What your funeral music says about you
Here’s an interesting article about the Brits, many of whom prefer "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," the Monty Python song, for their funerals. My probably unrealistic (and not morally binding) vision of my funeral is to forbid any tributes or even spoken words but make everyone sit through Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem (Kempe or Klemperer versions, about 79 minutes long) and then simply close the event and send everybody home.
Whether this is an aesthetic preference, or whether I don’t want to let them talk themselves out of weeping over my death, I am not sure.
Helicopter drop
Well…airplane drop. Consider it another instance of zero overhead giving.
eBook sales are way up
Penguin has reported that e-book sales from the first four months of
2008 have surpassed the house’s total e-book sales for all of last
year. According to the publisher, the spike is "more than five times
the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008." Penguin
Group CEO David Shanks said he attributed the jump, in large part, to
the growing popularity of e-book readers.
Here is the link and right here you can buy Discover Your Inner Economist in Kindle form (it’s also available as a Sony eBook) and paperback as well, here is the Amazon link.
Addendum: Here is more on the economics of Kindle.
Advice for visiting a developing country
William, a loyal MR reader, asks:
What advice do you have for an aspiring development economist visiting a developing country for the first time?
He is a rising sophomore from a very good university and has strong interests in economics. The locale is Cape Town, although the question is about general advice. My tips are the following:
1. Learn as quickly as you can what is safe and what is not. In Brazil taxicabs are pretty safe, in Mexico City they are not. This will take some doing and in the meantime be very careful. Have a prearranged safety net if you lose everything to a thief.
2. Do not get drunk take drugs or patronize prostitutes. Really, It is a path to trouble and if you want to do it save it for a more familiar environment.
3. Try out the various transportation networks in the region, the more inconvenient the better.
4. Attend a religious ceremony or fiesta or both.
5. Make sure you visit some small farms.
6. Immerse yourself in the music of the place — I don’t mean the most commercial musics — before you go and then of course after you arrive. This is more valuable and more "real" than reading the literature, which is often intended for outsiders. Of course read some non-fiction on the place as well.
7. See if you can teach or attend a class in a local school.
8. Eat the street food.
9. Do not rule out the idea of romance, keeping #2 in mind and noting that cross-cultural romantic signals are often misunderstood. This is a tricky one but it is the #1 teacher if it works out not to mention the romantic benefits.
10. Count the number of Indians and Chinese and Lebanese (and sometimes Koreans) around and draw inferences from that data.
11. If you can, arrive with a well-defined hypothesis in mind. But don’t think you can collect all the data on one trip, you probably can’t.
12. Realize that you probably won’t understand all the times that people are telling you "no."
Learning the language goes without saying. I suspect Chris Blattman can add to this list, can you?
Addendum: Here are Chris’s tips.
The culture that is Japanese
A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in
his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious
when food mysteriously began disappearing.Police found the
58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s
closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki
Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
Even better is how he caught her:
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted
images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing
from his kitchen over the past several months.
Hat tip goes to Instapundit.
My favorite things Japan, classical music edition
1. Piano: Mitsuko Uchida is a clear first choice. Her box of the Mozart sonatas remains the best. Oddly I don’t like her much in the rest of the classical repertoire, though her Debussy and Webern and Schoenberg are interesting (though not my preferred versions for the latter two, which are the steelier Pollini and Gould). I also like Aki Takahashi, most of all for Cage and Feldman.
2. Conductor: Seiji Ozawa has remarkable talent and he can conduct almost anything without a score (not easy). Still, he never really developed his own sound and he has to count as a missed opportunity. First prize goes to Maasaki Suzuki, who has recorded a remarkable all-Japanese St. Matthew’s Passion and is doing a cycle of the Bach cantatas.
3. String Quartet: Tokyo is first-rate, get their complete box of Beethoven’s String Quartets.
4. Composer: Toru Takemitsu is the obvious choice, though I don’t much come back to his work.
5. Classical guitarist: Kazuhito Yamashita. His transcriptions are mind-blowing, most of all the Stravinsky. The fascination of the Japanese with transcriptions could command an entire book.
Outside of classical music I’ll recommend Kodo (and indeed all Taiko music, but only live, not on disc), The Brilliant Green’s "The Angel Song," and yes Yoko Ono. Most of Japanese popular music is a blur to me, though not an unpleasant one.
The best beef in the world?
There is a new winner and yes it is Kobe Beef in Kobe, Japan. It lives up to the hype, if you are in Kobe just try any of the better beef establishments in town. My personal list now reads as follows (in order, of course):
1. Kobe Beef, Kobe, Japan.
2. Dry-aged beef in Hermosillo, Mexico.
3. Southern Brazil, near Curitiba.
4. Lockhart, Texas, most of all the brisket at Schmitty’s.
Maybe Argentina is next in line and it might place higher if I had consumed countryside barbecue there.
And yes, Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman are right: you should eat less beef. But Kobe is not the place to abstain. The reality is that eating beef in Kobe will make it very hard for you to eat beef almost anywhere else again.
Why did they build expensive medieval churches?
Bryan Caplan asks (the rest of the post is interesting on other matters):
Seeing a bunch of French cathedrals makes me even more skeptical of the claim (made by Larry Iannaccone
and others) that people weren’t more religious in earlier centuries. If
people weren’t far more religious in the Middle Ages, why did they pour
such a high fraction of their surplus wealth into century-long
religious architectural projects? You could say "It was primarily
rulers, not donors, who allocated the funds," but that just pushes the
question back a step. Were rulers vastly more religious than the
masses? That’s hard to believe. Were rulers trying to impress the
masses by building churches? Well, why would churches impress the
masses unless they were highly religious?
His answer:
Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism:
A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using
aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame
played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play
today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism. But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.
I would add that churches were a form of fiscal policy and the associated spending was a way to hand out goodies to political allies. (This is especially important if the finished project takes decades or centuries to materialize.) In a time of political decentralization it wasn’t easy to construct or maintain a long distance road. So you had to put a lot of expense in one easy-to-guard place and in a politically correct way. Churches were the obvious choice. Churches may have been an efficient means to store wealth for other reasons as well. If someone is going to plunder you on the run, they can wreck a church but they can’t dissemble and carry away its value very easily.
Robin Hanson might argue that beautiful churches also signaled the status of the elites who built them.
Markets in everything, Yugoslavia edition
Already from the first days and weeks of the
conflict in 1992, individuals sought to obtain money by providing
information about the locations of prisoners and detainees. Some people
offered to arrange prisoner exchanges or releases in exchange for
payment. The practice continued into the postwar era, when individuals
from all three ethnic groups offered information about mass graves and
other burial sites for profit. About 12,000 victims of the conflict
remain unaccounted for.
Here is the article, the pointer is from Stephen Smith.
The war against cultural diversity
This war has spread to New Jersey:
There’s East Rutherford, then Carlstadt, then Moonachie, then — whoosh—
faster than the car radio can play the latest hit single, you’re in
Little Ferry, the next borough over. That’s four boroughs in one song.
You pass through Moonachie during the refrain.Moonachie is small: about 2,700 residents. That’s smaller than some New York apartment complexes. That’s just one-seventh of the seating capacity of the arena at Madison Square Garden.
That’s too small, says New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D).
Corzine, who presided over mergers and acquisitions as chairman of Goldman Sachs, is telling hundreds of New Jersey’s smallest towns and boroughs that they are too small to exist. Multiple
layers of government are financially wasteful, he says, and the
littlest towns and boroughs need to merge with their bigger neighbors
to achieve economies of scale.Corzine’s incentive — more like a hammer — is a threatened cutoff of state aid.
I would be disappointed if they did away with East Rutherford and Moonachie. Here is the full story.
The best sentence I read today
So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.
That’s from Will Wilkinson and for those of you on EST I read it yesterday. The whole post is interesting.
What works in development economics?
Seven papers,
all by first-rate authors on topics of critical importance. I haven’t
had time to read these yet but I can recommend them nonetheless. I’ll
print them out once I’m back from Japan in the meantime they are yours.
The pointer is from Chris Blattman.
Who should be bounced from The Great Books series?
Before leaving for Japan, I’d been pawing through these volumes lately — you know, the U. Chicago fat tomes with two columns on each page? The obvious question is which books belong and which do not; overall I’m surprised at how well the 1952 picks have held up and yes that is tribute to the University of Chicago or at least its influence.
I’m sad that Hume doesn’t get his own volume, including many of his shorter essays. Plus I’d like to add Dickens’s Bleak House and at least the first two books of Proust. And who to bounce? I nominate Plotinus as the obvious choice, noting that he has only about 24,000 cites on scholar.google.com, not even as many as Joseph Stiglitz.
In 1990 they dropped four books: Apollonius’ On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat. The loss of Sterne is regretted but the others we can do without. You’ll find a list of the added books in 1990 at the first link, about halfway down and yes they did include Swann’s Way. Little Dorrit is not the best or even the second best Dickens selection. Most are good picks though I would have left the Bergson, the Dewey (unreadable), and tossed out some of the shorter works in favor of Ulysses. More William James is never a bad idea; how about The Varieties of Religious Experience? None of the science books will age well. And how about a wee bit of Mises and Hayek to reflect the failures of socialism? Absalom, Absalom would help cover race and maybe Mill on The Subjection of Women should be there too.
Free banking in Second Life
Yes, economic activity in Second Life continues to rise. I am interested in the Second Life currency, Linden Dollars, which trades against the U.S. dollar at a market-determined exchange rate.
Free banking economists used to debate whether a private sector fiat currency could succeed. Hayek, in his Denationalisation of Money, said yes but most other people said no. The obvious problem is time inconsistency, namely that the fiat currency issuer will at some point inflate away its value to the seigniorage-maximizing margin, noting that such a margin changes with the passage of time and not necessarily in a favorable direction.
Who would have foreseen that maximizing income from "land" sales might check this outcome? I think of Linden Dollars as akin to legal tender currencies: you can’t buy anything in Second Life without them. Since the goods and services in Second Life have value the currency does too.
Who had expected that the next generation of private currency suppliers would make it work by, in God-like fashion, supplying accompanying worlds as well? What other problems can be solved this way? Or are Linden Dollars the next bubble waiting to burst?