Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
*A Convergence of Civilizations*
That’s the new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. I read it as offering three major messages: a) there is no unique pattern for Muslim demographic evolution, b) there is more civilizational convergence than divergence, and c) the demographic data we observe explain a good deal about various Muslim countries. Here are some specific points:
1. In 1998-1999 about 55 percent of married women in Burkina Faso lived in polygamous relationships. In the Muslim parts of Nigeria, rates of polygamy can run forty to fifty percent, as opposed to about thirty percent in the Christian parts of Nigeria.
2. Demographically, Iran is very much a Western country with a 2.08 fertility rate, and the authors strongly hint that Iran has a reasonable chance of modernizing as Turkey has; the authors also worry that Turkey has not made a complete demographic transition and thus is vulnerable to backsliding. In general the authors seem to believe that the modernizing properties of Shiism are underrated.
3. Less than five percent of Uzbek or Tajik women are unmarried at age thirty. In Morocco it is 41 percent unmarried at age thirty, in Tunisia it is 54 percent, 50 percent in Lebanon, and a staggering 58 percent unmarried at age thirty in Algeria.
4. Palestinian birth rates are not as high as they are often made out to be: “If one takes Israel and the occupied territories together, one can grasp the absurdity of the demographic confrontations: The high fertility rate of Israeli Arabs is an internal threat to the Jewish state, whereas the high fertility rate of the Jewish settlers threatens Palestinian predominance in the West Bank.” (p.67)
5. In Shiite Azerbaijan, there are almost twice as many abortions per woman as live births, 3.2 to 1.7.
6. Among the Muslims of Europe, the Kosovars are arguably the least religious but also the most demographically conservative.
7. The Muslim Malays seem to have combined high birth rates with relatively high status for women.
Speculative throughout, as they say, but always interesting. Here is one short but accurate review. For the original pointer to the book I thank Chris F. Masse. Chris also points us to the DSK prediction market.
*The Great Stagnation* (Retrogression)
June 9 it is coming out in a physical edition, hard cover. Amazon pre-order is here. Barnes&Noble pre-order is here. The text is exactly the same as the eBook edition, although I made a minor addition to one footnote. If you’ve read Borges’s Pierre Menard, you’ll know why I regard the electronic edition as “the real book” and this volume as a kind of postmodern satire. Still, many people demanded a physical edition, sometimes for classroom use, and so now there is one.
Assorted links
1. One way of measuring structural shifts.
2. The culture that is German, they sold condoms in the Bundestag (in German), though now no more.
3. Debt ceiling games throughout the ages.
4. Coverage from Guinea (in French); the maid is described as a nice person. And “His most recent book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, discusses political and cultural affairs as an ongoing battle against the inhumane.” The Germans give the most detail.
5. The inefficiency of urban sorting?
6. Lengthy 2005 interview with Milton Friedman at 93 (Charlie Rose). Fascinating.
The offshore bias in U.S. manufacturing
In the newest Journal of Economic Perspectives, Susan Houseman, Christopher Kurz, Paul Lengermann and Benjamin Mandel report:
In this paper, we show that the substitution of imported for domestically produced goods and services—often known as offshoring—can lead to overestimates of U.S. productivity growth and value added. We explore how the measurement of productivity and value added in manufacturing has been affected by the dramatic rise in imports of manufactured goods, which more than doubled from 1997 to 2007. We argue that, analogous to the widely discussed problem of outlet substitution bias in the literature on the Consumer Price Index, the price declines associated with the shift to low-cost foreign suppliers are generally not captured in existing price indexes. Just as the CPI fails to capture fully the lower prices for consumers due to the entry and expansion of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, import price indexes and the intermediate input price indexes based on them do not capture the price drops associated with a shift to new low-cost suppliers in China and other developing countries. As a result, the real growth of imported inputs has been understated. And if input growth is understated, it follows that the growth in multifactor productivity and real value added in the manufacturing sector have been overstated. We estimate that average annual multifactor productivity growth in manufacturing was overstated by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points and real value added growth by 0.2 to 0.5 percentage points from 1997 to 2007. Moreover, this bias may have accounted for a fifth to a half of the growth in real value added in manufacturing output excluding the computer and electronics industry.
In other words, Michael Mandel was right. An ungated version is here. In terms of income distribution, think of these rents as going to those individuals and institutions which are good at managing international supply chains. That’s a relatively small number of people. A lot of the offshoring is enabled by an innovation — the internet — which really does boost productivity but not in a way which much helps the median U.S. wage.
New World Bank blog on project impact evaluations
Assorted links
Assorted links
What makes you an economist?
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been arrested, taken off a plane to Paris, and accused of a shocking crime. When I hear of this kind of story, I always wonder how the “true economist” should react. After all, DSK had a very strong incentive not to commit the crime, including his desire to run for further office in France, not to mention his high IMF salary and strong network of international connections. So much to lose.
Should the “real economist” conclude that DSK is less likely to be guilty than others will think? If you are following the social consensus estimate of p, does that make you less of an economist? A lesser economist? Is everyone else an economist anyway and thus you can agree with them? How many economists seriously use the concept of incentives — more than non-economists do — to understand everyday events? Is the notion that incentives predict individual behavior actually so central to economics? Should it be?
So run my thoughts this evening. I asked similar questions when legal charges were levied against Kobe Bryant.
Assorted links
1. An environmentalist perspective on The Great Stagnation.
2. A history of Christian rock.
3. Did the stimulus destroy jobs on net? (pdf)
4. The etymology of inflation, and also here.
5. Markets in everything: Barbara’s Bakery Peanut Butter Puffin Cereal.
Russia restaurant fact of the day
Russian tax law is so complex that Novikov Restaurant Group employs five accountants at each restaurant.
Here is more, mostly an interesting discussion of why there are so few good restaurants in Russia.
Assorted links
1. Tyler Cowen, speaking off the cuff, defines friendship, a two minute video.
2. Library of Congress launches National Jukebox.
3. Will data mining end the Great Stagnation? In any case you should major in statistics.
4. German economic growth is surging; again, real factors matter much more than fiscal policy or fiscal austerity.
Assorted links
1. Super-immigrants are low-hanging fruit, and more here.
2. Abandoned Yugoslavian brutalist war memorials.
4. The GM bailout doesn’t look so good.
5. I vote for Blattman on South Sudan.
The new Edge symposium
“What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”
There are 159 responses, starting with Daniel Kahneman and Richard Dawkins. Kahneman starts off by sounding like Bryan Caplan:
Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.
Income is an important determinant of people’s satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone [TC: in the US?] had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5%.
I’ll read the rest now…
*The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life*
That’s the new Harold Bloom book, which has all the strengths and weakness of Harold Bloom books (I am a fan). Excerpt:
Picasso is reputed to have said he did not care who influenced him but he did not want to influence himself.
Bloom’s books are very good for motivating rereads of classics, in this case Walter Pater, Paul Valery, Shakespeare, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Leopardi, and Montaigne’s essay “On Experience,” among others. Here is a weaker passage:
I recall first reading the poem when I was thirteen, thrilling to Satan and falling in love with Eve. In those years I fell regularly in love with fictive heroines and encountered Eve after a year of infatuation with Thomas Hardy’s heroines, particularly Eustacia Vye…and Marty South… I all but wept when Marty South cut off her long, beautiful hair, while I joined Milton and Satan in their lust for Eve’s wanton tresses.
Still, he is one of the greatest readers ever, this is probably his last major book, he truly believes in his project, and the point about prompting rereads makes this — whatever its flaws — better than almost anything else you can pick up.