Category: Uncategorized
Monday assorted links
1. Unusual Wikipedia pages. Time sink.
2. “…the Amish impulse is one to watch…” (Ross Douthat, NYT).
3. This robot prints cool designs on your fingernails (video).
4. Female economists in government.
5. Who needs the Argument Clinic?
6. “Despite its popularity, there was disagreement over the value of the attraction.“
Euthanasia arbitrage the moral hazard culture that is Belgian French
Demand curves do slope downwards:
Euthanasia tourists are flocking to Brussels to get a lethal dose. Doctors at hospitals and clinics at Belgium’s capital are seeing an increase in number of euthanasia tourists who are travelling from across the world to their accident and emergency rooms.
As elective medical killings are illegal in France, French patients are often arriving with suitcases. They believe that their request to die will be carried out within a week.
In 2015, a whopping 2,023 people were medically killed in Belgium. The number has more than doubled in five years. According to Olivier Vermylen, an emergency doctor at Brugmann University hospital, seven out of 15 euthanasia cases involved French people.
“It’s a phenomenon that did not exist five or six years ago. Nowadays I get phone calls about French people who arrive in the emergency room announcing that they want euthanasia,” Vermylen told Belgium’s Sudpresse newspaper, reports The Times.
Even at the Jules Bordet institute in Brussels, almost a third of euthanasia consultations, that is 40 out of 130 cases, are by French people. One of the primary reasons why people choose to get euthanized in Belgium is the cost.
Euthanasia in Switzerland costs €4,000 (AU$5,935), writes The Australian. However, euthanasia in Belgium is usually free as the treatment is covered by the European Union’s health insurance card. The bills are sent to French healthcare providers.
And here is a person who needs that extra dose of media training:
“Of course, Belgium is not here to euthanize half the planet. I can understand those who say that France should look after its own patients. But this is easy to say in the office. When you have a patient who is suffering in front of you, you don’t think of that. You help – whether they are French or not,” said Brugmann University hospital’s Michele Morret-Rauis.
I am sorry people, but in light of that state-dependent utility function known as “life or death,” if it ever came to such a point I would opt for Switzerland.
Here is the article, via the excellent T. Hynes.
My personal tech ecosystem, updated
A few of you have asked, I considered that question in 2012, here is a significantly revised update:
1. Now I know how to text, sort of, though I hardly ever do it. It strikes me as the worst and most inefficient technology of communication ever invented (seriously). It’s not that fast, and it’s broken up into tiny bits of back and forth. I don’t see how it makes sense beyond the “What should I get at the supermarket? — Blueberries” level. There is intertemporal substitution, so just, at some other point in time, spend more time talking, writing longer letters, making love, whatever. Not texting. It is never the best thing to be doing, except to answer some very well-defined question.
2. I now carry only one iPad around, as I donated my spare iPad to a poor Mexican family. I use it very often for directions, book and restaurant reviews, and general life advice. Plus email and keeping current on my Twitter feed. I simply don’t want a screen any smaller than that. My iPad now also has a rather pronounced crack on the front glass, but that adds to its artistic value. I dare not drop it again.
3. I have an iPhone, which I hardly ever use for anything. Occasionally someone calls me on it, or I use it to check email in situations when it might be rude to pull out the iPad. Other times I am rude, but it’s actually a form of flattery if I am willing to check my iPad in front of you. You may not feel flattered, however.
3b. Except for the occasional Uber ride, I don”t use apps and hate reading news sites through the apps, I won’t do it. I’m used to the web, not your app, and I hope I can get away with being a stubborn grouch on this forever.
4. I now have a Bloomberg terminal, which is very cool. It is amazing that a product designed in the “before the internet as we know it” era still is the clear market leader and the best option. Bloomberg is a great company with a great product(s). Right now I can do about 5 of the 25,000 separate commands, but the fault is mine not theirs. In the meantime, send me email at my gmu address, not what is listed on the Bloomberg column.
5. I use my Kindle less over time. It remains in that nebulous “fine” category, but I prefer “real books.” Kindle is best for works of fiction when I know in advance I wish to read every page in the proper order. I am continuing with my long-range plan to read Calvin’s Institutes on my Kindle, bit by bit, in between other works. This will take me ten years, but a) he is a brilliant mind, and b) in the meantime I won’t lose sight of the plot line.
6. I have a new Lenovo laptop, sleek and fast, plus some computers at work. I don’t even know what they are, but probably they are quite subpar.
Way more iPad and way less texting are I suppose the main ways in which I deviate from the dominant status quo. Come join me in this and we shall conquer the world.
Sunday assorted links
2. Bay area public transit will subsidize Uber and Lyft.
4. Matt Levine on death arbitrage.
5. “Is Simeon the fastest athlete from the Marshall Islands?” Or why the slowest athletes compete in the Olympics: “We should also take a moment to admire these athletes who make it look incredibly, incredibly hard.”
6. Choices made by a Japanese female economist (video). A mistake?
Driverless vehicles, on their way
Uber passengers in Pittsburgh will be able to summon rides in self-driving cars with the touch of a smartphone button in the next several weeks. Uber also announced that it is acquiring a self-driving startup called Otto, co-founded by Israeli Lior Ron, that has developed technology allowing big rigs to drive themselves.
Via Mark Thorson, here is more. And in Finland:
Residents of Helsinki, Finland will soon be used to the sight of buses with no drivers roaming the city streets. One of the world’s first autonomous bus pilot programs has begun in the Hernesaari district, and will run through mid-September.
Finnish law does not require vehicles on the road to have a driver, making it the perfect place to get permission to test the Easymile EZ-10 electric mini-buses.
So perhaps Finland can become a market leader in this area.
Saturday assorted links
1. Good explanation of wage segregation.
3. John Cleese has a new Miss Anne Elk video out. It’s not funny (at all), but viewing it is an object lesson in just how delicate a balance lies behind good humor.
4. BookForum does libertarianism.
5. “Indonesia considers renaming South China Sea to Natuna Sea.” I’ve been saying for a long time they need to do something like this.
How useful is it to formalize land titles?
There are both costs and benefits to bringing property into the formal sector. Along those lines, “The Deregularization of Land Titles” is a new paper by Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky:
In the last years, several countries implemented policy interventions to entitle urban squatters, encouraged by the results of studies showing large welfare gains from entitlement. We study a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles to very poor families in a suburban area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Although previous studies on this experiment have found important effects of titling on investment, household structure, educational achievement, and child health, in this article we document that a large fraction of households that went through a situation at which formalization was challenged (death, divorce, sale/purchase), ended up being de-regularized. The legal costs of remaining formal seem too high relative to the value of these parcels and the income of their inhabitants.
This piece helps explain why Hernando De Soto’s ideas, however useful they may be in some regards, have not quite transformed either the world or for that matter the practice of development economics.
Here is a good sentence from the paper: “The cost of processing the inheritance of an asset valued at US$ 11,700 is about US$ 2,300.” Legal systems are a normal good, and legalizing everything too quickly leads to burdens as well as benefits. Try this bit too: “When property rights are transferred to very poor people, preserving legal tenure will likely entail onerous expenses in the form of attorney and public notary fees, and courts costs. In addition, these charges are higher in relative terms in very unequal societies where the gap between the poor and the relatively well-off is wider.”
These topics remain under-explored.
Friday assorted links
1. Which celebrities are loved equally by Republicans and Democrats?
2. Male economists stand out once again (pdf).
3. Miles Kimball to move to University of Colorado at Boulder.
4. “Michelangelo’s David will explode.” (NYT) And “The most popular target for photographers was the David’s genitals.”
5. The gap between gdp growth and credit growth is widening in most Chinese provinces.
6. Martins Sandbu on Denmark and America; note the cited figures were means not medians.
Thursday assorted links
1. The Great Olympics stagnation.
2. Danish family is more important than Danish environment in predicting earnings (pdf). And Danish children’s television is stranger than you think.
3. Mark Koyama on why the Roman empire declined.
4. Interview with John Cochrane.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “…the slowdown in TFP during and after the great recession is due to the decline in the speed of adoption of new technologies in response to the credit disruptions that shocked the US economy since the end of 2007 and that have affected the cost and availability of funds for companies until the end of 2013.” Short paper here (pdf).
2. This piece takes too long to get going, it is nonetheless an interesting take on how tourism is transforming Iceland.
3. Aetna’s retreat from Obamacare.
4. A mathematical history of taffy pullers.
5. Myths about Sunnis and Shias. Good piece, useful corrective.
In which ways is today’s world like the Reformation?
I can think of a few reasons:
1. Many of the structures in places are perceived as failing, even though in absolute terms they are not obviously doing worse than previous times.
2. There is a rise in nationalist sentiment and a semi-cosmopolitan ethic is starting to lose influence.
3. The chance of violent conflict is rising.
4. Dialogue is becoming more polarized and bigoted, and at some margins stupider.
5. Tales of gruesome torture are being spread by new publishing and communications media.
6. The world may nonetheless end up much better off, but the ride to get there will be rocky iindeed.
I have been reading Carlos M.N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Yes I know it is 893 pp., but it is actually one of the most readable books I have had in my hands all year.
Helen DeWitt’s *Lightning Rods*
Do you ever read someone and find you are too addled to tell when the author is being funny or not, and then perhaps some of you have the temerity to suggest your confusion is the fault of the author?
Well, imagine a whole novel like that, and about the hot-button topics of sex and above all power and power in the workplace and yes race too. Helen DeWitt can in fact get away with writing sentences such as:
One man said he was not exactly disputing the points made but he did not think he could reward his top earners with titless sex.
So yes, buy this book but do not read it, for the temerity will rise in your soul.
Helen DeWitt is a national treasure, yet collectively we have driven her to Berlin. We do not deserve whatever she plans on serving up next.
Here is my previous post on Helen DeWitt.
Tuesday assorted links
1. New Dobbie-Fryer results on charter schools and their impact.
2. The positive economic impact of universities.
3. “The last time I used the word vulgar was to describe an amaryllis.” (NYT) Good piece, good format, good spousal pairing. “The vulgar,” Phillips says, “refuse to miss out.”
4. Good questions about the inequality rise as coming across different firms.
5. “Electricity is like blood.”
6. Taleb on whether there is a payoff to asymmetric rules in favor of intolerance.
Monday assorted links
1. Contemporary art exhibit for dogs, via Yana.
2. “Tyler Cowen asks what I think the five biggest open questions are in the current economic debate.” That is from Adam Ozimek, those are pretty close to my own list, I would toss in some China too like “what the hell is going on there?”.
3. Smart tattoos can control your phone — and what else?
4. Taxidermist robotic deer there is no great stagnation.
5. I’ve been telling you that foreign agents will continue to be a big and growing issue (NYT, #Ukraine, #Russia, #Manafort).
6. Iran fact of the day: per gdp, they are number one in medial count, USA is number three.
Sunday assorted links
1. Mistakes people make with publishing academic books.
2. What makes a McMansion bad architecture? Great piece.
3. Why so many lottery jackpots this year? (NYT)
4. The US and UK versions of Cloud Atlas are quite different.
5. So far the worst predictions about Brazil’s Olympics have not come true. And which are the most popular Olympic sports? I didn’t know people enjoy watching volleyball so much.
6. “The FDA wants to make it harder to buy and sell poop.” Are the pro-choice forces lining up against this one? I hope they will. There is in fact a new saying “My colon. My choice.” You don’t even have to worry about the status of the fetus…