Category: Books

Baumol’s new book on the cost disease

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is self-recommending, here are a few points of relevance:

1. There has been a clear cost disease in most kinds of education and many kinds of medicine, but I blame institutions and laws as much as the intrinsic nature of the product.

2. I do not see the arts as subject to the cost disease very much at all.  As for the “live performing arts,” the disease seems to afflict the older and less innovative sectors, such as opera and the symphony.  There is plenty of live music these days, it is offered in innovative ways, and much of it is free.

3. Even “the live performing arts” can be broken down into underlying characteristics, many of which show a great deal of recent innovation.  For instance the supply of “musical immediacy” has been non-stagnant through YouTube, which often gives you a better glimpse of the performer than you get through nosebleed seats and giant screens.  YouTube isn’t “live,” but there is no particular reason to break down the analysis at that level and certainly it is not a sacred category for consumers.

4. In many sectors of the arts, especially music, consumers demand constant turnover of product.  Old music becomes “obsolete” — for whatever sociological reasons — and in this sense the sector is creating lots of new value every year.  From an “objectivist” point of view they are still strumming guitars with the same speed, but from a subjectivist point of view — the relevant one for the economist – they are remarkably innovative all the time in the battle against obsolescence.  A lot of the cost disease argument is actually an aesthetic objection that the art forms which have already peaked — such as Mozart — sometimes have a hard time holding their ground in terms of cost and innovation.

5. In general “cost disease” sectors do not remain constant over time.  Agriculture has been unusually stagnant for the last twenty or so years, but it is hardly obvious that this trend will continue for the next century to come and it certainly was not the case for the period 1948-1990, quite the contrary.

6. The stagnancy of one sector may depend on the stagnancy of other sectors in non-transparent ways.  “Live music” may seem like it doesn’t change much, but lifting the embargo on Cuba would boost the quantity and quality of my consumption of spectacular concert experiences, as would a non-stop flight to Haiti.

You can buy the book here.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.

*Mismatch*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The authors are Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and the subtitle is How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.

Here is the book’s website, and a summary:

… law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. draw on extensive new research to prove that racial preferences put many students in educational settings where they have no hope of succeeding. Because they’re under-prepared, fewer than half of black affirmative action beneficiaries in American law schools pass their bar exams. Preferences for well-off minorities help shut out poorer students of all races. More troubling still, major universities, fearing a backlash, refuse to confront the clear evidence of affirmative action’s failure.

As you may know, the Supreme Court starts hearing oral arguments on affirmative action on October 9th.  I have not much followed the empirical debate on affirmative action, but it seems to me this is likely the best recent book on the “anti” side.  On the pro side, you can read The Shape of the River, by William Bowen and Derek Bok.

A cultural guide for Afghanis

by  Tyler Cowen in

After eleven years, we are trying a new approach:

“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.

“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”

This is news to me, though I would like to see it confirmed:

Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.

Finally:

NATO’s coalition is described as a “work of art.”

For my house, I might rather have a Suzani.

The Great Rice Stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the rice yield per hectare in Japan, after climbing for more than a century, has not increased at all over the last 17 years.  It is not that Japanese farmers do not want to continue raising their rice yields.  They do.  With a domestic support price far above the world market price, raising yields in Japan is highly profitable .  The problem is that Japan’s farmers are already using all the technologies available to raise land productivity.

Like Japan, South Korea’s rice yield also has plateaued.

…Rice yields in Chin are now very close to those in Japan.  Unless Chinese farmers can somehow surpass their Japanese counterparts, which seems unlikely, China’s rice yields appear about to plateau.  If China hits the glass ceiling for its rice yields, then one third of the world’s rice would be produced in three countries (Japan, South Korea, and China) that can no longer raise land productivity or expand the area in rice.

That is from the new, excellent and to the point Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, by Lester R. Brown.

*Innovation Economics*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Rob Atkinson and Stephen Ezell.  It is far more mercantilist than I feel comfortable with, yet it is full of information and argumentation, and it is a book one can profitably engage with.  Here is one excerpt:

The largely consensus view among U.S. economic elites is that the massive U.S. job loss in manufacturing is simply a reflection of manufacturing doing well: using technology to automate work and to become more efficient.  It’s the agriculture story they tell us…

There are two big problems with this view.  The first is that it is not supported by the official government data.  In fact, U.S. manufacturing lost jobs much faster in the 2000s than in the 1990s, even though productivity growth was similar during the two decades.  In the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment fell 1 percent, while productivity increased 56 percent.  Yet, in the 2000s, manufacturing employment fell 32 percent while productivity increased only slightly faster, 61 percent.  So, clearly, higher productivity was not the main cause of the manufacturing employment collapse.

As Michael Mandel has pointed out repeatedly, there are also problems with the data, and here are our authors on that point:

…a closer look reveals that every durable goods industry grew more slowly in output than GDP except one: computer/electronics which grew a whopping 720 percent faster than GDP…To put this in perspective, this one sector accounted for 113 percent of U.S. manufacturing output growth in the 2000s, even though, in 1997, it accounted for just 12 percent of manufacturing output.

Note that a lot of this measured growth is quality improvement in computers, rather than growth of the sector in the traditional sense of having a rapidly expanding industry.  Employment in that sector fell.  The performance of the other manufacturing sectors is not so impressive:

…during 2001-2010, manufacturing minus computers actually lost 6 percent of its value-added.  Output of the electrical equipment and wood products industries declined by 7 percent, plastics by 8 percent, fabricated metals by 10 percent, printing by 12 percent, furniture by 19 percent, nonmetallic minerals and primary metals and paper by 31 percent, apparel by 34 percent, and textiles and motor vehicles by 39 percent.  In other words, thirteen manufacturing sector that made up 58 percent of U.S. manufacturing employment all produced less in 2010 than in 2001, all at a time when the overall economy grew 15.8 percent.

I suppose you could say that education and health care have in fact seen striking advances in productivity during this period.  Or you could recall my portrait in The Great Stagnation of an economy which has only a very small number of dynamic sectors, with computers of course in the lead.  Overall it is not a pretty picture.

The new (and inaugural?) Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake

by  Tyler Cowen in

In volume one, it seems that only half the words of the original are kept.  M.A. Orthofer reports:

Beijing University teacher Liu Yiqing is quoted:

“There is still something we can improve in the way the footnotes are presented,” she says. “While putting every possible meaning in Chinese into the text, it will break the integrity of the story. We should make it a story that is also interesting for college students to read and understand.”

Also via Orthofer, here is one measure of which is the most frequently liberated book.

Sir John Strachey’s *India: its Administration & Progress*

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is a fascinating and indeed highly readable book.  The third edition dates from 1903 but it is based on some 1884 lectures.  Here is one excerpt:

If the richer classes in China were deprived of Indian opium they would suffer as the richer classes in Europe would suffer if they were deprived of the choice vintages of Bordeaux and Burgundy, or as tobacco-smokers would suffer if not more cigars were to come from Cuba.  In such a case, in our own country, the frequenters of public-houses would be conscious of no hardship, and the vast majority of the opium-smokers of China would be equally unconscious if they received no more opium from India [TC: China itself produced a lot of opium].  If, in deference to ignorant prejudice, India should be deprived of the revenue which she now obtains from opium, an act of folly and injustice would be perpetrated as gross as any that has ever been inflicted by a foreign Government on a subject country.  India now possesses the rare fortune of obtaining from one of her most useful products a large revenue without the imposition of taxes on her own people…

Recommended, especially if you like to discover what people were really thinking at the time.

Why 8 1/2 x 11?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Most books aren’t printed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper so why are these the standard paper dimensions? Paul Stanley offers an answer:

…we have ended up with paper sizes that were never designed or adapted for printing with 10-12 point proportionally spaced type. They were designed for handwriting (which is usually much bigger) or for typewriters. Typewriters produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving … around 65 to 78 characters: in other words something pretty close to ideal. But if you type in a standard proportionally spaced font (worse, in Times — which is rather condensed because it was designed to be used in narrow columns) at 12 point, you will get about 90 to 100 characters in the line.

The standard paper dimensions are thus not optimized for reading using printed fonts so typographers try to make adjustments. One adjustment is to abandon the standard paper size which is what books do. Another is to make the margins very wide which is the Latex default.

[Another] answer — which is what most wordprocessors did — was to stick to the standard “document design” (margins of an inch or so) and just use proportionally spaced fonts as if they were typewriter text. This produces very long lines, which are not comfortable to read. But that discomfort can be somewhat alleviated by increasing the space between lines (1.5 or double space), which helps prevent “doubling”, and by avoiding type sizes below about 11 or 12 points (depending very much on the design of the font).

Another possibility is to use the margins for marginalia, which I like. (Stanley points to the Latex tufte class as a way to do this.) One could also a two-column format or just make the text bigger.

Stanley concludes:

These are all potentially valid design choices. I happen to think that the most conventional one (stick with 1 inch margins, and add line spacing to prevent doubling) is probably the worst of them, and that it only seems “right” because we are accustomed to it. And it doesn’t generally save paper, because unless you use single spacing you lose vertically the extra space that you gain horizontally.

We need to fix this problem. Now is the time for a margin revolution.

Hat tip: John Cook at The Endeavour.

Fox and Mitchum on the Flynn Effect and how it works

by  Tyler Cowen in

James R. Flynn recommends this paper, by Fox and Mitchum, in his new book:

Secular gains in intelligence test scores have perplexed researchers since they were documented by Flynn (1984, 1987). Gains are most pronounced on abstract, so-called culture-free tests, prompting Flynn (2007) to attribute them to problem solving skills availed by scientifically advanced cultures. We propose that recent-born individuals have adopted an approach to analogy that enables them to infer higher-level relations requiring roles that are not intrinsic to the objects that constitute initial representations of items. This proposal is translated into item-specific predictions about differences between cohorts in pass rates and item-response patterns on the Raven’s Matrices, a seemingly culture-free test that registers the largest Flynn effect. Consistent with predictions, archival data reveal that individuals born around 1940 are less able to map objects at higher levels of relational abstraction than individuals born around 1990. Polytomous Rasch models verify predicted violations of measurement invariance as raw scores are found to underestimate the number of analogical rules inferred by members of the earlier cohort relative to members of the later cohort who achieve the same overall score. The work provides a plausible cognitive account of the Flynn effect, furthers understanding of the cognition of matrix reasoning, and underscores the need to consider how test-takers select item responses.

The paper is here (pdf).

The rickshaw was (possibly) invented by a Westerner

by  Tyler Cowen in

The rickshaw was invented in 1868 by John Goble, an American missionary living in Tokyo.

The source is Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China, which is also a good book.  Wikipedia offers a more complex story about the possible inventors, with some candidates for the inventor being Japanese.  In any case, I had thought of it as a more ancient device than it turns out to be.