Why would you write a bum check to God? (model this)
Maybe you are hoping that God will make the check a good one? From the Western Wall in Jerusalem:
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, who oversees Jerusalem’s Western Wall, said a worshipper found an envelope at the site Wednesday with 507 checks in the amount of about $1 million each. They were not addressed to anyone, and it’s doubtful they can be cashed.
Rabinovitch said most are Nigerian. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some were from the United States, Europe and Asia.
The story is here and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
The story of GiveDirectly
Paul Niehaus, Michael Faye, Rohit Wanchoo, and Jeremy Shapiro came up with a radically simple plan shaped by their own academic research. They would give poor families in rural Kenya $1,000 over the course of 10 months, and let them do whatever they wanted with the money. They hoped the recipients would spend it on nutrition, health care, and education. But, theoretically, they could use it to purchase alcohol or drugs. The families would decide on their own.
…Three years later, the four economists expanded their private effort into GiveDirectly, a charity that accepts online donations from the public, as well. Ninety-two cents of every dollar donated to GiveDirectly is transferred to poor households through M-PESA, a cell phone banking service with 11,000 agents working in Kenya. GiveDirectly chooses recipients by targeting homes made of mud or thatch, as opposed to more durable materials, such as cement or iron. The typical family participating in the program lives on just 65 nominal cents-per-person-per-day. Four in ten have had a child go at least a full day without food in the last month.
Initial reports from the field are positive. According to Niehaus, GiveDirectly recipients are spending their payments mostly on food and home improvements that can vastly improve quality of life, such as installing a weatherproof tin roof. Some families have invested in profit-bearing businesses, such as chicken-rearing, agriculture, or the vending of clothes, shoes, or charcoal.
More information on GiveDirectly’s impact will be available next year, when an NIH-funded evaluation of the organization’s work is complete. Yet already, GiveDirectly is receiving rave reviews.
Here is a good deal more. Here is one of my earlier posts on zero overhead giving. Here is Alex’s earlier post. Just last week I met up with one of the recipients of one of my 2007 donations and I am pleased to report he is doing extremely well as an actor and filmmaker.
Here is the site for GiveDirectly. Here is one very positive review of the site, from GiveWell.
What is the potential for 3-D printing?
I think 3-D printing will happen, and indeed already is happening, but I don’t see that it will bring a utopian new future. From a recent New Scientist article (gated, related version here), here are two points:
…it’s difficult to print an object in more than one or two materials…
And:
…these combined hardware and materials issues mean that only a relatively small proportion of all people will end up printing out objects themselves. A more likely scenario is the growth of online services like Shapeways…or perhaps neighborhood print shops.
Maybe I’m blind, but I don’t yet see this as a technological game-changer. It seems more like a way of saving on transportation costs. To put it another way, what’s the huge gain of making everyone a manufacturing locavore? Perhaps there will be some new flurry of home-based innovation, based on tinkering from what these printers can drum up, but that seems to me quite speculative.
How to resolve the fiscal cliff
In my latest column, I suggest another strategy, one the current Republican Party seems quite far from:
To see how this could work, consider this script: Let’s say the Republicans decide to largely give in to what the President Obama is proposing. There is, however, a catch: the president has to agree to raise marginal tax rates on all income classes, not just on the rich. The tax increase would be one-quarter of a percentage point, or some other arbitrary small amount, with larger increases possible for higher incomes, as has been discussed. The deal also stipulates that both the president and Congress must publicly acknowledge that current plans for government spending can’t be financed unless taxes on most or all income groups climb further yet, and by some hefty amount.
Given the slow economy, it is undesirable to reverse all or even most of the Bush tax cuts. A small but publicly trumpeted clawback of some of the cuts would send the right message to voters, while minimizing the macroeconomic fallout. The nice thing about symbols — single shots across the bow — is that they often can suffice.
If people already rationally expect these tax increases, this signal would do neither good nor harm, but perhaps such an approach would nudge political expectations closer to reality without draining the economy.
And this:
In the minds of many moderate and independent voters, the Republicans are currently identified with dysfunctional politics. But this proposal would let them take a credible stand against obstructionism. If the president didn’t like such a deal, he would be the naysayer, and the resulting publicity would shine a bright spotlight on the tax-and-spend mismatch. Suddenly, it would be the Republicans emphasizing the classic American line that “we are all in this together.”
Read the whole thing.
Markets in everything
Private investors in Switzerland, Austria and Germany are lining up to buy gold bars the size of a credit card that can easily be broken into one gram pieces and used as payment in an emergency.
The story is here and for the pointer I thank the excellent Mark Thorson.
Assorted links
1. Some advances in science from this year.
2. In praise of edited volumes.
3. Mexico will be doing major educational reform.
4. Interview with me on India.
5. Robert Gordon is too pessimistic about the future (and doesn’t get driverless cars).
The FT does Lunch with Tyler Cowen
I thought John McDermott did an excellent job, here was one part I liked:
There is no doubt Cowen is ruthlessly and admirably efficient; an infovore. I suggest he’s also, however, “phenomenally smart”. “I don’t know what that means,” he says. “I mean, I can absorb a lot of information about basketball. I like basketball but I’m not like being smart about it.” And then he’s off again … “Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it’s underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it’s oddly underrated.”
The rest of the chat covers food, economics, the future of technology, my life history, and some other matters too. I also liked this sentence:
He looks up and breaks the news: “They don’t have any food.”
The interview took place on the hottest day in Virginia history. And please note that when I refer to the Free Democrats of Germany, I don’t mean the party circa 2012.
In Texas, not all joint products are legal (the value of pets)
Last May, the Texas Banking Commission, which regulates funerals and cemeteries [does that make sense to you?], deep-sixed burials of pets in cemeteries for homo sapiens. But Texas still welcomes human burials alongside animals in pet cemeteries.
Do not underestimate the power of arbitrage:
…some Texans are also opting for their own burials–sans Bootsie—in pet cemeteries. The cost of room and board, notes the clip, beats its counterpart in people cemeteries by a mile. So why not think outside the box?
For the pointer I thank Lou Wigdor.
Assorted links
Do interest groups reward politicians for their votes in the legislature?
That is the title of the job market paper of Sungmun Choi, here is the abstract:
Abstract: Interest groups lobby politicians in various ways to influence their policy decisions, especially, their voting decisions in the legislature. Most, if not all, of the studies on this issue examine “pre-vote” lobbying activities of interest groups that occur before politicians vote in the legislature. In this paper, however, I examine “post-vote” lobbying activities of interest groups that occur after politicians vote in the legislature. I first develop theoretical models to show how such post-vote lobbying can be sustained. Then, by using data on the amount of monetary contributions given by interest groups to the members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have served in the 109th (2005-06) through 111th (2009-10) Congress, I find evidence that the politicians who voted in favor of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) of 2008, one of the most significant pieces of legislation and possibly the biggest government bailout in U.S. economic history, received more monetary contributions from the interest groups in the financial sector after passage of the EESA.
Maxim Pinkovsky on managed care
This result is not a shocker, but I have never seen the actual work done on this point:
The Impact of Managed Care Backlash on Health Care Costs
During the late 1990s, there was a substantial cultural, media and legal backlash against the cost-containment practices of managed care organizations (particularly, HMOs). Most states passed a variety of laws in this period that restricted the cost-cutting measures that managed care firms could use. I exploit panel variation in the passage of these regulations across states and over time to investigate the effects of the managed care backlash, as proxied by this legislation, on health care cost growth. I find that the backlash had a strong effect on health care costs, and can statistically explain much of the rise in health spending as a share of U.S. GDP between 1993 and 2005 (amounting to 1% – 1.5% of GDP). I also investigate the effects of the managed care backlash on intensity of care, hospital salaries and technology adoption. I conclude that managed care was largely successful in keeping health care costs on a sustainable path relative to the size of the economy.
The paper is here, and it is Maxim’s job market paper from MIT. A number of his other papers, at the link, look interesting as well.
*India’s Tryst with Destiny*
The authors are Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya and it is the new book on the contemporary Indian economy. Self-recommending and absolutely excellent, full of useful details. It is not yet on U.S. Amazon, but it is available in India and perhaps elsewhere.
Vices and more vices
Lately a few people have been linking to 2006 posts on the vices of various political philosophies. If you are curious, here is my post on the libertarian vice. Here is my post on the liberal vice. Here is my post on the conservative vice. I still like these posts.
Since I have written these posts, several additional acts of vice have been committed.
Assorted links
1. The influence of Bork on antitrust.
2. James Wood on Knausgaard and others.
3. The nature of Australian worker’s compensation.
5. When women dare to outearn men (pdf), and summary here.
Is there a great stagnation in action movies?
Chris MacDonald asks me:
Should we expect stagnation, or continued improvement, in the action film genre? The new Bond flick, Skyfall, is getting rave reviews, with some calling it the best Bond film ever. Hyperbole aside, it is indeed very good. Should we expect the next Bond film to be less good (regression to the mean) or is this one of the fields — like baseball management — where mechanisms exist to facilitate further improvement on a fairly reliable basis?
I was less crazy about Skyfall (“M, pull out your cell phone and call for aid!”) but that’s neither here nor there.
As for the stagnation issue, there are two main developments. The first is a resurrection of sorts, namely 3-D, which is a very real gain, but in my view it is a significant plus for fewer than ten movies, most notably Avatar.
CGI is a gain for some movies (e.g, Troy, Life of Pi, Lord of the Rings), though it often makes action scenes less visceral and more distant.
The main drawback for Hollywood action movies has been globalization, which leads to too many explosions and not enough subtle dialogue and characterization. The other main drawback has been high marketing costs, which encourages tent pole franchises with prior name recognition with a core audience. That often means too much clunky plot exposition, too many comic book characters, too great a need to heed the wishes of the hard core audience base, and too few surprises about the characters. There is one very good Spiderman movie but overall I call this trend a negative.
Still, there has been major progress in action movies, at least if we are willing to accept a particular semantic switch. I much prefer Goldfinger to the newer Bond movies, but I also don’t think of it as an action movie. It doesn’t have much action, although I don’t think people at the time felt that way. By my possibly distorted standards, the Bond movies start being action movies only with Diamonds are Forever.
King Solomon’s Mines is a very good movie, under-watched these days, as is Thief of Baghdad. Nonetheless prior to the 1970s I think of the action genre as virtually non-existent. I was stunned when I first (1981) saw the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, though these days it isn’t especially impressive, just well-executed.
One possibility is that each generation thinks it is the first to have had action movies.
To sum up, for all of the contemporary excess, we have been living in a Golden Age of Action Movies. Even a scorned movie such as Lara Croft is pretty awesome on the big screen. And Asian action movies have reached their peaks only in the last twenty years, including early John Woo. Call that the plus side of the globalization equation.
That said, a few impressive 3-D movies aside, the last five years have brought more negatives than positives, a’la “Transformers” and various overinflated, noisy, character-stuffed, and self-important Hollywood monstrosities. We’ll get over it, but in reality stagnation is something we might have wished for instead.
Here is one list of the greatest action movies of all time. Not many pre-70s movies can stand up to these for action.
The next trend will be RCT-like audience studies to find out exactly which action tricks, with which timings, thrill us and which do not. Great directors have an intuitive sense for this but it could be made much more scientific.