Jonathan Amith
Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.
His goal is both daring and quixotic: to preserve Nahuatl so that native speakers don’t discard their language as they turn to Spanish, which they need to compete in contemporary Mexico…"[Jonathan Amith] harkens back to the 19th century tradition of the
adventurer-scholar who says, "I’ll go out and do something and the
world be damned," says Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist
who studies Nahuatl-speakng villages.
For more, see the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal,
center column. By the way, tomato, coyote, avocado, and chocolate are all English words which came from Nahuatl. Nahuatl is the most beautiful language I have heard. Here is Jonathan’s web page. I think of Jonathan as an obsessive collector of words, in the best sense of that term. He is one of the most remarkable men I have met and his knowledge of the social sciences is phenomenal. Here are some MP3 files
of Jonathan’s linguistic work. Here is my book on the village, which also
profiles Jonathan. Comments are open, especially if you have a link to the article ("Scholar’s Dictionary of Aztec Language May Take a Lifetime," by Bob Davis); it should appear on-line at some point.
The economics of polygamy
The new HBO series Big Love presents a polygamous family, raising the obvious questions. Here is Ted Bergstrom on the economics of polygamy. Here is Tim Harford on polygamy. Excerpt:
It’s hardly surprising that in most polygynous societies, the bride’s
family gets large payments in exchange for her hand in marriage. If
polygyny combined with women’s rights, I bet we’d see more promises to
wash the dishes. Not everybody would have to share a husband, but I can
think of some who might prefer half of Orlando Bloom to all of Tim
Harford–including my wife.
In my bones I am a square who believes this arrangement cannot be best. Economists might question how polygamy makes women worse off, since they can always decline the arrangement. You might try a story about how the family, not the woman, captures the dowry payment and uses it to help their sons buy more wives (see Bergstrom, noting also that the very presence of polygamy shifts the outcome of the bargaining game with the family). Or you might try a story about sexually frustrated males who are led to revolt, thus destroying social order.
How about the trade-off between quality and quantity of children? A genetically talented father with many wives will likely maximize the quantity of children rather than their quality. This has a long-run negative externality, especially if you believe in the Lucas-Uzawa models of economic growth, or some approximation thereof. You would rather be in a society with fewer but more talented people. Switzerland rather than India. The loser is not the wives but rather the next generation of children. A piece in the February JPE also notes that the children may substitute for savings and thus polygamy can stunt capital formation; I take this as another version of the same argument.
The bottom line? We should encourage family structures that spur human capital formation. Polygamy does not do the trick. Comments are open…
Yet more economics of curling
Curling is the funniest sport I have seen. Best is how the duo scrubs the ice with brushes in front of the moving stone, while Anette Norberg barks out pagan Swedish curses, in an attempt to steer the thing after it has left her hand. The economics of curling? I needed only to watch it. If the sport falls on hard times, it could sell itself as a Monty Python skit, albeit in an obscure Swiss German dialect. Is it the only Olympic sport where you can wear earrings while playing? Here is a curling video — be baffled, be very baffled. The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, as they say.
Will our universe be mangled?
"It could be there’s a moment of pain before the end," [Robin] Hanson says. "But you could be comforted by the fact that versions of you will go on, even if you don’t."
Yes that is our Robin Hanson, on quantum mechanics and multiple universes, picked up by New Scientist. Here is Robin guest-blogging quantum mechanics for us; see also here. The bottom line? Finish that novel you are working on.
Poetry from the Spanish Civil War
You must look to Pablo Neruda and his suspiciously titled Hymn to the Glories of the People at War. Here is one brief bit (in Spanish). Here is a broader index of related poems. The visual presentation of the material is beautiful. Here is English-language background on Neruda in the war. Here is Neruda as Chilean diplomat to Spain. Here is a dual English-Spanish presentation of one part of the poem.
In my eyes, once you get past Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, and the 1920s, Paul Celan and Wallace Stevens are the only twentieth century poets who compare to Neruda.
Interesting links
1. Creativity in the fashion industry might be a more general model for the entertainment industry. But let us not forget differing levels of fixed and capital costs.
2. People in small, tribal societies have the most violence in their dreams.
3. Richard Epstein’s new book.
4. Markets in Everything, this time Hasidic reggae.
5. "Brincos" are special sneakers, equipped with secret storage compartments, for illegal aliens to cross the border. Now they are hip.
6. Matt Yglesias on the bureaucratic infighting behind the resignation of Larry Summers. Here is more.
7. Quantum computers that work even without running.
Can more bonuses improve the NBA?
If every player had money on the line in every game based upon a victory, you’d see some unbelievable competition. Sports and team concept would change dramatically.
Of course "per-victory" contracts are possible now, but most incentive clauses are based on individual performance or a victory or playoff threshold. Why?
1. Star players might injure themselves too frequently if they try hard every game. Their value to the league involves an external benefit which they do not internalize when deciding how much injury to risk. Plus an owner wants them to conserve their energy for the playoffs or for critical opponents.
2. Most fans don’t know the difference between a good game and a bad one. They want only to see the stars, and maybe a few slam dunks. So why impose more pecuniary risk on the players?
3. Players already try hard on offense. Making them play tough defense would deaden the game. This doesn’t explain why a single team doesn’t use per-victory bonuses, but it does suggest there will be no league pressure to do so.
4. Per-victory compensation will lead the players to blame each other too much for particular losses. Team morale and thus team productivity will decline.
5. Incentives of fame and approbation already impose this incentive structure, and in a more powerful way than money could do.
6. When bargaining over a contract, a player would reveal negative information about his self-estimated talent level by accepting high-powered incentives. If you cut a deal with big bonuses, the team must think your low-effort state of output is pretty crummy.
I put weight on all of these, but on #6 least. Of course this relates to the general question of why firms don’t use more high-powered incentives. Could the lesson be that fewer business variables matter than you might think? (A related question is why don’t more firms use idea futures.)
Would Rick Barry’s idea improve the NBA? Comments are open…
Word clouds
Here are the images, thanks to Virginia Postrel, and it seems you can get a MarginalRevolution.com T-shirt for $18.
The best sentence I read yesterday (previous post retraction edition)
Herr Andrew Hammel believes that German can be a happy language too:
I have tried smiling while saying umlauted vowels, and it seems to work just fine, it’s only a little tricky with the ‘ü’, since you’ve got to tighten your cheek muscles a bit to really get it right.
Hammel’s blog is frequently interesting, here is a good post on German compound nouns.
Indoor free throws — a paradox of exercise
Outdoors I am a mediocre free throw shooter. I hit 50 percent. Indoors I hit about 70 percent. This is close to the NBA average, and divided by my hourly wage it would put me at number one in the league. How can this difference be? Virginia is not that windy. My outdoor free throw shooting is best when dusk is approaching, and the air is hot, thick, and still. (I also feel I play tennis much better indoors, although that is harder to measure.) The Great Outdoors are wonderful, but it is disturbing when the basketball clunks on the rim. Each time I wonder what other life tasks I might perform much better, if only for some simple change in framing.
Addendum: Forget free throws, here are videos of NBA dunks from the recent slam-dunk contest, courtesy of http://kottke.org. My percentage there is the same, indoors or outdoors.
China fact of the day
That the [Shanghai pedestrian traffic] guards have no powers of arrest, or even the ability to issue tickets, allows many pedestrians to feel free to ignore them. What is worse, they are frequent targets of aggression from crowds of sneering and cursing pedestrians. According to the city government, they are physically assaulted at a rate of about 20 times a month. [emphasis added]
Here is the full and fascinating story of the traffic mess we call Shanghai. Any predictions on when the city turns into a mass of frozen gridlock? Or will they develop the technical infrastructure to institute road pricing, as Singapore has done?
Five open questions about prediction markets
Here is the new version of the paper, for $5. Here are older versions of the paper. Here is a summary of the five questions. Of these five, I worry most about getting uninformed traders to participate in a game with zero-sum (at best, assuming no trading costs) pecuniary returns. I doubt if idea futures will be the sexiest form of gambling for most people. Insofar as traders look for fun, only the celebrity-obsessed and current events-obsessed will find idea futures more attractive than Las Vegas or Baden-Baden. (That is why contracts on politicians and Michael Jackson have been so popular.) If you are simply looking to earn money for the longer run, Wall Street, with its positive expected rates of return, offers better odds. That being said, as the fixed costs of market creation fall, a relatively small number of traders may suffice to keep most of the important idea futures going.
Prudie blows it again
The question: I have a friend who is a functional alcoholic. Every day after work he stops by a bar, and within two hours consumes two pitchers of beer. Needless to say he drives home. He’s not sloppy drunk, nor does he exhibit signs of being drunk, but I’m sure his reaction time is impaired. Two years ago he was arrested for drunk driving. After hiring a lawyer who used to work as a police officer, he got the charges dropped to reckless driving. The lawyer advised him that next time he is pulled over not to submit to any tests, but to request a lawyer. He was pulled over again last week and did as he’d been advised. He spent the night in jail, allowing the alcohol level in his blood to drop, making it pointless to test him. I don’t want to see him get away with this anymore. I don’t know what to do. I fear that confronting him will do nothing. I feel if I make an ultimatum in regard to our friendship, he will choose alcohol, which won’t stop his drinking and driving. Part of me wonders if I should anonymously inform the police of information that would help prove their case against my friend, but I feel this would be a huge betrayal. I just want to stop this behavior and help him avoid harming an innocent bystander.
—Afraid for a Friend
Read Prudie’s answer here, but basically she says lie in wait for him at a bar and then call in the police to track him and arrest him. I suggest a different approach…
1. He shouldn’t be your friend in the first place.
2. Turning him in to the police will make him your ex-friend. That is in some ways a good start, but I suggest you have only weak duties to help your "soon to be ex-friends."
3. If you wish to help innocent bystanders, forget about your friend and stand outside a popular bar with a cell phone. Or work overtime and invest the money in third world micro-finance. There is no good consequentialist reason to target your friend’s drinking and driving. (Did I just call him your "friend"?) It is unlikely that is the area of your greatest effectiveness, especially since the guy doesn’t care much about you.
4. What is she trying to get out of her system? Has he neglected her in favor of the alcohol? Often you can infer the real motivations by taking the opposite of the "pen name," in this case "Afraid for a Friend."
Let us do one more:
Question: I have a fiance who has an anxiety problem for which he takes medication. He wants to bring his guitar with him on our honeymoon because he said since he can’t bring his piano (he’s a classically trained pianist), he needs some instrument to play. He said that he needs the guitar or else he will feel anxious, because he would not have any instrument to practice. It irks me to no end that if he doesn’t have an instrument and he’s sharing company with me, that’s what he’s focusing on even though we’re watching TV or at dinner, etc. When we have gone away for a weekend and he has not brought his guitar, he drinks instead. He does not get drunk, but he does drink enough over time that the alcohol keeps him from "performing." Is it selfish to want to have my honeymoon with just my husband and not have him leaving to go to another room to practice for a couple hours? I want undivided attention! Yet, I don’t want to have him drinking and not able to perform, nor yearning to play an instrument while he is with me. Shouldn’t I be enough, at least for our honeymoon?
—Feeling Not Important Enough
Prudie says you are a pain in the neck and you should split with a man you obviously do not love or even like. I’ve been known to offer this advice myself, but let’s give it another spin. There is a reason why "Feeling Not Important Enough" made a bad choice in the first place. If she splits with him, she will be "drawing from the urn without replacement," as they say. And what a very special urn it is. Should she think that simply making another choice will yield something much better? At least this first pick a) plays at least two musical instruments, and b) is taking medication, which is more than you can say for the median impotent, nervous, obsessive-compulsive, alcoholic musician.
On-line economics education?
A loyal reader writes:
I’d like to expand my economics knowledge. However, as I just finished 4 years of night school, I do I want to start another degree program in a brick and mortar institution. Indeed, my wife would likely divorce me if I did.
Do you know of any reputable on-line Masters degrees in Economics? I need something more structured than independent reading but less time consuming than attending class. I am not that concerned if the degree and/or the granting institution is not generally accepted in the Econ field as long as the content is sufficient. I do not plan on using it as a major résumé item. I am skeptical of online degrees, but that cannot mean all are worthless. I’ve googled the subject, but I do not have enough information to pick the good from the bad. Any information will be appreciated.
I have no idea. Readers…? Comments are open. In the early days of MR Alex argued that professors will soon become obsolete (and follow up here) as technology like CDs and podcasts of [fill in your favorite economist] come to dominate the market. I said no way, there is something about having the person right in front of your face that triggers your biological "pay attention" alert mechanisms…
Which students are most likely to complete an economics Ph.d.?
The best predictors would appear to be a high math GRE score, being foreign, and having recommendation letters from "quality professors." Here is the paper and data. Those indicators also predict research productivity. Thanks to Craig Newmark for the pointer; here is his source.
Do beware the general problem with this kind of study. It is easy to set up a model where GRE scores do not predict later academic success, precisely because GRE scores are used as a dominant criterion for admission. An admitted student with low scores presumably has some other virtue in his favor. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that scores, in the population pool, are not correlated with quality. The real trick would be to look at a broader pool of applicants, not just those who were accepted and attended.