Yummy yum yum at Krispy Kreme doughnuts
Since I live in a county dedicated to the rule of law, I was not surprised to read this:
You know Krispy Kreme doughnuts are bad for your arteries. But the
delectable sugar-bombs are apparently lousy for sewer pipes as well,
according to Fairfax County.
In a lawsuit filed this month against the company, the county says
that doughnut grease and other waste from a plant in Lorton have
clogged up the county's sewage system, causing $2 million in damage.
The county is seeking to recoup the cost of the repairs and another $17
million in civil penalties.
The problems began in 2004, shortly after the plant opened, when the
county's public works inspectors began noticing "deposits of doughnut
grease and slime emanating from Krispy Kreme's doughnut production
plant," according to the suit, which was first reported by the
Examiner.
The muck got so bad that a nearby pumping station began reeking of
doughnuts, and a camera inserted into one of the pipes "got stuck in
the grease, preventing inspection of the remainder of the line,"
according to the suit.
One of these days, maybe when the economic crisis is over, I will spend a week blogging Fairfax County rather than the nation at large.
*Up* (no spoilers)
I enjoyed the homages to Howl's Moving Castle and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The soundtrack was excellent. The protagonist, as a young man, resembles Bryan Caplan. As an old man he resembles Gordon Tullock. It's some of the most beautiful filmmaking I've seen and probably my favorite Pixar movie to date.
Assorted links
1. The grammar of Bing, the Microsoft search engine.
2. Jeff Sachs on Dambisa Moyo.
The patronage of Carlos Slim
This Carlos Slim profile (so far the link is subscriber only), from the June 1 issue of The New Yorker, is fascinating throughout. Here was my favorite bit:
Slim had already founded several charitable organizations, although he admitted to me: "I don't believe in charities too much…They can make you popular…but you don't solve any problems." Aside from his art museum, he has created the Telmex Foundation and the Carlos Slim Foundation, which have rather diffuse mandates. Through the Telmex Foundation, he has provided a hundred thousand computers to public schools, nearly two hundred thousands scholarships, seventy-eight thousand pairs of eyeglasses, and two hundred thousand bicycles, and has paid for nearly four hundred thousand surgeries; he also supports more than a hundred thousand soccer teams.
And people wonder why he wishes to finance The New York Times. He says he does read the paper, but only when he's in the USA.
“Why Steve Sailer is wrong”
That's a request I received and probably the reader is referring to IQ and race.
Let me first say that I am not the Steve Sailer oracle. On such a sensitive matter I don't wish to misrepresent anyone, so I'll simply tell you what I think of the issues, without suggesting that he or anyone else necessarily disagrees.
There is a belief that progress in genetics will resurrect old, now-unpopular claims about race and IQ, namely that some races are intrinsically inferior in terms of IQ. I very much expect that we will instead learn more about the importance of the individual genome and that variations within "groups" (whether defined in terms of race or not) are where the traction lies. So I don't expect "old style eugenics views" to make a comeback as applied to race, quite the contrary. On that point, here is more.
I also think that IQ will be shown to be more multi-dimensional than we now think. If you wish to understand the role
of IQ in human affairs, you would do better to study autism and ADHD than race (by the way, I discuss the importance of neurodiversity in much greater detail in my forthcoming book Create Your Own Economy.)
You may know that some nations — basically the wealthy ones — have higher IQs than the poor nations. But IQ is endogenous to environment, as evidenced by the Flynn Effect, namely the general rise in IQ scores with each generation. It is sometimes noted that some racial IQ gaps are not closing but I find it more significant that scores can continue to rise. For instance it is quite possible that groups with higher measured IQs simply have been on an "improvement track" for a longer period of time. More generally I think we should consider the Flynn Effect a bit of a mystery and that suggests an overall tone of caution on these issues rather than polemicism.
Most importantly, there is a critical distinction between hypocritical discourse on race and racism itself. Hypocritical discourse on race is harmful and often Sailer does a very good job skewering it. But racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today. It is fine if a given individual, for reasons of division of labor, spends his or her time attacking hypocritical discourse about race rather than attacking racism itself. (For instance we shouldn't all focus on condemning Hitler and Stalin, simply because they were among the most evil men; there are other battles to fight.) But I still wish that specified individual to ardently believe that racism is the far greater problem. Insofar as that individual holds such a belief about racism, I am much happier than if not.
The comments section is for discussion of the issues in a mature way; if you want to attack any particular individual, that is for elsewhere.
Addendum: If you are looking for another perspective, here is William Saletan on Steve Sailer.
*Chief Culture Officer*
That's the new Grant McCracken book and do check out the subtitle at this link. It is very exciting, very worthwhile. I need to send Tim Sullivan a blurb and I can't find his current email. How about this?
"Grant McCracken is a leading guru of ideas who combines a mastery of marketing, culture, anthropology, and modern business practice. I love his work and this will prove one of the most stimulating books of the year."
Is the Geithner plan dying a natural death?
Via Ezra Klein, we learn from the WSJ:
A government program designed to rid banks of bad loans, part of a broader effort once viewed as central to tackling the financial crisis, is stalling and may soon be put on hold, according to people familiar with the matter.
…the reasons appear to be twofold. First, few investors or banks want to work with the government. And second — and maybe more importantly — few investors and banks now think they'll have to. The banks, in particular, are apparently enthused by their ability to raise private capital, and now think they can wait out the market turmoil and sell their toxic assets in a few years, when they'll be worth more money.
And then:
Recently, I asked an administration official which government program we'd remember as making the most difference in averting catastrophe. Where will the history books place the credit?
"It'll be the Federal Reserve," he replied. "It'll be their decision to increase the size of their balance sheet from whatever it was before the crisis to whatever it is now."
Sentences to ponder
Simon Johnson writes:
If you want to the Fed ever to be able to tighten, you need a healthy enough financial sector – i.e., given what we now know about policymakers’ preferences, banks in the “too big to fail” category better not be close to failing.
Do read the whole thing. Don't be fooled into thinking that we can escape our current mess very easily — we can't.
Assorted links
1. Via Chug, what does Kindle bandwidth cost?
2. Did John Taylor forget about compound interest?
3. Survey article on the economic effects of climate change.
4. Double suicide.
5. Rewards for weight loss don't work; would penalties for failure do better?
Why are more colleges rewarding professorial research?
Dahlia Remler and Elda Pema are studying this question (do you know of an ungated copy?) but they don't yet have clear answers:
Higher education institutions and disciplines that traditionally did
little research now reward faculty largely based on research, both
funded and unfunded. Some worry that faculty devoting more time to
research harms teaching and thus harms students’ human capital
accumulation. The economics literature has largely ignored the reasons
for and desirability of this trend. We summarize, review, and extend
existing economic theories of higher education to explain why
incentives for unfunded research have increased. One theory is that
researchers more effectively teach higher order skills and therefore
increase student human capital more than non-researchers. In contrast,
according to signaling theory, education is not intrinsically
productive but only a signal that separates high- and low-ability
workers. We extend this theory by hypothesizing that researchers make
higher education more costly for low-ability students than do
non-research faculty, achieving the separation more efficiently. We
describe other theories, including research quality as a proxy for
hard-to-measure teaching quality and barriers to entry. Virtually no
evidence exists to test these theories or establish their relative
magnitudes. Research is needed, particularly to address what employers
seek from higher education graduates and to assess the validity of
current measures of teaching quality.
Here is an excellent summary of the piece, with discussion.
Can MR readers set them straight? One hypothesis is that donors prefer to affiliate with research rather than with higher teaching loads and, until the financial crisis, donors have been rising in importance for many universities.
You might also claim that faculty prefer to do research, but why are faculty getting their way more than before? (And why don't faculty just take the lower teaching load without the research requirement, if they are in charge of this evolution?) Or are you wishing to claim that research ability is a good proxy (the best available proxy?) for teaching ability? I doubt that.
My hypothesis draws on the tipping point idea. Due to coalitional politics, it's hard to keep a happy medium, so the most valuable members of the department, whether defined in terms of teaching or research, push for higher research standards than they might otherwise privately favor, if they could have their way. (This happens in both "research-teaching" departments and research departments.) They fear that turning the keys over to "the barbarians" won't much improve teaching either. Research prowess is one of the most efficient bases for organizing competing coalitions. Didn't Dr. Seuss write a novel about this?
Ideally there should be a better way to keep down the losing coalition but it
is hard to find and implement in an incentive-compatible fashion.
One implication is that when growth is high, relatively tough research standards are needed to keep down the losing coalition. When personnel is stagnant or shrinking, the emphasis on research may be less necessary because there is less chance of a shift in power.
Sonia Sotomayor and economics
Google yields this:
President Obama is apparently going to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. But, you rightly say, what is the Sports Economics angle in this story? Judge Sotomayor was the
judge who issued an injunction that said MLB teams could not impose a
collective bargaining agreement nor use replacement players to start the 1995 season, effectively ending the 1994-95 MLB strike.
James Kwak offers some general comments. He describes her as a "moderate" on economic issues. And here is another source on copyright:
A lot of freelancers know the centrist Sotomayor best from NY Times Company v. Tasini,
in which a large group of freelance writers sued the Times for putting
their articles into LexisNexis without further permission or
compensation. Sotomayor, a district judge at the time, ruled in favor of the Times
based on her interpretation of the Copyright Act of 1975. The decision
was reversed on appeal and the reversal was upheld by the Supremes — a win for the contractors, but not from Sotomayor.
Addendum: Here is a good summary article.
Dialogue
Assorted links
1. New book on the Ostroms and the Bloomington School.
2. Smart rooks (birds).
3. Mapping North Korea (hail Curtis Melvin!).
The relative value of health care
In a 2003 study, another Dartmouth team, led by the internist
Elliott Fisher, examined the treatment received by a million elderly
Americans diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, a hip fracture, or a
heart attack. They found that patients in higher-spending regions
received sixty per cent more care than elsewhere. They got more
frequent tests and procedures, more visits with specialists, and more
frequent admission to hospitals. Yet they did no better than other
patients, whether this was measured in terms of survival, their ability
to function, or satisfaction with the care they received. If anything,
they seemed to do worse.
That’s because nothing in medicine is
without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays,
medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of
marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent
years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we
do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million
surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country
does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better
off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After
all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of
surgery—far more than die in car crashes.
To make matters worse,
Fisher found that patients in high-cost areas were actually less likely
to receive low-cost preventive services, such as flu and pneumonia
vaccines, faced longer waits at doctor and emergency-room visits, and
were less likely to have a primary-care physician. They got more of the
stuff that cost more, but not more of what they needed.
Blog on economics and comic books
Today I received this email:
I am a student of
economics in New York, an avid comic
book reader since childhood, and a big fan of Marginal Revolution. I
just wanted to draw your attention to a blog that a friend and I have
created. It's called Ecocomics
and deals with economics in comic books. It's meant to be a fun read
and currently includes posts on topics such as how Two-Face
funds his crime sprees, the lucrative construction industry in comic
books, Jonah Hex and 19th century real estate, millionaires in
comic books, and Superman and labor unions. I think you might really
enjoy it!