The Canterbury earthquake
The NZX 50 Index of stocks climbed in Wellington, led by building-related companies. Insurers fell. New Zealand’s dollar rose to 72.41 U.S. cents from 72.07 cents in New York on Sept. 3. The nation’s bonds declined, pushing 10-year yields to their highest in more than a month.
Here is more. The costs of repair are estimated at about two percent of gdp. Milk supply from New Zealand has not been disrupted.
Western Cape prison gangs during and after apartheid
Have you ever seen a more appealing table of contents?:
Chapter 1: Nongoloza and Kilikijan
Chapter 2: The functions of violence I–Making men (and not children)
Chapter 3: The functions of violence II–Making men (and not women)
Chapter 4: Prison on the streets, the streets in prison
Chapter 5: Warders and gangs
It starts off a little slow and cliched, but picks up. Excerpt:
Once the drinking rituals have been completed and Kilikijan has discovered that his bandit brother drinks poison, Po instructs the two men to take the hide, drape it over the rock on which the band's diary is inscribed, and press it against the rock, until the diaries are imprinted on the animal's skin. The words of the diary, now duplicated–one on the rock, the other on the hide–are to become the law of the gang. Whenever there is a dispute about what bandits ought to do, Po says, consult the hide or the rock, because they are a record of how things were done at the beginning, and how things ought to be done in the future. Nongoloza rolls up the hide and takes it with him. Kilikijan is left with the rock.
That story is part of the opening myth of the piece. Read the whole thing, especially if you're into "strange and compelling, while laden with Erving Goffmanesque social science." It's ideal for Instapaper. Suddenly there comes:
The notion that order in the prisons was maintained by a delicate system of unwritten rules is one that begs for a control experiment. What happens when one side breaks the rules, when either ndotas or warders threaten to kill one another? Interestingly enough, there was a kind of control experiment in the 1980s: the medium-security, criminal prison on Robben Island.
The original pointer comes from Bamber.
Assorted links
Would you like more “plain talk” from airline employees?
Robert, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
Are there any airlines where the flight staff speak/behave more "naturally," as opposed to the robotic beauty queen default? I don't mean this in a snarky way. I'm just curious, since customers don't seem to be overly fond of the default mode, and some folks actively dislike it. I also imagine the enforced pleasantness to be a relatively tough/emotionally costly act for most flight attendants to keep up. However, I am not sure how customers would react to more natural flight-attendant speech, body language etc., given expectations of default behaviour.
My longstanding view is that half of them dislike or sometimes even despise their customers and that their natural speech patterns, given their true feelings, would come across negatively. Perhaps Air Genius Gary Leff can comment on the cross-sectional variations vis-a-vis different airlines. But the problem is a tough one. They face lots of customers, with varying and often unreasonable expectations, and they have few resources to buy them off with.
In which sectors do the service staff have the highest opinions of their customers? (Do you have nominations? How about the old days at Tower Records? How about an indie bookstore?) I would expect a greater extent of plain speak in those situations.
What should we infer about doctors? Ladies of the evening? Economics professors?
Addendum: Gary responds.
Fiscal stimulus coming to Haiti
Experts said the presidential and legislative elections could very well be the economic stimulus quake-ravaged Haitians have been awaiting since the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake left an estimated 300,000 dead, and wiped-out jobs. The campaigns are expected to hire tens of thousands of Haitians.
“It's like a cash transfer to the population, a sort of cash-for-work program,'' said Leslie Voltaire, a former government minister who plans to hire 10,000 Election Day monitors and a helicopter to get around Haiti's mountainous terrain.
The full story is here. And was the last election a model of Downsian competition? Maybe not:
In the 2006 presidential race, which saw Haitian President René Préval beat out 34 other candidates, experts speculated that a candidate needed between $3 million and $6 million to mount a strong challenge.
It is now also believed that the country can no longer afford to have senatorial elections every two years.
Adam Phillips on happiness
For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed. When this is impossible the pursuit of happiness tends to take over. The right to pursue happiness may be, at its worst, the right not to feel frustrated. And if frustration is not allowed to take its course, to take its time, there is no absorption, only refuges from unhappiness. The child is fobbed off with happiness when what she really wants is to get her appetite back. The right to the pursuit of happiness can be a cover story for the wish to hide.
Here is much more, hat tip goes to The Browser,
Markets in everything
From a Texas state fair, it seems:
Fried Beer is a beer-filled pretzel-like dough pocket that's shaped like ravioli. Take a bite and the beer pours out.
There is also a deep-fried frozen margarita.
Assorted links
Lester D.: “Science you never knew you needed”
He is possibly Vaughn Bell's favorite psychologist. Bell links to this blog post:
For example, Lester D. has discovered that:
Mormons view the afterlife as less pleasant than Jews.
On average, there is no difference in the height from which men and women jump to their deaths.
Wives of coast guards and no more likely than wives of firemen to be depressed following a family move, but are more likely to be taking antidepressants.
There is no relation between religiosity and death anxiety in Kuwait.
Both anxiety about computers and internet skills affect how likely you are to buy a textbook online.
Among organ donors, homicide victims were more likely to have blood types O and B. Suicides showed no differences.
Macintosh users have significantly greater anxiety about computers than PC users.
Here is the explanation:
When searching for psychology research, I inevitably come across a study by ‘Lester D’, who is apparently a psychologist in an obscure college in New Jersey who seems to be interested in everything.
Mostly, the things you’ve never thought of, and probably never even thought of thinking of, and perhaps don’t even have the capacity to conceptualise.
To be fair, he has a clear interest in suicide research and does a great deal of important work in this, and other areas, but what consistently amazes me are the diverse topics he investigates.
The ugly carpets of Vegas
I have a friend who teaches at Cornell's famous School of Hotel Administration; she has a lot of casino designer contacts. According to her, the carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor. The casinos sweep up a huge number of these every night. So the carpets are just another source of revenue.
There is more at the link, including some striking photos. For the pointer I thank Arun Eamani.
Assorted links
1. Eli's blog.
2. Kling teaches the Mankiw seminar.
5. The Massachusetts Virtual Academy, a fully on-line public school, opened yesterday.
6. Good article on Olive Garden and Red Lobster, both Darden restaurants.
Sentences to ponder, dubious distinctions edition
…as unemployment has skyrocketed in the U.S., we’ve overtaken the French in GDP per hour worked. We’re also ahead of Norway, an oil-and-gas-rich country that has a higher level of GDP per capita (PPP) than we do.
That is from Reihan, the link is here.
Do protagonists of great novels have children?
In his new book Encounter, Milan Kundera writes:
I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world's population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaasons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding's most famous hero. Not Werther. All Stendhal's protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac's; and Dostoyevsky's; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil's major characters…and Kafka's protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason — to erase the infant from his life — that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.
Toss in Melville and Conrad while you're at it. What I find striking, however, is that contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend). And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all. The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.
When is the first good Western literary characterization of a child?
I enjoyed reading this book, especially the two chapters about the still-underrated Janacek.
What stance will (should) Republicans take on payroll tax cuts?
Let's say you are a Republican policymaker and you already contradict yourself by a) "we can afford to extend the Bush tax cuts" and b) "we can't afford the current version of Social Security" not to mention c) "tax cuts for business are good." Do you still favor both a) and c)? And what if you have to pile on d) "Everything Obama proposes is bad" and yet c) leads you to e) "we should defund the very system which we can no longer afford"? What comes out at the end? I am curious.
Might we get a cut in the payroll tax? (Department of !)
The Washington Post reports:
President Obama's economic team is considering another big dose of stimulus in the form of tax breaks for businesses – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the talks.
Among the options are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the research and development tax credit…