Category: Uncategorized
Kathy and Carol Fata
From ages four to seven we lived in Fall River, Massachusetts. A few houses up the block lived Kathy and Carol Fata, who were a year or two older than I was. They were nonetheless friends with my sister and me. In fact they were probably the first real friends I ever had. They were consistently nice to me, and they liked to play with our dog.
They also were Syrian, or so I heard at the time. No one thought this was objectionable and all of us were very fond of them, their parents too.
Here is a short history of the Syrian-Lebanese in Fall River (pdf).
Some sources indicate the term “Syrian-Lebanese” was crafted by the Middle Easterners themselves, most of all in Brazil. When a lot of the Syrian-Lebanese migration to the New World occurred, the modern states of Syria and Lebanon, as we know them (knew them?), did not exist.
The first Syrian immigrants arrived in the United States from Ottoman Syria. Most of them came from Christian villages around Mount Lebanon (before the creation of Republic of Lebanon), while around 5-10% were Muslims of different sects. A small number were also Palestinians.
So it once was called Syria. In the 1920s, these immigrants switched from calling themselves “Syrians” to “Lebanese,” and given the location of Mount Lebanon today they would be Lebanese by nationality.
According to the 2000 Census, there are 142,897 Americans of Syrian ancestry living in the United States. These individuals include or have included Steve Jobs, Paula Abdul, Paul Anka, Mitch Daniels, and Yasser Seirawan. Jerry Seinfeld’s mother is of Syrian Jewish descent. Overall Arab-Americans have a higher than average per capita income in the United States and I suspect lower than average crime rates.
It seems downright bizarre to me to think we cannot take in 20,000 Syrian refugees or, heaven forbid, a greater number yet. There are right now children in Syria who could have lives comparable to those of Kathy and Carol Fata. Or not.
Friday assorted links
2. Why don’t elephants explode? A claim that the wind shortage is a data illusion.
3. 2015 was not a year of significant U.S. wage gains. And New York City ramps up its war against Coase.
4. Chelsea Clinton for President.
5. IS-LM really did fail for the 1980s.
6. Long-run migrant elasticities are larger than short-run migrant elasticities. And I sometimes say, only partly tongue in cheek, “the future comes first to Israel and Singapore.” And Henry Farrell interviews Joshua Ober on ancient Greece.
7. The NBER nudge, based on the order in which papers are presented.
Economics in Jonathan Franzen’s *Purity*
America’s hottest author apparently has been thinking about economics, as you can see on page one:
It wasn’t as if Pip felt good about making fun of her mother. But their dealings were all tainted by moral hazard, a useful phrase she’d learned in college economics.
Or later:
“America put too much carbon into the atmosphere, renewable energy could help with that, federal and state governments were forever devising new tax inducements, the utilities were indifferent-to-moderately-enthusiastic about greening their image, a gratifyingly non-negligible percentage of California households and businesses were willing to pay a premium for cleaner electricity, and this premium, multiplied by many thousands and added to the money flowing from Washington and Sacramento, minus the money that went to the companies that actually made or installed stuff, was enough to pay 15 salaries at Renewable Solutions and placate its venture-capitalist backers.”
There is even some Widow’s Cruse:
Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products.
Ted Gioia liked it. Laura Miller liked it. Here is a useful Christian Lorentzen review. Here is Colm Toibin’s take:
“Purity,” in other words, depends more on story than on style. It can seem, in fact, as though there is a battle going on in the novel between the slackness of its style and the amount of sharp detail and careful noticing, especially regarding Pip’s role as a damaged innocent in need of rescue and redemption. Most of the time, there is something oddly invisible about the style, so that you do not notice it as the plot moves from event to event.
Overall, after sixty-one pages of reading, I would not dissuade the eager, nor would I attempt to convert the skeptical. I am closer to the latter group, as the main theme, described by Sam Tanenhaus as “the false idolatry of the digital age,” is too close to my daily life to interest me further; it’s Raskolnikov, Captain Ahab, and Colonel Kurtz for me. It is Beauty is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan from Indonesia, that I am waiting for: “There is much dying in the novel.”
Thursday assorted links
2. Is most of the world’s biodiversity underground? Paper is here.
3. And you thought gdp revisions were tough. At least this one was in the upward direction. By a lot.
4. Preschool for robots. And “The Cotsbot robot, which has a vision system, is designed to seek out starfish and give them a lethal injection.”
5. Bill Easterly’s development economics reading list (pdf).
Who should take in more Syrian refugees?
Of course the United States should take in more Syrians, but we are not the only laggard:
Of the 4 million Syrians who have fled their country since the war began, including hundreds of thousands who have poured into Europe, the number who have been resettled in Britain could fit on a single London Underground train — with plenty of seats to spare.
Just 216 Syrian refugees have qualified for the government’s official relocation program, according to data released last week.
By the way, not long ago there were over 1.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria (pdf), I wonder how they figure in all the recent numbers we are seeing.
Before the 1920s, large numbers of Syrians (Syrian-Lebanese) emigrated to Brazil, most of all to Sao Paulo, with a second and smaller wave coming in the 1950s. As of March:
Since 2013 when Brazil opened its doors, 1,740 Syrian refugees have been registered in the country – far more than in the US.
But still that is not many compared to the preexisting total. According to the above link, Brazil has about 15 million Arabs and about three million people of Syrian descent, and by virtually all accounts this connection has benefited the rest of Brazil too, not just the migrants.
Here is my earlier post Will Latin America Stay Underpopulated for Another Century? And can you guess where that top photo is from?
Is there a wind shortage?
In academia, no, but in the real world perhaps:
Electricity generated by US wind farms fell 6 per cent in the first half of the year even as the nation expanded wind generation capacity by 9 per cent, Energy Information Administration records show.
The reason was some of the softest air currents in 40 years, cutting power sales from wind farms to utilities…
“We never anticipated a drop-off in the wind resource as we have witnessed over the past six months,” David Crane, chief executive of power producer NRG Energy, told analysts last month…
Standard and Poor’s put a negative outlook on bonds issued by two wind farm companies as their revenues tracked wind speeds lower.
“Although our current expectation is that the wind resource will revert back to historical averages, at this time it is unclear when that will happen,” the rating agency said.
Wind generated 4.4 per cent of US electricity last year, up from 0.4 per cent a decade earlier. But this year US wind plants’ “capacity factor” has averaged just a third of their total generating capacity, down from 38 per cent in 2014. EIA noted that slightly slower wind speeds can reduce output by a disproportionately large amount.
The Gregory Meyer FT article is here. Here are some earlier articles on wind speeds slowing down, some of them appear to be reputable. According to this recent article, for parts of 2015 wind speeds may be 20-50 percent below average in the American West. Caveat emptor, but food for thought.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The Chinese local debt situation is getting worse.
2. Will self-driving cars have windscreen wipers? And are the cars too safe and hesitant?
3. First fully automated restaurant, hope you like quinoa.
4. Has the U.S. economy become less interest rate-sensitive? (pdf)
5. Why Christopher Balding doesn’t believe Chinese gdp figures. And Europe, according to China, funny, recommended.
A simple primer for understanding China’s downturn
I’ve covered these ideas before a number of times, but now the Chinese slowdown is common knowledge, so let’s put them in one place:
1. You can’t invest 45-50 percent of your gdp very well forever. It’s amazing how long China’s run has been, but it is over. The quality of their marginal investments is now low and that means their growth rate will be much lower too. The low hanging fruit is gone, at least for the time being. They might later on resurrect some new low-hanging fruit through institutional reform, we’ll see if they end up stuck in the middle income trap but right now they are at a sharp discontinuity.
2. There is no simple way to switch to a “consumption-driven” economy without the growth rate both falling and staying permanently lower. Structural reforms are absolutely called for, but in this context they represent a surrender to a lower rate of growth and thus they are especially difficult to pull off in a politically sustainable manner.
3. The Chinese have been growing at ten percent or nearly ten percent for about thirty-five years. More than a generation of Chinese is used to treating the risk premium as if they don’t have to worry about it. I shudder to think what economic and also political decisions have been made on that basis.
4. The Chinese economic response to the dwindling of their low-hanging fruit is sharp rather than smooth because there is a sudden revision of expectations, as people realize the risk premium isn’t zero after all. And seeing the others see that causes the new set of beliefs to spread pretty quickly. That is a very painful process for a macroeconomy, and it is not well captured by simple AD-AS analysis, although of course it has implications for both AD and AS.
5. I would not so quickly infer that the Chinese government is stupid when it comes to economics. It is true their actions do not correspond to what professional economists would recommend. But they are painted into a very unpleasant corner and have lots of interest groups to feed. Their observed response is possibly explained by some kind of public choice-constrained, nested game, internal conflict-driven seventh-best response. They were smart a few years ago, and they are still smart now. That doesn’t mean they will end up doing a good job.
6. Avoid mood affiliation! You can be a pessimist about the Chinese recession now without being a) a pessimist about China in the longer run, or b) a pessimist about Chinese political stability. Those are separate albeit related questions, and you are not forced to have the same mood response to all of them.
Keep this primer on hand at all times. It is more useful than trying to twist the C + I + G tautology into a series of causal statements about China.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Laura Miller on Elena Ferrante.
2. In praise of law reviews and jargon-filled academic writing. And more on the marginal value of a good teacher.
3. Why do people do good spontaneously? And Harvard responds to complaints about its faculty health plan. More on the crack team of Chinese monkeys. Dramatic but not ridiculous claims about China.
4. Scott Sumner dissents on reach for yield. I don’t think easier money will boost the American economy right now. So I think you just get a loanable funds effect and then possibly a reach for yield.
5. Peak things?
Facts about Mexicans
In 2012, 5.9 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico lived in the U.S., down about 1 million from 2007. Despite the drop, Mexicans still make up a slight majority (52% in 2012) of unauthorized immigrants. At the same time, unauthorized immigration overall has leveled off in recent years. As a result, net migration from Mexico likely reached zero in 2010, and since then more Mexicans have left the U.S. than have arrived.
There is more at the link, might I have found this reference through Michael Clemens?
Do financial crises lie in Africa’s future?
The likes of Zambia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, and Ivory Coast have all issued foreign currency dominated sovereign bonds in recent years.
Ghana is one African nation with a history of debt crises (pdf), and also dating back to the 1980s (pdf). Tanzania was another offender, both current and past (pdf), and for a while a lot of lending to Africa dried up and that limited the number of possible debt crises. But now…?
Here is Amadou Sy at Brookings, telling us it is not yet time to worry. Here is the African Development Bank worrying a bit more than that:
Today, a third of African countries have debt to GDP ratios in excess of 40 percent. The outstanding sovereign debt for Africa as a whole increased 2.6 times between 2009Q2 and 2015Q2. In contrast, total debt in developing countries rose 2.3 times over the same period. The appreciation of the dollar has raised the nominal currency values of dollar denominated debts. Thus Africa’s outstanding bond debt is already 29 percent higher today in real terms than it would have been had the dollar remained at its March 2011 level…
Here is Andrew England at the FT:
A recent note by Fathom Consulting highlighted a 40 per cent year-on-year dip in Chinese imports from Africa for July. Martyn Davies, chief executive of Frontier Advisory, a group that specialises in Africa-China investment, says there is anecdotal evidence of an easing in Chinese activity on the continent. “The hurdle rates of Chinese sovereign wealth investment, or part sovereign wealth fund invested projects in Africa have been raised so the capital is more discerning and seeks greater profitability,” he says.
Here is my previous post on which countries are most likely to experience the next financial crises.
Monday assorted links
1. Human capital leading up to the Industrial Revolution.
2. How will European cinema fare under a single digital market? “Is he a collaborator?”
3. In America, is there too much TV?
4. What the Chinese 2008 stimulus looked like. And the Chinese use a bevy of animals to clear the parade skies.
5. How is the Greek election shaping up? Exit interview with Olivier Blanchard.
6. Consumption inequality tracks income inequality by more than we used to think. Is scalping ruining the Disney dining experience?
Will Syria *ever* come back?
In just 4 years, over half of Syria’s population of 22m has been killed, displaced or fled the country.
Tweet here, by Paul Kirby.
Sunday assorted links
1. Ten misunderstandings about beer (the culture that is China). And does “ethical food” taste better?
2. Oliver Burkeman makes claims about sleep.
3. Interview about microscopes and other things.
5. Ruth Leger Sivard has passed away: “With what she knows, she has every right to get on a rooftop and scream,” Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy wrote in 1986. “Instead, after 10 years of analyzing what 142 of the planet’s governments spend their citizens’ money on, she remains a clarifier. The field is small. Few are as skilled.”
6. Various airport ratings, including which countries’ citizens rate airports the highest and lowest.
Utah fact (estimate) of the day
One of my web searches turned up a study from Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) on the demographics of Mormons. According to the ARIS study, there are now 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men in the state of Utah—a 50 percent oversupply of women.
The article considers data on Orthodox Jews as well, via Jodi Ettenberg.
Solve for the equilibrium, as they say, and please consider as many different variables as possible…