A Cowen-Caplan dialogue

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bryan cites one from years ago, but in reality we reprise it in many different forms, about every three days or so:

Tyler: People like to think they’re special, but we’re all pretty much the same.

Me: No we’re not.  Some people are really great; others are simply awful.

Tyler: That’s just the kind of thing people say to make themselves feel special.

Me: You don’t really believe that.

Tyler: Do too.

Me: What if we use the metric of your willingness-to-pay to spend an hour with a person?
There are a few awesome people you would pay thousands of dollars to
meet. But you’d pay hundreds of dollars to avoid an hour with most
people.

Tyler: [3-second hesitation.]  Well, it’s not clear why that should be the relevant metric.

Me: But it’s your metric!

Tyler: What’s so special about my metric?

Me: What’s so special about it? By definition, that metric
captures everything that you think matters. And by that very metric,
people are not "pretty much the same." They’re incredibly different.

It’s funny how Bryan thinks he can cite my actions as evidence against the correct belief.  That’s absurd; for instance I also don’t act as if determinism is true, but citing that doesn’t settle the matter.  I sometimes describe Bryan’s most basic world view as the belief that what is good is very very good and what is bad is very bad indeed.   I am more likely to see endowment effects at work.

Thousand Mile Song

by  Tyler Cowen in

Roger Payne loved those 1960s songs so much he lamented their passing: "Today’s humpback whale songs pale beside those of the sixties," he recently wrote in an open letter to the youth of Japan.  "The North Atlantic is so musically lackluster today."  I don’t think Paul Knapp would agree.  Today, there might be more beats, maybe fewer legato passages.  We may like the beat more than melody today, and it might be the same with the whales.

The subtitle of this excellent book is Whale Music in a Sea of Sound and it is by David Rothenberg.  Here is David’s previous excellent book, Why Birds Sing.

The globalization of barbecue?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a neat but somewhat foggy blog post on barbecue:

The word out of the 2008 World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest,
the world’s largest pork BBQ contest held last weekend in Memphis, is
that the globalization of barbecue is in the "embryonic" stages.

Why is this foggy?  Well, barbecue went global some time ago, whether it be Maori "Hangi," indigenous Mexican cooking under the ground,  or North African nomads roasting a lamb.  Slow cooking at low heat is the formula in each case and usually smoke plays a role too.  The author notes that soon the Chinese will be in on it but has he ever had traditional Chinese short ribs?  By the way, the best barbecue town in America — Lockhart, Texas — draws heavily on German techniques for smoking its meats.

The pointer is from Henry Farrell.

What should be an allowable non-profit?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In a ruling last December that sent tremors through the not-for-profit world, the Minnesota Supreme Court said a small nonprofit day care agency here had to pay propery taxes because, in essence, it gave nothing away. 

…Almost 88 percent of overall nonprofit revenues in 2005, the most
recent year for which figures are available, came from fees for
services, sales and sources other than charitable contributions…Nonprofit
health care providers, day care centers and retirement homes, among
others, are often difficult to distinguish from their tax-paying
competitors.

…the Mall of America, a major tourist attraction, was seeking tax
exemptions as part of its plans to expand, arguing that it aids the
state economy by drawing visitors.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout.  I would say the Mall of America no, hospitals no (any subsidy to care should be more selective), the AAA club no, universities yes (ideas are public goods), and charities yes.  And here are important new developments in the world of Harvard philanthropy.

The ethanol program is even worse than you think

by  Tyler Cowen in

Thanks to the inflating cost of popcorn, the price of movie tickets is
expected to skyrocket by as much as 30% this year, according to Ricard
Gil, a University of Santa Cruz economist who studies the business.
"You’re going to see a one- to two-dollar increase in the price of a
movie ticket," he said. "And that’s being conservative."

Here is the link.  So what model is required for this to be true?  If movies and popcorn are complements, you might think that higher popcorn prices would imply lower movie prices, to partially restore the cheapness of the overall bundle.  But more realistically, the movie is a loss leader to attract buyers of high-margin popcorn.  If popcorn gets priced out of buyers’ range, movie prices will rise to make up the difference since cheap tickets no longer bring in so much extra revenue at the concession stand.

Thanks to John de Palma for the pointer.

My favorite things Japan, literature edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

I do not know Japanese literature well but nonetheless I recommend the following:

1. Out: A Novel, by Natsuo Kirino.  Vicious fun.  Dark, violent, etc.

2. Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes.  He has been called the Japanese Stanislaw Lem.  Why do I never hear about this book?  The movie by the same name is good too.

3. Yasunari Kawabata, both The Go Master and The Snow Country.

4. Mishima, Spring Snow, others.

5. Haruki Murakami.  My favorite is Hard-Boiled Wonderland (one of my favorite books period) and then Underground, a modern classic of social science (really).  I like most of them but I feel he is repeating himself as of late.

6. Shusaku Endo, Silence.  Very powerful and I remain fascinated by Japan’s so-called "Christian century."

7. Kenzaburo Oe: I like Teach us to Outgrow Our Madness.

Question: Is Tale of Genji actually fun to read?  I would say about half of it, so yes it is worth the time.  The best parts are very beautiful and mysterious and unlike anything else in literature.  Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is fun and is a good introduction to the period.

The bottom line: There is lots and lots more that I have never heard of, not to mention manga.

How to read a vita

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ugo, a loyal MR reader, asks:

If you were in a tenure committee how
would you evaluate an assistant professor who, among other things, has
two papers in a top journal with the second paper showing that the result
of his/her previous paper is wrong.

(a) Consider this situation has having
two publications in a top journal (the rationale for this is that you want
to give incentives to seek the truth and the two papers contributed to
our understanding of the problem, moreover the author showed to be able
to publish in top JNLs)

(b) Consider this situation as having
one publication in a top journal (same as above, but you recognize that
the contribution is less than two papers with a true result).

(c) Give zero value to the two papers
(because the results cancel each other).

(d) Give negative value to the two papers
(because people wasted time on a wrong result).

The best way to read a vita is to think of it in terms of a portfolio.  If all a person had on his vita was a single paper and then its repudiation, I would not think much of the combination.  If the person is producing a stream of papers, as a whole pointing toward greater knowledge and fleshing out a coherent research program, I would view the revisions and repudiations as a sign of intellectual strength.

Most questions about how to read vitas can be clarified by this portfolio approach.  For instance I am often asked how much a piece in Journal X is worth.  The correct response is to ask whether that publication complements a broader research program or not and then to ask how valuable that research program will be. 

The history of Chinese food in Japan

by  Tyler Cowen in

The popularization of other Chinese dishes in Japan dates further back than that of gyoza, however.  The influx of Westerners into Yokohama, Nagasaki and Kobe during the 1860s set the stage for the diffusion of Chinese cuisine in modern Japan.  Although the Chinese had no legal right to remain in Japan before the first Sino-Japanese treaty was concluded in 1871, they were brought in under the legal protection of Western powers.  Western merchants relied heavily on their Chinese staff — servants, clerks and middle-men — to run the households and enterprises that they relocated from the China coast.  During the 1870s and 80s independent Chinese merchants began to settle in Japan as well, so that the Chinese soon constituted the majority of the foreign population residing in the ports.

That is from Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity, by Katazyna J. Cwiertka.  One thing I learned from this book was how much Japanese wartime experience created the notion of a national cuisine in Japan.  Before the war, for instance, soy sauce and rice were not common foods in many parts of rural Japan.

Tuna fish query

by  Tyler Cowen in

Shaun, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I have something that is
bugging me: I have noticed that the small tuna fish cans are cheaper,
by the ounce, than the larger ones. This holds true with every brand
and supermarket. This seems very counterintuitive to me; nearly every
other food product gets cheaper as the quantity increases. I wondered
if you could tell me what’s going on here.

Could it be storage and spoilage costs, thereby making this the corollary of the vending machine question?  Or is it price discrimination against families and in favor of single people?  Or do single people never finish the can and thus they need a lower price as compensation, noting that you still have to cite storage costs to prevent arbitrage?  Those are my quick reactions, can you do better?

Franco Purini on Tokyo

by  Tyler Cowen in

The minute and the colossal follow one another and clash in a powerful energetic flow that knows no rest, while tangled strips of infrastructure wind between buildings in spectacular spatial combinations.  All is bathed in a hazy, dim light, which rarely brightens, and permeates every interstice of the city, from window to window, sign to sign and corner to corner.  At night, artificial lighting transforms Tokyo into a fantastical apparition of artificial mountain ranges that glow like braziers.  The visual trauma is due to Tokyo giving no sense of any recognizable structure.  Compare with Europe, or the West in general, where cities still have a perceptive — albeit residual and fragmentary — urban form which is always based on a more or less rational order, in Tokyo you find a randomness in which every urban rule is overturned or negated.  Or at least so it seems.  As a matter of face, once initial impressions have been overcome, you begin to notice the presence of recurring threads in the urban fabric, first on a subliminal level, than more consciously; a fabric made of multiple, fractal agglomerates of settlements.  These agglomerates are groups in self-similar masses, suggesting urban spaces which are not defined by clearly scaled hierarchies or distinct morphological types.  Here, urban spatiality seems to feature the unplanned coexistence of architectural units and the incidental contiguity or what is small and large, simple immaterial — rhythm beats over everything, constituting an amazing unifying element in its almost hypnotic repetition of the same model.  In this sense you discover that in the end Tokyo is a simple city that is different from European and American cities only because urban planning is practically absent.  If the former are cities of space, governed by the laws of perspective, then Tokyo is a city of situations…in Asia’s greatest city you are completely disoriented from the start. 

That is in a good book called Tokyo: City and Architecture.  I am struck by how much the Tokyo Metro and underground corridors are in fact the defining parts of the city and the most memorable destinations.