Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
1. The lost art of the cutaway.
2. On net, will these trends make the country more or less libertarian? And Sarah Binder on whether we have gridlock.
3. Peter Thiel’s graph of the year is about student debt.
4. By Neil Shah, the evolution of heavy metal drumming. And can a computer enter Tokyo University? Can robots better spot terrorists at airports?
5. Cities should diversify, not specialize.
6. Is fusion going to end up working? That’s nuclear fusion, not Asian fusion cuisine.
7. Scott Winship and David Schneider on mobility and inequality.
Where are people respected the most?
Following up on Noah Smith’s earlier blog post, we discussed this question at lunch. Noah cites Japan as a country where there is a high degree of respect granted, and a relatively high equality of respect, and very likely that is true for artisans, manufacturing workers, foreign dignitaries, and foxes. But is it true more generally if we take into the position of women, who are often locked out of good jobs? How about the position of the young “lost generation,” namely all those guys with virtual girlfriends, who have given up on real sex and won’t leave their apartments? How about various minorities in Japanese society, such as the ethnic Koreans? Does Japan lose out on the forms of respect that come from large, extended families, as you might find say in Sicily?
Those judgments have some subjective elements, but I do think they bring Japan down a few notches when it comes to respect and equality of respect.
Oddly I think of the United States as a country with a fair degree of both respect and equality of respect. The diversity of niches and the diverse geography create many pathways for being thought highly of, or for thinking highly of oneself, and there are many insulations from the overweening standards of elites. And we have plenty of indifference, which is a kind of equality of respect, albeit not to be confused with respect per se.
Arguably the most powerful and influential men find plenty of respect in just about any society. A lot of the cross-national variation in respect might come on the female side of the ledger. That would likely favor the Nordic countries and Iceland in a ranking of respect.
Cowen’s Third Law says there is a literature on everything, but the most obvious Google searches did not yield concrete results. (There is however Richard Sennett’s Respect in a World of Inequality.) Can any MR readers speak to the empirical knowledge on this question? We all know the literature on happiness across nations, but here we are interested specifically in respect, where people are respected the most, and where equality of respect is most robust.
How would one go about measuring respect?
Addendum: Justin Wolfers suggest this link, and some Gallup World Poll data, showing respect is positively correlated with wealth:
Request from MR commentator “Is disaggregate the word I want?”
A short while ago, he asked this:
taking requests? I doubt if, but here goes anyway – charisma half-life of Taylor Swift, Jorge Bergoglio, and James Levine as seen fifty years from now; when will the unquestionably converging IQs of point guards, quarterbacks, and chess champions meet up; what would life be like for a tenured economics professor who decides to spend a year studying midAtlantic Lepidoptera in the wild and learning Norwegian; Peter Hitchens versus Christopher Hitchens – who was or is less deceptive and deceived, assuming an ability to consider them as intellectual equals; how old was TC when he read “all of Harold Bloom’s canon” leaving out some of the Icelandic sagas. Not that any of these topics will be taken up, but if TC or Alex takes one of them seriously how about the Hitchens one, which has the whole Pascalian eternal potential return thing going for it.
Happy New Year’s Eve! And yes, I think disaggregate is indeed the word you want.
Note that Alex’s answers may differ from these.
Any more reader requests?
Assorted links
1. A relationship in five minutes.
2. First they have Scarlett Johansson play an operating system, then Jessica Alba as a Borneo tribeswoman, what will be next?
3. Ten simple points on how to be nettlesome.
4. Preserved moments of historical sass (volume seven).
Assorted links
1. Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, for electric guitar. And a story on the guy who played it.
2. Pearlstein on how the DC game has changed.
3. “Chris Crawford owns 29,216 small plastic beads.”
4. Toward a brief history of Camden, NJ, and why more young whites are coming to the city.
More on the difference between Airbus and Boeing control systems
An MR reader writes to me:
Chances are you have received an email similar to this from other airline pilots, but in the off case you have not:
The article you posted contains what I believe to be some oversimplifications of the A/B control system philosophy differences.
It’s commonly stated that the Airbus will override the pilot and the Boeing will not. This isn’t entirely true.
A more accurate statement would be this: All jet aircraft have override/feedback systems that will warn or resist the pilot at the edges of the aerodynamic envelope. Airbus has a slightly larger number of these systems, and they are set to trigger slightly earlier.
Both aircraft will automatically throttle back if in an overspeed condition.
Both aircraft will automatically shake the yoke, and then automatically push over, in a stall condition.etc.
Airbus, in addition, will limit max G forces on the aircraft. Boeing does not.
The advantage of the Airbus approach is that you can haul back on the stick as hard as you want without breaking the aircraft (and turning it into several smaller, less-airworthy aircraft). You are limited to G forces that produce no damage to the aircraft.
The advantage of the Boeing approach is that you can generate any g forces you want. This gives you the opportunity to fly in the region that generates enough G to bend the aircraft, but not to break it. That extra G force may help you avoid a mountain. Of course, you may extend into the part of the envelope that breaks the aircraft.
These differences are relatively minor, as the vast majority of crashes do not occur at the edges of the envelope, and are categorized as CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain). When within the aerodynamic envelope, Boeing and Airbus aircraft are usually under the control of the same sort interchangeable flight management computers.
Both the Asiana (Boeing) and Air France (Airbus) crashes were caused by crew that did not understand the systems of the aircraft they were flying. Both aircraft impacted terrain under full control.
Assorted links
1. More on what is going on in Turkey, from Monkey Cage. And here is Dexter Filkins.
2. Equality of income or equality of respect? And Lane Kenworthy on why income inequality should not be the main focus (pdf).
3. Hobo nickel art.
4. Interview with Psychology Today about Average is Over.
5. Why it is hard to cut (some parts of) government spending. And how badly will Italian opera fall apart?
6. Strand bookstore reports best sales ever.
7. Your doctoral thesis in one sentence, via Angus. The first person, by the way, needed two sentences.
Why does Singapore have such a low birth rate?
In the comments, Collin asked:
How is it the most productive, functional country Singapore has one of the lowest birth rate in the world? Is this robot future in which only the better off have children? Why is it richer the world is the less people can afford children?
Right now the total fertility rate in Singapore is at about 1.2 and at times it has slipped down as far as 1.16. (Though it just went up to 1.29, perhaps because of “dragon babies,” noting that intertemporal substitution may snatch some of this back.) Why?
1. Singapore does education very well, and education lowers birth rates.
2. Singapore land and housing prices are especially high, which makes it very costly to have a family with three kids. Long working hours are expected too.
3. Singapore is a lot more fun than it used to be, and in this regard it has improved more than say France has. Children are a bit more fun, because modern life is safer, but “the fun of children” is subject to Baumol’s cost disease.
4. Women are doing very well in Singapore and arguably they are not so willing to marry down in terms of income and educational status. I was struck, when I gave a talk to the economists at the Civil Service College in Singapore this summer, that well over half the audience was female. Sadly for some, rates of female “singlehood” for women in their twenties are still rising (pdf, very useful). Controlling for education, however, female singlehood is not going up, which indicates the decline in fertility is related to the rise in education. And in that same piece you will find direct evidence for a “marriage squeeze” for well educated women and less educated men. That same squeeze doesn’t seem as strong in the other wealthy East Asian countries.
5. This 209 pp. cross-national comparative study (pdf, also very useful) suggests that Singapore’s generous childbearing subsidies do not work because women are still expected to shoulder so many responsibilities of child rearing. The traditional family model there is stronger than in say France. At the same time, France is a culture of leisure, long vacations, and limited work hours in a way which is quite far from practices in Singapore.
6. Modern fairytales do not work. Rap music also does not work (try this video, if you need help), nor do government-sponsored cruises and speed dating services.
7. It is suggested that population density lowers birth rates.
8. Child care and subsidized child care have been less common in Singapore than in France (see about p.119 of this pdf, the comparative study cited above), though Singapore has been changing in this regard.
Here is a typical Singaporean answer to the question:
What is stopping you from having more than 1-2 children?
“Very stressful, because when they misbehave, you have to scold them.”Why do you think some Singaporeans are not having children nowadays?
“It is very stressful for Singaporeans as the cost of living has gone up and they do not have time for their children. More women are now busy working too.”
If you are interested in the comparison, ethnic Chinese in Malaysia have a total fertility rate of about 1.8. Malays in Singapore have a TFR of about 1.6, whereas the ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians in Singapore are just barely above 1.0. To me that suggests that both culturally-specific-to-Chinese-high-earner factors and cost-of-living-in-Singapore factors are playing a significant role. Malay population growth, in terms of Malay babies born in Malaysia, is robust. Perhaps Singaporean men need more confidence. In Shanghai, by the way, the rate is barely above 1.0.
If I had to put it all in a sentence, I might try this: in Singapore, work and educational norms have shifted far faster than have family norms, relative to other birth-subsidizing countries such as France.
Note, most of all, that the low birth rate in Singapore is not the fault of Lee Kuan Yew.
Upon which day of the week should Christmas fall?
I say the goal is to minimize non-convexities, which in this context means avoiding the possibility of no mail or UPS deliveries for two days running. That makes Saturday and Monday especially bad days to have Christmas.
When Christmas is on Wednesday, as it was this year, on that Wednesday you still can be reading the books which arrived on Tuesday and then a new lot comes on Thursday. The public libraries also close for only one day, not two or three in a row.
Christmas on Wednesday also means that the roads are deserted for all the other weekdays, since many people end up leaving town for the entire week. Then you can visit all those ethnic restaurants you wanted to get to in Gaithersburg or Mount Vernon without hassle.
And if you are taking a vacation abroad, and trying to use a limited number of vacation days, you certainly don’t want Christmas to fall on either a Saturday or a Sunday, which in essence wastes a granted day off.
You know what is also good about Christmas on Wednesday? It means New Year’s Day will be on Wednesday too, double your pleasure double your fun.
Assorted links
1. Atlas of the historical geography of the United States.
3. Iron Maiden is using BitTorrent analysis to plot tours. Update: it seems the story isn’t true.
4. What will the Republicans do about health care and the ACA now?
5. NYTMinusContext.
6. Why some people don’t like Wolf of Wall Street (I thought it was way too long and simply not that interesting).
Most Popular MR Posts of 2013
Here is my annual round-up of the most popular MR posts of 2013 as measured, somewhat eclectically, using the number of links, tweets, shares, comments and so forth. Sadly, the post that was most linked to this year was by neither Tyler nor myself but by… Tyrone.
- Tyrone on why the government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis were brilliant Republican strategy
Look people, I have explained this before. Tyrone is a bad man. Do Not Encourage Tyrone. Fortunately for us Tyrone doesn’t like it when people like him.
Second most highly linked was my post No One Is Innocent. I was also pleased that a related post, Did Obama Spy on Mitt Romney?, was also highly linked although I think that the question raised in this post about the potential for NSA tools to be abused for political purposes hasn’t been truly addressed in the main stream media. Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic in The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation was one of the few people to pick up on this important question.
Also highly linked were my post The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage and a few less substantive items drawn mostly from elsewhere such as Equal Population US States and What is the Most Intellectual Joke You Know.
If you followed Tyler’s timely advice in another highly linked post, China, and the soaring price of Bitcoin, you would have saved yourself from a big loss (albeit you would have made an even bigger profit by ignoring Tyler’s earlier advice).
The most shared post was Tyler’s Stereotyping in Europe with over seven thousand shares, followed by Nobody dislikes inflation more than strippers. I was pleased that a bunch of my substantive posts were highly shared including:
- My letter to my son’s high school principal, High School Safety in Northern Virginia
- Sinister Statistics: Do Left Hand People Die Young, a neat piece of statistical reasoning and
- The Animals are also Getting Fat.
Another highly shared and commented upon post was Our DNA, Our Selves on the FDA and 23andMe. Mark my words, when this or similar case goes to court the FDA will eventually lose on free speech grounds.
Gun posts get lots of comments including The Culture of Guns, The Culture of Alcohol, Guns, Suicide and Natural Experiments, Firearms and Suicides and How Japan Does Gun Control.
Question posts such as Who is the Worst Philosopher? and Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last twenty-five years? get lots of comments as did Who is Juan Galt?
There is overlap between most linked, shared, and commented so some of the above would fit in several categories but it’s surprisingly weak. Posts with a lot of comments, for example, often do not draw lots of links.
What were your favorite posts of 2013? And what requests do you have for 2014?
What I’ve been reading
1. Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. Good even if you think, as I do, that you are sick of WWI books.
2. Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. This book made many UK “best of” lists. It is subtle, like the author herself, and will prompt you to further reading or rereads, for instance I enjoyed The Gate of Angels right after this biography and soon will try Offshore.
3. Drew Daniel, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, in the 33 1/3 series. On the Throbbing Gristle album of the same name, this superb book is one of the best and most instructive pieces of popular music criticism I have read, ever. I recommend reading it while listening to the album, song by song. Drew Daniel by the way is part of the group Matmos (interesting in their own right) and an English professor at Johns Hopkins. He deserves something better than tenure.
4. Samuel Scheffler, Death & the Afterlife, with commentaries from other famous philosophers at the back. The bottom line: through the careful use of thought experiments, we can infer that we care about the impersonal future more than we might think. Scheffler is still getting better and deeper as a philosopher. This Thomas Nagel review of the book is gated, but even the first few (ungated) paragraphs are worth reading.
5. Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin, The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals. Self-explanatory.
Walter Oi has passed away
Here is an appreciation from David Henderson. Here is an appreciation from Steve Landsburg. Oi played a key role in helping to end the military draft, he was a mainstay of the Rochester economics program, he wrote an essential piece on the economics of two-part tariffs, he analyzed the implications of labor as a fixed factor for employment over the course of the business cycle, and also he was known for having overcome blindness to pursue a very successful career. Here is Oi on scholar.google.com.
John Cochrane on portable health insurance
The entire Op-Ed is interesting and noteworthy, but the part on health insurance is perhaps the cutting edge of the piece analytically:
Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers; lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick. Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine expenses.
People want to buy this insurance, and companies want to sell it. It would be far cheaper, and would solve the pre-existing conditions problem. We do not have such health insurance only because it was regulated out of existence. Businesses cannot establish or contribute to portable individual policies, or employees would have to pay taxes. So businesses only offer group plans. Knowing they will abandon individual insurance when they get a job, and without cross-state portability, there is little reason for young people to invest in lifelong, portable health insurance. Mandated coverage, pressure against full risk rating, and a dysfunctional cash market did the rest.
Rather than a mandate for employer-based groups, we should transition to fully individual-based health insurance. Allow national individual insurance offered and sold to anyone, anywhere, without the tangled mess of state mandates and regulations. Allow employers to contribute to individual insurance at least on an even basis with group plans. Current group plans can convert to individual plans, at once or as people leave. Since all members in a group convert, there is no adverse selection of sicker people.
I suppose my worry is this. As individuals age, they will become greater health risks and that will hold even if Cochrane keeps Medicare going. That means a higher price for their individual portable insurance. It is not clear to me under what conditions premia can be raised legally (what does “unexpected increase” mean?), but it seems the result is much higher premia for sick people, or legally-mandated low premia, but then providers will restrict access and lower the quality of care, as another means of raising the price of course. Contractually speaking, price is verifiable but quality of care is not. The overall problem is not one of “adverse selection” but rather simply that the good information of the suppliers means that insurance is hard to sell at all for many conditions.
I do understand the option of letting the premia rise, and selling insurance against that event too, and maybe that could work. Still, it is surprising how many insurance markets don’t really blossom even if it seems they would make economic sense. Just ask Robert Shiller or look at the earlier history of failed CPI futures. I’d like to experiment with Cochrane’s idea, which I think has real promise, but on a trial basis first. The question is what such a trial might actually mean, and who would be willing to give up their current arrangements to make such an experiment possible. If the recent Obamacare reactions show anything, it is that status quo bias is getting stronger all the time in matters of health care.
Assorted links
1. “Let them eat cake that looks like ramen.”
2. Dani Rodrik has lots of tweets on what is going on in Turkey.
3. “Spengler” makes claims about China.
4. Is fake knee surgery as good as real knee surgery? And is the decline of football proceeding?
5. Update on the “auction off the rights to kill a black rhino to save some black rhinos” debate.