Department of Oh-Oh, a continuing series
The explanation [of chevron deposits] is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or
comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population,
smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at
least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated
Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of
sediment to land.Most astronomers doubt that any large comets
or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But
the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old
Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not
known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the
world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts
during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong
enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a
violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once
in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate,
catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.
Here is the full story. I should add there are reports that a tidal wave (not nearly of this size) may hit Japan today. Here are our posts on asteroid deflection as a public good.
Has NBA defense become less important?
Matt Yglesias has read Aristotle:
I concede that the new [NBA] rules have made it harder to play defense. I
fail to see, though, how that makes defense less important. Two factors
determine who wins a basketball game: how many points your team scores
and how many points the other team scores. Since you have the ball
roughly half the time and the other team has the ball roughly half the
time, it stands to reason that offense and defense should have exactly
the same importance. You could even argue that, in an era when it’s
easier to score than to defend, a guy who can stop the other team from
scoring is more valuable than someone who can put the ball in the
basket.
Amen, and try putting that last point into a Solow model-like framework. That all said, I don’t understand why there are so few good centers these days. Why is there no Bob Lanier? Is the pay too low? Surely people are not shorter than thirty years ago.
While we are on the topic, I’ll offer up my yearly predictions and opt for San Antonio. Their new 30-year-old big lug seems able to play center, they have the game’s best power forward, lots of title experience, and an excellent backcourt. Plus they can play defense.
Addendum: A reader sends in this excellent commentary.
The best sentence I read today (so far)
Harvard’s system of general education should emphasize methodology over topic because methods are harder to teach and learn than facts.
That is Ed Glaeser, on the Harvard curriculum, more here. Thanks to Yan Li for the pointer.
East Germany, circa 1985
Chris Bertram writes in the comments of MR:
As it happens I spent some time in East Germany in 1984. As I
recall, it was then claimed that the per capita GDP was comparable to
that of the UK. It was immediately obvious to me that the standard of
living for most people was far far lower. But real problem with East
Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the
level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good,
actually). It was the fact that it was a police state where people were
denied the basic liberties.Given them those liberties and I think you’ve achieved most of
what’s morally important. If they then choose a policy of more leisure
and lower growth or the opposite … that’s up to them. I don’t think
it matters, morally speaking, that they are poorer than Americans are.
I am genuinely puzzled by this. I visited East Berlin — supposedly the showcase of the country – in 1985. Let me try to sound as superficial as possible, in light of the extreme poverty in Africa.
The food was terrible. The cars were a joke, if you even had one. There were hardly shops to be found. I had to spend 40 or so "Ostmarks" and literally could not find a single thing I wanted. I bought a Stendahl book and left the rest of the money on a bench. Few people had the means to travel, even if politics had permitted it. I am skeptical about the health care though I will admit I am not informed. Had the relatively productive people been free to leave, this all would have been much worse. It should also be noted that the country was neither donating much to Africa, nor taking in many immigrants, and again that is not just because of the politics.
Chris and I have a very different notion of what is morally important. I don’t wish to force anyone to be richer than East Berlin circa 1985, but if you give them liberty, almost everyone will try to exceed that level, and not just by a little bit.
The suburbs are good for your social life
A new study says that people who live in sprawling suburban areas have more friends, better community involvement and more frequent contact with their neighbours than urbanites who are wedged in side-by-side. The results challenge the accepted idea that suburban life is socially alienating a notion that’s inspired everything from the Academy Award-winning American Beauty to Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone.
The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking to their neighbours weekly increases by 10 per cent, and the likelihood they belong to hobby-based clubs jumps by 15 per cent.
"We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower," says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. "What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city."
Here is the story. Here is Brueckner’s home page, here is the paper on-line.
Links, mostly from the UK
1. How stores encourage consumers to swarm.
2. What we are learning about price stickiness.
3. Autism and assortative mating.
4. Jane Galt on nationalized health insurance in the U.S., and the VA.
5. How rich are you, by global standards?
6. A summary of the recent debate on social democracy, with commentary.
How much does economic growth matter anyway?
Mill’s idea (endorsed by Rawls btw) that the goal of our policy ought not to be one of continual struggle for growth or for relative advantage once the threshold has been reached where we could all hope to enjoy a satisfactory level of well being seems to be right.
In a forthcoming article, I write:
Just as the present appears remarkable from the vantage point of the past, our future may offer comparable advances in benefits. Continued progress might bring greater life expectancies, cures for debilitating diseases, and cognitive enhancements. Millions or billions of people will have much better and longer lives. Many features of modern life might someday seem as backward as we now regard the large number of women who died in childbirth for lack of proper care. Most of all, economic growth limits and mitigates tragedies. It is a simple failure of imagination to believe that human progress has run its course.
If I read Chris correctly, he is saying "so what if Germany is poorer than the United States?"
It is not my belief that the Germans will be consumed with envy. I do think that a) the Germans will be missing out on some wonderful gains, b) there is no real standard for "a satisfactory level of well-being," c) a poorer Germany will be much less able to help the truly desperate parts of the world, if only by accepting immigrants, d) this is not a long-run political equilibrium in Germany, and e) at the global level, it is important that Western and European values are prominent, and this does require good or at least a decent growth performance. Furthermore it is possible to believe a)-e) without seeing status games in relatively healthy Western societies as zero or negative sum.
On growth, keep the following in mind: If we are comparing a two percentage point boost to the growth rate, and starting at real income parity, a time horizon of only 55.5 years is needed to establish a 3:1 ratio of superiority in income.
I am not not not saying that Chris is a communist or even a socialist, but my reporting would be remiss if I did not point out that defenders of East Germany, in the 1980s, made more or less the same argument as Chris’s bit quoted at the top of this post.
That all said, I am relatively bullish about German recovery, at least compared say to France or Italy.
Assorted
1. Microfinance in the United States?
2. Camille Paglia is now a parent, and more.
3. Five comedies for a desert island? I want Smiles of a Summer Night on my list.
4. Americans are just less healthy than Englishmen (and no, it is not health care policy), but they won’t admit it.
Books I love on topics I don’t care about
I have a new nomination:
[Alice] Sheldon (1915-87) was the most important sf writer ever to live in the
Washington area. She also was, in her varied career, a psychologist, a
CIA officer and a chicken farmer. Her biographer, Julie Phillips,
combines diligent archival work with more than 40 interviews to
successfully portray one of sf’s most brilliant — and tortured —
authors.
That is from a review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon, by Julie Phillips.
Do, in the comments, give us your nominations for this category, but please make sure you don’t have any intrinsic interest in the topic of the book.
Taxing questions
1. Given the deductibility of state and local taxes, why do sales taxes exist?
2. The surplus from 2001 has disappeared – how much is this due to the Bush tax cuts?
Ideas worth pondering
From Mark Kleiman, via Matt Yglesias:
Since the Veterans Administration, since its reform under Bill Clinton,
now has the best medical-records system going and produces high-quality
health care at a reasonable cost, could we move a baby step toward
national health insurance by allowing non-veterans to buy into the VA
system at a price equal to whatever the VA figures is its marginal
cost?
I find this idea appealing: this is a market test of whether the federal government could take better care of most of us. (In case you are wondering, I wouldn’t buy in.) In any case, a reform like this could deflect the pressure for trying a related idea on a non-experimental basis. But if you think more government involvement in health care is desirable, well, this change should suffice to get us where we need to go. And if you don’t think the VA could handle the extra demand, for whatever reasons, let’s set up a copycat institution. If you are too worried about adverse selection, read Alex’s earlier post.
The productivity performance of universities
This paper presents new evidence on research and teaching productivity
in universities using a panel of 102 top U.S. schools during 1981-1999.
Faculty employment grows at 0.6 percent per year, compared with growth
of 4.9 percent in industrial researchers. Productivity growth per
researcher is 1.4-6.7 percent and is higher in private universities.
Productivity growth per teacher is 0.8-1.1 percent and is higher in
public universities. Growth in research productivity within
universities exceeds overall growth, because the research share grows
in universities where productivity growth is less. This finding
suggests that allocative efficiency of U.S. higher education declined
during the late 20th century. R&D stock, endowment, and post-docs
increase research productivity in universities, the effect of
nonfederal R&D is less, and the returns to research are
diminishing. Since the nonfederal R&D share grows and is higher in
public schools, this may explain the rising inefficiency. Decreasing
returns in research but not teaching suggest that most differences in
university size are due to teaching.
Here is the full paper. Here is a non-gated version.
I take "the returns to research are diminishing" to be the fundamental point. The authors also find that private universities are about twice as research productive as public universities, and that private universities have a higher rate of research productivity growth. Public universities have superior teaching productivity.
What is so great about social democracy anyway?
Andrew Smith, a loyal MR reader, writes:
You said in one of your
recent MR posts that although you did not find the European model
sustainable over the long run, frequent trips to Europe revealed much
in the model that delighted you. I believe you singled out Stockholm…as being a particularly vivid illustration of all that
social democracy could do right.
I, too, am a free-market enthusiast who is delighted by
European cities, but when I think carefully about what delights me I
find that it is less anything developed since World War II and more the
remnants of the Europe that existed before the First World War.
First, there is the dense urban development that created
incredible communities from the rise of Venice in the Middle Ages to
the Paris that Haussmann created in the mid-19th century. I cannot
think of a single community built mostly after World War I that has
much charm and those built mostly after WWII — like the tower
communities that ring Paris — are downright depressing, worse than any
of the strip malls and sprawl American capitalism has produced since
the war.
The regional cuisines, the sidewalk cafes, the specialty merchants, the distinctive aspects of each area’s art and music — it all came about before WWI and now lingers as
a slowly fading twilight of Europe’s high noon. (True, farm subsidies and merchant regulations do help maintain the beautiful countryside and the small shops, but I think Europeans have enough passion for local that both things would mostly survive in a free market.)
What part of the Europe that you enjoy so much owes its existence to social democracy? Just curious.
Excellent points. My answer is twofold. First, social democracy has kept Europe, its high standard of living, and its historical wonders, more or less intact. Through much of 1914-194? this outcome was by no means obvious. I am willing, at times, to resort to crude historicism.
Second, European social democracy offers its citizens the most wonderful vacations elsewhere. I just don’t see how most Americans tolerate only two weeks’ vacation.
(Mind you, I am not lazy; my vacations, done my way, are more strenuous than any work day. In fact I consider a work day my source of relaxatoin. If I have to relax, at least I want to be getting lots done.)
As an aside, I do find contemporary Finland visually attractive, and I believe Lille would please me also, from the photos I have seen.
In any case, Smith’s points should cause us to downgrade that "aesthetic halo of achievement" which social democracy has around many of our heads.
Underground classical music
Spurred on by a growing number of offbeat performance venues and enterprising young classical musicians, New York is experiencing a boom in small, largely below-the-radar concert series. There are opera nights at a Lower East Side dive bar, chamber music concerts at a boxing gym beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, contemporary music at a cabaret in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and avant-garde fare in a silo on the banks of an industrial canal.
The rise of an alternative classical scene recalls the 1960s and 70s, when downtown lofts and art galleries helped give rise to minimalism and performance art. The current crop of classical series resembles a similar trend happening in jazz and world-music circles, as the club epicenter has spread from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Classical musicians often say they are drawn to simpler, less pretentious encounters with audiences.
“It’s just like going to see a band,” says Anne Ricci, a soprano in describing Opera on Tap, an opera recital series that she co-founded in June 2005 at Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, a former bowling alley and cop bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that now presents live music.
“Audiences are allowed to be loud, they’re allowed to talk, get up and re-fill their beers. It helps the singers recover a sense of spontaneity that can easily be lost in the classical repertoire.”
Here is more.
Phone tax facts of the day
…the telephone tax is a very inefficient way to help poor people, says Thomas Hazlett, a professor at George Mason University, in a June white paper (senior.org/USFstudy). One Hawaiian phone company is getting an annual subsidy of $13,345 per line. It would be cheaper to give these people free satellite service.
Alaskans are getting rich off oil royalties but still qualify for an average $175 a year each in phone handouts. The citizens of Jackson Hole, Wyo. are winners, too, to the tune of $282 each. Does Harrison Ford really need your help?
That is from Bill Baldwin at Forbes.com.