Category: Uncategorized

Sicily fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen

In lieu of the Austerians:

Today, Sicily’s regional government has 1,800 employees — more than the British Cabinet Office — and the island employs 26,000 auxiliary forest rangers; in the vast forestlands of British Columbia, there are fewer than 1,500.

Out of a population of five million people in Sicily, the state directly or indirectly employs more than 100,000 of them and pays pensions to many more. It changed its pension system eight years after the rest of Italy. (One retired politician recently won a case to keep an annual pension of 480,000 euros, about $584,000.)

Here is more.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Noah Smith’s dissertation, plus a mention of my most fundamental view: “”Larry Summer’s maxim,“It isn’t easy to understand how the world works.””

2. Spanish baby stealing as an approach toward social change, and an old argument for the minimum wage.

3. Henry’s music bleg, with lots of comments.

4. Arnold Kling on education, disruption, and Benjamin Lima.

5. China’s railway arteries, photographed.

6. Olympic runner to compete, without a passport or home country.

*Affluence and Influence*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Martin Gilens and the subtitle is Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.  A few points:

1. It is an interesting book.

2. It is poorly written and the first fifty pages should have been abolished.

3. It argues, using a comprehensive data set, that the preferences of poor and even middle income people are neglected or underrepresented in the policy process.  The preferences of the wealthiest ten percent seem to have more sway.

4. It should take greater care to distinguish the preferences of the (often ill-informed) poor across means and ends.  Say a poor or middle class person feels “I want tariffs” and also “I want prosperity.”  The elites then push through free trade to produce prosperity and for that matter to get reelected and perhaps also to serve commercial interests and donors.  Have they met or frustrated the preferences of the poor?  By the metrics of Gilens the poor did not get their way but that is not obviously the correct conclusion.  Matt makes a related point.

5. Many lower- or middle-income voters decide to vote retrospectively over outcomes (mostly), rather than over policy inputs.  That suggests we should judge the responsiveness of the system in terms of how well it aims toward those outputs, not whether it gives lower-income voters their preferred policy inputs.

6. What is wrong with this simple alternative hypothesis?:  Politicians seek some measure of redistribution-weighted prosperity to get reelected.  Wealthier voters are better educated and smarter, so they have a better sense of which policies will bring that about.  It seems the wealthier voters are getting their way on policy inputs, but a deeper look shows the pressures on politicians are quite general.

7. I would be falling prey to the fallacy of mood affiliation if I simply assumed the author wanted policy to be more responsive to the wishes of the poor and middle class.  Still I can ask whether this would be a desirable end.  Aren’t they less educated and less well-informed on average?  Don’t they also care about politics less and derive less of their status from political processes and outcomes?  Do I want them to have a greater say over social issues, including gay marriage?  No.

Here is a Boston Review symposium on the book, including many responses from the notables on the sidebar, along with a response from the author.

Singapore R&D there is no great stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is one description (with photo and a very good video):

Unveiled at a design conference in the UK recently, Kissenger is basically an egg-like orb outfitted with two soft plastic lips packed with sensors and actuators. When a human on one end of the kiss transaction plants a kiss on the robot lips, the sensors record the shape changes the kisser creates on the lips and translates those pressure patterns into a mirror image that can be beamed over the Web to another Kissenger. That Kissenger then reproduces the sender’s unique kiss for a human on the other end.

Here is another:

Kissing Bot. Singaporean robotics studio Lovotics has a new robot in the news. Kissenger is an advanced and intimate form of telepresence robot specially designed to transmit the senstions of a kiss. Two units are able to record and remotely reproduce the unique pressure sensations from a kiss … although the design looks pretty chaste and seems to lack an option to go French. Research like this while seeming silly is crucial for innovating next-gen avatar robot tech.

Here is more.  Hat tip goes to @GrishinRobotics.

Self-recommending!

How hot did you say it was?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In fact, the actual trends in temperatures had nothing to do with how people perceived them. If you graphed the predictive power of people’s perceptions against the actual temperatures, the resulting line was flat—it showed no trend at all. In the statistical model, the actual weather had little impact on people’s perception of recent temperatures. Education continued to have a positive impact on whether they got it right, but its magnitude was dwarfed by the influences of political affiliation and cultural beliefs.

And those cultural affiliations had about the effect you’d expect. Individualists, who often object to environmental regulations as an infringement on their freedoms, tended to think the temperatures hadn’t gone up in their area, regardless of whether they had. Strong egalitarians, in contrast, tended to believe the temperatures had gone up.

The same does not hold for perceptions of droughts and floods.  The full story is here, the underlying paper is here, and for the pointers I thank Michael Rosenwald and Scott Duke Kominers.

*Savage Continent*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by Keith Lowe, with the subtitle Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.  Excerpt:

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering.  In Norway as many of 10 percent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war.  If the statistics on the number of children born to German soldiers are anything to go by, this was by no means unusual…

Resistance movements in occupied countries came up with all kinds of excuses for the behaviour of their women and girls.  They characterized women who slept with Germans as ignorant, poor, even mentally defective.  They claimed that women were raped, or that they only slept with Germans out of economic necessity.  While this was undoubtedly the case for some, recent surveys show that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes and all walks of life.  On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent, or because they needed money or food — but simply because they found the strong, “knightly” image of the German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk.  In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots.

Nowhere was this need more keenly felt than in France…

You can buy the book here.

David Brooks continues to be on a roll

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is his latest column, excerpt:

This shift of focus has been audacious. Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides.

But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, to being about capitalism, which Romney represents.

Do read the whole thing.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Sorority recruitment (and the limits of on-line education!).

2. Is the basketball “hot hand” true after all?

3. Spring 2013 Dan Ariely will do a Coursera course, and more on the spread of Coursera.

4. Sintetia interviews me about Spain and the great stagnation, and here from 2010 is my in-Spanish interview about what will happen in the eurozone.

5. The culture that is Singapore, and more here.