Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
Beethoven Violin Concerto #1
Stefan Jackiw, excerpt here. For the pointer I thank Jacob Robbins.
Assorted links
1. Thomas Quasthoff to retire from singing.
2. High MP animals.
3. Why is Mexico losing its war on drugs? And how well is Colombia doing these days?
4. The dangers of mental substitution, and if you wish to read optimism about the eurozone (pdf).
5. Superheroes and intergenerational mobility.
6. Update on claims about the new cold fusion; if nothing else this is worth reporting in expected value terms.
Will the era of conspicuous consumption wind down?
Rick Bookstaber writes:
And one notable area of consumption that by definition differentiates the classes, that of conspicuous consumption, is going by the wayside. Yes, I believe we are seeing the twilight of the era of conspicuous consumption. Not that Gucci and Chanel are going to go out of business, but for most people that sort of status statement is increasingly becoming irrelevant. No matter what you are wearing and driving, a far better picture of you and your status is just a few clicks away. You don’t have to drive a Ferrari to let everyone know you are rich and successful. If you are driving a Ferrari, what it will convey is that you – who as everyone who cares to Google you knows is running a hedge fund and is worth tons of money – must like a Ferrari.
Of course in Silicon Valley, the conspicuous consumption norm is already relatively weak among the wealthy, at least as that norm was traditionally understood. Yet you can think of a web company itself as the new “conspicuous” — “look at what I’ve done!”
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything, the culture that is France.
2. Brad DeLong on timing and sequencing.
3. Peter Boettke on Five Books.
4. Website for improving health news reporting, and why different weather predictions?; a systematic paper on this topic would be good.
Law and Literature reading list
Class started yesterday, the reading list is here (pdf):
The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition, Billy Budd and Other Tales, by Hermann Melville. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Fernando Verrissimo, Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line, Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1, I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov, Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line. Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, Edgar Allen Poe, The Gold-Bug, available on-line, Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, Running the Books, by Avi Steinberg, Sakhalin Island, Anton Chekhov. tr. Brian Reeve, Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman, The Pledge, Friedrich Durrenmatt. tr. Joel Agee, Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett, Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo, The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm, Leslie Katz, “John Keats’s Attitudes to Lawyers,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1307146.
Some additions to this list will be made as we proceed, mostly a few short articles. We also will view a small number of movies on legal themes. You will be responsible for obtaining these or for viewing them in the theater.
Assorted links
2. Eugene Fama’s life in finance, and interesting new paper on whether derivatives can increase risk, try this paper too.
3. Via Chris F. Masse, new website on charter cities, apply for a job here.
5. The culture that is Japan, with obscenity.
6. Scott is right on the mark (not a surprise). That’s the place to start the dialogue, not endless rehashing of the errors of others.
Assorted links
2. A pizza parable: when arbitrage becomes more costly.
3. Why Gideon is feeling strangely Austrian, and where are the liberals?, both very much on target.
5. Fukuyama on European identity and whether the French succeeded after all.
Limerick
There once was a Limerick that fell off the map,
The Irish said Google must take the rap,
They tried further zoom,
Cuz’ there wasn’t the room,
Making everyone happy ain’t always on tap.
Here is a discussion of some of the design choices behind Google Maps.
Assorted links
1. Interview with Esther Duflo.
2. Interview with Paul Collier.
3. Larry Summers on lots of stuff (FT link), without being interviewed per se.
5. Sen on Hume.
Assorted links
1. Photos of jokes by Slavoj Zizek; keep on hitting “page down” to see them, p.s. only one of them is funny.
2. Via Chug, the driverless helicopter.
3. Is it counterproductive to recommend restaurants in Tokyo?
4. Smith on Cowen on Smith, on causes of recovery.
Assorted links
1. Tyler Brûlé visits New Zealand and Australia.
2. Wilkinson on Rogoff and growth, although Will is closer than he thinks to the view he calls nutty, in fact he seems to hold it!
3. Does the narcissism of a CEO matter?, and the paper is here.
4. Rachel Strohm on development education at SAIS.
5. Economists who are gathering information on what other economists think, and why they are doing it.
Will Karl Smith have called “The Turn?”
Karl Smith assembles some green shoots. If indeed there is a continuing (modest) recovery, what are we to make of it? I see a few options:
1. Government responded to the downturn with vigorous policy actions and brought recovery.
2. We were in a liquidity trap, but enough depreciation of capital and consumer durables is pulling us out of it. As marginal rates of return rise with depreciation, spending will go up.
3. The neo-Keynesian model applies, and enough nominally sticky decisions have been reset to undo most of the initial negative AD shock.
4. The economy had a strong positive technology shock.
5. A mix of default, savings, and refinancing have led to some balance sheet repair.
6. We had a strong positive AD shock through higher global demand for our exports.
7. Banks recapitalized through playing the spread and now they are lending again to marginal borrowers, thereby spurring economic activity.
8. Recalculation has proceeded apace.
Conditional on our economy being in the recovery stage (e.g., no pending eurozone implosion), I would assign most of the weight to #2 and #3 and #5, noting that #2 can operate in a liquidity trap but does not require it. I see a small bit of #4 and #7 and #8 apiece, and I don’t regard #1 and #6 as playing roles in the story, mostly because they are not true.
The New Old Keynesian bloggers tend to downplay the recent bits of good news. If a real recovery were shown to be taking root, would they invoke a large dose of #2?
Haiti watch
Gambling everything, thousands of Haitians have made their way across the Americas to reach small towns in the Brazilian Amazon over the past year in a desperate search for work, including a surge of hundreds arriving in recent days amid fears that Brazil’s government could slow the influx before it overwhelms the authorities here…Companies like Fibratec, a swimming pool manufacturer in southern Santa Catarina State, have even sent managers all the way here to hire dozens of Haitians.
The excellent article is here. Via Carl-Henri Prophete, here is another story, of an Irish billionaire working to build up Haiti:
Digicel, on the other hand, is the country’s largest employer and taxpayer. The privately held company has invested $600 million in Haiti, making it by far the country’s largest foreign investor ever, and it has democratized communications with its strategy of selling low-price cellphones and services to the masses.
Mr. O’Brien has profited extensively from Haiti, which is Digicel’s largest market and accounts for roughly one-third of its 11.1 million subscribers.
…Digicel, for instance, has put up street signs in parts of Port-au-Prince, serving as reminders of the company’s role in public life as much as guides for navigating the city.
Most mornings, people crowd around the reception desk of Digicel’s office building, not to complain about the firm’s services but to see the mayor and other city officials whose offices are on the sixth floor since the earthquake.
The company provides the space rent-free, Mayor Jean-Yves Jason said, and gave the city computers and furniture. “We have plans to build a new city hall in downtown Port-au-Prince, but we are so comfortable here it is easy to delay,” Mr. Jason joked.
The article gives some other stories of growing foreign investment in Haiti. Here is Twitter and the Haitian earthquake response. Also via Carl-Henri, here is a Le Monde article on the Haitian elite, and here is their excellent slide show.
I have been reading and enjoying Laurent Dubois’s new Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, one of the very best books on the history of the country. In 1914-15, about eighty percent of the government’s revenue went to debt service. It is one of those rare books where you can know a lot about the topic, and yet still learn something interesting on virtually every page.