Category: Current Affairs

Pagamos con pesos?

The New York Times reports (and more):

Pizza Patrón, a Dallas-based pizza chain with many Latino customers,
has begun accepting pesos as payment, hitting a nerve in the nationwide
immigration debate.  Critics call the idea unpatriotic.

I see five readings:

1. This is testament to the remarkable new-found stability of the Mexican peso.  Immigrant arrivals still hold pesos rather than ditching them ASAP.

2. People could have free banking or competing currencies already, if they wanted it.

3. The pizza chain is receiving lots of positive publicity with its Latino customers.  I saw this same item on Primer Impacto last week.

4. If everyone accepted pesos, currency substitution effects would make the demand for dollars harder to predict, and thus monetary policy would be harder to implement.  Inflation would accelerate the velocity of monetary circulation to a greater degree, if dollar inflation is high just switch from dollars to pesos.

5. Change is given at the rate of twelve pesos to the dollar, so this is price discrimination against patriotic and possibly unsavvy Mexican customers.

Sao Paulo is banning outdoor advertising

Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards,
no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling
along the bottom. Come the new year, this city of 11 million,
overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plans to
press the “delete all” button and offer its residents an unimpeded view
of their surroundings…

The outsized billboards and screens that dominate the skyline,
promoting everything from autos, jeans and cellphones to banks and sex
shops, will have to come down, as will all other forms of publicity in
public space, like distribution of fliers.

The law also
regulates the dimensions of store signs and outlaws any advertising on
the sides of the city’s thousands of buses and taxis.

Here is the full story.  As far as I can tell (my last visit was eight years ago, however), most of it is not down yet.  In any case I suspect the city is more attractive with the commercial angle.  The underlying buildings are mostly ugly, so a fanciful clutter will do better than an attempt at sleek postmodernism.

By the way, it was already the case that most of Sao Paulo’s 13,000 or so outdoor billboards were installed illegally.  The goal is to clear the space entirely, so that any single offender sticks out very obviously and can be prosecuted.  But of course the tipping point matters.  Whatever change ends up in place, I expect a slow creep back towards the status quo ex ante.

Markets in everything – Paretian liberal edition

Male workers who vow to stay away from prostitutes after year-end celebrations in South Korea are to be rewarded.

The Ministry for Gender Equality is offering cash to
companies whose male employees pledge not to pay for sex after office
parties.

Men are being urged to register on the ministry’s website.  The companies with most pledges will receive a reward.

Note that the vow is awarded, not the abstinence.  The pointer is from Claudio Shikida, Brazilian economist and blogger.

Global Orgasm Day

Today is global orgasm day.  Why?  Well, why not?  But the organizers do have a larger goal: "To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy, a synchronized Global Orgasm."

Lest you think this is purely prurient, do note that there is an interesting scientific component.   The Global Consciousness Project  is a peculiar project run out of Princeton University that has for many years been running experiments correlating random output devices with human consciousness.  Results from 12 years of experiments show small but highly statistically significant results.

Beginning in 1998 the group started to record data from "eggs" (non-deterministic random number generators) located around the world.  The data show or seem to show higher than random correlations with "global events" such as the funeral of Princess Diana (the events are designated in advance or before examining the data).  The eggs will record whether today’s global orgasm is associated with a perturbation in the global consciousness field.

Do I believe any of this?  No.  Will I participate in the experiment?  Anything for science.

Legistorm Storm

LegiStorm is a web-database with information on the salaries of all Congressional staff.  (It was started by a friend, Jock Friedly.)  You can find data, for example, on which representatives spend the most say on press secretaries.  The salary data has always been "public" on paper, but now that it’s available on the web staff are comparing salaries and wondering why it is that that cute intern is paid so much more than the rest.  Of course, the politicians are not happy and are trying to shut Legistorm down.

More economists get picked up

The Economist blog reports:

We have also heard that Doug Holtz-Eakin, another former Bush administration official who went on to head the Congressional Budget Office, will be John McCain’s top economic advisor. Mr Holtz-Eakin is giving up his current job–running the Centre for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations–to work full-time for the McCain team.

Thanks to Martin Scriblerus for the pointer.

From WSJ Washington Wire

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s less-than-stealth positioning to join the
2008 presidential race took another baby step forward today, when two noted
economists – former chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisors Glenn Hubbard
and Greg Mankiw – signed on to lead his PAC’s Economic Advisory Council. Another
former Bush official, Cesar
Conda
, also signed on.

Thanks to Carrie Conko for the pointer.

Time inconsistent agreements

Matt Yglesias proposes an exchange:

There’s an obvious deal to be cut here — NATO membership for the Baltics is a done deal, but we can return Russia’s "near abroad" to Russia in exchange for Russian cooperation on Iran and North Korea, or else we can have a series of standoffs across a wide Eurasian arc.  Some would call this appeasement and, frankly, the shoe fits decently.  It strikes me, however, as preferable to either going to war with Iran or to having Iran build a nuclear bomb.

I might add that Natasha still thinks I promised to take out the trash every evening.

Milton Friedman passes away at 94

Here is the NYT story, still gated.  Here are more articles

I believe Capitalism and Freedom was the second or third book I ever read on economics and it definitely shaped my life.  I knew Milton only a bit but he was always gracious and of course razor sharp and a lover of liberty and prosperity.  He was one of the most important minds of the second half of the twentieth century and his influence remains felt all around the world.  In purely academic terms, he easily could have won two or three Nobel Prizes from the quality and quantity of his work.

Here is Levitt’s brief tribute.  Here is WSJ.com, via Brad DeLong.

For the curious

At about 8:30 a.m., Tradesports.com is giving the Republicans a 13 to 15 percent chance of Senate control.  The Webb-Allen race, described by newspapers as "too close to call," is being called for Webb; Allen’s chance is about five percent.

Addendum: Chris Masse reports: if Virginia and Montana go Democratic, as of morning yesterday, the prediction markets called every race correctly.