The largest cities at varying points in historical time
Here is the list, courtesy of kottke.org. Fez as the largest world city in 1170 was a surprise to me. At 300 A.D. the list leaves the Middle East, breaking into Pataliputra (Patna), India. I am not sure what kind of data they are using for the New World at earlier points in time.
Tyler Cowen on estate taxes
Here is an old Econoblog, as summarized on a previous MR post. I don’t like to recycle posts, but with the vote coming up this week, this one seems appropriate. Here is Greg Mankiw on the same topic.
New IP blog
By economist David K. Levine and others, the title is www.againstmonopoly.org, get the picture? Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the pointer.
“At least we should enforce the law”
I have heard this claim, or similar versions thereof, many times in the recent immigration debates. It sounds so uncontroversial. Who is against enforcing the law? The law is, after all…the law. It was passed by lawmakers. Our country is built upon the law. We also hear "let us first secure our border" before proceeding with other immigration reforms.
The economist is more likely to think in terms of the margin. We enforce laws up to some point. After that point we let transgressions slide, if only probabilistically. This is true for every law on the books.
Many murders and robberies are committed each year. No one says "let us first enforce the law" before proceeding with, say, tax reform and other beneficial improvements. We can’t nail every tax cheat, or even most of them. To truly enforce the law — in the sense of bringing transgressions to their minimum or zero level — would bankrupt us, turn us into a totalitarian state, or most likely both. The true question is not one of whether we should enforce the law, but rather of how much. Whether we admit it or not, we are all willing to allow some amount of illegal immigration.
Similarly, no rational business firm would vow to stamp out all employee theft before proceeding with a beneficial organizational change.
Most or perhaps all critics of illegal immigration think that open borders would be a bad idea. I agree. But their portrait of open borders betrays their other view that we are not enforcing immigration law right now. Critics paint a picture, perhaps a justified one, of untold millions swarming suddenly into the United States under open borders. It is evident to me that plenty of the Indians in Hyderabad, my current locale, would love to come.
But think what this implies. It means that current levels of law enforcement are in fact keeping out most of the people who would like to enter the country. It means we are enforcing the law, for better or worse, more than not.
Simply repeating the mantra that "we should enforce the law" is not itself a good argument for a tougher immigration policy.
We are not entirely human
"We are somehow like an amalgam, a mix of bacteria and human cells.
There are some estimates that say 90 percent of the cells on our body
are actually bacteria," Steven Gill, a molecular biologist formerly at
TIGR and now at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said in a
telephone interview.
Read more here.
Mami-hlapin-ata-pai
In the Chilean language of Fuegian this means
“looking at each other hoping that either will offer to do
something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do.”
That is from Eric Rasmusen.
Should we get rid of the penny?
Greg Mankiw says yes, and I am inclined to agree. When I lived in New Zealand, they didn’t have Kiwi pennies and no one minded. My problem, however, is that I don’t know what to do with sales tax (New Zealand had a General Services Tax [correction: Goods and Services Tax], akin to a VAT). In essence we would have to abolish sales tax on "small" items. That idea warms my libertarian heart, but what is then to stop suppliers from selling a car piece by piece, painted inch by painted inch? (But of course they wouldn’t ring it up that slowly at the cash register.) Must we eliminate sales taxes altogether? Or can the law accurately specify what is the "natural unit" of a given commodity purchase? Inquiring minds wish to know…
Here are some relevant links on penny elimination. It is an interesting microeconomic (macroeconomic?) problem to figure out which prices get rounded up to the nearest nickel and which prices get rounded down. A related question is why businesses do not already round to the nearest nickel; of course some do.
Goa ramblings
The monsoon is far less scary when they turn on their windshield wipers or for that matter when they have them. For abandoned rusted tankers in the water, Goa is #1. For non-abandoned rusted tankers, Goa also does well. Many are carrying iron ore to China. The Portuguese colonial churches are eerily like colonial Brazil, yet no one lives in old Goa any more. My guide claims the state of Goa is 45 percent Christian. My hotel practices Restaurant Apartheid and won’t let me sit with the Indian customers. They try to talk me out of eating the Goan foods ("don’t you want the chicken breast Sir? Very nice pastries…", etc.). The white pumpkin curry is amazing. Goa is far less densely populated than I had expected; the major city has only about 80,000 people. One meal experience can involve being served by eight different people, none of whom ever stand more than ten feet away from you and each of whom you must say goodbye to. Need I compare this to Bordeaux? Cashews are the gift of choice. When it stops pouring, which does happen occasionally, women flock to the beach in beautifully colored saris. My taxi driver looked quite a bit like me; I believe he has Portuguese blood as I do. I have read that the state of Goa has the highest per capita income in India; this appears to come from the entire distribution and not just from the peaks. Malcolm Gladwell books are seen everywhere, as is Freakonomics, which has Angelina Jolie on the cover. There is less here than I had thought but I’ve ended up liking it more. Next is Hyderabad, and back to work.
Internet hunting in China
It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country’s
most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a
college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife.
Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack."Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," one
person wrote, "to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for
the sacrifice of the husband."Within days, the hundreds had
grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers
forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his
university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their
home.
Here is the full story. One Chinese hunter is happy to defend the trend:
"What we Internet users are doing is fulfilling our social
obligations," said one man who posted a lengthy attack on the college
student and his alleged affair. "We cannot let our society fall into
such a low state." Asked how he would react if people began
publishing online allegations about his private life, he answered, "I
believe strongly in the traditional saying that if you’ve done nothing
wrong, you don’t fear the knock on your door at midnight."
Here is a previous post on comparable developments in Korea.
How to get your kid into a better college
The only out-of-school activity that increased the likelihood of a
student ending up enrolled at an elite college was parental [sic] visits to
art museums.
That is correlation, not causation, but I believe you can thread out the implied lessons. Read more here. How about this?
Two types of participation made it more likely students would end up at
elite colleges: yearbook or school newspapers and “hobby clubs.” …Numerous activities had no apparent impact on whether or not students
will end up in college – elite or otherwise. School plays,
interscholastic individual sports, intramurals, cheerleading, academic
honor societies, public service clubs – no impact is clear from any of
them.
Here is one author’s home page, full of fascinating material. Here is the other guy. What do you all think of these results?
Is autocracy bad for growth?
Gordon Tullock frequently tells me there is no good economic argument for democracy, if we adjust properly for economic variables such as the absolute state of development. After all, much of the European miracle occurred under non-democratic conditions, not to mention the golden ages of China or modern Singapore. But now Kevin Grier and Mike Munger argue from the empirics that democracy is better for economic growth. In particular:
New dictatorships grow very slowly, and very old dictatorships grow very slowly. But durable dictatorships in the middle years actually grow nearly as fast as democracies. A nonlinear specification fits almost exactly.
It is a tricky question which economic models of autocracy this is consistent with (try your hand at this in the comments). Here is part of the paper’s abstract:
In this paper we study a large unbalanced annual panel of 134 countries covering the period 1950 – 2003. We show that autocracies grow almost one percentage point slower than non-autocracies, holding constant the effect of regime length on growth…
I usually tell Gordon that the costs of keeping out democracy are prohibitive for most contemporary societies; that alone should tip the balance in favor of democracy. Sources of economic power and sources of political power have to stand in some sort of equilibrium relationship if stability is to persist. Singapore is an exception because it is a) very small, b) disciplined by world markets to an extreme degree, and c) its citizens realize that its "democracy" would otherwise collapse into identity politics of the three major ethnic groups; they therefore do not demand so much democracy.
Gordon never agrees. Here is the paper and further discussion. More importantly, here is Kevin on stereo equipment and tubes.
Betting markets in (almost) everything
Will the winner be wearing glasses? Will it be a boy or girl? Will the final word have an "e" in it?
The odds on the former proposition are 4-7, but they won’t let you bet on the individual identities of the little demon tykes.
In addition, here are some unusual insurance markets.
Addendum: The contest was decided by German words, here are the results.
India fact of the day
…a large part of that [Indian fiscal] deficit goes to financing the losses of the electric companies. Two and a half percent of GNP goes into power subsidies [emphasis added]; only half the electricity that’s generated actually gets paid for. Some of the other half goes in unfortunate (we economists think) programs to give free power to the farmers. Unfortunately, the farmers who qualify for free power are the ones who are rich enough to be able to afford power in the first place. But having gotten free power, they let their neighbors tap into it. That’s another portion of the power goes that way. Then there are those who tap the lines. It’s dangerous, but people know how to do it. So half the power doesn’t get paid for even while there’s a big increase in the fiscal deficit, while one has very expensive power for those who do pay, which includes large industry. What do you do if you’re an industrialist with power that costs more to buy than you can generate it for? You buy a generator, which is socially wasteful. A lot of the investment in India is wasted by companies’ generating their own power so as to bypass the power system. So while there have been some attempts at privatizing the power sector and at imposing a regulatory system, there are still big problems at the moment.
Here is the longer article.
Blogging becomes life?
Imagine having to live out what you blog. Have I stepped into this world?
Here is my post from August:
Monsoon vacations. They are held in India, often Goa, during the rainy season. "Come Feel the Rain" is the slogan. The main customers? Citizens from the United Arab Emirates (annual rainfall 120 millimeters). They worry if they don’t get enough rain during their vacation. Here is a hotel ad. Here is one colorful travel journal from such a vacation. I like this bit:
Let the rains plan
Don’t force the pace. Meticulously planned tour itineraries can be reduced to paper-boats for your children to play with in muddy puddles. Let the monsoons dictate your schedule."
If this trend holds up, economics will no longer be my preferred topic of blogging.
How to rile Alex
Get him in front of some other bloggers and say:
It’s liability per se that isn’t justified by libertarian standards. Under Lockean property rights theory, you own physical things, not the values of those things. It is for this reason that if you set up shop next to a competitor, you are not infringing his property rights, even if his business ends up being worth less. So let’s say I steal your painting. Yes, you do deserve your painting back. It is yours. But say I steal your painting and lose it or wreck it. That should be the end of the story. You never owned the "value of that painting." You simply owned the physical painting. You are not due compensation. If you take my money as compensation for your loss, that is simply another theft. All this talk about the "doctrine of rights forfeiture" is handwaving. The forfeiture doctrine is a convenient utilitarian fiction (which I will partially endorse), not libertarian theory. Rights aggressors do not, in fact, lose their own rights in turn. Why should they? Evreyone in prison is there unjustly and yes that includes murderers. I will, of course, accept many of these injustices for utilitarian reasons; I am a good pluralist.