Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
What is the evidence on whether cell phones can cause cancer?
The World Health Organization is publicizing this idea (pdf), but to me the evidence still does not look very strong at all. Chat away. Hat tip goes to Mocost on Twitter.
Assorted links
Cowards
The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday that lawyers for Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former Russian oil tycoon who was jailed after clashing with the Kremlin, had failed to prove that his case was politically motivated, as they had long contended.
If you read through the actual story, you will see the court’s decision is in fact more nuanced than that. It was found that his human rights were violated in prison, that procedural violations were committed before the trial, and that he had not proved a political motivation to his prosecution, not that no such motivation was present. Nonetheless in such issues, it really is the headlines and opening sentences which matter. Imagine how this will play in Russia. The Court should have written an opinion so the headline would read “European Court of Human Rights condemns Russian tyranny and human rights abuses.” Instead we get “European Court Backs Kremlin in Khodorkovsky Case.”
Update: A little later, I see the NYT changed it to “Partially Backs Kremlin,” still not nearly good enough for a court of human rights. By the way, it is an insult for the Court to call for the Russian government to pay Khodorkovsky a $35,000 fine. For a start, for two months he had only four square meters in his prison cell.
Assorted links
1. Has Singapore’s growth been on top of negative TFP? (This result is not a strong endorsement of their industrial policy.)
2. James Heckman to work on health economics at Dublin, but too late to change the country’s fundamental path.
3. Is the New Zealand boom finally arriving?
4. Why is it so hard to learn Danish?
5. I agree with Krugman on core inflation, but still this is a sobering thought.
6. Rumors of Greek bank runs, original story here (in Greek). I am afraid that I agree with this broader radical assessment. Let history prove me wrong, as it probably will.
Assorted links
In praise of driverless cars, don’t regulate them into oblivion
My column is here, one excerpt is this:
The benefits of driverless cars are potentially significant. The typical American spends an average of roughly 100 hours a year in traffic; imagine using that time in better ways — by working or just having fun. The irksome burden of commuting might be lessened considerably. Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers…
The point is not that such cars could be on the road in large numbers tomorrow, but that we ought to give the cars — and other potential innovations — a fair shot so that a prototype can become a commercial product someday. Michael Mandel, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, compares government regulation of innovation to the accumulation of pebbles in a stream. At some point too many pebbles block off the water flow, yet no single pebble is to blame for the slowdown. Right now the pebbles are limiting investment in future innovation.
A few points:
1. I couldn’t fit it in the column, but it is an interesting question why there is no popular movement to encourage driverless cars. Commuting costs are very high and borne by many people. (Here is Annie Lowery on just how bad commutes can be.) You can get people to hate plastic bags, or worry about a birth certificate, but they won’t send a “pro-driverless car” postcard to their representatives. The political movement has many potential beneficiaries but few natural constituencies. (Why? Does it fail to connect to an us vs. them struggle?) This is an underrated source of bias in political outcomes.
2. In the longer run a lot of driverless cars would be very small. Imagine your little mini-car zipping out and bringing you back some Sichuan braised fish, piping hot.
3. If a traffic situation gets really hairy, the driverless car can be programmed to pull over and stop. Oddly I think that perfecting the GPS system might be a trickier problem than making them safer than driver-run cars. Computers don’t drink, but they will drive around the same block forever and ever if they don’t understand the construction situation. Even the best chess-playing computers don’t very well “understand” blockaded positions and perpetual check.
4. This isn’t a column about driverless cars at all. It’s about our ambivalent attitudes toward major innovations. It’s also about how the true costs of regulation are often hidden. A lot of potentially good innovations never even reach our eyes and ears as concepts, much less realities. They don’t have tags comparable to that of the driverless car.
5. Via Michelle Dawson, here is a list of driverless trains. Here are links on robot-guided surgery.
Assorted links
Eskişehir bleg
You know the drill. We’ll be there soon.
As long as we are on medieval topics…
Science magazine reports that Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, and his fellow seismologists have been charged with manslaughter after they allegedly didn’t alert the residents of L’Aquila in Central Italy before a quake hit that town and killed 308 residents.
This might seem insanely harsh. Seismologists do work hard at trying to discover when and where a quake might hit.
However, in this case, it seems that these seven, all of whom sit on Italy’s major risks committee, reportedly offered certain words of reassurance that caused some residents of L’Aquila not to abandon their homes, but to stay in an area that had previously experienced some smaller quakes.
Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella reportedly offered that the seven had held a televised press conference six days before the quake and offered “imprecise, incomplete, and contradictory information.”
Some might wonder whether this is what scientists regularly do, however certain their words might sometimes seem. However, Garagarella reportedly further accuses Franco Barberi, the vice chairman of the committee, of specifically stating that no quake was to be immediately expected in the area.
This reassurance, Gargarella reportedly claimed to Corriere Della Serra, “thwarted the activities designed to protect the public.”
Assorted links
Price discrimination
Johnson insisted the casinos have only themselves to blame for their losses, opening the door by offering him high-stakes gambling. They also agreed to discount 20 percent of his blackjack losses as an incentive to get him to play, he said. For instance, if he lost $1 million, the casinos would forgive $200,000.
He ended up winning $15 million. The article is interesting throughout, and hat tip goes to Steve Silberman, more on the math here from Kid Dynamite.
Assorted links
1. Do positive fantasies make it harder to achieve your goals?
2. Via Chris F. Masse, Peter Thiel’s whiz kids.
3. Interview with Emmanuel Todd on the Arab Spring and whether Germany is in the core of Europe.
4. Recommended Spanish-language novels, and all the good books coming out this year.
5. The black middle class is more likely to reach the NBA.
6. John Tomasi will be guest-blogging at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
What I’ve been putting down
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, by David Abulafia.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, by Robert Bellah.
These are very good books for large classes of readers, just not for me. They have garnered, or will be garnering, stellar reviews. The former, for my taste, covers too many eras, has too much detail on matters I don’t care about, and ultimately chooses the wrong organizing principle for its material. The Economist, however, loved it. The latter has too much general material and doesn’t get to the cutting edge points in a sufficiently ruthless manner. For many people, though, it may be the best introduction to the general area.
By the way, I just pre-ordered Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, which looks to be an important book.
What is the economic value of the internet?
There is a new and very interesting study out from McKinsey on this topic. If you get past the press release, however, and give it a closer read it is consistent with stagnation hypotheses, contrary to some claims. The study shows a few things:
1. Most of the economic benefits of the internet are in fact captured in current economic statistics, which I’ve already argued do not look so fabulous. The point is not to blame the internet, as without it things would have been worse. The point is that the internet gains, in absolute terms, haven’t been large enough to produce a rosy picture overall.
2. The direct and indirect economic effects of the internet account for 3.8% of U.S. gdp, as currently measured (p.15). That’s less than many people think and that value is already incorporated in the current gdp measure. The good news — and it is good news — is that there is lots of room for future growth from internet impact. We’ve yet to really organize our economy around the internet, as we someday will, and then the gains will be enormous. In the meantime we are waiting.
3. What about the unpriced consumer surplus gains from the internet? The study considers that too:
In general, this surplus is generated from the exceptional value users place on Internet services such as e-mail, social networks, search facilities, and online reservation services, among many others. This value far outweighs the costs, both actual costs such as access and subscription fees and annoyances such as spam, excessive advertising, and the need to disclose personal data for some services. In the United States, for example, research conducted with the Interactive Advertising Board found that consumers placed a value of almost €61 billion on the services they got from the Internet, while they would pay about €15 billion to get rid of the annoyances, suggesting a net consumer surplus of about €46 billion.
A nice gain, but in an economy with a $14 trillion gdp it’s not that big a deal. It’s also less than the previous Goolsbee and Klenow estimate of about two percent of gdp, for the consumer surplus from internet use. That is not nearly enough to refute the view that median income growth is much slower in recent times, and that’s without adjusting for the problematic status of expenditures on health care and K-12 education. Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan stress this point — the unpriced benefits of internet use — but I don’t see them offering a better number than this rather paltry calculation, now confirmed as low, at least relative to the claims of internet boosters, by two differing sources.
In fairness, I should note that I cannot trace the study cited above. It may be wrong. The Goolsbee and Klenow paper may be wrong, and it is somewhat out of date, from 2006. I think a consumer surplus estimate of three or four percent is entirely plausible for 2011. We’re still left with relative stagnation. After all, penicillin had some consumer surplus too.