Ethiopia bleg
I’ll be there, in a bit of time, and I’ll have the chance to get outside Addis Adaba. What do you all recommend to me? And where and what should I eat? I thank you all in advance for your counsel and wisdom.
Those new service sector jobs
In North America the modern undertaker’s job is increasingly one of event-planning, says Sherri Tovell, an undertaker in Windsor, Canada. Among the requirements at her recent funerals have been a tiki hut, margaritas, karaoke and pizza delivery. Some people want to hire an officiant to lead a “life celebration”, others to shoot ashes into the skies with fireworks. Old-fashioned undertakers are hard put to find their place in such antics. Another trend—known as “direct cremation”—has no role for them at all.
Besides having to offer more diverse services, the trade also faces increased competition in its products. Its roots are in carpentry. “You’d buy an expensive casket and the funeral would be included in the price,” remembers Dan Isard, a funeral consultant in Phoenix, Arizona. The unwritten agreement was that the dead would be treated with dignity and that families would not ask if there was an alternative to the $1,000 or $2,000 coffin, or whether embalming was really needed. The business has something in common with prostitution, reflects Dominic Akyel of the University of Cologne. It is legal (as prostitution is in some places) but taboo, “and certainly not to be discussed or haggled over”.
The undertaker used to be able to rely on a steady stream of customers who asked few questions and of whom he (and it was usually a he) would ask few in return. Protestant or Catholic? Open coffin or closed? And, in some parts of the world, burial or cremation? A new generation of customers, though, no longer unthinkingly hands over its dead to the nearest funeral director. They are looking elsewhere, be it to a new breed of undertaker, to hotel chains that “do” funerals, or—for their coffin or urn—to Amazon or Walmart.
Here is more from The Economist, interesting throughout
The Middle East and Syria right now
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Some historical events are relatively easy to model with game theory: the Cuban Missile crisis, many of the Cold War proxy wars, the crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons. In those conflicts, the number of relevant parties is small and each typically has some degree of internal cohesion.
To find a situation comparable to the Middle East today, with so many involved countries, and so many interrelationships between internal and external political issues, one has to go back to the First World War, not an entirely comforting thought.
The situation right before that war had many distinct yet related moving parts, including the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the imperialist scramble for colonies, the prior Balkan Wars, a rising Germany seeking parity or superiority with Great Britain, an unstable alliance system, an unworkable Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the complex internal politics of Russia, which eventually led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
What do we learn from the history of that time? Well, even if the chance of war was high by early 1914, it was far from obvious that the Central Powers attack on France, Belgium and Russia would be set off by a political assassination in the Balkans.
Nonetheless, in sufficiently complex situations, chain reactions can cause small events to cascade into big changes. In World War I, one goal behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to break off parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a new Yugoslavia. The empire responded by making some demands on Serbia, which were not heeded, a declaration of war followed, and the alliance system activated broader conflicts across Europe.
If you don’t quite follow how a single assassination, which was not even seen as so important the day it occurred, triggered the death of so many millions, and the destruction of so much of Europe, that is exactly the point. When there is no clear way for observers to model the situation, a single bad event can take on a very large significance and for reasons that are not entirely explicable.
Do read the whole thing.
Saturday assorted links
1. One out of every 15 Mormons is from Brazil.
2. WSJ James Taranto profile of Bryan Caplan.
3. Why are city accents fading in the Midwest.
4. “…we present a deep learning audio-visual model for isolating a single speech signal from a mixture of sounds such as other voices and background noise.” You’ll have to hold that conversation in a park. Until the parks are bugged.
5. First chapter of the new Weyl and Posner now available on-line.
Thwarted markets in everything
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Wall Street billionaire, was prepared to cut a $25 million check to the high school he attended here in the 1960s, to help it pay for a huge renovation project.
He wanted only a few things in return.
For starters, the public school should be renamed in his honor. A portrait of him should be displayed prominently in the building. Spaces at the school should be named for his twin brothers. He should have the right to review the project’s contractors and to sign off on a new school logo.
The school district’s officials accepted the deal.
So it was that this Philadelphia bedroom community of 55,000, not normally a hotbed of civic unrest, exploded into a populist fury.
That is from Kate Kelly at the NYT.
America First to increase its World Bank contribution?
The Trump administration is poised to back a $13bn capital increase for the World Bank in a package that would see significant lending reforms and an increase in China’s shareholding.
Barring last-minute hiccups, US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin is set to tell fellow World Bank shareholders at next week’s spring meetings in Washington that he will support an increase in the bank’s capital, a senior Treasury official confirmed to the Financial Times on Friday. The move would be a significant shift in the US administration’s attitudes towards multilateral institutions.
Friday assorted links
1. Singapore conquers the sea.
2. The campus speech crisis is indeed worsening.
3. Ugandan government plans to tax social media users for too much gossip.
4. Facebook has legal problems stemming from Europe. And more on GDPR, and more here. This is important stuff.
5. Is this a Russian (?) perspective on Syria and Russia? Both speculative and evil.
6. Is Chinese growth overstated? Let’s look at the light.
7. Alcohol might in fact be bad for your health (speculative, but not evil).
The importance of local milieus
Using data on the entire population in combination with data on almost all individuals in Sweden listed as inventors, we study how the probability of being listed on a patent as inventor is influenced by the density of other future inventors residing in the same region. In this process, we control for demographic and sector effects along with the educational characteristics of parents. This approach allows us to trace how location history influences individuals’ inventive capacity. We focus on three types of influences: (a) future inventors in the municipality around the time of birth, (b) future inventors around the time of graduation from high school and (c) future inventors at graduation from higher education. We find suggestive evidence that co-locating with future inventors may impact the probability of becoming an inventor. The most consistent effect is found for place of higher education; some positive effects are also evident from birthplace, whereas no consistent positive effect can be derived from individuals’ high school location. Therefore, the formative influences mainly deriving from family upbringing, birth region and from local milieu effects arising from a conscious choice to attend a higher education affect the choice of becoming an inventor.
Here is the article, “How important are local inventive milieus: The role of birthplace, high school and university education,” by Olof Ejermo and Høgni Kalsø Hansen, via Ben Southwood.
Privacy sentences to ponder
The increasing difficulty in managing one’s online personal data leads to individuals feeling a loss of control. Additionally, repeated consumer data breaches have given people a sense of futility, ultimately making them weary of having to think about online privacy. This phenomenon is called “privacy fatigue.” Although privacy fatigue is prevalent and has been discussed by scholars, there is little empirical research on the phenomenon. A new study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior aimed not only to conceptualize privacy fatigue but also to examine its role in online privacy behavior. Based on literature on burnout, we developed measurement items for privacy fatigue, which has two key dimensions —emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Data analyzed from a survey of 324 Internet users showed that privacy fatigue has a stronger impact on privacy behavior than privacy concerns do, although the latter is widely regarded as the dominant factor in explaining online privacy behavior.
Emphasis added by me. That is by Hanbyl Choi, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung, via Michelle Dawson.
Why are so many graduate students depressed?
PhD and master’s students worldwide report rates of depression and anxiety that are six times higher than those in the general public (T. M. Evans et al. Nature Biotech. 36, 282–284; 2018). The report, based on the responses of 2,279 students in 26 nations, found that more than 40% of respondents had anxiety scores in the moderate to severe range, and that nearly 40% showed signs of moderate to severe depression.
That is from this summary statement. Here is the original piece. So what might be going on here?
1. The ordeal of studying and possibly finishing is extreme, and extreme ordeals depress people. This seems inconsistent with other evidence, however, namely rising (reported) rates of depression in prosperous, comfortable societies.
2. The task of studying and possibly finishing is correlated with a kind of extreme lassitude, and that in turn is correlated with depression.
3. Graduate students become depressed as they realize they have chosen poor life paths.
4. Graduate students become depressed as they realize, a’la Caplan, that it is mostly about signaling.
5. Graduate students are undergoing a transformation of their personalities, and being turned into intellectual elites, but this process is traumatic in several regards, thus leading to frequent depression. The chance of depression is part of the price of admission to a select club.
6. Our graduate institutions serve women poorly (women in graduate school experience depression at higher rates — 41% vs 35% for the men).
7. It’s all just sample bias, as depressed graduate students have nothing better to do than respond to this survey.
What else? And how much should we regard these results are symptoms of a deeper malaise? Or is the problem confined mainly to academic life?
*Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism*
That is the new book by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall:
Their main point is that social tactics used in interventions abroad tend to come back and haunt us at home. I am not nearly as non-interventionist in foreign policy questions as they are, but still I wish their perspective would receive a much broader hearing. You can buy the book here. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a video related to the book.
Malthusian dog markets in everything
An effort that animal rescuers began more than a decade ago to buy dogs for $5 or $10 apiece from commercial breeders has become a nationwide shadow market that today sees some rescuers, fueled by Internet fundraising, paying breeders $5,000 or more for a single dog.
The result is a river of rescue donations flowing from avowed dog saviors to the breeders, two groups that have long disparaged each other. The rescuers call many breeders heartless operators of inhumane “puppy mills” and work to ban the sale of their dogs in brick-and-mortar pet stores. The breeders call “retail rescuers” hypocritical dilettantes who hide behind nonprofit status while doing business as unregulated, online pet stores.
But for years, they have come together at dog auctions where no cameras are allowed, with rescuers enriching breeders and some breeders saying more puppies are being bred for sale to the rescuers.
Here is more from Kim Kavin at WaPo, substantive throughout with photos and video. In essence, somebody has solved for the equilibrium.
For the pointers I thank Tom Vansant and Alexander Lowery.
U.S.A. (Holocaust) fact of the day
But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened — and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.
Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. Only 39 percent of Americans know that Hitler was democratically elected.
Here is the full Maggie Astor NYT story. The last error is a little tricky, since Hitler was elected into a coalition government, but he wasn’t really elected to be “Hitler as head honcho.” His later ascent resulted from political machinations of a not entirely democratic nature. Still, I doubt if that confusion is what is steering most Americans wrong.
The fox
Sen. Leahy has a Facebook pixel, invisible to users, that gathers user data of Facebook users who visit the site. (For a quick primer on what “pixels” do, visit Facebook’s resource guide on the data-gathering tool.)
That’s right, if you visit Senator Leahy’s campaign website, it’s likely your data, including your demographics and what pages you looked at on the site, have been placed into a custom data targeting audience by Leahy’s team.
Here is more, via @tedfrank. You will note that Leahy was one of the interlocutors who confronted Zuckerberg over the privacy issue.
Thursday assorted links
1. NBA cooperation markets in everything: “And so to avoid this descent into the mud, many players strike unofficial pacts with their opponents.”
3. Report from Somaliland. It could be much worse. And night light intensity and Roman road density.
4. Scott Sumner on labor markets, empirics, and monopsony.
5. New study on occupational licensing and restricted mobility.
6. Holly Cowen captures Hawthorne wildlife with photography.