Category: Television

The Onion has clearly been reading Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.

In The Know: Candidates Compete For Vital Idgit Vote

Here’s from Robert Jensen and Emily Oster:

Cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the
developing world. The availability of cable and satellite television
exposes viewers to new information about the outside world, which may
affect individual attitudes and behaviors. This paper explores the
effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in
rural India. Using a three-year individual-level panel dataset, we find
that the introduction of cable television is associated with
improvements in women’s status. We find significant increases in
reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating
and decreases in reported son preference. We also find increases in
female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via
increased birth spacing). The effects are large, equivalent in some
cases to about five years of education in the cross section, and move
gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in
urban areas. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing
differential trends. These results have important policy implications,
as India and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women.

Here is the paper, here is a non-gated version.  The pointer is from David Zetland.

Ezra Klein has a neat argument:

…the incentives are changing.  Assume that the incentive for going on television is to raise your profile (which is about 75 percent correct).  If I went on television five years ago, a large part of my incentive would be to make the host like me.  After all, these appearances pass in an instant, and most of you would never see the program.  So if I want to reach the maximum number of people with my arguments and do the most to increase my visibility, I want to keep coming back.

Now, however, with YouTube and GoogleVideo and online archiving, a single, contentious appearance can be seen on the internet a million times.  Everyone, after all, has seen Stewart berate Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, but very few of us had actually tuned in that day.  Similarly, my segment on the Kudlow show, replayed on the internet a few thousand times, did much more for my reputation among the audience relevant to my success than have my more friendly, but bland, appearances on other shows.

Making sense often requires you to be disruptive, and not long ago, being disruptive was probably a bad idea.  Now it’s a good one.  And since the channels are wising up and putting their videos online with advertising before them, they also want widespread online dissemination of appearances, and so their incentives are increasingly aligned with mine.  Does this mean more folks will be making sense?  Not necessarily.  But it means there might be more room for sense-making.

Or is Ezra just being deliberately disruptive to get links?  How will TV hosts respond to maintain equilibrium?  Invite fewer uncontrolled guests?  Invite fewer guests period?  Or will contestability force hosts to invite more disruptive guests?

Your suspicion is correct, there is a contestant named Elmer.  The winning inventor with the best new idea, as determined by a four-person panel, gets a million dollars and national fame on this ABC show.  The jury includes George Foreman, who says yes to almost everything, and a sour but articulate British gentleman, who says no to virtually everything.  One of the panel members praises the development of an inflatable neck brace to prevent people from "drownding."

Watch on-line episodes here.  Wikipedia is here.

The ideas included a foot pedal to lift the lid on toilets at night, a funnel for toilet use, a bra with no strap in the back (isn’t that old?), a hands-free flashlight which attaches at the neck and projects upright and forward, a way to rub down the back of your spouse using the TV remote, a computer program which matches strangers in a bar according to their pre-programmed interests (didn’t I blog that once?), a jacket which helps deaf people feel the vibrations from music, and a foam cushion which holds up the heads of small babies.

The winners of this episode came from MIT and Harvard Business School.  Two nerdy guys produced and demonstrated a way of storing bikes vertically in a garage; I wasn’t impressed.

The main lessons are twofold.  First, many people pour years of their lives and love into projects which are absurd on the face of it and could be revealed as such within seconds. 

Second, when it comes to the (possibly) good inventions, it is very very difficult to tell what is a good idea and what isn’t.  Without sector-specific knowledge, how do you know if that no-strap-in-the-back bra is a novelty?  It sounded good and indeed it looked good but I just don’t have the experience (or the attentiveness?) to say.

The real world doesn’t judge inventions with a panel of four quasi-celebrities (sadly Charles Nelson Reilly is now dead) and most valuable novelties are process innovations, produced while someone is working full-time doing something pretty similar.

In my evil, wicked fantasy world I imagine economics graduate students presenting their new Ph.d. dissertation ideas to a jury of four: Paul Lynde, Fred Thompson, Charles Barkley, and Kenny Smith.

I thank several loyal MR readers for the pointer.

Why not ask me?

"A lot of school is about developing alliances, contacts and a self image," he [Cowen] says, "and if you’re a movie star, you don’t really need those things."

Here is much more.

Most bets say he will survive the final episode; Ezra agrees.  Here are more predictions.  The formal odds are 150-110 that he will survive. Via Kottke, here is a betting sheet.

The first disc of this BBC-produced nature series blew me away, buy it here.  Amazon calls it "quite simply the greatest nature/wildlife series ever produced," and no it doesn’t matter that the narrative is at a fourth-grade level and fails to mention the Hotelling rule or the tragedy of the commons.

Of course I’m not talking about myself here, Tyler is candidate-neutral.  I’m talking about other people.  Can they just say "I like his character on TV, I think I’ll vote for him"?

Surely there exists some game in which this strategy makes sense (I always chuckle when I write this line).  Let’s say many other people vote the same way and thus expect this same character from him.  Isn’t he then locked into playing this character to some extent?  Of course this means you should favor only truly popular and typecast actors, since an obscure actor, or any actor with many different roles, won’t be much locked in. 

And if he can play the character on TV, maybe he can play the character in the Oval Office as well.  The actual content of policy would still be driven by his ability to pick and heed good advisors, which presumably is not negatively correlated with acting ability or with the nature of this single character.  In fact maybe his agent told him to take the role and he listened.

Ankush has negative remarks on Thompson.

With German themes, really.  Here.  Some of it is in German with subtitles.  I had never seen these before.

Thanks to Yana for the pointer.

…explore the potential effects of not only making cable tv a la carte, but also requiring that television content providers allow choice in how the consumer pays for the service – either an advertisement based system or a fee that would eliminate the commercials.  Additionally, require that the consumers be given a choice of types of advertisements they would be exposed to (I could choose for example an advertisement-based model, but that I would not want to see ads for children’s toys or cereal, and that I wanted to see no political ads).

Here is my earlier post on a’la carte cable.  The second question is, in effect, whether a cable company should be allowed to own TiVo and similar providers.  Yes, and Grossman and Hart suggest such mergers can encourage joint investments with value specific to that relationship, in this case perhaps computer-TV linkages.  By the way, the net effect of TiVo will be more shows with ads; if they add commercials to The Sopranos, the people who hate ads can take them out themselves.

Buying and selling specific ads?  The people who want to zap children’s ads for sugar are precisely the homes the advertisers wish to reach; I’ll bet the Coasian equilibrium keeps the ads running but involves parental quotas on TV watching.

#08 in a series of 50.

I start with the obvious: he is 51 and never married.  So the "foreign woman" bit probably is an artifice to avoid admitting bachelorhood is his preferred long-run equilibrium.  Beyond that, he should seek out a reliable third party certifier.  One is Uncle Sam; Natasha was a longstanding U.S. citizen when we married.  But if he seeks a non-citizen, parents are possible certifiers.  He should go to India but not even try to meet Indian women.  He should try to meet Indian parents.  Yes he may be given the worst daughter but at least he gets someone who is still part of her family. 

What traits should he look for in a foreign woman?  He should avoid countries which lost the Cold War.  Avoid women met in hotels or hotel rooms.  Avoid countries which generate large amounts of spam.  Hepatitis counts as a minus.  How about a plus for women who work in agriculture?  Any other advice?  Readers, feel free to pile on…

Addendum: Here is an excellent article on seeking a bride in the Ukraine, via Jason Kottke.  It does not refute my hypotheses.

No, it is not Firefly or Battlestar Galactica.  But maybe you, like I, are starved for good science fiction, yet feel that almost everything out there is rot, whether written or on the screen.  For eleven episodes — until cancellation of course — you can pretend that the rest of the world is more like you than it really is.  The premise is that aliens have sent a pulsating fractal signal which is transforming human DNA and turning some of us into evil replicators.  Only a crackerjack team of beautiful women, nerds, bald black career bureaucrats, and midgets can stop them.  The philosophical content is to query whether evolution isn’t repugnant by its very nature, and why we think we are so special.  Don’t expect the sky, but if you are at all tempted, try it, more info here.