Although Ikea stores have yet to arrive in India, its catalogs are sold by
street hawkers and bookstores in many major cities….

When Arundhati Ray redecorates her home, she picks up an Ikea catalog to
search for that perfect piece of furniture….she clips a photo of the desired item, which typically includes measurements,
and then takes it to a local carpenter.

The welfare economics of Ikea knockoffs in India, like those of pharmaceutical knockoffs, are not clear-cut.  On the surface, Ikea appears to be losing out to design theft but India’s emerging middle class generates media attention far in excess of its numbers.  India is still a very poor country that probably could not currently support the low-price, high volume Ikea model.  Thus, knockoffs allow a few Indian consumers to take advantage of good design and Ikea loses little to nothing.

Thanks to Carl Close for the pointer.

"Capitalism is not much loved," writes Clive Crook in The Atlantic.

Seen a movie lately? Watched television or read a newspaper? The culture that speaks to Americans, and hence to the Western world, radiates suspicion of free enterprise….

The point is not that such movies, or the culture more generally, argue that capitalism is evil. Just the opposite: it is that they so often merely assume, innocently and expecting to arouse no skepticism, that capitalism is evil….

It is difficult to see where any heightened
appreciation of the market system is going to come from. Economists,
presumably, ought to be supplying it. Unfortunately, in most cases,
communicating a sense of wonder is not among their gifts. In some ways,
teachers of economics are probably making matters worse. As practiced
in universities, economics continues to turn inward, with ever more
emphasis on math, quantitative methods, and narrow specialization. You
can make a case for that, but it silences the discipline on the thing
that matters most.

Crook is right of course but his piece would have been a lot better had he mentioned the book Americans found most influential in their lives after the Bible.

Mahalanobis points us to Ugly Criminals:

Using data from three waves of
Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult’s (ages
18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for
a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests
demonstrate that this result is not because beauty is acting as a proxy for
socio-economic status. Being very attractive is also positively associated with adult
vocabulary test scores, which suggests the possibility that beauty may have an
impact on human capital formation. We demonstrate that, especially for females,
holding constant current beauty, high school beauty (pre-labor market beauty)
has a separate impact on crime, and that high school beauty is correlated with
variables that gauge various aspects of high school experience, such as GPA,
suspension or having being expelled from school, and problems with teachers.
These results suggest two handicaps faced by unattractive individuals. First, a
labor market penalty provides a direct incentive for unattractive individuals
toward criminal activity. Second, the level of beauty in high school has an
effect on criminal propensity 7-8 years later, which seems to be due to the
impact of the level of beauty in high school on human capital formation,
although this second avenue seems to be effective for females only.

Long before Larry Summers shocked the elite by suggesting that men and women might be different he signed on to a World Bank memo noting:

"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the
lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it."

A number of people suggested that the US was doing just this as lower tariff barriers made it easier to export dirty manufacturing industries and import the goods.  An NBER paper, however, finds no evidence for this effect.  Quoting from the NBER Digest:

Imports overall grew by 318 percent during the period. But according to World Bank data that characterizes industries by their pollution intensity, imports of goods manufactured in highly polluting processes grew at a much slower rate. In other words, just as the U.S. manufacturing sector was growing while simultaneously shifting toward clean industries, the same thing was happening to our imports: they were rising, but the percentage of goods coming from polluting industries was going down. "The cleaner U.S. manufacturing composition is not offset by dirtier imports," the authors write. "Rather, the composition of imports has also become cleaner."

One reason pollution hasn’t been exported may be that the dirtier (older) industries have more political power and have resisted tariff reductions.  The authors find, however, that even if one eliminated all tariffs on manufactured goods pollution would still not be exported.

It’s not that this wouldn’t be a good idea, it’s just that it so happens that poor countries don’t have a comparative advantage in producing the goods that require a lot of pollution.  Of course, if we tax pollution in the United States at higher levels it will make more sense to export it – an interesting dilemma.