Category: Television

Really.  View it here.  This one is even better.  Here is the Fed on risk protection.  And here: "The Greatest Risk is Not Taking One."  Here is Fed Karaoke.

The economist and blogger.  He is now a screenwriter for Fringe.  But not just; he remains an excellent economist.  Thanks to several MR readers for the pointer.

John A. Courson, chief operating officer of the Mortgage Bankers
Association, a trade group, also pointed with relief to the statement
by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr. on Sunday morning that Fannie and Freddie would examine the fees they
charge banks for loan securitization services, “with an eye toward
mortgage affordability.”

Don’t they…um…"need the money"?  And:

“The government doesn’t have a great deal of interest in foreclosing on
a ton of homes,” said Kurt Eggert, a law professor at Chapman
University in Orange, Calif., and a former member of the Federal
Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council.

And:

While it is not yet clear whether stockholders in Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac will be wiped out entirely, Mr. Paulson did say on Sunday
that the entities “will no longer be managed with a strategy to
maximize common shareholder returns.”

That’s some theorem.  Here is the article.

In a nutshell, yes:

The variation Mr. Gentzkow
and Mr. Shapiro exploited was the timing of the introduction of TV into
different cities. Television began taking off in the U.S. in 1946,
after a wartime ban on TV production was lifted. But the Federal
Communications Commission stopped granting new commercial television
licenses from September 1948 to April 1952 while it made changes in
allocating broadcast spectrum. There was a long lag between when some
cities got television and when others did.

The economists then
looked at results of a survey of 800 U.S. schools that administered
tests to 346,662 sixth-grade, ninth-grade and 12th-grade students in
1965. Their finding: Adjusting for differences in household income,
parents’ educational background and other factors, children who lived
in cities that gave them more exposure to television in early childhood
performed better on the tests than those with less exposure.

The
economists found that television was especially positive for children
in households where English wasn’t the primary language and parents’
education level was lower. "We don’t exactly know why that is, but a
plausible interpretation is that the effect of television on cognitive
development depends on what other kinds of activity television is
substituting for," says Mr. Shapiro, 28.

Here is much more.  And yes the "Mr. Shapiro" is in fact Wunderkind Jesse Shapiro, a familiar figure to MR readers everywhere.  You’ll find two versions of the paper here.

Addendum: Here is Alex’s excellent post on the topic.

Peter Leeson is posting over at Freakonomics on the econometrics of bigfoot and ufos, he finds that states with a lot of ufo sightings also have a lot of bigfoot sightings.  Unfortunately, Leeson draws entirely wrong conclusions from his research.  If he wants to explain his results, my young colleague needs to study the classics. 

This one is a request from a long time ago.  Wintercow20, a loyal MR reader, asked:

What do you think of Top Chef? I am an addict!

I am a fan of reality TV but mostly I have chosen blogging instead.  I’ve seen about a dozen Top Chef episodes, mostly through the urging of darling Yana.  Mark of excellence: the drama is so good that the commentary makes sense even though you can’t taste the food.  It’s a show about learning, excellence, and motivation.  The voice-over narratives are an object lesson in behavioral economics and self-deception.

Here is a wonderful post by Grant McCracken on reality TV; excerpt:

Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely,
one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to
get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer
to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the
process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise
have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into
the studio and prime time.  Reality programming is contemporary culture
on tap.  It is by no means a "raw feed."  That is YouTube’s job.  But
it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by
their own efforts.  In effect, reality programming is "stealing
signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit.  (Mixed
metaphor alert.  Darn it, too late.)

Grant adds: "Reality programming also serves as a way for a divergent culture to
stay in touch."

Addendum: I don’t see why she married Salman Rushdie; books are reproducible after all.

Second addendum: Here is Matt Yglesias, on the new form of reality TV…markets indeed in truly everything.

According to the morals of urban area residents in Japan, the assumption that “it is scenery [viewable] from public roads and therefore it must be public” is in fact incorrect. Quite the contrary, [these morals state that] “people walking along public roads must avert their glance from the living spaces right before their eyes."

…With this culture [of privacy], if you were to walk along a residential street in an urban area of Tokyo, every 10 meters surveying all 360 degrees of your surroundings, there’s no question that you would be reported to the police within 30 minutes. Even just filming the scenery from the street with camera in hand, there’s no question that if you tried to shoot the area not covered by Street View, you would be asked, after initial questioning, to come to either the Ikegami Police Station or the Den-en-Chofu Police Station.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout.  Keep also in mind that Japanese urban residents are more likely to urinate in public or use a love hotel than are, I think, most Americans. 

I thank Riemannzeta for the pointer.

Yesterday, I was supposed to be on Street Signs with Erin Burnett to talk about the effect of the Iraq war on the state of the economy.  Sadly, they canceled me at the last minute.  Bummer.  Then when I got home, there it was, waiting, mocking, the Tivo recording of "my show."  I felt bad but… I had to watch.

Heh, they got Joe Stiglitz to replace me!  Well, anything less than a Nobel prize and I would have been insulted but I feel much better now!  Amusingly, Stiglitz and I are good substitutes on this issue.  In case you are wondering, we both think that at the present time the net effect of the Iraq war is (modestly) contractionary rather than stimulative due to higher oil prices, higher interest rates and less wealth.

The Buddhist notion of "Dharma" refers to a state of affairs where people are liberated from the cycles of both birth and death.  Babies cannot be born on the island and it is an open question whether one can really die there so the island is an attempt to realize this ideal.  Of course the original project on the island is called The Dharma Initiative.  The Buddhist notion of Bardo involves reviewing the major events of one’s previous life, as represented by the show’s frequent flashbacks.  More generally the islanders are most likely experiencing a cycling of bardos and it is no accident that we are now peering into their futures.  Ben and Widmore represent two evil spirits of the Buddhist pantheon, dueling for the power to corrupt and to control life and death.  The numbers which reappear in various contexts, including 108, and the sequence of winning lottery numbers, are taken from Buddhist mythology (see the links).  Desmond’s retreat from the world, and his ability to foresee Charlie’s death, are both very Buddhist themes.  Claire’s baby is probably a reincarnation and John Locke is arguably a Tulku and he is explicitly tested as such in the last season.  The names Rousseau, Hume, and Locke are used because one theme is Western philosophy confronting the truths of the East.  Here is more and try this too though it is vague.  Here’s the single best page.  Aldous Huxley is an influence as well.  The Buddhist interpretation isn’t new, but no one quite seems to have said "This is it."  Toss in time travel, and a bunch of women who look like underwear models, and you can explain most of the apparent anomalies in the plot.

Let’s say you meet up with an alien race and you need to bargain with them by radio or some other method of signaling.  You don’t have any other information other than your knowledge of human beings.  What traits should you think are overrepresented in humans, relative to what a rerun of evolution can be expected to produce in an intelligent being?  Would you expect them to be more or less benevolent than humans?

Should it matter if they have demonstrated superior technology?  Should such achievement make you think they are more or less cooperative toward "outsiders"?

Let’s say the "alien beings" are designed robots, like Cylons.  How would that change your answer?  But unlike in BSG you know only that they were once designed.  What if you know the robots were designed not by evolved beings but by other designed robots?  Does it matter how many levels of robot design enter the picture?

Tyler to Will:

No you can’t agree with me because its absurd.  I can agree with your absurd view, but you can’t agree with mine.   

That is from my Bloggingheads debut; Robin Hanson reproduces one critical and entertaining part of the transcript, in which I explain which is my most absurd belief.

Here is the link to the show, I am sorry that I cannot embed it.  The chat covers many topics, including whether capitalism will triumph, whether you should have more kids, and which country is most likely to be hit by the next nuclear weapon attack.  Can you guess my pick?  Hint: It’s not the U.S. or even Saudi Arabia or Israel.

I conclude with this:

If no one agrees with you, you should be quite worried.  If only a small number of people agree with you, you still should be quite worried.  I don’t think it’s a numbers game, but I think whatever view you end up with, it doesn’t have to be a majority point of view, that reasons have weight, not just adding up whoever agrees with you.  But you still ought to say at the end of the day, look all those other people are against me, maybe I think I’m right probability 57 to 43, but on any truly controversial question among intelligent people, you should never think it’s 95 to 5 in your favor. 

Addendum: Ann Althouse embeds the parenting discussion.

Here is a mini-dialogue that Seth Roberts and I worked up; it is about Entertainment Weekly, arguably my favorite magazine.  Seth starts off:

When my friends look puzzled that I subscribe to EW I say “entertainment” means art.  It’s about art. They could have called it Art Weekly but they didn’t want to scare people.

Later, I wrote this:

I find the grades for books are the least reliable section of EW.
Which for me means they are the most reliable section.  If they like a
book, I know to stay away.  How could a critic be better or more
trustworthy than that? Too many readers are too concerned about
affiliating themselves with prestigious magazines, rather than learning
something.

I enjoyed experimenting with the dialog format. Seth and I often think alike, while having different things to say, which I think makes us suitable partners in such a venture.