Netherlands fact of the day
Some 12,000 more people have registered as organ
donors in the Netherlands since a Dutch TV hoax that featured a
"competition" for a kidney.
The Big Donor Show was revealed to be a hoax as the fake donor was apparently about to reveal her choice of patient.
But Dutch media say the number of people registering as
organ donors has jumped since the hoax. The usual monthly figure is
just 3-4,000.
Will this greater interest in organ donation last? Here is the link and story.
Economists who collect art
Here is the story, here is one bit at the end:
Now that the Bhagwatis have acquired a strong collection, they have decided to shift their focus away from expanding their art holdings. The couple will be working more with charities and philanthropy. Ms. Desai is also writing her 10th book, which is about America and the opportunities it offers to reinvent yourself.
Thanks to David Quinn for the pointer.
Which countries have an eye on the future?
Singapore comes in first, Russia comes in last ("Natasha, we’re going to be late!"); not all countries were surveyed. Here is the article and graph, via Private Sector Development blog. Having an orientation toward the future is also strongly correlated with both happiness and confidence.
Advice for the college bound
Your kid is going away to college for the first time (Yana is going to Franklin and Marshall, by the way; boo-hoo but of course we are proud of her). What advice do you offer her (or is it me?), keeping in mind that all strictures must embody economic reasoning in some form or another?
History lesson
The Aztecs were soon dominating Central Mexico, and overawed others as they built and extended their empire. While the capital city housed over 200,000, the valley and its surroundings held an addition million people. Thousands of public buildings, canals, and causeways impressed everyone who came, including the Spanish.
Here, or try Charles Mann’s 1491, one of my favorite books. Try reading him on the selective breeding of corn, still one of mankind’s most impressive scientific feats. Or:
The Maya, Inca, and Aztec empires [were] greatly advanced in the topics agriculture, writing, and engineering and astronomy.
You might think that some kind of dysgenic breeding has kicked in since, but a) there is zero evidence for that, and b) it is more plausible to cite a few negative supply shocks. You know, like the pandemic that wiped out 90 percent of the Aztecs or more, their virtual enslavement by the Spanish, the move from trade-based cities to the isolated hacienda system, and the subsequent malnutrition and demoralization and cultural devastation, all of which amounted to perhaps the most extreme destruction of a civilization ever seen.
James Heckman, Nobel Laureate writes:
This paper develops a model of skill formation that explains a variety of findings established in the child development and child intervention literatures. At its core is a technology that is stage-specific and that features self productivity, dynamic complementarity and skill multipliers. Lessons are drawn for the design of new policies to alleviate the consequences of the accident of birth that is a major source of human inequality.
Try these papers too, plus previous MR posts on the Flynn Effect. IQ is worth talking about, but compare Heckman’s models and data to much of the IQ literature — those models are not very well specified, nor given our current state of knowledge about either growth or IQ can they be — and you’ll see I do mean what I am saying.
If you do wish to try a "genetic argument," there is much more evidence for the "predisposition to debilitating alcoholism" claim. I’d estimate that half of the adult males of Oapan — the village I cite and direct descendants of the Aztec empire I might add — are debilitated alcoholics.
Please leave your comments on the already-active previous thread.
MR book club
I’ve thought of running a week-long or five-day MR symposium of a book of general interest to MR readers. Each day I would "review" one part of the book, in sequence. You could read along and of course comment, but the posts also would be fully intelligible to people who weren’t reading the book at all.
If we did this, which book would you like to have covered, not counting some of the books we discussed yesterday…?
What I haven’t been reading
1. Taxi: A Social History of the New York Cabdriver, by Graham Hodges, 44 out of 240 pp.
2. Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas, 169 out of 522 pp., it is actually quite good.
3. Kiwis Might Fly, by Polly Evans, 1 out of 310 pp.
4. Gold: The Once and Future Money, by Nathan Lewis, 13 out of 447 pp., some of you will love it.
5. Cosmonaut Keep, by Ken MacLeod, 77 out of 352 pp., sorry guys.
The World Without Us
To this day, nature hasn’t come up with a microbe that eats it [a tire], either. Goodyear’s process, called vulcanization, ties long rubber polymer chains together with short strands of sulfur atoms, actually transforming them into a single giant molecule. Once rubber is vulcanized — meaning it’s heated, spiled with sulfur, and poured into a mold, such as one shaped like a truck tire — the resulting huge molecule takes that form and never relinquishes it.
Being a single molecule, a tire can’t be melted down or turned into something else. Unless physically shredded or worn down by 60,000 miles of friction, both entailing significant energy, it remains round. Tires drive landfill operators crazy, because when buried, they encircle a doughnut-shaped air bubble that wants to rise. Most garbage dumps no longer accept them, but for hundreds of years into the future, old tires will inexorably work their way to the surface of forgotten landfills, fill with rainwater, and begin breeding mosquitoes again.
In the United Sates, an average of one tire per citizen is discarded annually — that’s a third of a billion, just in one year.
That is from Alan Weisman’s truly excellent The World Without Us. Here is my previous post on the book.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations
How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog? I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution. Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples’ blogs.
I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience. I’ve spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there. They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring. And that’s in their second language, Spanish.
I’m also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably. In fact I can’t think of any written test — no matter how simple — they could pass. They simply don’t have experience with that kind of exercise.
When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.
Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people. If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.
OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village. But still, there you have it. Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.
So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?
Addendum: I am sorry there have been too many nasty comments, so I have taken the comments down. They aren’t deleted forever, I like to think that I will have time to pick out the bad ones and put the thread back up. I do understand that most of you (and not just on one side of the debate) are capable of discussing this topic with the appropriate tone.
The future of blogging
Imagine a full extension of property rights and a closing off of the "commons" problems known as the comments section of a blog. Marc Andreessen writes:
The first time I met Dave Sifry,
over three years ago, he told me that conversations on the Internet
would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog,
each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs
cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search
engines (such as Dave’s Technorati).The advantage of this new world, said Dave, is that each individual
(anonymous or not) would be publicly responsible for their own content
and in charge of their own space — substantially reducing the risk of
spam and trolls — and the communication would flow through the links.
There would still be the risk of link spam, but at least this new world
would make people more responsible for their own content, and that
would tend to uplevel the discourse.
But how will readers know which blogs and which comments to visit? I fear that tagging (and related acts of evaluation) is an underprovided public good. How can we compensate effective taggers for their efforts? And do you not enjoy the weaving back and forth of discussion in a single blog thread?
My prediction of the future equilibrium is…the current equilibrium, like it or not.
Here is an article on the future of search.
While we’re at it, I’ll repeat the norms of this blog: it’s fine to be humorous, but don’t treat the other commenters, or for that matter bloggers, in an insulting manner.
An exchange about health care
Charles W. Tidd, Jr., Newtown, Conn.: Your column today
continues to avoid a central issue: a great number of Americans do not
trust the government with their health care. This mistrust is not the
result of television ads by insurance companies but follows from
increasingly frequent routine encounters with the government: waiting
for a passport, figuring out the tax law, having an intelligent
conversation with someone at the DMV, listening to the news – Hurricane
Katrina, the federal prosecutors, the pardons by both Clinton and Bush,
immigration. The list goes on and on.Why in the world do you want to trust the nation’s health care to the government? He who pays the piper calls the tune.
I write you because there is no question that our health system
needs to be fixed, but until the issue of public mistrust of government
is addressed, any sort of universal health care will be shunned by many
people.Paul Krugman:: Do people really distrust the government? I
think we have this program called Medicare, which most people seem to
like. On the other hand, maybe people don’t know that it’s the
government: former Sen. John Breaux was famously accosted by a
constituent demanding that he not let the government get its hands on
Medicare.
Here is the link.
People like Medicare because it pays some of the bill, while keeping interference in the medical process to an apparent minimum; admittedly non-interference is in part illusory because the indirect effects of Medicare (e.g., it drives up prices) have become enormous. Almost all government payments of this kind are popular, whether or not the programs are a good use of scarce resources. People are looking to get something from their costly government, and not necessarily because they trust it.
As Medicare expenditures rise, this illusion of non-interference will become much harder to maintain and indeed Medicare itself may become less popular. I am always curious to hear — from single-payer proponents — which interest groups they think will have a decisive say over the system, and how those interest groups differ in America vs. Western Europe. That is one reason why we cannot simply replicate the VA approach writ large, or for that matter the French system. For a sobering wake-up call, compare the flood defense policies of the Netherlands to, say, Louisiana.
The Last Novel
By David Markson, fun, fun, fun. Excerpt:
Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid everyone of his bills — electric, phone, whatever — on the same day that it arrived.
Or:
We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra.
Is this a novel or a book of aphorisms? Could it be a set of blog posts spread out over 190 pp.? Who cares, I finished it. Or:
A woman’s body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete of cadaveric putrefaction.
An early critics presumed to inform Renoir.
The critic as the handmaiden of Google
What are critics good for anyway?
I look for one main piece of information from a review: is the name of the product or artist worth Googling? Yes or no. That is a binary decision.
Once I have the answer to that question I usually stop reading the review.
I look for one main piece of information from Google: is the product worth buying, on Amazon or elsewhere?
Once I have the answer to that question I usually stop pawing through Google. That’s another binary decision.
Imagine that. The critic as the handmaiden of Google, and Google as the handmaiden of Amazon.
To me, the most valuable critics are those who can be disposed of most quickly. Is it any wonder that so many critics do not like the Internet and bloggers?
Sometimes I think it is enough to simply list how many of the book’s pages I bothered to read.
Should all patients be treated the same?
If a woman is a lawyer, or the wife of a lawyer, does she get better treatment? Lawyers seem to be regarded by doctors as especially litigious patients who should be treated with caution when it comes to risky procedures such as surgery. The rate of hysterectomy in the general population in Switzerland was 16 percent, whereas among lawyers’ wives it was only 8 percent — among female doctors it was 10 percent. In general, the less well educated a woman is and the better private insurance she has, the more likely it is that she’ll get a hysterectomy. Similarly, children in the general population had significantly more tonsillectomies than the children of physicians and lawyers. Lawyers and their children apparently get better treatment, but here, better means less.
That is from Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings: the Intelligence of the Unconscious. It is a good microeconomics question to ponder the conditions under which a) this is efficient, and b) you would rather be the poorer patient or the non-lawyer than the lawyer.
The Romers of Berkeley, on fiscal policy
…tax increases are highly contractionary. The effects are strongly
significant, highly robust, and much larger than those obtained using
broader measures of tax changes. The large effect stems in considerable
part from a powerful negative effect of tax increases on investment. We
also find that legislated tax increases designed to reduce a persistent
budget deficit appear to have much smaller output costs than other tax
increases.
Their work is of the very highest quality, and not to be confused with many of the more dubious claims made about taxation and investment. In particular they make a point of isolating exogenous changes in the tax code. Here is the paper. Here is a non-gated version.