*Affluence and Influence*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Martin Gilens and the subtitle is Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.  A few points:

1. It is an interesting book.

2. It is poorly written and the first fifty pages should have been abolished.

3. It argues, using a comprehensive data set, that the preferences of poor and even middle income people are neglected or underrepresented in the policy process.  The preferences of the wealthiest ten percent seem to have more sway.

4. It should take greater care to distinguish the preferences of the (often ill-informed) poor across means and ends.  Say a poor or middle class person feels “I want tariffs” and also “I want prosperity.”  The elites then push through free trade to produce prosperity and for that matter to get reelected and perhaps also to serve commercial interests and donors.  Have they met or frustrated the preferences of the poor?  By the metrics of Gilens the poor did not get their way but that is not obviously the correct conclusion.  Matt makes a related point.

5. Many lower- or middle-income voters decide to vote retrospectively over outcomes (mostly), rather than over policy inputs.  That suggests we should judge the responsiveness of the system in terms of how well it aims toward those outputs, not whether it gives lower-income voters their preferred policy inputs.

6. What is wrong with this simple alternative hypothesis?:  Politicians seek some measure of redistribution-weighted prosperity to get reelected.  Wealthier voters are better educated and smarter, so they have a better sense of which policies will bring that about.  It seems the wealthier voters are getting their way on policy inputs, but a deeper look shows the pressures on politicians are quite general.

7. I would be falling prey to the fallacy of mood affiliation if I simply assumed the author wanted policy to be more responsive to the wishes of the poor and middle class.  Still I can ask whether this would be a desirable end.  Aren’t they less educated and less well-informed on average?  Don’t they also care about politics less and derive less of their status from political processes and outcomes?  Do I want them to have a greater say over social issues, including gay marriage?  No.

Here is a Boston Review symposium on the book, including many responses from the notables on the sidebar, along with a response from the author.

Singapore R&D there is no great stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is one description (with photo and a very good video):

Unveiled at a design conference in the UK recently, Kissenger is basically an egg-like orb outfitted with two soft plastic lips packed with sensors and actuators. When a human on one end of the kiss transaction plants a kiss on the robot lips, the sensors record the shape changes the kisser creates on the lips and translates those pressure patterns into a mirror image that can be beamed over the Web to another Kissenger. That Kissenger then reproduces the sender’s unique kiss for a human on the other end.

Here is another:

Kissing Bot. Singaporean robotics studio Lovotics has a new robot in the news. Kissenger is an advanced and intimate form of telepresence robot specially designed to transmit the senstions of a kiss. Two units are able to record and remotely reproduce the unique pressure sensations from a kiss … although the design looks pretty chaste and seems to lack an option to go French. Research like this while seeming silly is crucial for innovating next-gen avatar robot tech.

Here is more.  Hat tip goes to @GrishinRobotics.

Self-recommending!

The new Ron Unz piece on IQ

by  Tyler Cowen in

A new piece by Ron Unz, in The American Conservative, is subtitled “What the Facts Tell Us About a Taboo Subject.”  Excerpt:

Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90, while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much closer to the West German numbers.

These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded rise in East German scores of 7–9 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to explain.

And:

Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in 1961 and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ of Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective, especially since the earlier set represented children and the latter adults, so the two groups might even be the same individuals tested at different times. Both sample sizes are in the hundreds, not statistically insignificant, and while it is impossible to rule out other factors behind such a large discrepancy in a single country, it is interesting to note that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that same period, with the real per capita GDP rising by 170 percent.

And:

Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due to changes in the general socio-economic environment appear completely absent when we examine the international or domestic IQ data for East Asian populations, for whom even tenfold differences in real per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact on IQ. Missing this unexpected contrast between the impact of socio-economic factors on Europeans and on East Asians may have been a major reason that Lynn and Vanhanen failed to notice the serious flaws in their “Strong IQ Hypothesis.”

There is much more at the link, interesting throughout.  Here is a short profile of Ron Unz, noting rumors that he has an IQ of 214.  Here is his Wikipedia page.  Here is Unz’s new website.

The Great Olympic stagnation?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on the way to the London Olympics: Athletes stopped breaking world records. Remember the run-up to Beijing in 2008, when the sports world was abuzz over how many marks Michael Phelps would smash? He set seven world records there but hasn’t bested a global time since 2009. The Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 provided plenty of drama but few record-shattering wins — Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo’s highest-ever score in pairs figure skating wasn’t exactly a Bob Beamon moment. World records are now decades old in classic men’s Olympic sports such as the long jump (1991), shot put (1990) and discus throw (1986).

Many scientists have concluded from recent events that athletic performance is hitting a wall. Geoffroy Berthelot of INSEP, a sports research institute in Paris, looked at competitions from 1896 to 2007 and found that peak scores stopped improving in 64 percent of track and field events after 1993. Giuseppe Lippi of the University of Verona examined nine Olympic sports from 1900 to 2007 and found similar results. “Improvement has substantially stopped or reached a plateau in several specialities,” he wrote. Berthelot has predicted that the “human species’ physiological frontiers will be reached” in most sports around 2027.

Yet his conclusion is more measured:

But what these researchers are detecting isn’t some final biological frontier but rather a lull in technological enhancement. Athletes have always relied on science to push the bounds of achievement. Olympic athletes’ great stagnation, then, is really a temporary halt in innovation.

That is from Peter Keating, here is more.  For the pointer I thank Allison Kasic.

College fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

What do families actually pay for college? On average, the answer was $20,902 in 2011-2012, which is down from $24,097 in 2009-2010.

That is from Timothy Taylor.  That is not deflation due to higher productivity, but rather mostly the result of a series of substitutions, including living at home and switching to two-year colleges.

File under “Further reasons why the current revenue model is unsustainable.”

Elsewhere, Mark Edmundson, a U Va. English professor, writes:

Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.

Boo hoo!  Poor you!  Poor me!  Poor Alex, que triste!

File under “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Price inflation in Syria

by  Tyler Cowen in

…as the conversation deepened and tea flowed, he spoke of prices. Mr. Hamed leads a battalion near Aleppo. The demand for weapons on his turf is so high, and supplies are so short, he said, that he has had to pay more than $4 for a single rifle or machine-gun cartridge. A Kalashnikov assault rifle, he said, costs $2,000 or more.

In the history of conflict, these are high prices…

What will the supply elasticity be?

…full RPG-7 systems (a reusable launcher with two or three high-explosive antitank rounds) cost more than $2,000, and each replacement grenade costs $500. PK machine guns, another common firearm, cost $6,000 to $7,000. No modern infantry rifle is available for less than $900. Some cost several times that. Thus, arming three riflemen, a machine gunner and a man with a rocket-propelled grenade could easily cost a commander more than $10,000 — not counting ammunition.

Because of lack of ammunition, they are using M-16s as sticks, not guns.  Here is much more, interesting throughout.  For the pointer I thank Peter Somerville on Twitter.

How hot did you say it was?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In fact, the actual trends in temperatures had nothing to do with how people perceived them. If you graphed the predictive power of people’s perceptions against the actual temperatures, the resulting line was flat—it showed no trend at all. In the statistical model, the actual weather had little impact on people’s perception of recent temperatures. Education continued to have a positive impact on whether they got it right, but its magnitude was dwarfed by the influences of political affiliation and cultural beliefs.

And those cultural affiliations had about the effect you’d expect. Individualists, who often object to environmental regulations as an infringement on their freedoms, tended to think the temperatures hadn’t gone up in their area, regardless of whether they had. Strong egalitarians, in contrast, tended to believe the temperatures had gone up.

The same does not hold for perceptions of droughts and floods.  The full story is here, the underlying paper is here, and for the pointers I thank Michael Rosenwald and Scott Duke Kominers.

The culture that is Shanghai

by  Tyler Cowen in

Louis Vuitton is courting China’s wealthy with one-of-a-kind shoes and bags it is branding as unique works of art to reclaim its exclusive cachet in the luxury market.

The French luxury brand, a unit of LVMH (LVMH.PA), is set to open its largest China store in Shanghai on Saturday, complete with a gilded spiral staircase and an invitation-only private floor where big spenders can get their hair done while dreaming up designs for custom bags.

“The made-to-order concept is the ultimate luxury,” Louis Vuitton Chief Executive Yves Carcelle told Reuters during a tour of the store, which the company calls a “maison”.

Here is more, via Daniel Lippman.

Clifford Whinston on driverless cars

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one good point of many:

Driverless cars don’t need the same wide lanes, which would allow highway authorities to reconfigure roads to allow travel speeds to be raised during peak travel periods. All that is needed would be illuminated lane dividers that can increase the number of lanes available. Driverless cars could take advantage of the extra lane capacity to reduce congestion and delays.

Another design flaw is that highways have been built in terms of width and thickness to accommodate both cars and trucks. The smaller volume of trucks should be handled with one or two wide lanes with a road surface about a foot thick, to withstand trucks’ weight and axle pressure. But the much larger volume of cars—which apply much less axle pressure that damages pavement—need more and narrower lanes that are only a few inches thick.

Building highways that separate cars and trucks by directing them to lanes with the appropriate thickness would save taxpayers a bundle. It would also favor the technology of driverless cars because they would not have to distinguish between cars and trucks and to adjust speeds and positions accordingly.

The full piece is here.

*Savage Continent*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Keith Lowe, with the subtitle Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.  Excerpt:

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering.  In Norway as many of 10 percent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war.  If the statistics on the number of children born to German soldiers are anything to go by, this was by no means unusual…

Resistance movements in occupied countries came up with all kinds of excuses for the behaviour of their women and girls.  They characterized women who slept with Germans as ignorant, poor, even mentally defective.  They claimed that women were raped, or that they only slept with Germans out of economic necessity.  While this was undoubtedly the case for some, recent surveys show that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes and all walks of life.  On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent, or because they needed money or food — but simply because they found the strong, “knightly” image of the German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk.  In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots.

Nowhere was this need more keenly felt than in France…

You can buy the book here.