Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
1. Against the “safe haven” argument; note also that terror planners in “safe” countries are likely to be more efficient, and thus more destructive, than planners in the wild.
2. Models vs. hand-waving, and They Already Told Tyler Cowen. Most envy is local.
3. My old post on the macroeconomics of Superman.
4. Live blog of debt ceiling battles.
5. Do not visit the bear. Got that?
Paragraphs to ponder
The popularity of private-plane travel is forcing many high-priced camps, where seven-week sessions can easily cost more than $10,000, to balance the habits of their parents against the ethos of simplicity the camps spend the summer promoting.
Kyle Courtiss, whose family runs Camp Vega in Maine, said that his staff was trained “to be cognizant of stuff like that” and that private planes were “not what this camp is about.”
The article is interesting throughout.
Robert Ettinger does not pass away at age 92
The story is here. Here is a clue:
“If both of my wives are revived,” Mr. Ettinger told the Detroit News last year, “that will be a high class problem.”
So far, not many newspapers have picked up this “obituary,” though I doubt if that is an intended tribute to Ettinger’s ideas.
What I’ve been reading
1. Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken: Travels Among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. One of my favorite travel books. It avoids both being too impressionistic and being too didactic. It never assumes that the writer’s state of mind is interesting to the reader per se. It brings a little-known and by now largely destroyed corner of the world to light.
2. Ludwig Mises on the exhuastion of the reserve fund. I first read that passage when I was fourteen years old and I was scared.
3. Dubner’s excellent memoir, largely about religion, will become a movie.
4. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor. There is a splendid new Oxford University Press edition. Browsing or reading this book is one of the best ways to get a feel for Victorian England (circa 1850-51), or for how labor markets have changed.
5. The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan. Half of this is quite fun, the other half is quite stupid. Your call, but half fun is actually a lot.
I’ve also relented and finally tried Game of Thrones. I’m just at the beginning; we’ll see whether it ends up owned or liberated.
Means testing is a marginal tax increase
So says Modeled Behavior, citing also Paul Krugman. All true, but the need to point this out to people suggests it is not widely understood. Which suggests the tax, at least right now, brings a relatively low deadweight loss. A lot of people don’t really see that it is a tax at all. Admittedly, that state of affairs may not last forever.
There is also hyperbolic discounting, namely that the marginal extra loss from earning more income may be coming many years in the future. Even if you’re sixty-two years old, the reduction in subsequent Medicare benefits may last through your eighties or longer. That also makes it a less distorting tax.
Because it tricks people in this manner, it may well be a less fair tax. But still it is a more efficient tax, at least if it can be enforced.
Blogging the debt ceiling
At this point, what is there to say? The Asian markets open soon. The InTrade contract, which for some reason is defined around the end of August, is up somewhat today. Who knows why? Brad DeLong and Rortybomb wrestle with the question of how to respond to the credit rating agency vigilantes.
Calculated Risk surveys options. Ezra Klein’s coverage continues to be very useful. Keith Hennessey defends some version of a “Republican point of view.”
A Twitter search on “Boehner” yields good updates. What else works?
Shortly I’m headed out for some food from Sierra Leone, we’ll see what I come back to. I’m currently predicting a two-stage process, announced fairly soon, without the deal itself quite being there, but the confidence intervals on that call are pretty wide.
Via Michelle Dawson, here is an article on what happens to seven-footers after they retire from the NBA.
Assorted links
1. El Mundo interview with me, in Spanish.
2. Why do criminals brazenly wear gang colors? (pdf)
4. Markets in everything: will the police sell your phone number to journalists?
Assorted links
1. “Blaming the Republicans” is used as a false substitute for “rejecting the doctrine.” We can do both!
2. The Great Factor Price Equalization; in this framework I have been focusing on our inability to move U.S. labor up the value chain of production with new, complex ideas. You can discuss the causality in a number of different ways, such as putting more causal emphasis on how outsourcing has chipped away at the previous networks of production.
4. Markets in everything: snore absorption rooms.
5. Disputes over the size of Chinese debt.
6. Poor choice of words. And how can the now-expensive city of Budapest make that list?
The future of Ontario (Canada?)
Daniel Drache reports on some trends which I had not quite been following:
Ontario has the densest concentration of car production probably in the world…
From a North American perspective, Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland, ranks 16 out of 18 on his competitiveness ranking index, just ahead of Michigan.
…the job boom in resources including minerals and agricultural exports offset less than one-fifth of the jobs lost in Canadian manufacturing facilities. The big winners in terms of job growth are private services and government…
…the incredible growth in services challenges one of the standard assumptions of globalization — that Canada is becoming more integrated into the global economy. Most service production is consumed domestically and virtually all public services are not traded…the most remarkable structural change in the Canadian economy is that Canada was less integrated in world markets at the end of 2006 than it was a decade earlier measured by intense export openness…Canadian exports reached their peak at over 45 percent of the share of Canada’s total GDP in 2000; by 2007 this had declined by 10 points to 35 percent.
Here is yesterday’s related post on America. Here is my earlier post on Harold Innis.
Assorted links
1. Emergency markets in everything.
2. The dolphin Solow residual.
3. How much is life expectancy expected to rise?
4. From the Levy and Peart Summer Institute, history of economic thought videos and papers.
North America has always (since colonialism) been wealthier than Latin America
From a new paper by Robert Allen, Tommy Murphy, and Eric Schneider:
We begin by measuring real wages in North and South America between colonization and independence, and comparing them to Europe and Asia. We find that for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, North America was the most prosperous region of the world, offering living standards at least as high as those in the booming parts of North-Western Europe. Latin America, on the other hand, was much poorer and offered a standard of living like that in Spain and less prosperous parts of the world in general.
It is a common view that North America had to play catch-up, but the extensive data sets in this paper suggest that North American wages were up to twice as high as the general level of wages further south.
For the pointer I thank Mark Koyama on Twitter.
Assorted links
1. How to maximize the value of Larry Summers, and the interview is here.
2. This superhero cartoon spans many excellent themes.
3. The Age of the Infovore is now out in a Penguin India edition.
4. A crude look at some mortgage agency cumulative default rates.
5. Markets in everything, invisible art.
From the comments
This is from Mark, the caps are his:
We had these big interconnected undercapitalized things that were mandated by federal policy to keep expanding the amount of paper they bought or backed, which meant inevitably they were going to reach the point where the paper they were backing was too risky, and the GSE’s mandated growth necessarily called for them to issue more paper of their own to do that..And then you had Basel II and its US application that made GSE paper Tier I capital to support maximum loan growth in private sector banks. No wonder credit dried up when the GSEs were taken over in Sept 08. But you never see the Rortys and Mins speak to this perspective. THE GSE’S WERE PROCYCLICAL VECTORS THAT TRANSFORMED HOUSING DEMAND TRENDS INTO CREDIT MARKET TRENDS AND VICE VERSA, FREQUENTLY AMPLIFYING THEM, BUT THEY WERE NOT STRONGLY CAPITALIZED ENOUGH TO ABSORB A TREND REVERSAL.
Sentences which are sometimes forgotten
All else being the same, the market tends to create and allocate jobs for those people who are most interested in working.
That is from Casey Mulligan. I do not always accept Mulligan’s arguments, but he raises the interesting question of why, during the last recession, employment rates for the elderly did not in general fall.