Are test-tube mice different?
They are bolder and more confident, but have poorer memories, here is the story.
And humans?
Studies are needed to see if test-tube humans are similarly affected, he says…In the Western world, around 1% of children are conceived through assisted reproductive technologies. In one common method known as in vitro fertilization, eggs are fertilized in a test tube, cultured for a short while and then returned to the womb. Over a million ‘test-tube’ babies have been born worldwide. But little is known about the long-term effects of culturing embryos. The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born just 26 years ago. There have been few systematic attempts so far to assess the long-term health and behaviour of these children.
Food for thought, perhaps we are engaging in social experimentation here without knowing it.
Can climate engineering limit global warming?
Maybe so, according to Futurepundit. Here are some options (not all of this represents Futurepundit’s words, some is from his links):
Proposed options for reducing carbon dioxide pollution currently include underground burying of liquefied carbon dioxide; disposal in the sea; fertilising its absorption by marine algae; reflecting the sun’s rays in the atmosphere; and stabilizing sea-level rise. These and other macro-engineering ideas will be evaluated against a strict set of criteria, including effectiveness, environmental impacts, cost, public acceptability, and reversibility. All of these options go beyond the conventional approaches of improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon intensity by using more renewable energy sources, and may be needed in addition to these conventional approaches.
And further out on the limb:
… the scientists backed more way-out systems for reflecting the sun’s rays back into space. Plan A would float thousands of bubble-making machines across the world’s oceans to send huge amounts of salt spray into the atmosphere. The trillions of tiny droplets would make the clouds bigger, whiter, and more reflective — enough, in theory, to shut down several decades worth of global warming.
Plan B would flood the stratosphere with billions of tiny metal-coated balloons, “optical chaff” to backscatter the sun’s rays. Most sophisticated of all, Plan C would assemble giant mirrors in orbit, ready to be positioned at will by a global climate controller.
The BBC reports on 4 major categories of conceivable climate engineering approaches.
* “sequestering” (storing) carbon dioxide, for example in the oceans, by removing it from the air for storage, or by improved ways of locking it up in forests
* “insolation management” – modifying the albedo (reflectivity) of clouds and other surfaces to affect the amount of the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth
* climate design, for example by long-term management of carbon for photosynthesis, or by glaciation control
* impacts reduction, which includes stabilising ocean currents by river deviation, and providing large-scale migration corridors for wildlife.
Here is another article on the topic. I’ll never be competent to assess these proposals, but they could be among the most important scientific innovations we come up with. Global warming may well be real and the result of human activity, follow Chris Mooney. For better or worse I’ll predict the world won’t much cut its CO2 omissions in the near future, so we need to look toward other solutions.
A famous economist paints
Here are some paintings by economist William Baumol. Baumol has done much notable work, my personal favorite is his recent The Free-Market Innovation Machine on how oligopolistic competition drove the innovation behind the Industrial Revolution. Unlike many others, Baumol has never called it quits. He is still going strong at 81 years of age and producing some of his best work.
Thanks to Greg Delemeester for the pointer.
Are blogs now hurting Howard Dean’s chances?
Dean did poorly because not enough people voted for him, and the usual explanations — potential voters changed their minds because of his character or whatever — seem inadequate to explain the Iowa results. What I wonder is whether Dean has accidentally created a movement (where what counts is believing) instead of a campaign (where what counts is voting.)…
…participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the real world. When you’re communing with like-minded souls, you feel like you’re accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom.
There are many reasons for this, but the main one seems to be that the pleasures of life online are precisely the way they provide a respite from the vagaries of the real world. Both the way the online environment flattens interaction and the way everything gets arranged for the convenience of the user makes the threshold between talking about changing the world and changing the world even steeper than usual.
The bottom line:
“Would you vote for Howard Dean?” and “Will you vote for Howard Dean?” are two different questions…
Not to mention “Did you vote for Howard Dean?”
The quotations are from Clay Shirky, here is the permalink. Shirky concludes: “Voting, the heart of the matter, is both dull and depressing.”
Blackjack and haystacks
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is sending 21 Monet masterworks to the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas, in return for a payment of at least $1 million. Here is some promotional material, here is another account.
From my point of view this is good news. The museum has 36 Monet paintings (an MFA curator tells me 80 but I cannot confirm this in print), and they cannot be displayed all at once. Only five Monets will be taken down from the walls to run the show. The Casino brings in more customers, and more people will see the art of Monet. The Bellagio Gallery is run by international art dealers Pace Wildenstein, who have expertise in displaying quality paintings. The casinos themselves are masters of security and climate control, two important factors in any art show. On top of everything, the MFA is not a major recipient of state and federal grants, so now it has more revenue to stage future shows.
What then is the problem? Art world critics charge that the museum is “selling out,” by lending art in return for money. But surely blatant commercialism has a long and often noble history in the artistic world. Most of the notable artists of the Italian Renaissance were consummate businessmen, and they produced for patrons who had their own motives of power, profit, and status. Furthermore few museums predate the nineteenth century. Before that time commercially (or politically) motivated collectors played a primary role in producing artistic publicity.
The real issue: Many people in the museum world are afraid this venture will succeed. If a museum can make money lending pictures to a casino, why do such institutions need explicit government support? Right now museums. for better or worse, are often the major artistic agenda setters. Greater commercialization threatens to take this role away from museums and place it in the hands of the greater public. People will pay $15 to see Monets in a casino, but not to see Robert Gober.
Have you noticed that Clear Channel, the media company and Rush Limbaugh promoters, is now in the business of organizing art exhibits on a for-profit basis.? This too is unpopular with the traditional museum crowd, for competitive, aesthetic, and political reasons. Clear Channel plays commercial hardball with the display sites and puts the exhibit together in a year or two. A non-profit museum, in contrast, will invest in greater scholarship and perhaps take ten years or more to put together an exhibit. This market is starting to change rapidly, and museum curators are scared. Unlike most Americans, I prefer to see Gober over Monet. But at the same time I wish that museums enter and master the future to come, rather than running away from it.
A readable treatment of current macroeconomics
Is there a new consensus about macroeconomics? Read this recent essay by Perry Mehrling.
Mehrling makes the following points:
1. Macroeconomists are more optimistic than before, in part due to the 1990s extended, low-inflation boom.
2. Monetary policy has replaced fiscal policy as the preferred instrument of stabilization.
3. The current consensus would look remarkably familiar to many of the pre-Keynesian monetary theorists, such as Ralph Hawtrey.
4. The more concerned we are with price stabilization, the more our economies take on properties of commodity money standards. Money is moving again toward the notion of a “promise to pay.”
Read the whole article for a stimulating treatment of further critical issues. If you would like a more technical and theoretical treatment, for macro nerds only, try Michael Woodford’s recent Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy. Fans of Wicksell (notice the title) and the conundrums of Fischer Black will enjoy Woodford’s work, which reexamines the central assumptions of monetary theory. Think of the book as the 21st century version of Don Patinkin’s Money, Interest, and Prices. And what are we told in practical terms? The price level is best controlled through interest rate policy.
Thanks to Daniel Davies for the pointer to Mehrling’s home page.
A (slightly) reassuring fact
A penny dropped from the Empire State Building would not kill someone standing below, most likely. The observation deck is 1050 feet high, and the penny would reach a maximum velocity of 57 miles an hour after falling 500 feet. That’s enough to hurt pretty bad, but only a very very lucky (unlucky) shot would kill you. Most importantly of all, there is an updraft. Tossed coins generally land on the setback roof of floor 80.
The calculations come from the February issue of Popular Science, the article itself is not available on-line.
Addendum: Cecil offers some more detailed observations. Here is another supporting account, albeit with different details, in engineering language.
If paintings were stocks
Friday’s Wall Street Journal offers an update on who is hot in the art market, classifying artists into buy, hold, and sell categories. The big winner? Cindy Sherman, art photographer. Why have her prices skyrocketed so much? First, the quality of the work is high. Second, she is a woman and museums feel the need to address the gender gap on their walls. Third, Sotheby’s and Christie’s now sell her under the “Contemporary Art” category, rather than “Photography.” This reclassification automatically boosts her prices.
Here is one of the classic Cindy Sherman images, but not all of them involve beautiful women.
Another big winner was Jeff Koons, former Wall Street commodities broker. Here are some typical Koons pieces, although his style is highly diverse, as NBA fans will attest. His prices have doubled in each of several recent years. Damien Hirst is on the upswing as well, so are some of the late Picassos. Among the classics there is also price strength with Cezanne, Gauguin, and Caillebotte.
Who is falling in price and due to fall more? Julian Schnabel. Some of the works are falling apart, and others are too big for collectors’ walls. Could you hang and maintain this one? Warhol has cooled off after a big run-up and it is opined that Basquiat (scroll down to the images) is due for a fall. Chagall painted too many mediocre pictures. Collectors are bored with Sisley and the sometimes fruity style of Renoir has fallen out of favor, despite its painterly virtues. This one will likely push you off the edge.
My take: The current generation of earners doesn’t care much about uniqueness or the original image. Younger collectors love to buy photographs, and don’t care if they don’t “own the original” or if that phrase has meaning at all. Many prefer that an exact copy of what is on their wall also hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. So look for photography, and painting/photography hybrids to continue their run-up.
I like to tease Robin Hanson that the painting market is a bit like terrorism futures. If you believe in a particular painter or style, you can put your money where your mouth is. The paintings market therefore might reflect new information might efficiently than does, say, the music market, where marketable investment assets are harder to come by. Of course that does not rule out the art market as a classic Keynesian “beauty contest,” in which everyone is guessing at the future opinions of everyone else, rather than at some objective facts.
It’s simple, part II
“For the past two years our farmers have struggled with historically low milk prices,” said Senator James Jeffords, an Independent from Vermont who often votes with the chamber’s Democrats. “The last thing we need right now is a flood of imported milk products that could drive prices even lower, perhaps permanently.
Imagine the horror, permanently low prices! And what is the political context?
Senators from dairy states like Vermont fear that a proposed US-Australian Free Trade Agreement could mean “undue hardships” for American milk producers…More than 30 senators signed a letter to President Bush last week that said the proposed trade agreement “would have dire consequences for several of America’s agricultural industries including the dairy industry…
By the way, current U.S. tariffs on Australian dairy products average about 100 percent. The above facts are from the Sunday Boston Globe, the article is not currently on-line.
Are you wondering what the title of this post means? Here is “It’s Simple” [part I], in case you missed it a few days ago.
Frequent flyers and the new world of music
Recently I suggested that the on-line music world had yet to settle on a workable business model. Now Gary Leff reports the following new arrangement, whereby you use frequent flyer miles to buy music:
Sony has partnered with United Airlines to introduce another business model
for downloadable music — paying for songs with alternative currency
(frequent flyer miles) rather than money.Details are still being worked on, I understand, and the website is still a
few months from launch, but it looks like Sony and United will offer
consumers both
* the ability to buy songs while earning United Mileage Plus miles, making
United’s loyalty currency a reason for consumers to pick the Sony site over
rivals (and tapping a 37 million member marketing database on top of Sony’s
own lists).
* the ability to pay in miles rather than money, which will be perfect for
infrequent flyers with a small unused stash of miles (a free ticket starts
at 25,000 miles – a song may cost 100 or 250 or 500 miles, price has yet to
be set).
Keep in mind, the recorded music market is a mere $12 billion or so a year. For purposes of comparison, Kraft sold for $13 billion. Southwest has had a capitalization comparable as well. Tobacco advertising for one year is about $11.5 billion. Now I don’t expect the whole music market to be driven by frequent flyer miles. But neither is it obvious that the best way to proceed is to first sue people and then get them to fork over $12 billion into your coffers. The music industry is small relative to the economy as a whole, and relative to advertising as a whole. Here’s hoping for some new and creative solutions to the property rights problem.
The continuing rise of the DVD
In 2003 a new DVD issue was released every 57 minutes, giving us over 9000 titles for the year (Entertainment Weekly, Jan.23-30).
The film industry is changing accordingly. Hollywood now has greater incentives to issue movies for male taste. DVDs are often impulse buys, and men are bigger impulse buyers than are women, at least in the DVD market. Movies for children are favored as well, since children love repeat viewings. Note that in 2002 DVD sales and rentals accounted for 62 percent of moviemaking income. At least four-fifths of this sum came from DVD sales.
Fear of losses from piracy is causing accelerated DVD releases. If you wait too long with your DVD, illegal competitors will fill the market. Pirates of the Caribbean, for instance, was released on DVD only four months after the film’s release. Video releases, in contrast, used to come after six to twelve months. Some European films have been released simultaneously on DVD and in theatres, despite the protests of rental chains. Some insiders expect simultaneous or near-simultaneous release to be common practice in the future. Simultaneous release, of course, raises fears that one market will cannibalize the other. But one commentator noted: “I’m one of those who believes that ultimately everything will be available at a price. So, if you want to see it at home when it is at the theatres you can, but it will be a premium price.”
The bottom line: I’m psyched. DVDs are a wonderful medium for foreign films, subtitled films, complex films requiring explanation and accompanying disks, historical classics, and action movies. All of these I love. DVDs have opened up the entire world of Bollywood cinema — usually in Hindi — to easy subtitling and thus to American viewers. If these movies are too long for your taste, just flick to your favorite songs and dances, much easier than trying to do the same with a VCR. As the DVD rises in popularity, the quality of the best scene in a movie may become increasingly important.
The universe on a T-shirt? Not yet.
Here is an update on the quest for a Theory of Everything. It is written by Lee Smolin, of inflation theory fame, and recommended to me by Robin Hanson. In pdf format it is over sixty pages long but makes for fascinating albeit difficult reading. Smolin defends “loop gravity” theories over string theory. He claims that within ten years we may have real experimental evidence to resolve the dispute.
Does monogamy resemble addiction?
Recent research suggests the following:
The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.
In other words, if you are monogamous, your feelings toward your partner bear some resemblances to other addictions.
Whither Haiti?
Protests have been growing in Haiti, check out this link for some compelling visuals. It is becoming ever clearer than Aristide is simply another Haitian mafia. Our previous support for him represents one of the more gullible episodes in American foreign policy. Most Haitians are turning against him as well, most of all because living standards have continued to deteriorate.
How might Haiti recover? It is hard to see a case for optimism. In many ways the country was richer in 1840 than it was today. One huge problem has been unchecked environmental degradation, brought on by poorly-defined property rights and a tragedy of the commons. The destruction of trees and the erosion of soil are continuing unchecked. Haitians commonly cut down trees for firewood but the collective impact of this practice has taken the life out of the soil. The country, which already is a net importer of food, is on the verge of not being able to feed itself at all. It will struggle to maintain its current per capita income of $400, noting that some estimates run closer to $250. Many Haitians are now asking for reparations.
Add on a totally corrupt port, dishonest politicians, no good roads, hardly any infrastructure, the Duvaliers’ destruction of intermediate civil society institutions, a rampant brain drain, few protections for foreign investors, and the complete absence of rule of law, and you have some real problems. The question is not so much how to improve policy, since policy does not reach most Haitians. Previous policies have destroyed so much value that it would be hard to find an institutional framework for current reforms, if Haiti’s politicians were ever so inclined. Most Haitians live in something approximating the state of nature. They are ruled, if that word can be used, by local mafias rather than by the national government.
By the way, did I mention that 85 percent of the population is illiterate and 99.9 percent carry malaria?
Public safety is breaking down as well. I used to visit yearly, but the number of carjackings, many carried out in broad daylight, have scared me off for the time being.
As Daniel Drezner would say, “Continuing…”
Why 99 cents per song?
Apple’s iTunes charges 99 cents for every song downloaded. Why? Is Outkast’s “Hey Ya” really worth no more than a creaky Pat Boone ballad?
Some artists object to this “one price fits all” model. A star may feel it cheapens the value of her wares, or that she simply deserves a higher return.
An alternative business model asks users to donate to the artist, depending how much they like the song. For one service, you can pay as little as $5 but it is suggested that you pay more. The average payment is running at $8.93, though this is a small and self-selected group using the service. In any case not all songs go for the same final price. The service is called Magnatune: We Are Not Evil, check out their web site.
Yet another idea would use an auction system. Listeners could bid for song downloads, with the price determined periodically by supply and demand. We would then expect the songs in highest demand to bring the highest price. Note also that when bands sell their concert recordings on-line, they don’t generally all charge the same prices.
Alternatively, songs may be like books. You charge a low price at first, to stimulate a snowball of fan demand. Bestsellers sell for less, per page, than academic books. (Imagine a professor boasting “Stephen King’s books sell for a mere $6.99; my books sell for a royal $75 a piece.”) In this case the supplier would flood the downloads market with copies, so that the price of the more popular song would be less, not more, despite higher demand.
Different movies sell for the same prices. Either Return of the King or the latest bomb both go for $8.50 at the same theater. This practice has long puzzled me. Perhaps the low price satisfies a fairness constraint, and also helps generate a snowball of fan demand, as with books. It might make more sense to expand the number of screens for the movie rather than raise the price. And hit movies pull people into movie theaters more generally, which spills over into demand for other movies.
The big change may come when downloads are used as advertising. Pepsi is expected to give away up to one million downloaded songs, through iTunes, in connection with the Super Bowl. Coca-Cola may be entering the market as well. Keep in mind that the recorded music industry is small in size relative to corporate advertising budgets. Perhaps corporations will become patrons of music, giving away songs wrapped in an advertisement.
The bottom line: iTunes is just one business model, and it has yet to prove itself. Apple is making money off the hardware, not the songs. Returns will plummet once the hardware business becomes more competitive. It remains to be seen how the downloads market will evolve, but do not expect a mere extrapolation of current trends.