Why did the Senate refuse to ratify the disabilities Convention?
Many people are criticizing the Senate for failing to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, background here. The text of the Convention is here. In terms of enforceability, it is the usual “shall undertake to do” approach, with nothing in the way of actual teeth.
Erik Voeten seems upset that the United States did not ratify and seems to regard ratification as a no-brainer. Keep in mind that many of the good aspects of the Convention are already law in the United States and indeed often stem from American precedents.
If you would like one starting point for thinking about this issue, here is a simple exercise: imagine yourself a specialist in international law advising the U.S. government. Here is a Wikipedia summary of one part of the Convention:
In accordance with international law, to ensure that law protecting intellectual property rights do not constitute an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier to access by persons with disabilities to cultural materials.
What do you advise? Consider that the United States, when writing bilateral trade treaties, tries to enforce or even redefine IP law to the hilt. (NB: I don’t at all favor this, but it is a fact of life and will very likely remain so, for obvious public choice reasons.) You are the most powerful country on earth, so why should you ratify a Convention which will make this IP policy harder to see through and which will in fact create an entire series of loopholes, or at least rhetorical moves, many of which could end up involving weaker IP enforcement against the non-disabled? Imagine a nation, negotiating with the U.S., insisting that derivative works with subtitles for the hearing-impaired receive weaker IP protection, and citing the U.S. ratification of this Convention. (Personally, I probably would favor this by the way.) All of a sudden the U.S. would have to spend some political capital whacking this back down.
Very often UN Conventions are fights over the rhetoric which will be allowed and recognized in (binding) negotiations elsewhere. It is thus weaker nations which favor the increased ability to use such rhetoric, and stronger nations which wish to limit such rhetoric. Guess where that puts the United States?
I do not personally have any problem with the United States ratifying this Convention. But I recognize that a failure to ratify is simply “business as usual,” reflecting longstanding and rather deeply rooted priorities, rather than some strange Senatorial or Republican intransigence against the disabled.
More generally, the U.S. will be most interested in ratifying Conventions only if they bind other nations in a useful way to the United States. The WTO (although not legally a “Convention”) is a good example of that, but such examples are not that frequent.
This entire debate could use a closer look at the differences between being a states party to a Convention, signing, and ratifying.
I’ve read a bunch of articles on this Convention, from various media outlets, and not one of them is setting out the basic principles here with much accuracy.
Threats
If the deal is rejected [as would appear to be the case], Mr Huang said he would tell “the whole world that Iceland doesn’t welcome Chinese businessmen”.
Here is more, and here is background and here is my previous blog post on this episode.
Assorted links
1. Profile of James C. Scott, including on anarchism but not just.
2. Sex in cheese.
3. Camille Paglia, on women she does and does not like.
4. Has government funding of science become too conservative?
5. Which sector, other than punditry, is benefiting from the “fiscal cliff” chatter?
The Palestinian Emirates?
From Barry Shaw:, this is also known as the “eight-state solution”:
Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, a Middle East expert…calls his alternative “the Palestinian Emirates.”
He visualizes eight emirate-type city states with designated borders that will incorporate the Arabs within them. The rest of the land can be populated by the inhabitants, whether they be Jews or Arabs, living and behaving with respect and deference to the inhabitants of the various city-states. The states shall be granted sovereignty. They shall be granted surrounding land for expansion and development. Road systems in vacant lands shall be developed for transport of people and commerce, both Jewish and Arab.
If Palestinians could “vote with their feet” across these various Emirates, it would be interesting to see what kind of policies would evolve, relative to what is produced by currently existing forms of political participation.
Here is a web site devoted to the concept, with one more detailed account here. I should add that there are versions of this idea which do not add all of the “baggage” found on this web site.
In presenting this material, I am not seeking to have MR commentators reprise all of the usual debates on the broader topic of Middle East peace or lack thereof. Nonetheless I had never heard this idea before, and so I am passing it along.
*My Struggle: Book One*, by Karl Knausgaard
Imagine a Norwegian Proust, albeit more concrete and with less repetition. The Amazon link is here, and you will notice that all nine Amazon reviews give it five stars. Here is a James Wood review from The New Yorker. Here is Wikipedia on the author. Here is a good blog review. Note this is only one out of six volumes, from Norway.
I would put this among the greatest Continental novels of the last fifty years and not at the bottom of that tier. It is not often that one discovers such books.
How much do charter schools really matter?
I’ve seen so many people discuss this topic, but Yusuke Jinnai seems to be making progress on the question. Here is part of his abstract:
In this paper, I propose a new empirical approach to identify the impact of charter schools on local traditional schools. Specifically, I define direct impact as the effect of introducing charter schools on traditional-school students in grades that overlap with charter schools’ grades, while indirect impact is defined as the effect on students in non-overlapping grades. Unlike prior research work, which estimates the effects of charter school entry at the school level, I examine the impact at the grade level by exploiting the variation in gaps between grades offered by charter schools and grades at nearby traditional schools.
Using student-level panel data from North Carolina, this paper shows that the introduction of charter schools does not induce any significant indirect impact but generates a positive and significant direct impact on student achievement. Distinguishing between the two distinct impacts and taking into consideration both traditional-school and charter-school students, my study finds overall positive effects of introducing charter schools on student achievement. I also demonstrate that such overall effects would have been underestimated by 85% in the literature, since previous work identifies the impact of charter school entry at a moment when the direct and indirect impacts are likely to be mixed.
Finally, I argue that the direct impact consists of student sorting effects and competitive effects and, by controlling for unobserved peer characteristics, demonstrate one-quarter of the positive direct impact is driven by the former while three-quarters result from the latter.
The paper is here, and Yusuke is on the job market from Rochester this year. His entire portfolio of papers on education appears to be quite interesting.
Here is a related post on school choice in Sweden, from Modeled Behavior.
Assorted links
1. Garett Jones and the role of Fannie and Freddie.
2. The Bloomberg best books of the year list.
3. Rogoff comments on the stagnationists, and are we running out of phosphate reserves?
4, MIE: precious friends become precious gems.
5. Christmas video about macro, will offend some of you. Worth a view in any case! By John Popola, and it considers Malthus on aggregate demand.
6. Outcompeting the driverless car (does the theory of comparative advantage apply to dogs?), caveat emptor.
What the Beckworth diagram really means
From my earlier post, here it is again (and Beckworth here, with links to critics, Krugman here, and see also @ProfSufi on Twitter):
As Scott already has stressed, this is about whether the liquidity trap makes the Fed impotent.
My view is this: The Fed cannot very well control ngdp during a credit collapse (parts of 2008-2009) but it can control ngdp in a so-called “liquidity trap.”
I view my theory as consistent with this graph, rather obviously consistent.
Scott and I think David believe something more like: “The Fed can always control ngdp.”
That means they have to think Bernanke made a huge error and indeed they do think that. (I think Bernanke was slow to react along the longer-run ngdp forecast dimension, but I am more sympathetic to B. than they are, as I don’t think currency is such a useful substitute for collapsing credit, contra Fama 1980.)
Here is the key question: what do the liquidity trappers think?
That this ngdp path is a coincidence? That fiscal policy has been keeping it on an even keel in more recent times? (Implausible for 2010-2012, given other claims they make about fiscal policy, plus implausible more generally.) That some other process — which? — drives the ngdp path?
The problem with the debate, so far, is that we don’t yet know which clear alternative theory of 2010-2012 ngdp determination the liquidity trappers are proposing.
Sufi, by the way, is complaining that Beckworth (and others) are passing over Romer and other empirical pieces on stimulus, but David is pretty clearly covering “the multiplier contingent upon a reaction function of the monetary authority, with the monetary authority moving last and having control over ngdp.” I have discussed these matters with David and he is not behind the academic discussion here but rather very often ahead of it. He has a clearer theory of ngdp determination than do the liquidity trappers, even if I do not agree with his theory in every regard.
I would very gladly have a more transparent debate on ngdp path determination, noting in advance that I personally do not think it would go very well for the liquidity trap hypothesis.
Addendum: This paper surveys some relevant issues from the theory side, although it is not my preferred approach.
My favorite things Israel
1. Film: A rich and rapidly improving genre. My favorites are Lebanon or Waltz with Bashir, with a sentimental nod to Yana’s Friends, which isn’t great but I saw it on my second date with Natasha.
2. Movie, set in (non-Israeli): I don’t like Exodus, so can I cite the Mel Gibson movie? Are we totally sure that it is indeed set in Israel? What else am I missing? “Painting, set in” would be a fun category, but too hard to choose.
3. Actress: Natalie Portman is excellent in Closer.
4. Classical musician: Daniel Barenboim, Yefim Bronfman, Ivry Gitlis, and Eliahu Inbal would be at the top of a pretty long list. Perlman has a style too aggressive for my taste, at least as it comes across on disc.
5. Fiction author: I very much admire and enjoy David Grossman’s To The End of the Land.
6. Philosopher: Joseph Raz, especially his The Morality of Freedom.
7. Non-fiction author: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is splendid. Tom Segev could be a runner-up.
8. Co-author: Amihai Glazer, from UC Irvine.
9. Other economists: Donald Patinkin, Ariel Rubinstein, Ehud Kalai, Jacob Frenkel, Dan Ariely, Robert Aumann, Sergiu Hart, Elhanan Helpman, Reuven Brenner, Zvi Hercowitz, Oded Galor, Michael Bruno, and Stanley Fischer would be a few others. Overall the country is strong in game theory and monetary economics, as well as economics more generally.
I strike a zero when it comes to popular music. I don’t like Kiss/Gene Simmons, and Israeli popular music I don’t know well but from a distance I do not expect to like it much. The visual arts are also not obviously strong, though perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments.
Measuring the distribution of spitefulness
There is a new paper by Erik Kimbrough and J. Philipp Reiss, of importance for my world view:
Spiteful, antisocial behavior may undermine the moral and institutional fabric of society, producing disorder, fear, and mistrust. Previous research demonstrates the willingness of individuals to harm others, but little is understood about how far people are willing to go in being spiteful (relative to how far they could have gone) or their consistency in spitefulness across repeated trials. Our experiment is the first to provide individuals with repeated opportunities to spitefully harm anonymous others when the decision entails zero cost to the spiter and cannot be observed as such by the object of spite. This method reveals that the majority of individuals exhibit consistent (non-)spitefulness over time and that the distribution of spitefulness is bipolar: when choosing whether to be spiteful, most individuals either avoid spite altogether or impose the maximum possible harm on their unwitting victims.
I put Bryan Caplan on the “least spiteful” side of the distribution.
For the pointer I thank (the non-spiteful) Michelle Dawson.
Sentences to ponder
Is it better to raise rates or cut loopholes? Maybe conservatives should be preferring the boost in rates. From Kevin Drum:
…which is simpler and easier, raising rates or closing loopholes? I’d say raising rates is easier, and if it’s done now it will make it harder to raise them again in the future. This means that if Democrats want to soak the rich again, they’ll have to do it via closing loopholes, which is a harder lift.
Second, there’s Coburn’s point. If you want to have any chance at all of broadening the base and lowering rates in the future, you can’t close loopholes now. You need to leave them there as bargaining chips. Tax reform will be more likely if rates are higher (making them easier to lower) and loopholes are all still intact (giving you plenty of stuff to close in return for lowering rates).
Does it matter who gets the money first?
Here is Scott Sumner, gently poking Richard Cantillon and the Austrians:
This is a good example of the fallacy of composition. In aggregate, the total level of nominal purchases is constrained by the amount of currency in circulation. But not at the individual level. Hence being the first to get the new money doesn’t confer any advantage at all–as the new money has no more purchasing power than the existing money. A dollar is a dollar—and a $100 bill is a $100 bill.
Read the whole thing, there is much more, and here Scott follows up.
Markets in everything
Craft & Commerce, a gastropub located in San Diego, has chosen the more forward approach and taken to playing audio clips of their
bestworst Yelp reviews while patrons do their business in the bathroom.
Here is more, and I thank Michael Rosenwald for the pointer.
Does the theory of comparative advantage apply to horses?
And if not, why not? Where exactly does the model fail to apply to our equine friends?
Beginning in the late 19th century, and with increasing mechanization in the 20th century, especially following World War I in the USA and after World War II in Europe, the popularity of the internal combustion engine, and particularly the tractor, reduced the need for the draft horse. Many were sold to slaughter for horsemeat and a number of breeds went into significant decline.
The link for that is here, and for the pointer I thank Braden Anderson.
What I’ve been reading
1. Rwanda, Inc., by Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond. The positive story on that country, though I don’t buy it, given that the broader region still is not close to peace. Governance problems will do them in.
2. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. It is stunningly good, not just “stunningly good for a 90-year-old.”
3. Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. The first 61% of this book, as measured by Kindle, is fascinating and superbly original. The rest is a well-done retread of other intelligent popular food books. That is for me a high ratio of excellent to good.
4. Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds: A Novel. Everyone else loved it, though for me it was too impressionistic. Call it my fault.
5. Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography. An excellent book, though I find it hard to care. Easier than reading Derrida, and the author doesn’t make the mistake of trying to tell you what Derrida is all about.
I have not yet seen a copy of Erik Angner, A Course in Behavioral Economics, but perhaps it is of interest.