Category: Books
Puerto Rico hypergamy fact of the day
In Puerto Rico, women already outearn men — in 2009, women’s wages were 103 percent of men’s. In other regions, women are close to catching up: in the District of Columbia, with a high number of federal workers and a high proportion of minorities, women earn 88 percent of what men do…Among 25- to 34-year-olds working full-time, women’s earnings were 91 percent of men’s in 2010, up from 68 percent in 1979.
That is from Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family. It is an interesting book, though it does not always focus on the questions that I would. The core thesis is that women will learn to marry down and men will learn to marry up.
The text has subtitles like “Women Will Have to Learn to Appreciate New Qualities in Men.”
Here is a paper on “the end of hypergamy,” it has fragments like “we estimate a female hypergamy parameter, following Mare’s example (1991),” plus it introduces me to the word “hypogamy.” The key sentence I suppose is this:
This means that the gender gap in education accounts for almost 80% of the cross-country and within country variance in observed hypergamy.
And it is stated:
According to our results, if current trends in education are to continue the end of hypergamy is near.
That would be for recorded marriages, but at what rate of marriage might such an equalization take place? This paper on hypergamy suggests that marriage rates are falling predominantly for the less educated women; Betsey Stevenson has work on related topics. It is a puzzle for the extreme hypergamy theorists why the rate of marriage for educated women has not fallen lower than it has.
*The Clash of Economic Ideas*
In 1958, on his first visit to India, the Hungarian-British development economist Peter Bauer was eager to meet the Indian economist B.R. Shenoy. Bauer knew the name from a “Note of Dissent on the Memorandum of the Economists’ Panel,” which Shenoy had written criticizing India’s Second five-Year Plan. In 1955 the Indian government had recruited twenty-one senior Indian economists for the Panel of Economists, chaired by the minister of finance, to review the plan. Twenty of the economists had signed a memorandum endorsing the plan. Professor Shenoy was the lone dissenter Shenoy’s “Note of Dissent” was an annoyance to members of the Indian Planning Commission; to Prime Minister Nehru, who had initiated the planning effort; to Nehru’s adviser P.C. Mahalanobis, who had drafted the plan; and even to international aid officials, who overwhelmingly supported the planning effort. Shenoy had become persona non grata in official economic policy-making circles.
Yet Shenoy turned out largely to be right.
That is from the forthcoming excellent book by Lawrence H. White, Amazon link here. The book is not mostly about India, but it is about the role of economic ideas in shaping economic outcomes. The chapter on India is my favorite, however, and it is perhaps the very best place to start to understand the failures of India’s planning period.
White also points our attention to Milton Friedman’s 1955 Memorandum to the Indian Government, which is I believe not well known, not even among Friedman fans.
The book truck
Sometimes the number of books arriving at the house each day exceeds my ability to carry them away (not a complaint), in part because I am not always in town to bring them to the office. Kathleen Fasanella suggests the book truck:
I have a Bretford, 36″ long shelves (6 sloped shelves), 18″ deep, 43″ or so high, 5″ Casters. 2 swivel, 2 lock. It is a welded frame so there is nothing to put together (except to snap in the casters)This model is available at highsmith…http://www.highsmith.com/Bretfordreg-Duro-Book-Truck-6-Sloped-Shelves-43Hnbspxnbsp36Wnbspxnbsp18D-c_21704649/H10251/
The model no is L3W-H10251, bottom of the page at the above link.
This is the least expensive price I found but I don’t know if this company is any good:
http://www.worthingtondirect.com/school_furniture/av_equipment/V336PB_37X18X42H__PUTTY_BEIGE__SIX_SLANT_SHELVES__MOBILE_UTILITY_TRUCK.htm?utm_source=shopzillacom&utm_medium=productfeed&utm_campaign=product
Here is her blog post on how to organize books.
I am going to buy the book truck.
Three new additions to my pile
Jonathan Schlefer, The Assumptions Economists Make.
James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. Not their only co-authorship, now out in paperback.
Claude Shannon and juggling
As he turned away from academic pursuits, Shannon also focused on inviting aspects: It was a game, a problem, a puzzle. It produced motions he considered beautiful. And it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more tantalizing. Shannon would often lament that he had small hands, and thus had great difficulty making the jump from four balls to five — a demarcation, some might argue, between a good juggler and a great juggler. Old friends — fellow jugglers from the Bell Labs days — wrote encouraging letters suggesting he was closer to five balls than he realized. It’s likely Shannon never quite achieved that. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before — for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess — he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.
That is from Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Here is my previous post on the book, which I recommend highly.
How to raise your child, or yourself, an atheist
That is a discussion from Justin L. Barrett’s new and interesting Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. He gives more than equal time to how to raise your child to be religious, but we’re already pretty good at that. Here are his atheism tips, noting that I am excerpting and paraphrasing:
1. Have less-than-average fluency in reasoning about minds.
2. Do not have children.
3. Stay safe.
4. Get in the habit of crediting or blaming humans for whatever you can.
5. Learn to like pseudoagents (including abstractions).
6. Take time to reflect.
7. Add to these factors indoctrination of the young against religion.
The key theme of Barrett’s book is HADD — Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, and how pronounced it is in most human beings.
*The Social Conquest of Earth*
By Edward O. Wilson, Amazon link here. I am a big Wilson fan, but I didn’t find anything new in it, although for some readers it might be a good introduction to a variety of ideas such as eusociality.
I was surprised to see the main blurb as “A monumental exploration of the biological origins of the human condition!” — James D. Watson.
Amazing Bezos
A delightful thought from Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Business Insider.
If you had asked an 11-year-old Jeff Bezos to let his imagination run wild and think of the stuff that he would most dream to have as an adult, he might have said:
- The world’s biggest bookstore! Maybe even a bookstore that can beam any book directly to your hand in an instant (and movies and music, too!).
- A giant sky computer that can imitate human intelligence.
- A spaceship.
- …And maybe even a robot army.
Of course any adult would have smiled slightly condescendingly, patted him on the head and helpfully explained that these things aren’t possible.
Timothy Noah’s *The Great Divergence*
The subtitle is America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. His policy conclusions are:
1. Soak the rich
2. Fatten government payrolls
3. Import more skilled labor
4. Universalize preschool
5. Impose price controls on colleges and universities
6. Reregulate Wall Street
7. Elect Democratic Presidents
8. Revive the labor movement
This book is well-written and it is a useful survey of left-democrat points of view on the problem. I do not think most of these recommendations will much limit inequality (though they may have other virtues), but my main wish is that he had offered some additional possible solutions. #1 on my list is “more innovations which benefit virtually everybody,” which is how the last great equalization (1870-1970 or so) came about. Parts of his list, such as #3, get at this obliquely but it should be front and center of the entire book. Let’s debate how we can make that happen. If there were a new invention as important as the toilet, shareholders would not and could not appropriate most of the gains. “Deregulate housing” and “deregulate medical care” also deserve a ponder, as does “abolish occupational licensing” and “subsidize basic science.” That global inequality has fallen radically is understood and recognized but not emphasized. It is culturally beyond the pale — on the left at least — to write “encourage conversions to Mormonism” but as a recommendation it is right on the mark. This book needs more which is culturally beyond the pale. How about “run some of the bad schools with lots of discipline, more like the KIPP academy?”
*The Idea Factory*
I loved this book and devoured it in a single sitting. The author is Jon Gertner and the subtitle is Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Here is one excerpt:
Scientists who worked on radar often quipped that radar won the war, whereas the atomic bomb merely ended it. This was not a minority view. The complexity of the military’s radar project ultimately rivaled that of the Manhattan Project, but with several exceptions. Notably, radar was a far larger investment on the part of the U.S. government, probably amounting to $3 billion as contrasted with $2 billion for the atomic bomb. In addition, radar wasn’t a single kind of device but multiple devices — there were dozens of different models — employing a similar technology that could be used on the ground, on water, or in the air.
One lesson of this book is how much war can spur innovation. Here is one Gertner article on the themes of the book. Here is a review of the book. Anyone interested in the history of science, tech, or innovation should buy and read this book.
*A Naked Singularity*
Contemporary American fiction faces an ongoing problem of what to write about. Yuppie life in Brooklyn doesn’t have the gravitas, suburban ennui is long since overdone, and so much of American life — mostly for the better — doesn’t face serious moral choices. Sergio de la Pava has solved this problem by writing about the American legal system, set in New York City and with a Colombian immigrant public defender. At first I was skeptical but at page 256 (out of 678) it is still getting better. It is likely to make my “best of the year” list. My five word summary would be “A more approachable William Gaddis.” You will note it is published by University of Chicago press and presumably it is “too serious” to have attracted a major trade contract. It’s not for everyone, but it’s living up to its billing as a sleeper under the radar. You can pre-order it here.
All of postwar development economics in one exchange?
Check out the book Economic Development for Latin America, edited by Howard S. Ellis and Henry C. Wallich, circa 1961 and read Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s classic essay “Notes on the Theory of the “Big Push””.
In ten pages you get the essence of increasing returns arguments, though do see Paul Krugman’s cautionary notes about this era and its lack of formal modeling.
After those ten pages, there is then Celso Furtado, that underrated and perhaps someday forgotten Brazilian economist, who in five pages tries to take PRR apart. The big push didn’t work in Bolivia, and in conclusion
“The point is not, therefore, to show that there are indivisibilities in the production function. The main interest lies in demonstrating how processes can be modified so as to elude the effects of those indivisibilities.”
The reader is then treated to three and a half pages of Ragnar Nurske, who shores up PRR.
There is then transcribed discussion, including remarks from Theodore Schulz (he rejects big push as an analytical tool), Albert Hirschman, Howard Ellis, Henry Wallich, more from Nurske, and Haberler, who wrote:
“…the lumpy factor could often be stretched to accommodate a varying amount of the co-operating factors. The big push was no substitute for normal piecemeal progress.”
That was a popular point in those days. Hirschman also…
“doubted that as a general rule overhead facilities would create a demand for their services. This depended on the kind of entrepreneurship available. Certainly there was no fixed short-run relation between investment in overhead and other investment, since overhead could be stretched.”
Nurske then fought back. Whew!
Reading those twenty pages exhausted me, and transported me to another and earlier era. It was like watching one of those taped 1980s NBA games, as they show them in Taiwan and some other countries, without the timeouts and breaks and besides they weren’t playing much defense anyway.
Overall it raised my estimation of those economists.
*Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics*
Great book, Virginia Postrel tell us it is on Kindle for $3.99. Buy it! Here is my previous post on the book.
Charles Murray on the role of economic forces
This has been debated by Brooks, Krugman, and around the blogosphere, so let us hear from the man himself:
“OK, let’s try this,” he said. “If you get a rising economy, for example, if Barack Obama could say we are going to bring on seven years of incredibly low unemployment, then he would argue that this would do a lot of good to the working class, wouldn’t he?” I agree. “But we already had that in the 1990s, and yet the dropout from the labour force continued to go up, people on social disability went up. Divorce went up. We have no evidence that a robust economy has much to do with these problems at all.”
I point out that many employers complain of a shortage of skills – a large chunk of America’s workforce is not as well equipped as it used to be relative to the rest of the world. If you don’t have the skills to make a living, how can you feel pride in your situation? “Well, that’s a different problem,” says Murray, looking suddenly uninterested. “If you are arguing that 22-year-old men are saying to their girlfriends, ‘I just need a job and then I’ll behave responsibly …’ Well, that’s just bullshit. If you ask women in working class communities, they will say, ‘Why should I marry these losers? It’s like taking another child into the household.’ ”
That is from his FT interview, I am not sure if it is gated for you. The closing paragraph is this:
I feel mildly guilty at having spoiled Murray’s jovial mood but he quickly bounces back. The bill arrives. I disguise my shock at its size. As we get up to leave, Murray says: “Here is an interesting commentary: I was willing to talk to the Financial Times under the influence of alcohol but I’m not willing to play poker under the influence. What does that say?” Don’t worry, I reply, you won’t lose your shirt. Murray laughs. As we are shaking hands, he adds, “I really enjoyed that. We must do it again some time.” Then he strides off in what looks to me like a straight line.
Charles Murray’s policy proposals
To narrow the class divide, that is. I am almost completely in disagreement (how about more aid and opportunity, less attempted equalization?), the Op-Ed is here. In the form of a list:
1. Apply the minimum wage to internships for the young, so privileged children cannot so easily receive this training.
2. Replace the SAT with specific subject tests.
3. Replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action.
4. Sue to challenge the constitutionality of a B.A. degree as a job requirement.
He does admit these proposals will not do so much good in absolute terms, but he nonetheless praises them for their symbolic value.