Favorite songs about technology
Michael Weintraub asks:
What are your favorite songs about technology? In my own thinking I have limited the universe of cases to those whose lyrics deal explicitly with technological innovations and their cultural effects, along the lines of Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble" or the Talking Heads' "(Nothing But) Flowers."
Those are good picks. For me, what comes to mind immediately is XTC's "Factory Brides," "Roads Girdle the Globe" (there should be more songs about infrastructure, no?), Kraftwerk's "Computer World" (and many others), and a number of Byrds songs, including "CTA-102" and "Space Odyssey." What do you choose?
What I’ve been reading
1. King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes. An excellent short book on feminism, rape, and prostitution. Given how much ink has been spilt on these issues, it's more vital than you would expect; "full of energy," as they say.
2. Solar, by Ian McEwan. Maybe this is still better than most people's stuff, but I didn't finish it. He's lost his intellectual edge.
3. Wolf Hall: A Novel , by Hilary Mantel. Usually I'm willing to blame myself when I don't like "classics," but on this one I'll push back. I started thinking "magisterial" (itself a mixed blessing) and then found myself slipping to "dutiful." It's good — not great — and it doesn't beat reading non-fiction about British history. The second Amazon review hits the mark.
4. The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000, by Thomas A. Stapleford. No, I'm not actually reading this one, but I should be.
5. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, by Haruki Murakami. This remains one of the classic studies of collective action, although it is hardly ever recognized as such.
One more public talk
It's this Tuesday at 8:30 p.m., Room 301 of the Marvin Center at GWU, 800 21st Street Northwest, WDC. I'll open with some brief remarks on "Create Your Own Economy," but mostly I'll be answering written questions from the audience. All are welcome…
Assorted links
1. Judging bloggers by their books. (it's a tie for first)
2. The defining books of recent French literature? (in French, useful list in any case)
3. Richard Thaler: trading up in the NFL draft isn't worth it.
Medical innovation during war
Marines often go on foot patrols with tourniquets loosely strapped high on their thighs, so they can begin cranking right away if a foot is blown off.
The article is interesting throughout and thanks to The Browser for the pointer.
The iPad
Could this be the medium through which the fabled convergence finally occurs?
Most of all, think of it as a substitute for your TV.
It has the all-important quality of allowing you to bend your head and body as you wish (more or less), as you use it. By bringing it closer or further, you control the "real size" of the iPad, so don't fixate on whether it appears "too big" or "too small."
The pages turn faster than those of Kindle. The other functions are also extremely quick and the battery feels eternal.
So far my main complaint is how it uses "auto-correct" to turn "gmu" into "gum."
While I will bring it on some trips, most of all it feels too valuable to take very far from the house.
On YouTube I watched Chet Atkins, Sonny Rollins, and Angela Hewitt.
Note all the categories on this short post!
Questions to ponder
I enjoyed this one, from The Browser:
It is 1975, and you are a 26-year-old high-school art teacher, the divorced mother of a 3-year-old boy, living in Russellville, Ark. You hear that a world-famous novelist is in town for one night, so you wangle an invitation to the party in his honor, hoping he’ll autograph your book. You find yourself smitten with this 52-year-old man – as he is with you – and at the end of the evening you go home together. After he leaves, you pour out your heart in a love poem and mail it to him. He mails it back – copy-edited, in red pencil. Do you:
a) Hop a plane to New York and strangle him with your bare hands?
b) Quit your job, move to New York with your son and become the guy’s sixth wife?
That's the story of Norris Church Mailer and Norman Mailer.
Norris says she believes in an afterlife. So she expects to see Mailer? “Hopefully not for a while,” she said quickly. “I need a break.”
The clincher is this:
When people asked, “Which wife are you?” her answer was, “The last one.”
She also had had a fling with the unmarried Bill Clinton, in Arkansas. The article is interesting throughout.
Still true, you beasts
I will try to buy an iPad later today, we'll see with what success. In the meantime, Matt Fraser reminds me of my words from a few years ago:
So go ahead, buy your iPad, and feel the joy of technological advance (and the status it conveys). But think twice before whining when Apple inevitably introduces its faster, sleeker, less-expensive next generation of iPads. As economist Tyler Cowen, himself an early adopter, put it during the iPhone kerfuffle: “It is you people, who resent Coase (1972), you people who induce wage and price stickiness and widen the Okun gap. You people, who don’t know what it means to sit back and enjoy your consumer surplus. You beasts!”
Assorted links
1. Not a bus allocation photo?
2. Economic themes in film, by Larry Moss.
4. Speculative look at dating and politics, caveat emptor.
5. Green Eggs and Ham in Jamaican patois.
6. Good piece on the influential books list going viral.
Are taxicabs allocated optimally?
Here are some simple facts, for instance:
On a Saturday at 11 p.m., it’s easier to hail a cab on the nightclub-and-bar-filled Lower East Side than at Grand Central Terminal. Columbus Circle gets more passenger pickups than the Port Authority bus station. And make sure you are in the right neighborhood: taxi rides are 25 times as likely to start in the West Village as in Washington Heights.
I am wondering whether these patterns are optimal in the economic sense.
One non-optimality is that too many cabs cruise (and deliver passengers) in the crowded part of the city, not taking congestion costs into account. But that we already knew. Congestion aside, is there another suboptimal clustering effect?
If I go hear Joe Lovano at the Village Vanguard (West Village, heavily cabbed), 11 p.m. show, I know I don't have to walk back to my uptown hotel or take the subway. So I make cab-dependent plans and I go to the late show rather than the early show. Some particular cabbie benefits from the fact that other cabbies have cultivated a pool of ready customers in the area. It's like a well-functioning singles bar with lots of matches.
If one extra cab were allocated away from the West Village and to Washington Heights, would that create on net more valuable cab-consistent plans? That's an empirical question, but the basic issue is whether marginal spillover externalities are more potent in very dense or very sparse clusters.
You'll note that, by law, cabs are supposed to charge a single rate for all rides. That leads to a shortage of trips in dangerous areas, but it doesn't answer the question about where the marginal externality is greater. It could be that the sparse cluster cannot achieve critical mass and thus investing there is largely a waste.
A second question is whether the marginal external benefit is greater for the cabbie or the rider. As Coase's logic indicates, riders can be misallocated just as cabs can be. Maybe I'm going to the wrong night club.
Addendum: I liked this bit:
At 3 a.m. on a Sunday, passengers stumble into more cabs at 10th Avenue and 27th Street in Chelsea than anywhere else in the city. About as many taxi trips begin there at that hour on average as at 9 a.m. on a weekday at the Seventh Avenue entrance to Penn Station.
Taxi trips may also offer a more objective guide to night-life trends than Zagat: late-night pickups in the meatpacking district dominate other popular areas like Sheridan Square and St. Marks Place. The East Village barely cracks the top 10 on early Sunday mornings, but if you need a cab, try Third Avenue and 11th Street.
There's also a new iPhone application that tells you where to stand to maximize your chances of getting a cab; I wonder if this will turn out like portfolio insurance in 1987!?
A Korean most influential books list
The list is here, I especially liked the first selection:
1. Fisher-Price Toy Catalog (Age 6)
Yes, I'm serious. Laugh all you want for being childish, but heck, I was a child. At around age 6 while living in Korea, I somehow came to have a spiffy catalog from America that listed all Fisher-Price toys that were available for mail-order. The catalog had all these incredible toys that neither I nor any of my friends have ever seen. I read that catalog so many times, imagining playing with those toys, until the catalog eventually disintegrated in my hands one day.
The catalog was the book that confirmed to me — who was six, mind you — that America must be the best and the greatest country in the world. Later when I came to America, my faith was validated.
Assorted links
2. In search of World Research, Inc.
3. Fassbinder as technology prophet.
4. The top-rated professor in the nation?
5. Quake survivors now released from jail.
6. Fiscal austerity in Lithuania: what it looks like.
Explaining the United States to German graduate students
I'll be teaching a class at the Freie Universität this summer on this topic, in the North American Studies department. I am wondering what I should have them read. So far I am considering:
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
2. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell.
3. The American Religion, by Harold Bloom.
4. John Gunther, Inside U.S.A.; a longstanding favorite of mine.
5. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey.
6. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, by Seymour Martin Lipset.
7. Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How American and Europe are Alike. I disagree with the premise of this book but nonetheless it may shake them out of their dogmatic slumbers.
8. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.
Albion's Seed is an excellent book but it is too long. What have I forgotten? Should I have more on Mormons?
Why the Massachusetts mandate is stronger than the federal mandate
Reihan Salam pursues the issue:
Reader Jim Fair kindly pointed me to an important provision in the Massachusetts law that is not present in ACA, as I understand it. The following is from a summary provided by Healthinsuranceinfo.net:
- If you buy individual health insurance through Commonwealth Choice you may face a pre-existing exclusion period. No pre-existing condition exclusion period can be applied unless you have a break of 63 or more days of continuous coverage. Pre-existing condition exclusion periods can last up to 6 months. Commonwealth Choice plans can look back 6 months to see if you actually received care or treatment for a condition. In addition, pregnancy can be considered a pre-existing condition in individual health insurance. Genetic information cannot be considered a pre-existing condition.
- No preexisting condition exclusion period can be imposed if you are HIPAA eligible.
This strikes me as a powerful disincentive to going without coverage that effectively strengthens the mandate.
Ray Fair reports on China and yuan appreciation
Here is the abstract of a very sophisticated and detailed study:
This paper uses a multicountry macroeconometric model to estimate the macroeconomic effects of a Chinese yuan appreciation. The estimated effects on U.S. output and employment are modest. Positive effects on U.S. output from a decrease in imports from China are offset by negative effects on U.S. output from increased inflation and from a decrease in U.S. exports to China because of a Chinese contraction.
Here is the paper and thanks to E. Barandiaran for the pointer.