3. Japan fact of the day: “…the number of foreign workers, though still relatively small, has nearly doubled over the past eight years, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party is considering policies to speed up arrivals.” Please note the link is noisy.
4. “Professional chefs, who one might think would be an ideal demographic, are not frequent customers. Sven says they have a haughty attitude toward cookbooks.” Link here.
6. What is the most relaxing song of them all? (Frankly, it pissed me off.) And this: “But time and social change have been rough on the Beach Boys. Their best-known hits (say, “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Get Around”) are poems of unenlightened straight-male privilege, white privilege, beach privilege. It is hard to imagine that they helped anyone toward self-determination or achieving their social rights.” I say they’re mostly about melancholy, thank goodness not everything is didactic.
According to the most recent Statistics Canada data, in 2012, women over 40 gave birth to 13,395 children, while teenagers produced 12,915. Demographers have been expecting this tipping point for decades. In 1974, the older age group gave birth to just 3,550 children while teenagers produced 38,650—and the numbers have shifted each year since. The transition has just been confirmed in the U.K. and Australia as well, while data show that men are also fathering children later in life: the average age of Canadian fathers at birth of their children was 41 in 2011, compared to 39 in 1995.
That is from Meagan Campbell. On another issue, Ian Bremmer calls this the best Canada fact he’s seen all year.
In the latest video from our Principles of Macroeconomics course at MRUniversity we look at a question that has come up in this election, Is the unemployment rate undercounted?
A homeowner took to a message board Sunday to complain about her neighbor’s sign supporting the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The anonymous homeowner said his or her family lived in a liberal part of Northern Virginia and were putting their house up for sale. The homeowner feared that the Trump sign would scare away potential buyers, and asked on the message board whether it was appropriate to ask the neighbor to take down the sign.
…The question proved popular, and elicited 10 pages of responses. Some commenters, in more offensive terms, said the anonymous poster was being ridiculous to even think this was in issue; others suggested the homeowner wait until after the election to sell the house. Still others said they would not want to buy a house next to a Trump supporter.
And the denouement?
But somehow, amid this divisive election, peace was found. The homeowner reported back later Monday that she or he talked to the neighbor, and the neighbor seemed understanding of the predicament and removed the sign. The neighbor was an elderly woman who apparently didn’t even like Trump much. She was, however, married to a big Trump fan who was not home at the time. It is unclear how her husband felt about her decision to remove the sign.
The Steven Pinker podcast and transcript will be ready next week, November 7 is a live event with Joseph Henrich, a Conversation with Tyler, Arlington campus 6 p.m. If you don’t already know, here is Joseph Henrich:
Joseph Henrich…[is]…an expert on the evolution of human cooperation and culture…
Henrich’s research has challenged the typical narrative about human evolution to show how our collective brains – our ability to socially interconnect and learn from one another – is the driving factor behind our evolutionary success. Henrich presents these compelling arguments in his latest book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2015).
Co-author of Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation (2007), Henrich’s research seeks to discover the role of culture in shaping our evolution; how evolutionary theory can help us understand how we learn and transmit culture; the role of war and conflict in the evolution of cooperation and sociality; what factors drive innovation and cultural evolution; and ultimately what has allowed humankind to flourish over other species.
Henrich earned his MA and PhD in anthropology from University of California at Los Angeles. He currently teaches at Harvard University as a professor of human evolutionary biology.
The style guide of The Economist magazine, after explaining the difference between the two terms, leaves no ambiguity about what its reporters should use: “Renminbi, which means the people’s currency, is the description of the yuan, as sterling is the description of the pound. Use yuan.” The Financial Times favors the use of renminbi over yuan by a six-to-one ratio. But Financial Times reporters seem to believe its readers are sophisticated enough to be able to shift back and forth between the two terms without further explanation.
“Renminbi” is the official name of the currency introduced by the Communist People’s Republic of China at the time of its foundation in 1949. It means “the people’s currency”.
“Yuan” is the name of a unit of the renminbi currency. Something may cost one yuan or 10 yuan. It would not be correct to say that it cost 10 renminbi.
I did not know this:
The word “yuan” goes back further than “renminbi”. It is the Chinese word for dollar – the silver coin, mostly minted in the Spanish empire, used by foreign merchants in China for some four centuries.
If you wish to pursue it further:
As it happens, Chinese people rarely talk about renminbi or yuan.
The word they use is “kuai”, which literally means “piece”, and is the word used historically for coins made of silver or copper.
1. Peter Ames Carlin, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon. I hadn’t known that Simon originally recorded the Hearts and Bones album with Garfunkel, but later erased his partner’s contributions to the songs. Nor had I known that Simon produced a stripped-down, acoustic guitar version of “Surfer Girl.” For fans, the book is interesting throughout, and most of all the story is of an ongoing rivalry — with Art — that never became functional again once it collapsed.
2. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama. A 1950s Argentinean novel set in colonial times, and beloved by Roberto Bolaño; the introduction describes the author as “a would-be magical realist who can’t quite detach himself from reality.” For fans of the disjointed tragic. I very much liked it, but had to read the first half twice in a row to grab hold of what was going on.
3. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and its Demons. Fresh and stimulating throughout, I found most interesting the parts of how the Commander in Chief role of the president evolved under Lincoln, and Lincoln as the first “media president.” Highly relevant for current politics too.
I have only browsed Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, but it appears to be a quite interesting political economy take on the (non-optimal) transactional economies from having criminals so deeply involved in Indian politics.
The deal may “feel wrong” to a lot of people, but for the regulators it ought not to be a big deal:
AT&T’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner…is considered “vertical” because the two companies largely do not compete against each other but operate on the same supply chain.
This is the bottom line:
“By standard antitrust metrics, this deal should be O.K. in Washington,” said Paul Gallant, a technology, media and telecommunications policy analyst with Cowen & Company. “But the Democratic Party is moving left, and if Clinton wins, this could become an early test for her ‘tougher on business’ rhetoric.”
The negative arguments are speculative or quite a stretch:
AT&T could make it more expensive for its competitors to gain access to Time Warner’s content or give preferential treatment to its own programming, said John Bergmayer, senior counsel at Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group.
That is all from Leslie Picker and Cecilia Kang at the NYT. I would stress that “entertainment” and “content” are sectors where choices have exploded more or less without precedent. If the goal is to stop Time-Warner content from spreading to multiple sectors of the consumer media universe, I don’t see this one as a winner.
More generally, it is hard to see where the efficiencies from the deal are supposed to come from. About the recent Bayer and Monsanto proposed merger I wrote:
There is a well-known academic literature, dating to the early 1990s, showing that acquiring firms usually decline in value after tender offers, especially after the biggest deals. Mergers do not seem to make companies more valuable or efficient.
Why then do so many mergers and acquisitions happen? Well, some of them do pay off (Google buying YouTube), but also many managers engage in empire-building by increasing the size of their companies, even at the expense of the shareholders. Another possibility is what economists call “winner’s curse,” namely that the winner of an auction or contest or bidding war tends to be the person or institution most optimistic, and in fact overly optimistic, about the value at stake.
So from a social point of view, I doubt if there is so much at stake here.
4. “The way the students made decisions about drinking actually resembled the single most common feedback controller that’s used in engineering,” Passino said. “It’s called a proportional-derivative controller, and it measures how far a system has moved from a particular set point and adjusts accordingly. It’s the same as cruise control on a car.” Link is here.