The dangers of “early intervention”

by  Tyler Cowen in

An Australian psychologist says smartphone apps allowing parents to send their naughty children phone calls from Santa “are not useful” and “could be abused.”

Dr. John Irvine said the smartphone apps — including the free “Fake Call From Santa” app and the $1.99 “Parents Calling Santa” app — are “not productive” methods of behavior correction, The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, reported Wednesday.

“These kinds of apps have made the Santa threat much more real and immediate and they could be abused by some parents in the lead-up to Christmas Day,” he said. “What is the point in threatening something that you are not going to carry out? Is mum really going to cancel presents on Christmas Day?
“Empty threats are not useful as kids soon realize that there are no consequences,” he said.

The “Fake Call from Santa” app includes an incoming call with audio, but the “Parents Calling Santa” app allows parents to choose from three recorded messages — a “well done call,” a “could do better” call, or a “must improve or you will get a lump of coal for Christmas” call.

The link is here.

*The Dawn of Innovation*

by  Tyler Cowen

That is the new book by Charles Morris and the subtitle is The First American Industrial Revolution.  Excerpt:

The overwhelming proportion of American mechanization efforts went into basic processing industries, not precision manufacturing.  Food and lumber processors were 60 percent of all power-using manufacturing industries in 1869.  Add textiles, paper, and primary metal industries like smelting, and the number rises to 90 percent.   Industries that would plausibly lend themselves to armory practice methods — fabricated metal products, furniture, machinery, and instruments — accounted for only 7.5 percent of 1869 manufacturing power demand.

…Mid-Century America was still a predominantly agricultural country.  On the eve of the Civil War, only 16 percent of the workforce was in manufacturing.  They worked in grain milling, meatpacking, lard refining, turning logs into planks and beams, iron smelting and forging, and making steam engines and steamboats, vats and piping, locomotives, reapers and mowers, carriages, stoves, cotton and woolen cloth, shoes, saddles and harnesses, and workaday tools.  These were the industries in which America’s comparative advantage loomed largest and were the ones that dominated American output.  It was the drive to mass scale in those industries, by a wide variety of strategies and methods, that was the real American system, or perhaps the American ideology, of manufacturing.

Recommended.

My favorite fiction books of 2012

by  Tyler Cowen in

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl.

Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds.

Alonso Cueto, The Blue Hour.

Peter Sis, The Conference of the Birds.  Mostly illustrated, beautiful in any case.

Alice Munro, Dear Life: Stories.  I can confidently put this on my list without having read it yet.

I was disappointed by most of the well-known novels to have come out this year, including the Tom Wolfe (unreadable, alas) and the McEwan (OK but not distinguished).  Mantel is somehow too dense for me and I do not enjoy it, the fault may be mine.

The Cueto was my favorite of the lot.

My favorite non-fiction books of 2012

by  Tyler Cowen in

Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.

Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States.

George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling.

James Fallows, China Airborne.

Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story.

Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750.

Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography.

Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Khanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy.

I am sure I missed some, even of my own favorites!

Claims about nursing homes

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Neil Emery:

 Nursing homes are chronically understaffed in times of economic prosperity. But, when the job market tightens, a one percent increase in unemployment sees full time employment in nursing facilities rise three times as fast. After a recession, when the economy picks back up and jobs become available again, low skilled workers abandon nursing homes jobs’ low pay and even fewer accolades for better prospects. The shift of workers in and out of nursing jobs drives the swings in the national death rate and underscores the importance of these under-appreciated jobs.

A look at the relationship between economic downturns and health outcomes in the United States reveals a complex picture: harm from lost insurance and increased anxiety but better care for the elderly. These two trends coexist because, while harm concentrates in working age people, retirees reap the majority of the benefit.

I do not know if these claims are true, but see the post for a discussion of the evidence.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. We’re faking a marathon, and a new and different method for liberating books.

2. Acemoglu and Robinson respond to Sachs.  And on Twitter there has been excellent back and forth, including Sachs and Blattman and ViewfromtheCave, among others, presented here, a worthwhile debate for Thanksgiving especially.

3. Still lacking the right to vote, the langur nonetheless made an unannounced appearance at a political rally.

4. One view of why the 1950s were so strong economically.

5. How easy is it to simulate the brain?

6. Some simple reasons why Catalonian independence is a bad idea.

My favorite films of 2012

by  Tyler Cowen in

Hollywood continues to collapse into mediocre tent pole franchises, but overall it has been a splendid year for movies.  Here were some of my favorites, noting that I count by “the year I saw them” and especially for foreign films this will not correspond so well to “the year of release”:

A Separation

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Marley

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (boring for most people, big screen only I suspect)

The Dictator

The Three Stooges

The Raid: Redemption (better Indonesian martial arts you will not see)

Your Sister’s Sister (Straussian)

Circo, Mexican circus movie

Take This Waltz

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Margaret

Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry

Samsara (makes sense on a big screen only, I suspect)

Searching for Sugar Man

Day Night Day Night (from five years ago, but a real stunner, underrated and a wonderful study of Nudge of top of everything else)

Sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe has discovered. Larger family size in America correlates to early marriage and childbirth, lower women’s employment, and opposition to gay rights — all social factors that lead voters to see red.

That is Lauren Sandler.  Here is more, hat tip to Steve Sailer (and David Brooks).  And as Robin Hanson would say, “politics isn’t about policy.”

Discrimination against shorter people, as reported by Andrew Solomon

by  Tyler Cowen in

One recent study observed that adults with achondroplasia have “lower self-esteem, less education, lower annual incomes, and are less likely to have a spouse.”  The income statistic bears witness to institutional discrimination against LPs; the study found that while three-quarters of the dwarfs’ family members, presumably demographically similar to them in most regards, made more than $50,000 per year, less than a third of the dwarfs made that amount.

That is from Andrew Solomon’s new book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.

I pre-ordered this book eagerly, but overall I am having difficulty with it.  Too many sections throw too much at the proverbial wall and fail to sort out truth from fallacy.  I am not sure what is supposed to be insight and what is supposed to be a recording of different views.  I would have liked a more direct confrontation with the issue of parental narcissism.  This is still a good review of the book.  I longed for a page of Ross Douthat or Michael Bérubé.

The book, however, supplies excellent data for anyone wishing to study the utter hypocrisy of current understandings of diversity.

One Amazon reviewer raised a good question:

As a special ed teacher, my question is, does it make sense to include murderers in the same category with deaf people, dwarves, and people with physical disabilities? Perhaps he has a justification for it, in that parents might be disappointed and heartbroken in all these cases. But right off the bat that seems wrong to me, categorically different, moral deviance v. physical or intellectual.

Solomon is a very smart guy.  But overall this book leaves one with a sense of being tired of the value of the individual, written by an author overwhelmed by what comes across as, despite Solomon’s quest for nobility, a rogue’s gallery of misfits, baroque style, and without the writing itself coming to terms with the book’s own underlying emotional tenor.  Is it unfair to read this as still being, ultimately, a book about depression?

This book may interest many of you, and its publication can be seen as an event of sorts, but I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it.

Ghana “fact” of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Two years ago Ghana’s statistical service announced it was revising its GDP estimates upwards by over 60%, suggesting that in the previous estimates about US$13bn worth’s of economic activity had been missed. As a result, Ghana was suddenly upgraded from a low to lower-middle-income country. In response, Todd Moss, the development scholar and blogger at the Center of Global Development in Washington DC, exclaimed: “Boy, we really don’t know anything!”

Here is more, by Morten Jerven. Here is another good paragraph from that article:

Let us be conservative and assume that the GDP in Nigeria merely doubles following the revision. This alone will mean that the GDP for the whole region increases by more than 15%. The value of the increase amounts to nothing less than 40 economies roughly the size of Malawi’s. The knowledge that currently there are 40 “Malawis” unaccounted for in the Nigerian economy should raise a few eyebrows.

I have just pre-ordered his forthcoming book Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It.