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.
Does Google lead to winner-take-all websites?
Maybe not, read about this new study. Excerpt:
While search engines do not make for a level playing field, their use partially mitigates the rich-get-richer nature of the Web, giving new sites an increased chance of being discovered, as long as they are about specific topics that match the interests of users. So it seems that cyberspace, for now, is more of a googlocracy than a googlearchy.
What is new and essential in political philosophy?
That is for the last 25 to 30 years; here is the collective wisdom of CrookedTimber commentators. The picks are good ones, but I’ll predict the lasting work for (if not in) political philosophy will come from some other direction entirely. How about neuroscience, experiments, or evolutionary psychology?
I’ll run a similar query soon about economics, with open comments of course. Get your thoughts ready. If you leave a comment today, restrict yourself to political philosophy.
The blockbuster bestseller is dying
The average number of weeks that a new No. 1
bestseller stayed top of the hardback fiction section of the New York
Times Bestseller List has fallen from 5.5 in the 1990s, 14 in the 1970s
and 22 in the 1960s to barely a fortnight last year — according to the
study of the half-century from 1956-2005.In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did.
Here is the link, the pointer was from Alex. To repeat my standard mantra, the evidence shows we are moving away from a winner-take-all society, not toward it.
Did the Soviets run a chess cartel?
Steve Levitt told us that sumo wrestlers cheat. Are you surprised that Soviet grandmasters did the same? They were expected to take certain deliberate draws against other, or sometimes even throw a game, so as to ensure that a given tournament would be won by a Soviet and not by a foreigner. Bobby Fischer had alleged this for years, now economists Charles Moule and John Nye offer some evidence.
David Warsh on Levy and Peart
Gustave Flaubert
"Of all possible debauches, travel is
unsurpassed by any I know. It’s the one invented after all the others
have ceased to excite."
Gustave Flaubert, letter to Ernest Chevalier (April 9, 1851)
Here is the permalink, from Terry Teachout’s blog. Did I mention that I fly to Goa tomorrow, monsoons permitting? I’ll have two days of pure vacation there, so your tips are welcome…comments of course are open…
Henry Paulson defends the dividend tax cut
Here is the closest I find to a formal economic argument from the man. In this WSJ Op-Ed, if my eyes catch the fine print correctly, Paulson argued that the Bush dividend tax cuts will add 5 to 20 percent value to the stock market. (Here is my source, though I cannot find a permalink. And here is my source’s critique of the idea, although on this screen my old eyes cannot read it.)
I’ve never understood the Paulson argument for two reasons. First, at least in theory paying dividends should lower the value of the firm, relative to capital gains, given the higher dividend tax rate at the time. Dividends would appear to shift around the form in which wealth is held, pulling it from one pocket to another, rather than increasing wealth. I am the first to admit the entire topic of why dividends are paid is poorly understood, but that uncertainty does not militate in favor of targeting dividends for early and primary tax cuts. I would sooner cut or abolish the corporate income tax, for instance.
Second, for any given level of government spending, the wealth effects of the dividend tax cut (if those effects exist in the first place) are a transfer to equity holders and from….? Well, that remains to be seen. Stay tuned for your forthcoming tax increase…Some of you, that is…
Addendum: I should make the broader point that this pick is probably very good news.
The culture that is French, a continuing series
One of France’s most popular rappers will appear in court today charged
with offending public decency with a song in which he referred to
France as a "slut" and vowed to "piss" on Napoleon and Charles de
Gaulle. Monsieur R, whose real name is Richard Makela, could face three
years in prison or a €75,000 (£51,000) fine after an MP from the ruling
UMP party launched legal action against him over his album Politikment
Incorrekt.
Here is the full story.