Sand dreams and spontaneous order
One of my dreams is to go to Niger. In the meantime I will have to be satisfied reading the excellent Sahara: A Natural History, by Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle. No student of spontaneous orders can ignore the following passage:
Obviously [sic], dunes are formed because jumping sand bounces more easily off hard surfaces than off soft ones, so that more sand can be moved over a pebbly desert surface than over a smooth or soft one. Even a slight hollow, though, or a rock, will reduce the amount of sand that the wind can carry, and a small sand patch begins. Very quickly, this patch will trap more sand. When the patch is big enough, it begins to change the wind velocity about it. The winds decrease near the surface and deposit more sand on the patch. Quickly, the dune is built up.
If the conditions are right, the dune will grow rapidly: In days it will be taller than a man, and in just a few weeksit can reach sixty-five or one hundred feet, and keep growing. Over time, the windward slope eventually adjusts itself, and the wind velocity close to the sand increases to compensate for the drag imposed by the sandy surface. The smooth leeward slope steepens until the wind can’t be deflected down sharply enough to follow it, leaving a “dead zone” into which the sand falls. When this so-called dispositional slope reaches the natural slope angel of dry sand (about thirty-two degrees), the added sand cascades down the slope, now called the “slip face.” The dune has stopped growing — there is no gain or loss of sand — though it continues to move forward as a whole, slowly, ponderously, relentlessly.
It turns out that driving on sand is an art, and no one can avoid getting stuck in the long run. Fortunately (to my surprise) most of the surface of the Sahara is rock rather than sand.
Here is a lecture on spontaneous order and sand. Here is advice on how to build a better sand castle.
Every now and then someone is inclined to think that this kind of analysis holds the key to either business cycles or stock market crashes. It has yet to come through, but in the meantime I will keep dreaming of Niger.
Markets in everything, for the newspaper fanatic
I usually read six newspapers a day, and enjoy every one of them (can you guess which six?). But what to do on vacation, especially when traveling abroad? I hate reading papers on-line, plus I left all my passwords at home. And Polish newsstands are of varying quality.
Try NewspaperDirect.com, which delivers print-on-demand copies of your favorite paper directly to your hotel. Here is Poland I am enjoying the American edition of USA Today, and reading about the NBA Playoffs in depth. But hey, if the Lichtensteiner Volksblatt is your thing, you can get that too.
Lawsuits in everything
Get this one: a guy blames his school for not catching his plagiarism sooner.
An argument for genetic engineering
Soon we will have cows that are immune to mad cow disease. We’re not about to engineer cows on a large scale, and probably we don’t need to; my interest is in how this upsets the usual spectrum of ecological worries. I’ve found that people who fear mad cow disease also tend to fear genetic engineering of animals. But now, which way to turn? It reminds me of those reports saying we need not fear global warming, because we will run out of oil in the meantime!
My favorite Polish things
My favorite Polish novel: Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem. Don’t worry if you hate science fiction, this is possibly the best novel ever penned about erotic guilt and the nature of personal identity.
My favorite Polish music: My traditional favorites have been the Chopin Etudes and the Polonaise Op.40. But arguably the Mazurkas hold up best over time. Here is a recent Chopin CD that will blow you away.
My favorite Polish movie: Kanal, directed by Andrzej Wajda. A European movie of great depth with a plot as gripping as Hollywood.
My favorite Polish TV show: The Decalogue, episode four. This audiovisual classic is now available in its entirety on DVD. In the fourth episode, a daughter receives an envelope from her father, with the written instructions: “Don’t Open This Until I Die.” I leave the rest up to your imagination.
I’m enjoying my time here very much, soon I will be in Kracow.
Addendum: Let’s not forget the goose in cranberry sauce, the pork knuckle pate, the wild boar with dumplings, the sour soup with sausage, the duck with cherry sauce, or the wonderful Brazilian restaurant they have here. Polish food in Brazil is fantastic, so now they are returning the favor, all to the benefit of me.
Econometrics and New Yorker fiction
What kind of stories get published?
Ms. [Katherine] Milkman, who has a minor in American studies, read 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001, and built a substantial database. She then constructed a series of rococo mathematical tests to discern, among other things, whether certain fiction editors at the magazine had a specific impact on the type of fiction that was published, the sex of authors and the race of characters. The study was long on statistics…the thesis segues to the “Kolmogorov-Smirnov Two-Sample Goodness of Fit Test” and the “Pearson Correlation Coefficient Test.”
And what is the main conclusion?
…male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters
More generally:
Under both [fiction] editors the fiction in the magazine took as its major preoccupations sex, relationships, death, family and travel.
Are you surprised? And what does the magazine say?
“I was personally riveted by the whole thing,” said Roger Angell, a writer at The New Yorker who worked as a fiction editor during part of the period scrutinized by Ms. Milkman. He spent a significant amount of time talking to Ms. Milkman and helped connect her with other people at the magazine. He was charmed by the results but worries they may sow confusion.
“Some unpublished writers are going to read this and say, `I now know what I have to do to get published in The New Yorker,’ and it’s not helpful in that way,” he said. “In the end we published what we liked.”
Here is the New York Times story.
The bottom line: Expect to see more of this kind of analysis in the future. In the longer run I expect all of the humanities disciplines to have a quantitative branch.
A serious health care proposal
Brad DeLong argues that the government should pick up all health care costs above $50,000. Among other things, this would diminish the incentive for HMOs to neglect sick patients or try to push them off the books. It also would provide comprehensive catastrophic insurance. By lowering the cost of private insurance, it will lead more people to be insured, which will lower governmental costs elsewhere in the system. Being on the run in Poland, I don’t have the ability to offer a full analysis. But it’s one of the best economics posts I’ve read in the blogosphere in a long time.
One question I have is how many of these expenditures are worth subsidizing at all. A big chunk of our health care bill is spent in the last year or two of life, without always bringing much of a payoff. A second question is what would happen to cost control at these higher levels of expenditure. In particular what would happen to cost care as we approached the $50,000 threshold?
The proposal can be viewed in one of two lights. From one perspective, it will bring catastrophic care to many who are otherwise uninsured. From another perspective, we already have too much catastrophic care, at the expense of prevention and healthy lifestyle habits. Government catastrophic insurance will lead to price controls, either explicit or implicit, and rationing. Catastrophic care will decline, but in a way that might be beneficial. This latter alternative is not politically appealing, but we cannot rule it out as the relevant scenario.
But read Brad’s post and make up your own mind. Health care reform is an area where no one (i.e., you, the reader, and me, the writer) should feel they already have a pat or satisfactory answer.
The myth of free trade Britain?
Was nineteenth century Britain really a free trade wonder? Just how entrenched is protectionism in French national history?
John Nye offers some provocative answers:
Britain preached the gospel of free trade and France was cast in the role of the sinner, but there was little truth in this stereotype. France did have more protected products than England did but the average level of French tariffs (measured as total value of duties divided by total value of imports, cf. Figure 1) was actually lower than in Britain for three-quarters of the nineteenth century.2 In other words, tariffs had a smaller impact on French trade than British duties had on Britain’s trade. The French, while eschewing free trade, and openly rejecting the Anglo doctrine of open markets, actually succeeded in making their trade more liberal and more open than that of the more vocal British. The master of this was Napoleon III–Bonaparte’s nephew–who throughout the 1850s promoted the most radical liberalizing reforms of the French economy, all the while insisting that France was only interested in moderate reform.
The revisionism continues:
Indeed, it was not British unilateral tariff reduction that moved the world to freer trade. Despite the belief that is still common today that British exhortation opened the doors to European free trade in the late 19th century, it was the 1860 Treaty of Commerce, promoted by the Napoleon III and concluded between Britain and France, that really ushered in the age of nineteenth century “globalization”. British demands for unilateral tariff reduction usually fell on deaf ears.
Might this advantage of bilateralism be true more generally? If so, it would mean that a serious U.S. free trade agreement with Japan would be the best outcome imaginable for promoting free trade.
Read the whole thing, and don’t miss the illustrative chart.
Beauty and Brains
Last week, Alex wrote about how smart people live longer. Today, we learn that smart people may be better looking too!
Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and his colleague, Jody L. Kovar, assert that beautiful people also tend to be smart people — and vice versa.
In the July issue of Intelligence, the sociologists offer a theory to explain the confluence of beauty and brains. Their argument, in a nutshell: Intelligent men achieve higher status and marry beautiful women, who pass their genes on to their disproportionately attractive and smart kids, who win mates who are good-looking or brainy, and so on. Or at least that’s what they put forth in the journal article, “Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent.”
Here is the full story. Here is a home page for one of the researchers. But wait…he’s the same guy who says that marriage ruins male productivity.
Addendum: I just stumbled upon Randall Parker’s treatment of the same study.
The largest known prime number
We just found a new one, and it has seven million digits. Here is the bottom line:
Mersenne primes are an especially rare type that take the form 2^p-1, where p is also a prime number. They are named after a 17th Century French monk who first came up with an important conjecture about which values of p would yield a prime. The new number can be represented as 2^(24,036,583)-1. It is the 41st Mersenne prime to have been found.
Here is the full story.
Note also that the number was found by a consortium of private computers, designed to exchange spare computing power:
GIMPS volunteers download a piece of software that runs in the background on their computer. A central server distributes different prime number candidates to each machine, which use spare processing power to test whether it is a genuine prime or not.
Here is more information, plus how to volunteer. Or perhaps you would prefer to search for alien lifeforms.
Blogging from Poland
My time in Paris is over and I’ve arrived safely in Poland. I’ve found exactly what I’d expected. It is a modestly bustling economy, but not setting the world on fire. The slowdown of the last two years appears to be over. Corruption is low for a transition economy, social capital appears to be high, and there is an emerging middle class. The government has serious fiscal problems, but then again they probably should be running deficits, though not at 51 percent of gdp as they are doing. Overall it is hard to see them not turning the corner. If you would like an illustrative lesson as to how the world is a better place than it was twenty years ago, Poland is exhibit B after China as exhibit A.
I might add that Warsaw has excellent food, arguably the best in Eastern Europe after Budapest.
I’m blogging just across from the famous statue of Copernicus. Did you know that he offered one of the earliest statements of the Quantity Theory of Money?
How to choose a restaurant
Where oh where should we eat?
Perhaps the common social choice problem that any of us face in practice is when we find ourselves in a group that must choose one restaurant at which all of us will eat. We propose a method where, similar to the I-choose-you-cut rule for dividing a cake, individuals in the group take turns restricting the set of choices for the group. Specifically, under our method the first person restricts the set of restaurants to a certain number the second person restricts the set to a smaller number and so on until the last person in the group selects one restaurant. We derive a formula for choosing these numbers such that – under a natural assumption about individual preferences.the probability that the group will choose any individual’s favorite restaurant is equal for each individual.
That’s from an interesting recent working paper by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo.
My recipe is simpler: “Go Where I Say,” though I am less likely to use it in repeated game settings. And I am willing to defer to Randall Kroszner and John Nye, among others.
I do wonder why collective choices are not made in more efficient ways. Overall there is not enough deference to expertise and too much interest in finding a “lowest common denominator” of taste within the group. The real problem is to allow those who know to exert their influence, but without appearing like bullies. Yes I know the group cares more about harmony but that is precisely the problem: outlier tastes in the group end up frustrated. Maybe we should sever food decisions from all others, if this is possible. Then people could cede to the food expert, but without fear of future bullying in all other areas. As is sometimes the case in politics, the question is not “what is the proper social welfare function?” but rather “how do we get the right thing done?”
Who has the highest tax burden?
Number one is France, Belgium and Sweden are right behind. I am shocked to see China come in fourth, and to see the U.S. (New York State at least) beat out Canada.
The relevant metrics do not measure tax burden fully. Instead the rankings measure a weighted average of various marginal rates; average tax rates do not seem to enter into the calculation. Nor do they seem to consider how much of the tax is actually paid, or what you get for your taxes.
Since 2000, the tax burden, as measured in this fashion, has dropped in 22 countries, risen in 13, and held steady in 15.
The least taxed country is now United Arab Emirates, pushing long-time winner Hong Kong into second place. Next in line for low marginal rates are Singapore, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, an odd mix of countries. Then comes Ireland.
Here are extensive links to the data.
Note that economic theory says that marginal rates should be of primary importance. But often in the data it is the average tax rate that matters. Why is this? Could it be that liquidity effects are paramount? High average rates then suck away cash and end up affecting decisions at the margin. Or consider another channel. The tax system is very complex and full of loopholes and deductions. The average rate might in fact be the best measure of the true marginal rate we have.
Postscript: I know this is a market-oriented economics blog, but hey, I am also a contrarian at heart. I cannot help asking: which countries would you rather live in? Visit?
One view is “France is great, but it would be even better with lower taxes.” Another is: “France is great, and for reasons which bring both its wonders and its high taxes.” I am perpetually torn between these two views, often co-blogger Alex tries to push me more toward the former.
What if paintings were fully reproducible?
Fabio points out that good copies of masterworks are very cheap, a fraction of the value of the original. Charles Murray make a similar point:
The technology already exists to make perfect, full-size (or any size) copies of any painting–“perfect” meaning not only absolutely accurate color values and reproductions of line, but the same kind of canvas or plaster, the same three-dimensional ridges and textures in the brush strokes, the same sheen to the varnish, and even the same cracks in the varnish, if so desired. “Perfect” means also that the most acute and best-trained artistic eye in the world would have only a 50-50 chance of picking the original over the copy.
He exaggerates the state of technology but the point remains nonetheless: what if paintings were like recorded music?
Murray continues:
Economically, I assume that the acceptance of copies would devastate the resale value of originals of everything except the first-tier work. But for the first-tier work–the owners of which would have the exclusive right to reproduce it–the amount of money to be made selling copies might well rival current market value.
It is also fun to speculate on which paintings would sell the most copies if only the intrinsic attractiveness of the art mattered. Would the market be comparatively small, on the scale of the audience for classical music? Or would great art attract a mass market? In a world where the price of the painting is not going to impress houseguests, which paintings would be used for interior decoration, and which would be the ones that ordinary people, having become collectors, would put in their private galleries for measured contemplation? How would the works of Titian and Caravaggio fare against Monet and Renoir? How would the early Picasso–the easy-to-enjoy Picasso of “Boy with a Pipe”–fare against the later Picasso?
The most exciting prospect is what low-cost perfect copies would do to visual art as part of our daily lives. As matters stand, great art is something most of us see a few times a year, if that, having no choice but to move quickly from work to work, wondering if we will be able to get to the Impressionists before our feet hurt too much to enjoy them.
My prediction: Contra Fabio and Murray, I think most people would find it oppressive to live with “great art,” as that concept is traditionally understood. They prefer the inferior rendition. They like the ¤¤¤¤ they put on their walls. So there is less of a mass market here than meets the eye. A separate question is whether museums will license their works for such reproductions. If museums could make real money through this route, would they continue to receive charitable donations and government grants? The commercialization of high art would completely redefine the question of who controls an art museum. It is not obvious that this would benefit current museum management.
A new religion of mankind?
Not the usual MR fare, but I found the following Richard Rorty essay interesting reading. Rorty appears to have moved away from his anti-foundationalism — (roughly) the belief that truths cannot be proven from first principles — and is calling for a new pluralistic religion of humanity:
Rorty believes that we in the West are all polytheists now because we think that there are various goods and no overarching good. He chooses this term “polytheism” carefully–and not altogether ironically–because he believes that the idea can bring together John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James in the belief that “there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs.” If gods and goods are plural and serve different people in different ways, why should we feel the need to rank them? In fact, it may be the pursuit of such divergent human ends that benefits us all in the long run…
So far I am close to agreeing…although I recognize the possible use of a “stolen concept” of general well-being at the end. If you can’t rank goods, don’t tell me at the end that recognizing this fact will make us all better off. There is more:
Rorty is convinced that such an inexorable transition from traditional monotheism to this secular civil religion is already under way: “I think that the religion of love has gradually moved out of the churches and into the political arena. That religion is in the process of being transfigured into democratic politics. What is left in the churches is the fear that human beings may not be able to save themselves without help–that social cooperation is not enough.” Rorty hopes that the American civil religion of democracy will be enough for most people, so that those left over will be an inconsequential minority.
I agree with much of this point, though I do not approve as Rorty does. Now how about this part:
…Rorty describes the role of college professors in almost fundamentalist terms: professors should see their work in the classroom as nothing less than an exercise in conversion. They ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.” With no hint of his usual irony, Rorty writes that “students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”
As this point I will offer no further comment.