Category: Uncategorized
Coasean kidnappings and the bargaining range
One of the highest ransoms ever paid — US $60 million for the two Born brothers in Argentina in 1975 — was negotiated by one of the captives himself: Jorge Born. As a company insider, he knew how much money could be raised, but it still took seven months before his captors were convinced that they had truly squeezed him dry. When it finally arrived, the father felt he had no option but to accede to the memorandum signed by his son and his kidnappers. So negotiators work extremely hard to avoid parallel negotiations and bat away unhelpful interventions from the hostage. It is not surprising that some victims despair.
That is from the new and interesting Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business, by Anja Shortland.
Thursday assorted links
1. Umps are bad at calling strikes.
2. The Non-Non-libertarian FAQ.
3. Small towns are doing better out west.
4. “The Travis Corcoran novel (a sequel to last year’s winner) the moon colonists consult a “Cowen wiki” to figure out where to eat, and Corcoran says in the Afterword that this is a hat tip to you.” Or so I am told.
5. Why doesn’t the price of on-line higher education fall more? A very interesting and important symposium.
6. “The data don’t seem to support the claim that human capital investments are most effective when targeted at younger ages.” A very interesting and important post.
Filibuster sentences to ponder
These data reveal that, in half of the Congresses over the past two decades, successful filibustering minorities usually represented more people than the majorities they defeated.
That is from Benjamin Eidelson in Yale Law Review, note that he is covering only 1991-2010.
What Explains Labor’s Declining Share of Revenue in Major League Baseball?
Somehow I had missed this earlier paper by John Charles Bradbury:
Since the early-2000s, the share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players has been diminishing similar to the decline of labor’s share of revenue observed in the US economy. This study examines potential explanations for the decline in baseball, which may result from related factors and provide information relevant to explaining this macroeconomic trend. The results indicate that the value-added from non-player inputs, collective bargaining agreement terms, and related changes in the returns to winning contributed to the decline of players’ share of income. Competition from substitute foreign labor and physical capital are not associated with the decline in labor’s share of income in baseball.
There is also this sentence:
The decline in labor’s revenue share in MLB is consistent with changes in revenue share in the hospitality and leisure industry that experienced a decrease in labor’s share of income from 65.7 percent to 62.1 percent between 1987 and 2011 (Elsby, Hobijn, and Şahin 2013).
Another hypothesis I have heard is that baseball players are not nearly as good at, or as well-suited for, the use of social media, as compared say to the more visible basketball players. Another (quite speculative) claim is that sabermetrics has commoditized a lot of players and in turn lowered their bargaining power.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Andrea O’Sullivan reviews Big Business for Reason magazine: “In true Cowenesque fashion, the book starts out with a markedly contrarian premise that by the last page seems so evident that you wonder why it first felt outlandish at all. I expect that even the most dogged big business critic will feel just a little tenderer towards today’s titans by the end (whether they want to admit it or not).”
2. Boeing and innovation (NYT).
3. Interview with Preston McAfee.
Are big projects up and running again?
Amazon’s plan to launch thousands of internet satellites to connect billions of people around the world represents a serious and underappreciated entrant in the space business, multiple analysts and industry executives told CNBC.
Here is the full story. And for Facebook and Africa:
The company is in talks to develop an underwater data cable that would encircle the continent, according to people familiar with the plans, an effort aimed at driving down its bandwidth costs and making it easier for the social media giant to sign up more users.
Both developments promise to contribute to the central achievement of our age, namely tying people to information, and to other people, at a hitherto unprecedented scale, mobile devices included of course.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Will space colonization be fully automated?
3. Earlier 20th century criticisms of the Electoral College, maybe not what you think.
4. “Two-thirds of roads in Sweden are privately operated and managed by local Private Road Associations (PRAs).” Link here.
5. High-speed rail Addis Ababa to Djibouti (NYT, recommended).
Genes, income, and happiness
Significant differences between genetic correlations indicated that, the genetic variants associated with income are related to better mental health than those linked to educational attainment (another commonly-used marker of SEP). Finally, we were able to predict 2.5% of income differences using genetic data alone in an independent sample. These results are important for understanding the observed socioeconomic inequalities in Great Britain today.
That is from a new paper by W. David Hill, et.al. And from Abdel Abdellouai’s summary:
Educational attainment shows a larger genetic overlap with subjective wellbeing than IQ does (rgs = .11 & .03, respectively), while income shows a larger genetic overlap with subjective wellbeing than both education or IQ (rg = .32).
All via Richard Harper.
Monday assorted links
U.S.A. fact of the day, *Jump-Starting America*
The United States, as of 2014, spends 160 times as much exploring space as it does exploring the oceans.
That is from the new and interesting Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, two very eminent economists. And if you are wondering, I believe those numbers are referring to government efforts, not the private sector. I am myself much more optimistic about the economic prospects for the oceans than for outer space.
Most of all this book is a plea for radically expanded government research and development, and a return to “big science” projects.
Overall, books on this topic tend to be cliche-ridden paperweights, but I found enough substance in this one to keep me interested. I do, however, have two complaints. First, the book promotes a “side tune” of a naive regionalism: “here are all the areas that could be brought back by science subsidies.” Well, maybe, but it isn’t demonstrated that such areas could be brought back in general, as opposed to reshuffling funds and resources, and besides isn’t that a separate book topic anyway? Second, too often the book accepts the conventional wisdom about too many topics. Was the decline of science funding really just a matter of will? Is it not at least possible that federal funding of science fell because the return to science fell? Curing cancer seems to be really hard. Furthermore, some of the underlying problems are institutional: how do we undo the bureaucratization of society so that the social returns to science can rise higher again? Will a big government money-throwing program achieve that end? Maybe, but the answers on that one are far from obvious. This is too much a book of levers — money levers at that — rather than a book on complex systems. I would prefer a real discussion of how today science has somehow become culturally weird, compared say to Mr. Spock and The Professor on Gilligan’s Island. The grants keep on going to older and older people, and we are throwing more and more inputs at problems to get at best diminishing returns. Help!
Still, I read the whole thing through with great interest, and it covers some of the very most important topics.
Sunday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. The productivity slowdown was Transatlantic.
2. Dominic Cummings splat starts with Soviets ends with drones.
3. The agency fight, explained (NYT).
4. Robin Hanson on trusting big business.
5. Cats know their name, but don’t really care.
6. Vitalik Buterin on collusion.
7. Good pro-Fortnite piece, mentions in passing that Fortnite is another social network competing with Facebook (NYT).
Friday assorted links
The friendship paradox and systematic biases in perceptions and social norms
Except I call it the Twitter paradox, and it is about how neurotics really get on each others’ nerves:
The “friendship paradox” (first noted by Feld in 1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this oversampling of more popular people can lead people to perceive more engagement than exists in the overall population. This feeds back to amplify engagement in behaviors that involve complementarities. Also, people with the greatest proclivity for a behavior choose to interact the most, leading to further feedback and amplification. These results are consistent with studies finding overestimation of peer consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs and with resulting high levels of drug and alcohol consumption.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ruby Warrington, Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Concentration Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol. Both the title and content make it self-recommending.
2. Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare. “One key argument is that Shakespeare’s form of classical fabling was profoundly antiheroic because it was constantly attuned to the force of sexual desire.” Bate is very smart and this book shows it.
3. Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security. An important contribution to political science, expanding on their concept of “weaponized interdependence,” namely how the U.S. (and sometimes other political actors) uses access to international networks, such as SWIFT, to push other nations around. See #weaponizedinterdependence on Twitter for an introduction.
4. Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict that Made the Modern World. Covers the Phoenicians, Venice, the Dutch Golden Age, the rise of the British empire, and more. Interesting throughout, but I most liked the final section on why there are no seapowers today, and why China and Russia never will be seapowers. Overall a nice integration of geopolitics and culture.
5. Rucker C. Johnson and Alexander Nazaryan, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. A good summary of what the subtitle promises, though I was hoping for more attention on the costs and losers from those arrangements.
6. Guzel Yakhina, Zukeikha. Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, a Tatar woman is sent into exile in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. This is one of the novels I enjoyed this year, several others I know concur.