Category: Uncategorized
U.S. press coverage of foreign crises
Here is a well-known but now somewhat dated (1991) paper by Zaller and Chiu. It suggests two regularities:
1. U.S. press coverage tends to take its positions from the range of views which exist within government (“indexing”).
2. When a foreign conflict goes well, the U.S. press becomes more hawkish; when the conflict goes less well, the press becomes more dovish. The press swing in opinion is stronger than the swing of opinion from official sources.
Here is an empirical paper, applying this framework to the Libya crisis of 1985-1986. Here is a general look at the indexing hypothesis, again dated and pre-blogosphere. Here is a 2008 paper, showing greater influence for media, relative to the distribution of opinion within government.
Assorted links
The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake
Every now and then, there is some evidence for the moral progress of mankind. Looking back in time, Wikipedia reports:
One particularly pernicious rumor was that Koreans were taking advantage of the disaster, committing arson and robbery, and were in possession of bombs. In the aftermath of the quake, mass murder of Koreans by brutal mobs occurred in urban Tokyo and Yokohama, fueled by rumors of rebellion and sabotage. About 6,600 Koreans were murdered. Some newspapers reported the rumors as fact, which led to the most deadly rumor of all: that the Koreans were poisoning wells. The numerous fires and cloudy well water, a little-known effect of a large quake, all seemed to confirm the rumors of the panic-stricken survivors who were living amidst the rubble. Vigilante groups set up roadblocks in cities, towns and villages across the region. Because people with Korean accents pronounced “G” or “J” in the beginning of words differently, 円 銭 (jū-go-en, go-jū-sen) and がぎぐげご (gagigugego) were used as a shibboleth. Anyone who failed to pronounce them properly was deemed Korean. Some were told to leave, but many were beaten or killed. Moreover, anyone mistakenly identified as Korean, such as Chinese, Okinawans, and Japanese speakers of some regional dialects, suffered the same fate. About 700 Chinese, mostly from Wenzhou were killed.
On modern-day Japan, Edward Hugh has an excellent post.
Assorted links
1. Gary Becker’s entire Human Capital class on YouTube.
2. No gains from trade, the worst date ever? (with lots of euphemisms, I love Date Lab).
How to arbitrage the salad bar?
Nate Silver has a tip, based obviously on the assumption of additive separability of utility:
4. Go crazy on toppings. Check out how high the prices for walnuts, almonds, gorgonzola crumbles and croutons are in the graphic above. Much to its credit, Whole Foods doesn’t stock the best salad topping of all — bacon bits, obviously — in its salad bar. Why? Because it costs a whopping $21.28 per pound. With any luck your local salad-bar merchant isn’t quite as savvy.
I don’t want free toppings! And you have to pay me to eat bacon bits.
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything, for Chas.
3. Comment or vote (short video from Jonathan Rauch), “Trolls belong under bridges.”
5. Are the wealthiest countries the smartest countries?
6. Exit interview with Larry Summers.
7. Great Stagnation debate, this coming Monday morning in DC, register here.
What’s the new incentive of The New York Times?
Don’t ask me to explain all the details of the pay wall system (can’t people set up rotating faux blogs and tweets, rich with daily NYT links, to get around the limits?), but I know there will be an articles quota, twenty per month. So the new NYT incentive is to have more than twenty must-read articles each month. Maybe they’re hire Bill Simmons. Maybe they’ll support more blogs. Maybe they’ll keep their reporters in the field and cover more controversial science topics. The best case outcome is that the infovores find tricky ways through the pay wall, some of the non-paying non-infovores spend more time on yahoo.com, some of them pay up, while the quantity and quality of good content increases. I wouldn’t bet on that, but most of the analysis I am reading does not focus on how the supply side will change. The NYT arguably will be running fewer cliched or predictable or easily substitutable articles. It should make the paper less comprehensive, but sharper at the edges.
The incentive of NYT writers to keep blogs — so people can access their columns easily — will go up.
Via The Browser, Vanity Fair adds comment. On this topic, Felix Salmon is always a must.
Assorted links
1. On right-wing economists and health care plans, John Goodman responds.
2. Should you stuff your little kid full of learning?
3. One hypothesis as to why they are selling expiring ebooks to libraries.
4. How to end the Great Stagnation there is no Great Stagnation.
5. File under “unlikely to prove expansionary for the global economy.”
6. Scott Sumner on Japan and the yen.
7. What kind of economic arguments work on TV? (pdf)
8. Dilbert markets in everything.
9. The forthcoming change in Japan’s working age population.
10. Michael Kremer symposium on development economics, RCTs, etc.
Assorted links
1. Lindsey and Loury on TGS; Glenn gets mad.
2. How do charter schools affect outcomes other than test scores?
3. How much denser can New York City be?
4. Are cultural omnivores declining, or perhaps just switching media?
5. Libertarianism and science fiction.
6. The first review of the new David Foster Wallace; I’ll pass.
7. Should academics join the government? I’ll pass on that one too!
8. The Gastronomics of bad service; I also try to avoid that.
Assorted links
1. There is no Great Stagnation.
2. Via Chris F. Masse, Intrade on a Japanese nuclear accident, grade 5.
4. Olivier Blanchard’s remarks on macro (video), and comments from Arnold Kling.
Should you send aid to Japan?
Felix Salmon offers the case against donating money to Japan. Read the whole thing, I don’t wish to quote it out of context.
For reasons which you can find outlined in my Discover Your Inner Economist, I am generally in sympathy with arguments like Felix’s, but not in this case. I see a three special factors operating here:
1. The chance that your aid will be usefully deployed, and not lost to corruption, is much higher than average.
2. I believe this crisis will bring fundamental regime change to Japan (currently an underreported issue), rather than just altering the outcome of the next election. America needs to signal its partnership with one of its most important allies. You can help us do that.
3. Maybe you should give to a poorer country instead, but you probably won’t. Odds are this will be an extra donation at the relevant margin. Sorry to say, this disaster has no “close substitute.”
It may be out of date, but the starting point for any study of Japan is still Karel von Wolferen’s The Enigma of Japanese Power. Definitely recommended.
Some simple analytics of government debt
U.S. Treasury yields just plunged, as part of a flight to safety. This is because of Japan and perhaps because of the situation in Bahrain also.
Quick quiz: does this mean our federal government should:
a) spend more money, because there are even fewer bond market vigilantes than before, or
b) spend less money, because there is a general signal that everyone should pull back on excess commitments and risky projects, governments included.
Sadly, we are allowed only one guess at this problem.
The extra credit question is a) vs. b) when the lower yields are instead caused by a global financial crisis.
Assorted links
1. John Currin and Rachel Feinstein have unusual politics, see the end of the article.
2. New neutrality results for the minimum wage.
4. Hear different.
Assorted links
1. Leijonhufvud interviews Hayek.
2. Displaced cargo containers, whole slide show here.
3. Tsunami early warning systems are effective.
5. Beatles reviewed 1000 years from now (video).
6. Using the new MR search function to read about Daylight Savings Time.
*Understanding Cairo*
The author is David Sims and the subtitle is The Logic of a City Out of Control. It is interesting throughout for anyone studying urban density or informal land titles or urban sprawl or Third World mega-cities. This passage is off the central topics of the book, but I found it an interesting corrective to the usual picture:
There is a misconception held by many Egyptian professionals, especially engineers, that informal housing is haphazardly constructed and liable to collapse. However, such precarious housing is almost unknown in informal areas. Since informal housing is overwhelmingly owner-built without use of formal contractors, it is in the owner’s own best interest to ensure that care is taken in construction. In fact, one of the main features of informal housing construction is its high structural quality, reflecting the substantial financial resources and tremendous efforts that owners devote to these buildings. It is worth noting that in the 1992 earthquake in Cairo, practically all building collapses and the resulting fatalities occurred not in informal areas, but either in dilapidated historic parts of the city or informal areas…where apartment blocks had been constructed by (sometimes) unscrupulous developers and contractors.