’s post Will the Middle East run out of water? for more on where water privatization may have benefits.
The Treaty of Tripoli
In the late 1790s the US was having difficulty with Muslim pirates in the waters off Northern Africa. After some difficulty, a treaty was signed in 1796 with the Bey of Tripoli promising friendship, trade and an end to hostilities. The 11th article of the treaty provides a remarkable contrast between how these sorts of issues were handled by the founders and how they are handled today. It reads:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen; and as
the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility
against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an
interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The Treaty was read aloud in the Senate and approved unanimously. In his proclamation John Adams said, "I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen
and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice consent of
the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and
article thereof." The treaty was published in a number of leading newspapers. It never aroused any opposition.
The Mansion Wars
John Tierney had an excellent column on "mansionization" in yesterday’s NYTimes (I am cited). Unfortunately, it’s behind the great wall (which I predict will be down within 6 months) but here are some key grafs:
In the town where I live, a once placid Washington suburb, the mayor has just sent out a letter asking the natives to stop throwing eggs at each other’s homes. Such is life on the front lines of the anti-mansionization war….
My first impulse was to side with the mansionizers [because]…of my knee jerk libertarian reaction to the moralizers…Who were they to control other people’s property?…But when I talked to housing experts, they pointed to another message from the market… A majority of new homes in rapidly growing urban areas are in communities governed by private homeowners assocations that impose much stricter rules than governments do.
Some people chafe at the restrictions [but] Amanda Agan and Alexander Tabarrok…found that a home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington that was part of a private community typically sold for 5 percent more than a similar home nearby not governed by a homeowners association…
[M]ost people apparently want aesthetics to be regulated – not by politicians at the city or county level, but by homeowners in the neighborhood. That’s why the developers of private communities write constitutions that give so much power to the homeowners associations…Those founding fathers learned by trial and error that empowering local busybodies is the best way to maximize home values and minimize strife.
Aesthetic and other rights held by homeowner assocations and condominiums are a relatively new but rapidly growing type of property, the private but collective property right. Figuring out the best form for these rights will be an evolutionary process but one that is greatly aided by the fact that developers and homeowners have the same incentives – to make the home as valuable as possible.
Addendum: Art Woolf points me to the Rutland Herald which has Tierney’s column in full.
Torture, terrorism, and incentives
President Bush, Dick Cheney and others who support the use of torture by the United States and its agents usually rely on the ticking time bomb argument. Sometimes torture is necessary to prevent a greater evil. I accept this argument. If my kid were kidnapped and the suspect was refusing to talk, I’d want Vic Mackey to do the questioning.
But it does not follow from the "ticking time bomb" argument that torture should be legal. The problem with making torture legal is that the government will abuse its powers. I do not trust the government, any government, to use this power responsibly. Leviathan must be heavily restrained, especially when it comes to torture.
Here is where economics can make a contribution. By making torture illegal we are raising the price of torture but we are not raising the price to infinity. If the President or the head of the CIA thinks that torture is required to stop the ticking time bomb then they ought to approve it knowing full well that they face possible prosecution. Only if the price of torture is very high can we expect that it will be used only in the most absolutely urgent of circumstances.
The torture victim faces incredible pain and perhaps death at the hands of his torturer. If these costs are to be born by the victim then we had better make damn sure that the benefits are also high and the only way we can do that is to make the torturer also bear some of the costs. Torture must not be cheap.
Cosby was Correct
In Debunking Cosby on Blacks Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary attacks Bill Cosby for his speech last year to the NAACP.
Poor blacks are bad parents because they waste what little money they have
buying high-priced, brand-name shoes, Cosby chided.
"All this child knows is gimme, gimme, gimme," Cosby said, according to
a transcript of the speech. "They are buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers.
For what?"
Cosby was lauded by white conservatives and some blacks for being brave
enough to speak out. But like the price of sneakers that Cosby got wrong, he was
incorrect about much of what he said.…the comedian was rattling off
nonsense much like his Fat Albert character Mushmouth.
I was curious so I went to Table 2100 of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and found the following for 2003:
Average income of whites and other races: $53,292.
Average income of blacks: $34,485.
The survey then lists expenditures on a wide variety of goods from eggs and fish to books and televisions; to do a proper comparison we would have to correct for income and other demographic variables but some figures just jump out at you, including this:
Expenditures on footwear by whites and other races: $274
Expenditures on footwear by blacks: $440.
Chalk one up for the good Dr. Cosby.
Bad Statistics Lead to False Hope
Newspapers around the world are all agog with the story of a British Man, 25, ‘cured of HIV’; that headline from the normally reserved BBC. Scot is first in world to beat HIV says, (can you guess?), the Glasgow Sunday Mail. The more cosmopolitan, but doubly wrong, Medical News Today says, Man is Cured of AIDS. Other newspapers are reporting that doctors are "stunned," "mystified" and wondering whether this man holds the key to curing AIDS.
The story is pathetically simple once one gets past the headlines. A man tested positive for HIV, he took a lot of vitamins and just over a year later tested negative (several times). Now what are you going to believe that he cured himself of HIV or that the first test was wrong? HIV tests have high accuracy but when millions of people take these tests it’s an easy bet that there will be significant numbers of false positives.
It is even possible that in low-risk populations there will be more incorrect diagnoses than correct ones! Doctors may be stunned but to a statistician results like this are banal. Unfortunately, in about a dozen articles that I took a look at, many doctors were quoted (sadly, even the skeptical doctors were skeptical for the wrong reasons – they think the guy must still have HIV!) but not a single statistician. For the correct statistics see here or my earlier post, Why Most Published Research Findings are False, which analyzes a different application of the same idea.
Sex on the Margin
Sexual preferences are primarily biological in origin. But sexual choice is about preferences and constraints. Raise the price of sex with women and more men will choose to have sex with other men – that’s what happens in prisons.
In a remarkable paper, Andrew Francis (a graduate student at the University of Chicago) examines how AIDS has changed sexual choice. With admirable precision, Francis lays out the price of sex:
…it is thousands of times more likely that a male would get HIV having sex with a man than having sex with a woman. In terms of AIDS-related mortality, the expected cost of having unprotected sex once with a man is almost $2000, while the expected cost of having unprotected sex once with a woman is less than a dollar.
Thus AIDS changes the price of sex, do we observe changes in choice? Francis wants to be careful about causality so he uses a clever instrumental variables approach. He reasons that knowledge of AIDS and thus responsiveness to price is correlated with knowing someone who has AIDS and that knowing someone who has AIDS is exogeneous to other factors influencing sexuality. Unfortunately, it appears that he only has information on whether a relative has AIDS and genetic factors mean exogeneity is unlikely to hold. In fact, we would probably expect that simply knowing someone with AIDS is positively correlated with being homosexual (especially in 1992 when the survey was taken).
Indeed, Francis finds, as expected, that women who have a relative with AIDS are more likely to be engage in homosexual acts and identify as being homosexual. But Francis finds that men who have a relative with AIDS are significantly less likely to:
…have had sex with a man during the last sexual event…have had a male sexual partner in the last year… say they are sexually attracted to men…rate having sex with someone of the same gender as appealing…[or] think of themselves as homosexual or bisexual.
The tendency to greater homosexuality among women and less among men is exactly what the economic theory predicts given how AIDS affects the price of sex. Genetic and social factors will have greater difficulty resolving this bifurcation so I think Francis has the upper-hand on the argument, although there may be counter-arguments based on the gay-uncle theory).
Importantly, note also that Francis finds that not only is sexual choice malleable, as the prison story I opened with suggests, but so are sexual desire and identity. At least on the margin! (A point that non-economists are likely to miss.)
Thanks to Emily Oster for the pointer.
Is Religion Rational?
Is Religion Rational? The Economics of Faith is the title of a debate to be held between my colleagues Larry Iannaconne and Bryan Caplan. The debate will be on Wed. Nov. 16, 6:30 pm in the front ballroom of Student Union Building II at George Mason University-Fairfax. The debate is free and open to the public. I think it is going to be a great debate (I will moderate). Among the sorts of things to be discussed are:
Is religion rational, irrational, or distinct from rationality? What does economics have to say about religion? Why is religion demanded and supplied? What effect does religion have on economic, social and political outcomes? How does an understanding of religion affect our understanding of economics and politics?