The Pirates’ Code

James Surowiecki writes:

…pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs.  The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in [Peter] Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”

There is more:

Leeson is fascinated by pirates because they flourished outside the state–and, therefore, outside the law. They could not count on higher authorities to insure that people would live up to promises or obey rules. Unlike the Mafia, pirates were not bound by ethnic or family ties; crews were as remarkably diverse as in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Nor were they held together primarily by violence; while pirates did conscript some crew members, many volunteered. More strikingly, pirate ships were governed by what amounted to simple constitutions that, in greater or lesser detail, laid out the rights and duties of crewmen, rules for the handling of disputes, and incentive and insurance payments to insure that crewmen would act bravely in battle.

Read the whole thing.

iPod music listening

Carrying around my iPhone, I listen more to an iPod than before and I’ve upgraded the music collection on my iPod.

I suspect that iPods encourage musical nuggets which are short, to the point, and complementary to adrenalin.  I’ve heard the ? and the Mysterians song "99 Teardrops" more often in the last week than in the preceding last year.

The iPod means we listen more on the go, and with background noise, so the music should have energy.  iPod listening also brings more frequent interruptions, which discriminates against longer pieces.  Unlike with a CD player there is no particular reason to listen to a whole album straight through and what’s an album anymore anyway?

The curmudgeonly side of me worries a little.  What about slowly enfolding, architectonically subtle musical structures?  I love LaMonte Young, Pandit Kumar, and Andrew Violette, but thery’re not on my iPod.  I also resent that now my brain is more likely to expect music to be fun, though often I would rather hear music that is good for me.

I’ve read that classical music is more popular on iTunes than in music stores; I wonder if the preference is for arias and energetic movements of snappy symphonies, or if the iTunes purchase doesn’t end up very active on the iPod.

A loyal MR reader asked for mbaqanga recommendations for iPod; start with The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Mahlathini (best without the Mahotella Queens), and Township Jazz n’ Jive; the last is not exactly mbqanga but you will love it anyway.

Who should control the IMF?

Here is a typical smart person’s thought about the IMF; the intro to the article reads:

When the IMF was a monitor of borrowers’ policies, dominance of the IMF
Board by creditor countries was natural, but an institution whose main
role is to facilitate global consultations and arbitrate currency
disputes needs a more balanced shareholder structure.

I again find myself drawn into a "public choice" response rather than an "optimization" response.  I read the above sentence as stating the problem the IMF faces, not stating a solution.  The U.S., Western Europe, and Japan support the IMF in large part because they control it.  For the U.S. in particular the IMF has been a relatively good deal.  You don’t have to think the IMF is especially effective (I don’t), but the institution allows for pre-arranged contributions to bailouts and pre-arranged coordination.  Having a dominant hand in a multilateral institution works better for U.S. policymakers than having to assemble consortia on the spot, or explaining to some countries on a nation-to-nation basis that they won’t get any help. 

If China and India had a significant voice in the IMF, what would they want?  It’s not clear, and that is part of the problem.  The U.S. isn’t about to stop paying its "country club dues," but when new upgraded members might someday form a blocking coalition, I’m not sure America will step up its contribution either.   

Markets in everything, telekinesis edition

If you’ve ever wanted to remotely access the files on your mac’s hard
drive through the Safari application on your iPhone (and who hasn’t?)
then you’ll want to download Telekinesis from the genius mind behind Quicksilver.

Here is more.  I haven’t tried the download but from appearances it even seems to be one of those free markets with a dollar price of zero…

Why doesn’t capitalism flow to poor countries?

Why isn’t 30 percent of the economics profession working on this problem?  Di Tella and MacCulloch tell us the following:

We find anecdotal evidence suggesting that governments in poor
countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries. 
Thus, it appears that capitalist rhetoric doesn’t flow to poor
countries.  A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more
widespread in poor countries, reduces more the electoral appeal of
capitalism than that of socialism.  The empirical pattern of beliefs
within countries is consistent with this explanation: people who
perceive corruption to be high in their country are also more likely to
lean left ideologically (and to declare support for a more intrusive
government in economic matters).  Finally, we present a model explaining
the corruption-left connection.  It exploits the fact that an act of
corruption is more revealing about the fairness type of a rich
capitalist than of a poor bureaucrat.  After observing corruption,
voters who care about fairness react by increasing taxes and moving
left.  There is a negative ideological externality since the existence
of corrupt entrepreneurs hurts good entrepreneurs by reducing the
electoral appeal of capitalism.

Here is the paper.  Here are non-gated versions.

My favorite things Colorado

These do not spring easily to mind:

1. Public building: The new Denver art museum, by Daniel Liebeskind.

2. Fiction: I reject Kesey and Michener, so I’ll go with Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, an excellent piece of fantasy/science fiction.

4. Movie, set in: The Shining comes to mind. 

5. Music: I can’t pick John Denver and while I enjoy big band, I think that Glenn Miller, once you get past a few tunes, is overrated.  Jello Biafra, of The Dead Kennedys, is an obvious pick here; don’t forget "Holiday in Cambodia." 

6. Wild card: Ted Mack, remember his amateur hour?  It was a favorite show of my father’s.

The bottom line: Eh.  Toss in Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks and it is still Eh.  I hope the green chili is good.

What’s actually annoying about bad customer service?

Jane Galt posts her thoughts on Sony Vaio customer service.  I bought a Sony Vaio a few months ago, at the recommendation of a friend.  Fortunately [it now seems] it arrived at the Best Buy with a broken drive and I never had the chance to lay my hands on it.  It was only last week that they gave me my money back.   Best Buy wouldn’t give me the computer, and Sony wouldn’t accept the damage claim from Best Buy rather than from the customer.

I see two especially frustrating elements in bad customer service.  First, the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are already turned on, anticipating that a longstanding problem — lack of a computer — was going to be solved.  The resulting disappointment is especially acute, much worse than before you try to fix the problem.

Second, we don’t like the tension of not knowing when the problem will be solved, or when being put on hold will end.  Going to the dentist with certainty stresses me less than some chance I might have to go.

I try to manage the former problem by not getting excited until the product has been working for at least a day.  That means I remain a bit emotionally flat in some spheres of commercial life and I don’t go out shopping enough or with enough gusto.  I try to manage the second problem by mentally capitalizing the worst case customer service outcome I can imagine.  That means when something goes wrong I toss in the towel too quickly.  Sometimes I just buy a new item rather than solving the problem with the old one, or working to get a refund.

On this matter, Natasha believes I am crazy, yet I persist in my ways.

Alumni economics

Alumni with kids are 13 percentage points more likely than alumni without kids to give in any year.  The tendency to give rises slowly–by three more percentage points total–through kids’ early teens.  At about age 14, as mom and dad see their kid’s algebra and composition grades, they decide whether he or she will apply to the alma mater.

Here is much more.

An early start in life is a good start

A’la James Heckman, the importance of early life for economic outcomes seems only to grow:

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people
established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over
the working lifetime?  We answer this question within a model that
features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from
data, as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn, initial human
capital, and initial wealth — features which are chosen to match
observed properties of earnings dynamics by cohorts.  We find that as of
age 20, differences in initial conditions account for more of the
variation in lifetime utility, lifetime earnings and lifetime wealth
than do differences in shocks received over the lifetime.
  Among initial
conditions, variation in initial human capital is substantially more
important than variation in learning ability or initial wealth for
determining how an agent fares in life.  An increase in an agent’s human
capital affects expected lifetime utility by raising an agent’s
expected earnings profile, whereas an increase in learning ability
affects expected utility by producing a steeper expected earnings
profile.

The emphasis is mine; here is the whole paper.  Here is a non-gated version.  In other words, treat your kids well, invest in them, and realize that determinism is not altogether crazy.  Here is a related paper about how mental health problems in childhood plague later life and earnings.