American Inventor
Your suspicion is correct, there is a contestant named Elmer. The winning inventor with the best new idea, as determined by a four-person panel, gets a million dollars and national fame on this ABC show. The jury includes George Foreman, who says yes to almost everything, and a sour but articulate British gentleman, who says no to virtually everything. One of the panel members praises the development of an inflatable neck brace to prevent people from "drownding."
Watch on-line episodes here. Wikipedia is here.
The ideas included a foot pedal to lift the lid on toilets at night, a funnel for toilet use, a bra with no strap in the back (isn’t that old?), a hands-free flashlight which attaches at the neck and projects upright and forward, a way to rub down the back of your spouse using the TV remote, a computer program which matches strangers in a bar according to their pre-programmed interests (didn’t I blog that once?), a jacket which helps deaf people feel the vibrations from music, and a foam cushion which holds up the heads of small babies.
The winners of this episode came from MIT and Harvard Business School. Two nerdy guys produced and demonstrated a way of storing bikes vertically in a garage; I wasn’t impressed.
The main lessons are twofold. First, many people pour years of their lives and love into projects which are absurd on the face of it and could be revealed as such within seconds.
Second, when it comes to the (possibly) good inventions, it is very very difficult to tell what is a good idea and what isn’t. Without sector-specific knowledge, how do you know if that no-strap-in-the-back bra is a novelty? It sounded good and indeed it looked good but I just don’t have the experience (or the attentiveness?) to say.
The real world doesn’t judge inventions with a panel of four quasi-celebrities (sadly Charles Nelson Reilly is now dead) and most valuable novelties are process innovations, produced while someone is working full-time doing something pretty similar.
In my evil, wicked fantasy world I imagine economics graduate students presenting their new Ph.d. dissertation ideas to a jury of four: Paul Lynde, Fred Thompson, Charles Barkley, and Kenny Smith.
I thank several loyal MR readers for the pointer.
Why?
****ing libertarians. I swear to God, you guys act the same every
single time. EVERY time I post something about a societal trade off,
you instantly, passionately and irrevocably identify yourself with one
and only one side. Why? WHY? WHY do you do that? I thought this one
might be harder for you. I mean, two picturesque resource extractors. I
thought the salmon fishers might get some love from you. Two years
they lost their entire livelihood and way of life! But no. Instead you
write with a fanatic dedication to the potential costs to the farmers!
Why?! What did you choose on? Seriously, it was "rippling back muscles
of the fisher as he winches his nets out of the sea, man on his boat
against the elements" versus "his thigh muscles flexing, the grower
squats to take a handful of soil, surveying the new growth on his
alfalfa before whistling for his dog". How the hell did you choose?
That is from Megan Very-Non-McArdle, and there are some related posts at the blog; commentary is here. The asterisks are from me.
These days, if a TV show is going to draw me in as a viewer, it has to be really, really good.
The Raw Shark Texts
…is great fun. I still can’t decide if it is a "good bad book," like Shantaram, or a "good good book," but it’s a good book of some kind or another.
Imagine a cross between Memento and The Time Traveler’s Wife and you get halfway there. There’s also plenty on when cheap talk equilibria matter (I hope you’ve seen Saw) and some visual influences from graphic novels and alternative typographies. In any case it should become a big hit.
Mali fact of the day
A fifth of the population of Mali, for instance, already moves to Ivory Coast during drought years.
Here is the link.
Most underrated mystery novel
Many of you have asked for posts on the most underrated books. Today will start a short flirtation with this topic ("underrated week," which of course starts on Friday) and we’ll break books down by category.
For mystery, I’ll nominate the works of Henning Mankel, although arguably he is not underrated any more by critics. Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is my other pick. Or how about Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx?
Readers, comments are open…
Museum:
The subtitle is Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the content is a series of varied, first person, quasi-biographical reports of how the Met works:
1. "We received our art education at home, where we were fortunate enough to be surrounded by Impressionist paintings…"
2. "The building is in pretty good condition considering the amount of use it gets. There have to be at least thirty bathrooms in this place, and in each of those bathrooms you have six or seven toilets, four or five urinals, four or five sinks, plus you have the locker room for the employees, with showers and things like that."
3. "I think it’s very important to have art in the world. I am somebody who is not terribly impressed with people. The only thing which is really exceptional about humans is art; apart from that, we are animals."
Who would you most like to be?
Recommended.
China estimates of the day
Pollution is more globalized too:
Bruce Hope, a senior environmental toxicologist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, estimates that global sources contribute 18 percent–more than four times the local share–to Oregon’s air pollution. Increasingly, the ozone on the west coast will be determined by China. In California, for example, some researchers believe at least one-third of California’s fine particulate pollution–known as aerosol–originates from Asia. These pollutants could potentially nullify California’s progress on meeting stricter Clean Air Act requirements. In May 2006, University of California-Davis researchers claimed that almost all the particulate matter over Lake Tahoe was from China. The great irony is that these pollutants are mainly due to the burgeoning demand of U.S. and EU consumers for cheap Chinese goods–which is driving the Chinese economic development. Some estimates cite that 7 percent of China’s CO2emissions are due to production of U.S. imports.
Here is the source, the pointer is from Robin Hanson. Concerning the last sentence, if you haven’t already seen it by now, here is Hal Varian’s piece on where the iPod is made.
Manhattan Without Us
Even on a clear, sunny day, the people who keep the subway going have to pump 13 million gallons of water away. Otherwise the tunnels start to flood.
That is from the July 2007 Scientific American, drawing upon Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us; I have pre-ordered my copy and I am waiting for his secret blog.
“One line to rule them all”?
Jane Galt writes:
Everyone knows the unified queue is the best way to move checkout traffic. So how come every time customers in a crowded drugstore try to form a single queue, the cashiers force us to line up at the registers? Do they get some kind of psychic job from knowing in advance which customer they’ll check out?
You might try to argue that the indirect utility function is convex (risk-loving) in prices, and that people, when they realize that their personal line-choice algorithms result in shorter (longer) waits, make more (fewer) trips to the store. Samuelson once proved a theorem about that in the QJE. The intuition is that consumers can take advantage of price variability, in this case "time price" variability, and come out ahead. Admittedly the notion of "going to the store more often when your innate line-choosing algorithm turns out to be good" requires a mental stretch.
People also might like knowing that the end to waiting is in sight. On the phone they put you on hold and tell you the expected wait time, or they should. At least five times in my life I’ve bolted a supermarket and abandoned the groceries, simply because the lines appeared too long. It is harder to estimate how long a single line will take, and it is harder to compare single lines across supermarkets.
And might there be "line price discrimination"? Hurried people like me can scout out the best lines (don’t you have visual algorithms for speedy cashiers?…young girls are best), whereas the conversation-starved, check-writing old ladies might even prefer a slower line.
There are thousands of papers on queuing theory, but I’ve never seen a good study of when single lines are to be preferred. How sad indeed is my profession…
Overrated novels
Here is one nomination for the most overrated novel of the 20th century.
I wonder about Gide and Sartre as well. J.D. Salinger is too easy a target, as is John Barth. How about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird? I keep on thinking there is an obvious and juicy British nomination (just look up how the Penguin Guide to Classical Music treats Elgar recordings), but I can’t settle on a single glaring name which stands above all others.
For the most overrated major author, I’ll pick Carlos Fuentes. I love Mexico (and I’ve tried reading his works in Spanish), but I find he deadens the place rather than bringing it to life. Had he not been around for the fashionably left-wing, anti-imperialist 1960s, he’d just be another guy with a pen.
The most overrated good book is Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which although very good is far from his best work.
What are your picks?
The most absurd sentence I read today
I am proposing that the Son and the Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe.
That is from Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Christianity.
But wait, there is competition for the honor:
If Jesus indeed rose from the dead using the mechanism described in Chapter 8, namely electroweak tunneling to convert matter into energy, and if indeed this was done with the intention of showing us how to use the same process, then we ourselves should be able to learn how to turn matter into either electromagnetic energy or neutrinos within a few decades.
You choose…
Assorted links
What it is like to be a baby
I found these claims intriguing, but memory did not provide a test:
Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious
than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that
people in general — adults, that is — have more conscious experience
of what they attend to than of what they disregard…Baby brains, Gopnik says, exhibit a much broader plasticity than adults’ and have a general neurochemistry
similar to the neurochemistry involved in adult attention. Babies learn
more quickly than we do, and about more things, and pick up more
incidental knowledge outside a narrow band of attention. Gopnik
suggests that we think of attention, in adults, as something like a
mechanism that turns part of our mature and slow-changing
brains, for a brief period, flexible, quick learning, and plastic —
baby-like — while suppressing change in the rest of the brain.So
what is it like to be a baby? According to Gopnik, it’s something like
attending to everything at once: There’s much less of the reflexive and
ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert. She suggests that
the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience
is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very
different cultures, where everything is new.
In my view, some people have a better sense (a much better sense) of what it is like to be a baby than others…
Why doesn’t America have electronic medical records?
Ezra Klein poses the question:
I’ve never read a compelling explanation of why the nation’s doctors and hospitals haven’t broadly adopted electronic medical records. It’s not as if they’re allergic to technology. At this point, cardiovascular care employs every strategy but astral projection to keep our in rhythm. It’s not as if it wouldn’t be cheaper and easier for them. The man hours and costs from keeping track of files, printing out labels, finding lost manila folders, and getting sued because the nurse misread the doctor’s handwriting are enormous. Theoretically, insurers should be pushing on this, but they seem behind the curve, too. And it’s not as if there aren’t tested programs in use — not only does Europe do electronic records well, but the VA does them beautifully, and they’ve released their primary program, ViSTA, as open source, for free use by anybody.
I can think of four reasons.
1. Most of the benefits are reaped by the patient, and in the long run. Today’s suppliers don’t realize these benefits in the form of profits.
2. The United States has relatively weak data protection laws. Many people don’t want outsiders to know their medical history, and information compilers fear lawsuits if the information leaks out or is hacked.
3. No single provider has an incentive to move first in this game. Why computerize if no one else has?
4. I haven’t computerized my office (is Alex laughing?), I worry more about surviving until the next day.
The comments over at Ezra’s are excellent. And if you think that electronic records are the source of vast productivity gains, just have Medicare mandate such a change. Readers?
Addendum: Here is Arnold Kling.
What’s the social value of Microsoft?
Here is Mark Thoma and Robert Barro, here is Brad DeLong. You may recall that Barro had claimed that the social value of the company was roughly equal to its revenue; of course many critics objected.
Imprecise questions are being thrown around. It is fine to question Microsoft’s net contribution by asking what other companies would have done in its stead. But then, to be consistent, we should ask what revenue those alternate-universe companies would have earned. The correct comparison is one set of social values minus revenue (that of Microsoft) to another (hypothetical) social value minus revenue (what would have happened without Bill Gates). Would the alternative have been more or less monopolistic, more or less stifling of innovation, more or less able to enforce copyright? And so on. We can speculate but of course we’ll never solve those counterfactuals.
We can, however, assert the nonetheless profound truism that gross social benefits of Microsoft, over time, exceed the gross revenue of the company by quite some amount. The company is a highly imperfect price discriminator and many people rip off its software.
I’ll call the comparisons in the counterfactual (different revenues, propensities to monopolize, social values, etc.) a wash and thus I believe that the correct measure of the social value of the company is much greater than its revenue. It would make more sense to compare the company to a first best if we thought there was a feasible antitrust policy to get us there, but I find that hard to believe.
In other words, Barro probably is underestimating the value of Bill Gates and Microsoft.