Murder markets in everything
Mr. Kahan estimated that there were perhaps half a dozen murderabilia vendors in the United States who advertise online. They include serialkillersink.com, murderauction.com, and supernaught.com.
Just type in the address and behold: A holiday card signed by Joel David Rifkin, convicted of the murders of nine women in New York City, available for $350. A shirt worn by Richard Ramirez, a k a the Night Stalker, can be yours for as little as $1,400. Paintings by the executed serial killer John Wayne Gacy are especially popular and pricey; a portrait of his alter ego, Pogo the Clown, is currently going for $19,999.
And why would anyone want this stuff?
“Each piece tells a story,” Joe Turner, a British collector who owns a Gacy painting and a lock of Charles Manson’s hair, wrote in an e-mail.
Assorted links
1. Price collapse for Japanese watermelon, down to $4,000.
2. In many U.S. counties, life expectancy for women is declining.
4. UFM in Guatemala.
6. Meandering but interesting blog post, culminating in a discussion of “peak attention” and Coasean growth.
“Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive bias”
Via Michelle Dawson, here is a new paper by Melissa Bateson, et.al.:
Whether animals experience human-like emotions is controversial and of immense societal concern [1,2,3]. Because animals cannot provide subjective reports of how they feel, emotional state can only be inferred using physiological, cognitive, and behavioral measures [4,5,6,7,8]. In humans, negative feelings are reliably correlated with pessimistic cognitive biases, defined as the increased expectation of bad outcomes [9,10,11]. Recently, mammals [12,13,14,15,16] and birds [17,18,19,20] with poor welfare have also been found to display pessimistic-like decision making, but cognitive biases have not thus far been explored in invertebrates. Here, we ask whether honeybees display a pessimistic cognitive bias when they are subjected to an anxiety-like state induced by vigorous shaking designed to simulate a predatory attack. We show for the first time that agitated bees are more likely to classify ambiguous stimuli as predicting punishment. Shaken bees also have lower levels of hemolymph dopamine, octopamine, and serotonin. In demonstrating state-dependent modulation of categorization in bees, and thereby a cognitive component of emotion, we show that the bees’ response to a negatively valenced event has more in common with that of vertebrates than previously thought. This finding reinforces the use of cognitive bias as a measure of negative emotional states across species and suggests that honeybees could be regarded as exhibiting emotions.
From the comments
Albert Ling writes:
How about this: Amy Chua’s method is better in raising successful kids career-wise, at the expense of emotional attachment, family warmth, etc. It’s a trade-off. If you envision your child’s future life to be of economic hardship and misery, maybe it’s a GOOD trade-off (as evidenced by the stricter methods of parenting on poorer societies, and also in the past when being poor really influenced your happiness).
If you already earn more than USD 25,000$ a year (which is the threshold after which income stops correlating positively with happiness), then it’s probably better to be a B.Caplan-style parent. (if your goal is to maximize your child’s total future happiness).
I think the answer is that simple.
Is information technology a general purpose technology?
Here is a 2006 paper by Susanto Basu and John Fernald, relevant to some current debates:
Many people point to information and communications technology (ICT) as the key for understanding the acceleration in productivity in the United States since the mid-1990s. Stories of ICT as a ‘general purpose technology’ suggest that measured TFP should rise in ICT-using sectors (reflecting either unobserved accumulation of intangible organizational capital; spillovers; or both), but with a long lag. Contemporaneously, however, investments in ICT may be associated with lower TFP as resources are diverted to reorganization and learning. We find that U.S. industry results are consistent with GPT stories: the acceleration after the mid-1990s was broadbased—located primarily in ICT-using industries rather than ICT-producing industries. Furthermore, industry TFP accelerations in the 2000s are positively correlated with (appropriately weighted) industry ICT capital growth in the 1990s. Indeed, as GPT stories would suggest, after controlling for past ICT investment, industry TFP accelerations are negatively correlated with increases in ICT usage in the 2000s.
This is further evidence for the view that we are in the preparatory stages of a longer-run boom, that many of the gains have yet to come, and the productivity-enhancing impact of IT so far has been overstated.
Health care queuing: this will get worse
The study used a “secret shopper” technique in which researchers posed as the parent of a sick or injured child and called 273 specialty practices in Cook County, Ill., to schedule appointments. The callers, working from January to May 2010, described problems that were urgent but not emergencies, like diabetes, seizures, uncontrolled asthma, a broken bone or severe depression. If they were asked, they said that primary care doctors or emergency departments had referred them.
Sixty-six percent of those who mentioned Medicaid-CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) were denied appointments, compared with 11 percent who said they had private insurance, according to an article being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
In 89 clinics that accepted both kinds of patients, the waiting time for callers who said they had Medicaid was an average of 22 days longer.
Here is more. Once again, health care policy needs to be about the supply side.
Addendum: Ezra Klein reports that the budget deal may involve significant Medicaid cuts.
Assorted links
Ralph Waldo Emerson on books
From his Notebooks, (the best Emerson to read, in my view) circa 1841:
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages. Even the great books. “Come,” say they, “we will give you the key to the world” — Each poet each philosopher says this, & we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre, but the thunder is a superficial phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the Sage — whether Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates; striking at right angles to the globe his force is instantly diffused laterally & enters not. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. I have found this to be the case with every book I have read & yet I take up a new writer with a sort of pulse beat of expectation.
Another look at why both AD and AS matter
Often I read blog posts by other economists, using the AD-AS model. The implicit assumption is that there is either too little AD, or too little AS, but the two problems do not and indeed cannot exist together. If the economy is well-described by these two curves, that is indeed the implication: if AD is shifted in too far to the left, how can there be too little AS?
I suggest a slightly more complex model. During the financial crisis the American economy took a big AD hit due to debt overhang, falling asset prices, unemployment, imperfect monetary policy, credit contraction, and several other factors. After the peak of the crisis there were massive layoffs, largely because of these AD problems, toss in an increase in the risk premium and perhaps higher fixed costs of employing people. A lot of the labor market problems from this hit still have not been cleaned up, and furthermore with lower net wealth many of these jobs are never coming back, with or without monetary stimulus.
Now fast forward. These days, the layoffs are no longer so frantic, but the rate of new job creation is slow. Some of the unemployed (not all) could find new work by moving to North Dakota or Australian mining communities, but few of them will do so, mostly for the obvious reasons. They are waiting for good, new jobs in areas they are willing to live in. But slow underlying rates of innovation mean slow job creation and so many of these unemployed continue to wait. It also means a very low quit rate, which we have observed too, because employed workers can’t so easily step into new jobs.
The economy still has a problem with weak AD. The economy also has an ongoing problem from weak AS. Both are true, though you won’t see this if you think those two AD and AS curves sum up the whole picture. Again, it is about the disaggregated aggregate demand.
Thinking even a little bit hard about the derivation of the AD curve (especially in “p space” rather than “p dot space”) should cure one of the tendency to take these models too literally. Note also that most AD-As models are not integrated with growth theory, though the Modern Principles text with Alex is a big exception here.
Here is further simple proof, using seasonal data, that both blades of the scissors matter. Via Matt Yglesias, here is a iscussion of how productivity growth in the recovery — if you could call it that — is lagging behind other U.S. business cycles.
An outline of Austro-Chinese business cycle theory
Investment has indeed grown far faster than GDP. From 2000 to 2010, growth of gross fixed investment averaged 13.3 per cent, while growth of private consumption averaged 7.8 per cent. Over the same period the share of private consumption in GDP collapsed from 46 per cent to a mere 34 per cent, while the share of fixed investment rose from 34 per cent to 46 per cent.
Professor Pettis argues that suppression of wages, huge expansions of cheap credit and a repressed exchange rate were all ways of transferring incomes from households to business and so from consumption to investment. Dwight Perkins of Harvard argued at the China Development Forum that the “incremental capital output ratio” – the amount of capital needed for an extra unit of GDP – rose from 3.7 to one in the 1990s to 4.25 to one in the 2000s. This also suggests that returns have been falling at the margin.If this pattern of growth is to reverse, as the government wishes, the growth of investment must fall well below that of GDP. This is what happened in Japan in the 1990s, with dire results.
Sentences to ponder
So just because health-care benefit costs have been rising, pushing up total employer costs, does not mean that real wages, including benefits have been increasing. And if you take into account that defined benefit pensions were common in the past, whereas they are virtually non-existent in the private sector, then there is no reason to believe that benefits, in real terms, have been increasing. If anything, previous generations received more benefits, but the cost of those benefits, particularly in terms of pension plans and medical plans for retirees, are only being realized now.
Here is more, hat tip goes to Interfluidity.
“What Lessons for Economic Development Can We Draw from the Champagne Fairs?”
There is a new paper by Jeremy Edwards and Sheilagh Ogilvie, here is the abstract:
The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs’ decline, and the institutions for securing property rights and enforcing contracts at the fairs. It finds that contract enforcement at the fairs did not take the form of private-order or corporative mechanisms, but was provided by public institutions. More generally, the success and decline of the Champagne fairs depended crucially on the policies adopted by the public authorities.
It is a very nice paper and also quite readable. Sheilagh’s star continues to rise and Edwards is also no slouch. Here is their paper “revising” Avner Greif’s thesis about the Maghribi traders.
Assorted links
1. Workers’ share of U.S. national income, over time.
2. Neuroskeptic is now on Twitter.
3. How is Cass Sunstein doing?
4. Indian hangmen: thwarted markets in everything.
A defense of Hungarian economic policies and prospects
It seems that Hungary has climbed out of its slump and it is now growing at 2.5 percent a year, at least during the last quarter. This interesting but self-serving editorial serves up a few reasons why:
We are increasing small- and medium-size businesses’ access to capital through grants and loan programs for product development, and reducing corporate-income taxes for these firms to 10% from 19%—among the lowest in Europe. These businesses are vital to Hungary’s export-driven recovery. As they continue to grow, so will private-sector employment, which in turn will reduce the heavy burden on our welfare system.
We would rather receive the same total tax revenues from a larger number of employers—each paying less tax—and have more employed Hungarians spending their wages and driving consumption. We’ve significantly lifted the tax burden off consumers by slashing the personal income-tax levy to a flat rate of 16%, from a tiered system where the highest rate was 32%.
We are also tackling welfare reform. Our government-run system has been plagued by spiralling costs, systemic abuse and inefficiencies that were exposed by the deteriorating economic conditions after the financial crisis. We believe that any welfare cuts should aim to boost employment and embed a work ethic among Hungarians. So we have reduced unemployment and disability benefits and pharmaceutical subsidies, and are in the process of reducing back the red tape that makes employing workers complicated and expensive.
I would stress caution is interpreting these arguments and note they are from a member of the current government. Luck, positive real shocks (agriculture), and mean reversion are also at work. Still, it is interesting to see that the Hungarian recovery is far outpacing that of the PIIGS countries; Hungary of course is not on the euro and it has avoided wrenching deflation, instead experiencing mild inflation. Furthermore the Hungarians seem to be putting a spending freeze into operation and they are addressing pension liability problems. It is unlikely that is the cause of their recent turnaround, but it hasn’t hindered it either.
All this is true:
Our economy has grown for six consecutive quarters, unemployment levels are falling and the Hungarian forint is one of the world’s strongest-performing currencies this year.
Budapest is now an expensive city, and it no longer makes for a good cheap vacation.
Favorite Hungarian composers
1. Franz Liszt: The “late, serious” pieces are important but I don’t think they are much fun to listen to. I recommend the Transcendental Etudes, performance preferences here. “Funerailles,” played by the young Lazar Berman. “Years of Pilgrimage, the Swiss years,” by Aldo Ciccolini. The Hungarian Rhapsodies, played by Cziffa or Robert Szidon. Many of the opera transcriptions are subtler than they are made out to be, as creative examples of early mash-ups. The B Minor Sonata is a bit too long but Clifford Curzon has a lovely version. The organ music remains undervalued and the instrument well suited the composer’s chromatic tendencies.
2. Bela Bartok: The orchestral music is easier to enjoy live, when the different colors and melodic strands stand out more. Concerto for Orchestra is a good place to start (for a Hungarian conductor try Fritz Reiner) and also Piano Concerto #1, get both Pollini/Abbado and Barenboim/Boulez for contrasting interpretations, both brilliant. The six string quartets, by the Emerson Quartet. The piano sonata by Youri Egorov and “Out of Doors” and “Allegro Barbaro.” The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, by Bartok himself if you wish.
3. Gyorgy Ligeti. My favorite piece is Lux Aeterna but that is best heard in concert, like a lot of choral music. On disc the horn trio works best. The Sony collection volumes are uniformly excellent and perhaps the piano music is the easiest place to start.
Other notable Hungarian composers are Kodaly and Péter Eötvös, sorry that I have not in every case mastered the diacritical marks. Most Kurtag leaves me cold but the Kafka Fragments are one place to start. There are many fine Hungarian film music composers.